Slam (16 page)

After a little while all these words started flying out of the men.

“Satisfaction.”

“No sleep!” (“Ha ha.” “Too right.”)

“Love.”

“A challenge.”

“Anxiety.”

“Poverty!” (“Ha ha.” “Too right.”)

“Focus.”

And loads of other words. I didn't understand a single thing anyone said. When we'd finished, Giles handed the big piece of cardboard back to Terry and she started reading the words out and they all started talking about them. I got distracted by the marker pen. I know I shouldn't have done it, and I don't know why I did, but it was just lying there on the carpet, and everyone was distracted by the conversation, so I put it in my pocket. Afterwards, I found out that Alicia had swiped hers too.

“We're never going back there,” I said to Alicia afterwards.

“You don't have to persuade me,” she said. “They were all so old. I mean, I know we're young. But some of them had grey hair.”

“Why did she send us there?”

“She said we'd meet nice people. She said she'd met lots of friends there, and they used to go to Starbucks together with their babies. Except I don't think they had Starbucks then. Coffee, anyway.”

“I'm not going to Starbucks with teachers. Or any of those people.”

“We'll have to go to classes where there are people like us. Teenagers,” said Alicia.

I thought about that girl I'd gone out with once, who said she wanted a baby soon, and wondered whether she'd be in a class like that.

“The trouble is,” I said, “the people in that sort of class…They'd be stupid, wouldn't they?”

Alicia looked at me and laughed, except it was the sort of laugh you do when something's not funny.

“And how clever are we, do you think?”

 

When I got back home after that class, Mum was sitting watching TV with Mark. He spent a lot of time at ours now, so I wasn't surprised to see him or anything, but when I came in, Mum got up and switched off the TV and said that she had something she wanted to talk about with me. I knew what it was, of course. I'd been doing some sums. If I really had seen the future that night, then I reckoned TH had whizzed me forward a year. So there could only be five or six months between Alicia's baby and Mum's baby. Roof had been four months old in the future, and Mum had looked big to me, so perhaps she'd been eight months pregnant. Which meant that her baby would be born when Roof was five months old. And Alicia was five months pregnant now, so…

“Do you want to talk in private?” said Mark.

“No, no,” said Mum. “We'll have plenty of time on our own to talk things through. Sam, you know Mark and I have been seeing a lot of each other.”

“You're pregnant too,” I said.

Mum looked shocked, and then she burst out laughing.

“Where did that come from?”

I didn't think there was any point in trying to explain, so I just shook my head.

“Is that what you're worried about?”

“No. Not worried. Just…At the moment, when people have news, that seems to be what it is.”

“I've just thought,” said Mum. “If I had another baby, then he or she would be younger than yours. My child would be younger than my grandchild.” And she and Mark laughed.

“Anyway. No,” she said. “That's not the news. The news is, how would you feel if Mark moved in. Well, that was a question, not news. We're not telling you he's moving in. We're asking. How would you feel if Mark moved in? Question mark?”

“And if it's a problem for you, we'll forget about it,” said Mark.

“But he's been spending a lot of time here, and…”

I didn't know what to say. I didn't know Mark, and I didn't particularly want to share a house with him, but I wasn't sure I was going to be living there for much longer anyway. Not if the future was right.

“Fine,” I said.

“You must think more than that,” said Mum. And of course she was right, I did. I thought a lot of things. For example

• Why would I want to live with someone I don't know?
  
• And so on.
  

In other words, I had one big question and a lot of smaller questions involving televisions, bathrooms and dressing gowns, if you understand what I mean by dressing gowns. And his kid. I didn't want to get stuck with him.

“I don't want to get stuck with his kid,” I said.

“Sam!”

“You asked me what I was thinking. That was what I was thinking.”

“Fair enough,” said Mark.

“It sounded rude, though,” said my mum.

“I just meant that I'm going to have enough babysitting on my plate,” I said.

“It's not babysitting if it's your baby,” she said. “That's just called ‘being a parent.'”

“He lives with his mum,” said Mark. “You won't have to look after him.”

“OK, then. Fine.”

“So you're saying it's all right as long as you don't have to put yourself out,” said Mum.

“Yeah. More or less.”

I didn't see why I should have to put myself out. It wasn't my idea, him coming to live with us. The truth was, he was going to move in whatever I said, I could tell. And anyway, if it wasn't him, there'd be somebody else, one day. And that might be worse, because we could end up going to live with him and, I don't know, his three kids and his Rottweiler.

Listen. I've got no problem with people getting divorced. If you can't stand someone, then you shouldn't have to be married to them. It's obvious. And I wouldn't have wanted to grow up with my mum and dad arguing all the time. To be honest, I wouldn't have wanted to grow up with my dad full stop. But the trouble is that divorce leaves you open to stuff like this. It's like going out in the rain with only a T-shirt on, isn't it? You increase the chances of catching something. The moment your dad's out of the house, then there's a possibility of someone else's dad moving in. And then things can start getting weird. There was this kid at school who didn't hardly know anyone he lived with. His dad moved out, some other bloke with two daughters moved in, his mum didn't get on with the two daughters. She met someone else, moved out, didn't take her son with her, and this kid found himself stuck with three people he hadn't even met a year before. He didn't seem that bothered, but I wouldn't have liked it much. Home is supposed to be home, isn't it? A place where you know people.

And then I remembered that according to the future I was going to end up living with a lot of people I didn't know.

I didn't call
Alicia's dad Mr. Burns anymore. I called him Robert, which was better, because every time I said Mr. Burns, I thought of an ancient bald bloke who owned the Springfield nuclear reactor. And I didn't call Alicia's mum Mrs. Burns either. I called her Andrea. We were on first-name terms.

They had obviously decided that they were going to Make An Effort with me. Making An Effort meant asking me how I was feeling about everything every couple of days, and what was worrying me. Making An Effort meant laughing for an hour if I said something that wasn't absolutely deadly serious. And Making An Effort meant Talking About The Future.

They started Making An Effort around the time they stopped trying to talk Alicia into having an abortion. They tried talking to both of us, and they tried talking to me, and they tried talking to her. All of it was a waste of time. She wanted the baby. She said it was the only thing she'd ever wanted, which made no sense to me, but at least it made her sound serious. And every time Robert and Andrea tried talking to me, I said, “I see what you mean. But she won't do it.” And then it got to the stage where you could see the bump, which was close to when you weren't allowed to have an abortion anymore, and they gave up.

I knew what they thought of me. They thought I was some hoodie chav who'd messed up their daughter's future, and they sort of hated me for it. I know it sounds funny, but I could understand that. I mean, I certainly hadn't helped, had I? And the hoodie chav bit, that was just their ignorance. The important bit was that their plans for Alicia had gone up in smoke. I don't really think they had any actual plans, to be honest, but whatever plans they had didn't involve a baby. People like them didn't have a pregnant daughter, and they couldn't get their heads around it, you could see that. But they were trying, and part of the trying was trying to treat me like part of the family. That was why they asked me to live with them.

I was round there for supper, and Alicia was going on about this book she was reading about how a baby could learn ten languages if you taught it early enough. And Andrea wasn't really listening, and then she said, “Where are you going to live when the baby's born?”

And we looked at each other. We'd already decided. We just hadn't told them.

“Here,” said Alicia.

“Here.”

“Yeah.”

“Both of you?” said Robert.

“Which both?” said Alicia. “Me and Sam? Or me and the baby?”

“All three of you then.”

“Yeah.”

“Wow,” said Andrea. “Right. OK.”

“What did you think was going to happen?” said Alicia.

“I thought you'd be living here with us, and Sam would come and visit,” said Andrea.

“We're together,” said Alicia. “So if we don't live here, we'll have to live somewhere else.”

“No, no, darling, of course Sam's welcome here.”

“Sounds like it.”

“He is. Really. But you're very young to be living as man and wife under your parents' roof.”

When she put it like that, Alicia's idea sounded completely insane. Man and wife? Man? Wife? I was going to be a man? And Alicia was going to be my wife? I don't know if you ever play word-association games, like where someone says “fish” and you say “chips” or “sea” or “finger.” But if someone said to me, “man,” I would have said things like “beer” or “suit” or “shave.” I didn't wear a suit or shave, although I had drunk beer. And now I was going to have a wife.

“Don't be melodramatic, Andrea,” said Robert. “She means that she'll be sharing a room with Sam and the baby. At least for the time being.”

That didn't sound much better, really. I had never shared a room with anyone since I was nine, when I used to go on sleepovers. I stopped because I could never get to sleep with someone else fidgeting in the next bed. This was all beginning to sound real. Real and terrible.

“Maybe you should see how it goes with Sam living up the road,” said Andrea.

“If you want me to be unhappy, we could do that,” said Alicia.

“Oh, for God's sake,” said Robert. “Not everything we say or do is calculated to destroy your life, you know. Sometimes, just very occasionally, we try and think about what's best for you.”

“Very occasionally,” said Alicia. “Very, very occasionally.”

“I was being sarcastic.”

“And I wasn't.”

“Do you know, Sam, how terrible it is sharing a bedroom with somebody?”

Robert looked at her.

“Sorry, but it's the truth,” said Andrea. “The lack of sleep. The farting and snoring.”

“I don't fart or snore,” said Alicia.

“You don't know what you do,” said Andrea. “Because you've never shared a bed with anybody. And you don't know what a baby will do to you.”

“No one's stopping you from moving out,” said Robert.

“You think I haven't thought of it?” said Andrea.

“Well, this is a good example, I must say,” said Andrea. “Welcome, Sam. Come and join our happy family.”

If I had been Robert or Andrea, I would have said, Don't you see? This is what it's like? Man and wife? Let Sam stay with his mum! He can see the baby all day, every day! But they didn't say that. They must have thought it, but they didn't say it, however much I wanted them to.

I needed my skateboard.

 

When I got home that night, I went straight to my room to pick up my board. I hadn't used it since my trip to Hastings. It was leaning on the wall underneath my poster of TH, and I could tell that he was disappointed in me.

“I've had a lot on my plate,” I said.

“I didn't want the responsibility of including someone so closely in my life and have her involved on all different levels,” said Tony. I didn't want to get involved in a conversation, so I just picked up the board and ran.

Rubbish was down at The Bowl, on his own, doing a few tricks. I hadn't seen him since I'd found out about Alicia, but he didn't ask where I'd been, because he knew. He knew about the baby, anyway. Nobody had ever talked about me before, as far as I knew, because what was there to talk about? I'd never done anything. People found out stuff about me because I told them, not because they were telling each other. Now everybody knew my business, and it was weird.

“How's it going?” he said. Rubbish was practising his rock-and-rolls. He hadn't got any better.

“Yeah, well. You know.”

I was doing a 5-0 grind in The Bowl, pretending as though I was concentrating on it more than I was.

“You're screwed, aren't you?”

“Thanks.”

“Sorry. But you are.”

“Thanks again.”

“Sorry. But—”

“You weren't going to tell me I'm screwed for a third time, were you?”

“So explain why you're not.”

“I can't explain why I'm not. Because I am.”

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry. Again. I've just realized.”

“What?”

“I don't know. When somebody tells a kid our age that he's screwed, he's usually not, is he? Not really. I mean, maybe it will end up with him getting a slap. Or a bollocking from a teacher. But it isn't going to ruin their life, is it? Something little happens and it's over. But you becoming a father…That's serious, isn't it? I mean, you really are—”

“Don't say it again. Really. Otherwise you're screwed. Old-school. In other words, I'll have to give you a slap.”

I never hit anyone, but he was doing my head in.

“Sorry. I mean, sorry I nearly said it again. And I'm sorry for all that's happened.”

“Why, was it your fault? Was it actually you that got Alicia pregnant?”

I was joking, but because I'd just offered to give him a slap, he looked worried.

“I've never even met her. I just meant, you know. Bad luck.”

“Yeah. Well.”

“What are you going to do?”

“About what?”

“I dunno. About anything.”

“I haven't got a clue.”

I was enjoying the feeling of the decks mashing against the concrete, mostly because I knew what I was doing. It was the first time I'd known what I was doing for ages. Rubbish was rubbish at grinds and rock-and-rolls and pretty much everything, but I still wanted to be him. I wished that skate tricks were all I had to worry about. I used to be like Rubbish, except I could do the tricks. From where I was standing, that looked like the perfect life. I'd had the perfect life, and I hadn't realized it, and now it was over.

“Rubbish,” I said.

He ignored me. The trouble with being called Rubbish is you don't always know when someone's talking to you.

“Rubbish. Listen to me.”

“Yeah.”

“Your life is perfect. Did you know that?”

Right at that second, he bailed. He smashed his knees right into the concrete bench, came off the board, and lay on the ground swearing and trying not to cry.

“Did you know that?” I said again. “Perfect. I'd give anything to be you right at this second.”

He looked at me to see if I was laughing at him, but I wasn't. I meant it. I'd slammed too. I'd never had a slam like this, though. The wheels had come off the trucks, the trucks had come off the deck, and I'd shot twenty feet into the air and gone straight into a brick wall. That's what it felt like, anyway. And there wasn't even a mark on me.

 

“Andrea called,” Mum said later. I stared at her.

“Alicia's mum,” she said.

“Oh. Yeah.”

“She said you and Alicia are planning to live together at her house when the baby's born.”

I looked at my shoes. I hadn't ever properly noticed that the holes for the laces were red round the outside.

“You didn't want to talk to me about this?”

“Yeah. I was going to.”

“When?”

“Today. Now. If you hadn't got in first. You beat me to it by ten seconds.”

“You think this is all a joke?”

It's true I was joking about when I was going to tell her. But the point of my joke was that nothing was funny, really, and I was trying to be brave. I was taking everything so seriously that making a joke seemed like the nearest I could get to being a hero. I thought she'd see that, and love me for it.

“No,” I said. “Sorry.” There was no point in explaining it all. She wasn't going to think I was being heroic.

“Do you want to live at Alicia's house?”

“It's gone past what I want, hasn't it?”

“No,” she said. “You mustn't think that. You're a kid. You've got your whole life in front of you.”

“Is that what you felt when you got pregnant?”

“No. Course not. But…”

“But what?”

“Nothing.”

“But what?”

“Well. I didn't have a choice, did I? I was carrying you around with me. I couldn't escape.”

“You mean blokes can get out of it?”

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. My mum! Telling me I should run!

“I'm not saying you can get out of it. I'm not suggesting that you run away to Hastings. That would be pathetic.”

“Thanks.”

“You can't have it both ways. You can't go all high and mighty about blokes not getting out of it five minutes after you tried to do exactly that.”

There wasn't much I could say.

“I'm saying, you know, go there every day. Look after your kid. Be a father to him. Just…don't live in Alicia's bedroom.”

“She wants me to. And there's a lot of getting up in the night and burping and all that, isn't there? Why should she have to do that on her own?”

“Has she seen your bedroom? You can't hardly live with yourself, let alone someone else. You going to throw your dirty underwear all over her floor? Have you thought about all of that?”

I hadn't thought of any of it. And there wasn't any point anyway.

 

I talked to TH again last thing that night.

“What am I going to do?” I said. “Don't go on about your life. I'm fed up of hearing about your life. Tell me about my life. Say, ‘Sam, this is what you've got to do about Alicia and the baby,' and then just give me some answers.”

“Riley demanded a change in our lifestyles, and Cindy and I figured out a way to make it all work,” he said.

Riley was his son. I wasn't interested in his son.

“What did I just tell you?” I said. “It's no use to me, all that business about Riley. I'm not a world-famous skater. You're not listening to me.”

“How the park locals stopped themselves from beating me up I'll never know. I could be the biggest idiot without realizing it.”

We'd been here before. I realized he said this when he was frustrated with me, when he thought I was being an idiot. And when he was frustrated, he whizzed me.

I went to bed. But I didn't know when I was going to wake up.