“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.
