Slam (11 page)

“And also, I'm not a girl.”

“Oh, I worked that out ages ago,” he said. “But I didn't say anything because I thought it might make you get a haircut.”

“Well, see you later,” I said.

“When?”

“Just…you know. Whenever I see you.”

“You'll see me in half an hour.”

“I won't be here.”

“I'll pay you, you fool. I don't expect anybody to do anything for nothing. Not these days. Three pounds for an up and down.” He waved at the steps. “Twenty pounds a day if you'll do as you're told. I've got money. Money's not the problem. Getting out of that bloody place to spend it is the problem.”

I'd found a job. My first day in Hastings, and I was in work. I was pretty sure then that I'd be able to get by on my own.

“Half an hour?” I said.

“Oh, I thought money would interest you,” he said. “Heaven forbid that anyone would do anything out of the kindness of their hearts.”

And he shuffled…Well, I was going to say he shuffled off, or he shuffled away, but that wouldn't be right, because he was going so slowly that he never actually went anywhere. I could have watched him for fifteen minutes and I'd still have been able to spit chewing gum onto his head. So we'll just leave it like that. We'll just say that he shuffled.

 

I hadn't even got myself a room yet. I went in, dinged the bell again, and prayed that no other old geezer would appear from nowhere asking for help. Although what if he did? I thought to myself. Maybe I could do better than earn enough money for food and a room.

Maybe I could make a fortune out of old people. But nobody appeared apart from the lady who ran the place, and she could move under her own steam.

“How can I help you?” she said. I got why the whole place smelled of fish. Fish don't smell of fish as much as she did. It was like she'd been boiling cod or whatever for a thousand years.

“I need a room,” I said.

“For yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Where is she?”

“Who?”

“How old would you say I was?”

I looked at her. I'd played this game before, with one of my mum's friends from work. For some reason mum's friend asked me to guess how old she was and I said fifty-six and she was thirty-one and she started crying. It never ends well. And this woman—she definitely wasn't, I don't know, under forty. I don't think. But she could have been sixty-five. How was I supposed to know? So I stood there, probably with my mouth open.

“I'll help you out,” said the woman. “Would you say I'm more than one day old?”

“Yes,” I said. “Course. You're
much
older than a day.” And even then she sort of frowned a bit at the way I said it, as if I was telling her she was a horrible ancient old witch, whereas all I actually meant was that she wasn't a newborn baby. I mean, what are you supposed to say to these people? “Oh, you look so young, you could even be a newborn baby not even a day old”? Is that what they want?

“Right,” she said. “So I wasn't born yesterday.”

“No.” Ah. I got it now.

“And that's how I know you have a girl waiting outside.”

A girl! That was too funny. She thought I wanted a room so that I could sleep with a girl in her hotel, when the truth was that I was never going to sleep with anyone for the rest of my life, in case I made her pregnant.

“Come out and look.”

“Oh, I know she won't be standing out on the street. You may be naïve, but I'm sure you're not actually daft.”

“I don't know anyone in Hastings,” I said. I didn't think I should go into the whole thing with the Parrs. She wouldn't care about them. “I don't know anyone in Hastings and I don't like girls.”

That was a mistake, obviously.

“Or boys. I don't like girls or boys.”

And that didn't sound right.

“I like them as friends. But I'm not interested in sharing a room in a B-and-B with anyone.”

“So what are you doing here?” she said.

“It's a long story.”

“I'll bet it is.”

“You can bet,” I said. She was annoying me. “You can bet any money.”

“I will.”

“Go on then.”

This was turning into a stupid conversation. Nobody was going to bet anything on how long my story was, and yet we'd ended up talking about that instead of what I wanted to talk about, which was where I was going to spend the night.

“So you're not going to give me a room.”

“No.”

“So what am I supposed to do, then?”

“Oh, there are plenty of other places that will take your money. But we're not like that here.”

“I'm working for one of your guests,” I said. I don't really know why I stuck at it. There were plenty of other places—places that might smell of cabbage, or old bacon fat, or anything other than fish.

“Is that right?” She was finished with me, and she wasn't interested. She started tidying up the desk, checking her phone for messages, that sort of thing.

“Yeah, and I promised him I'd be here to help him up the steps in a few minutes. He's got one of those frame things.”

“Mr. Brady?”

She looked at me. She was scared of him, you could see it.

“I don't know his name. He's just a rude old guy with a frame. I just met him and he asked me to be his assistant.”

“His assistant. What are you going to do? Help him with his tax and VAT?”

“No. Help him up and down the steps. Get him stuff, maybe.”

Obviously I was making up that last bit, because we hadn't yet had a chance to talk about the job in any detail.

“Anyway. He warned me about you.”

“What did he say?”

“He said not to let you throw me out, or he'd cause trouble.”

“He causes trouble anyway.”

“So it's just a question of whether you want any more.”

She turned her back on me, which I think was her way of saying, Sit down! Make yourself at home!

So I sat down on the bench in the reception. There was a local paper there, so I flicked through it and tried to learn something about my new home, and after a little while I heard Mr. Brady shouting for me.

“Oi. Stupid boy. Where are you?”

“That's me,” I said to the woman.

“You'd better go and help him, then,” she said. “And I'm not giving you a double room.”

A single room was twenty quid a night, and Mr. Brady was going to give me twenty quid a day. So I had made it. I could live. And that's the story of how I got a job and somewhere to sleep in Hastings.

I was OK
checking into the room and putting my stuff away and all that. It felt weird, of course, being in a strange room in a strange town and breathing fish, but not weird in a bad way. I had a shower, put a T-shirt and boxers on, then lay down on the bed and fell asleep. It was in the middle of the night that everything started to feel bad.

I'm sure I would have slept straight through if Mr. Brady hadn't started banging on my door at four o'clock in the morning.

“Stupid!” he was shouting. “Stupid! Are you in there?”

I didn't say anything for a while, because I was hoping he'd just go back to his room if I ignored him. But he kept knocking, and a couple of other guests opened their doors and started threatening him, and he started threatening them back, so I had to get up just to calm everybody down.

“Come in here,” I said to Mr. Brady.

“You're naked,” he said. “I'm not going to employ naked people.”

I told him that someone with a T-shirt and boxer shorts on wasn't naked. I didn't tell him that you couldn't ask someone never to get undressed just because they worked for you. He wouldn't come into the room, and he wouldn't whisper.

“I've lost my remote control,” he said. “Not lost it. I dropped it down the side of the bed and I can't reach it.”

“It's four o'clock in the morning,” I said.

“This is what you're being paid for,” he said. “You think I'm paying you twenty pounds a day to push me up and down the stairs a couple of times? I don't sleep, so you don't sleep. You don't sleep when I haven't got the remote, anyway.”

I went back into my room, put my jeans on and walked down the corridor with him. His room was huge, and it didn't smell of fish; it smelled of some chemical that must have been used to kill Germans in the war or something. He had his own bathroom, and he had a TV and a double bed and a sofa. I didn't have anything like that.

“Down there,” he said, pointing to the side of the bed next to the wall. “Anything else you feel down there, just leave it. And if you do touch anything, I've got a lot of carbolic soap. I bought a job lot.”

This was one of the most disgusting things anyone has ever said to me, and as I was reaching down, I was actually scared. What did he think might be down there? His dead pet dog? His dead wife? A lot of old pieces of fish that he hadn't wanted to eat and had been scraping off the plate and down the side of the bed for the last twenty years?

And that's when I decided to go home. It was four o'clock in the morning and I was maybe about to feel the rotting remains of a dead dog and I was being paid twenty pounds for a whole day's work, and that whole day's work was actually a whole day and half the night, and possibly involved dead dogs. And twenty pounds was exactly what it was costing me to stay in this terrible smelly B&B. Was it possible that rotting dog actually smelled of fish, if it rotted for long enough? I was going to be working all day and half the night for a profit of nought pounds and nought pence.

So the question I asked myself, as I was groping down the side of a strange old man's bed, was, Could having a baby be any worse than this? And the answer I gave myself was, No it could not.

As it turned out, there wasn't much down there apart from the remote control. I might have felt a sock, and it gave me a fright for a second, but the sock was definitely made out of cotton or wool and not fur or flesh, so it was OK. And I came back up with the remote and gave it to Mr. Brady and he didn't say thank you and I went back to bed. But I couldn't sleep. I was homesick. And I felt…well, stupid too. Mr. Brady was right. My mum should have called me Stupid. What had I been thinking?

• I had a pregnant girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend, and I'd run out on her.
  
• I hadn't told my mum where I'd gone, and she'd be worried sick, because I'd been away for a night.
  
• I had really believed that I was going to live in Hastings and become either a putter-upper of giant bowling pins or a lifter-upper of old people who needed to climb a lot of stairs. I had told myself that I could make a living doing these things, and I had also told myself that this was a life that I would enjoy, despite having no friends or family or money.
  

It was all stupid, stupid, stupid. Of course, I felt bad about everything, but it wasn't the guilt that stopped me from sleeping, it was the embarrassment. Can you imagine that? Embarrassment stopping you from sleeping? I was blushing. There was literally too much blood in my face for me to close my eyes. Well, maybe not literally, but that was absolutely what it felt like.

At six o'clock I got up, got dressed and walked back to the railway station. I hadn't paid for the room, but then, Mr. Brady hadn't paid me. He could sort it out. I was going back home to marry Alicia and look after Roof, and I was never going to think about running away again.

 

It's not enough, though, just to decide not to be stupid. Otherwise, why don't we
decide
to be really clever—clever enough to invent something like the iPod and make a lot of money? Or, why don't we just
decide
to be David Beckham? Or Tony Hawk? If you are actually stupid, then you can make as many clever decisions as you like and it won't help you. You're just stuck with the brain you were born with, and mine must be the size of a small pea.

Listen to this.

First of all, I was pleased that I got home at nine o'clock in the morning, because Mum goes to work at 8:30. So I thought I could make myself a cup of tea and some breakfast, watch daytime TV and say sorry and all that to Mum when she came back. Stupid? Stupid. It turned out that Mum hadn't gone to work the morning after I'd run away from home without telling her where I'd gone. It turned out that she'd been worrying about me since yesterday afternoon, and hadn't even gone to bed. Who would have guessed that? You, maybe. And everyone else in the world over the age of two. But not me. Oh, no.

It gets worse, though. When I turned the corner into our street, there was a police car outside our flat. So I walked down the road wondering who was in trouble, or hoping that nothing bad had happened to Mum, or praying that no burglars had come into the house overnight and taken our DVD player. Stupid? Stupid. Because it turned out that when it got to three o'clock in the morning and Alicia hadn't heard from me and Mum hadn't heard from me and nobody could phone me on my mobile because it was at the bottom of the sea, they'd all panicked and brought the law in! Isn't that amazing?

Even when I put my key in the lock, I thought I was going to see a flat with no DVD player in it. In fact, the DVD player was the first thing I saw. The second thing I saw was my mum wiping her eyes with a Kleenex, and two policemen. One of the policemen was a woman. And even when I saw Mum wiping her eyes, I thought, Oh, no! What's happened to Mum?

She looked at me, and then looked around for something to throw at me, and she found the remote control. She didn't hit me with it, but if she had, it might have made me go back to Hastings, and I could have spent the whole day going to Hastings and back because of things involving TV remotes, and that would have been funny. Or, at least, funnier than anything else that was happening to me.

“You stupid, stupid boy,” she said. People were really beginning to notice this stupid thing. “Where have you been?”

And I just made a sort of sorry face, and said, “Hastings.”

“Hastings? Hastings?” She was really screaming now. The policewoman who was sitting on the floor by her feet touched her on her leg.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Well. Do you remember we went there to play mini-golf with the Parrs?”

“I don't mean why Hastings! I mean why did you go anywhere?”

“Have you spoken to Alicia?”

“Yes. Of course I have. I've spoken to Alicia, I've spoken to Rabbit, I've spoken to your father, I've spoken to everyone I could think of.”

I got distracted for a moment by the idea of my mum talking to Rabbit. I wouldn't have known how to get hold of him, so I don't know how she managed it. Also, I wondered whether he'd been tempted to ask her out.

“What did Alicia say?”

“She said she didn't know where you were.”

“Nothing else?”

“I didn't stop to chat with her about the state of your relationship, if that's what you mean. She was upset, though. What have you done to her?”

I couldn't believe it. The only good thing about the last twenty-four hours, as far as I was concerned, was that Alicia would have told Mum she was pregnant, which meant that I didn't have to. And now it sounded like nothing had happened.

“Oh.”

“Where's your mobile?”

“Lost it.”

“Where did you stay?”

“Just…In a hotel. A B-and-B sort of thing.”

“How did you pay for it?”

The policewoman stood up. We'd gone from talking about whether I was dead or alive to talking about how I paid for the B&B, so I suppose she thought she wasn't needed anymore. To me, that wasn't professional. I could have just been waiting until she'd gone out the door to tell Mum that I'd sold crack or mugged some pensioners. And then she would have missed the chance of an arrest. Maybe she wasn't bothered because it all happened in Hastings, and not on her patch.

“We'll be getting on,” the policewoman said. “I'll give you a call later.”

“Thanks for all your help,” said Mum.

“Not at all. We're just happy he's back safe and sound.”

She looked at me, and I'm pretty sure the look had a meaning, but I have no idea what it was. It could have been

• be nice to your mum; or
  
• I know how you paid for that room; or
  
• now we know you are bad, we'll be watching you
  FOREVER.
  

It wasn't just good-bye, that's for sure.

I was sorry to see them go, because once they'd gone, there was nothing to stop Mum committing illegal acts on me, and I could tell she was in the mood to. She waited until she heard the front door close behind them, and then she said, “Right. What's all this about?”

And I didn't know what to say. Why hadn't Alicia told Mum she was pregnant? There were lots of different answers to this question, of course, but the answer I chose—because I'm an idiot—was this one: Alicia hadn't told Mum she was pregnant because she wasn't pregnant after all. What was my evidence? Especially if you take away the whole whizzing forward into the future thing, which you couldn't really rely on? My evidence was that Alicia wanted to buy a pregnancy tester. I never got to hear the results of the test because I switched my phone off and then threw it in the sea. Well, loads of people must buy testers and find out they're not pregnant, right? Otherwise, there'd be no point to them, would there? So if Alicia wasn't pregnant, there was no need to tell Mum anything about anything. That was the good news. The bad news was that if Alicia wasn't pregnant, I didn't have a very good reason for running away from home for a night.

We sat there.

“Well?” said Mum.

“Can I have some breakfast?” I said. “And a cup of tea?”

I was clever, or as clever as it was possible for a stupid boy to be. I said it in a way that meant, It's a long story. And it would be a long story, when I'd made it up.

My mum walked over to me and hugged me, and we went into the kitchen.

 

She made me scrambled eggs, bacon, mushrooms, beans and potato waffles, and then she made me exactly the same thing again. And I was starving, because in Hastings I'd had two bags of chips, but one breakfast would have been fine. It was more that while she was cooking and I was eating, I didn't have to tell her anything. Every now and again, she'd ask me something, like, How did I get to Hastings? or Did I speak to anyone? So I did end up talking about Mr. Brady, and the job I'd got, and the remote-control story, and she was laughing, and everything was OK. But I knew I was just putting things off. I wondered for a moment whether I could manage a third breakfast and a fourth cup of tea, just so that we could stay cozy, but I would have thrown it up again.

“So?”

I frowned at my plate, like someone would do if they were about to get something off their chest.

“I just…I don't know. I just freaked out.”

“But about what, sweetheart?”

“I don't know. A lot of stuff. Splitting up with Alicia. School. You and Dad.”

I knew that she'd focus on the last thing first.

“Me and your dad? But we divorced years ago.”

“Yeah. I dunno. It was like it suddenly sunk in.”

Any normal person would just laugh at this. But in my experience, parents want to feel guilty. Or rather, if you make out that you've been scarred for life by something that they've done, they don't notice how stupid it sounds. They take it really, really seriously.

“I knew we should have done things differently.”

“Like what?”

“I wanted to see a family counsellor, but of course your dad thought that was bollocks.”

“Yeah. Well. Too late now,” I said.

“Ah, but that's the thing,” said Mum. “It's not. I read this book about a guy who was tortured by the Japanese fifty years ago, and he couldn't come to terms with it, so he went to talk to someone. It's never too late.”

I wanted to laugh, for the first time in days, but I couldn't.

“Yeah. I know. But what you and Dad did…It messed me up, I suppose, but it wasn't like being tortured by the Japanese. Not really.”

“No, and it's not fifty years ago that we got divorced either. So, you know.”

I didn't, but I just nodded.

“Oh, God,” she said. “You hold this baby in your arms, and you look at him, and you think, I don't want to mess you up. And then what do you do? You mess him up. I can't believe what a…what a pig's ear I've made of everything.”