Just Like You

by Nick Hornby

He’d never done anything on a Saturday lunchtime apart from buy a sandwich from next door and eat it out the back. But he walked into a room smelling of coffee and bacon. And there was sunlight, toast and marmalade on the table, jazz on the Bluetooth speaker, Lucy at the stove, her hair tied back in a scrunchy. The three-minute walk had taken him into a different universe. She turned to him and smiled.

Joseph nodded at the glass in his hand. He was trying to work out why she looked different from anyone he knew. She wasn’t wearing very much make-up, he didn’t think. And she was wearing a long grey cardigan that by rights shouldn’t have done much for her. It seemed to hang nicely in some way that he couldn’t have described. It wasn’t tight, it wasn’t baggy, and there was no brand visible anywhere. Oh, and the eyebrows: they hadn’t been shaved off and painted back on to make a thick dark line. He didn’t know whether he liked all this because it was different, or because it was her. He knew it was weird, zoning in on the eyebrows, but eyebrows had become a thing the last couple of years, and they freaked him out. He didn’t know what function eyebrows were supposed to perform, but whatever it was, they weren’t there to be looked at. So if you ended up looking, it seemed to him that something had gone wrong.

During the drive, she’d realized that she was clueless, without a plan – and she’d always had a plan, more or less since the last couple of years at school. She had wanted to be head girl, and then she had wanted to go to college, and on and on it went, marriage, children, promotions, hurdles jumped over with relative ease. But she’d been thrown by men, first Paul and now Joseph, and she couldn’t work out how to rejoin the race, or where on earth it would finish if she did.

She was happy, in a bubble, and the only reason to pop it was on the grounds that bubbles were not real life. But bubbles made life tolerable, and the trick was to blow as many as possible. There were new-baby bubbles, and honeymoon bubbles, and success-at-work bubbles, and new-friends bubbles, and great-holiday bubbles, and even tiny T.V.-series bubbles, dinner bubbles, party bubbles. They all burst without intervention, and then it was a matter of getting through to the next one. Life hadn’t been fizzy for a while. It had been hard. And

She remembered telling Emma that she wanted someone clean, because a lack of hygiene meant that nothing else counted. Sobriety, she realized, was just as important. She might even have been thinking about sobriety all the time. Clean was another word for sober, after all. You could have the same taste in everything, have the same number of qualifications, share the same sense of humour and the same politics, but a vicious dependency would cut through it all and you were left with a thousand pieces of thread that nobody could knit together again.

But it hadn’t occurred to her that there was this, Joseph’s insecurity, on top of everything else that made their relationship so delicate, like a houseplant, with no ability to survive out in the world. And now, when it was too late, she was saying too much, as if she wanted to demolish his doubts and objections one by one. She really didn’t. The time had come. ‘I just meant, you and me are like something between brackets.’ ‘Yeah. I suppose that’s right. For both of us.’

They drove for thirty minutes, and as promised the roads became twisty and narrow, and then Lucy turned down a drive and they were outside a joke country cottage, with ivy growing up the walls and cows on the hill behind, and Joseph was embarrassed that he’d ever thought about not coming. He had been out of London, but not very often, and nowhere like this. And he didn’t think he’d been to a house that was so far away from another house. There were, as far as he could tell, no neighbours. This probably wasn’t what you were supposed to think – you were probably supposed to think about poetry, or God – but Joseph wished he had an amp, a deck, and a 2,000-watt QSC K12.2. That was what the freedom of the countryside meant: the ability to turn the fucker up as loud as it would go. ‘I’ll

Joseph took a similar view, so the boys stayed back at the cottage and the book-lovers got in the car. In Lucy’s experience, these were the two genders, boys and readers. She wished there was as much gender fluidity as people seemed to think.

The café was packed. People were ambling around with trays full of drinks that were constantly on the verge of sliding off, looking for tables, and as a consequence there was always somebody at their elbow. The hot, harassed waitresses were walking around with plates of food, shouting out numbers to customers who were too deep in conversation to hear, or who had mislaid their tickets, or who had wandered off to look at the sea. It wasn’t the best environment to discuss affairs of the heart.

Maybe there was only wondering about wondering, which had to be as good a definition of self-consciousness as any.

There was no kind or easy way of doing this, that he could see. Either he played it and let her do what she wanted, or he told her that when she tried to express her feelings for the music, he felt every single second of the twenty years between them.

Why not? They could both think of plenty of reasons why not. Lucy wanted to avoid the disapproval of a woman her own age, and for some reason she was worried that her children would be judged, too. They probably owned too much, talked too often, used language that might horrify Joseph’s mother, a woman who went to church every Sunday. (Lucy wondered what difference church made, and whether disapproval was easier to come by as a result of attendance. It could go either way, in theory, but the churchgoers she had known, mostly friends of her parents, didn’t seem to have had their minds stretched by their faith.) Joseph was afraid that his mother would feel intimidated by Lucy – by her confidence, her clothes, her figure, her curiosity. (Joseph wondered whether Lucy was curious because she was confident. She didn’t mind where she looked, and she asked anything she wanted to know. He hoped his mother was different at work. He hoped she felt she knew what she was doing, and that her competence gave her the eyes and ears and voice that Lucy had.)

They arranged a date and a time, and when Lucy hung up she was slightly sweaty. She had met countless parents over the years, but none of them had ever discombobulated her like this. She didn’t mind being judged as a teacher, not any more, not since she got good at it. But now she was going to be judged as a woman and a partner, by a peer, and there was nothing to protect her.

She was hurt, but not bitter, sad but not angry. She felt foolish, above all. She’d entered into a steady relationship with a young man in his early twenties. What did young men do? They slept with other people. That’s why nobody got married when they were twenty-three: they weren’t done yet. Of course, it sometimes turned out that people weren’t done at thirty-three, forty-three, or eighty-three, even though they thought they were, but the point is that they thought they were, and life – addictions, new people, whatever – got in the way. She’d known she wouldn’t end up with Joseph because he wasn’t done yet. So if she’d known that, why had she put any weight on him? He was a wonky table, a glass skylight, thin ice. But people enjoyed thin ice! They liked looking at it, or skimming stones across it, or cracking it! They just tried to avoid walking on it, when they knew it was thin (which Lucy had). So was there a way of skimming stones across Joseph, metaphorically? Or chucking stones on him, just for fun, with no chance of causing damage? Even though she wanted to a bit? She had no idea.

It was a time when everyone was vowing never to forgive people. Politicians were never going to be forgiven for what they had done, friends and family were never going to be forgiven for the way they had voted, for what they had said, maybe even for what they thought. Most of the time, people were not being forgiven for being themselves. Politicians who had lied every day of their professional lives were not forgiven for lying. People who lived in cities were not forgiven for being metropolitan, people who were poor were not forgiven for expressing dissatisfaction, old people were not forgiven for being old and scared. But was that all there was to them? And could you only love someone who thought the same way as you, or were there other bridges to be built further up the river? Could you just tunnel under the whole mess, even? She hadn’t ever been able to forgive Paul for what he had done to her and the children. Now she had to decide whether she could forgive a young man for being a young man, and if she decided she could, would she be able to follow through with it? Deciding to forgive, after all, was not the same thing as forgiveness.

He still didn’t know much about anything. He wasn’t interested in customs unions or backstops, even though he seemed to hear those words every day. But Brexit seemed to have floated clear of its details. It was now like a religion. There were those who believed and those who didn’t, and there were nutters on both sides, marching and shouting, and you could never prove that you were right and somebody else was wrong because nothing happened one way or the other anyway. He was beginning to wonder whether it was driving everyone demented, and the country was losing its collective marbles one by one.