Slam (14 page)

 

We sat around the kitchen table. There was a lot of messing around with tea and milk and sugar and biscuits, and I was beginning to wonder whether they'd guessed, and all the business with the kettle and so on was just a way of hanging on to their old life just a little bit longer. It was like me throwing my mobile into the sea. The longer someone's not telling you what you don't want to hear, the better. It wouldn't have been hard to guess, really. What could the two of us have wanted to say? We split up a while ago, so we weren't going to tell them we wanted to get married. And Alicia hadn't been anywhere, so we weren't going to tell them that we'd already run off somewhere and got married. What was there left?

“What's on your mind?” said Alicia's dad.

Alicia looked at me. I cleared my throat. Nobody said anything.

“I'm going to have a baby,” I said.

I don't think I need to tell you that I wasn't trying to be funny. It just came out wrong. I think it was because Alicia had given me that little lecture about how everything had to be “we” from now on. I'd taken it too seriously. I knew the baby wasn't just hers, but now I'd overdone it, and made it so that the baby was just mine.

Whatever the reason, we couldn't have had a worse start. Because Alicia made a kind of snorting sound, which was her trying not to laugh. I'd said something stupid because I was nervous, and Alicia had wanted to laugh because she was nervous, but her dad didn't take any notice of our nerves. He just went nuts.

“You think this is FUNNY?” he shouted, and I realized that they had guessed. In films, and I think probably in life too, people go quiet when they hear bad news. Or they repeat the last word. You know, “A
baby
?” But he didn't do that. He just started shouting. Alicia's mum wasn't shouting, though. She started crying, and sort of slumped on the kitchen table with her arms over her head.

“And we're keeping it,” said Alicia. “I'm not getting rid of it.”

“Don't be so ridiculous,” said her dad. “You can't care for a baby at your age. Either of you.”

“Plenty of girls my age do,” said Alicia.

“Not girls like you,” said her dad. “Usually they've got more sense.”

“Do you hate us?” said her mum suddenly. “Is that what this is about?”

“Mum, you know I don't hate you,” said Alicia.

“I'm talking to him,” said her mother. And then, when I looked at her, all confused, she said, “Yes. You.”

I just shook my head. I didn't know what else to do.

“Because this stops her getting away, doesn't it?”

I didn't know what she was talking about, really.

“How do you mean?” I said.

“How do you mean?” she said, in a stupid voice that I think was supposed to show I was thick.

“He's got nothing to do with it,” said Alicia. And then, before her parents could say anything, she said, “Well, something to do with it. But it was my decision to keep the baby. He didn't want to, I don't think. And also, I'd already got away. He didn't want to be with me.”

“How did this happen?” said her mum. “I presumed you were having sex. I didn't think you were too stupid to use contraception.”

“We did use contraception,” said Alicia.

“So how did this happen?”

“We don't know.”

I knew, but I didn't really want to go into all that stuff about things half-happening just at the wrong time. It didn't really matter now.

“And what makes you think you want a baby? You couldn't look after a goldfish.”

“That was years ago.”

“Yes. Three years ago. You were a kid then, and you're a kid now. God. I don't believe we're having this conversation.”

“What happened to the goldfish?” I said. But everyone ignored me. It was a stupid question. What happened to her goldfish was probably the same thing that happened to my goldfish, and everybody else's goldfish. You don't sell them, or have them adopted, do you? They all get flushed down the toilet in the end.

“What about your mother, Sam? What does she think?”

“She doesn't know yet.”

“Right. Let's go and talk to her. Now. All of us.”

“That's not fair, Mum,” said Alicia.

I didn't think it was fair either, but I couldn't think of a reason why it wasn't.

“Why is it ‘snot fair'?” said her mum. She put on another silly voice, this time one that was supposed to show that Alicia was a whiny little girl.

“Because we should have the chance to tell her without you being there. She's not here now, is she? When we told you?”

“Can I ask you something, Sam?” said Alicia's dad. He hadn't spoken for a while.

“Yeah. Course.”

“I remember your mother at the party where you met Alicia. She's very pretty, isn't she?”

“I dunno. S'pose, yeah.”

“Young and pretty.”

“Yeah.”

“How old is she?”

“She's…Well, yeah, she's thirty-two.”

“Thirty-two. So she was sixteen when you were born.”

I didn't say anything.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Don't you people ever learn anything?”

 

They did come with us in the end. They calmed down, and Alicia's mum told her dad off for what he'd said, and he apologized. I knew I wasn't going to forget it, though. “You people.” Which people? The people who have babies when they're sixteen? What kind of people are they? It was my idea that we all went together. I was afraid. It wasn't as if I thought my mum would do anything to me. I was just afraid of how miserable she was going to be. Of all the things she was afraid of, this was probably number one. It would be better, I thought, if she'd always been afraid of me getting hooked on drugs, and I turned up with a syringe sticking out of me. At least she could pull it out. It would be better if she'd always been afraid of me being decapitated, and I turned up with my head tucked under my arm. At least I'd be dead. So I was hoping that if the four of us turned up on the doorstep, she'd have to put a lid on it, at least until they'd gone. Oh, everything was in the short term. That was the only way I could think. If I went to Hastings, I could put things off for a day. If Alicia's mum and dad came with me to my house to tell my mum I'd made their daughter pregnant, it wouldn't be quite so terrible for an hour or so. I couldn't bear to think about the proper future, so I just tried to make things better for the next twenty minutes or so, over and over again.

 

I'd told Mum I was going out after school, so I had no idea whether she was going to be in or not. I'd told her I was going round to a friend's for tea, and I'd be back around eight. If she knew I wasn't coming back straight after school, she sometimes went out for a drink with someone from work, or went round someone's house for a cup of tea. I'd warned them, but Alicia's mum and dad said that seeing as it was a serious situation, they'd just come in and wait for her if she wasn't there.

Something made me ring on the doorbell, rather than just get out my key and let everybody in. I suppose I didn't think it was right to let Alicia's mum and dad in without warning Mum first. Anyway, there was no answer at first, but just as I'd got my keys out, Mum came to the door in her dressing gown.

She knew something had happened straightaway. I think she probably knew what that something was, as well. Alicia, her mum, her dad, four unhappy faces…Put it this way, she probably wouldn't have needed three guesses. It had to be sex or drugs, didn't it?

“Oh. Hi. I was just in the middle of…”

But she couldn't think what she was in the middle of, which I took to be a bad sign. I suddenly got worried about the dressing gown. Why couldn't she tell us she was having a bath? If that was what she was doing? Having a bath is nothing to be ashamed of, is it?

“Anyway. Come in. Sit down. I'll just go and put something on. Put the kettle on, Sam. Unless you'd like something stronger? We've got some wine open, I think. We don't usually, but…And there might be some beer. Have we got beer, Sam?”

She was babbling. She wanted to put it off too.

“I think we're fine, thanks, Annie,” said Alicia's mum. “Please, can we say something before you get dressed?”

“I'd rather—”

“Alicia's pregnant. It's Sam's, of course. And she wants to keep it.”

My mum didn't say anything. She just looked at me for a long time, and then it was like her face was a piece of paper that someone was screwing up. There were these folds and lines and creases everywhere, in places where there was never usually anything. You know how you can always tell when a piece of paper has been screwed up, no matter how hard you try to smooth it out? Well, even as she was making that face, you could tell those creases would never go away, however happy she got. And then this terrible noise. I'd never see her if she ever found out I was dead, but I can't imagine the noise would be any different.

She stood there crying for a little while, and then Mark, her new boyfriend, came into the living room to see what was going on. So Mark explained the dressing gown. You didn't have to have any special powers to read the minds of Alicia's mum and dad. Their minds were easy to read, because they were written all over their faces and eyes. You people, I could hear her dad saying to me, even though he wasn't saying anything now, just looking. You people. Do you ever do anything else? Apart from have sex? And I wanted to kill Mum, which was a coincidence, because she wanted to kill me.

“Of all the things, Sam,” Mum said after what seemed like ages and ages. “Of all the things you could do. All the ways you could hurt me.”

“I wasn't trying to hurt you,” I said. “Really. I didn't want to get Alicia pregnant. It was the last thing I wanted to do.”

“Here's a good way of not getting someone pregnant,” said Mum. “Don't have sex with them.”

I didn't say anything. I mean, you couldn't argue with that, could you? But her argument did mean that I could only have sex two or three times in my life, and not even that many times if I decided I didn't want kids. That decision wasn't mine to make anymore, though. I was having kids whether I liked it or not. One kid, anyway, unless Alicia was having twins.

“I'm going to be a grandmother,” said Mum. “I'm four years younger than Jennifer Aniston and I'm going to be a grandmother. I'm the same age as Cameron Diaz.”

Cameron Diaz was a new one. I hadn't heard her mention Cameron Diaz before.

“Yes,” said Alicia's father. “Well. There is a great deal about this whole thing that is unfortunate. But at the moment we're more worried about Alicia's future.”

“Not Sam's?” said my mum. “Because he had a future too.”

I looked at her. Had? I
had
a future? Where was it now? I wanted her to tell me that everything was going to be all right. I wanted her to say that she'd survived, so I could too. But she wasn't telling me that. She was telling me that I didn't have a future anymore.

“Of course. But we're more worried about Alicia because she's our daughter.”

That sounded fair enough to me. When Mum started howling, it wasn't because she was upset about Alicia.

“Alicia, love,” said my mum. “You've only just found out, right?”

Alicia nodded.

“So you don't know what you think yet, do you? You can't possibly know whether you want to keep it or not.”

“Oh, I know that,” said Alicia. “I'm not killing my baby.”

“You're not killing a baby. You're—”

“I've been reading about it on the Internet. It's a baby.”

Alicia's mum sighed.

“I wondered where you'd been getting this stuff from,” she said. “Listen. The people who post things on the Internet about abortions, they're all evangelical Christians, and—”

“Doesn't matter what they are, does it? Facts are facts,” said Alicia.

The whole conversation was a mess. It was all over the place. Cameron Diaz, evangelical Christians…I didn't want to be listening to any of this stuff. I didn't know what I did want to listen to, though. What would have been better?

“I'd better be off,” Mark said. We'd all forgotten he was there, and we all looked at him as if we still weren't quite sure whether he was.

“Home,” said Mark.

“Yes,” said my mum. “Course.” She waved at him half-heartedly, but he didn't have his shoes on, so he had to go back into Mum's bedroom.

“So where does all this leave us?” said Alicia's dad.

Nobody spoke for a while, apart from when Mark walked back through and said good-bye again. I didn't really understand how anyone could expect talking to leave us anywhere at all, apart from in the place we already were. Alicia was pregnant, and she wanted the baby. If things stayed like that, then you could talk until you were blue in the face and it wouldn't make any difference.

“I need to talk to my son in private,” said Mum.

“There isn't any private anymore,” said Alicia's dad. “Anything you have to say to him involves us. We're all family now.”

I could have told him that was a stupid thing to say. Mum went nuts.

“I'm sorry, but I'll be talking to my son in private for the rest of my life if that's what he and I want to do. And we're not family. Not now, and maybe not ever. Sam will always do what's right, and so will I, but if you think that allows you to come into my house and demand the right to hear my private conversations, then you've got another thing coming.”

Alicia's dad was about to have a go back, but Alicia stepped in.

“You're not going to believe this,” she said. “But Dad's actually quite clever most of the time. He wasn't very clever just then, though. Dad, do you think you'll ever want to talk to me in private without Sam and his mum being around? Yes? Well, shut up then. God. Honestly.”