High Fidelity Read Free Page B

girl who would do everything there was to do? Maybe it was best not to think about it too hard; I didn’t want to feel sorry for anybody else except me.
    I expect Penny turned out all right, and I know I turned out all right, and I would suspect that even Chris Thomson isn’t the world’s worst person. At least, it’s hard to imagine him skidding into his place of work, his bank or his insurance office or car showroom, chucking his briefcase down and informing a colleague with raucous glee that he has “knobbed” said colleague’s wife. (It is easy enough to imagine him knobbing the wife, however. He looked like a wife-knobber, even then.) Women who disapprove of men—and there’s plenty to disapprove of—should remember how we started out, and how far we have had to travel.
    3. J ACKIE A LLEN (1975)
    Jackie Allen was my friend Phil’s girlfriend, and I pinched her off him, slowly, patiently, over a period of months. It wasn’t easy. It required a great deal of time, application, and deception. Phil and Jackie started going out together around the same time as Penny and I did, except they went on and on: through the giggly, hormonal fourth form, and the end-of-the-world “O”-level and school-leaving fifth, and on into the mock-adult sobriety of the lower sixth. They were our golden couple, our Paul and Linda, our Newman and Woodward, living proof that in a faithless, fickle world, it was possible to grow old, or at least older, without chopping and changing every few weeks.
    I’m not too sure why I wanted to fuck it all up for them, and for everyone who needed them to go out together. You know when you see T-shirts piled up in a clothes shop, beautifully folded and color-coded, and you buy one? It never looks the same when you take it home. It only looked good in the shop, you realize too late, because it had its mates around it. Well, it was kind of like that. I had hoped that if I went out with Jackie, then some of that elder-stateswoman dignity would rub off on me, but of course without Phil, she didn’t have any. (If that’s what I wanted, I should perhaps have looked for a way to go out with both of them, but that sort of thing is hard enough to pull off when you’re an adult; at seventeen it could be enough to get you stoned to death.)
    Phil started working in a men’s boutique on Saturdays, and I moved in. Those of us who didn’t work, or who, like me, worked after school but not on weekends, met on Saturday afternoons to walk up and down High Street, spend too much time and too much money in Harlequin Records, and “treat ourselves” (we had somehow picked up our mothers’ vocabulary of postwar abstention) to a filter coffee, which we regarded as the last word in French cool. Sometimes we called in to see Phil; sometimes he let me use his staff discount. It didn’t stop me from screwing his girlfriend behind his back.
    I knew, because both Alison and Penny had taught me, that busting up with someone could be miserable, but I didn’t know that getting off with someone could be miserable too. But Jackie and I were miserable in a thrilling, grown-up way. We met in secret and phoned each other in secret and had sex in secret and said things like “What are we going to do?” in secret and talked about how nice it would be when we didn’t have to do things in secret anymore. I never really thought about whether that was true or not. There wasn’t time.
    I tried not to run Phil down too much—I felt bad enough as it was, what with screwing his girlfriend and all. But it became unavoidable, because when Jackie expressed doubts about him, I had to nurture those doubts as if they were tiny, sickly kittens, until eventually they became sturdy, healthy grievances, with their own cat doors, which allowed them to wander in and out of our conversation at will.
    And then one night at a party I saw Phil and Jackie