Juliet, Naked

three

Annie had thought she might be stuck teaching forever, and she’d hated the job so much that, even now, simply arriving at the museum ten or fifteen minutes late made her happy. For a teacher, those fifteen minutes would have represented a humiliating disaster, involving riots, reprimands and disapproving colleagues, but nobody cared whether she arrived three minutes or thirty minutes before a small and infrequently visited museum was due to open. (The truth was that nobody really cared if she arrived three or thirty minutes after it was supposed to have opened, either.) Wandering out for a mid-morning takeout coffee was a frequent and rather pitiful daydream in her old job; now she made sure she did it every day, whether she needed the caffeine or not. Okay, there were some things she missed: that feeling you got when a lesson was going well, when it was all bright eyes and concentration so thick it felt almost humid, something that might cling to your clothes; and sometimes she could do with some of the energy and optimism and life that you could find in any child, no matter how apparently surly and damaged. But most of the time, she was happy still to have made it under the barbed wire that surrounded secondary education and out into the world.

She worked on her own, for great chunks of the day, mostly trying to raise funds, although this was beginning to feel like an increasingly pointless task: nobody, it seemed, had the spare cash for an ailing seaside museum anymore, and possibly never would again. Occasionally, she had to speak to visiting parties of local schoolchildren, which was why she’d been given the chance to escape from the classroom. There was always a volunteer at the front desk, usually Vi or Margaret or Joyce or one of the other old ladies whose aching need to show that they could be useful broke Annie’s heart, when she bothered to think about them at all. And when there was a special exhibition being planned, then she worked with Ros, a freelance curator who also taught history at Duncan’s college. (Duncan, of course, had never been able to bring himself to talk to her, in case he “got stuck” with her during one of his visits to the staff room.) Ros and Annie were attempting to prepare an exhibition at the moment, a photographic record of the heat-wave summer of 1964, when the old town square was redeveloped, the Stones played the ABC cinema up the road and a twenty-five-foot shark had been washed up on the beach. They had asked for contributions from residents, and they had advertised on all the relevant local- and social-history websites they could think of, but so far they had received only two snapshots—one of the shark itself, which had clearly died of some kind of fungal condition much too gruesome for an exhibition intended to celebrate a golden summer, and one of four friends—coworkers?—having fun on the boardwalk.

This photograph had arrived through the mail a couple of days after they’d posted their Internet ads, and she couldn’t believe how perfect it was. The two men were in suspenders and shirtsleeves, and the two women were in floral sundresses; the teeth were bad, the faces were lined, the hair was Brylcreemed, and they looked as if they had never had so much fun in their lives. That’s what she said to Ros, when she saw it—“Look at them! It’s like this is the best day out they’ve ever had!” And she laughed, so convinced was she that their enjoyment was due to a happy trick of the camera, or alcohol, or a dirty joke, anything but the day out and the surroundings. And Ros said simply, “Well. That’s almost certainly true.”

Annie, who was about to have a moderately good time on a three-week tour of the United States—pleasant, but not world-shaking, those mountains in Montana—felt humbled. In 1964, five years before she was born, it was still possible for English people to feel ecstatic about a day off in a northerly seaside town. She looked at them again and wondered what they did, how much money they had in their pockets at that precise second, how long their holidays were, how long their lives were. Annie had never been rich. But she’d been to every European country she wanted to see, to the United States, even to Australia. How, she wondered, had we got to here from there, to this from that? She suddenly saw the point of the exhibition that she’d conceived and planned with no real enthusiasm or sense of purpose. More than that, she suddenly saw the point of the town she lived in, how much it must have meant to people that she and everyone else she knew were losing the capacity to imagine. She always took her job seriously, but she was determined to find a way of making visitors to the museum feel what she felt.

And then, after the dead shark offering, the photos just dried up. She had already given up on 1964, although she hadn’t told Ros that yet, and had been trying to think of a way of broadening the hunt without making the exhibition unfocused and sloppy. Being away for three weeks had restored her hope, not least because she had eighteen days’ worth of mail to sort through.

There were two more pictures. One had been dropped off by a man who’d been sorting through his recently deceased mother’s things; it was a nice enough snapshot of a little girl standing next to a Punch-and-Judy booth. The other, sent without a cover letter, was of the dead shark. Annie felt that she had the dead shark covered, and she wished she’d never mentioned it. She’d included it in her request only as a nudge to the memory of the aging population of the town. She might as well have sent them a notice saying “Diseased-shark pics wanted.” This one seemed to show a hole in the flank where the flesh had simply rotted away.

She went through the rest of the mail, replied to some e-mails and went out for her coffee. It was only on the way back that she remembered Duncan’s maniacal activity of the night before. She knew that his review had provoked a reaction, because he kept running up- and downstairs, checking his e-mail, reading the comments on the website, shaking his head and chuckling at the strange and suddenly alive world he inhabited. But he hadn’t shown her what he’d written, and she felt she should read it. It wasn’t just that, she realized—she actually wanted to read it. She’d heard the music, even before he had, which meant that for the first time ever she’d formed an opinion about it that hadn’t been filtered through his own intimidating evangelism… She wanted to see for herself just how wrongheaded he could be, how far apart they were.

She logged on to the website (for some reason, she had it bookmarked) and printed the piece so that she could concentrate on it. By the time she’d finished it, she was properly angry with Duncan. She was angered by his smugness, his obvious determination to crow to the fellow fans he was supposed to feel some kind of kinship with; so she was angered by his pettiness, too, his inability to share something that was clearly of value in that shrinking and increasingly beleaguered community. But most of all, she was angered by his perversity. How could those sketches for songs be better than the finished product? How could leaving something half-formed be better than working on it, polishing it, layering and texturing it, shaping it until the music expresses what you want it to express? The more she stared at Duncan’s ridiculous piece, the angrier she got, until she got so angry that the anger itself became an object of curiosity to her: it mystified her. Tucker Crowe was Duncan’s hobby, and people with hobbies did peculiar things. But listening to music wasn’t like collecting stamps, or fly-fishing, or building ships in a bottle. Listening to music was something that she did, too, frequently and with great enjoyment, and Duncan somehow managed to spoil it, partly by making her feel that she was no good at it. Was that it? She read the end of his piece again. “I have been living with Tucker Crowe’s remarkable songs for nearly a quarter of a century, and only today, staring at the sea, listening to ‘You and Your Perfect Life’ as God and Crowe intended it to be heard…”

It wasn’t that he made her feel incompetent and unsure of herself and her tastes. It was the reverse. He knew nothing about anything, and she’d never really allowed herself to notice it until now. She’d always thought that his passionate interest in music and film and books indicated intelligence, but of course it didn’t have to indicate anything of the sort, if he constantly got the wrong end of the stick. Why was he teaching trainee plumbers and future hotel receptionists how to watch American television, if he was so smart? Why did he write thousands of words for obscure websites that nobody ever read? And why was he so convinced that a singer nobody had ever paid much attention to was a genius to rival Dylan and Keats? Oh, it spelled trouble, this anger. Her partner’s brain was dwindling away to nothing while she examined it. And he’d called her a moron! One thing he was right about, though: Tucker Crowe was important, and he revealed harsh truths about people. About Duncan, anyway.

When Ros stopped by to find out whether they’d made any progress with the photographs, Annie still had the website up on her computer.

“Tucker Crowe,” said Ros. “Wow. My college boyfriend used to like him,” she said. “I didn’t know he was still going.”

“He’s not, really. You had a college boyfriend?”

“Yes. He was gay, too, it turned out. Can’t imagine why we broke up. But I don’t understand: Tucker Crowe has his own website?”

“Everyone has their own website.”

“Is that true?”

“I think so. Nobody gets forgotten anymore. Seven fans in Australia team up with three Canadians, nine Brits and a couple of dozen Americans, and somebody who hasn’t recorded in twenty years gets talked about every day. It’s what the Internet’s for. That and pornography. Do you want to know which songs he played in Portland, Oregon, in 1985?”

“Not really.”

“Then this website isn’t for you.”

“How come you know so much about it? Are you one of the nine Brits?”

“No. There are no women who bother. My, you know, Duncan is.”

What was she supposed to call him? Not being married to him was becoming every bit as irritating as she imagined marriage to him might be. She wasn’t going to call him her boyfriend. He was forty-something, for God’s sake. Partner? Life partner? Friend? None of these words and phrases seemed adequately to define their relationship, an inadequacy particularly poignant when it came to the word “friend.” And she hated it when people just launched in and started talking about Peter or Jane when you had no idea who Peter and Jane were. Perhaps she just wouldn’t ever mention him at all.

“And he’s just written a million words of gibberish and posted them up for the world to see. If the world were interested, that is.”

She invited Ros to inspect Duncan’s piece, and Ros read the first few lines.

“Aaah. Sweet.”

Annie made a face.

“Don’t knock people with passions,” said Ros. “Especially passions for the arts. They’re always the most interesting people.”

Everyone had succumbed to that particular myth, it seemed.

“Right. Next time you’re in the West End, go and hang out by the stage door of a theater showing a musical and make friends with one of those sad bastards waiting for an autograph. See how interesting you find them.”

“Sounds like I should buy that CD.”

“Don’t bother. That’s what gets me. I played it, and he’s completely wrong. And for some reason I’m bursting to say so.”

“You should write your own review and stick it up next to his.”

“Oh, I’m not an expert. I wouldn’t be allowed.”

“They need someone like you. Otherwise they all disappear up their own bottoms.”

There was a knock on Annie’s open office door. An old lady wearing a hoodie was standing there offering them both an envelope. Ros stepped over and took it.

“Shark picture,” the old lady said, and waddled off.

Annie rolled her eyes. Ros opened the envelope, laughed and passed the picture over. It featured the same gaping, diseased wound that Annie’d seen in one of the other photos. But someone had had the bright idea of planting a small child on top of the shark. She was sitting there with her bare feet dangling inches from the hole; both toddler and wound were weeping.

“Jesus,” said Annie.

“Maybe nobody went to see the Rolling Stones here in 1964,” said Ros. “The dead shark was just too much fun.”

Annie started writing her review that night. She had no intention of showing it to anyone; it was just a way of working out whether what she thought meant anything to her. It was also a way of sticking a fork into her irritation, which was beginning to swell like a sausage on a barbecue. If it burst, then she could imagine consequences that she wasn’t yet prepared for.

She had to write at work—letters, descriptions of exhibitions, captions, bits and pieces for the museum website—but most of the time, it seemed to her, she had to think up something to say, create an opinion from nothing. This was different; it was all she could do to stop herself from following every single one of the strands of thought she’d been chewing on for the last couple of days. Juliet, Naked had somehow given her ideas about art and work, her relationship, Tucker’s relationship, the mysterious appeal of the obscure, men and music, the value of the chorus in song, the point of harmony and the necessity of ambition, and every time she finished a paragraph, the next one appeared in front of her, unbidden and annoyingly unconnected to the last. One day, she eventually decided, she would try to write about some of those things, but it couldn’t be here and now; she wanted this essay to be about the two albums, the immeasurable and unquestionable superiority of one over the other. And maybe about what people (Duncan, in other words) thought they heard in Naked that wasn’t actually there, and why these people (he) heard these things, and what it said about them. And maybe… No. That was enough. The album had created such mental turbulence that she briefly began to wonder whether it was a work of genius after all, but she dismissed the idea. She knew from her book group that novels none of them had enjoyed could produce stimulating and sometimes even useful conversation; it was the absences in Naked (and, therefore, in Duncan) that had made her think, not the presences.

Meanwhile, Duncan’s friends on the website had been listening, and several more long reviews had been posted. In Tuckerland, it was something like Christmas; clearly those who believed had stopped work for the festive season, in order to spend time with their extended Internet family and, from the look of some of the pieces of writing, celebrate with a few beers or a spliff. “NOT a masterpiece but masterful nonetheless,” was the headline of one review. “WHEN WILL THE POWERS THAT BE RELEASE ALL THE REAL UNRELEASED STUFF?” said another, who went on to say that he knew for a fact that there were seventeen albums of material in the vaults.

“Who’s that guy?” she asked Duncan, after trying to read a paragraph of his feverish, occasionally rather affecting prose.

“Oh. Him. Poor old Jerry Warner. He used to teach English at some public school somewhere, but he got caught with a sixth-form boy a couple of years back, and he’s been a bit off the rails since. Too much time on his hands. Why do you keep looking at the website, anyway?”

She’d finished her essay now. Somehow Juliet, Naked—or her feelings about it, anyway—had woken her from a deep sleep: she wanted things. She’d wanted to write, she wanted Duncan to read what she’d written. She wanted the other message board members to read it, too. She was proud of it, and she had even begun to wonder whether it might not be socially useful in some way. Some of these cranks, she hoped, might read it, blush a deep crimson and return to their lives. There was no end to her wanting.

“I wrote something.”

“What about?”

“About Naked.”

Duncan looked at her.

“You?”

“Yes. Me.”

“Gosh. Well. Wow. Ha.” He smiled, stood up and started pacing around the room. This was the closest she would ever get to telling him that he was about to become the father of twins. He wasn’t thrilled by the news, but he knew he wasn’t allowed to be openly discouraging.

“And do you think… Well, do you think you’re qualified to write something?”

“Is it a matter of qualifications?”

“Interesting question. I mean, you’re perfectly at liberty to write whatever you want.”

“Thanks.”

“But for the website… People expect a certain level of expertise.”

“In the first paragraph of his post, Jerry Warner says that Tucker Crowe lives in a garage in Portugal. How expert is that?”

“I’m not sure you’re supposed to take him literally.”

“So, what, he lives in a Portuguese garage of the mind?”

“Yes, he’s wayward, Jerry. But he can sing every word of every song.”

“That qualifies him to busk outside a pub. It doesn’t necessarily make him a critic.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Duncan, as if he had a crazy gut feeling that the receptionist should be offered a place on the board of his company. “Let me see it.”

She was holding the piece in her hand. She gave it to him.

“Oh. Right. Thank you.”

“I’ll leave you to it.”

She went upstairs, lay down on the bed and tried to read her book, but she couldn’t concentrate. She could hear the sound of his shaking head all the way through the floorboards.

Duncan read the essay twice, just to buy himself some time; the truth was that he knew he was in trouble after the first reading, because it was both very well written and very wrong. Annie had made no factual errors that he could find (although someone on the boards would always point out some glaring and utterly inconsequential mistake, he found, when he wrote something), but her inability to recognize the brilliance of the album was indicative of a failure in taste that appalled him. How had she ever managed to read or see or listen to anything and come to the right conclusion about its merits? Was it all just luck? Or was it just the boring good taste of the Sunday newspaper supplements? So she liked The Sopranos—well, who didn’t? He’d had a chance this time to watch her have to come to her own conclusions, and she’d messed it up.

He couldn’t refuse to put the piece up, though. That wouldn’t be fair, and he didn’t want to be put in the position of turning her down. And it wasn’t as if she didn’t get the greatness of Tucker Crowe: this was, after all, a long hymn of praise to the perfection of Dressed. No, he’d post it on the site and let the others tell her what they thought of her.

He read it through once more, just to make sure, and this time it depressed him: she was better than him in everything but judgment—the only thing that mattered in the end, but still. She wrote well, with fluency and humor, and she was persuasive, if you hadn’t actually heard the music, and she was likable. He tended to be strident and bullying and smart-alecky, even he could see that. This wasn’t what she was supposed to be good at. Where did that leave him? And supposing they didn’t shoot her down in flames? Supposing, instead, that they used her as a stick to beat him with? Naked, which just about everyone had heard by now, was getting a very mixed reaction, and the negative stuff, he feared, had been provoked by his original, overenthusiastic review. He was just beginning to change his mind about accepting her into the community when she appeared in front of him.

“Well?” she said. She was nervous.

“Well,” he said.

“I feel as though I’m waiting for my exam results.”

“I’m sorry. I was just thinking about what you wrote.”

“And?”

“You know I don’t agree with it. But it’s really not bad.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

“And I’m happy to put it up, if that’s what you really want.”

“I think so.”

“You have to include your e-mail address, you know that.”

“Do I?”

“Yes. And you’ll get a few nutters contacting you. But you can just delete them, if you don’t want to get involved in a debate.”

“Can I use a fake name?”

“Why? Nobody knows who you are.”

“You’ve never mentioned me to any of your friends?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“Oh.”

Annie looked rather taken aback. But was that so weird? None of the other Crowologists lived in the town, and he only ever talked to them about Tucker, or occasionally about related artists.

“Have you ever had a contribution from a woman?”

He pretended to think about it. He’d often wondered why they only ever heard from middle-aged men, but it had never worried him unduly. Now he felt defensive.

“Yes,” he said. “But not for a while. And even then they just wanted to talk about how, you know, attractive they found him.”

The only women he could invent, it seemed, were clichéd airheads, unable to contribute to serious debate. He’d only had a couple of seconds to imagine them, but even so, he could and should have done better. If he ever did write his novel, he’d have to watch that.

“Do women find him attractive?”

“God, yes.”

Now he was beginning to sound weird. Well, not weird, because homosexual attraction wasn’t weird, of course it wasn’t. But he was certainly sounding more vehement about Tucker’s good looks than he had meant to.

“Anyway. Send me the piece as an attachment and I’ll put it up tonight.”

And, after only a couple of arguments with himself, he did what he’d promised.

At work the next morning, Annie found herself logging on to the website a couple of times an hour. At first, it seemed obvious to her that she’d want some feedback on what she’d written—she’d never done this before, so she was bound to be curious about the process. Later in the day, however, she realized that she wanted to win, to beat Duncan hollow. He’d had his say, and for the most part his say had been greeted by hostility, sarcasm, disbelief and envy; she wanted people to be nicer to her than they had been to him, more appreciative of her eloquence and acuity, and, to her great delight, they were. By five o’clock that afternoon, seven people had posted in the “comments” section, and six of them were friendly—inarticulate, and disappointingly brief, but friendly nonetheless. “Nice work, Annie!” “Welcome to our little online ‘community’—good job!” “I completely agree with you. Duncan’s so far off-base he’s disappeared off of the radar.” The only person who wanted to make it clear that he hadn’t enjoyed her contribution didn’t seem very happy about anything. “Tucker Crowe is FINISHED get over it you people are pathetic just going on and on about a singer who hasn’t made an album for twenty years. He was overrated then and he’s overrated now and Morrissey is so much better its embarrassing.”

She wondered why someone would bother to write that; but then, “Why bother” was never a question you could ask about more or less anything on the Internet, otherwise the whole bunch of them shriveled to a cotton-candy nothing. Why had she bothered? Why does anybody? She was for bothering, on the whole; in which case thank you, MrMozza7, for your contribution, and thank you, everybody else, on every other website.

Just before she shut down her computer for the day, she checked her e-mails again. She’d suspected that Duncan had told her she had to provide an address in an attempt to frighten her off; clearly the comments section was the preferred method of providing feedback. Duncan had implied that there would be a host of homicidal cyber stalkers, spewing bile and promising vengeance, but so far, nothing.

This time, however, there were two e-mails, from someone called Alfred Mantalini. The first was titled “Your Review.” It was very short. It said, simply, “Thank you for your kind and perceptive words. I really appreciated them. Best wishes, Tucker Crowe.” The title on the second was “P.S.,” and the message said, “I don’t know if you hang out with anyone on that website, but they seem like pretty weird people, and I’d be really grateful if you didn’t pass on this address.”

Was it possible? Even asking the question felt stupid, and the sudden breathlessness was simply pathetic. Of course it wasn’t possible. It was obviously a joke, even though it was a joke removed of all discernible humor. 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? “Fuck off, Duncan”? Or should she just ignore it? But supposing… ?

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