Nick Hornby: Juliet, Naked part 3

It was obviously a joke, even though it was a joke removed of all discernible humour. 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? “F**k off, Duncan”? Or should she just ignore it? But supposing . . . ?

She tried mocking herself again, but the self-mockery only worked, she realised, 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 bankrupting 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 15 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 on at work for an hour or two in the hope that he’d reply, and then she went home.

***

From: Tucker
Subject: Re: Re: Your review

Dear Annie, It really is me, although I can’t think of a good way of proving it to you. How about this: nothing happened to me in a toilet in Minneapolis. Or this: I don’t have a secret love-child with Julie Beatty. Or this: I stopped recording altogether after I made the album Juliet, so I don’t have two hundred albums’ worth of material locked away in a shed, and nor do I regularly release material under an assumed name. Does that help? Probably not, unless you are sane enough to believe that the truth about anyone is disappointing, the truth about me especially so. This is due to an unfortunate turn of events: the longer I spent doing nothing at all, apart from watching TV and drinking, the more a small but impressively imaginative number of people seemed to be convinced that I was doing a whole procession of outlandish things — making hip-hop albums with Lauryn Hill in Colorado, for example, or making a movie with Steve Ditko in Los Angeles. I wish I knew Lauryn Hill and/or Steve Ditko, because I admire both of them greatly (and because I’d make myself some money somehow), but I don’t. The fact is, some of these myths are so colourful that they have deterred me from re-entering the world; it seems to me that people were having more fun with me gone than they could ever have if I was around.

Can you imagine, if I were to give an interview, for example to the kind of music magazine still interested in someone like me? “No, I didn’t. No, I haven’t. No, we weren’t . . .” It would be so dull as to be unconvincing. Anyone could say they haven’t done anything.

Today I learnt that I was going to be a grandfather. As I don’t really know the pregnant daughter in question — I don’t really know four of my five children, by the way — I was not able to feel joyful; for me, the only real emotional content of the news was the symbolism, what it said about me. I don’t feel bad about that, particularly. There’s no point in pretending to feel joy when someone you don’t know very well tells you she’s pregnant, although I suppose I do feel bad that various decisions I’ve taken and avoided have reduced my daughter to the status of a stranger.

Anyway, the symbolism . . . Learning that I was about to become a grandfather felt like reading my own obituary, and what I read made me feel terribly sad. I haven’t done much with whatever talents I was given, whatever your friends on the website think, and nor have I been terribly successful in other areas of my life. The children I never see are products of relationships I messed up, through my indolence and my drinking; the child I do see, my beloved six-year-old son Jackson, is the product of a relationship that I’m in the process of messing up. His mother has been keeping me for a few years now, so I owe her an awful lot, but understandably I have begun to irritate her, and her irritation makes me tetchy and combative. She thought that our relationship might work because we are different. And though it’s true that she is practical and financially astute (she is a wholesaler of organic produce), and can enjoy lengthy business meetings with people who care about money and fruit, these qualities have turned out to be of little use to us when it comes to getting along. I don’t value them as much as I should, and in any case my impracticality is no longer allied with my ability to write songs, since I no longer write songs.

The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product. (I must confess to being as confused as I have ever been, when it comes to the subject of compatibility. I have tried to live with women who share a similar sensibility to mine, with predictably disastrous consequences, but the opposite route seems every bit as hopeless. We get together with people because they’re the same or because they’re different, and in the end we split with them for exactly the same reasons. I am coming to the conclusion that I need a woman who admires fecklessness and indolence in a man; whether that woman is the CEO of a Wall Street bank or a graffiti artist makes no difference to me.) I had completely forgotten about the existence of those Juliet demos until a few months ago, when somebody I used to know found them on a shelf somewhere. He was the one who arranged to release them on CD, but I didn’t mind, even though I agreed with every word you said about their crudity: I worked and worked on those songs, and so did my band, and the idea that a person with ears could listen to those two sets of recordings and decide that the shitty, sketchy one is better than the one we sweated blood over is baffling to me. (To be honest, I would drop every single one of that guy’s bootleg collection, all the 127 albums he foolishly boasts about owning, on his head, and ban him from listening to music ever again.) But the release of Naked was a way of reminding myself that I was once capable of some kind of action; and in any case, I was given a small advance, which I was able to hand straight on to my wife. For an afternoon, I almost felt like a man, bringing home the bacon for his family.

I have given you too much information, I suspect, but I don’t see that you can seriously doubt whether I am me. I am very much me, and today I am very much wishing I wasn’t.

With best wishes Tucker Crowe

Tucker’s reply was waiting for Annie when she arrived at work. She could have checked her e-mails on her home computer, before breakfast, and of course she’d been excited enough to have wanted to. But if there had been a reply, there was a chance that Duncan might have seen it, and easily the best thing in her life at the moment was her secret.

It had been the best thing even yesterday, when all she’d received were two functional but still amazing messages that gave very little away, but now she had information that Duncan would have regarded as the key to unlocking the mysteries of the Universe. She didn’t want him to have that key, for all sorts of reasons, most of them ignoble.

She read the e-mail twice, three times, and then went to get her coffee early. She needed to think. Or rather, she needed to stop thinking about the stuff she was thinking about, if she were to have a chance of thinking about anything else today; and what she was thinking about, more than Tucker Crowe and his complicated life, even, was how Naked had poisoned the air that she breathed in her home.

* * *

From: Annie Platt Subject: Beyond Reasonable Doubt . . .

. . . It’s you. I read enough fiction to know it’s detail that makes a story seem real, and anyone who has gone to all the trouble of making that lot up deserves a reply anyway. And if it’s not you, I don’t really care, to be honest. I’m having an e-mail conversation with an interesting and thoughtful man who lives a long way away, so where’s the harm? (I suppose there’s another way of looking at this, which is that you’re a lunatic, and all your children and grandchildren are simply the product of a damaged mind. If it turns out that you’re a lunatic I MIGHT ACTUALLY KNOW, then I swear to God I will kill you. But please ignore that if you’re not. And I’m proceeding on the basis that it’s you.) As you have probably worked out, I know people who think a lot of your work, and who think a lot about you. I have thought about you sometimes, but not that often, until relatively recently. Your name cropped up once or twice on a trip I took recently. And your new album Juliet, Naked — or rather, the response to it that a couple of overenthusiastic fans had — got me thinking more about you, and about Juliet, than I’d ever done before. I have never written anything like that before, either, but the two albums helped me to see some things that I suspect I’ve always thought about art and the people who consume it ravenously, but which weren’t quite in focus. Of course, there are a lot of things I would like to ask you about your missing two decades, but you probably don’t want to be interviewed.

I’m sure that if you put any two random strangers in a room together and got them to talk about their lives, all sorts of patterns and themes and opposites would emerge, to the extent that it would look as though they hadn’t been chosen randomly at all. For example: you have too many children who you don’t know, and it’s making you unhappy. I have none, and I don’t think I will have any, and that’s making me unhappy, more so than I would have believed possible, three or four years ago. So all the time I’ve spent with the man that I’m not having children with is beginning to look like all the time you’ve spent drinking and not making albums. Neither of us will get that time back. And yet, agonisingly, it’s not quite too late either. Do you ever think that? I hope you do.

I am writing this from my office, which is in a small seaside museum in a small town in the northern half of England. I am supposed to be preparing an exhibition about the summer of 1964 in this town, but we don’t have very much to exhibit, apart from some rather unpleasant photos of a dead shark that got washed up on the beach that year. And, as of this morning, an eye that apparently belonged to the shark, once upon a time. A couple of hours ago, a man came into the museum with something, very possibly a shark’s eye, floating in vinegar in a jam jar. The man claimed his brother had cut it out of the shark with a pen-knife. So far, it’s our prize exhibit. You wouldn’t like to write a concept album about the summer of 1964 in a small English seaside town, would you? Although it still wouldn’t give me much to show.

She stopped typing. If she’d been using pen and paper, she would have screwed the paper up in disgust, but there wasn’t a satisfying equivalent with email, seeing as everything was designed to stop you making a mistake. She needed a f**k-it key, something that made a satisfying ka-boom noise when you thumped it. What was she doing? She’d just received communication from a recluse, a man who had been hiding from the world for 20-odd years, and she was telling him about the shark’s eye in a jam jar. Did he really want to know about that? And what about her need to have a child? Why not tell someone else? A friend, say. Or even Duncan, who as far as she knew was unaware of her unhappiness.

And she was flirting, in her own reserved and complicated way. She wanted him to like her. How else to explain the circumlocutions about the Tucker Tour of America, and her relationship with “people who think a lot about his work”? It would have been much simpler to say that the man she lived with, the man she wasn’t having babies with, was a Tucker Crowe obsessive, but she didn’t want Tucker to know that. Why not? Did she think he was going to jump on a plane and impregnate her, unless he found out what kind of person she lived with? Even if they embarked on a passionate affair, she could imagine it would be difficult to persuade Tucker not to take precautions, given the unwieldy and unhappy family he already had. Oh, God! Even the self-directed sarcasm was pathetic. It still involved jokes about contraceptive arrangements with a man she had never met.

But if she didn’t write about shark’s eyes, what was she going to tell him? He’d read everything she had to say about his work, and she couldn’t just bombard him with questions — she sensed that would be a good way of never hearing from him again. She was the wrong person to engage in an e-mail correspondence with Tucker Crowe. She didn’t know enough, she didn’t do enough. She wouldn’t reply.

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby is published by Viking today and is available from BooksFirst priced £17.09 (RRP £18.99), free p&p, on 0870 1608080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst