Nick Hornby - High Fidelity

High Fidelity
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Page 100 of 112
6/20/2006
alarms me. I thought we were supposed to ditch anything superfluous and get by on the rest, and that
doesn’t appear to be the case at all.
The big day itself goes by in a blur, like it must have done for Bob Geldof at Live Aid. Marie turns up,
and loads of people turn up to watch her (the shop’s packed, and though she doesn’t stand on the counter
to play, she does have to stand behind it, on a couple of crates we found for her), and they clap, and at
the end, some of them buy tapes and a few of them buy other stuff they see in the shop; my expenses
came to about ten pounds, and I sell thirty or forty quid’s worth of stock, so I’m laughing. Chuckling.
Smiling broadly, anyway.
Marie flogs the stuff for me. She plays about a dozen songs, only half of which are her own; before
she starts, she spends some time rummaging through the browsing racks checking that I’ve got all the
cover versions she was intending to play, and writing down the names and the prices of the albums they
come from. If I haven’t got it, she crosses the song off her set list and chooses one I do have.
“This is a song by Emmylou Harris called ‘Boulder to Birmingham,’ ” she announces. “It’s on the
album Pieces of the Sky, which Rob is selling this afternoon for the unbelievable price of five pounds
and ninety-nine pence, and you can find it right over there in the ‘Country Artists—(Female)’ section.’
This is a song by Butch Hancock called … ” And at the end, when people want to buy the songs but
have forgotten the names, Marie is there to help them out. She’s great, and when she sings, I wish that I
weren’t living with Laura, and that my night with Marie had gone better than it did. Maybe next time, if
there is a next time, I won’t feel so miserable about Laura going, and then things might be different with
Marie, and … but I’m always going to feel miserable about Laura going. That’s what I’ve learned. So I
should be happy that she’s staying, right That’s how it should work, right And that’s how it does
work. Kind of. When I don’t think about it too hard.
It could be argued that my little event is, on its own terms, more successful than Live Aid, at least
from the technical point of view. There are no glitches, no technical fuck-ups (although admittedly it
would be hard to see what could go wrong, apart from a broken guitar string, or Marie falling over), and
only one untoward incident: two songs in, a familiar voice emerges from the back of the shop, right next
to the door.
“Will you play ‘All Kinds of Everything’”
“I don’t know that,” says Marie sweetly. “But if I did, I’d sing it for you.”
“You don’t know it”
“Nope.”
“You don’t know it”
“Nope again.”
“Jesus, woman, it won the Eurovision Song Contest.”
“Then I guess I’m pretty ignorant, huh I promise that the next time I play live here, I’ll have learned
it.”
“I should fuckin’ hope so.”
And then I push through to the door, and Johnny and I do our little dance, and I shove him out. But it’s
not like Paul McCartney’s microphone conking out during ‘Let It Be,’ is it
“I had a terrific time,” says Marie afterwards. “I didn’t think it would work, but it did. And we all
made money! That always makes me feel good.”
I don’t feel good, not now that it’s all over. For an afternoon I was working in a place that other people
wanted to come to, and that made a difference to me—I felt, I felt, I felt, go on say it, more of a man, a
feeling both shocking and comforting.
Men don’t work in quiet, deserted side streets in Holloway: they work in the City or the West End, or
in factories, or down mines, or in stations or airports or offices. They work in places where other people
work, and they have to fight to get there, and perhaps as a consequence they do not get the feeling that
real life is going on elsewhere. I don’t even feel as if I’m the center of my own world, so how am I
supposed to feel as though I’m the center of anyone else’s When the last person has been ushered out