Nick Hornby - High Fidelity

High Fidelity
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Page 65 of 112
6/20/2006
in Ladbroke Grove, of course. I call, but I hold the receiver about an inch away from the phone, so that I
can hang up quick if anyone answers. Someone answers. I hang up. I try again, about five minutes later,
although this time I hold the receiver a little nearer to my ear, and I can hear that a machine, not a
person, is answering. I still hang up, though. I’m not ready to hear her voice yet. The third time, I listen
to her message; the fourth time, I leave one of my own. It’s incredible, really, to think that at any time
over the last decade I could have done this: she has come to assume such an importance I feel she should
be living on Mars, so that attempts to communicate with her would cost millions of pounds and take
light-years to reach her. She’s an extraterrestrial, a ghost, a myth, not a person with an answering
machine and a rusting wok and a two-zone travel pass.
She sounds older, I guess, and a little bit posher—London has sucked the life out of her Bristol burr—
but it’s obviously her. She doesn’t say whether she’s living with anyone, not that I was expecting a
message giving details of her current romantic situation, but she doesn’t say, you know, “Neither
Charlie nor Marco can come to the phone right now,” or anything like that. Just, “There’s no one here,
please leave a message after the bleep.” I leave my name, including surname, and my phone number,
and stuff about long time no see, etc.
I don’t hear anything back from her. A couple of days later I try again, and I say the same stuff. Still
nothing. Now this is more like it, if you’re talking about rejection: someone who won’t even return your
phone messages a decade after she rejected you.
Marie comes into the shop.
“Hi, guys.”
Dick and Barry disappear, conspicuously and embarrassingly.
“Bye, guys,” she says after they’re gone, and shrugs.
She peers at me. “You avoiding me, boy” she asks, mock-angry.
“No.”
She frowns and cocks her head to one side.
“Honest. How could I, when I don’t know where you’ve been the last few days”
“Well, are you embarrassed, then”
“Oh, God yes.”
She laughs. “No need.”
This, it seems, is what you get for sleeping with an American, all this up-front goodwill. You wouldn’t
catch a decent British woman marching in here after a one-night stand. We understand that these things
are, on the whole, best forgotten. But I suppose Marie wants to talk about it, explore what went wrong;
there’s probably some group-counseling workshop she wants us to go to, with lots of other couples who
spent a misguided one-off Saturday night together. We’ll probably have to take our clothes off and
reenact what happened, and I’ll get my sweater stuck round my head.
“I was wondering if you wanted to come see T-Bone play tonight.”
Of course I don’t. We can’t speak anymore, don’t you understand, woman We had sex, and that was
the end of it. That’s the law in this country. If you don’t like it, go back to where you came from.
“Yeah. Great.”
“Do you know a place called Stoke Newington He’s playing there. The Weavers Arms”
“I know it.” I could just not turn up, I suppose, but I know I’ll be there.
And we have a nice time. She’s right to be American about it: just because we’ve been to bed together
doesn’t mean we have to hate each other. We enjoy T-Bone’s set, and Marie sings with him for his
encore (and when she goes up onstage, people look at the place where she was standing, and then they
look at the person next to the place where she was standing, and I quite like that). And then the three of
us go back to hers for a drink, and we talk about London and Austin and records, but not about sex in
general or the other night in particular, as if it were just something we did, like going to the curry house,
which also requires no examination or elaboration. And then I go home, and Marie gives me a nice kiss,
and on the way back I feel as though there’s one relationship, just one, that is OK really, a little smooth
spot I can feel proud of.