Nick Hornby - High Fidelity

High Fidelity
http://www.fictionbook.ru/author/hornby_nick/high_fidelity/hornby_high_fidelity.html
Page 89 of 112
6/20/2006
and sit in a corner and talk. I buy some more fags and she smokes half of them or, rather, she lights one,
takes a drag or two, grimaces, stubs it out and then five minutes later takes another. She stubs them out
with such violence that they cannot be salvaged, and when she does it I can’t concentrate on what she’s
saying, because I’m too busy watching my fags disappear. Eventually she notices and says she’ll buy me
some more and I feel mean.
We talk about her dad, mostly, or rather, what life will be like without him. And then we talk about
what life will be like generally without dads, and whether it’s the thing that makes you feel grown-up,
finally. (Laura thinks not, on the evidence available to date.) I don’t want to talk about this stuff, of
course: I want to talk about Ray and me and whether we’ll ever come as close to having sex again and
whether the warmth and intimacy of this conversation means anything, but I manage to hold myself
back.
And then, just as I have begun to accept that none of this is going to be about me me me, she sighs,
and slumps back against her chair, and says, half smiling, half despairing, “I’m too tired not to go out
with you.”
There’s a kind of double negative here—‘too tired’ is a negative because it’s not very positive—and it
takes me a while to work out what she means.
“So, hold on: if you had a bit more energy, we’d stay split. But as it is, what with you being wiped out,
you’d like us to get back together.”
She nods. “Everything’s too hard. Maybe another time I would have had the guts to be on my own, but
not now I haven’t.”
“What about Ray”
“Ray’s a disaster. I don’t know what that was all about, really, except sometimes you need someone to
lob into the middle of a bad relationship like a hand grenade, and blow it all apart.”
I’d like to talk, in some detail, about all the ways in which Ray is a disaster; in fact, I’d like to make a
list on the back of a beermat and keep it forever. Maybe another time.
“And now you’re out of the bad relationship, and you have blown it all apart, you want to be back in
it, and put it back together again.”
“Yes. I know none of this is very romantic, and there will be romantic bits at some stage, I’m sure. But
I need to be with someone, and I need to be with someone I know and get on with OK, and you’ve made
it clear that you want me back, so … ”
And wouldn’t you know it Suddenly I feel panicky, and sick, and I want to get record label logos
painted on my walls and sleep with American recording artists. I take Laura’s hand and kiss her on the
cheek.
There’s a terrible scene back at the house, of course. Mrs Lydon is in tears, and Jo is angry, and the
few guests that are left stare into their drinks and don’t say anything. Laura takes her mum through to
the kitchen and shuts the door, and I stand in the sitting room with Jo, shrugging my shoulders and
shaking my head and raising my eyebrows and shifting from foot to foot and doing anything else I can
think of to suggest embarrassment, sympathy, disapproval, and misfortune. When my eyebrows are sore,
and I have nearly shaken my head off its hinges, and I have walked the best part of a mile on the spot,
Laura emerges from the kitchen in a state and tugs me by the arm.
“We’re going home,” she says, and that is how our relationship resumes its course.
Twenty-Seven
Five conversations:
1. (Third day, out for a curry, Laura paying.)
“I’ll bet you did. I’ll bet you sat there, five minutes after I’d gone, smoking a fag,”—she always
emphasizes the word, to show that she disapproves—“and thinking to yourself, cor, this is all right, I can