High Fidelity

My point exactly.

I watch the couples that come into the shop, and the couples I see in pubs, and on buses, and through windows. Some of them, the ones that talk and touch and laugh and inquire a lot, are obviously new, and they don’t count: like most people, I’m OK at being half of a new couple. It’s the more established, quieter couples, the ones who have started to go through life back-to-back or side-to-side, rather than face-to-face, that interest me.

There’s not much you can decipher in their faces, really. There’s not much that sets them apart from single people; try dividing people you walk past into one of life’s four categories—happily coupled, unhappily coupled, single, and desperate—and you’ll find you won’t be able to do it. Or rather, you could do it, but you would have no confidence in your choices. This seems incredible to me. The most important thing in life, and you can’t tell whether people have it or not. Surely this is wrong? Surely people who are happy should look happy, at all times, no matter how much money they have or how uncomfortable their shoes are or how little their child is sleeping; and people who are doing OK but have still not found their soul mate should look, I don’t know, well but anxious, like Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally; and people who are desperate should wear something, a yellow ribbon maybe, which would allow them to be identified by similarly desperate people. When I am no longer desperate, when I have got all this sorted out, I promise you here and now that I will never ever complain again about how the shop is doing, or about the soullessness of modern pop music, or the stingy fillings you get in the sandwich bar up the road (£1.60 for egg mayo

Nothing much, by which I mean even less than usual, happens for a couple of weeks. I find a copy of ‘All Kinds of Everything’ in a junk shop near the flat, and buy it for fifteen pence, and give it to Joh

Twenty-five

I hear about it on the same morning she does. I ring her number from the shop, intending just to leave a message on her machine; it’s easier that way, and I only wanted to tell her about some ex-colleague who left a message for her on our machine. My machine. Her machine, actually, if we’re talking legal ownership. Anyway. I wasn’t expecting Laura to pick up the phone, but she does, and she sounds as though she’s speaking from the bottom of the sea. Her voice is muffled, and low, and flat, and coated from first syllable to last in snot.

“Cor dear oh dear, that’s a cold and a half. I hope you’re in bed with a hot book and a good water bottle. It’s Rob, by the way.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“Laura? It’s Rob.”

Still nothing.

“Are you all right?”

And then a terrible moment.

“Pigsty,” she says, although the first syllable’s just a noise, really, so ‘pig’ is an educated guess.

“Don’t worry about that,” I say. ‘Just get into bed and forget about it. Worry about it when you’re better.”

“Pig’s died,” she says.

“Who the fuck’s Pig?”

This time I can hear her. ‘My dad’s died,” she sobs. ‘My dad, my dad.”

And then she hangs up.

I think about people dying all the time, but they’re always people co

“You all right?” says Barry, when he sees me staring into space. “Who were you talking to?”

“Laura. Her dad’s died.”

“Oh, right. Bad one.” And then he wanders off to the post office with a pile of mail orders under his arm. See? From Laura, to me, to Barry: from grief, to confusion, to a fleeting, mild interest. If you want to find a way to extract death’s sting, then Barry’s your man. For a moment it feels strange that these two people, one who is so maddened by pain that she can hardly speak, the other who can hardly find the curiosity to shrug, should know each other; strange that I’m the link between them, strange that they live in the same place at the same time, even. But Ken was Barry’s boss’s ex-girlfriend’s dad. What is he supposed to feel?

Laura calls back an hour or so later. I wasn’t expecting her to.

“I’m sorry,” she says. It’s still hard to make out what she’s saying, what with the snot and the tears and the tone and the volume.

“No, no.”

Then she cries for a while. I don’t say anything until she’s a bit quieter.

“When are you going home?”

“In a minute. When I get it together.”

“Can I do anything?”

“No.” And then, after a sob, “No” again, as if she’s realized properly that there’s nothing anybody can do for her, and maybe this is the first time she’s ever found herself in that situation. I know I never have. Everything that’s ever gone wrong for me could have been rescued by the wave of a bank manager’s wand, or by a girlfriend’s sudden change of mind, or by some quality—determination, self-awareness, resilience—that I might have found within myself, if I’d looked hard enough. I don’t want to have to cope with the sort of unhappiness Laura’s feeling, not ever. If people have to die, I don’t want them dying near me. My mum and dad won’t die near me, I’ve made bloody sure of that. When they go, I’ll hardly feel a thing.

The next day she calls again.

“Mum wants you to come to the funeral.”

“Me?”

“My dad liked you. Apparently. And Mum never told him we’d split, because he wasn’t up to it and … oh, I don’t know. I don’t really understand it, and I can’t be bothered to argue. I think she thinks he’ll be able to see what’s going on. It’s like … ” She makes a strange noise which I realize is a manic giggle. “Her attitude is that he’s been through so much, what with dying and everything, that she doesn’t want to upset him any more than she has to.”