Nick Hornby - High Fidelity

High Fidelity
http://www.fictionbook.ru/author/hornby_nick/high_fidelity/hornby_high_fidelity.html
Page 105 of 112
6/20/2006
“ ’Course we are.”
“I’ll give you ten percent of the door if you don’t play.”
“We’re getting that anyway.”
“What’s she fucking playing at OK, twenty percent.”
“No. We need the gig.”
“One hundred and ten percent. That’s my final offer.”
He laughs.
“I’m not kidding. If we get one hundred people paying a fiver a throw, I’ll give you five hundred and
fifty pounds. That’s how much it means to me not to hear you play.”
“We’re not as bad as you think, Rob.”
“You couldn’t be. Look, Barry. There’s going to be people from Laura’s work there, people who own
dogs and babies and Tina Turner albums. How are you going to cope with them”
“How are they going to cope with us, more like. We’re not called Barrytown anymore, by the way.
They got sick of the Barry/Barrytown thing. We’re called SDM. Sonic Death Monkey.”
“ ‘Sonic Death Monkey.’ ”
“What do you think Dick likes it.”
“Barry, you’re over thirty years old. You owe it to yourself and to your friends and to your mum and
dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.”
“I owe it to myself to go out on the edge, Rob, and this group really does go out on the edge. Over it,
in fact.”
“You’ll be going fucking right over it if you come anywhere near me next Friday night.”
“That’s what we want. Reaction. And if Laura’s bourgeois lawyer friends can’t take it, then fuck ’em.
Let ’em riot, we can handle it. We’ll be ready.” He gives what he fondly imagines to be a demonic,
drug-crazed chuckle.
Some people would relish all this. They’d make an anecdote out of it, they’d be getting the phrasing
right in their heads even as the pub was being torn apart, even as weeping lawyers with bleeding
eardrums were heading for the exits. I am not one of those people. I just gather it all up into a hard ball
of nervous anxiety and put it in my gut, somewhere between the belly button and the arsehole, for safe
keeping. Even Laura doesn’t seem to be that worried.
“It’s only the first one. And I’ve told them they can’t go on for longer than half an hour. And OK, you
might lose a couple of my friends, but they won’t be able to get baby-sitters every week, anyway.”
“I’ve got to pay a deposit, you know. As well as the rental on the room.”
“That’s all taken care of.”
And just that one little sentence sets something off in me. I suddenly feel choked up. It’s not the
money, it’s the way she’s thought of everything: one morning I woke up to find her going through my
singles, pulling out things that she remembered me playing and putting them into the little carrying cases
that I used to use and put away in a cupboard somewhere years ago. She knew I needed a kick up the
backside. She also knew how happy I was when I used to do this; and from whichever angle I examine
it, it still looks as though she’s done it because she loves me.
I cave in to something that has been eating away at me for a while, and put my arms around her.
“I’m sorry I’ve been a bit of a jerk. I do appreciate what you’ve done for me, and I know you’ve done
it for the best possible reasons, and I do love you, even though I act as though I don’t.”
“That’s OK. You seem so cross all the time, though.”
“I know. I don’t get myself.”
But if I had to take a wild guess, I’d say that I’m cross because I know I’m stuck, and I don’t like it. It
would be nicer, in some ways, if I wasn’t so bound to her; it would be nicer if those sweet possibilities,
that dreamy anticipation you have when you’re fifteen or twenty or twenty-five, even, and you know
that the most perfect person in the world might walk into your shop or office or friend’s party at any
moment … it would be nicer if all that were still around somewhere, in a back pocket or a bottom
drawer. But it’s all gone, I think, and that’s enough to make anyone cross. Laura is who I am now, and