High Fidelity (18 page)

Steve annoys me throughout: he has this trick of waiting until the conversation is in full flow, and then muttering something in my ear when I'm attempting either to talk or to listen to somebody else. So I can either ignore him and appear rude, or answer him, involve everyone else in what I'm saying, and change their direction entirely. And once he's got everyone talking about soul, or
Star Trek
(he goes to conventions and things), or great bitters of the north of England (he goes to conventions and things), subjects nobody else knows anything about, we go through the whole process all over again. Dan yawns a lot, Marie is patient, T-Bone is tetchy, and his date, Suzie, is positively appalled. What is she doing in a grotty pub with these guys? She has no idea. Neither have I. Maybe Suzie and I should disappear off somewhere more intimate, and leave these losers to get on with it. I could take you through the whole evening, but you wouldn't enjoy it much, so I'll let you off with a dull but entirely representative sample:

Etc.

Never again will this combination of people be seated around a table; it just couldn't possibly happen, and it shows. I thought the numbers would provide a feeling of security and comfort, but they haven't. I don't really know any of these people, not even the one I've slept with, and for the first time since I split up with Laura, I really feel like slumping onto the floor and bawling my eyes out. I'm homesick.

It's supposed to be women who allow themselves to become isolated by relationships: they end up seeing more of the guy's friends, and doing more of the guy's things (poor Anna, trying to remember who Richard Thompson is, and being shown the error of her Simple Minded ways), and when they're ditched, or when they ditch, they find they've floated too far away from friends they last saw properly three or four years before. And before Laura, that was what life was like for me and my partners too, most of them.

But Laura…I don't know what happened. I liked her crowd, Liz and the others who used to come down to the Groucho. And for some reason—comparative career success, I guess, and the corresponding postponements that brings—her crowd were more single and more flexible than mine. So for the first time ever I played the woman's role, and threw my lot in with the person I was seeing. It wasn't that she didn't like my friends (not friends like Dick and Barry and Steve and Dan, but
proper
friends, the sort of people I have allowed myself to lose). It was just that she liked hers more, and wanted me to like them, and I did. I liked them more than I liked my own and, before I knew it (I never knew it, really, until it was too late), my relationship was what gave me my sense of location. And if you lose your sense of location, you get homesick. Stands to reason.

So now what? It feels as though I've come to the end of the line. I don't mean that in the American rock'n'roll suicide sense; I mean it in the English Thomas the Tank Engine sense. I've run out of puff, and come to a gentle halt in the middle of nowhere.

“These people are your friends?” Marie asks me the next day when she takes me for a post-birthday crispy bacon and avocado sandwich.

“It's not that bad. There were only two of them.”

She looks at me to see if I'm joking. When she laughs, it's clear that I am.

“But it was your
birthday.”

“Well. You know.”

“Your
birthday.
And that's the best you can do?”

“Say it was your birthday today, and you wanted to go out for a drink tonight. Who would you invite? Dick and Barry? T-Bone? Me? We're not your bestest friends in the whole world, are we?”

“Come on, Rob. I'm not even in my own
country.
I'm thousands of miles from home.”

“My point exactly.”

 

I watch the couples that come into the shop, and the couples I see in pubs, and on buses, and through windows. Some of them, the ones that talk and touch and laugh and inquire a lot, are obviously new, and they don't count: like most people, I'm OK at being half of a new couple. It's the more established, quieter couples, the ones who have started to go through life back-to-back or side-to-side, rather than face-to-face, that interest me.

There's not much you can decipher in their faces, really. There's not much that sets them apart from single people; try dividing people you walk past into one of life's four categories—happily coupled, unhappily coupled, single, and desperate—and you'll find you won't be able to do it. Or rather, you could do it, but you would have no confidence in your choices. This seems incredible to me. The most important thing in life, and you can't tell whether people have it or not. Surely this is wrong? Surely people who are happy should
look
happy, at all times, no matter how much money they have or how uncomfortable their shoes are or how little their child is sleeping; and people who are doing OK but have still not found their soul mate should look, I don't know, well but anxious, like Billy Crystal in
When Harry Met Sally;
and people who are desperate should wear something, a yellow ribbon maybe, which would allow them to be identified by similarly desperate people. When I am no longer desperate, when I have got all this sorted out, I promise you here and now that I will never ever complain again about how the shop is doing, or about the soullessness of modern pop music, or the stingy fillings you get in the sandwich bar up the road (£1.60 for egg mayonnaise and crispy bacon, and none of us have ever had more than four pieces of crispy bacon in a whole round yet) or anything at all. I will beam beatifically at all times, just from sheer
relief.

 

Nothing much, by which I mean even less than usual, happens for a couple of weeks. I find a copy of “All Kinds of Everything” in a junk shop near the flat, and buy it for fifteen pence, and give it to Johnny next time I see him, on the proviso that he fuck off and leave us alone forever. He comes in the next day complaining that it's scratched and demanding his money back. Barrytown make a triumphant debut at the Harry Lauder, and rock the place off its foundations, and the buzz is incredible, and there are loads of people there who look like A&R men, and they go absolutely mental, and honestly Rob, you should have been there (Marie just laughs, when I ask her about it, and says that everyone has to start somewhere). Dick tries to get me to make up a foursome with him, Anna, and a friend of Anna's who's twenty-one, but I don't go; we see Marie play at a folk club in Farringdon, and I think about Laura a lot more than I think about Marie during the sad songs, even though Marie dedicates a song to “the guys at Championship Vinyl” I go for a drink with Liz and she bitches about Ray the whole evening, which is great; and then Laura's dad dies, and everything changes.

I HEAR
about it on the same morning she does. I ring her number from the shop, intending just to leave a message on her machine; it's easier that way, and I only wanted to tell her about some ex-colleague who left a message for her on our machine. My machine. Her machine, actually, if we're talking legal ownership. Anyway. I wasn't expecting Laura to pick up the phone, but she does, and she sounds as though she's speaking from the bottom of the sea. Her voice is muffled, and low, and flat, and coated from first syllable to last in snot.

“Cor dear oh dear, that's a cold and a half. I hope you're in bed with a hot book and a good water bottle. It's Rob, by the way.”

She doesn't say anything.

“Laura? It's Rob.”

Still nothing.

“Are you all right?”

And then a terrible moment.

“Pigsty,” she says, although the first syllable's just a noise, really, so “pig” is an educated guess.

“Don't worry about that,” I say. “Just get into bed and forget about it. Worry about it when you're better.”

“Pig's died,” she says.

“Who the fuck's Pig?”

This time I can hear her. “My dad's died,” she sobs. “My dad, my dad.”

And then she hangs up.

I think about people dying all the time, but they're always people connected with me. I've thought about how I would feel if Laura died, and how Laura would feel if I died, and how I'd feel if my mum or dad died, but I never thought about Laura's mum or dad dying. I wouldn't, would I? And even though he was ill for the entire duration of my relationship with Laura, it never really bothered me: it was more like, my dad's got a beard, Laura's dad's got angina. I never thought it would actually
lead
to anything. Now he's gone, of course, I wish…what? What do I wish? That I'd been nicer to him? I was perfectly nice to him, the few times we met. That we'd been closer? He was my common-law father-in-law, and we were very different, and he was sick, and…we were as close as we needed to be. You're supposed to wish things when people die, to fill yourself full of regrets, to give yourself a hard time for all your mistakes and omissions, and I'm doing all that as best I can. It's just that I can't find any mistakes and omissions. He was my ex-girlfriend's dad, you know? What am I supposed to feel?

“You all right?” says Barry, when he sees me staring into space. “Who were you talking to?”

“Laura. Her dad's died.”

“Oh, right. Bad one.” And then he wanders off to the post office with a pile of mail orders under his arm. See? From Laura, to me, to Barry: from grief, to confusion, to a fleeting, mild interest. If you want to find a way to extract death's sting, then Barry's your man. For a moment it feels strange that these two people, one who is so maddened by pain that she can hardly speak, the other who can hardly find the curiosity to shrug, should know each other; strange that I'm the link between them, strange that they live in the same place at the same time, even. But Ken was Barry's boss's ex-girlfriend's dad. What is he supposed to feel?

 

Laura calls back an hour or so later. I wasn't expecting her to.

“I'm sorry,” she says. It's still hard to make out what she's saying, what with the snot and the tears and the tone and the volume.

“No, no.”

Then she cries for a while. I don't say anything until she's a bit quieter.

“When are you going home?”

“In a minute. When I get it together.”

“Can I do anything?”

“No.” And then, after a sob, “No” again, as if she's realized properly that there's nothing anybody can do for her, and maybe this is the first time she's ever found herself in that situation. I know I never have. Everything that's ever gone wrong for me could have been rescued by the wave of a bank manager's wand, or by a girlfriend's sudden change of mind, or by some quality—determination, self-awareness, resilience—that I might have found within myself, if I'd looked hard enough. I don't want to have to cope with the sort of unhappiness Laura's feeling, not ever. If people have to die, I don't want them dying near me. My mum and dad won't die near me, I've made bloody sure of that. When they go, I'll hardly feel a thing.

 

The next day she calls again.

“Mum wants you to come to the funeral.”

“Me?”

“My dad liked you. Apparently. And Mum never told him we'd split, because he wasn't up to it and…oh, I don't know. I don't really understand it, and I can't be bothered to argue. I think she thinks he'll be able to see what's going on. It's like…” She makes a strange noise which I realize is a manic giggle. “Her attitude is that he's been through so much, what with dying and everything, that she doesn't want to upset him any more than she has to.”

I knew that Ken liked me, but I could never really work out why, apart from once he was looking for the original London cast recording of
My Fair Lady,
and I saw a copy at a record fair, and sent it to him. See where random acts of kindness get you? To fucking funerals, that's where.

“Do
you
want me there?”

“I don't care. As long as you don't expect me to hold your hand.”

“Is Ray going?”

“No, Ray's not going.”

“Why not?”

“Because he hasn't been invited, OK?”

“I don't mind, you know, if that's what you want.”

“Oh, that's so sweet of you, Rob. It's your day, after all.”

Jesus.

“Look, are you coming or not?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Liz'll give you a lift. She knows where to go and everything.”

“Fine. How are you?”

“I haven't got time to chat, Rob. I've got too much to do.”

“Sure. I'll see you Friday.” I put the phone down before she can say anything, to let her know I'm hurt, and then I want to phone her back and apologize, but I know I mustn't. It's like you can never do the right thing by someone if you've stopped sleeping with them. You can't see a way back, or through, or round, however hard you try.

 

There aren't really any pop songs about death—not good ones, anyway. Maybe that's why I like pop music, and why I find classical music a bit creepy. There was that Elton John instrumental, “Song for Guy,” but, you know, it was just a plinky-plonky piano thing that would serve you just as well at the airport as at your funeral.

“OK, guys, best five pop songs about death.”

“Magic,” says Barry. “A Laura's Dad Tribute List. OK, OK. ‘Leader of the Pack,' The bloke dies on his motorbike, doesn't he? And then there's ‘Dead Man's Curve' by Jan and Dean, and ‘Terry,' by Twinkle. Ummm…that Bobby Goldsboro one, you know, ‘And Honey, I Miss You…'” He sings it off-key, even more so than he would have done normally, and Dick laughs. “And what about ‘Tell Laura I Love Her.' That'd bring the house down.” I'm glad that Laura isn't here to see how much amusement her father's death has afforded us.

“I was trying to think of serious songs. You know, something that shows a bit of respect.”

“What, you're doing the DJ-ing at the funeral, are you? Ouch. Bad job. Still, the Bobby Goldsboro could be one of the smoochers. You know, when people need a breather. Laura's mum could sing it.” He sings the same line, off-key again, but this time in a falsetto voice to show that the singer is a woman.

“Fuck off, Barry.”

“I've already worked out what I'm having at mine. ‘One Step Beyond,' by Madness. ‘You Can't Always Get What You Want.'”

“Just 'cause it's in
The Big Chill.”

“I haven't seen
The 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 it.”

“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 squil-lion 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.

“It's at a crematorium.”

“You're having me on.”

“Of course I'm not having you on, you fool.”

“A crematorium? Jesus.”

“What difference does it make?”

“Well, none, but…Jesus.” I wasn't prepared for this.

“What's the matter?”

“I don't know, but…bloody hell.”

She sighs. “Do you want me to drop you off at a tube station?”

“No, of course not.”

“Shut up, then.”

“I just don't want to pass out, that's all. If I pass out because of lack of preparation, it'll be your fault.”

“What a pathetic specimen you are. You know that nobody actively enjoys these things, don't you? You know that we're all going to find this morning terribly upsetting? It's not just you. I've been to one cremation in my life and I hated it. And even if I'd been to a hundred it wouldn't be any easier. Stop being such a baby.”

“Why isn't Ray going, do you think?”

“Wasn't invited. Nobody in the family knows him. Ken was fond of you, and Jo thinks you're great.” Jo is Laura's sister, and I think she's great. She's like Laura to look at, but she hasn't got the sharp suits, or the sharp tongue, or any of the “A” levels and degrees.

“Nothing more than that?”

“Ken didn't die for your benefit, you know. It's like everyone's a supporting actor in the film of your life story.”

Of course. Isn't that how it works for everybody?

“Your dad died, didn't he?”

“Yes. A long time ago. When I was eighteen.”

“Did it affect you?” Terrible. Stupid. “For ages?” Saved. Just.

“It still does.”

“How?”

“I don't know. I still miss him, and think about him. Talk to him, sometimes.”

“What do you say?”

“That's between me and him.” But she says it gently, with a little smile. “He knows more about me now that he's dead than he ever did when he was alive.”

“And whose fault's that?”

“His. He was Stereotype Dad, you know, too busy, too tired. I used to feel bad about it, after he'd gone, but in the end I realized that I was just a little girl, and quite a good little girl, too. It was up to him, not me.”