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<strong>High</strong> <strong>Fidelity</strong><br />
http://www.fictionbook.ru/author/hornby_nick/high_fidelity/hornby_high_fidelity.html<br />
Page 33 of 112<br />
6/20/2006<br />
The night before Liz and I were supposed to have a drink in Camden, Liz and Laura met up<br />
somewhere for something to eat, and Liz had a go at Laura about Ian, and Laura wasn’t planning on<br />
saying anything in her own defense, because that would have meant assaulting me, and she has a<br />
powerful and sometimes ill-advised sense of loyalty. (I, for example, would not have been able to<br />
restrain myself.) But Liz pushed it too far, and Laura snapped, and all these things about me poured out<br />
in a torrent, and then they both cried, and Liz apologized between fifty and one hundred times for<br />
speaking out of turn. So the following day Liz snapped, tried to phone me and then marched into the pub<br />
and called me names. I don’t know any of this for sure, of course. I have had no contact at all with Laura<br />
and only a brief and unhappy meeting with Liz. But, even so, one does not need a sophisticated<br />
understanding of the characters in question to guess this much.<br />
I do not know what, precisely, Laura said, but she would have revealed at least two, maybe even all<br />
four, of the following pieces of information:<br />
1) That I slept with somebody else while she was pregnant.<br />
2) That my affair contributed directly to her terminating the pregnancy.<br />
3) That, after her abortion, I borrowed a large sum of money from her and have not yet repaid any of<br />
it.<br />
4) That, shortly before she left, I told her I was unhappy in the relationship, and I was kind of sort of<br />
maybe looking around for someone else.<br />
Did I do and say these things Yes, I did. Are there any mitigating circumstances Not really, unless<br />
any circumstances (in other words, context) can be regarded as mitigating. And before you judge,<br />
although you have probably already done so, go away and write down the worst four things that you<br />
have done to your partner, even if—especially if—your partner doesn’t know about them. Don’t dress<br />
these things up, or try to explain them; just write them down, in a list, in the plainest language possible.<br />
Finished OK, so who’s the arsehole now<br />
Eight<br />
“Where the fuck have you been” I ask Barry when he turns up for work on Saturday morning. I<br />
haven’t seen him since we went to Marie’s gig at the White Lion—no phone calls, no apologies,<br />
nothing.<br />
“Where the fuck have I been Where the fuck have I been God, you’re an arsehole,” Barry says by<br />
way of an explanation. “I’m sorry, Rob. I know things aren’t going so well for you and you have<br />
problems and stuff, but, you know. We spent fucking hours looking for you the other night.”<br />
“Hours More than one hour At least two I left at half-ten, so you abandoned the search at halftwelve,<br />
right You must have walked from Putney to Wapping.”<br />
“Don’t be a smartarse.”<br />
One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, somebody will be<br />
able to refer to me without using the word arse somewhere in the sentence.<br />
“OK, sorry. But I’ll bet you looked for ten minutes, and then had a drink with Marie and thingy. T-<br />
Bone.”<br />
I hate calling him T-Bone. It sets my teeth on edge, like when you have to ask for a Big Heap Buffalo<br />
Billburger, when all you want is a quarter-pounder, or a Just Like Mom Used to Make, when all you<br />
want is a piece of apple pie.<br />
“That’s not the point.”<br />
“Did you have a good time”<br />
“It was great. T-Bone’s played on two Guy Clark albums and a Jimmie Dale Gilmore album.”<br />
“Far out.”