State of the Union Read online

  ALSO BY NICK HORNBY

  FICTION

  Funny Girl

  Juliet, Naked

  Slam

  A Long Way Down

  How to Be Good

  High Fidelity

  About a Boy

  NONFICTION

  Shakespeare Wrote for Money

  Housekeeping vs. the Dirt

  The Polysyllabic Spree

  Songbook

  Fever Pitch

  ANTHOLOGY

  Speaking with the Angel

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Lower East Ltd.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  SundanceTV is a registered trademark and the SundanceTV logo is a trademark of Sundance Enterprises, Inc.

  ISBN 9780593087343 (trade paperback)

  ISBN 9780593087350 (ebook)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  contents

  Also by Nick Hornby

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Week One: Marathon

  Week Two: Antique Globes

  Week Three: Syria

  Week Four: Plaster Cast

  Week Five: Normal Slope

  Week Six: Nigel and Naomi

  Week Seven: Call the Midwife

  Week Eight: Dolphins

  Week Nine: Prison Sex

  Week Ten: Another Drink

  About the Author

  week one

  MARATHON

  When Louise arrives, Tom is already halfway through a pint, and he’s doing The Guardian’s cryptic crossword.

  “Hey,” says Louise.

  “Oh,” says Tom. “Hi. I bought you a drink.”

  “Thanks.”

  She picks it up and takes a sip.

  “Thank you for coming,” she says.

  “Oh, that’s okay.”

  “Have you been here long?”

  “No, no,” he says. “This is my fourth.”

  Louise looks alarmed.

  “It’s not really my fourth.”

  “Right. Phew.”

  She chuckles mirthlessly.

  “It is my second, though.”

  “You’re entitled to two,” she says. “But won’t you want a pee break?”

  “I hope so. And I’ll make it last as long as I can.”

  “But then it’ll seem like you’ve been for a poo.”

  “Oh, hell. So then I’ll announce right at the beginning that I can never poo in someone else’s house.”

  Louise shows willing by making another noise intended to express amusement.

  “I think I could say just about anything today and you’d laugh,” Tom says. “Within reason.”

  “Well. Let’s not test that theory out.”

  “Except what constitutes reason? There’s a talking point.”

  “We’ve probably got enough talking points, without delving into the history of Western philosophy,” Louise says.

  “You’re right. Who was the reason philosopher? I want to say Kant. I want to, and I will. Kant. There. I said it. Shall I check?”

  He gets out his phone.

  “Please don’t. We’ve only got a few minutes.”

  “Sure? Won’t take a second.”

  “I’m sure. But thank you. Were the kids okay? Did Christina remember she was staying late today?”

  “All fine,” Tom says. “Dylan got another detention.”

  “Oh, hell. What for this time?”

  “He was doing an impression of someone I’ve never heard of in Geography.”

  “Idiot. Shall we talk about . . .”

  “I mean, literally never heard of,” Tom says. “A YouTuber, a grimy . . . Who knows? And Otis was feeling ‘a little better’ when I left. Surprise, surprise.”

  “Are you trying to fill the time before we go?”

  “I suppose I am, a bit. I’m nervous.”

  “I’m sorry,” Louise says. “If it wasn’t for me, we wouldn’t be here.”

  “No.”

  Louise looks at him.

  “Just ‘no’?”

  “Yes. Just ‘no.’ If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t be here. A sad fact.”

  “You wouldn’t take a tiny bit of the responsibility?”

  “No,” Tom says. “Why?”

  “Because . . . Because it’s a long and complicated road that has led us here. Don’t you think?”

  “Well. It depends which way you look at it. There’s the long and complicated, and then there’s . . . as the crow flies.”

  “Talk me through the route your crow flies,” Louise says.

  “You slept with someone else, and here we are.”

  Louise takes another sip of her drink and then a deep breath.

  “But there’s a bit more to it than that, isn’t there?” she says.

  “Which way do you go, then?”

  “Crow or no crow?”

  “Crow.”

  “Well. You stopped sleeping with me, I started sleeping with someone else.”

  “That’s . . . That’s a very short version. And quite crude, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  “See, my version is actually longer than yours,” Louise says.

  “Mine explains why we’re here. Yours is a partial version of the long mess that came before.”

  Louise sighs and tries to gather her thoughts.

  “Yes,” she says. “I made a mistake. But . . .”

  “Can I clear something up? How many mistakes was it in total?”

  “Well. One.”

  “One.”

  “Yes. Depending on how you define it.”

  “Define it in the way that gives the highest number. Just so I know what we’re dealing with.”

  “The highest number would be in the hundreds.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Tom says.

  “Because of all the tiny, tiny decisions that led to the big mistake.”

  “Oh. No. I’m not interested in the tiny decisions. We have to leave in five minutes.”

  “So one.”

  “But when you said, ‘Depending on how you define it’ . . .”

  “You could define it as one affair,” Louise says. “Or you could define it as four mistakes.”

  “How?”

  “The original mistake repeated three times.”

  “I’m lost. How many times did you sleep with this guy?”

  “Four.”

  “Not three, then.”

  “No. One mistake, three repetitions of the original mistake. The first time being the original sin, sort of thing. And the other three as duplicates.”

  “Four times. You can’t write four times off as being accidental. You’d
be hard pushed to write one off as accidental, to be honest.”

  He laughs at his own joke.

  “I mean, how would that work?” he says.

  “I told you. I had an affair. You’re not consoled that it was only four times? Not forty?”

  “Well, not really. Once you get to four, it might as well be forty.”

  “I think if it had been forty, we’d be having a different conversation.”

  “Yes. One with lots of forties in it. Instead of fours.”

  “You know what I mean,” Louise says. “Forty would have meant it was going on for . . .”

  She trails off.

  “I’d like you to finish that sentence. How much time would it have taken you to get to forty?”

  “This is a ridiculous conversation.”

  “I only wanted an approximate rate. So we can calculate frequency as well as number.”

  “Why?”

  “Comparison.”

  “There is no comparison. It’s like comparing a twenty-five-yard dash with a marathon.”

  “And we’re the marathon?”

  “Of course,” Louise says. “We’re married, with children.”

  “Except we didn’t know that was going to happen when we started having sex. We weren’t pacing ourselves. We didn’t say, ‘Best not go at it too hard or there’ll be nothing left in fifteen years.’”

  “Look. These four times took place over a few weeks. Our first four times took place over a few days.”

  Tom looks pleased.

  “But where does that get us?” she says. “How long is it going to take us to get to four times from here?”

  “What’s ‘here,’ though?”

  “Here. Now. When we’re not having sex at all.”

  “Well. If you want to stick with the running analogy . . .”

  “Which I’m not committed to . . .”

  “At the moment,” says Tom, “we’re Usain Bolt with an injury. A groin strain, if you like.”

  “We’re both Usain Bolt? Not just you?”

  “Our sexual relationship is Usain Bolt with a groin strain. It’s stalled. But once it starts up again, we’ll get to four in no time.”

  Louise looks at her watch.

  “We’ve got less than five minutes. We should sort out an agenda that doesn’t involve Olympic runners.”

  “My agenda is, why did you sleep with someone else?”

  “To answer that question, I suspect we have to answer a lot of others.”

  Tom sighs wearily.

  “Really?”

  He’s distracted by something out the window.

  “Look. They’ve just come out.”

  Another couple have emerged from the house across the street.

  “You can see the house from here?”

  “It’s that one. With the green door,” Tom says. “Those two. They’ve just been given a right counseling. They look shell-shocked.”

  “They’re completely fucked.”

  “As in exhausted? Or as in no future for their relationship?”

  “Both,” Louise says. “Look. She’s going to kill him.”

  The couple walk past the pub and disappear from view.

  “Is that what we want?” Tom says. “To completely fuck our relationship? I mean, it’s not as if there’s nothing left of it.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “We’ve got two kids, for a start.”

  “Exactly. And . . .”

  “Crosswords,” says Tom hopefully. “Game of Thrones.”

  “Yes. When it’s on.”

  “So do we really . . . I didn’t know we were in a marriage that needed . . . poking round in.”

  “‘Poking round in’?” says Louise.

  “I suppose it’s a medical metaphor.”

  “Well, it’s a good one. If they opened you up and found you riddled with cancer, would you want them to sew you up again?”

  “You know I don’t like talking about cancer. Can’t it be Ebola?”

  “You’d rather have Ebola than cancer?”

  “Ebola’s harder to catch if you live in Kentish Town.”

  “Yes,” says Louise. “But the whole point of the metaphor is that you’ve got it. Not that you haven’t. If we’d managed to avoid all marital disease, we wouldn’t be sitting here now.”

  “Fair enough. All right. Cancer.”

  “So would you like them to sew you up and pack you off?”

  “I suppose it depends how far it had gone.”

  “Well, that’s why they’re poking round. They can’t tell without a poke.”

  “Which is why I never go to the doctor’s.”

  “Which takes us back where we started. You don’t want to talk to anyone about our marriage. If it dies, you’d rather find out about it because it collapses on the spot.”

  “Exactly,” says Tom. “You’re a gerontologist. You know all about good deaths. Keeling over suddenly has got to be the best, right?”

  “But that’s a heart attack. Marriages never die suddenly. They’ve always been sick for a while before they kick the bucket.”

  “Oh, hell.”

  “I think what I’m saying, medically speaking, is that either we leave it and it kills us or we get it looked at.”

  She looks at her watch again.

  “Okay?”

  Tom nods, as if newly determined.

  “Yes,” he says. “I can’t say I’m looking forward to it, but . . .”

  “I don’t want to run away from this,” says Louise.

  “No. Of course not. I mean, however badly it goes, it’s only an hour.”

  “Oh. No. I meant the marriage, not the counseling.”

  “Oh. Hah.”

  “Before we go: Is it a man or a woman? You never said.”

  “I did,” Louise says. “It’s a woman.”

  “A woman? Oh, Christ.”

  “Wouldn’t you have said the same thing if I’d told you it was a man?”

  “Yes. Bad in a different way. If it were a man, I wouldn’t be able to talk about anything intimate, obviously.”

  “Obviously.”

  “But if it’s a woman . . . I’m going to get slaughtered.”

  “Slaughtered? Why won’t she slaughter me?”

  “Feminism.”

  Louise laughs disbelievingly.

  “I know you had an affair,” Tom says. “But it’ll turn out to be my fault. Because of mitigating circumstances. Not just my . . . our . . . you know, the sex thing. But she’ll find out you earn all the money and do most of the cooking even though you’re at work and I’m not, and you do all the boring arranging stuff, and . . . I think she’ll just write you a blank check. Go on, Louise. Fill your boots, girl. You’re entitled to ten affairs if you want them.”

  “I’m not sure marital counselors tell clients to have ten affairs. And I really don’t want ten. The one I had was very stressful.”

  She stands up. Tom does likewise. They both drain their drinks.

  “She’s going to write it off, that’s for sure.”

  “I won’t let her. I’ll tell her,” says Louise. “I’ll tell her exactly how bad I’ve been.”

  Tom gives her a look.

  “I’m not sure we want the details, do we?”

  “Not like that. I mean, how awful I was. How unfair and sneaky and . . . and morally reprehensible.”

  They leave the pub and cross the road. When they get to the other side, Tom stops.

  “Let’s walk up the road for a bit,” Tom says. “Try to sort this out.”

  They start to walk away from the counselor’s house.

  “What are we sorting out?”

  “Whether a man or a woman is best.”

 
“It’s a woman,” says Louise. “Sitting there waiting for us. There’s nothing to sort out.”

  “Well. Not necessarily. We could forget about this and look for a man.”

  “Who, as you point out, would be bad in a different way.”

  “I’ve changed my mind about that.”

  Louise is getting impatient.

  “Come on, Tom,” she says. “This was your idea in the first place.”

  She walks back toward the counselor’s house. Tom follows. She rings the doorbell. They stand there, nervous. Suddenly, Tom runs away. He’s running fast, as if for a bus.

  “Tom!” Louise shouts. “TOM! Tom!”

  But he ignores her and disappears from view.

  week two

  ANTIQUE GLOBES

  Louise is in the pub on her own, nursing a glass of wine, sitting at the table where she and Tom sat a week ago. His pint is waiting for him. She is checking her phone when the couple who take the counseling spot before them emerge from the house. Louise watches through the window. All isn’t well. The woman marches ahead while the man stands still and shouts at her. She keeps marching. Tom comes in, sits down, takes a sip of his drink, and watches with Louise for a moment.

  “What have I missed?” Tom says.

  “She’s stormed off.”

  They watch as the man runs after her and grabs her by the arm. She takes a swing and catches him on the head, hard. He lets go of her arm and puts his hand to his face in disbelief. She marches on.

  “Oh, for God’s sakes. He’s like a footballer,” says Louise.

  Over the road, the husband rubs his head and walks slowly and sadly in the same direction as his wife.

  “She’s just full-on walloped him,” says Tom.

  “Yes, but only up here. On the forehead. She’d have to be Mike Tyson to do him any proper damage.”

  Tom looks at her.

  “What?” says Louise.

  “I’d have thought you’re anti–domestic violence. Of any kind.”

  “I didn’t say I was pro-it. I said he was making a fuss.”

  “So if you thump me like that, how should I react?”

  “You can say ‘Ow,’” Louise says. “And express disappointment. But you can’t roll around as if you’ve broken your skull.”