High Fidelity (5 page)

“I don't want old sad bastard music on either. I just want something I can ignore.”

“Great. That's the fun thing about working in a record shop, isn't it? Playing things that you don't want to listen to. I thought this tape was going to be, you know, a talking point. I was going to ask you for your top five records to play on a wet Monday morning and all that, and you've gone and ruined it.”

“We'll do it next Monday.”

“What's the point of that?”

And so on, and on, probably for the rest of my working life.

I'd like to do a top five records that make you feel nothing at all; that way, Dick and Barry would be doing me a favor. Me, I'll be playing the Beatles when I get home.
Abbey Road,
probably, although I'll program the CD to skip over “Something.” The Beatles were bubblegum cards and
Help
at the Saturday morning cinema and toy plastic guitars and singing “Yellow Submarine” at the top of my voice in the back row of the coach on school trips. They belong to me, not to me and Laura, or me and Charlie, or me and Alison Ashworth, and though they'll make me feel something, they won't make me feel anything bad.

I WAS
worried about what it would be like, coming back to the flat tonight, but it's fine: the unreliable sense of well-being I've had since this morning is still with me. And, anyway, it won't always be like this, with all her things around. She'll clear it out soon, and the Marie Celestial air about the place—the half-read Julian Barnes paperback on the bedside table and the knickers in the dirty clothes basket—will vanish. (Women's knickers were a terrible disappointment to me when I embarked on my cohabiting career. I never really recovered from the shock of discovering that women do what we do: they save their best pairs for the nights when they know they are going to sleep with somebody. When you live with a woman, these faded, shrunken tatty scraps suddenly appear on radiators all over the house; your lascivious schoolboy dreams of adulthood as a time when you are surrounded by exotic lingerie for ever and ever amen…those dreams crumble to dust.)

I clear away the evidence of last night's traumas—the spare duvet on the sofa, the balled-up paper hankies, the coffee mugs with dog-ends floating in the cold, oily-looking dregs, and then I put the Beatles on, and then when I've listened to
Abbey Road
and the first few tracks of
Revolver,
I open the bottle of white wine that Laura brought home last week, sit down and watch the
Brookside
omnibus that I taped.

 

In the same way that nuns end up having their periods at the same time, Laura's mum and my mum have mysteriously ended up synchronizing their weekly phone calls. Mine rings first.

“Hello, love, it's me.”

“Hi.”

“Everything all right?”

“Not bad.”

“What sort of week have you had?”

“Oh, you know.”

“How's the shop doing?”

“So-so. Up and down.” Up and down would be great. Up and down would imply that some days are better than others, that customers came and went. This has not been the case, frankly.

“Your dad and I are very worried about this recession.”

“Yeah. You said.”

“You're lucky Laura's doing so well. If it wasn't for her, I don't think either of us would ever get off to sleep.”

She's gone, Mum. She's thrown me to the wolves. The bitch has fucked off and left me…
Nope. Can't do it. This does not seem to be the right time for bad news.

“Heaven knows she's got enough on her plate without having to worry about a shop full of bloomin' old pop records…”

How can one describe the way people born before 1940 say the word “pop”? I have been listening to my parents' sneering one-syllable explosion—heads forward, idiotic look on their faces (because pop fans are idiots) for the time it takes them to spit the word out—for well over two decades.

“…I'm surprised she doesn't make you sell up and get a proper job. It's a wonder she's hung on as long as she has. I would have left you to get on with it years ago.”

Hold on, Rob. Don't let her get to you. Don't rise to the bait.
Don't…ah, fuck it.

“Well, she has left me to get on with it now, so that should cheer you up.”

“Where's she gone?”

“I don't bloody know. Just…gone. Moved out. Disappeared.”

There is a long, long silence. The silence is so long, in fact, that I can watch the whole of a row between Jimmy and Jackie Corkhill without hearing so much as a long-suffering sigh down the receiver.

“Hullo? Anybody there?”

And now I
can
hear something—the sound of my mother crying softly. What is it with mothers? What's happening here? As an adult, you know that as life goes on, you're going to spend more and more time looking after the person who started out looking after you, that's par for the course; but my mum and I swapped roles when I was about nine. Anything bad that has happened to me in the last couple of decades—detentions, bad exam marks, getting thumped, getting bunged from college, splitting up with girlfriends—has ended up like this, with Mum visibly or audibly upset. It would have been better for both of us if I had moved to Australia when I was fifteen, phoned home once a week and reported a sequence of fictitious major triumphs. Most fifteen-year-olds would find it tough, living on their own, on the other side of the world, with no money and no friends and no family and no job and no qualifications, but not me. It would have been a piece of piss compared to listening to this stuff week after week.

It's…well, it's
not fair.
'Snot fair. It's never been fair. Since I left home, all she's done is moan, worry, and send cuttings from the local newspaper describing the minor successes of old school friends. Is that good parenting? Not in my book. I want sympathy, understanding, advice, and money, and not necessarily in that order, but these are alien concepts in Canning Close.

“I'm all right, if that's what's upsetting you.”

I know that's not what's upsetting her.

“You know that's not what's upsetting me.”

“Well, it bloody well should be, shouldn't it? Shouldn't it? Mum, I've just been dumped. I'm not feeling so good.” And not so bad, either—the Beatles, half a bottle of Chardonnay, and
Brookside
have all done their stuff—but I'm not telling her that. “I can't deal with me, let alone you.”

“I knew this would happen.”

“Well, if you knew it would happen, what are you so cut up about?”

“What are you going to
do,
Rob?”

“I'm going to drink the rest of a bottle of wine in front of the box. Then I'm going to bed. Then I'll get up and go to work.”

“And after that?”

“Meet a nice girl, and have children.”

This is the right answer.

“If only it was that easy.”

“It is, I promise. Next time I speak to you, I'll have it sorted.”

She's almost smiling. I can hear it. I'm beginning to see some light at the end of the long, dark telephonic tunnel.

“But what did Laura say? Do you know why she's gone?”

“Not really.”

“Well, I do.”

This is momentarily alarming until I understand what she's on about.

“It's nothing to do with marriage, Mum, if that's what you mean.”

“So
you
say. I'd like to hear her side of it.”

Cool it. Don't let her…Don't rise…
ah, fuck it.

“Mum, how many more times, for Christ's sake? Laura didn't
want
to get married. She's not that sort of girl. To coin a phrase. That's not what happens now.”

“I don't know what does happen now. Apart from you meet someone, you move in together, she goes. You meet someone, you move in together, she goes.”

Fair point, I guess.

“Shut up, Mum.”

 

Mrs. Lydon rings a few minutes later.

“Hello, Rob. It's Janet.”

“Hello, Mrs. L.”

“How are you?”

“Fine. You?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“And Ken?”

Laura's dad isn't too clever—he has angina, and had to retire from work early.

“Not too bad. Up and down. You know. Is Laura there?”

Interesting. She hasn't phoned home. Some indication of guilt, maybe?

“She's not, I'm afraid. She's round at Liz's. Shall I get her to give you a ring?”

“If she's not too late back.”

“No problem.”

And that's the last time we will ever speak, probably. “No problem”: the last words I ever say to somebody I have been reasonably close to before our lives take different directions. Weird, eh? You spend Christmas at somebody's house, you worry about their operations, you give them hugs and kisses and flowers, you see them in their dressing gown…and then, bang, that's it. Gone forever. And sooner or later there will be another mum, another Christmas, more varicose veins. They're all the same. Only the addresses, and the colors of the dressing gown, change.

I'M
in the back of the shop, trying to tidy it up a bit, when I overhear a conversation between Barry and a customer—male, middle-aged, from the sound of him, and certainly not hip in any way whatsoever.

“I'm looking for a record for my daughter. For her birthday. ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You.' Have you got it?”

“Oh, yeah,” says Barry. “Course we've got it.”

I know for a fact that the only Stevie Wonder single we have at the moment is “Don't Drive Drunk” we've had it for donkey's years and have never managed to get rid of it, even at sixty pence. What's he playing at?

I go out the front to see what's going on. Barry is standing there, smiling at him; the guy looks a bit flustered.

“Could I have it then?” He half smiles with relief, as if he were a little boy who has remembered to say “please” at the very last minute.

“No, I'm sorry, but you can't.”

The customer, older than I first thought and wearing a cloth cap and a dirty beige raincoat, stands rooted to the spot; I didn't want to come into this noisy dark hell-hole in the first place, you can see him thinking, and now I'm being messed about.

“Why not?”

“Sorry?” Barry's playing Neil Young, and Neil has just this second gone electric.

“Why not?”

“Because it's sentimental, tacky crap, that's why not. Do we look like the sort of shop that sells fucking ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You,' eh? Now, be off with you, and don't waste our time.”

The old guy turns round and walks out, and Barry chuckles merrily.

“Thanks a lot, Barry.”

“What's up?”

“You just drove a fucking customer away, that's what's up.”

“We didn't have what he wanted. I was just having some fun, and I never cost you a penny.”

“That's not the point.”

“Oh, so what's the point, then?”

“The point is, I don't want you talking to anyone who comes in here like that ever again.”

“Why not? You think that silly old duffer was going to become a regular?”

“No, but…listen Barry, the shop isn't doing so well. I know we used to take the piss out of anyone who asked for anything we didn't like, but it's got to stop.”

“Bollocks. If we'd had the record, I would have sold it to him, and you'd be fifty pee or a quid better off, and you'd never have seen him again. Big fucking deal.”

“What harm has he ever done you?”

“You know what harm he's done me. He offended me with his terrible taste.”

“It wasn't even his terrible taste. It was his daughter's.”

“You're going soft in your old age, Rob. There was a time when you'd have chased him out of the shop and up the road.”

He's right; there was. It feels like a long time ago now. I just can't muster that sort of anger any more.

 

Tuesday night I reorganize my record collection; I often do this at periods of emotional stress. There are some people who would find this a pretty dull way to spend an evening, but I'm not one of them. This is my life, and it's nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it.

When Laura was here I had the records arranged alphabetically; before that I had them filed in chronological order, beginning with Robert Johnson, and ending with, I don't know, Wham!, or somebody African, or whatever else I was listening to when Laura and I met. Tonight, though, I fancy something different, so I try to remember the order I bought them in: that way I hope to write my own autobiography, without having to do anything like pick up a pen. I pull the records off the shelves, put them in piles all over the sitting room floor, look for
Revolver,
and go on from there; and when I've finished, I'm flushed with a sense of self, because this, after all, is who I am. I like being able to see how I got from Deep Purple to Howlin' Wolf in twenty-five moves; I am no longer pained by the memory of listening to “Sexual Healing” all the way through a period of enforced celibacy, or embarrassed by the reminder of forming a rock club at school, so that I and my fellow fifth-formers could get together and talk about Ziggy Stardust and
Tommy.

But what I really like is the feeling of security I get from my new filing system; I have made myself more complicated than I really am. I have a couple of thousand records, and you have to be me—or, at the very least, a doctor of Flemingology—to know how to find any of them. If I want to play, say,
Blue
by Joni Mitchell, I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the autumn of 1983, and thought better of giving it to her, for reasons I don't really want to go into. Well, you don't know any of that, so you're knackered, really, aren't you? You'd have to ask me to dig it out for you, and for some reason I find this enormously comforting.

 

A weird thing happens on Wednesday. Johnny comes in, sings “All Kinds of Everything,” tries to grab a handful of album covers. And we're doing our little dance out of the shop when he twists away from me, looks up and says, “Are you married?”

“I'm not, Johnny, no. You?”

He laughs into my armpit, a terrifying, maniacal chuckle that smells of drink and tobacco and vomit and ends in an explosion of phlegm.

“You think I'd be in this fucking state if I had a wife?”

I don't say anything—I just concentrate on tangoing him toward the door—but Johnny's blunt, sad self-appraisal has attracted Barry's attention—maybe he's still cross because I told him off yesterday—and he leans over the counter. “It doesn't help, Johnny. Rob's got a lovely woman at home, and look at him. He's in a terrible way. Bad haircut. Zits. Terrible sweater. Awful socks. The only difference between you and him, Johnny, is that you don't have to pay rent on a shop every week.”

I get this sort of stuff from Barry all the time. Today, though, I can't take it and I give him a look that is supposed to shut him up, but which he interprets as an invitation to abuse me further.

“Rob, I'm doing this for your own good. That's the worst sweater I've ever seen. I have never seen a sweater that bad worn by anybody I'm on speaking terms with. It's a disgrace to the human race.”

I hurl Johnny out onto the pavement, slam the door shut, race across the shop floor, pick Barry up by the lapels of his brown suede jacket, and tell him that if I have to listen to one more word of his useless, pathetic, meaningless babble again in my entire life I will kill him. When I let him go I'm shaking with anger.

Dick comes out from the stockroom and hops up and down.

“Hey, guys,” he whispers. “Hey.”

“What are you, some kind of fucking idiot?” Barry asks me. “If this jacket's torn, pal, you're gonna pay big.” That's what he says, “pay big.” Jesus. And then he stomps out of the shop.

I go and sit down on the stepladder in the stockroom, and Dick hovers in the doorway.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah. I'm sorry.” I take the easy way out. “Look, Dick, I haven't got a lovely woman at home. She's gone. And if we ever see Barry again, perhaps you could tell him that.”

“Of course I will, Rob. No problem. No problem at all. I'll tell him next time I see him,” Dick says.

I don't say anything. I just nod.

“I've…I've got some other stuff to tell him, anyway, so it's no problem. I'll just tell him about, you know, Laura, when I tell him the other stuff,” Dick says.

“Fine.”

“I'll start with your news before I tell him mine, obviously. Mine isn't much, really, just about someone playing at the Harry Lauder tomorrow night. So I'll tell him before that. Good news and bad news, kind of thing,” Dick says.

He laughs nervously. “Or rather, bad news and good news, because he likes this person playing at the Harry Lauder.” A look of horror crosses his face. “I mean, he liked Laura too, I didn't mean that. And he likes you. It's just that…”

I tell him that I know what he meant, and ask him to make me a cup of coffee.

“Sure. Course. Rob, look. Do you want to…have a chat about it, kind of thing?”

For a moment, I'm almost tempted: a heart-to-heart with Dick would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But I tell him there's nothing to say, and for a moment I thought he was going to hug me.