Juliet, Naked

and her irritation makes me grouchy and defensive.

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 whose sensibility is similar 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 investment firm 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 agree with every word you said about their crudity: I worked and worked on the official versions of 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 one hundred and twenty-seven 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 over 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-mail 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.

The night before, Duncan had come home late and smelling of drink; he was monosyllabic, curt even, when she’d asked him about his day. He’d fallen asleep quickly, but she had lain awake, listening to him snoring and not liking him. Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But she’d spent her hours in the dark wondering whether she’d ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend those years alone? Why did there have to be someone else in the room while she was eating, watching TV, sleeping? A partner was supposed to be some mark of success: anyone who shared a bed with someone on a nightly basis had proved herself capable in some way, no? Of something? But her relationship now seemed to her to betoken failure, not success. She and Duncan had ended up together because they were the last two people to be picked for a sports team, and she felt she was better at sports than that.

“Hello, gorgeous,” said Franco, the man in the coffee bar.

“Hello,” she said. “Usual, please.”

Would he have said “Hello, gorgeous” if she were bad at sports, as it were? Or was she reading too much into a cheesy greeting from a man who probably said it twenty times a day?

“How many times a day do you say that?” she said. “As a matter of interest?”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“Only once.”

She laughed, and he looked mock hurt.

“You don’t see who comes in here,” said Franco. “I could say ‘Hello, gorgeous’ to people who look like my mother or my grandmother. I used to. But it feels wrong. So I keep it for you, my youngest customer.”

His youngest customer! Was everything an accident of geography? She could believe it about this town. Franco wouldn’t have said what he said if his coffee bar were in London or Manchester; she wouldn’t have sleepwalked through fifteen years with Duncan if she lived in Birming ham or Edinburgh. Gooleness was the wind and the sea and the old, the smell of fried food that somehow clung on even when nobody seemed to be frying anything, the ice-cream kiosks that seemed to be boarded up even when there were people around… And there was the past. There was 1964, and the Rolling Stones, and the dead shark, and the happy vacationers. Somebody had to live there. It might as well be her.

On the way back to the office she realized that it was Thursday, and Thursday was the day that Moira worked at the front desk. Moira was a Friend of the Museum who was convinced that Annie’s childlessness was the result of some lack, a lack that could be cured. She was right, probably, but not in the way she thought. There had been absolutely no conversation prior to Moira’s intervention, which had apparently been prompted entirely by Annie’s age, rather than by any longing that she had articulated to this woman she didn’t actually know. Annie hated Thursdays.

Today it was celery. Moira, a sprightly octogenarian with a fine head of purple-tinged hair, was standing there waiting for her, with a big bunch.

“Hello,” said Annie.

“The leaves are what you want. What he wants, anyway.”

“Thank you.”

“Have you got a blender?”

“I think so.”

“Just whizz the leaves up in that and make him drink it.”

“Nothing for me? No tea, or seeds, or fruit dipped in milk?”

“Well, we’ve tried everything for you. So it must be him.”

Technically, Moira was right: it was him. He wore a condom.

“I’ll try it tonight.”

“If you try it tonight, you have to try everything. If you see what I mean. Down in one and upstairs.”

“I’ll try it Saturday night, then.”

Oh, dear God. Why on earth was she giving this woman information about their sexual timetable?

“Oh. He’s a Saturday-night man, is he?”

“I should get on with some work.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I’m not ashamed.”

But of course she was. She was ashamed of the implied monotony and she was ashamed of her inability to tell the meddling old crone where to get off.

“Oh. Alan. Hello. We don’t see you in here very often.”

Moira was addressing a man in his seventies who appeared to be wearing both an overcoat and a raincoat, as well as two or maybe even three scarves. He was clutching a jam jar containing what looked like a rotting pickled onion swimming in murky vinegar.

“Someone said you were interested in the shark.”

“We are,” said Moira, firmly. “Very.”

“I’ve got his eye.”