Slam (12 page)

“Oh, it's OK,” I said. But not very, you know, strongly. I wanted to show that I'd be able to forgive her one day, but not for another ten years or so.

“Will you come with me to talk to someone?”

“I don't know.”

“Why don't you know?”

“I don't know, you know…what I've got to say about it all now.”

“Of course you don't know. That's why we've got to go to family counselling. All sorts of things will come up that you might not know about. I'll make your father come too. He's not as narrow-minded as he was. Carol made him go and talk to someone when they couldn't have a baby. I'm going to do some research at work. The sooner the better.”

And she hugged me. I had been forgiven for running away from home because I couldn't handle my parents splitting up. So that was good. On the bad side, though: I was going to have to sit in a room talking to a stranger about feelings I didn't have, and I'm not very good at making things up. And also: my mum still had no idea why I'd gone to Hastings for a night, and I couldn't think of a way to tell her.

Mum wanted to go to work, and she made me promise that I wouldn't go anywhere. I didn't want to go anywhere. I wanted to sit at home watching
Judge Judy
and
Deal or No Deal
all day. But I knew I couldn't. I knew I had to go to Alicia's house and see what was up. I could have called her from our home phone, but something stopped me. I suppose it was the thought of her going off on one on the phone, and me just standing there with my mouth opening and closing. If I was standing in front of her, at least I'd feel like I was a person. On the phone I'd just be an opening and closing mouth.

My plan was to get the bus to Alicia's house and hide in the bushes until I could see something that let me know one way or the other what was going on. There were two flaws in the plan, I discovered:

• no bushes
  
• What actually was there to look at?
  

In my mind, I'd been away for a few months, so I thought that what I'd see would be Alicia walking along slowly with a swollen belly, or Alicia stopping somewhere to be sick. But the truth was that I'd only been away for a day and a half, and so when I did see her, she looked pretty much exactly like she did when we met in Starbucks to buy a home testing kit. I was confused by a lot of things. I was confused because I'd spent so much time thinking about Alicia being pregnant. But also, being whizzed into the future hadn't helped either. I was living in three different time zones at once.

As there were no bushes, I had to make do with a lamppost opposite her house. This wasn't much use as a lookout, because the only way I could properly hide was to put my back and head against it and keep still. So of course I couldn't see anything apart from the house in front of me, which was the house on the other side of the road from Alicia's house. What was I doing? It was eleven o'clock in the morning, and Alicia was probably at school. And if she wasn't at school, she was inside a house I wasn't looking at. And if she came out of the house I wasn't looking at, then I couldn't see her anyway. And then Rabbit walked past with his board under his arm. I tried to hide from him, but he saw me, so that just made the hiding seem even more stupid.

“Who we hiding from?” he said.

“Oh. Hi, Rabbit.”

He dropped his board down beside the tree with a clatter.

“Do you want a hand?”

“A hand?”

“I've got nothing to do. I might as well help out. Shall I hide with you? Or find somewhere else?”

“Maybe somewhere else,” I said. “There isn't really room for two behind a lamppost.”

“Good point. Why are we hiding, anyway?”

“We don't want the people in that house there to see us.”

“Right. Cool. Why don't we just go home? They'll never see us there.”

“Why don't you go home, Rabbit?”

“You don't have to be like that. I know when I'm not wanted.”

If Rabbit knew when he wasn't wanted, he'd be living in Australia by now. But it wasn't his fault that I'd run away from my pregnant girlfriend and I didn't have the guts to knock on her door.

“I'm sorry, Rabbit. I just think I should do this on my own.”

“Yeah. You're right. I never really understood what we were up to anyway.”

And he went.

After Rabbit had gone, I changed my tactics. I moved round to the other side of the lamppost and leaned against it that way. So I was pretty much staring through the window of her sitting room, and if anyone was in there and wanted to come out and talk to me, then they could. Nobody did. Phase Two of my mission was over, and I couldn't see how there could be a Phase Three, so I walked back to the bus stop. I spent the rest of the day watching
Judge Judy
and
Deal or No Deal
and eating rubbish food which I paid for out of the money that was supposed to support me in my new life in Hastings. That was just one of the great things about coming home. I could spend the rest of my forty pounds in one day on crisps if I wanted to.

 

Just before Mum got home from work, I realized that I could have done something apart from lean on one side of the lamppost and then the other side of the lamppost. I could have knocked on Alicia's door, and asked whether she was pregnant, and how she was, and how her parents were. And then I could have got on with the next part of my life.

 

But I didn't want to do that yet. I had seen what the next part of my life looked like when I was whizzed into the future, and I didn't like the look of it one bit. If I sat at home and watched TV, then the next part of my life would never come.

And for may be
two days, it worked, and I felt powerful. I could stop time! At first, I was careful: I didn't go out, didn't answer the phone, not that it ever rung much anyway. I told Mum I had picked up a bug from the crappy hotel and coughed a lot and she let me stay off school. I ate toast, and messed around on You-Tube, and designed a new T-shirt for Tony Hawk. I hadn't spoken to him since I got back. I was a little scared of him now. I didn't want to go back to the place that he'd sent me the last time we talked.

On the third day, there was a knock at the door, and I answered it. Mum buys stuff off Amazon sometimes, and because there's nobody in, we had to go to the sorting office to collect it on Saturdays, so I thought I'd save us a trip.

But it wasn't the postman. It was Alicia.

“Hello,” she said. And then she started crying. I didn't do anything. I didn't say hello back, didn't ask her in, didn't touch her. I thought of the phone at the bottom of the sea, and how this was like all the phone messages and texts coming at once.

I woke up, finally. I pulled her indoors, made her sit down at the kitchen table, asked her if she wanted a cup of tea. She nodded, but she kept crying.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Do you hate me?”

“No,” I said. “No. No way. Why should I hate you?”

“Where did you go?”

“Hastings.”

“Why wouldn't you call me?”

“Threw my phone in the sea.”

“Do you want to know the results of the pregnancy test?”

“I think I can guess.”

And even then, when I said it, with her crying and coming round to my house during the day and all the millions of other things that told me there was bad news, my heart started to beat faster. Because there was still a one-in-a-trillion chance that she was going to say, “I'll bet you can't,” or “No, that's not it at all.” It wasn't all over yet. How was I to know that she wasn't upset about us splitting up, or her parents splitting up, or some new boyfriend being horrible to her? It could have been anything.

But she just nodded.

“Do your mum and dad want to kill me?”

“God, I haven't told them,” she said. “I was hoping you'd do that with me.”

I didn't say anything. OK, so I'd only been in Hastings for one night, but nothing had happened while I was there at all, and that had been half the point of me going: so that things would happen. So that my mum could find out from Alicia's parents, and get upset. But then she'd get worried about me disappearing and forgive me. I wanted to go back to Hastings. I was wrong about the job with Mr. Brady being just as bad as or even worse than having a baby. It wasn't. Having a baby was going to kill my mum and Alicia's mum and dad and probably me and Alicia, and there wasn't anything you could feel down the side of Mr. Brady's bed that was going to do that much damage.

“What are you going to do?” I said.

She was quiet for a while.

“Can you do me a favor?” she said. “When we talk about this, can you say ‘we'?”

I didn't understand, and I made a face to show her I didn't.

“You said, ‘What are
you
going to do?' And it should be, ‘What are
we
going to do?'”

“Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”

“Because…Well, I've been thinking about this. The splitting up doesn't matter, because it's your baby too, right?”

“I suppose. If you say so.”

In just about every film or TV program I've ever seen, the bloke says that at some point in these situations. I didn't even mean anything by it, really. I was just saying the lines you say.

“I knew you'd be like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

“I knew you'd try to wriggle out of it. Boys always do.”

“Boys always do? How many times have you been in this situation, then?”

“Fucking go and fuck yourself.”

“Fucking go and fuck yourself,” I said back, in a silly voice.

The kettle boiled. I took a long time getting mugs out and dunking tea bags and pouring milk and throwing tea bags away.

Before I go on with this conversation, I have to stop and say this: I'm eighteen years old now. I was just sixteen when this conversation happened. So it was only two years ago, but it feels more like ten years ago. It feels like that not just because a lot has happened since then, but also because the boy who was talking to Alicia that afternoon…he wasn't sixteen. He wasn't just two years younger than the person who's talking to you now. It feels now, and it even felt then, as though that boy was eight or nine years old. He felt sick, and he wanted to cry. His voice wobbled just about every time he tried to say anything. He wanted his mum, and he didn't want his mum to know.

“I'm sorry,” I said. Alicia had stopped crying for a bit, but now she was at it again, so I had to say something.

“Not a very good start, is it?”

I shook my head, but the word “start” made me feel even worse. She was right, of course. This was a start. But I didn't want it to be a start. I wanted this to be the worst of it, and the end, and it wasn't going to be.

“I'm going to keep the baby,” she said.

I sort of knew that, because of the night and day I'd spent in the future, so it was funny to think this was news. To tell you the truth, I'd forgotten there was any choice.

“Oh,” I said. “What happened to ‘we'?”

“How d'you mean?”

“You just told me I should be talking about what
we're
going to do. And now you're telling me what
you're
going to do.”

“It's different, isn't it?”

“Why?”

“Because while the baby's in here, it's my body. When it comes out, it's our baby.”

There was something that felt not quite right about what she was saying, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was.

“But what are we going to do with a baby?”

“What are we going to do with it? Look after it. What else can you do with it?”

“But…”

Later, cleverer people than me would come up with some arguments. But right then, I couldn't think of anything. It was her body and she wanted the baby. And then when we had the baby we would look after it. There didn't seem like there was much else to say.

“When you going to tell your mum and dad?”

“
We.
When are we going to tell my mum and dad.”

We. I was going to sit there while Alicia told her mum and dad something that would make them want to kill me. Or maybe she was going to sit there while I told them something that would make them want to kill me. When I ran away to Hastings, I'd sort of worked out that things were going to be bad. I just hadn't worked out how bad.

“OK. We.”

“Some girls don't tell their parents for ages. Not until they have to,” she said. “I've been reading stuff on the Net.”

“Sounds sensible,” I said. Wrong.

“You reckon?” And she made a snorting noise. “Sounds sensible to you, because you just want to put it off.”

“No I don't.”

“What are you doing tonight?” she said.

“Tonight's no good,” I said, not too quickly, but not too slowly either.

“Why?”

“I said”—What did I say, what did I say?—“I'd go with”—Who? Who? Who?—“my mum to”—Where? Where? Shit—“This work thing she's got on. Everyone always goes with someone and she always goes on her own, so I told her ages ago—”

“Fine. Tomorrow night?”

“Tomorrow night?”

“You don't want to put it off, remember?”

Oh, but I did. I really did. I wanted to put it off forever. I just knew I wasn't allowed to say so.

“Tomorrow night,” I said, and even the sound of the words coming out of my mouth made me want to go to the toilet. I couldn't imagine what my guts would feel like in twenty-four hours' time.

“Promise? You'll come round after school?”

“After school. Promise.”

Tomorrow night was hundreds of years away. Something would have changed by then. “Are you going out with anyone?” Alicia said.

“No. God. No.”

“Me neither. That sort of makes things easier, doesn't it?”

“I suppose.”

“Listen,” said Alicia. “I know you got sick of me—”

“No, no. It wasn't that,” I said. “It was…” But I couldn't think of anything, so I stopped.

“Whatever,” she said. “But I know you're OK. So if this had to happen with someone, I'm glad it was you.”

“Even though I ran away?”

“I didn't know you'd run away. I just knew you weren't at school.”

“I couldn't handle it,” I said.

“Yeah, well. Neither could I. Still can't.”

We drank our tea, and tried to talk about other things, and then she went home. When she'd gone, I puked into the kitchen sink. Too many breakfasts, I suppose. And even though I wasn't talking to TH, I suddenly heard his voice. “I sat on the toilet while shakily holding a trash can in front of my face as my stomach contents blew out my nose and mouth with equally impressive force,” he said. Funny what you think of at times like that, isn't it?

I missed talking to TH, but what was happening in the present was bad enough, so I really didn't want to know anything that might happen to me in the future. Instead of chatting with him, I read his book again. Even though I'd read it a thousand times, there were still things in there that I'd forgotten. I'd forgotten how he asked Erin to marry him, for example, that thing with the coyotes and the flashlight. Maybe it wasn't so much that I'd forgotten it. Maybe it was more that I'd never found it that interesting before. It had never meant that much to me. His first marriage was just about bearable when I was fourteen or fifteen, because every now and again you meet someone you think about marrying. I was pretty sure I was going to marry Alicia for the first couple of weeks, for example. But you're not really thinking about second marriages when you're that age, in my opinion. Now, though, it was like my first marriage, which hadn't actually yet started, was over, and we had a kid, and it was all a mess. So reading about TH and Erin was helpful, because TH had married Cindy and had Riley and they'd got over it. TH and Erin were the future. If I ever survived this mess, I'd never get married again, I was absolutely positive about that. But maybe there'd be something on the other side. Something to look forward to. Something like Erin, except not Erin, or any other woman or girl.

And this is why
Hawk—Occupation: Skateboarder
is such a brilliant book. Whenever you pick it up, there's something in it that helps you with your life.

 

When Mum came back from work, she told me we were going straight out again, because someone at the council had put her in touch with a family counsellor, and because this counsellor was a friend of a friend, we could jump the queue, and we had an appointment at 6:30.

“What about tea?” I said. It was the only thing I could think of, but even I could see it wouldn't be enough to get me out of going.

“Curry afterwards. The three of us can go out and talk.”

“The three of us? How do we even know we'll get on with this counsellor?”

“Not the counsellor, you muppet. Your dad. I persuaded him to drive down. Even he could see it was serious, you running away.”

Well, it couldn't really have been any more of a disaster, could it? My whole family was going to see someone to talk about problems we didn't have. The problems we did have, though, they didn't know about, and they weren't going to find out about. It would be funny, if anything was ever going to be funny again.

 

The lady's name was Consuela, which was enough to put my dad into a bad mood from the very first minute. I don't know if you could call Dad a racist, because I've never heard him say anything bad about black people or Muslims or Asians. But he hates pretty much anyone from Europe. He hates the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Italians…For some reason, he hates anyone who comes from somewhere you might want to go on holiday. He has been to all these places on holiday. He always says that he didn't start it, and that they hated him first, but I went on one or two of those holidays with him, and that's not true. Each time, he got off the plane and started sulking. We've all tried talking to him about it, but we never get anywhere. It's his loss, anyway. Last year he went to Bulgaria, but that wasn't any better, he said. The truth is that he hates going abroad, so it's a good thing that Africa and other places where black people live are so far away, otherwise he'd be a proper racist, and we'd all have to stop talking to him.

We couldn't even pretend that Consuela wasn't Spanish, because she had a Spanish accent. Every time she said “yust” instead of “just” or something like that, you could almost see the steam coming out of Dad's ears.

“So,” she said. “Sam. You ran from home, is that right?”

“Ran away,” my dad said.

“Thank you,” said Consuela. “I occasionally makes mistakes with my English. I'm from Madrid.”

“I'd never have guessed,” said Dad, all sarcastic.

“Thank you,” said Consuela.

“So,” she said. “Sam. Can you explain why you ran?”

“Yeah, well,” I said. “I was telling Mum. School was getting on top of me, and then I…I dunno. I just started to feel bad about Mum and Dad splitting up.”

“And when did they split up?”

“Only about ten years ago,” said Dad. “So it's early days yet.”

“Yes, go on,” said Mum. “A little bit of gentle piss-taking will help.”

“He doesn't give a monkey's about us splitting up anymore,” said Dad. “It wasn't because of us he buggered off to Hastings. Something's going on that he's not telling us about. He's pinched something. He's been taking drugs. Something.”