目录
Content
Chapter_1
Chapter_2
Chapter_3
Chapter_4
Chapter_5
Chapter_6
Chapter_7
Chapter_8
Chapter_9
Chapter_10
Chapter_11
Chapter_12
Chapter_13
Chapter_14
Chapter_15
Chapter_1
High Fidelity
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nick Hornby was born in 1957. He is the author of Fever Pitch and of three
novels: High Fidelity, About a Boy and How to be Good. All four books have been
international bestsellers and all are published by Penguin. He has also edited
two anthologies, My Favourite Year and Speaking with the Angel. In 1999 he was
awarded the E. M. Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He
lives and works in Highbury, north London.
NICK HORNBY
High Fidelity
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
www.penguin.com
First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz 1995
Published in Penguin Books 2000
12
Copyright ? Nick Hornby, 1995
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
For Virginia
then . . .
My desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups, in chronological
order:
1) Alison Ashworth
2) Penny Hardwick
3) Jackie Allen
4) Charlie Nicholson
5) Sarah Kendrew
These were the ones that really hurt. Can you see your name in that lot, Laura?
I reckon you'd sneak into the top ten, but there's no place for you in the top
five; those places are reserved for the kind of humiliations and heartbreaks
that you're just not capable of delivering. That probably sounds crueler than it
is meant to, but the fact is that we're too old to make each other miserable,
and that's a good thing, not a bad thing, so don't take your failure to make the
list personally. Those days are gone, and good fucking riddance to them;
unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it's just a drag, like a cold
or having no money. If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to
me earlier.
1. Alison Ashworth (1972)
Most nights we used to mess around in the park around the corner from my house.
I lived in Hertfordshire, but I might just as well have lived in any suburb in
England: it was that sort of suburb, and that sort of park — three minutes away
from home, right across the road from a little row of shops (a VG supermarket, a
newsagent, an off-license). There was nothing around that could help you get
your geographical bearings; if the shops were open (and they closed at
five-thirty, and one o'clock on Thursdays, and all day Sunday), you could go
into the newsagent's and look for a local newspaper, but even that might not
give you much of a clue.
We were twelve or thirteen, and had recently discovered irony — or at least,
what I later understood to be irony: we only allowed ourselves to play on the
swings and the roundabout and the other kids' stuff rusting away in there if we
could do it with a sort of self-conscious ironic detachment. This involved
either an imitation of absentmindedness (whistling, or chatting, or fiddling
with a cigarette stub or a box of matches usually did the trick) or a flirtation
with danger, so we jumped off the swings when they could go no higher, jumped on
to the roundabout when it would go no faster, hung on to the end of the
swingboat until it reached an almost vertical position. If you could somehow
prove that these childish entertainments had the potential to dash your brains
out, then playing on them became OK somehow.
We had no irony when it came to girls, though. There was just no time to
develop it. One moment they weren't there, not in any form that interested us,
anyway, and the next you couldn't miss them; they were everywhere, all over the
place. One moment you wanted to clonk them on the head for being your sister, or
someone else's sister, and the next you wanted to . . . actually, we didn't know
what we wanted next, but it was something, something. Almost overnight, all
these sisters (there was no other kind of girl, not yet) had become interesting,
disturbing, even.
See, what did we have that was any different from what we'd had before?
Squeaky voices, but a squeaky voice doesn't do much for you, really — it makes
you preposterous, not desirable. And the sprouting pubic hairs were our secret,
strictly between us and our Y-fronts, and it would be years before a member of
the opposite sex could verify that they were where they should be. Girls, on the
other hand, quite clearly had breasts, and, to accompany them, a new way of
walking: arms folded over the chest, a posture which simultaneously disguised
and drew attention to what had just happened. And then there was makeup and
perfume, invariably cheap, and inexpertly, sometimes even comically, applied,
but still a quite terrifying sign that things had progressed without us, beyond
us, behind our backs.
I started going out with one of them . . . no, that's not right, because I
had absolutely no input into the decision-making process. And I can't say that
she started going out with me, either: it's that phrase 'going out with' that's
the problem, because it suggests some sort of parity and equality. What happened
was that David Ashworth's sister Alison peeled off from the female pack that
gathered every night by the bench and adopted me, tucked me under her arm, and
led me away from the swingboat.
I can't remember now how she did this. I don't think I was even aware of it
at the time, because halfway