Nick Hornby - High Fidelity

High Fidelity
http://www.fictionbook.ru/author/hornby_nick/high_fidelity/hornby_high_fidelity.html
Page 60 of 112
6/20/2006
always was a girl for sensible clothes, but what she’s wearing tonight—a big floral dress, a beige
raincoat—pushes sensible over the edge toward death. “What’s that cool guy in the leather jacket doing
with Virginia Bottomley’s elder sister” the audience is thinking. Probably.)
We go to this Italian place she knows, and they know her, too, and they do vulgar things with the
pepper grinder that seem to amuse her. It’s often the way that people who take their work seriously
laugh at stupid jokes; it’s as if they are under-humored and, as a consequence, suffer from premature
laugh-ejaculation. But she’s OK, really. She’s a good sort, a good sport, and it’s easy to talk about Chris
Thomson and knobbing. I just launch into it, with no real explanation.
I try to tell the story in a lighthearted, self-deprecatory way (it’s about me, not him and her), but she’s
appalled, really disgusted: she puts her knife and fork down and looks away, and I can see that she’s
close to tears.
“Bastard,” she says. “I wish you hadn’t told me that.”
“I’m sorry. I just thought, you know, long time ago and all that.”
“Well, it obviously doesn’t seem that long ago to you.”
Fair point.
“No. But I just thought I was weird.”
“Why this sudden need to tell me about it, anyway”
I shrug. “Dunno. Just … ”
And then I show her that, on the contrary, I do know: I tell her about Laura and Ian (although I don’t
tell her about Marie or money or abortions or pain-in-the-arse Rosie) and about Charlie, maybe more
about Charlie than she wants to know; and I try to explain to her that I feel like the Rejection Man, and
that Charlie wanted to sleep with Marco and not me, and Laura wanted to sleep with Ian and not me, and
Alison Ashworth, even all those years ago, wanted to snog with Kevin Bannister and not me (although I
do share with her my recent discovery about the invincibility of fate), and that as she, Penny, wanted to
sleep with Chris Thomson and not me, perhaps she would be able to help me understand why it kept
happening, why I was apparently doomed to be left.
And she tells me, with great force, with venom, frankly speaking, about what she remembers: that she
was mad about me, that she wanted to sleep with me, one day, but not when she was sixteen, and that
when I packed her in—“When you packed me in,” she repeats, furiously, “because I was, to use your
charming expression, ‘tight,’ I cried and cried, and I hated you. And then that little shitbag asked me out,
and I was too tired to fight him off, and it wasn’t rape, because I said OK, but it wasn’t far off. And I
didn’t have sex with anyone else until after university because I hated it so much. And now you want to
have a chat about rejection. Well, fuck you, Rob.”
So that’s another one I don’t have to worry about. I should have done this years ago.
Eighteen
Sellotaped to the inside of the shop door is a handwritten notice, yellowed and faded with age. It reads
as follows:
HIP YOUNG SINGERS WANTED (BASS, DRUMS GUITAR) FOR NEW BAND.
MUST BE INTO REM, PRIMAL SCREAM, FANCLUB ETC. CONTACT BARRY IN
THE SHOP.
The advertisement used to end with the intimidating postscript ‘no slackers please,’ but after a
disappointing response during the first couple of years of the recruitment drive, Barry decided that
slackers were welcome after all, to no noticeable effect; perhaps they couldn’t get it together to walk
from the door to the counter. A while back, a guy with a set of drums made inquiries, and though this
minimalist vocal/drums two-piece did rehearse a few times (no tapes survive, sadly), Barry eventually
and perhaps wisely decided that he needed a fuller sound.