Nick Hornby - High Fidelity

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High Fidelity http://www.fictionbook.ru/author/hornby_nick/high_fidelity/hornby_high_fidelity.html Page 58 of 112 6/20/2006 I take it from there. “Is that Mrs. Ashworth” “It is.” Mrs. Ashworth and I were never introduced. We never really got to the meet-the-parents stage during our six-hour relationship. “I’m an old friend of Alison’s, and I’d like to get in touch with her again.” “You want her address in Australia” “If … if that’s where she lives, yeah.” I won’t be forgiving Alison in a hurry. In fact, it will take me weeks: weeks to get around to writing a letter, weeks for a reply. She gives me her daughter’s address, and I ask what Alison’s doing out there; it turns out that she’s married to someone with a building business, and she’s a nurse, and they have two children, both girls, and blah blah. I manage to resist asking whether she ever mentions me at all. You can only take selfabsorption so far. And then I ask about David, and he’s in London working for a firm of accountants, and he’s married, and he’s got two girls as well, and can’t anybody in the family produce boys Even Alison’s cousin has just had a little girl! I express disbelief in all the right places. “How did you know Alison” “I was her first boyfriend.” There’s a silence, and for a moment I worry that for the last twenty years I have been held responsible in the Ash-worth house for some sort of sexual crime I did not commit. “She married her first boyfriend. Kevin. She’s Alison Bannister.” She married Kevin Bannister. I was ousted by forces beyond my control. This is tremendous. What chance did I stand against fate No chance at all. It was nothing to do with me, or any failings on my part, and I can feel the Alison Ashworth scar healing over as we speak. “If that’s what she’s saying, she’s a liar.” This is meant to be a joke, but it comes out all wrong. “I beg your pardon” “No, seriously, joking apart, ha ha, I went out with her before Kevin did. Only for a week or so”—I have to up it a bit, because if I told the truth, she’d think I was mad—“But they all count, don’t they A snog’s a snog, after all, ha ha.” I’m not going to be written out of history like this. I played my part. I did my bit. “What did you say your name was” “Rob. Bobby. Bob. Robert. Robert Zimmerman.” Fucking hell. “Well, Robert, I’ll tell her you called, when I speak to her. But I’m not sure she’ll remember you.” She’s right, of course. She’ll remember the evening she got off with Kevin, but she won’t remember the evening before. It’s probably only me who remembers the evening before. I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn’t something I’m very good at. This man comes into the shop to buy the Fireball XL theme tune for his wife’s birthday (and I’ve got one, an original, and it’s his for a tenner). And he’s maybe two or three years younger than me, but he’s well-spoken, and he’s wearing a suit, and he’s dangling his car keys, and for some reason these three things make me feel maybe two decades younger than him, twenty or so to his fortysomething. And I suddenly have this burning desire to find out what he thinks of me. I don’t give in to it, of course (“There’s your change, there’s your record, now come on, be honest, you think I’m a waster, don’t you”), but I think about it for ages afterwards, what I must look like to him. I mean, he’s married, which is a scary thing, and he’s got the sort of car keys that you jangle confidently, so he’s obviously got, like, a BMW or a Batmobile or something flash, and he does work which requires a suit, and to my untutored eye it looks like an expensive suit. I’m a bit smarter than usual today—I’ve got my newish black denims on, as opposed to my ancient blue ones, and I’m wearing a long-sleeved polo shirt thing that I actually went to the trouble of ironing—but even so I’m patently not a grown-up man in a grown-up job. Do I want to be like him Not really, I don’t think. But I find myself worrying away at that stuff about pop music again, whether I like it because I’m unhappy, or whether I’m unhappy because I like it. It would help me to know whether this guy has ever taken it seriously, whether he has ever sat surrounded by thousands and thousands of songs about … about …
High Fidelity http://www.fictionbook.ru/author/hornby_nick/high_fidelity/hornby_high_fidelity.html Page 59 of 112 6/20/2006 (say it, man, say it) … well, about love. I would guess that he hasn’t. I would also guess Douglas Hurd hasn’t, and the guy at the Bank of England hasn’t; nor has David Owen or Nicholas Witchell or Kate Adie or loads of other famous people that I should be able to name, probably, but can’t, because they never played for Booker T and the MG’s. These people look as though they wouldn’t have had the time to listen to the first side of Al Green’s Greatest Hits, let alone all his other stuff (ten albums on the Hi label alone, although only nine of them were produced by Willie Mitchell); they’re too busy fixing base rates and trying to bring peace to what was formerly Yugoslavia to listen to ‘Sha La La (Make Me Happy).’ So they might have the jump on me when it comes to accepted notions of seriousness (although as everyone knows, Al Green Explores Your Mind is as serious as life gets), but I ought to have the edge on them when it comes to matters of the heart. “Kate,” I should be able to say, “it’s all very well dashing off to war zones. But what are you going to do about the only thing that really matters You know what I’m talking about, baby.” And then I could give her all the emotional advice I gleaned from the College of Musical Knowledge. It hasn’t worked out like that, though. I don’t know anything about Kate Adie’s love life, but it can’t be in a worse state than mine, can it I’ve spent nearly thirty years listening to people singing about broken hearts, and has it helped me any Has it fuck. So maybe what I said before, about how listening to too many records messes your life up … maybe there’s something in it after all. David Owen, he’s married, right He’s taken care of all that, and now he’s a big-shot diplomat. The guy who came into the shop with the suit and the car keys, he’s married, too, and now he’s, I don’t know, a businesman. Me, I’m unmarried—at the moment as unmarried as it’s possible to be—and I’m the owner of a failing record shop. It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can’t afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You’ve got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you’ve got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you’re compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship. Maybe Al Green is directly responsible for more than I ever realized. See, records have helped me to fall in love, no question. I hear something new, with a chord change that melts my guts, and before I know it I’m looking for someone, and before I know it I’ve found her. I fell in love with Rosie the simultaneous orgasm woman after I’d fallen in love with a Cowboy Junkies song: I played it and played it and played it, and it made me dreamy, and I needed someone to dream about, and I found her, and … well, there was trouble. Seventeen She’s easy. I don’t mean, you know, easy (if I meant that, I wouldn’t have to meet up with her and talk about knobbing and Chris Thomson, because I would have knobbed her first and he wouldn’t have been able to shoot his mouth off in the classroom that morning); I mean she’s easy to track down. My mum sees her mum quite often, and a while back Mum gave me her phone number and told me to get in touch, and Penny’s mum gave her mine, and neither of us did anything about it, but I kept the number anyway. And she’s surprised to hear from me—there’s a long computer-memory silence while she tries to make sense of the name, and then a little laugh of recognition—but not, I think, displeased, and we arrange to go to a film together, some Chinese thing that she has to see for work, and to eat afterwards. The film’s OK, better than I thought it would be—it’s about this woman who’s sent off to live with this guy, and he’s already got loads of wives, so it’s about how he gets on with her rivals, and it all goes horribly wrong. Of course. But Penny’s got one of these special film critic pens that have a light in the end of them (even though she’s not a film critic, just a BBC radio journalist) and people keep looking round at her and nudging each other, and I feel a bit of a berk sitting there with her. (I have to say, although it is ungallant, that she looks funny, anyway, even without the special film critic pen: she
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Nick Hornby - High Fidelity

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