BetterthanBob 2 страница

And now here Annie was, allowing her day to become gloriously colored by a communication from a man she’d never even met.

ten

I n the last e-mail Annie had sent Tucker, she’d posed the following question:

What do you do if you think you’ve wasted fifteen years of your life?

She’d had no reply, as yet, possibly because of the domestic turmoil he’d hinted at the last time he’d written, so she’d had to address the problem on her own. She was currently working on the assumption that time was money. What would she do if she’d just lost fifteen thousand pounds? It seemed to her that there were two alternatives: you could either write it off or try to get it back. And you could try to get it back either from the person who took it from you in the first place or by trying to compensate for the loss in other ways—by selling stuff, or betting on a horse, or doing lots of overtime.

This analogy was only helpful up to a point, obviously. Time wasn’t money. Or rather, the time she was talking about couldn’t be converted into cash, like the services of a lawyer, or a prostitute. Or rather (one last “or rather, ” otherwise she’d have to concede that this whole way of thinking about time wasn’t working) it could, theoretically, but nobody was going to pay her. She could knock on Duncan’s—Gina’s! —door and demand compensation for the time she’d wasted on him, but the value would be difficult to calculate, and anyway, Duncan was cheap. She didn’t want money, though. She wanted the time back, to spend on something else. She wanted to be twenty-five again.

If she hadn’t wasted so much time with Duncan, she might be better equipped to work out where it had gone; she had never been very good at algebra, and algebra was, it seemed to her, what was needed for the kind of thinking she wanted to do. One of the traps she kept falling into—and she couldn’t help it, even though she was aware of it—was to equate time with Duncan as time generally. T = D, when of course T really equaled D + W + S + F& F + C, where W is work, S is sleep, F& F is family and friends, C is culture and so on. In other words, she’d wasted only her romantic time on Duncan, whereas life consisted of more than that. In her own defense, though, she would like to point out that D was more than just one element to rack up alongside the others. She saw his F& F, for example, as well as her own, although admittedly he had fewer of both. Who knows whether W would have been different if D hadn’t been living in the same town? She was guessing it might have been. They stayed put, doing jobs that satisfied neither of them, because finding new work in the same place at the same time would have been almost impossible. And whose C was it anyway? He was the one who bought the music and the DVDs, he was the one who didn’t like going to the theater (or to other towns to see it)… She couldn’t do equations, really, but she thought it was probably more like

T = W + S + F& F + C D

And there was another part of the equation that she didn’t like thinking about: her own stupidity and torpor (OST). She had played a part in all this. She had allowed her life to drift. She would have to multiply the whole bloody lot by OST, thus ending up with a number greater than the one she’d first thought of. And if it turned out she’d wasted twenty or fifty or a hundred years, then whose fault was that?

* * *

The fifteen years were gone, anyway. And what had gone with them? Children, almost certainly, and if she ever did take Duncan to court, that’s what she would sue him for. But what else? What hadn’t she done because she’d spent too much time with a boring, faithless nerd, apart from live the kind of life she’d wanted when she was twenty-five? She kept coming back to sex. It was reductive and unimaginative, she knew that, but it was also unarguable: Duncan had kept her from having sex with other people, and quite often with him. (They had never been the most highly sexed couple, but whoever kept score of these things would say he’d turned down her overtures more often than she’d turned down his. ) How could she make up for fifteen years of missed opportunity, aged thirty-nine? And how much sex was that anyway? Suppose she’d met somebody she loved passionately fifteen years ago, and the relationship had endured? Then it would be fifteen years of sex with Other Man (OM) minus fifteen years of sex with Duncan. To include quality (Q) in the calculation would require a mathematical sophistication that was beyond her capabilities, even though it was probably necessary to give an accurate final figure.

In other words: she wanted to see if anyone would want to have sex with her. Where to start, in Gooleness?

* * *

She asked Ros, first of all, on the grounds that Ros was younger, and that younger people were closer to sex than she was.

“I can tell you how to meet gay women in London, ” Ros said.

“Right. Thanks. I’m going to aim at straight men in Gooleness first, but I might get back to you if it doesn’t work out. ”

“What is it you’re actually after? A one-night stand? ”

“Maybe. If it stretched into a second night, I wouldn’t complain. Unless, of course, the first night was horrific. Don’t you know any single men? ”

“Ummm… no. I’m not sure there are any. Not the kind you’re looking for. ”

“What am I looking for? ”

“Well, Gooleness has clubs, and lads, and… but…”

“I know the next four words you’re going to say. ”

“What? ”

“‘With all due respect. ’”

Ros laughed.

“We could go out, ” she said. “If you want. ”

“But you’re…”

“Gay? Or married? ”

“Both. ”

“Here’s the thing: I wouldn’t be looking. I’d be helping you to look. We, in the meantime, would be having a night out. And if it looks as though you’re in luck, I will make my excuses and leave. Unless you need me for anything. ”

“Don’t be disgusting. ”

“Don’t be prudish. Things have changed since you last slept with somebody for the first time. Unless there’s been someone you haven’t told me about. ”

“No. Duncan. In 1993. ”

“Blimey. You’re in for a shock. ”

“That’s what worries me. What sort of shock am I in for? ”

“I just imagine a world of pornography and sex toys. And I’m presuming that there is always a minimum of three people involved. ”

“Oh, God. ”

“And then five minutes after you’ve finished doing it with a minimum of two other people, explicit images of your thirty-nine-year-old body will start appearing on your friends’ mobile phones. And all over the Internet, of course, but that goes without saying. ”

“Right. Well. If that’s what you have to do. ”

“Ideally, you’d want someone like you, wouldn’t you? I don’t mean, you know, a female museum curator. I mean someone who’s just come out of a long relationship and is similarly perplexed by what happens now. ”

“I suppose. ”

“Let me think. What are you doing Friday night? ”

Annie looked at her.

“Yes. Right. Sorry. Let’s meet in the Rose and Crown at seven, and I’ll bring a plan with me. ”

“A sex plan? ”

“A sex plan. ”

The Rose and Crown, halfway between the museum and the college, was their usual meeting place. It was an unexceptional downtown pub, usually half-full of shop assistants and office workers too intimidated to drink in some of the seaside bars, all of which seemed to employ DJs, even on Sunday at lunchtime. Annie wondered whether there was, anywhere in the country, a DJ wondering how to break into the business. It seemed unlikely, given the number of establishments that seemed to think they needed one. On the contrary, she suspected demand was such that young people had to be coerced into playing music in bars whether they wanted to or not, like a form of national service. Anyway, the Rose and Crown had a jukebox that offered Vince Hill’s version of “Edelweiss, ” an offer that was only rarely taken up, in Annie’s experience. It was hard to imagine many sex plans being drawn up in there. And if any were, they would be safe-sex plans, drawn up slowly, and running to several pages of warnings.

Ros bought two half-pints of pale ale and they sat down at the back of the pub, away from a quiet group of fragrant-looking women who appeared as though they were trying to understand the root cause of a particularly bad day’s profits at the Body Shop. Annie realized she was nervous, or excited, or something. Not because she seriously believed that there would be a plan, but because somebody was about to demonstrate interest in how she might spend part of the rest of her life—it had been a very long time since she had provided anyone with anything to talk about. She was somebody’s project. She hadn’t even been her own project for a while.

“There’s a book group, ” said Ros. “But not in Gooleness, you know, proper. In a village just outside. You could borrow my car. ”

“And there are single men in it? ”

“Well, no. Not at the moment. But a friend who belongs feels that if there were any single arts-graduate males in the area, that’s where they’d wash up eventually. There was one a couple of years ago, apparently. Anyway. Just a thought. And the other one I had was that we could go away for the weekend. To Barcelona, maybe. Or Reykjavik, if Iceland still exists. ”

“So. Let’s get this straight. The best way to have sex in Gooleness is either to join a book club not actually in the town, with no men in it, or to go to another country. ”

“These are just initial ideas. Others will come. And we haven’t even touched on Internet dating. Ah. Look. As if by magic. ”

Two men in their early forties had come into the pub. While one was at the bar buying two pints of lager, the other was examining the jukebox. Annie studied him and tried to imagine taking off her clothes for him or with him. Would he even want her to? She had absolutely no idea whether she was even passably attractive; she felt as though she hadn’t looked in a mirror for years. She was about to ask Ros (and surely having a lesbian friend would be helpful, or was that not how it worked? ) when he started shouting at his friend.

“Gav! Gav! ”

The music he’d chosen came on, a bright, fast and tinny soul song that sounded like Tamla Motown but wasn’t.

“Fucking hell! ” said Gav. “Go on, Barnesy. Get yourself warmed up. ”

“Too much carpet, ” said Barnesy, who was small, skinny and muscular, and wearing baggy trousers and a Fred Perry sports shirt. If he were sixteen years old, and she was his teacher, Annie would have had him pegged for the kind of kid who would start a fight with the biggest guy in the class, just to show that he wasn’t scared.

He put down the duffel bag he was carrying anyway, despite the carpet. It clearly wouldn’t take much to push Barnesy over the edge, even though it wasn’t entirely clear what lay beneath.

“Don’t make excuses, ” said Gav. “These ladies want to see what you’ve got. Don’t you, ladies? ”

“Well, ” said Ros. “Some of it. ”

That, Annie thought, was the sort of thing she’d have to come up with if she were ever to start picking up men in pubs. It was the speed that intimidated her. It wasn’t as if “Some of it” was a Wildean one-liner, but it did the job, and both men laughed. Annie, meanwhile, was still trying to twist her mouth into a polite smile. It would take her five minutes to complete the smile, and probably another twenty-four hours to produce an accompanying snappy verbal response. Gav and Barnesy would probably have left by then.

What Barnesy had, it turned out, was an extraordinary array of gymnastic dance moves, which he proceeded to demonstrate for the duration of the song. To Annie’s untutored eye, Barnesy was a heady mix of break-dancer, martial-arts warrior and Cossack—there were spins and flailing arms and push-ups and kicks—but it was his complete lack of embarrassment, his absolute confidence that what he was doing was something the half dozen people in the pub would want to see, that was really impressive.

“Good God, ” said Ros, when he’d finished. “What was that? ”

“What do you mean, what was that? ”

“I’ve never seen anything like it. ”

“You don’t live in Gooleness then? ”

“I do, actually. We both do. ”

“And you’ve never seen northern soul dancing? ”

“I can’t say I have. You, Annie? ”

Annie shook her head and blushed. What was the blush for, actually? Why was she embarrassed to say that she hadn’t seen northern soul dancing before? She wanted to punch her stupid treacherous cheeks in.

“That’s what Gooleness is, ” said Barnesy. “The Gooleness all-nighters. We’ve been coming here since eighty-one, haven’t we, Gav? ”

“Where from? ”

“Scunny. Scunthorpe. ”

“You come all the way to Gooleness from Scunthorpe to do northern soul dancing? ”

“’Course we bloody do. Only fifty miles. ”

Gav came back from the bar with their beers and put them down on the table at which Annie and Ros were sitting.

“What are you doing tonight? ”

For a moment, Annie had the absurd notion that Ros was going to tell them precisely what they were doing, and that Gav or Barnesy or both would offer themselves up as the solution to the sex problem. She didn’t think she wanted sex with either of them.

“Nothing, ” said Annie, quickly. The speed of the response, the eagerness it seemed to contain, was the diametric opposite of what she was after. By jumping in to stop Ros from talking about the sex plan, it seemed to her, she was more or less offering sex.

“Well, there we are then, ” said Gav, who seemed too chubby to be a northern soul dancer, if Barnesy’s moves were indicative of the kind of stuff a northern soul dancer needed to strut. “We’re laughing, aren’t we? Two good-looking men, two good-looking women. ”

“Ros here is gay, ” said Annie. And then, helpfully, “A lesbian, ” as if this might clear up any doubts anyone had about the variety of homosexuality Ros subscribed to. If she had succumbed to the temptation to punch her own cheeks in earlier, the chances are that she wouldn’t have been able to say anything quite so mortifyingly crass. Ros, to her credit, merely groaned and rolled her eyes. She would have been entitled to walk out of the pub and never contact Annie again.

“Annie! ”

“A lesbian? ” said Gav. “A real one? In Gooleness? ”

“She’s not a lesbo, ” said Barnesy.

“How can you tell? ” said Gav.

“It’s just what birds say when they don’t like the look of you. Do you remember those two at the Blackpool all-nighter? Told us they weren’t into men, and then we saw them with their tongues down the throats of the DJs. ”

Ros laughed. “I’m sorry if it seems like a brush-off, ” she said. “But I was gay long before you two walked in. ”

“Fucking hell, ” said Barnesy in wonderment. “You just walk around, gay, like. ”

“Yep. ”

“I’ve got to tell you, ” said Gav, with sudden excitement. “I…”

“You don’t have to tell me at all, ” said Ros.

“You don’t even know what I was going to say. ”

“You were going to say that, even though gay men make you sick to your stomach, the idea of gay women you find titillating in the extreme. ”

“Oh, ” said Gav. “You’ve heard that before, have you? ”

“How does that work, anyway? ” said Barnesy. “If one of you’s gay and the other one isn’t? ”

“How does it work? ” said Ros, and then “Oh. No. We’re not together. We’re friends. ”

“Lezby friends, ” said Gav. “Geddit? ”

Barnesy punched him hard on the arm. “That’s the second stupid thing you’ve said. If you count the thing she didn’t let you say. How old are you? Fucking idiot. Pardon my language, ladies. Anyway, it don’t really matter, does it? ”

“In what way? ” said Ros.

“If you wanted to come with us. To be honest, I’m too tired for sex after an all-nighter anyway these days, so you being gay isn’t as much of a problem as it might have been. ”

“That’s good to hear, ” said Ros.

“I don’t even know what northern soul is, ” said Annie. She was almost certain that there was nothing offensive in the admission, and, as far as she could tell, she had managed to make it without her face turning scarlet.

“You don’t know what it is, ” said Barnesy, flatly. “How can you not know what it is? You don’t like music, is that it? ”

“I do. I love music. But…”

“What are you into, then? ”

“Oh, you know. All sorts. ”

“Like what? ”

This, she thought, was unbearable. Did this question still come up, after all these years? Clearly it did, and clearly it became harder to answer as you got older. In the time before Duncan, it had been easy: she was young, and she liked exactly the same kind of music as the young man asking the question, who, like her, was either on his way to university, or an undergraduate, or recently graduated. So she could say that she listened to The Smiths and Dylan and Joni Mitchell, and the young man would nod and add The Fall to her list. Telling a boy in your class that you liked Joni Mitchell was really another way of saying, “If the worst comes to the worst and you knock me up, it’ll be okay. ” But now, apparently, she was expected to tell people who were not just like her, people who might not have an arts degree (and she knew she was being presumptuous, but she had decided that Barnesy was not an English graduate), and she knew that she could not make herself understood. How could she, when she wasn’t able to use some of the cornerstones of her vocabulary—words like Atwood and Austen and Ayckbourn? And that was just the As. It was terrifying, the prospect of having to engage with another human being without those crutches. It meant exposing something else, something more than bookshelves.

“I dunno. I listen a lot to Tucker Crowe? ”

Was that true? Or did she just think a lot about Tucker Crowe? Was it her way of saying “I’m taken. By a man I’ve never met, who lives in another country”?

“What’s he? Country and bloody western? I hate that shit. ”

“No, no. He’s more like, I don’t know, Bob Dylan, or Bruce Springsteen. Leonard Cohen. ”

“I don’t mind a bit of the Boss sometimes. That ‘Born in the U. S. A. ’ is all right when you’ve had a few and you’re driving home. Bob Dylan’s for students, and I’ve never heard of the other one. Leonard. ”

“But I do like soul music, too. Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye. ”

“Yeah, they’re all right. But they’re not Dobie Gray, are they? ”

“Well, no, ” said Annie. She didn’t know who Dobie Gray was, but it was safe to assume that he (he? ) was neither Marvin nor Aretha. “What did Dobie Gray do, actually? ”

“That was Dobie Gray! ‘Out on the Floor’! ”

“And you like that one. ”

“It’s, I don’t know, the national anthem of northern. It’s not a matter of liking it or not. It’s a classic. ”

“I see. ”

“Yeah. Dobie. And then there’s Major Lance, and Bar bara Mason, and…”

“Right. I’ve never heard of any of them. ”

Barnesy shrugged. In that case, the shrug seemed to indicate, there wasn’t much he could do for her, and for a moment she could feel herself turning pedagogical, even though she was the one trying to do the learning. “You can do better than that, ” she wanted to say. “I’m not expecting a Reith Lecture, but you could attempt to describe what the music sounds like. ” She thought, inevitably, of Duncan—his earnestness, his desire always to make Tucker’s music come alive through the words he used to talk about it. Maybe there was more to say about Tucker, what with the Juliet story and the Old Testament influences. But did that make it better, if there was more to unpack? And was Duncan more interesting as a result?

Eventually, through patient probing, Annie and Ros learned that northern soul was so called because people from the north of England, especially people in Wigan, liked it, which struck them both as remarkable and strangely empowering; there were very few areas in life, they felt, where people in Wigan and Blackpool had much influence on the terminology of black American culture. The music had for the most part been made in the 1960s, and as far as they could tell it sounded like Tamla Motown.

“But most Tamla’s too famous, see? ” said Gav.

“Too famous? ”

“Not rare enough. It’s got to be rare. ”

So Duncan would, despite all indications to the contrary, find common ground with Gav and Barnesy after all. There was the same need for obscurity, the same suspicion that if a piece of music had reached a large number of people, it had somehow been drained of its worth.

“Anyway, ” said Barnesy. “You coming or what? ”

Annie looked at Ros, and Ros looked at Annie, and they shrugged and laughed and drained their glasses.

The all-nighter took place in the Gooleness Working Men’s Club, a place that Annie must have walked past a thousand times without noticing. She tried to deal herself a feminism card by telling herself that she hadn’t noticed because she wasn’t welcome, but she knew it wasn’t just that: the second word of the club’s name was every bit as intimidating as the third.

As they waited behind their new friends to pay (ladies, she noted, were half-price tonight, which meant that she and Ros could get in for a fiver), Annie felt a weird sense of triumph: she was on the verge of discovering the real Gooleness, a town that had effectively evaded her for all these years. Barnesy had told them that what they were about to see—to participate in, even, if she screwed up her courage and danced—was what Gooleness was; he’d been quite emphatic about it. So, as she walked down the stairs into the club, she was looking forward to a seething, teeming, wriggling, wiggling throng of dancers, many of whom she’d recognize: she wanted to see former pupils, local shopkeep ers, museum regulars, all of whom would look at her as if to say, “Here we are! What kept you? ” This could be it, she thought. This could be the night I feel I belong here.

But when they turned the corner and got their first look at the dance floor beneath them, the triumph shrunk into a little hard knot of embarrassment. There were thirty or forty people spread thinly around the large basement room, only a dozen or so of whom were dancing. Each dancer had acres of space to himself (most of them were men, and most of them were dancing on their own). None of the dancers or the drinkers around the edge was young. It turned out that she’d known all the time what Gooleness was: a place whose best days were behind it, a place that held on grimly to what was left of the good times it used to have, back in the eighties or the seventies or the thirties or the century before last. Gav and Barnesy stopped for a moment on the stairs and looked down wistfully.

“You should have seen it when we first started coming, ” said Gav. “It was mental. ” He sighed. “Why does everything have to fucking wither and die? Get the beers in, Barnesy. ” If Gav or Barnesy had mentioned the withering and the dying, Annie thought, they might not have bothered to come.

Ros and Annie understood that they were not being included in the round, so Ros went off to the bar while Annie watched an elderly man with a mane of gray hair try to decide whether he was going to dance or just tap his feet and snap his fingers. It was Terry Jackson, the councillor with the treasure trove of old bus tickets, and when he noticed Annie, he looked startled, and the finger-snapping stopped.

“Bloody hell, ” he said. “Annie the museum lady. I wouldn’t have thought this was your scene. ”

“It’s old music, isn’t it? ” she said. She was quite pleased with that. It wasn’t downright hilarious, but it was an appropriate and lighthearted response, delivered moderately quickly.

“How d’you mean? ”

“Old music. Museums. ”

“Oh, I see. Very good. Who brought you along? ”

She bridled a little. Why did she have to be “brought along”? Why couldn’t she have discovered it for herself, come on her own, persuaded others to accompany her? She actually knew the answer to those questions. The bridling was unnecessary.

“A couple of guys we met in the pub. ” She wanted to laugh at the sheer outlandishness of this most ordinary of explanations. She wasn’t someone who met a couple of guys in a pub.

“I probably know them, ” said Terry. “Who are they? ”

“Two chaps from Scunthorpe. ”

“Not Gav and Barnesy? They’re legends. ”

“Are they? ”

“Well, only because they’ve been coming from Scunny for twenty-odd years, never miss. And Barnesy can dance, did you know that? ”

“He showed us in the pub. ”

“He’s serious. Always got his little tub of talcum powder. ”

“What does he do with it? ”

“Sprinkles it on the floor. For grip, you see? That’s what the serious ones do. Talc and a towel, that’s what you keep in your sports bag. ”

“You’re not serious then, Terry? ”

“I can’t dance like I could. But I wouldn’t miss one. This is the last thing we’ve got left here, more or less. It’s a sort of long good-bye to the old days, when I had my scooter, and we used to get into… scrapes on the seafront. The mods up here all became northern soulies. But it’s not going to last much longer, is it? Look at us. ”

Suddenly, Annie saw everything too clearly, and she felt sick. It had all gone, the whole fucking lot; it was all over. Gooleness, Duncan, her childbearing years, Tucker’s career, northern soul, all the exhibits in the museum, the long-dead shark, the long-dead shark’s cock, and his eye, too, the 1960s, the Working Men’s Club, probably working men as well… She had come out tonight because she believed there had to be a present tense, somewhere, and she’d followed Gav and Barnesy because she’d hoped they knew where it was. Is. And they’d dragged her to yet another haunted house. Where was the now? In bloody America, probably, apart from the bit that Tucker lived in, or in bloody Tokyo. In any case, it was somewhere else. How could people who didn’t live in bloody America or bloody Tokyo stand it, all that swimming around in the past imperfect?

They had children, these people. That was how they stood it. The realization rose slowly through the bitter ale she’d been drinking, and then slightly more quickly through the lager that lay on top of it, and the gin that lay on top of the lager, the increased speed possibly a result of all the bubbles. That was why she wanted children, too. The clich& #233; had it that kids were the future, but that wasn’t it: they were the unreflective, active present. They were not themselves nostalgic, because they couldn’t be, and they retarded nostalgia in their parents. Even as they were getting sick and being bullied and becoming addicted to heroin and getting pregnant, they were in the moment, and she wanted to be in it with them. She wanted to worry herself sick about schools and bullying and drugs.

An epiphany, then. That seemed to be what it was. But epiphanies were a little like New Year’s resolutions, Annie found: they just got ignored, especially if you experienced them during a northern soul night when you’d had a couple of drinks. She’d probably had three or four epiphanies in her entire life, and she’d been either drunk or busy every time. What good was an epiphany then? You really needed one on a mountaintop a couple of hours before you were going to make a life-changing decision, but she couldn’t recall ever having had these experiences singly, let alone in tandem. And in any case, what use was an epiphany that revealed to you that everything you did revolved around the dead and the dying? What was she supposed to do with that information?

The consequence of ignoring her epiphany was that she stayed in the club, and drank, and danced a little, with pudgy Gav, mostly, because Barnesy was off doing handstands and kung-fu kicks and dusting the floor with talc, and because Ros left at around midnight, with Annie’s permission, and because Terry Jackson stayed at the bar, drinking and getting morose about the good old days, when you could get into a fight without anyone running off whining to the bloody Health and bloody Safety brigade. And when she eventually left, at two in the morning, Barnesy followed her out, and then home, and she found herself inviting a man she had only just met to spend the night on her couch, and then sitting on her sofa watching him attempting to do the splits while declaring his love for her.

“I do. ”

“No you don’t. ”

“I bloody do. I bloody love you. I’ve loved you since I saw you in the pub. ”

“Because my mate turned out to be gay. ”

“That just made it easier to make my mind up. ”

Annie laughed and shook her head, and Barnesy looked pained. It was something, anyway. It was an anecdote, an event, a moment that didn’t refer back to something earlier in her life, or the life of the country. This was happening now, in her living room. Maybe that was why she’d offered Barnesy the couch in the first place. Maybe she’d hoped he might do the splits while telling her he loved her, and, gratifyingly, that was exactly what was happening.

“I’m not just saying it because I’m, you know, exerting myself acrobatically. It’s the other way round. I’m exerting myself because I love you. ”

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