TRACK LISTING

⇐ ПредыдущаяСтр 2 из 20Следующая ⇒

SIDE 1:

1. And You Are?

2. Adultery

3. We’re in Trouble

4. In Too Deep

5. Who Do You Love?

SIDE 2:

1. Dirty Dishes

2. The Better Man

3. The Twentieth Call of the Day

4. Blood Ties

5. You and Your Perfect Life

two

A nnie scrolled back through the photo library on her computer and started to wonder whether her whole life had been a waste of time. She wasn’t, she liked to think, a nostalgic, or a Luddite. She preferred her iPod to Duncan’s old vinyl, she enjoyed having hundreds of TV channels to choose from, and she loved her digital camera. It’s just that in the old days, when you eventually got your pictures back from the drugstore, you never went backward through time. You shuffled through the twenty-four holiday snapshots, only seven of which were any good, put them in a drawer and forgot about them. You didn’t have to compare them to every other holiday you’d had in the last seven or eight years. But now she couldn’t resist it. When she uploaded or downloaded or whatever it was you did, the new photos took their place alongside all the others, and the seamlessness was beginning to depress her.

Look at them. There’s Duncan. There’s Annie. There’s Duncan and Annie. There’s Annie, Duncan, Duncan, Annie, Duncan standing at a urinal, pretending to have a pee… Nobody should have children just because it made the photo library on the computer more interesting. On the other hand, being childless meant that you could, if you were in a negative frame of mind, come to the conclusion that your snapshots were a little on the dull side. Nobody grew up or got bigger; no landmark occasions were commemorated, because there were none. Duncan and Annie just got slowly older, and a little fatter. (She was being loyal here. She hadn’t got much fatter at all, she noticed. ) Annie had single friends who’d never had kids, but their holiday photos, usually taken in exotic locations, were never boring—or rather, they didn’t feature the same two people over and over again, quite often wearing the same T-shirts and sunglasses, quite often sitting by the same swimming pool in the same hotel on the Amalfi coast.

Her single childless friends seemed to meet new people on their travels, people who then became friends. Duncan and Annie had never made friends on holiday: Duncan was always terrified of speaking to anybody, in case they should “get stuck. ” Once, sitting by the pool at the hotel on the Amalfi coast, Duncan had spotted someone reading the same book as him, a relatively obscure biography of some soul or blues musician. Some people—most people, maybe—would have regarded this as a happy and unlikely coincidence worth a smile or a hello, maybe even a drink and an eventual exchange of e-mail addresses; Duncan marched straight to their bedroom, put the book away and got out another one, just in case the other reader wanted to talk to him. Maybe it wasn’t her whole life that had been a waste of time—maybe it was just the fifteen years that she’d spent with Duncan. A chunk of her life, rescued! The chunk that finished in 1993! The photos from the American holiday didn’t do much to lift her gloom. Why had she allowed herself to be snapped outside an old-fashioned ladies’ underwear shop in Queens, New York, adopting exactly the same pose that Tucker had struck for the album cover of You and Me Both?

Duncan’s sudden rejection of all things Tucker made it all even more pointless. She kept asking him what had happened at Juliet’s house, but he simply claimed that he’d been losing interest for a while, and the morning in Berkeley had underlined the ridiculousness of it all. Annie didn’t buy it. He’d been blabbing on about Juliet all through breakfast that morning and he was clearly upset about something that afternoon when she saw him back at the hotel; the evidence suggested a Minneapolis toilet-style incident, destined to provoke wild Internet speculation among Crowologists forever.

She closed her photo library and went down to the hall to pick up all the mail that had been lying on the floor since they got home that morning. Duncan had already picked out all his Amazon parcels, and he wasn’t interested in anything else he got, so once she’d finished opening her mail, she started to tear open his, just in case there was anything that shouldn’t go straight into the recycling bin. There was an invitation to a symposium for English teachers, two invitations to apply for a credit card and a brown envelope containing a letter and a CD in one of those see-through plastic sleeves.

Dear Duncan (she read),

Haven’t spoken to you in a while, but then, there hasn’t really been much to talk about, has there? We’re releasing this in a couple of months, and I thought you should be one of the first to hear it. Who knew? Not me, and I suspect not even you. Anyway, Tucker has decided that the time is right. These are solo acoustic demos of all the songs on the album. We’re calling it Juliet, Naked.

Lemme know what you think, and enjoy!

Best wishes,

Paul Hill,

Press Officer,

PTO Music

Annie had in her hands a new Tucker Crowe release, and her excitement wasn’t even vicarious, just as it wouldn’t be vicarious if Duncan were elected prime minister. In the entire fifteen years of their relationship, this had never happened before, and as a consequence she didn’t know how to react. She would have called Duncan on his cell, but his cell was right in front of her, plugged into the spare socket by the kettle to recharge; she would have loaded it straight onto his iPod, but he’d taken that with him to work. (Both gadgets had come back from their holiday with drained batteries. One had been taken care of straightaway, the other forgotten about until just before Duncan left the house. ) So how was she supposed to mark the occasion?

She took the CD out of its plastic sleeve and put it into the portable player they kept in the kitchen. But instead of pressing the “play” button, her finger hovered above it for a second. Could she really listen to it before he did? It felt like one of those moments in a relationship—and there were enough of them in theirs, God knows—that would look completely innocuous to an outsider, but which were packed with meaning and aggression. Annie could imagine telling Ros at work that Duncan had gone absolutely nuts because she played a new CD when he wasn’t at home, and Ros would be suitably appalled and disgusted. But she wouldn’t be telling the whole story. She’d be telling a self-serving version, omitting the context. And, of course, it would be legitimate to feel bafflement and outrage if Ros didn’t understand, but Annie knew Duncan too well. She understood. She knew that playing the CD was an act of naked hostility, even if anyone peering through the windows wouldn’t be able to see the nakedness.

She put the CD back in its sleeve and made herself a cup of coffee. Duncan had only gone to pick up a timetable for the new semester, so he’d be back in less than an hour. Oh, this is ridiculous, she thought. Told herself, anyway, telling oneself being a more self-conscious mode of self-communication, and thus a more efficient way of lying, than thinking. Why couldn’t she put on some music she’d almost certainly like while she was pottering around in the kitchen? Why not pretend that Duncan was a normal person, with a healthy relationship to the things that pleased him? She put the disk back in the machine, and this time she pressed “play. ” And already she was preparing the opening lines of the skirmish to come.

To begin with, she was so stirred up by the act of playing the CD, the drama and the treachery of it, that she forgot to listen to the music—she was too busy composing her retorts. “It’s just a CD, Duncan! ” “I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but I quite like Juliet too. ” (That “quite”—so innocent and casual, and yet so wounding. She hoped. ) “It never occurred to me for a moment that I wasn’t allowed to listen! ” “Oh, don’t be such a baby! ” Where had this ill feeling sprung from? It wasn’t as if their relationship was any more precarious than it ever had been. But she could see now that a lot of resentment had been locked into her somewhere, and it was busy, restless stuff, roaming around looking for the tiniest open window. The last time she’d felt like this was during a house-share at university, when she’d found herself setting ridiculously complicated and time-consuming traps to catch a housemate whom she suspected of stealing her cookies. It took her a while to understand that the cookies weren’t really the point, and that somehow, without her noticing, she’d come to loathe this other girl—her greed, her smugness, her face and voice and bathrobe. Was that happening here? Juliet, Naked was both as blameless and as incendiary as a chocolate chip cookie.

Eventually she managed to stop wondering whether she hated her life partner and to start listening. And what she heard was exactly what she might have guessed she’d hear if she’d read about Juliet, Naked in a newspaper: it was Juliet, but without all the good bits. That probably wasn’t fair. Those lovely melodies were all there, intact, and Crowe had clearly written most of the lyrics, although a couple of the songs were missing choruses. But it was so tentative, so unadorned—it was like listening to one of those people you’ve never heard of who comes onstage at lunchtime in a folk festival. There wasn’t really any music to it yet, no violins, no electric guitars, no rhythm, none of the texture or the detail that still contained surprises, even after all this time. And there was no anger that she could hear, either, no pain. If she were still a teacher, she’d have played the two albums back-to-back to her sixth-formers, so that they could understand that art was pretending. Of course Tucker Crowe was in pain when he made Juliet, but he couldn’t just march into a recording studio and start howling. He’d have sounded mad and pathetic. He had to calm the rage, tame it and shape it so that it could be contained in the tight-fitting songs. Then he had to dress it up so that it sounded more like itself. Juliet, Naked proved how clever Tucker Crowe was, Annie thought, how artful; but only because of all the things that were missing, not because of anything that you could actually hear.

Annie heard the front door open during “Blood Ties, ” the second-from-last song. She hadn’t really been tidying up the kitchen while she’d been listening, but now she busied herself, and the stab at multitasking was in itself a form of betrayal: It’s just an album I put on! No big deal!

“How was college? ” she asked him when he walked in. “Anything happen while you were away? ”

But already he wasn’t listening to her. He was standing still, his head pointed toward the speakers like some kind of hunting dog.

“What’s… Hold on. Don’t tell me. That Tokyo radio-show bootleg? The solo acoustic one? ” And then, with rising panic, “He didn’t play ‘Blood Ties’ then. ”

“No, it’s…”

“Sssshh. ”

They both listened for a few bars. Annie watched his confusion and began to enjoy it.

“But this…” He stopped again. “This is… It’s nothing. ”

She burst out laughing. But of course! If Duncan had never heard it before, then all he could do was deny its existence.

“I mean, it’s something, but… I give up. ”

“Juliet, Naked, it’s called. ”

“What’s called? ” More panic. His world was tilting on its axis, and he was sliding right off.

“This album. ”

“What album? ”

“The one we’re listening to. ”

“This album is called Juliet, Naked. ”

“Yes. ”

“There is no album called Juliet, Naked. ”

“There is now. ”

She picked up the note from Paul Hill and handed it to him. He read it, read it again, read it for a third time.

“But this is addressed to me. You opened my post. ”

“I always open your post, ” she said. “If I don’t open your post, it stays unopened. ”

“I open the interesting letters. ”

“You left this one because it looked boring. ”

“But it isn’t boring. ”

“No. But I had to open it to find that out. ”

“You had no right, ” he said. “And then… To actually play it… I don’t believe this. ”

Annie never got a chance to chuck any of her scripted darts at him. He marched over to the CD player, pulled the disk out of the player and marched off.

* * *

The first time Duncan had watched his computer fill in the track names of the CD he’d put into it, he simply didn’t believe it. It was as if he were watching a magician who actually possessed magic powers: there was no point in looking for the explanation, for the trick, because there wasn’t one—or rather, there wasn’t one that he’d ever understand. Shortly after that, people from the message board started sending him songs attached to e-mails, and that was every bit as mysterious, because it meant that recorded music wasn’t, as he’d previously always understood, a thing at all—a CD, a piece of plastic, a spool of tape. You could reduce it to its essence, and its essence was literally intangible. This made music better, more beautiful, more mysterious, as far as he was concerned. People who knew of his relationship with Tucker expected him to be a vinyl nostalgic, but the new technology had made his passions more romantic, not less.

Over the years, though, he had detected a niggling dissatisfaction with the track-naming part of this new sorcery. He couldn’t help imagining, when he inserted a CD into his laptop, that whoever it was in cyberspace monitoring his musical tastes thought them dull, and a little too mainstream. You could never catch him out. Duncan imagined a twenty-first-century Neil Armstrong wearing a helmet with built-in Bang and Olufsen headphones, floating around somewhere a lot like old-fashioned space (except it was even less comprehensible and clearly contained a lot more pornography), thinking, Oh, not another one of these. Give me something harder. Give me something that stumps me for a moment, something that sends me scurrying off to the cyber reference library. Sometimes, when the computer seemed to whir for longer than usual, Duncan got the feeling that he’d set some kind of a challenge; but then one day, when he was stocking up his iPod with back catalog, it had taken nearly three minutes to obtain the track names for Abbey Road, and it was clear that any delay was due to a bad connection or something, and not because Neil Headphones was stumped. So recently Duncan had been taking pleasure in those rare occasions when Neil couldn’t help him, and he’d had to fill out the titles himself, even though it was boring. It meant that he was off the well-trodden paths and into the musical jungle. Neil Headphones had never heard of Juliet, Naked, which was something of a consolation. Duncan couldn’t have borne it if the information had popped up without any effort on anyone’s part, as if he were the seven-hundredth person to have requested it that day.

He didn’t want to listen to Juliet, Naked straightaway. He was still too angry, both with Annie and, more obscurely, with the album itself, which seemed to belong to her more than him. So he was grateful for the time it took to name the tracks (he took a gamble on the track listing being the same on Naked, as he was already learning to call it, as it was on the original album—the long last song, six minutes even in its demo form, suggested that it would be), and then for his machine to inhale the music into itself. What had she been thinking of? He wanted to find a benign interpretation for her behavior, but there just wasn’t one. It was malevolence, pure and simple. Why did she hate him so much, all of a sudden? What had he done?

He plugged his iPod in, transferred the album with a still-miraculous click of the finger and flick of the wrist, picked his jacket up from the newel post at the bottom of the stairs and went out.

He went down to the seashore. He’d grown up in the London suburbs, and still couldn’t get used to the idea that the sea was five minutes’ walk away. It wasn’t much of a sea, of course, if what you wanted was a sea that contained even the faintest hint of blue or green; their sea seemed committed to a resourceful range of charcoal gray blacks, with the occasional suggestion of muddy brown. The weather conditions were perfect for his needs, though. The sea was hurling itself at the beach over and over again, like a nasty and particularly stupid pit bull, and the vacationers who still, inexplicably, chose to come here when they could fly to the Mediterranean for thirty quid all looked as though they’d been bereaved that morning. Fallacies really never got more pathetic than this. He got himself a cup of takeout instant coffee from the kebab stand by the pier and sat down on a bench overlooking the ocean. He was ready.

Forty-one minutes later, he was scrabbling around in his pockets for something he could use as a handkerchief when a middle-aged woman came over and touched him on the arm.

“Do you need someone to talk to? ” she said gently.

“Oh. Thank you. No, no, I’m fine. ”

He touched his face—he’d been crying harder than he’d realized.

“You sure? You don’t look fine. ”

“No, really. I’ve just… I’ve just had a very intense emotional experience. ” He held out one of his iPod headphones, as if that would explain it. “On here. ”

“You’re crying about music? ”

The woman looked at him as if he were some kind of pervert.

“Well, ” said Duncan, “I’m not crying about it. I’m not sure that’s the right preposition. ”

She shook her head and walked off.

* * *

He listened from beginning to end twice more while sitting on the bench, and then started to walk home during the third play. One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it. What did it matter that Annie had heard the album before he’d had his chance? Imagine all the people who’d heard the original album before he’d discovered it! Imagine all the people who’d seen Taxi Driver before him, come to that! Did that deaden its impact? Did it make it less his? He wanted to go home, hug her and talk about a morning that he would never forget. He wanted to hear what she had to say, too. He valued her insights into Crowe’s work—she could be surprisingly shrewd, sometimes, given her unwillingness to immerse herself in the subject, and he wanted to hear whether she’d noticed the same things that he’d picked up: the lack of chorus in “The Twentieth Call of the Day, ” for example, which gave the song a relentlessness and a self-loathing that you couldn’t really detect in its “finished” form. (He’d play this version to anyone who dared to trot out that tired old line about Crowe being the poor man’s Dylan. “The Twentieth Call of the Day, ” in Duncan’s opinion, was “Positively Fourth Street, ” but it had more texture and heft. And Tucker could sing. ) And who’d have thought that “And You Are? ” could sound so ominous? On Juliet, it was a song about two people making a connection straightaway—in other words, it was a simple (but very pretty) love song, a sunny day before the psychic storms started rolling in from the sea. But on Juliet, Naked, it was as if the lovers were standing in a little pool of sunlight that was becoming smaller even while they were talking for the first time. They could see the thunder and the rain already, and it made the album more complete, somehow, more coherent. It was a proper tragedy, with the doom about to befall them implied from the very beginning. The flat restraint of “You and Your Perfect Life, ” meanwhile, gave the song a staggering power that was muffled by the histrionics of the rock ’n’ roll version.

Annie was still in the kitchen when he got home, reading the Guardian at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. He went up behind her and hugged her, probably for longer than she was comfortable being hugged.

“What’s that for? ” she said, with moderate but determined affection. “I thought you were annoyed with me. ”

“I’m sorry. Stupid. Petty. What does it matter who hears it first? ”

“I know. I should have warned you it was a bit on the dreary side. But I thought that would make you even crosser. ”

He felt as though he’d been punched in the stomach. He let go of her, took a breath, waited for the impact to fade a little before he spoke again.

“You didn’t like it? ”

“Well, it was all right. Mildly interesting, if you’ve heard the other one. I don’t suppose I’ll play it again. What did you think? ”

“I think it’s a masterpiece. I think it blows the other one out of the water. And as the other one is my favorite album of all time…”

“You’re not serious? ”

“ ‘Dreary’! My God! What else is dreary, according to you? King Lear? The Waste Land? ”

“Don’t do that, Duncan. You always lose your powers of reason when you get angry. ”

“That’s anger for you. ”

“No, but… We’re not having an argument. We’re trying to discuss, you know, a work of art. ”

“Not according to you. According to you we’re trying to discuss a piece of shit. ”

“There you go. You think it’s King Lear, I think it’s a piece of shit… Get a grip, Duncan. I love the other one. I suspect most people will feel the same way. ”

“Oh, most people. We all know what most people think about everything. The wisdom of fucking crowds. Jesus. Most people would rather buy an album made by a dancing midget from a reality TV show. ”

“Duncan Thomson, the great populist. ”

“I’m just… I’m so disappointed in you, Annie. I thought you were better than that. ”

“Ah, yes. That’s the next step. It becomes a moral failing on my part. A character weakness. ”

“But I’m sorry to say that’s how it is. If you can’t hear anything in this…”

“What? Please. Tell me. I’d love to know what that would say about me. ”

“The usual stuff. ”

“Which is what? ”

“Which is, I don’t know. You’re a moron. ”

“Thanks. ”

“I didn’t say you were a moron. I said you were a moron if you can’t hear anything in this. ”

“I can’t. ”

He left the house again, then, and went back to the bench overlooking the sea with his iPod.

Another hour or so went by before he even thought about the website. He’d be the first to write about the album, if he were quick. Better than that: he’d be the first to alert the Crowe community to its existence, even! He’d listened to Juliet, Naked four times, and he had already thought of a great deal he wanted to say about it; in any case, to wait any longer would be to risk his advantage. He didn’t think Paul Hill would have contacted anyone else from the message boards yet, but copies would have been pushed through all sorts of mailboxes this morning. He had to go home, however much hostility he felt toward Annie.

He managed to avoid her anyway. She was on the phone in the kitchen, probably to her mother. (And who wanted to speak to a member of the family, immediately on return from holiday? Didn’t that prove something? What, he wasn’t precisely sure. But it seemed to him that anyone still so connected to family—to childhood, essentially—was hardly going to be able to respond to the kind of stark adult truths spread generously through the ten songs on Juliet, Naked. She’d get it one day, maybe, but clearly not for a few years yet. )

Their shared office was on the half landing. The real estate agent who sold them the house was inexplicably convinced that they would one day use the tiny room as a nursery, before deciding to move out of town and buy a house with a garden. They would then sell this house to another couple who would, in time, do the same thing. Duncan had wondered whether their childlessness was a direct response to the depressing predictability of it all— whether the real estate agent had, inadvertently but effectively, made their minds up for them.

It was the opposite of a nursery now. It contained two laptops, placed side by side on a workbench, two chairs, a machine that converted vinyl into MP3s and about two thousand CDs, including bootlegs of every single concert Tucker Crowe had performed between 1982 and 1986, with the exception of the September 1984 show at KB in Malm& #246;, Sweden, which, bizarrely, nobody seems to have taped—a constant thorn in the side of all serious students, given that this, according to a normally reliable Swedish source, was the night Crowe chose to do a never-to-be-repeated cover version of “Love Will Tear Us Apart. ” He cleared away the bank statements and letters that Annie had opened and placed by his computer for his attention, opened a document and began to type. He produced three thousand words in just under two hours and posted it on the website shortly after five o’clock that afternoon. By ten o’clock that night, there were 163 comments, from fans in eleven different countries.

The next day, he would see that he’d overcooked it a little. “ Juliet, Naked means that everything else Tucker Crowe recorded is suddenly a little paler, a little too slick, a little too digested… And if it does that to Crowe’s work, imagine what it does to everyone else’s. ” He hadn’t wanted to get into arguments about the relative merits of James Brown, or the Stones, or Frank Sinatra. He’d meant Crowe’s singer-songwriter peers, of course, but the literal-minded hadn’t wanted to take it that way. “This version of ‘You and Your Perfect Life’ makes the one you’re familiar with sound like something off a Westlife album…” If he’d waited, he’d have found that the “Dressed” version (inevitably, Juliet came to be known as Dressed, for ease of distinction) reasserted its superiority quite comfortably, after its initial shock. And he wished he hadn’t mentioned Westlife at all, seeing as some crazed Westlife fan would come across the reference and spend a day posting obscene messages on the message boards.

In his na& #239; vet& #233;, he hadn’t really expected anger. But then he imagined himself checking the website idly for some tidbit of gossip—news of an interview with the guy who did the cover art for the EP, say—and discovering there was a whole new album out there that he hadn’t heard. It would have been like turning on the TV for the local weather forecast, only to find that the sky was falling in. He wouldn’t have been happy, and he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to read some other bastard’s smug review. He would have hated the reviewer, certainly, and he would probably have decided there and then that the album was no good. He began to worry that his ecstatic praise might have done Naked a disservice: now nobody—none of the real fans, anyway, and it was difficult to imagine that many other people would bother with it—would be able to listen to it without prejudice. Oh, it was a complicated business, loving art. It involved a lot more ill will than one might have suspected.

The responses that meant the most to him came via e-mail, from the Crowologists he knew well. Ed West’s e-mail said, simply, “Fuck me. Gimme. Now. ” Geoff Old-field’s said (with unnecessary cruelty, Duncan thought), “That, my friend, was your moment in the sun. Nothing quite as good will ever happen to you again. ” John Tay lor went for a quote, from “The Better Man”: “Luck is a disease / I don’t want it near me. ” He created a mailing list and started sending them all the tracks, one by one. Tomorrow morning, a handful of middle-aged men would be regretting that they had gone to bed much too late.

three

A nnie had thought she might be stuck teaching forever, and she’d hated the job so much that, even now, simply arriving at the museum ten or fifteen minutes late made her happy. For a teacher, those fifteen minutes would have represented a humiliating disaster, involving riots, reprimands and disapproving colleagues, but nobody cared whether she arrived three minutes or thirty minutes before a small and infrequently visited museum was due to open. (The truth was that nobody really cared if she arrived three or thirty minutes after it was supposed to have opened, either. ) Wandering out for a mid-morning takeout coffee was a frequent and rather pitiful daydream in her old job; now she made sure she did it every day, whether she needed the caffeine or not. Okay, there were some things she missed: that feeling you got when a lesson was going well, when it was all bright eyes and concentration so thick it felt almost humid, something that might cling to your clothes; and sometimes she could do with some of the energy and optimism and life that you could find in any child, no matter how apparently surly and damaged. But most of the time, she was happy still to have made it under the barbed wire that surrounded secondary education and out into the world.

She worked on her own, for great chunks of the day, mostly trying to raise funds, although this was beginning to feel like an increasingly pointless task: nobody, it seemed, had the spare cash for an ailing seaside museum anymore, and possibly never would again. Occasionally, she had to speak to visiting parties of local schoolchildren, which was why she’d been given the chance to escape from the classroom. There was always a volunteer at the front desk, usually Vi or Margaret or Joyce or one of the other old ladies whose aching need to show that they could be useful broke Annie’s heart, when she bothered to think about them at all. And when there was a special exhibition being planned, then she worked with Ros, a freelance curator who also taught history at Duncan’s college. (Duncan, of course, had never been able to bring himself to talk to her, in case he “got stuck” with her during one of his visits to the staff room. ) Ros and Annie were attempting to prepare an exhibition at the moment, a photographic record of the heat-wave summer of 1964, when the old town square was redeveloped, the Stones played the ABC cinema up the road and a twenty-five-foot shark had been washed up on the beach. They had asked for contributions from residents, and they had advertised on all the relevant local- and social-history websites they could think of, but so far they had received only two snapshots—one of the shark itself, which had clearly died of some kind of fungal condition much too gruesome for an exhibition intended to celebrate a golden summer, and one of four friends—coworkers? —having fun on the boardwalk.

This photograph had arrived through the mail a couple of days after they’d posted their Internet ads, and she couldn’t believe how perfect it was. The two men were in suspenders and shirtsleeves, and the two women were in floral sundresses; the teeth were bad, the faces were lined, the hair was Brylcreemed, and they looked as if they had never had so much fun in their lives. That’s what she said to Ros, when she saw it—“Look at them! It’s like this is the best day out they’ve ever had! ” And she laughed, so convinced was she that their enjoyment was due to a happy trick of the camera, or alcohol, or a dirty joke, anything but the day out and the surroundings. And Ros said simply, “Well. That’s almost certainly true. ”

Annie, who was about to have a moderately good time on a three-week tour of the United States—pleasant, but not world-shaking, those mountains in Montana—felt humbled. In 1964, five years before she was born, it was still possible for English people to feel ecstatic about a day off in a northerly seaside town. She looked at them again and wondered what they did, how much money they had in their pockets at that precise second, how long their holidays were, how long their lives were. Annie had never been rich. But she’d been to every European country she wanted to see, to the United States, even to Australia. How, she wondered, had we got to here from there, to this from that? She suddenly saw the point of the exhibition that she’d conceived and planned with no real enthusiasm or sense of purpose. More than that, she suddenly saw the point of the town she lived in, how much it must have meant to people that she and everyone else she knew were losing the capacity to imagine. She always took her job seriously, but she was determined to find a way of making visitors to the museum feel what she felt.

And then, after the dead shark offering, the photos just dried up. She had already given up on 1964, although she hadn’t told Ros that yet, and had been trying to think of a way of broadening the hunt without making the exhibition unfocused and sloppy. Being away for three weeks had restored her hope, not least because she had eighteen days’ worth of mail to sort through.

There were two more pictures. One had been dropped off by a man who’d been sorting through his recently deceased mother’s things; it was a nice enough snapshot of a little girl standing next to a Punch-and-Judy booth. The other, sent without a cover letter, was of the dead shark. Annie felt that she had the dead shark covered, and she wished she’d never mentioned it. She’d included it in her request only as a nudge to the memory of the aging population of the town. She might as well have sent them a notice saying “Diseased-shark pics wanted. ” This one seemed to show a hole in the flank where the flesh had simply rotted away.

She went through the rest of the mail, replied to some e-mails and went out for her coffee. It was only on the way back that she remembered Duncan’s maniacal activity of the night before. She knew that his review had provoked a reaction, because he kept running up- and downstairs, checking his e-mail, reading the comments on the website, shaking his head and chuckling at the strange and suddenly alive world he inhabited. But he hadn’t shown her what he’d written, and she felt she should read it. It wasn’t just that, she realized—she actually wanted to read it. She’d heard the music, even before he had, which meant that for the first time ever she’d formed an opinion about it that hadn’t been filtered through his own intimidating evangelism… She wanted to see for herself just how wrongheaded he could be, how far apart they were.

She logged on to the website (for some reason, she had it bookmarked) and printed the piece so that she could concentrate on it. By the time she’d finished it, she was properly angry with Duncan. She was angered by his smugness, his obvious determination to crow to the fellow fans he was supposed to feel some kind of kinship with; so she was angered by his pettiness, too, his inability to share something that was clearly of value in that shrinking and increasingly beleaguered community. But most of all, she was angered by his perversity. How could those sketches for songs be better than the finished product? How could leaving something half-formed be better than working on it, polishing it, layering and texturing it, shaping it until the music expresses what you want it to express? The more she stared at Duncan’s ridiculous piece, the angrier she got, until she got so angry that the anger itself became an object of curiosity to her: it mystified her. Tucker Crowe was Duncan’s hobby, and people with hobbies did peculiar things. But listening to music wasn’t like collecting stamps, or fly-fishing, or building ships in a bottle. Listening to music was something that she did, too, frequently and with great enjoyment, and Duncan somehow managed to spoil it, partly by making her feel that she was no good at it. Was that it? She read the end of his piece again. “I have been living with Tucker Crowe’s remarkable songs for nearly a quarter of a century, and only today, staring at the sea, listening to ‘You and Your Perfect Life’ as God and Crowe intended it to be heard…”

It wasn’t that he made her feel incompetent and unsure of herself and her tastes. It was the reverse. He knew nothing about anything, and she’d never really allowed herself to notice it until now. She’d always thought that his passionate interest in music and film and books indicated intelligence, but of course it didn’t have to indicate anything of the sort, if he constantly got the wrong end of the stick. Why was he teaching trainee plumbers and future hotel receptionists how to watch American television, if he was so smart? Why did he write thousands of words for obscure websites that nobody ever read? And why was he so convinced that a singer nobody had ever paid much attention to was a genius to rival Dylan and Keats? Oh, it spelled trouble, this anger. Her partner’s brain was dwindling away to nothing while she examined it. And he’d called her a moron! One thing he was right about, though: Tucker Crowe was important, and he revealed harsh truths about people. About Duncan, anyway.

When Ros stopped by to find out whether they’d made any progress with the photographs, Annie still had the website up on her computer.

“Tucker Crowe, ” said Ros. “Wow. My college boyfriend used to like him, ” she said. “I didn’t know he was still going. ”

“He’s not, really. You had a college boyfriend? ”

“Yes. He was gay, too, it turned out. Can’t imagine why we broke up. But I don’t understand: Tucker Crowe has his own website? ”

“Everyone has their own website. ”

“Is that true? ”

“I think so. Nobody gets forgotten anymore. Seven fans in Australia team up with three Canadians, nine Brits and a couple of dozen Americans, and somebody who hasn’t recorded in twenty years gets talked about every day. It’s what the Internet’s for. That and pornography. Do you want to know which songs he played in Portland, Oregon, in 1985? ”

“Not really. ”

“Then this website isn’t for you. ”

“How come you know so much about it? Are you one of the nine Brits? ”

“No. There are no women who bother. My, you know, Duncan is. ”

What was she supposed to call him? Not being married to him was becoming every bit as irritating as she imagined marriage to him might be. She wasn’t going to call him her boyfriend. He was forty-something, for God’s sake. Partner? Life partner? Friend? None of these words and phrases seemed adequately to define their relationship, an inadequacy particularly poignant when it came to the word “friend. ” And she hated it when people just launched in and started talking about Peter or Jane when you had no idea who Peter and Jane were. Perhaps she just wouldn’t ever mention him at all.

“And he’s just written a million words of gibberish and posted them up for the world to see. If the world were interested, that is. ”

She invited Ros to inspect Duncan’s piece, and Ros read the first few lines.

“Aaah. Sweet. ”

Annie made a face.

“Don’t knock people with passions, ” said Ros. “Especially passions for the arts. They’re always the most interesting people. ”

Everyone had succumbed to that particular myth, it seemed.

“Right. Next time you’re in the West End, go and hang out by the stage door of a theater showing a musical and make friends with one of those sad bastards waiting for an autograph. See how interesting you find them. ”

“Sounds like I should buy that CD. ”

“Don’t bother. That’s what gets me. I played it, and he’s completely wrong. And for some reason I’m bursting to say so. ”

“You should write your own review and stick it up next to his. ”

“Oh, I’m not an expert. I wouldn’t be allowed. ”

“They need someone like you. Otherwise they all disappear up their own bottoms. ”

There was a knock on Annie’s open office door. An old lady wearing a hoodie was standing there offering them both an envelope. Ros stepped over and took it.

“Shark picture, ” the old lady said, and waddled off.

Annie rolled her eyes. Ros opened the envelope, laughed and passed the picture over. It featured the same gaping, diseased wound that Annie’d seen in one of the other photos. But someone had had the bright idea of planting a small child on top of the shark. She was sitting there with her bare feet dangling inches from the hole; both toddler and wound were weeping.

“Jesus, ” said Annie.

“Maybe nobody went to see the Rolling Stones here in 1964, ” said Ros. “The dead shark was just too much fun. ”

Annie started writing her review that night. She had no intention of showing it to anyone; it was just a way of working out whether what she thought meant anything to her. It was also a way of sticking a fork into her irritation, which was beginning to swell like a sausage on a barbecue. If it burst, then she could imagine consequences that she wasn’t yet prepared for.

She had to write at work—letters, descriptions of exhibitions, captions, bits and pieces for the museum website—but most of the time, it seemed to her, she had to think up something to say, create an opinion from nothing. This was different; it was all she could do to stop herself from following every single one of the strands of thought she’d been chewing on for the last couple of days. Juliet, Naked had somehow given her ideas about art and work, her relationship, Tucker’s relationship, the mysterious appeal of the obscure, men and music, the value of the chorus in song, the point of harmony and the necessity of ambition, and every time she finished a paragraph, the next one appeared in front of her, unbidden and annoyingly unconnected to the last. One day, she eventually decided, she would try to write about some of those things, but it couldn’t be here and now; she wanted this essay to be about the two albums, the immeasurable and unquestionable superiority of one over the other. And maybe about what people (Duncan, in other words) thought they heard in Naked that wasn’t actually there, and why these people (he) heard these things, and what it said about them. And maybe… No. That was enough. The album had created such mental turbulence that she briefly began to wonder whether it was a work of genius after all, but she dismissed the idea. She knew from her book group that novels none of them had enjoyed could produce stimulating and sometimes even useful conversation; it was the absences in Naked (and, therefore, in Duncan) that had made her think, not the presences.

Meanwhile, Duncan’s friends on the website had been listening, and several more long reviews had been posted. In Tuckerland, it was something like Christmas; clearly those who believed had stopped work for the festive season, in order to spend time with their extended Internet family and, from the look of some of the pieces of writing, celebrate with a few beers or a spliff. “NOT a masterpiece but masterful nonetheless, ” was the headline of one review. “WHEN WILL THE POWERS THAT BE RELEASE ALL THE REAL UNRELEASED STUFF? ” said another, who went on to say that he knew for a fact that there were seventeen albums of material in the vaults.

“Who’s that guy? ” she asked Duncan, after trying to read a paragraph of his feverish, occasionally rather affecting prose.

“Oh. Him. Poor old Jerry Warner. He used to teach English at some public school somewhere, but he got caught with a sixth-form boy a couple of years back, and he’s been a bit off the rails since. Too much time on his hands. Why do you keep looking at the website, anyway? ”

She’d finished her essay now. Somehow Juliet, Naked —or her feelings about it, anyway—had woken her from a deep sleep: she wanted things. She’d wanted to write, she wanted Duncan to read what she’d written. She wanted the other message board members to read it, too. She was proud of it, and she had even begun to wonder whether it might not be socially useful in some way. Some of these cranks, she hoped, might read it, blush a deep crimson and return to their lives. There was no end to her wanting.

“I wrote something. ”

“What about? ”

“About Naked. ”

Duncan looked at her.

“You? ”

“Yes. Me. ”

“Gosh. Well. Wow. Ha. ” He smiled, stood up and started pacing around the room. This was the closest she would ever get to telling him that he was about to become the father of twins. He wasn’t thrilled by the news, but he knew he wasn’t allowed to be openly discouraging.

“And do you think… Well, do you think you’re qualified to write something? ”

“Is it a matter of qualifications? ”

“Interesting question. I mean, you’re perfectly at liberty to write whatever you want. ”

“Thanks. ”

“But for the website… People expect a certain level of expertise. ”

“In the first paragraph of his post, Jerry Warner says that Tucker Crowe lives in a garage in Portugal. How expert is that? ”

“I’m not sure you’re supposed to take him literally. ”

“So, what, he lives in a Portuguese garage of the mind? ”

“Yes, he’s wayward, Jerry. But he can sing every word of every song. ”

“That qualifies him to busk outside a pub. It doesn’t necessarily make him a critic. ”

“I’ll tell you what, ” said Duncan, as if he had a crazy gut feeling that the receptionist should be offered a place on the board of his company. “Let me see it. ”

She was holding the piece in her hand. She gave it to him.

“Oh. Right. Thank you. ”

“I’ll leave you to it. ”

She went upstairs, lay down on the bed and tried to read her book, but she couldn’t concentrate. She could hear the sound of his shaking head all the way through the floorboards.

Duncan read the essay twice, just to buy himself some time; the truth was that he knew he was in trouble after the first reading, because it was both very well written and very wrong. Annie had made no factual errors that he could find (although someone on the boards would always point out some glaring and utterly inconsequential mistake, he found, when he wrote something), but her inability to recognize the brilliance of the album was indicative of a failure in taste that appalled him. How had she ever managed to read or see or listen to anything and come to the right conclusion about its merits? Was it all just luck? Or was it just the boring good taste of the Sunday newspaper supplements? So she liked The Sopranos —well, who didn’t? He’d had a chance this time to watch her have to come to her own conclusions, and she’d messed it up.

He couldn’t refuse to put the piece up, though. That wouldn’t be fair, and he didn’t want to be put in the position of turning her down. And it wasn’t as if she didn’t get the greatness of Tucker Crowe: this was, after all, a long hymn of praise to the perfection of Dressed. No, he’d post it on the site and let the others tell her what they thought of her.

He read it through once more, just to make sure, and this time it depressed him: she was better than him in everything but judgment—the only thing that mattered in the end, but still. She wrote well, with fluency and humor, and she was persuasive, if you hadn’t actually heard the music, and she was likable. He tended to be strident and bullying and smart-alecky, even he could see that. This wasn’t what she was supposed to be good at. Where did that leave him? And supposing they didn’t shoot her down in flames? Supposing, instead, that they used her as a stick to beat him with? Naked, which just about everyone had heard by now, was getting a very mixed reaction, and the negative stuff, he feared, had been provoked by his original, overenthusiastic review. He was just beginning to change his mind about accepting her into the community when she appeared in front of him.

“Well? ” she said. She was nervous.

“Well, ” he said.

“I feel as though I’m waiting for my exam results. ”

“I’m sorry. I was just thinking about what you wrote. ”

“And? ”

“You know I don’t agree with it. But it’s really not bad. ”

“Oh. Thank you. ”

“And I’m happy to put it up, if that’s what you really want. ”

“I think so. ”

“You have to include your e-mail address, you know that. ”

“Do I? ”

“Yes. And you’ll get a few nutters contacting you. But you can just delete them, if you don’t want to get involved in a debate. ”

“Can I use a fake name? ”

“Why? Nobody knows who you are. ”

“You’ve never mentioned me to any of your friends? ”

“I don’t think so, no. ”

“Oh. ”

Annie looked rather taken aback. But was that so weird? None of the other Crowologists lived in the town, and he only ever talked to them about Tucker, or occasionally about related artists.

“Have you ever had a contribution from a woman? ”

He pretended to think about it. He’d often wondered why they only ever heard from middle-aged men, but it had never worried him unduly. Now he felt defensive.

“Yes, ” he said. “But not for a while. And even then they just wanted to talk about how, you know, attractive they found him. ”

The only women he could invent, it seemed, were clich& #233; d airheads, unable to contribute to serious debate. He’d only had a couple of seconds to imagine them, but even so, he could and should have done better. If he ever did write his novel, he’d have to watch that.

“Do women find him attractive? ”

“God, yes. ”

Now he was beginning to sound weird. Well, not weird, because homosexual attraction wasn’t weird, of course it wasn’t. But he was certainly sounding more vehement about Tucker’s good looks than he had meant to.

“Anyway. Send me the piece as an attachment and I’ll put it up tonight. ”

And, after only a couple of arguments with himself, he did what he’d promised.

At work the next morning, Annie found herself logging on to the website a couple of times an hour. At first, it seemed obvious to her that she’d want some feedback on what she’d written—she’d never done this before, so she was bound to be curious about the process. Later in the day, however, she realized that she wanted to win, to beat Duncan hollow. He’d had his say, and for the most part his say had been greeted by hostility, sarcasm, disbelief and envy; she wanted people to be nicer to her than they had been to him, more appreciative of her eloquence and acuity, and, to her great delight, they were. By five o’clock that afternoon, seven people had posted in the “comments” section, and six of them were friendly—inarticulate, and disappointingly brief, but friendly nonetheless. “Nice work, Annie! ” “Welcome to our little online ‘community’—good job! ” “I completely agree with you. Duncan’s so far off-base he’s disappeared off of the radar. ” The only person who wanted to make it clear that he hadn’t enjoyed her contribution didn’t seem very happy about anything. “Tucker Crowe is FINISHED get over it you people are pathetic just going on and on about a singer who hasn’t made an album for twenty years. He was overrated then and he’s overrated now and Morrissey is so much better its embarrassing. ”

She wondered why someone would bother to write that; but then, “Why bother” was never a question you could ask about more or less anything on the Internet, otherwise the whole bunch of them shriveled to a cotton-candy nothing. Why had she bothered? Why does anybody? She was for bothering, on the whole; in which case thank you, MrMozza7, for your contribution, and thank you, everybody else, on every other website.

Just before she shut down her computer for the day, she checked her e-mails again. She’d suspected that Duncan had told her she had to provide an address in an attempt to frighten her off; clearly the comments section was the preferred method of providing feedback. Duncan had implied that there would be a host of homicidal cyber stalkers, spewing bile and promising vengeance, but so far, nothing.

This time, however, there were two e-mails, from someone called Alfred Mantalini. The first was titled “Your Review. ” It was very short. It said, simply, “Thank you for your kind and perceptive words. I really appreciated them. Best wishes, Tucker Crowe. ” The title on the second was “P. S., ” and the message said, “I don’t know if you hang out with anyone on that website, but they seem like pretty weird people, and I’d be really grateful if you didn’t pass on this address. ”

Was it possible? Even asking the question felt stupid, and the sudden breathlessness was simply pathetic. Of course it wasn’t possible. It was obviously a joke, even though it was a joke removed of all discernible humor. Why bother? Don’t ask. She draped her jacket over the back of her chair and put her bag on the floor. What would be an amusing response? “Fuck off, Duncan”? Or should she just ignore it? But supposing…?

She tried mocking herself again, but the self-mockery only worked, she realized, if she thought with Duncan’s head—if she really believed that Tucker Crowe was the most famous man in the world, and that there was more chance of being contacted out of the blue by Russell Crowe. Tucker Crowe, however, was an obscure musician from the 1980s, who probably didn’t have much to do at nights except look at websites dedicated to his memory and shake his head in disbelief. And she could certainly understand why he wouldn’t want to contact Duncan and the rest of them: the torch they were holding burned way too bright. Why Alfred Mantalini? She Googled the name. Alfred Mantalini was a character in Nicholas Nickleby, apparently, an idler and philanderer who ends up bank rupting his wife. Well, that could fit, couldn’t it? Especially if Tucker Crowe had a sense of self-irony. Quickly, before she could think twice, she clicked on “Reply” and typed, “It isn’t you really, is it? ”

This man had been both a presence and an absence in her life for fifteen years, and the idea that she had just sent him a message that might somehow appear somewhere in his house, if he had one, seemed preposterous. She waited at work for an hour or two in the hope that he’d reply, and then she went home.

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