Free High Fidelity by Nick Hornby Page A

inside the communal front door, there are three letters amidst the takeout menus and the minicab cards: a bill for me, a bank statement for Laura…and a TV license reminder for Mr. I. Raymond (Ray to his friends and, more pertinently, to his neighbors), the guy who until about six weeks ago lived upstairs.
    I’m shaking when I get into the flat, and I feel sick. I know it’s him; I knew it was him the moment I saw the letter. I remember Laura going up to see him a couple of times; I remember Laura…not flirting, exactly, but certainly flicking her hair more often, and grinning more inanely, than seemed to be strictly necessary when he came down for a drink last Christmas. He would be just her type—little-boy-lost, right-on, caring, just enough melancholy in his soul to make him appear interesting. I never liked him much then, and I fucking hate him now.
    How long? How often? The last time I spoke to Ray—Ian—the night before he moved…was something going on then? Did she sneak upstairs on nights when I was out? Do John and Melanie, the couple in the ground-floor flat, know anything about this? I spend a long time looking for the change-of-address card he gave us, but it’s gone, ominously and significantly—unless I chucked it, in which case strike the ominous significance. (What would I do if I found it? Give him a ring? Drop round, and see if he’s got company?)
    I’m starting to remember things now: his dungarees; his music (African, Latin, Bulgarian, whatever fucking world music fad was trendy that week); his hysterical, nervous, nerve-jangling laugh; the terrible cooking smells that used to pollute the stairway; the visitors that used to stay too late and drink too much and leave too noisily. I can’t remember anything good about him at all.
    I manage to block out the worst, most painful, most disturbing memory until I go to bed, when I hear the woman who lives up there now stomping around and banging wardrobe doors. This is the very worst thing, the thing that would bring anybody (any man?) in my position out in the coldest and clammiest of sweats: we used to listen to him having sex. We could hear the noises he made; we could hear the noises she made (and there were two or three different partners in the time the three of us—the four of us, if you count whoever was in Ray’s bed—were separated by a few square meters of creaking floorboard and flaking plaster).
    â€œHe goes on long enough,” I said one night, when we were both lying awake, staring at the ceiling. “I should be so lucky,” said Laura. This was a joke. We laughed. Ha, ha, we went. Ha, ha, ha. I’m not laughing now. Never has a joke filled me with such nausea and paranoia and insecurity and self-pity and dread and doubt.
    When a woman leaves a man, and the man is unhappy (and yes, finally, after all the numbness and the silly optimism and the who-cares shrug of the shoulders, I am unhappy—although I would still like to be included somewhere in the cover shot of Marie’s next album)…is this what it’s all about? Sometimes I think so, and sometimes I don’t. I went through this period, after the Charlie and Marco thing, of imagining them together, at it, and Charlie’s face contorted with a passion that I was never able to provoke.
    I should say, even though I do not feel like saying it (I want to run myself down, feel sorry for myself, celebrate my inadequacies—that’s what you do at times like these), that I think things were OK in That Department. I think. But in my fearful imaginings Charlie was as abandoned and as noisy as any character in a porn film. She was Marco’s plaything, she responded to his every touch with shrieks of orgasmic delight. No woman in the history of the world had better sex than the sex Charlie had with Marco in my head.
    But that was nothing. That had no basis in reality at all. For all I know, Marco and