Nick Hornby: High Fidelity (vocabulary alphabetical order)

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

 About The Author
 then ...

Barry has made me an
elaborately annotated compilation tape, and Dick now rephrases his questions four or five times instead
of the usual two or three.

I should explain that I am not
a tattoo kind of guy; I am, and was, neither rock’n’roll go-to-hell decadent or wrestling-team muscular.


All my life I’ve hated Sundays, for the obvious British reasons (Song of Praise, closed shops,
congealing gravy that you don’t want to go near but no one’s going to let you escape from) and the
obvious international reasons as well, but this Sunday is a corker.

We are so happy, in
fact, that between throwing the customers out and leaving for the day, we list our top five Elvis Costello
songs (I go for ‘Alison,’ ‘Little Triggers,’ ‘Man Out of Time,’ ‘King Horse,’ and a bootleg Merseybeat-
style version of ‘Everyday I Write the Book’ I’ve got on a bootleg tape somewhere, the obscurity of the
last cleverly counteracting the obviousness of the first, I thought, and thus preempting scorn from Barry)
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I had been
humiliated, beaten, outperformed; I felt stupid, and small, and much, much younger than this unpleasant,
oversized, big-mouthed moron.

I had kind of hoped that my adulthood would be long and meaty and
instructive, but it all took place in those two years; sometimes it seems as though everything and
everyone that have happened to me since were just minor distractions.

Frampton Comes Alive,
top of the American rock charts for something like seven hundred and twenty years, and bought,
presumably, by every brain-dead, coke-addled airhead in L.A.!

(Women’s knickers were a terrible disappointment to me when I embarked on my cohabiting
career.

When I want to kiss people in that
way now, with mouths and tongues and all that, it’s because I want other things too: sex, Friday nights
at the cinema, company and conversation, fused networks of family and friends, Lemsips brought to me
in bed when I am ill, a new pair of ears for my records and CDs, maybe a little boy called Jack and a
little girl called Holly or Maisie, I haven’t decided yet.

They are together still, for all I know, and, as of today, I
am unattached again.

The Vanishing, Diva), although on the whole I prefer
American films.

Barry is standing there, smiling at him; the guy looks a bit
flustered.

We have the Durex conversation, as in I tell her I haven’t
brought anything with me and she laughs and says that she’d be appalled if I had and anyway she has
something in her bag.

I was depressed by the lack of flamboyance in my wardrobe.

I was intimidated by the other men in her design course, and became
convinced that she was going to go off with one of them.

And Laura’s the backward part, the last person I
loved, and when I hear those sweet, sticky acoustic guitar chords, I reinvent our time together, and,
before I know it, we’re in the car trying to sing the harmonies on ‘Love Hurts’ and getting it wrong and
laughing.

We called it the Groucho Club, because of Groucho Marx’s thing about not wanting to join any
club that would have him as a member; later on we found out that there was another Groucho Club
somewhere in the West End, but nobody seemed to get confused about which was which.

“You’d never said more than two words to me
before this evening, and they were real crotchety words.”

Round about that second ditto I should have spotted that we were in a rut, that I had allowed
things to fester to the extent that she was on the lookout for someone else.

I gave Penny one last try, in my bedroom while my mum and dad were at the town
hall watching a local dramatic society interpretation of Toad of Toad Hall: I used a degree of force that
would have outraged and terrified an adult female, but got nowhere, and when I walked her home we
hardly spoke.

She’s had a little girl!), just to keep myself on my toes, events which required a whole series
of readjustments and conversions to keep my fantasies alive.

“He goes on long enough,” I said one night, when we were both lying awake, staring at the ceiling.

I was like all those people who suddenly shaved their heads and said they’d
always been punks, they’d been punks before punk was even thought of: I felt as though I was going to
be found out at any moment, that somebody was going to burst into the college bar brandishing one of
the anorak photos and yelling, “Rob used to be a boy!

I’m particularly disappointed to
learn that Marie is an interluder, because I thought she’d be a little more bohemian, what with the
recording contract and all; I thought sex would be a little dirtier, literally and figuratively.

She cried, then, and I loathed her
for making me feel guilty, and for making me finish with her.

There’s a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier,
more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world
I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at
school, including music.

Some days I’m afraid I’ll go berserk, rip the Elvis Costello mobile down from the ceiling, throw the
‘Country Artists (Male) A-K’ rack out into the street, go off to work in a Virgin Megastore, and never
come back.

Barry has made me an
elaborately annotated compilation tape, and Dick now rephrases his questions four or five times instead
of the usual two or three.

But what I really like is the feeling of security I get from my new filing system; I have made myself
more complicated than I really am.

The acoustics are all wrong, though; there are no books, there’s no wall of records, and
there’s very little furniture, just a sofa and an armchair.

One part imitation (people I had seen kissing by 1972: James Bond, Simon Templar,
Napoleon Solo, Barbara Windsor and Sid James or maybe Jim Dale, Elsie Tanner, Omar Sharif and
Julie Christie, Elvis, and lots of black-and-white people my mum wanted to watch, although they never
waggled their heads from side to side) to one part hormonal slavery to one part peer group pressure
(Kevin Bannister and Elizabeth Barnes had been at it for a couple of weeks) to one part blind panic ...
th...

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Her house is enormous, the sort of place that seems to have meandered to Wood Green from another
part of London, and she’s not very nice.

,”—Rosie, the four-bonk, simultaneous
orgasm, pain-in-the-arse girl, the girl I was seeing when Laura was pregnant—” ... that you were very
nice to me for quite a long time, and that was just what I needed.

He fumbles nervously with the giant headphones, gets one side stuck around his ear, and the other side
falls over one eye.

She was tall, with blond cropped hair (she said she knew some people who were at
St. Martin’s with some friends of Johnny Rotten, but I was never introduced to them), and she looked
different and dramatic and exotic.

We’re in a quiet street in Holloway, carefully placed to attract the bare
minimum of window-shoppers; there’s no reason to come here at all, unless you live here, and the
people that live here don’t seem terribly interested in my Stiff Little Fingers white label (twenty-five
quid to you—I paid seventeen for it in 1986) or my mono copy of Blonde on Blonde.

He laughs into my armpit, a terrifying, maniacal chuckle that smells of drink and tobacco and vomit
and ends in an explosion of phlegm.

This is my life, and it’s nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it.

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I clear away the evidence of last night’s traumas—the spare duvet on the sofa, the balled-up paper
hankies, the coffee mugs with dog-ends floating in the cold, oily-looking dregs, and then I put the
Beatles on, and then when I’ve listened to Abbey Road and the first few tracks of Revolver, I open the
bottle of white wine that Laura brought home last week, si...

This is the very worst
thing, the thing that would bring anybody (any man?) in my position out in the coldest and clammiest of
sweats: we used to listen to him having sex.

All
I know is that you could, if you wanted to, find the answers to all sorts of difficult questions buried in
that terrible war-torn interregnum between the first pubic hair and the first soiled Durex.

Laura stuck with it, and though I wanted to see whether she’d
struggle gamely through to the end, I got nervous when people weren’t dancing, so I put ‘The Love You
Save’ on quick.

She walks over to her
audiocassette, ejects one tape, rummages around, and then puts in another, and the two of us sit in the
dark and listen to the songs of Marie LaSalle.

I remember Laura going up to see him a couple of times; I remember Laura ... not
flirting, exactly, but certainly flicking her hair more often, and grinning more inanely, than seemed to be
strictly necessary when he came down for a drink last Christmas.

It’s tatty, and drafty, and the benches have had the stuffing slashed out of
them, and the staff are surly, and the regular clientele are either terrifying or unconscious, and the toilets
are wet and smelly, and there’s nothing to eat in the evening, and the wine is hilariously bad, and the
bitter is fizzy and much too cold; in other words, it’s a run-of-the-mill north London pub.

“That’s amazing!”

She walks over to her
audiocassette, ejects one tape, rummages around, and then puts in another, and the two of us sit in the
dark and listen to the songs of Marie LaSalle.

One part imitation (people I had seen kissing by 1972: James Bond, Simon Templar,
Napoleon Solo, Barbara Windsor and Sid James or maybe Jim Dale, Elsie Tanner, Omar Sharif and
Julie Christie, Elvis, and lots of black-and-white people my mum wanted to watch, although they never
waggled their heads from side to side) to one part hormonal slavery to one part peer group pressure
(Kevin Bannister and Elizabeth Barnes had been at it for a couple of weeks) to one part blind panic ...
th...

Never has a joke filled me with such nausea and paranoia and insecurity and self-pity and
dread and doubt.

It amused us at the time, although
Barry, being Barry, went one stage further: he compiled the questionnaire and presented it to some poor
woman he was interested in, and she hit him with it.


My desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups, in chronological order:
1) Alison Ashworth
2) Penny Hardwick
3) Jackie Allen
4) Charlie Nicholson
5) Sarah Kendrew

These were the ones that really hurt.

It
would be nice to think that as I’ve got older times have changed, relationships have become more
sophisticated, females less cruel, skins thicker, reactions sharper, instincts more developed.

Are there any mitigating circumstances?

Wouldn’t it be annoying to be commemorated as a
dice player?

But this disastrously partial grasp of the
male sex organs caused distress and embarrassment and shame until one afternoon in a Wimpy Bar, a
school friend, apropos of nothing, remarked that the saliva he had left in his glass of Wimpy cola
‘looked like spunk,’ an enigmatic observation that had me puzzling feverishly for an entire weekend,
although at the time, of course, I tittered knowingly.

She describes the set-up and her knock-
back with wisdom and honesty and a dry, self-deprecating humor, and I can see why her songs are as
good as they are.

We don’t
come here that often, even though it’s only up the road, because the bands that usually play here are the
kind of abysmal second-division punk group you’d pay half your wages not to listen to.

I’m starting to remember things now: his dungarees; his music (African, Latin, Bulgarian, whatever
fucking world music fad was trendy that week); his hysterical, nervous, nerve-jangling laugh; the
terrible cooking smells that used to pollute the stairway; the visitors that used to stay too late and drink
too much and leave too noisily.

Barry interpreted the pay rise as a signal
to cut his hours back, so I haven’t given him one since.

When you live
with a woman, these faded, shrunken tatty M&S scraps suddenly appear on radiators all over the house;
your lascivious schoolboy dreams of adulthood as a time when you are surrounded by exotic lingerie for
ever and ever amen ... those dreams crumble to dust.)

He talks relentlessly, and more or less everything he says is gibberish.

You need as
much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on,
otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or
supporting actors, and it’s just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and
nobody to speak to, and who’d believe in this character then?

Sometimes something banal and obvious
is responsible for the distraction: they have heard it on the radio, or at a club.

At least, it’s hard to imagine him skidding into his place
of work, his bank or his insurance office or car showroom, chucking his briefcase down and informing a
colleague with raucous glee that he has ‘knobbed’ said colleague’s wife.

(And, like James Stewart in Vertigo, I had developed a
‘type’: cropped blond hair, arty, dizzy, garrulous, which led to some disastrous mistakes.)

But Jackie and I were
miserable in a thrilling, grown-up way.

But even so, I
feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this
horrible way.

You can spot the vinyl addicts because after a while they get fed up with the rack they are flicking
through, march over to a completely different section of the shop, pull a sleeve out from the middle
somewhere, and come over to the counter; this is because they have been making a list of possible
purchases in their head (“If I don’t find anything in the next five minutes, that blues compilation I saw
half an hour ago will have to do”), and suddenly sicken themselves with the amo...

“What?” says Barry, bristling.

“She tucks her stomach in and everything,” Clive Stevens remarked approvingly of
his brother’s girlfriend; it took me nearly a year to work out the import of this maneuver.

He’s got long blond hair, and cheekbones, and he’s well over nine feet tall, but he’s got
muscles too (he’s wearing a denim waistcoat and no shirt) and a voice that makes that man who does the
Guinness adverts sound soppy, a voice so deep that it seems to land with a thud on the stage and roll
toward us like a cannonball.

Marriage’ll wake her up!

I
started sleeping with people again, although every one of these affairs I regarded as a fluke, a one-off,
nothing likely to alter my dismal self-perception.

But if they
ever find out about Elvis and James Brown and Jerry Lee Lewis and the Pistols and the Beatles and the
rest, they will suffer immediate and possibly dangerous traumatic shock, and I will have to counsel
them, and ...

We were twelve or thirteen, and had recently discovered irony—or at least, what I later understood to
be irony: we only allowed ourselves to play on the swings and the roundabout and the other kids’ stuff
rusting away in there if we could do it with a sort of self-conscious ironic detachment.

You know when you see T-shirts piled up in a clothes shop, beautifully folded and color-
coded, and you buy one?

The other people I like are the ones who are being driven to find a tune that has been troubling them,
distracting them, a tune that they can hear in their breath when they run for a bus, or in the rhythm of
their windshield wipers when they’re driving home from work.

They are not interested in ‘foreplay’; they
have no desire to stimulate the erogenous zones of the opposite sex; they are selfish, greedy, clumsy,
unsophisticated.

I was offhand with her the next time we went out, and when she went to kiss me at the end of the
evening, I shrugged her off.

But his conversation is simply
enumeration: if he has seen a good film, he will not describe the plot, or how it made him feel, but where
it ranks in his best-of-year list, his best-of-all-time list, his best-of-decade list—he thinks and talks in
tens and fives, and as a consequence, Dick and I do too.

I’d
say that there were millions like me, but there aren’t, really: lots of blokes have impeccable music taste
but don’t read, lots of blokes read but are really fat, lots of blokes are sympathetic to feminism but have
stupid beards, lots of blokes have a Woody Allen sense of humor but look like Woody Allen.

And this certitude, this Ian-atheism, lasts until I get home.

This is his cue to launch into an enthusiastic rendition of Dana’s ‘All Kinds of Everything,’ which is
my cue to come out from behind the counter and lead him back toward the door, which is his cue to hurl
himself at one of the browser racks, which is my cue to open the door, loosen his grip on the rack with
the other, and push.

I get by because of the people who make a special effort to shop here Saturdays—young men, always
young men, with John Lennon specs and leather jackets and armfuls of square carrier bags—and
because of the mail order: I advertise in the back of the glossy rock magazines, and get letters from
young men, always young men, in Manchester and Glasgow and Ottowa, young men who seem to spend
a disproportionate amount of their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and ‘ORIGINAL NOT RE- ...

I stopped
drinking so much, I stopped listening to song lyrics with quite the same morbid fascination (for a while,
I regarded just about any song in which somebody had lost somebody else as spookily relevant, which,
as that covers the whole of pop music, and as I worked in a record shop, meant I felt pretty spooked
more or less the whole time), I stopped constructing the killer one-liners that left Charlie writhing on the
floor with regret and self-loathing.


The lesson I learned from the Charlie debacle is that you’ve got to punch your weight.

When the whole sorry tale comes out in a great big lump like that,
even the most shortsighted jerk, even the most self-deluding and self-pitying of jilted, wounded lovers
can see that there is some cause and effect going on here, that abortions and Rosie and Ian and money all
belong to, deserve each other.

It doesn’t feel good to know that she has invented this look
just for me.

He must be terrible to work with the morning after a wine-tasting session: not
because of the reek of stale booze, or the bloodshot eyes, or the crabby behavior, but because of all the
facts he has swallowed.

I’m not that crass.

We were twelve or thirteen, and had recently discovered irony—or at least, what I later understood to
be irony: we only allowed ourselves to play on the swings and the roundabout and the other kids’ stuff
rusting away in there if we could do it with a sort of self-conscious ironic detachment.

At the time
I thought it was a let’s-be-grown-up-about-life’s-imperfectability sort of conversation, an abstract, adult
analysis; now I see that we were really talking about her and Ian, and that she suckered me into
absolving her.

Now, she works for a City law firm (hence, I guess, the restaurants and the expensive suits and
the disappearance of the spiky haircut and a previously unrevealed taste for weary sarcasm) not because
she underwent any kind of political conversion, but because she was made redundant and couldn’t find
any legal aid work.

I should say, even though I do not feel like saying it (I want to run myself down, feel sorry for myself,
celebrate my inadequacies—that’s what you do at times like these), that I think things were OK in That
Department.

It was the only time I have ever really had a sense of momentum, although
later I could see that it was a false momentum, because it didn’t belong to me at all, but to the music:
anyone playing his favorite dance records very loud in a crowded place, to people who had paid to hear
them, would have felt exactly the same thing.

One
moment you’re ticking along, cleaning the toilet bowl, and expressing your feelings and doing all the
other things that a modern chap is supposed to do; the next, you’re manipulating and sulking and
double-dealing and fibbing with the best of them.

I started going out with one of them ... no, that’s not right, because I had absolutely no input into the
decision-making process.

The Vanishing, Diva), although on the whole I prefer
American films.

That probably sounds crueler
than it is meant to, but the fact is that we’re too old to make each other miserable, and that’s a good
thing, not a bad thing, so don’t take your failure to make the list personally.

Of course, I have never had to take that
long walk again, and my ears have not burned with quite the same fury, and I have never had to count
the No. 6 packets in order to avoid mocking eyes and floods of tears ... not really, not actually, not as
such.

Sometimes something banal and obvious
is responsible for the distraction: they have heard it on the radio, or at a club.

But the pleasure only lasts a few seconds and then everything sinks in: that
somewhere Laura really is fucking Ray (maybe not exactly now, because it’s 3:56 a.m., although with
his stamina—his inability to climax, ha ha—you never know), and I’m here, in this stupid little flat, on
my own, and I’m thirty-five years old, and I own a tiny failing business, and my friends don’t seem to be
friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven’t lost.

So, on this third or fourth time, she came up to my little rostrum thing and
spoke to me, and I liked her straightaway: she asked me to play a record that I really loved (‘Got to Get
You off My Mind’ by Solomon Burke, if anyone cares), but which had cleared the floor whenever I’d
tried it.

We thought we were being
grown-up, but we were being preposterously naive, childish even, to think that one or the other of us
could get up to no good, and own up to the misdemeanor, while we were living together.)

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I clear away the evidence of last night’s traumas—the spare duvet on the sofa, the balled-up paper
hankies, the coffee mugs with dog-ends floating in the cold, oily-looking dregs, and then I put the
Beatles on, and then when I’ve listened to Abbey Road and the first few tracks of Revolver, I open the
bottle of white wine that Laura brought home last week, si...

And when I found it for him (it was an old reggae thing, ‘Happy Go Lucky Girl’
by the Paragons), and it was more or less exactly as it had appeared to him in his sleep, the look on his
face made me feel as though I was not a man who ran a record shop, but a midwife, or a painter,
someone whose life is routinely transcendental.

I’m late to work, and when I get there Dick is already leaning against the door reading a book.

Does that clarify the situation?”

Someone who
shares her microphone with her with an intimacy I don’t like, and sings harmony on ‘Love Hurts,’ and
looks at her while he’s doing so in a way that suggests that he’s ahead of me in the queue for the album
shoot.

But there
still seems to be an element of that evening in everything that has happened to me since; all my other
romantic stories seem to be a scrambled version of that first one.

And then one night at a party I saw Phil and Jackie huddled together in a corner, and Phil was
obviously distressed, pale and near to tears, and then he went home, and the next morning she phoned up
and asked if I wanted to go out for a walk, and we were away, and we weren’t doing things in secret
anymore; and we lasted about three weeks.

I’m starting to remember things now: his dungarees; his music (African, Latin, Bulgarian, whatever
fucking world music fad was trendy that week); his hysterical, nervous, nerve-jangling laugh; the
terrible cooking smells that used to pollute the stairway; the visitors that used to stay too late and drink
too much and leave too noisily.

We were little animals, which is not to imply that by the end of the week we were
tearing our tank tops off; just that, metaphorically speaking, we had begun to sniff each other’s bottoms,
and we did not find the odor entirely repellent.

Are they all as rich as Croesus, as charming as Clark Gable, as preposterously
endowed as Errol Flynn, as witty as Oscar Wilde?

And people turn round to look at us, and we look at each other sheepishly, and Barry is
on the verge of giggling with excitement, the idiot.

And the
sprouting pubic hairs were our secret, strictly between us and our Y-fronts, and it would be years before
a member of the opposite sex could verify that they were where they should be.

When Laura was here I had the records arranged alphabetically; before that I had them filed in
chronological order, beginning with Robert Johnson, and ending with, I don’t know, Wham!, or
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somebody African, or whatever else I was listening to when Laura and I met.

I’m average height, not slim, not fat, no unsightly facial hair.

(And, like James Stewart in Vertigo, I had developed a
‘type’: cropped blond hair, arty, dizzy, garrulous, which led to some disastrous mistakes.)

But it became unavoidable, because when Jackie expressed doubts about him, I had to nurture
those doubts as if they were tiny, sickly kittens, until eventually they became sturdy, healthy grievances,
with their own cat doors, which allowed them to wander in and out of our conversation at will.

But this disastrously partial grasp of the
male sex organs caused distress and embarrassment and shame until one afternoon in a Wimpy Bar, a
school friend, apropos of nothing, remarked that the saliva he had left in his glass of Wimpy cola
‘looked like spunk,’ an enigmatic observation that had me puzzling feverishly for an entire weekend,
although at the time, of course, I tittered knowingly.

At least, it’s hard to imagine him skidding into his place
of work, his bank or his insurance office or car showroom, chucking his briefcase down and informing a
colleague with raucous glee that he has ‘knobbed’ said colleague’s wife.

I used to get nervous, sure, but I was never in
any doubt that I wanted to go through with it; now, it seems more than enough to know that I can if I
want to, and if there was a way of cheating, of circumnavigating the next bit—getting Marie to sign
some sort of affidavit which said I’d spent the night, for example—I’d take it.

There were pictures all over my parents’
house of me with big ears and disastrous clothes, sitting on tractors, clapping with glee as miniature
trains drew into miniature stations; and though later on, distressingly, girlfriends found these pictures
cute, it all seemed too close for comfort then.

I went out with a girl called Kim, who I knew for a fact had already been invaded, and who (I was
correct in assuming) wouldn’t object to being invaded again.

The old guy turns round and walks out, and Barry chuckles merrily.

None of this was an effort, of course, and none of
it was done with any sense of calculation: I found it easy to remember things about her, because I didn’t
think about anything else, and I really did think she was beautiful, and I would not have been able to
prevent myself from buying her little presents, and I did not have to feign devotion.

He has also edited two anthologies, My Favourite Year and Speaking with the
Angel.

I get by because of the people who make a special effort to shop here Saturdays—young men, always
young men, with John Lennon specs and leather jackets and armfuls of square carrier bags—and
because of the mail order: I advertise in the back of the glossy rock magazines, and get letters from
young men, always young men, in Manchester and Glasgow and Ottowa, young men who seem to spend
a disproportionate amount of their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and ‘ORIGINAL NOT RE- ...

Never has a joke filled me with such nausea and paranoia and insecurity and self-pity and
dread and doubt.

I know that she went to
college, did well, and landed a job as a radio producer for the BBC.

Why would a girl want to kiss you if she
knew (or knew somebody who knew) that just a few years before, you had insisted on sewing souvenir
patches from the Norfolk Broads and Exmoor on your anorak?

Dick says Marie lives here
now; he read somewhere that she finds England more open to the kind of music she makes, which
means, presumably, that we’re cheerfully indifferent rather than actively hostile.


I worried about what it would be like, coming back to the flat tonight, but it’s fine: the unreliable sense
of well-being I’ve had since this morning is still with me.

If I was
being obtuse, I’d say that money changed everything: when she switched jobs, she suddenly had loads,
and when I lost the club work, and the recession seemed to make the shop suddenly invisible to passers-
by, I had none.

I read the Guardian and the Observer, as well as the New Musical Express and music
glossies; I am not averse to going down to Camden to watch subtitled films (top five subtitled films:
Betty Blue, Subway, Tie Me Up!

I couldn’t ever get comfortable, if you know what I mean; there was no room
to stretch out and relax.

In a hostile and unpredictable world, we rely on each other to provide something
to count on.

But that’s about it as far as
staff interaction goes.

”
I hurl Johnny out onto the pavement, slam the door shut, race across the shop floor, pick Barry up by
the lapels of his brown suede jacket, and tell him that if I have to listen to one more word of his useless,
pathetic, meaningless babble again in my entire life I will kill him.

It is a hard song to dance to; it’s a mid-tempo R&B
thing, and the intro sort of stops and starts.

This is my life, and it’s nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it.

She had a nice mum and dad, and a nice house, detached, with a garden and a tree and a fishpond, and a
nice girl’s haircut (she was blond, and she kept her hair a sort of sporty, clean, wholesome, form-captain
mid-length), and nice, smiling eyes, and a nice younger sister, who smiled politely when I rang the
doorbell and kept out of the way when we wanted her to.

I did a spot of shoplifting, the
precise motivation for which escapes me now.

That sort of anonymity was unavailable then,
though.

Attack and defense, invasion and repulsion ... it was as if
breasts were little pieces of property that had been unlawfully annexed by the opposite sex—they were
rightfully ours and we wanted them back.

Marie
LaSalle comes onstage (as it were—there is a little platform and a couple of microphones a few yards in
front of us) at nine; by five past nine, to my intense irritation and embarrassment, I’m in tears, and the
feel-nothing world that I’ve been living in for the last few days has vanished.

This involved
either an imitation of absentmindedness (whistling, or chatting, or fiddling with a cigarette stub or a box
of matches usually did the trick) or a flirtation with danger, so we jumped off the swings when they
could go no higher, jumped on to the roundabout when it would go no faster, hung on to the end of the
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swingboat until it reached an almost v...

Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands,
literally thousands, of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.

In a few short weeks, mock-marital status had ceased to be something to aspire to, and had become a
cause for scorn.

Sometimes it seems as though the only way a man can judge his own niceness, his own decency, is by
looking at his relationships with women, or rather, with prospective or current sexual partners.

It is difficult to stare at foreign matter floating on
the top of a glass of cola and from this minimal information work out the miracle of life itself, but that is
what I had to do, and I did it, too.

You walk much more quickly afterward, trying to
recapture the part of the day that has escaped, and quite often you have the urge to read the international
section of a newspaper, or go to see a Peter Greenaway film, to consume something solid and meaty
which will lie on top of the cotton-candy worthlessness clogging up your head.

(Top five
floor-fillers at the Groucho, incidentally: ‘It’s a Good Feeling’ by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles;
‘No Blow No Show’ by Bobby Bland; ‘Mr. Big Stuff’ by Jean Knight; ‘The Love You Save’ by the
Jackson Five; ‘The Ghetto’ by Donny Hathaway.)

You’re entitled to know that I didn’t let myself down,
that none of the major problems afflicted me, that I didn’t deliver the goods but Marie said she had a
nice time anyway, and I believed her; and you’re entitled to know that I had a nice time, too, and that at
some point or other along the way I remembered what it is I like about sex: what I like about sex is that I
can lose myself in it entirely.

I was intimidated by the other men in her design course, and became
convinced that she was going to go off with one of them.

Maybe I never really enjoyed the naked part
of sex, just the dinner, coffee and get-away-that’s-also-my-favorite-Hitchcock-film-too part of sex, as
long as it’s a sexual preamble, and not just a purposeless chat, and ...

I was out of my depth,
and so was she.

Attack and defense, invasion and repulsion ... it was as if
breasts were little pieces of property that had been unlawfully annexed by the opposite sex—they were
rightfully ours and we wanted them back.

I regret to say that this great feeling, part liberation and part nervous excitement, enters me somewhere
around my toes and sweeps through me in a great wave.

I lived in
Hertfordshire, but I might just as well have lived in any suburb in England: it was that sort of suburb,
and that sort of park—three minutes away from home, right across the road from a little row of shops (a
VG supermarket, a newsagent, an off-license).

I went through this period, after the Charlie and Marco thing, of
imagining them together, at it,and Charlie’s face contorted with a passion that I was never able to
provoke.

(And what would he say, I wonder, if he were not
tongue-tied by his class and his sex and his diffidence?

There are loads of things I want to ask, but they are all questions I
don’t really want answered: when did you start seeing Ian, and was it because of the, you know, the
ceiling noise thing, and is it better (What? she’d ask; Everything, I’d say), and is this really definitely it,
or just some sort of phase, and, this is how feeble I’m becoming, have you missed me at all even one bit,
do you love me, do you love him, do you want to end up with him, do you want to have babies with ...

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I clear away the evidence of last night’s traumas—the spare duvet on the sofa, the balled-up paper
hankies, the coffee mugs with dog-ends floating in the cold, oily-looking dregs, and then I put the
Beatles on, and then when I’ve listened to Abbey Road and the first few tracks of Revolver, I open the
bottle of white wine that Laura brought home last week, si...

So, concentrating very hard on the empty No. 6 packets that
marked out the path between the girls and the boys, and not looking up or behind me or to either side, I
headed back toward the massed ranks of the single males hanging off the swing-boat.

In this sort of company the three of
us—me morose and monosyllabic, Dick nervy and shy, Barry solicitously self-censoring—constitute a
wild and massive office outing.

Anyway, all this is by way of
saying that the woman I saw out of the cab window inspired me and consoled me, momentarily: maybe I
am not too old to provoke a trip from one part of London to another, and if I ever do have another date,
and I arrange to meet that date in, say, Islington, and she has to come all the way from Stoke Newington,
a journey of some three to four miles, I will thank her from the bottom of my wretched thirty-five-year-
old heart.)

Mr.
Porter, which he thinks is hilarious, and The Guns of Navarone.

I lived in
Hertfordshire, but I might just as well have lived in any suburb in England: it was that sort of suburb,
and that sort of park—three minutes away from home, right across the road from a little row of shops (a
VG supermarket, a newsagent, an off-license).

“She tucks her stomach in and everything,” Clive Stevens remarked approvingly of
his brother’s girlfriend; it took me nearly a year to work out the import of this maneuver.

We were little animals, which is not to imply that by the end of the week we were
tearing our tank tops off; just that, metaphorically speaking, we had begun to sniff each other’s bottoms,
and we did not find the odor entirely repellent.

”
I hurl Johnny out onto the pavement, slam the door shut, race across the shop floor, pick Barry up by
the lapels of his brown suede jacket, and tell him that if I have to listen to one more word of his useless,
pathetic, meaningless babble again in my entire life I will kill him.

I was just going to have a discreet ‘J’ � ‘R’ done on my upper arm, but Victor the tattooist wasn’t
having any of it.

Anyway, I worked and worked at this one, and I’ve still got a couple of early demons knocking around
the flat, prototype tapes I changed my mind about when I was checking them through.

When I want to kiss people in that
way now, with mouths and tongues and all that, it’s because I want other things too: sex, Friday nights
at the cinema, company and conversation, fused networks of family and friends, Lemsips brought to me
in bed when I am ill, a new pair of ears for my records and CDs, maybe a little boy called Jack and a
little girl called Holly or Maisie, I haven’t decided yet.

She’s mid-to-late forties, with a dodgy tan and a suspiciously
taut-looking face; and though she’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, the jeans have the name of an Italian
where the name of Mr. Wrangler or Mr. Levi should be, and the T-shirt has a lot of jewelry stuck to the
front of it, arranged in the shape of a CND sign.

On the windowsill where we put the post,
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just inside the communal front door, there are three letters amidst the takeout menus and the minicab
cards: a bill for me, a bank statement for Laura ... and a TV license reminder for Mr. I. Raymond (Ray
to his friends and, more pertinently, to his neighbors), the guy who until about six weeks ago lived
upstairs.

Sometimes I got so bored of trying to touch her breasts that I would
try to touch her between her legs, a gesture that had a sort of self-parodying wit about it: it was like
trying to borrow a fiver, getting turned down, and asking to borrow fifty quid instead.

Phil and Jackie
started going out together around the same time as Penny and I did, except they went on and on: through
the giggly, hormonal fourth form, and the end-of-the-world ‘O’-level and school-leaving fifth, and on
into the mock-adult sobriety of the lower sixth.

We thought we were being
grown-up, but we were being preposterously naive, childish even, to think that one or the other of us
could get up to no good, and own up to the misdemeanor, while we were living together.)

If she came into my shop, I might
really get to like her, and then I’d be waiting for her to come in all the time, and then when she did come
in I’d be nervous and stupid, and probably end up asking her out for a drink in some cack-handed
roundabout way, and either she wouldn’t catch my drift, and I’d feel like an idiot, or she’d turn me down
flat, and I’d feel like an idiot.

Both Dick and Barry were employed to
work part-time, three days each, but shortly after I’d taken them on they both started turning up every
day, including Saturdays.

One morning, maybe three weeks after my last grapple with Penny, Thomson came
roaring into our form room.

He’s a really nice guy,” he adds, astonished that someone who has reached
these dizzying heights is capable of exchanging a few civil words in a pub.

I go and sit down on the stepladder in the stockroom, and Dick hovers in the doorway.

I’m stuck in this pose, this shop-managing
pose, forever, because of a few short weeks in 1979 when I went a bit potty for a while.

We were little animals, which is not to imply that by the end of the week we were
tearing our tank tops off; just that, metaphorically speaking, we had begun to sniff each other’s bottoms,
and we did not find the odor entirely repellent.

In this sort of company the three of
us—me morose and monosyllabic, Dick nervy and shy, Barry solicitously self-censoring—constitute a
wild and massive office outing.

How had this transformation in Penny been effected?

I normally don’t bother with house clearance, but this woman
seems to know what she’s talking about: she mutters about white labels and picture sleeves and all sorts
of other things that suggest we’re not just talking about half a dozen scratched Electric Light Orchestra
records that her son left behind when he moved out.

And I can’t say that she started going out with me, either: it’s that phrase
‘going out with’ that’s the problem, because it suggests some sort of parity and equality.

At least, it’s hard to imagine him skidding into his place
of work, his bank or his insurance office or car showroom, chucking his briefcase down and informing a
colleague with raucous glee that he has ‘knobbed’ said colleague’s wife.

She drove me
mad, and I drove her mad, and the fact that we had the knack of being able to come at the same time
(and this, it seems to me, is what people mean when they talk about good sex, no matter what Dr. Ruth
tells you about sharing and consideration and pillow talk and variety and positions and handcuffs)
counted for nothing.

Is it really as easy as this to approximate my life?

Scarring myself for life seemed much easier than having to tell Jackie that it had all been
a grotesque mistake, that I’d just been messing about; if I could show her the tattoo, my peculiar logic
ran, I wouldn’t have to bother straining after words that were beyond me.

We’re in a quiet street in Holloway, carefully placed to attract the bare
minimum of window-shoppers; there’s no reason to come here at all, unless you live here, and the
people that live here don’t seem terribly interested in my Stiff Little Fingers white label (twenty-five
quid to you—I paid seventeen for it in 1986) or my mono copy of Blonde on Blonde.

There was just no time to develop it.

“Dad, did you ever have to worry about the female orgasm in either its
clitoral or its (possibly mythical) vaginal form?

He laughed like a drain.

That sort of anonymity was unavailable then,
though.

She laughs at the onslaught of enthusiasm.

The shop smells of stale smoke, damp, and plastic dust-covers, and it’s narrow and dingy and dirty and
overcrowded, partly because that’s what I wanted—this is what record shops should look like, and only
Phil Collins’s fans bother with those that look as clean and wholesome as a suburban Habitat, and partly
because I can’t get it together to clean or redecorate it.

They were our golden couple, our Paul and Linda, our
Newman and Woodward, living proof that in a faithless, fickle world, it was possible to grow old, or at
least older, without chopping and changing every few weeks.

Dick would never go so far as to tell Barry that he’s messed up, but the
implication is clear.

He has also edited two anthologies, My Favourite Year and Speaking with the
Angel.

(One Saturday morning, I woke up, switched on the TV, and
found myself smitten with Sarah Greene from Going Live, a devotion I kept very quiet about at the
time.)

You know the worst thing about
being rejected?

There’s a nice symmetry here: when I gave her that tape with the
Solomon Burke song on it, all those years ago, she was wearing loads of makeup, much more than she
was used to wearing, and much more than she had worn the previous week, and I knew, or hoped, that
this was for my benefit, too.

Not the
brightest bloke in the world, but certainly not the dimmest: I have read books like The Unbearable
Lightness of Being and Love in the Time of Cholera, and understood them, I think (they were about girls,
right?), but I don’t like them very much; my all-time top five favorite books are The Big Sleep by
Raymond Chandler, Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, Sweet Soul Music by Peter Guralnick, The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, and, I don’t know, something by Wi...

I made sure, however, that I was never in anything, work or relationships, too deep: I convinced
myself that I might get the call from Charlie at any moment, and would therefore have to leap into
action.

The shop smells of stale smoke, damp, and plastic dust-covers, and it’s narrow and dingy and dirty and
overcrowded, partly because that’s what I wanted—this is what record shops should look like, and only
Phil Collins’s fans bother with those that look as clean and wholesome as a suburban Habitat, and partly
because I can’t get it together to clean or redecorate it.

For all I know, Marco and Charlie never even
consummated their relationship and Charlie has spent the intervening decade trying—but failing
miserably—to recapture the quiet, undemonstrative ecstasy of the nights that we spent together.

It’s sobering, really, to see
how little she is taking with her, this woman who loves her things, her teapots and her books and her
prints and the little sculpture she bought in India: I look at the bag and think, Jesus, this is how much she
doesn’t want to live with me.

When I start going through them properly, I can see straightaway that it’s the haul I’ve always
dreamed of finding, ever since I began collecting records.

Laura is wearing an expression I have come to know well in recent months, a look that denotes both
infinite patience and hopeless frustration.

Why would a girl want to kiss you if she
knew (or knew somebody who knew) that just a few years before, you had insisted on sewing souvenir
patches from the Norfolk Broads and Exmoor on your anorak?

I stopped
drinking so much, I stopped listening to song lyrics with quite the same morbid fascination (for a while,
I regarded just about any song in which somebody had lost somebody else as spookily relevant, which,
as that covers the whole of pop music, and as I worked in a record shop, meant I felt pretty spooked
more or less the whole time), I stopped constructing the killer one-liners that left Charlie writhing on the
floor with regret and self-loathing.

In a few short weeks, mock-marital status had ceased to be something to aspire to, and had become a
cause for scorn.

I was depressed by the lack of flamboyance in my wardrobe.

It’s tatty, and drafty, and the benches have had the stuffing slashed out of
them, and the staff are surly, and the regular clientele are either terrifying or unconscious, and the toilets
are wet and smelly, and there’s nothing to eat in the evening, and the wine is hilariously bad, and the
bitter is fizzy and much too cold; in other words, it’s a run-of-the-mill north London pub.

At about half-past eleven, an Irish drunk called Johnny stumbles in.

He’s
thirty-one years old, with long, greasy black hair; he’s wearing a Sonic Youth T-shirt, a black leather
jacket that is trying manfully to suggest that it has seen better days, even though he only bought it a year
ago, and a Walkman with a pair of ludicrously large headphones which obscure not only his ears but
half his face.

She would have understood the
validity of the exercise.

It would have been
better for both of us if I had moved to Australia when I was fifteen, phoned home once a week and
reported a sequence of fictitious major triumphs.

One moment they
weren’t there, not in any form that interested us, anyway, and the next you couldn’t miss them; they
were everywhere, all over the place.

I was frightened by the aggressive masculinity of the parlor—the other customers (who were all firmly
wrestling-team muscular, and seemed inexplicably amused to see me), the nude women on the walls, the
lurid examples of services offered, most of which were conveniently located on Victor’s forearms, even
Victor’s mildly offensive language.

“Scrubber,” spat Alison’s brother David, and I smiled gratefully at him.

If I can get her to concede that there
is a chance we’ll patch things up, that makes things easier for me: if I don’t have to go around feeling
hurt, and powerless, and miserable, I can cope without her.

“Because it’s sentimental, tacky crap, that’s why not.

2) That my affair contributed directly to her terminating the pregnancy.

And Laura’s the backward part, the last person I
loved, and when I hear those sweet, sticky acoustic guitar chords, I reinvent our time together, and,
before I know it, we’re in the car trying to sing the harmonies on ‘Love Hurts’ and getting it wrong and
laughing.

We did it to
compensate for the fact that life was going on elsewhere, that somewhere Michael and Charlie were
together, having a better time than we with people more glamorous than us, and making a noise was a
sort of defiant gesture, a futile but necessary last stand.

So what was the significance of the snog?

But his conversation is simply
enumeration: if he has seen a good film, he will not describe the plot, or how it made him feel, but where
it ranks in his best-of-year list, his best-of-all-time list, his best-of-decade list—he thinks and talks in
tens and fives, and as a consequence, Dick and I do too.

So, concentrating very hard on the empty No. 6 packets that
marked out the path between the girls and the boys, and not looking up or behind me or to either side, I
headed back toward the massed ranks of the single males hanging off the swing-boat.

In 1999 he was awarded the E. M. Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

I understand that I was in dire need of
symptoms to help me understand that I have been deeply traumatized by recent events, but did they have
to be this extreme?

We made them into life, which is much messier, and more time-consuming, and leaves
nothing for anybody to whistle.

I
started sleeping with people again, although every one of these affairs I regarded as a fluke, a one-off,
nothing likely to alter my dismal self-perception.

They didn’t want to be touched, caressed, stimulated,
aroused; in fact, they used to thump us if we tried.

I’m OK-looking; in fact, if you put, say, Mel Gibson on one end of the looks spectrum and, say, Berky
Edmonds from school, whose grotesque ugliness was legendary, on the other, then I reckon I’d be on
Mel’s side, just.

I try not to think about the peculiar anatomical diagram she has just drawn.

I read the Guardian and the Observer, as well as the New Musical Express and music
glossies; I am not averse to going down to Camden to watch subtitled films (top five subtitled films:
Betty Blue, Subway, Tie Me Up!


Jackie Allen was my friend Phil’s girlfriend, and I pinched her off him, slowly, patiently, over a period
of months.

(Women’s knickers were a terrible disappointment to me when I embarked on my cohabiting
career.

She’s had a little girl!), just to keep myself on my toes, events which required a whole series
of readjustments and conversions to keep my fantasies alive.

But it became unavoidable, because when Jackie expressed doubts about him, I had to nurture
those doubts as if they were tiny, sickly kittens, until eventually they became sturdy, healthy grievances,
with their own cat doors, which allowed them to wander in and out of our conversation at will.

That sounds feeble,
but she did.

Did
you ever fret about how long you could keep going for, or didn’t you think about that sort of thing then?

He looks at her aghast.

In fact, it’s so much like my place that it’s depressing.

“Your dad and I are very worried about this recession.”

I was frightened by the aggressive masculinity of the parlor—the other customers (who were all firmly
wrestling-team muscular, and seemed inexplicably amused to see me), the nude women on the walls, the
lurid examples of services offered, most of which were conveniently located on Victor’s forearms, even
Victor’s mildly offensive language.

For all I know, Marco and Charlie never even
consummated their relationship and Charlie has spent the intervening decade trying—but failing
miserably—to recapture the quiet, undemonstrative ecstasy of the nights that we spent together.

We were having a state-of-the-nation conversation and she said, quite matter-of-factly, that
we were in a pretty unhappy phase at the moment, and I agreed; she asked whether I ever thought about
meeting somebody else, and I denied it, and she laughed, and said that people in our position were
always thinking about meeting somebody else.

Ours was a marriage of convenience as cynical and as
mutually advantageous as any, and I really thought that I might spend my life with her.

Squeaky voices, but a
squeaky voice doesn’t do much for you, really—it makes you preposterous, not desirable.

As a result of Marie LaSalle’s cover version of ‘Baby, I Love Your Way’ (“I
know I’m not supposed to like that song, but I do,” she says with a cheeky smile when she’s finished), I
find myself in two apparently contradictory states: a) I suddenly miss Laura with a passion that has been
entirely absent for the last four days, and b) I fall in love with Marie LaSalle.

Sometimes we called in to see Phil; sometimes he let
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me use his staff discount.

Some of the girls at her school, and some of the boys at ours, presumed
that Jackie had been using me to renegotiate the terms of her relationship with Phil, and the Saturday
shopping afternoons were never the same again.

We stand up and kiss, and then we sit down and kiss, and half of me is telling myself not to
worry, and the other half is feeling pleased with myself, and these two halves make a whole and leave
no room for the here and now, for any pleasure or lust, so then I start wondering whether I have ever
enjoyed this stuff, the physical sensation rather than the fact of it, or whether it’s just something I feel I
ought to do, and when this reverie is over I find that we’re no longer kissin...

Now, she works for a City law firm (hence, I guess, the restaurants and the expensive suits and
the disappearance of the spiky haircut and a previously unrevealed taste for weary sarcasm) not because
she underwent any kind of political conversion, but because she was made redundant and couldn’t find
any legal aid work.

Scarring myself for life seemed much easier than having to tell Jackie that it had all been
a grotesque mistake, that I’d just been messing about; if I could show her the tattoo, my peculiar logic
ran, I wouldn’t have to bother straining after words that were beyond me.

Etc. I have never been entirely sure what it is women like about me, but I know that ardor helps
(even I know how difficult it is to resist someone who finds you irresistible), and I was certainly ardent:
I didn’t make a nuisance of myself, not until the end, anyway, and I never outstayed my welcome, not
while there was still a welcome to be outstayed; but I was kind and sincere and thoughtful and devoted
and I remembered things about her and I told her she was beautiful and bough...

To coin a phrase.

Sex, in fact, is the most absorbing activity I have discovered in adulthood.

Scarring myself for life seemed much easier than having to tell Jackie that it had all been
a grotesque mistake, that I’d just been messing about; if I could show her the tattoo, my peculiar logic
ran, I wouldn’t have to bother straining after words that were beyond me.

I’m OK-looking; in fact, if you put, say, Mel Gibson on one end of the looks spectrum and, say, Berky
Edmonds from school, whose grotesque ugliness was legendary, on the other, then I reckon I’d be on
Mel’s side, just.

But what I really like is the feeling of security I get from my new filing system; I have made myself
more complicated than I really am.

I regret to say that this great feeling, part liberation and part nervous excitement, enters me somewhere
around my toes and sweeps through me in a great wave.

And I can’t say that she started going out with me, either: it’s that phrase
‘going out with’ that’s the problem, because it suggests some sort of parity and equality.

Marie pushes me away so that she can have a look at me and, rather than
let her see me gazing blankly into space, I squeeze my eyes tight shut, which gets me out of the
immediate hole but which in the long run is probably a mistake, because it makes it look as though I
have spent most of my life waiting for this moment, and that will either scare her rigid or make her
assume some things that she shouldn’t.

This is fantastic news!

She was always intense, but, before,
the intensity had somewhere to go: she could worry about tenants’ rights, and slum landlords, and kids
living in places without running water.

The
best customers are the ones who just have to buy a record on a Saturday, even if there’s nothing they
really want; unless they go home clutching a flat, square carrier bag, they feel uncomfortable.

I stopped
drinking so much, I stopped listening to song lyrics with quite the same morbid fascination (for a while,
I regarded just about any song in which somebody had lost somebody else as spookily relevant, which,
as that covers the whole of pop music, and as I worked in a record shop, meant I felt pretty spooked
more or less the whole time), I stopped constructing the killer one-liners that left Charlie writhing on the
floor with regret and self-loathing.

I gave Penny one last try, in my bedroom while my mum and dad were at the town
hall watching a local dramatic society interpretation of Toad of Toad Hall: I used a degree of force that
would have outraged and terrified an adult female, but got nowhere, and when I walked her home we
hardly spoke.

It’s raining, and the fluorescent lights make patterns on our faces; the taxi driver asks us if
we’ve had a good day, and we grunt, and he slams the partition shut behind him.

And she’s charming, as far as I can tell, and not without talent: once she has got Peter Frampton
out of her system, she sticks to her own songs, and they’re good, affecting and funny and delicate.

The Vanishing, Diva), although on the whole I prefer
American films.

There are a couple
of guitars leaning against the walls, and some sort of computer that looks as though it might be able to
do something musical if you were that way inclined.

So we’re two hours on the tube, or we get a minicab,
which’ll cost us, ooh, a fiver each.

That ludicrous machine you
had to build, where silver balls went down chutes, and little men went up ladders, and one thing knocked
into another to set off something else, until in the end the cage fell onto the mouse and trapped it?

There was
no news I couldn’t handle; there was nothing she and Marco could do that would convince me that it
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wasn’t all just a stage we were going through.

Laura wants to come
around on Saturday afternoon, when I’m at work, to pick up some more underwear, and that’s fine by
me; we should have stopped there, but I try to have a different sort of conversation, and she doesn’t like
it because she’s at work, but I persist, and she hangs up on me in tears.

(Top five
floor-fillers at the Groucho, incidentally: ‘It’s a Good Feeling’ by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles;
‘No Blow No Show’ by Bobby Bland; ‘Mr. Big Stuff’ by Jean Knight; ‘The Love You Save’ by the
Jackson Five; ‘The Ghetto’ by Donny Hathaway.)

I can see what feminists are on about, most of the time, but not the radical ones.

One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, somebody will be
able to refer to me without using the word arse somewhere in the sentence.

That’s about me and my ex dividing up our
record collections.”

The shop smells of stale smoke, damp, and plastic dust-covers, and it’s narrow and dingy and dirty and
overcrowded, partly because that’s what I wanted—this is what record shops should look like, and only
Phil Collins’s fans bother with those that look as clean and wholesome as a suburban Habitat, and partly
because I can’t get it together to clean or redecorate it.

“I left because we weren’t really getting on, or even talking, very much, and I’m at an age where I
want to sort myself out, and I couldn’t see that ever happening with you, mostly because you seem
incapable of sorting yourself out.

I just can’t muster that sort of anger any more.

We devised these moves a couple of years ago, so we’ve got them off pat now.

I was realistic too: every now and again I updated Charlie’s life, imagining a whole series of
disastrous events (She’s living with Marco!

I was out of my depth with Charlie; after
her, I was determined never to get out of my depth again, and so for five years, until I met Sarah, I just
paddled around in the shallow end.

I was out of my depth with Charlie; after
her, I was determined never to get out of my depth again, and so for five years, until I met Sarah, I just
paddled around in the shallow end.

(Top five
floor-fillers at the Groucho, incidentally: ‘It’s a Good Feeling’ by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles;
‘No Blow No Show’ by Bobby Bland; ‘Mr. Big Stuff’ by Jean Knight; ‘The Love You Save’ by the
Jackson Five; ‘The Ghetto’ by Donny Hathaway.)

At home I didn’t have a history, just stuff that
everybody already knew, and that, therefore, wasn’t worth repeating.

For all I know, Marco and Charlie never even
consummated their relationship and Charlie has spent the intervening decade trying—but failing
miserably—to recapture the quiet, undemonstrative ecstasy of the nights that we spent together.

It made sense to swear off together, to pool our
loathing of the opposite sex and get to share a bed with someone at the same time.

I was frightened by the aggressive masculinity of the parlor—the other customers (who were all firmly
wrestling-team muscular, and seemed inexplicably amused to see me), the nude women on the walls, the
lurid examples of services offered, most of which were conveniently located on Victor’s forearms, even
Victor’s mildly offensive language.

Not really, unless
any circumstances (in other words, context) can be regarded as mitigating.

That’s why I’m trying to find a compromise.

Mine isn’t much, really, just about
someone playing at the Harry Lauder tomorrow night.

I had kind of hoped that my adulthood would be long and meaty and
instructive, but it all took place in those two years; sometimes it seems as though everything and
everyone that have happened to me since were just minor distractions.

It only looked good in the
shop, you realize too late, because it had its mates around it.

Ten partners in a couple of decades of sexual activity is actually pretty feeble, if you think about
it: one partner every two years, and if any of those partners was a one-night stand, and that one-night
stand came in the middle of a two-year drought, then you’re not in trouble exactly, but you’re hardly the
Number One Lurve Man in your particular postal district.

I had kind of hoped that my adulthood would be long and meaty and
instructive, but it all took place in those two years; sometimes it seems as though everything and
everyone that have happened to me since were just minor distractions.

We have one of those conversations where everything clicks, meshes,
corresponds, locks, where even our pauses, even our punctuation marks, seem to be nodding in
agreement.

I wasn’t even sure how I’d ended up on her
side of the park, away from her brother and Mark Godfrey and the rest, nor how we had separated from
her crowd, nor why she tipped her face toward me so that I knew I was supposed to put my mouth on
hers.

Ours was a marriage of convenience as cynical and as
mutually advantageous as any, and I really thought that I might spend my life with her.

And then there
was makeup and perfume, invariably cheap, and inexpertly, sometimes even comically, applied, but still
a quite terrifying sign that things had progressed without us, beyond us, behind our backs.

But nobody ever writes about
how it is possible to escape and rot—how escapes can go off at half-cock, how you can leave the
suburbs for the city but end up living a limp suburban life anyway.

I was just going to have a discreet ‘J’ � ‘R’ done on my upper arm, but Victor the tattooist wasn’t
having any of it.

I know that she went to
college, did well, and landed a job as a radio producer for the BBC.

That ludicrous machine you
had to build, where silver balls went down chutes, and little men went up ladders, and one thing knocked
into another to set off something else, until in the end the cage fell onto the mouse and trapped it?

All
we really had in common (our shared admiration of Diva did not, if truth be told, last us much beyond
the first few months) was that we had been dumped by people, and that on the whole we were against
dumping—we were fervent antidumpers.

Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?

But in my fearful imaginings Charlie was as abandoned and as noisy as any
character in a porn film.

They didn’t want to be touched, caressed, stimulated,
aroused; in fact, they used to thump us if we tried.

Suppose you’d just at
that moment finished a brilliant poem or something?

Sometimes—not so often recently—I could do something or say something that allowed her to escape
from herself, and that’s when we worked best; she complains frequently about my ’relentless triviality,”
but it has its uses.


Most nights we used to mess around in the park around the corner from my house.

When it comes to girlfriends, though, it’s much trickier to be consistently honorable.

Compare and contrast with what happens if I make that sort of mess now: I can go to different pubs
and clubs, leave the answering machine on, go out more, stay in more, fiddle around with my social
compasses and draw a new circle of friends (and anyway, my friends are never her friends, whoever she
might be), avoid all contact with disapproving parents.

She was tall, with blond cropped hair (she said she knew some people who were at
St. Martin’s with some friends of Johnny Rotten, but I was never introduced to them), and she looked
different and dramatic and exotic.

Not children, because we were children, and not Friday nights at the pictures, because we
went Saturday mornings, and not Lemsips, because my mum did that, not even sex, especially not sex,
please God not sex, the filthiest and most terrifying invention of the early seventies.

Penny used the expression ‘broken into’: “I don’t want to be broken into yet,” she would
explain patiently and maybe a little sadly (she seemed to understand that one day—but not now—she
would have to give in, and when it happened she wouldn’t like it) when she removed my hand from her
chest for the one hundred thousandth time.

I have been listening to
my parents’ sneering one-syllable explosion—heads forward, idiotic look on their faces (because pop
fans are idiots) for the time it takes them to spit the word out—for well over two decades.

Anyway, all this is by way of
saying that the woman I saw out of the cab window inspired me and consoled me, momentarily: maybe I
am not too old to provoke a trip from one part of London to another, and if I ever do have another date,
and I arrange to meet that date in, say, Islington, and she has to come all the way from Stoke Newington,
a journey of some three to four miles, I will thank her from the bottom of my wretched thirty-five-year-
old heart.)

I get by because of the people who make a special effort to shop here Saturdays—young men, always
young men, with John Lennon specs and leather jackets and armfuls of square carrier bags—and
because of the mail order: I advertise in the back of the glossy rock magazines, and get letters from
young men, always young men, in Manchester and Glasgow and Ottowa, young men who seem to spend
a disproportionate amount of their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and ‘ORIGINAL NOT RE-
REL...

I stopped
drinking so much, I stopped listening to song lyrics with quite the same morbid fascination (for a while,
I regarded just about any song in which somebody had lost somebody else as spookily relevant, which,
as that covers the whole of pop music, and as I worked in a record shop, meant I felt pretty spooked
more or less the whole time), I stopped constructing the killer one-liners that left Charlie writhing on the
floor with regret and self-loathing.

I’m not as vulnerable as I was when Alison or Charlie dumped me, you haven’t changed the
whole structure of my daily life like Jackie did, you haven’t made me feel bad about myself like Penny
did (and there’s no way you can humiliate me, like Chris Thomson did), and I’m more robust than I was
when Sarah went—I know, despite all the gloom and self-doubt that bubbles up from the deep when you
get dumped, that you did not represent my last and best chance of a relationship.

What
came first, the music or the misery?

When you live
with a woman, these faded, shrunken tatty M&S scraps suddenly appear on radiators all over the house;
your lascivious schoolboy dreams of adulthood as a time when you are surrounded by exotic lingerie for
ever and ever amen ... those dreams crumble to dust.)