High Fidelity Read online

  Charlie hadn’t known me as a ten-year-old, however, and she didn’t know anybody who knew me, either. She knew me only as a young adult. I was already old enough to vote when I met her; I was old enough to spend the night with her, the whole night, in her hall of residence, and have opinions, and buy her a drink in a pub, secure in the knowledge that my driving license with its scrambled proof of age was in my pocket…and I was old enough to have a history. At home I didn’t have a history, just stuff that everybody already knew, and that, therefore, wasn’t worth repeating.

  But I still felt a fraud. I was like all those people who suddenly shaved their heads and said they’d always been punks, they’d been punks before punk was even thought of: I felt as though I was going to be found out at any moment, that somebody was going to burst into the college bar brandishing one of the anorak photos and yelling, “Rob used to be a boy! A little lad!,” and Charlie would see it and pack me in. It never occurred to me that she probably had a whole pile of books about ponies and some ridiculous party dresses hidden away at her parents’ place in St. Albans. As far as I was concerned, she had been born with enormous earrings, drainpipe jeans, and an incredibly sophisticated enthusiasm for the works of some guy who used to splodge orange paint around.

  We went out for two years, and for every single minute I felt as though I was standing on a dangerously narrow ledge. I couldn’t ever get comfortable, if you know what I mean; there was no room to stretch out and relax. I was depressed by the lack of flamboyance in my wardrobe. I was fretful about my abilities as a lover. I couldn’t understand what she saw in the orange-paint guy, however many times she explained. I worried that I was never ever going to be able to say anything interesting or amusing to her about anything at all. I was intimidated by the other men in her design course, and became convinced that she was going to go off with one of them. She went off with one of them.

  I lost the plot for a while then. And I lost the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the intermission, my popcorn, the credits, and the exit sign. I hung around Charlie’s hall of residence until some friends of hers caught me and threatened to give me a good kicking. I decided to kill Marco (Marco!), the guy she went off with, and spent long hours in the middle of the night working out how to do it, although whenever I bumped into him I just muttered a greeting and sloped off. I did a spot of shoplifting, the precise motivation for which escapes me now. I took an overdose of Valium, and stuck a finger down my throat within a minute. I wrote endless letters to her, some of which I posted, and scripted endless conversations, none of which we had. And when I came around, after a couple of months of darkness, I found to my surprise that I had flunked my course and was working in Record and Tape Exchange in Camden.

  Everything happened so fast. I had kind of hoped that my adulthood would be long and meaty and instructive, but it all took place in those two years; sometimes it seems as though everything and everyone that have happened to me since were just minor distractions. Some people never got over the sixties, or the war, or the night their band opened for the Rolling Stones at the Marquee, and spend the rest of their days walking backwards; I never really got over Charlie. That was when the important stuff, the stuff that defines me, went on.

  Some of my favorite songs: “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” by Neil Young; “Last Night I Dreamed That Somebody Loved Me” by the Smiths; “Call Me” by Aretha Franklin; “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” by anybody. And then there’s “Love Hurts” and “When Love Breaks Down” and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” and “The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” and “She’s Gone” and “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” and…some of these songs I have listened to around once a week, on average (three hundred times in the first month, every now and again thereafter), since I was sixteen or nineteen or twenty-one. How can that not leave you bruised somewhere? How can that not turn you into the sort of person liable to break into little bits when your first love goes all wrong? What came first—the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?

  People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands—literally thousands—of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.

  Anyway. Here’s how not to plan a career: (a) split up with girlfriend; (b) junk college; (c) go to work in record shop; (d) stay in record shops for rest of life. You see those pictures of people in Pompeii and you think, how weird: one quick game of dice after your tea and you’re frozen, and that’s how people remember you for the next few thousand years. Suppose it was the first game of dice you’ve ever played? Suppose you were only doing it to keep your friend Augustus company? Suppose you’d just at that moment finished a brilliant poem or something? Wouldn’t it be annoying to be commemorated as a dice player? Sometimes I look at my shop (because I haven’t let the grass grow under my feet the last fourteen years! About ten years ago I borrowed the money to start my own!), and at my regular Saturday punters, and I know exactly how those inhabitants of Pompeii must feel, if they could feel anything (although the fact that they can’t is kind of the point of them). I’m stuck in this pose, this shop-managing pose, forever, because of a few short weeks in 1979 when I went a bit potty for a while. It could be worse, I guess; I could have walked into an army recruiting office, or the nearest Slaughterhouse. But even so, I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way.

  Eventually I stopped posting the letters; a few months after that I stopped writing them, too. I still fantasized about killing Marco, although the imagined deaths became swifter (I allow him a brief moment to register, and then BLAM!)—I didn’t go in quite so much for the sicko slow stuff. I started sleeping with people again, although every one of these affairs I regarded as a fluke, a one-off, nothing likely to alter my dismal self-perception. (And, like James Stewart in Vertigo, I had developed a “type”: cropped blond hair, arty, dizzy, garrulous, which led to some disastrous mistakes.) I stopped drinking so much, I stopped listening to song lyrics with quite the same morbid fascination (for a while, I regarded just about any song in which somebody had lost somebody else as spookily relevant, which, as that covers the whole of pop music, and as I worked in a record shop, meant I felt pretty spooked more or less the whole time), I stopped constructing the killer one-liners that left Charlie writhing on the floor with regret and self-loathing.

  I made sure, however, that I was never in anything, work or relationships, too deep: I convinced myself that I might get the call from Charlie at any moment, and would therefore have to leap into action. I was even unsure about opening my own shop, just in case Charlie wanted me to go abroad with her and I wasn’t able to move quickly enough; marriage, mortgages, and fatherhood were out of the question. I was realistic too: every now and again I updated Charlie’s life, imagining a whole series of disastrous events (She’s living with Marco! They’ve bought a place together! She’s married him! She’s pregnant! She’s had a little girl!), just to keep myself on my toes, events which required a whole series of readjustments and conversions to keep my fantasies alive. (She’ll have nowhere to go when they split! She’ll really have nowhere to go when they split, and I’ll have to support her financially! Marriage’ll wake her up! Taking on another man’s kid will show her what a great guy I am!) There was no news I couldn’t handle; there was nothing she and Marco could do that would convince me that it wasn’t all just a stage we were going through. They are together still, for all I know, and, as of tod
ay, I am unattached again.

  5. SARAH KENDREW (1984–1986)

  The lesson I learned from the Charlie débâcle is that you’ve got to punch your weight. Charlie was out of my class: too pretty, too smart, too witty, too much. What am I? Average. A middleweight. Not the brightest bloke in the world, but certainly not the dimmest: I have read books like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Love in the Time of Cholera, and understood them, I think (they were about girls, right?), but I don’t like them very much; my all-time top five favorite books are The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, Sweet Soul Music by Peter Gural-nick, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, and, I don’t know, something by William Gibson, or Kurt Vonnegut. I read the Guardian and the Observer, as well as the New Musical Express and music glossies; I am not averse to going down to Camden to watch subtitled films (top five subtitled films: Betty Blue, Subway, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, The Vanishing, Diva), although on the whole I prefer American films. (Top five American films, and therefore the best films ever made: The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, and Reservoir Dogs.)

  I’m OK-looking; in fact, if you put, say, Mel Gibson on one end of the looks spectrum and, say, Berky Edmonds from school, whose grotesque ugliness was legendary, on the other, then I reckon I’d be on Mel’s side, just. A girlfriend once told me that I looked a bit like Peter Gabriel, and he’s not too bad, is he? I’m average height, not slim, not fat, no unsightly facial hair. I keep myself clean, wear jeans and T-shirts and a leather jacket more or less all the time apart from in the summer, when I leave the leather jacket at home. I vote Labour. I have a pile of classic comedy videos—Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Cheers, and so on. I can see what feminists are on about, most of the time, but not the radical ones.

  My genius, if I can call it that, is to combine a whole load of averageness into one compact frame. I’d say that there were millions like me, but there aren’t, really: lots of blokes have impeccable music taste but don’t read, lots of blokes read but are really fat, lots of blokes are sympathetic to feminism but have stupid beards, lots of blokes have a Woody Allen sense of humor but look like Woody Allen. Lots of blokes drink too much, lots of blokes behave stupidly when they drive cars, lots of blokes get into fights, or show off about money, or take drugs. I don’t do any of these things, really; if I do OK with women, it’s not because of the virtues I have, but because of the shadows I don’t have.

  Even so, you’ve got to know when you’re out of your depth. I was out of my depth with Charlie; after her, I was determined never to get out of my depth again, and so for five years, until I met Sarah, I just paddled around in the shallow end. Charlie and I didn’t match. Marco and Charlie matched; Sarah and I matched. Sarah was average-attractive (smallish, slim, nice big brown eyes, crooked teeth, shoulder-length dark hair that always seemed to need a cut no matter how often she went to the hairdresser’s), and she wore clothes that were the same as mine, more or less. All-time top five favorite recording artists: Madness, Eurythmics, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley. All-time top five favorite films: National Velvet, Diva (hey!), Gandhi, Missing, Wuthering Heights.

  And she was sad, in the original sense of the word. She had been dumped a couple of years before by a sort of male equivalent to Charlie, a guy called Michael who wanted to be something at the BBC. (He never made it, the wanker, and each day we never saw him on TV or heard him on the radio, something inside us rejoiced.) He was her moment, just as Charlie was mine, and when they split, Sarah had sworn off men for a while, just as I had sworn off women. It made sense to swear off together, to pool our loathing of the opposite sex and get to share a bed with someone at the same time. Our friends were all paired off, our careers seemed to have hardened into permanence, we were frightened of being left alone for the rest of our lives. Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at twenty-six; we were of that disposition. Everything seemed much later than it was, and after a few months she moved in with me.

  We couldn’t fill a room. I don’t mean that we didn’t have enough stuff: she had loads of books (she was an English teacher), and I had thousands of records, and the flat is pretty poky anyway—I’ve lived here for over ten years, and most days I feel like a cartoon dog in a kennel. I mean that neither of us seemed loud enough, or powerful enough, so that when we were together, I was conscious of how the only space we occupied was that taken up by our bodies. We couldn’t project the way some couples can.

  Sometimes we tried, when we were out with people even quieter than we; we never talked about why we suddenly became shriller and louder, but I’m sure we both knew that it happened. We did it to compensate for the fact that life was going on elsewhere, that somewhere Michael and Charlie were together, having a better time than we with people more glamorous than us, and making a noise was a sort of defiant gesture, a futile but necessary last stand. (You can see this everywhere you go: young, middle-class people whose lives are beginning to disappoint them making too much noise in restaurants and clubs and wine bars. “Look at me! I’m not as boring as you think I am! I know how to have fun!” Tragic. I’m glad I learned to stay home and sulk.) Ours was a marriage of convenience as cynical and as mutually advantageous as any, and I really thought that I might spend my life with her. I wouldn’t have minded. She was OK.

  There’s a joke I saw in a sitcom once—Man About the House, maybe?—a terribly unsound joke, wherein a guy takes a really fat girl with specs out for the evening, gets her drunk, and makes a move on her when he takes her home. “I’m not that kind of girl!” she shrieks. He looks at her aghast. “But…but you must be,” the bloke says. It made me laugh when I was sixteen, but I didn’t think about it again until Sarah told me she had met someone else. “But…but you can’t have,” I wanted to splutter. I don’t mean that Sarah was unfanciable—she wasn’t, by any means, and anyway, this other guy must have fancied her. I just mean that her meeting someone else was contrary to the whole spirit of our arrangement. All we really had in common (our shared admiration of Diva did not, if truth be told, last us much beyond the first few months) was that we had been dumped by people, and that on the whole we were against dumping—we were fervent antidumpers. So how come I got dumped?

  I was being unrealistic, of course. You run the risk of losing anyone who is worth spending time with, unless you are so paranoid about loss that you choose someone unlosable, somebody who could not possibly appeal to anybody else at all. If you’re going to go in for this stuff at all, you have to live with the possibility that it won’t work out, that somebody called Marco, say, or in this case, Tom, is going to come along and upset you. But I didn’t see it like that at the time. All I saw then was that I’d moved down a division and that it still hadn’t worked out, and this seemed a cause for a great deal of misery and self-pity.

  And then I met you, Laura, and we lived together, and now you’ve moved out. But, you know, you’re not offering me anything new here; if you want to force your way onto the list, you’ll have to do better than this. I’m not as vulnerable as I was when Alison or Charlie dumped me, you haven’t changed the whole structure of my daily life like Jackie did, you haven’t made me feel bad about myself like Penny did (and there’s no way you can humiliate me, like Chris Thomson did), and I’m more robust than I was when Sarah went—I know, despite all the gloom and self-doubt that bubbles up from the deep when you get dumped, that you did not represent my last and best chance of a relationship. So, you know. Nice try. Close, but no cigar. See you around.

  NOW…

  ONE

  LAURA leaves first thing Monday morning with a hold-all and a carrier bag. It’s sobering, really, to see how little she is taking with her, this woman who loves her things, her teapots and her books and her prints and the little sculpture she bought in India: I look at the bag and think, Jesus, this is how much she doesn’t want to live with me.

  We hug at the front door, a
nd she’s crying a little.

  “I don’t really know what I’m doing,” she says.

  “I can see that,” I say, which is sort of a joke and sort of not. “You don’t have to go now. You can stay until whenever.”

  “Thanks. But we’ve done the hard part now. I might as well, you know…”

  “Well, stay for tonight, then.”

  But she just grimaces, and reaches for the door handle.

  It’s a clumsy exit. She hasn’t got a free hand, but she tries to open the door anyway and can’t, so I do it for her, but I’m in the way, so I have to go through on to the landing to let her out, and she has to prop the door open because I haven’t got a key, and I have to squeeze back past her to catch the door before it shuts behind her. And that’s it.

  I regret to say that this great feeling, part liberation and part nervous excitement, enters me somewhere around my toes and sweeps through me in a great wave. I have felt this before, and I know it doesn’t mean that much—confusingly, for example, it doesn’t mean that I’m going to feel ecstatically happy for the next few weeks. But I do know that I should work with it, enjoy it while it lasts.