Free High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

coming into the shop? Laura and I have just had a phone call in which I suggested that she’d fucked up my life and, for the duration of the call, I believed it. But now—and I can do this with no trace of bemusement or self-dissatisfaction—I’m worrying about what to wear, and whether I look better stubbly or clean-shaven, and about what music I should play in the shop today.
    Sometimes it seems as though the only way a man can judge his own niceness, his own decency, is by looking at his relationships with women—or rather, with prospective or current sexual partners. It’s easy enough to be nice to your mates. You can buy them a drink, make them a tape, ring them up to see if they’re OK…there are any number of quick and painless methods of turning yourself into a Good Bloke. When it comes to girlfriends, though, it’s much trickier to be consistently honorable. One moment you’re ticking along, cleaning the toilet bowl, and expressing your feelings and doing all the other things that a modern chap is supposed to do; the next, you’re manipulating and sulking and double-dealing and fibbing with the best of them. I can’t work it out.
    I phone Liz early afternoon. She’s nice to me. She says how sorry she is, what a good couple she thought we made, that I have done Laura good, given her a center, brought her out of herself, allowed her to have fun, turned her into a nicer, calmer, more relaxed person, given her an interest in something other than work. Liz doesn’t use these words, as such—I’m interpreting. But this is what she means, I think, when she says we made a good couple. She asks how I am, and whether I’m looking after myself; she tells me that she doesn’t think much of this Ian guy. We arrange to meet for a drink sometime next week. I hang up.
    Which fucking Ian guy?
    Marie comes into the shop shortly afterward. All three of us are there. I’m playing her tape, and when I see her walk in I try to turn it off before she notices, but I’m not quick enough, so I end up turning it off just as she begins to say something about it, and then turning it back on again, then blushing. She laughs. I go to the stockroom and don’t come out. Barry and Dick sell her seventy quid’s worth of cassettes.
    Which fucking Ian guy?
    Barry explodes into the stockroom. “We’re only on the guest list for Marie’s gig at the White Lion, that’s all. All three of us.”
    In the last half-hour, I have humiliated myself in front of somebody I’m interested in, and found out, I think, that my ex was having an affair. I don’t want to know about the guest list at the White Lion.
    â€œThat’s really, really great, Barry. The guest list at the White Lion! All we’ve got to do is get to Putney and back and we’ve saved ourselves a fiver each. What it is to have influential friends, eh?”
    â€œWe can go in your car.”
    â€œIt’s not my car, is it? It’s Laura’s. Laura’s got it. So we’re two hours on the tube, or we get a minicab, which’ll cost us, ooh, a fiver each. Fucking great.”
    Barry gives a what-can-you-do-with-this-guy shrug and walks out. I feel bad, but I don’t say anything to him.
    Â 
    I don’t know anybody called Ian. Laura doesn’t know anybody called Ian. We’ve been together three years and I’ve never heard her mention an Ian. There’s no Ian at her office. She hasn’t got any friends called Ian, and she hasn’t got any girlfriends with boyfriends called Ian. I won’t say that she has never met anyone called Ian in the whole of her life—there must have been one at college, although she went to an all-girls school—but I am almost certain that since 1989 she has been living in an Ianless universe.
    And this certitude, this Ian-atheism, lasts until I get home. On the windowsill where we put the post, just