“Good God,” said Ros, when he’d finished. “What was that?”
“What do you mean, what was that?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“You don’t live in Gooleness then?”
“I do, actually. We both do.”
“And you’ve never seen northern soul dancing?”
“I can’t say I have. You, Annie?”
Annie shook her head and blushed. What was the blush for, actually? Why was she embarrassed to say that she hadn’t seen northern soul dancing before? She wanted to punch her stupid treacherous cheeks in.
“That’s what Gooleness is,” said Barnesy. “The Gooleness all-nighters. We’ve been coming here since eighty-one, haven’t we, Gav?”
“Where from?”
“Scunny. Scunthorpe.”
“You come all the way to Gooleness from Scunthorpe to do northern soul dancing?”
“ ’ Course we bloody do. Only fifty miles.”
Gav came back from the bar with their beers and put them down on the table at which Annie and Ros were sitting.
“What are you doing tonight?”
For a moment, Annie had the absurd notion that Ros was going to tell them precisely what they were doing, and that Gav or Barnesy or both would offer themselves up as the solution to the sex problem. She didn’t think she wanted sex with either of them.
“Nothing,” said Annie, quickly. The speed of the response, the eagerness it seemed to contain, was the diametric opposite of what she was after. By jumping in to stop Ros from talking about the sex plan, it seemed to her, she was more or less offering sex.
“Well, there we are then,” said Gav, who seemed too chubby to be a northern soul dancer, if Barnesy’s moves were indicative of the kind of stuff a northern soul dancer needed to strut. “We’re laughing, aren’t we? Two good-looking men, two good-looking women.”
“Ros here is gay,” said Annie. And then, helpfully, “A lesbian,” as if this might clear up any doubts anyone had about the variety of homosexuality Ros subscribed to. If she had succumbed to the temptation to punch her own cheeks in earlier, the chances are that she wouldn’t have been able to say anything quite so mortifyingly crass. Ros, to her credit, merely groaned and rolled her eyes. She would have been entitled to walk out of the pub and never contact Annie again.
“Annie!”
“A lesbian?” said Gav. “A real one? In Gooleness?”
“She’s not a lesbo,” said Barnesy.
“How can you tell?” said Gav.
“It’s just what birds say when they don’t like the look of you. Do you remember those two at the Blackpool all-nighter? Told us they weren’t into men, and then we saw them with their tongues down the throats of the DJs.”
Ros laughed. “I’m sorry if it seems like a brush-off,” she said. “But I was gay long before you two walked in.”
“Fucking hell,” said Barnesy in wonderment. “You just walk around, gay, like.”
“Yep.”
“I’ve got to tell you,” said Gav, with sudden excitement. “I . . .”
“You don’t have to tell me at all,” said Ros.
“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”
“You were going to say that, even though gay men make you sick to your stomach, the idea of gay women you find titillating in the extreme.”
“Oh,” said Gav. “You’ve heard that before, have you?”
“How does that work, anyway?” said Barnesy. “If one of you’s gay and the other one isn’t?”
“How does it work?” said Ros, and then “Oh. No. We’re not together. We’re friends.”
“Lezby friends,” said Gav. “Geddit?”
Barnesy punched him hard on the arm. “That’s the second stupid thing you’ve said. If you count the thing she didn’t let you say. How old are you? Fucking idiot. Pardon my language, ladies. Anyway, it don’t really matter, does it?”
“In what way?” said Ros.
“If you wanted to come with us. To be honest, I’m too tired for sex after an all-nighter anyway these days, so you being gay isn’t as much of a problem as it might have been.”
“That’s good to hear,” said Ros.
“I don’t even know what northern soul is,” said Annie. She was almost certain that there was nothing offensive in the admission, and, as far as she could tell, she had managed to make it without her face turning scarlet.
“You don’t know what it is,” said Barnesy, flatly. “How can you not know what it is? You don’t like music, is that it?”
“I do. I love music. But . . .”
“What are you into, then?”
“Oh, you know. All sorts.”
“Like what?”
This, she thought, was unbearable. Did this question still come up, after all these years? Clearly it did, and clearly it became harder to answer as you got older. In the time before Duncan, it had been easy: she was young, and she liked exactly the same kind of music as the young man asking the question, who, like her, was either on his way to university, or an undergraduate, or recently graduated. So she could say that she listened to The Smiths and Dylan and Joni Mitchell, and the young man would nod and add The Fall to her list. Telling a boy in your class that you liked Joni Mitchell was really another way of saying, “If the worst comes to the worst and you knock me up, it’ll be okay.” But now, apparently, she was expected to tell people who were not just like her, people who might not have an arts degree (and she knew she was being presumptuous, but she had decided that Barnesy was not an English graduate), and she knew that she could not make herself understood. How could she, when she wasn’t able to use some of the cornerstones of her vocabulary—words like Atwood and Austen and Ayckbourn? And that was just the As. It was terrifying, the prospect of having to engage with another human being without those crutches. It meant exposing something else, something more than bookshelves.
“I dunno. I listen a lot to Tucker Crowe?”
Was that true? Or did she just think a lot about Tucker Crowe? Was it her way of saying “I’m taken. By a man I’ve never met, who lives in another country”?
“What’s he? Country and bloody western? I hate that shit.”
“No, no. He’s more like, I don’t know, Bob Dylan, or Bruce Springsteen. Leonard Cohen.”
“I don’t mind a bit of the Boss sometimes. That ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ is all right when you’ve had a few and you’re driving home. Bob Dylan’s for students, and I’ve never heard of the other one. Leonard.”
“But I do like soul music, too. Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye.”
“Yeah, they’re all right. But they’re not Dobie Gray, are they?”
“Well, no,” said Annie. She didn’t know who Dobie Gray was, but it was safe to assume that he (he?) was neither Marvin nor Aretha. “What did Dobie Gray do, actually?”
“That was Dobie Gray! ‘Out on the Floor’!”
“And you like that one.”
“It’s, I don’t know, the national anthem of northern. It’s not a matter of liking it or not. It’s a classic.”
“I see.”
“Yeah. Dobie. And then there’s Major Lance, and Bar bara Mason, and . . .”
“Right. I’ve never heard of any of them.”
Barnesy shrugged. In that case, the shrug seemed to indicate, there wasn’t much he could do for her, and for a moment she could feel herself turning pedagogical, even though she was the one trying to do the learning. “You can do better than that,” she wanted to say. “I’m not expecting a Reith Lecture, but you could attempt to describe what the music sounds like.” She thought, inevitably, of Duncan—his earnestness, his desire always to make Tucker’s music come alive through the words he used to talk about it. Maybe there was more to say about Tucker, what with the Juliet story and the Old Testament influences. But did that make it better, if there was more to unpack? And was Duncan more interesting as a result?
Eventually, through patient probing, A
nnie and Ros learned that northern soul was so called because people from the north of England, especially people in Wigan, liked it, which struck them both as remarkable and strangely empowering; there were very few areas in life, they felt, where people in Wigan and Blackpool had much influence on the terminology of black American culture. The music had for the most part been made in the 1960s, and as far as they could tell it sounded like Tamla Motown.
“But most Tamla’s too famous, see?” said Gav.
“Too famous?”
“Not rare enough. It’s got to be rare.”
So Duncan would, despite all indications to the contrary, find common ground with Gav and Barnesy after all. There was the same need for obscurity, the same suspicion that if a piece of music had reached a large number of people, it had somehow been drained of its worth.
“Anyway,” said Barnesy. “You coming or what?”
Annie looked at Ros, and Ros looked at Annie, and they shrugged and laughed and drained their glasses.
The all-nighter took place in the Gooleness Working Men’s Club, a place that Annie must have walked past a thousand times without noticing. She tried to deal herself a feminism card by telling herself that she hadn’t noticed because she wasn’t welcome, but she knew it wasn’t just that: the second word of the club’s name was every bit as intimidating as the third.
As they waited behind their new friends to pay (ladies, she noted, were half-price tonight, which meant that she and Ros could get in for a fiver), Annie felt a weird sense of triumph: she was on the verge of discovering the real Gooleness, a town that had effectively evaded her for all these years. Barnesy had told them that what they were about to see—to participate in, even, if she screwed up her courage and danced—was what Gooleness was; he’d been quite emphatic about it. So, as she walked down the stairs into the club, she was looking forward to a seething, teeming, wriggling, wiggling throng of dancers, many of whom she’d recognize: she wanted to see former pupils, local shopkeep ers, museum regulars, all of whom would look at her as if to say, “Here we are! What kept you?” This could be it, she thought. This could be the night I feel I belong here.
But when they turned the corner and got their first look at the dance floor beneath them, the triumph shrunk into a little hard knot of embarrassment. There were thirty or forty people spread thinly around the large basement room, only a dozen or so of whom were dancing. Each dancer had acres of space to himself (most of them were men, and most of them were dancing on their own). None of the dancers or the drinkers around the edge was young. It turned out that she’d known all the time what Gooleness was: a place whose best days were behind it, a place that held on grimly to what was left of the good times it used to have, back in the eighties or the seventies or the thirties or the century before last. Gav and Barnesy stopped for a moment on the stairs and looked down wistfully.
“You should have seen it when we first started coming,” said Gav. “It was mental.” He sighed. “Why does everything have to fucking wither and die? Get the beers in, Barnesy.” If Gav or Barnesy had mentioned the withering and the dying, Annie thought, they might not have bothered to come.
Ros and Annie understood that they were not being included in the round, so Ros went off to the bar while Annie watched an elderly man with a mane of gray hair try to decide whether he was going to dance or just tap his feet and snap his fingers. It was Terry Jackson, the councillor with the treasure trove of old bus tickets, and when he noticed Annie, he looked startled, and the finger-snapping stopped.
“Bloody hell,” he said. “Annie the museum lady. I wouldn’t have thought this was your scene.”
“It’s old music, isn’t it?” she said. She was quite pleased with that. It wasn’t downright hilarious, but it was an appropriate and lighthearted response, delivered moderately quickly.
“How d’you mean?”
“Old music. Museums.”
“Oh, I see. Very good. Who brought you along?”
She bridled a little. Why did she have to be “brought along”? Why couldn’t she have discovered it for herself, come on her own, persuaded others to accompany her? She actually knew the answer to those questions. The bridling was unnecessary.
“A couple of guys we met in the pub.” She wanted to laugh at the sheer outlandishness of this most ordinary of explanations. She wasn’t someone who met a couple of guys in a pub.
“I probably know them,” said Terry. “Who are they?”
“Two chaps from Scunthorpe.”
“Not Gav and Barnesy? They’re legends.”
“Are they?”
“Well, only because they’ve been coming from Scunny for twenty-odd years, never miss. And Barnesy can dance, did you know that?”
“He showed us in the pub.”
“He’s serious. Always got his little tub of talcum powder.”
“What does he do with it?”
“Sprinkles it on the floor. For grip, you see? That’s what the serious ones do. Talc and a towel, that’s what you keep in your sports bag.”
“You’re not serious then, Terry?”
“I can’t dance like I could. But I wouldn’t miss one. This is the last thing we’ve got left here, more or less. It’s a sort of long good-bye to the old days, when I had my scooter, and we used to get into . . . scrapes on the seafront. The mods up here all became northern soulies. But it’s not going to last much longer, is it? Look at us.”
Suddenly, Annie saw everything too clearly, and she felt sick. It had all gone, the whole fucking lot; it was all over. Gooleness, Duncan, her childbearing years, Tucker’s career, northern soul, all the exhibits in the museum, the long-dead shark, the long-dead shark’s cock, and his eye, too, the 1960s, the Working Men’s Club, probably working men as well . . . She had come out tonight because she believed there had to be a present tense, somewhere, and she’d followed Gav and Barnesy because she’d hoped they knew where it was. Is. And they’d dragged her to yet another haunted house. Where was the now? In bloody America, probably, apart from the bit that Tucker lived in, or in bloody Tokyo. In any case, it was somewhere else. How could people who didn’t live in bloody America or bloody Tokyo stand it, all that swimming around in the past imperfect?
They had children, these people. That was how they stood it. The realization rose slowly through the bitter ale she’d been drinking, and then slightly more quickly through the lager that lay on top of it, and the gin that lay on top of the lager, the increased speed possibly a result of all the bubbles. That was why she wanted children, too. The cliché had it that kids were the future, but that wasn’t it: they were the unreflective, active present. They were not themselves nostalgic, because they couldn’t be, and they retarded nostalgia in their parents. Even as they were getting sick and being bullied and becoming addicted to heroin and getting pregnant, they were in the moment, and she wanted to be in it with them. She wanted to worry herself sick about schools and bullying and drugs.
An epiphany, then. That seemed to be what it was. But epiphanies were a little like New Year’s resolutions, Annie found: they just got ignored, especially if you experienced them during a northern soul night when you’d had a couple of drinks. She’d probably had three or four epiphanies in her entire life, and she’d been either drunk or busy every time. What good was an epiphany then? You really needed one on a mountaintop a couple of hours before you were going to make a life-changing decision, but she couldn’t recall ever having had these experiences singly, let alone in tandem. And in any case, what use was an epiphany that revealed to you that everything you did revolved around the dead and the dying? What was she supposed to do with that information?
The consequence of ignoring her epiphany was that she stayed in the club, and drank, and danced a little, with pudgy Gav, mostly, because Barnesy was off doing handstands and kung-fu kicks and dusting the floor with talc, and because Ros left at around midnight, with Annie’s permission, and because Terry Jackson stayed at the bar, drinking and getting morose
about the good old days, when you could get into a fight without anyone running off whining to the bloody Health and bloody Safety brigade. And when she eventually left, at two in the morning, Barnesy followed her out, and then home, and she found herself inviting a man she had only just met to spend the night on her couch, and then sitting on her sofa watching him attempting to do the splits while declaring his love for her.
“I do.”
“No you don’t.”
“I bloody do. I bloody love you. I’ve loved you since I saw you in the pub.”
“Because my mate turned out to be gay.”
“That just made it easier to make my mind up.”
Annie laughed and shook her head, and Barnesy looked pained. It was something, anyway. It was an anecdote, an event, a moment that didn’t refer back to something earlier in her life, or the life of the country. This was happening now, in her living room. Maybe that was why she’d offered Barnesy the couch in the first place. Maybe she’d hoped he might do the splits while telling her he loved her, and, gratifyingly, that was exactly what was happening.
“I’m not just saying it because I’m, you know, exerting myself acrobatically. It’s the other way round. I’m exerting myself because I love you.”
“You’re very sweet,” she said. “But I need to go to bed.”
“Can I come with you?”
“No.”
“No? Just, like, no?”
“Just no.”
“Are you married?”
“Do you mean, is my husband asleep in the marital bed, which is why I’m not letting you in there? No.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“There’s no problem. Well, there is, actually. I’m seeing someone. But he lives in America.”
Consistency and repetition were beginning to make the lie feel something like the truth, in the way that a path eventually becomes a path, if enough people walk along it.