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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 34 of 112<br />
6/20/2006<br />
“Oh, fuck off.”<br />
I’m glad it’s Saturday because we’re reasonably busy, and Barry and I don’t have to find much to say<br />
to each other. When Dick’s making a cup of coffee and I’m looking for an old Shirley Brown single in<br />
the stockroom, he tells me that T-Bone’s played on two Guy Clark albums and a Jimmie Dale Gilmore<br />
album.<br />
“And do you know what He’s a really nice guy,” he adds, astonished that someone who has reached<br />
these dizzying heights is capable of exchanging a few civil words in a pub. But that’s about it as far as<br />
staff interaction goes. There are too many other people to talk to.<br />
Even though we get a lot of people into the shop, only a small percentage of them buy anything. The<br />
best customers are the ones who just have to buy a record on a Saturday, even if there’s nothing they<br />
really want; unless they go home clutching a flat, square carrier bag, they feel uncomfortable.<br />
You can spot the vinyl addicts because after a while they get fed up with the rack they are flicking<br />
through, march over to a completely different section of the shop, pull a sleeve out from the middle<br />
somewhere, and come over to the counter; this is because they have been making a list of possible<br />
purchases in their head (“If I don’t find anything in the next five minutes, that blues compilation I saw<br />
half an hour ago will have to do”), and suddenly sicken themselves with the amount of time they have<br />
wasted looking for something they don’t really want. I know that feeling well (these are my people, and<br />
I understand them better than I understand anybody in the world): it is a prickly, clammy, panicky<br />
sensation, and you go out of the shop reeling. You walk much more quickly afterward, trying to<br />
recapture the part of the day that has escaped, and quite often you have the urge to read the international<br />
section of a newspaper, or go to see a Peter Greenaway film, to consume something solid and meaty<br />
which will lie on top of the cotton-candy worthlessness clogging up your head.<br />
The other people I like are the ones who are being driven to find a tune that has been troubling them,<br />
distracting them, a tune that they can hear in their breath when they run for a bus, or in the rhythm of<br />
their windshield wipers when they’re driving home from work. Sometimes something banal and obvious<br />
is responsible for the distraction: they have heard it on the radio, or at a club. But sometimes it has come<br />
to them as if by magic. Sometimes it has come to them because the sun was out, and they saw someone<br />
who looked nice, and they suddenly found themselves humming a snatch of a song they haven’t heard<br />
for fifteen or twenty years; once, a guy came in because he had dreamed a record, the whole thing,<br />
melody, title, and artist. And when I found it for him (it was an old reggae thing, ‘Happy Go Lucky Girl’<br />
by the Paragons), and it was more or less exactly as it had appeared to him in his sleep, the look on his<br />
face made me feel as though I was not a man who ran a record shop, but a midwife, or a painter,<br />
someone whose life is routinely transcendental.<br />
You can really see what Dick and Barry are for on Saturdays. Dick is as patient and as enthusiastic and<br />
as gentle as a primary-school teacher: he sells people records they didn’t know they wanted because he<br />
knows intuitively what they should buy. He chats, then puts something on the record deck, and soon<br />
they’re handing over fivers almost distractedly as if that’s what they’d come in for in the first place.<br />
Barry, meanwhile, simply bulldozes customers into submission. He rubbishes them because they don’t<br />
own the first Jesus and Mary Chain album, and they buy it, and he laughs at them because they don’t<br />
own Blonde on Blonde, so they buy that, and he explodes in disbelief when they tell him that they have<br />
never heard of Ann Peebles, and then they buy something of hers, too. At around four o’clock most<br />
Saturday afternoons, just when I make us all a cup of tea, I have a little glow on, maybe because this is<br />
after all my work, and it’s going OK, maybe because I’m proud of us, of the way that, though our talents<br />
are small and peculiar, we use them to their best advantage.<br />
So when I come to close the shop, and we’re getting ready to go out for a drink as we do every<br />
Saturday, we are all happy together again; we have a fund of goodwill which we will spend over the<br />
next few empty days, and which will have completely run out by Friday lunchtime. We are so happy, in<br />
fact, that between throwing the customers out and leaving for the day, we list our top five Elvis Costello<br />
songs (I go for ‘Alison,’ ‘Little Triggers,’ ‘Man Out of Time,’ ‘King Horse,’ and a bootleg Merseybeatstyle<br />
version of ‘Everyday I Write the Book’ I’ve got on a bootleg tape somewhere, the obscurity of the<br />
last cleverly counteracting the obviousness of the first, I thought, and thus preempting scorn from Barry)