Nick Hornby - High Fidelity

High Fidelity
http://www.fictionbook.ru/author/hornby_nick/high_fidelity/hornby_high_fidelity.html
Page 81 of 112
6/20/2006
“I haven’t seen he Big Chill, have I”
“You lying bastard. You saw it in a Lawrence Kasdan double bill with Body Heat.”
“Oh, yeah. But I’d forgotten about that, honestly. I wasn’t just nicking the idea.”
“Not much.”
And so on.
I try again later.
“ ‘Abraham, Martin, and John,’ ” says Dick.
“That’s quite a nice one.”
“What was Laura’s dad’s name”
“Ken.”
“ ‘Abraham, Martin, John, and Ken.’ Nah, I can’t see”
“Fuck off.”
“Black Sabbath Nirvana They’re all into death.”
Thus is Ken’s passing mourned at Championship Vinyl.
I have thought about the stuff I want played at my funeral, although I could never list it to anyone,
because they’d die laughing. ‘One Love’ by Bob Marley; ‘Many Rivers to Cross’ by Jimmy Cliff;
‘Angel’ by Aretha Franklin. And I’ve always had this fantasy that someone beautiful and tearful will
insist on ‘You’re the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me’ by Gladys Knight, but I can’t imagine who
that beautiful, tearful person will be. But that’s my funeral, as they say, and I can afford to be generous
and sentimental about it. It doesn’t alter the point that Barry made, even if he didn’t know he was
making it: we have about seven squillion hours’ worth of recorded music in here, and there’s hardly a
minute of it that describes the way Laura’s feeling now.
I’ve got one suit, dark gray, last worn at a wedding three years ago. It doesn’t fit too well now, in all
the obvious places, but it’ll have to do. I iron my white shirt and find a tie that isn’t made of leather and
doesn’t have saxophones all over it, and wait for Liz to come and pick me up. I haven’t got anything to
take with me—the cards in the newsagent’s were all vile. They looked like the sort of thing the Addams
Family would send to each other on their birthdays. I wish I’d been to a funeral before. One of my
grandfathers died before I was born, and the other when I was very little; both my grandmothers are still
alive, if you can call it that, but I never see them. One lives in a home, the other lives with Aunty Eileen,
my dad’s sister. And when they do die it will hardly be the end of the world. Just, you know, wow, stop
press, extremely ancient person dies. And though I’ve got friends who have friends who’ve died—a gay
guy that Laura was at college with got Aids, a mate of my mate Paul was killed in a motorbike crash,
and loads of them have lost parents—it’s something I’ve always managed to put off. Now I can see that
it’s something I’ll be doing for the rest of my life. Two grans, Mum and Dad, aunts and uncles, and,
unless I’m the first person in my immediate circle to go, loads of people my age, eventually—maybe
even sooner than eventually, given that one or two of them are bound to cop it before they’re supposed
to. Once I start to think about it, it seems terribly oppressive, as though I’ll be going to three or four a
week for the next forty years, and I won’t have the time or the inclination to do anything else. How do
people cope Do you have to go What happens if you refuse on the grounds of it being just too fucking
grim (“I’m sorry for you and everything, Laura, but it’s not really my scene, you know”) I don’t think
I can bear to get any older than I already am, and I begin to develop a grudging admiration for my
parents, just because they’ve been to scores of funerals and have never really moaned about it, not to
me, anyway. Perhaps they just don’t have the imagination to see that funerals are actually even more
depressing than they look.
If I’m honest, I’m only going because it might do me some good in the long run. Can you get off with
your ex-girlfriend at her father’s funeral I wouldn’t have thought so. But you never know.
“So the vicar says nice things, and then, what, we all troop outside and they bury him”
Liz is talking me through it.