Nick Hornby - High Fidelity

High Fidelity
http://www.fictionbook.ru/author/hornby_nick/high_fidelity/hornby_high_fidelity.html
Page 31 of 112
6/20/2006
“You’re a fucking arsehole, Rob,” she says, and then she turns around and walks out, and the people at
the next table stare at me. I blush, stare at the Time Out and take a big pull on my pint in the hope that
the glass will obscure my reddening face.
She’s right, of course. I am a fucking arsehole.
Seven
For a couple of years, at the end of the eighties, I was a DJ at a club in Kentish Town, and it was there
I met Laura. It wasn’t much of a club, just a room above a pub, really, but for a six-month period it was
popular with a certain London crowd—the almost fashionable, right-on, black 501s-and-DMs-crowd
that used to move in herds from the market to the Town and Country to Dingwalls to the Electric
Ballroom to the Camden Plaza. I was a good DJ, I think. At any rate, people seemed happy, they danced,
stayed late, asked me where they could buy some of the records I played, and came back week after
week. 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. (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.)
And I loved, loved doing it. To look down on a roomful of heads all bobbing away to the music you
have chosen is an uplifting thing, and for that six-month period when the club was popular, I was as
happy as I have ever been. 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. Dance music, after all, is supposed to have momentum—I
just got confused.
Anyway, I met Laura right in the middle of that period, in the summer of ’87. She reckons she had
been to the club three or four times before I noticed her, and that could well be right—she’s small, and
skinny, and pretty, in a sort of Sheena Easton pre-Hollywood makeover way (although she looked
tougher than Sheena Easton with her radical lawyer spiky hair and her boots and her scary pale blue
eyes), but there were prettier women there, and when you’re looking on in that idle kind of way, it’s the
prettiest ones you look at. 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.
“Were you here when I played it before”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you saw what happened. They were all about to go home.”
It’s a three-minute single, and I’d had to take it off after about a minute and a half. I played ‘Holiday’
by Madonna instead; I used modern stuff every now and again, at times of crisis, just like people who
believe in homeopathy have to use conventional medicine sometimes, even though they disapprove of it.
“They won’t this time.”
“How do you know that”
“Because I brought half of this lot here, and I’ll make sure they dance.”
So I played it, and sure enough Laura and her mates flooded the dance floor, but one by one they all
drifted off again, shaking their heads and laughing. It is a hard song to dance to; it’s a mid-tempo R&B
thing, and the intro sort of stops and starts. 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 wouldn’t dance to the Jackson Five, and she marched over to me, but she was grinning and said