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the other people i like are the ones who are being driven to find a tune that has been troubling them, distracting them, a tune that they can hear in their breath when they run for a bus, or in the rhythm of their windshield wipers when they’re driving home from work. sometimes something banal and obvious is responsible for the distraction: they have heard it on the radio, or at a club. but sometimes it has come to them as if by magic. sometimes it has come to them because the sun was out, and they saw someone who looked nice, and they suddenly found themselves humming a snatch of a song they haven’t heard for fifteen or twenty years; once, a guy came in because he had dreamed a record, the whole thing, melody, title, and artist. and when i found it form (it was an old reggae thing, "happy go lucky girl" by the paragons), and it was more or less exactly as it had appeared to him in his sleep, the look on his face made me feel as though i was not a man who ran a record shop, but a midwife, or a painter, someone whose life is routinely transcendental ...
maybe i missed somebody traveling on a bus or tube or cab, going out of her way, to meet me, maybe dressed up a little, maybe wearing more makeup than usual, maybe even slightly nervous; when i was younger, the knowledge that i was responsible for any of this, even the bus ride, made me pathetically grateful. when you’re with someone permanently, you don’t get that: if laura wanted to see me, she only had to turn her head, or walk from the bathroom to the bedroom, and she never bothered to dress up for the trip. and when she came home, she came home because she lived in my flat, not because we were lovers, and when we went out, she sometimes dressed up and sometimes didn’t, depending on where we were going, but again, it was nothing whatsoever to do with me ...
"you’re just saying that to make me look stupid."
"no, i’m not. i enjoy my work. it’s stimulating, i like the people i work with, i’ve got used to the money … but i don’t like liking it. it confuses me. i’m not who i wanted to be when i grew up."
"who did you want to be?"
"not some woman in a suit, with a secretary and half an eye on a partnership. i wanted to be a legal-aid lawyer with a dj boyfriend, and it’s all going wrong."
"so find yourself a dj. what do you want me to do about it?"
"i don’t want you to do anything about it. i just want you to see that i’m not entirely defined by my relationship with you. i want you to see that just because we’re getting sorted out, it doesn’t mean that i’m getting sorted out ..."
- nick hornby, high fidelity
posted September 27, 2003 in music, print. 2004