Slam (2 page)

A couple of
other things, before we go on. First of all, my mum was thirty-two years old at the time I'm talking about. She's three years older than David Beckham, a year older than Robbie Williams, four years younger than Jennifer Aniston. She knows all the dates. If you want, she can supply a much longer list. The list hasn't got any really young people on it, though. She never says, “I'm thirteen years older than Joss Stone” or anything like that. She only knows about people round about her age who look good.

For a while, it didn't really register that she wasn't old enough to be the mother of a fifteen-year-old boy, but this last year especially, it's started to seem a little bit weird. First of all, I grew about four inches, so more and more people think she's my aunt, or even my sister. And on top of that…There isn't a good way of saying this. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll repeat a conversation I had with Rabbit, who's this guy I know from skating. He's like two years older than me, and he goes to Grind City too, and we meet from time to time at the bus stop with our boards, or at The Bowl, which is the other place we skate at when we can't be bothered to go to Grind City. It's not really a bowl. It's a kind of concrete pond thing that was supposed to cheer up the flats around the corner, but it hasn't got any water in it anymore, because they started to worry about kids drowning. They should have worried about kids drinking it, if you ask me, because people used to piss in it on the way back from the pub and all sorts. It's dry now, so if you're looking for somewhere to skate when you've only got half an hour or so, then it's perfect. There are three of us who use it all the time—me, Rabbit and Rubbish, who can't really skate, which is why he's called Rubbish, but who at least talks sense. If you want to learn something about skating, watch Rabbit. If you want a conversation that isn't completely insane, talk to Rubbish. In a perfect world, there'd be somebody who had Rabbit's skills and Rubbish's brain, but as you know, we don't live in a perfect world.

 

So this one evening, I was messing around down at the Bowl, and Rabbit was there, and…Like I said, Rabbit isn't the most incredible brainbox, but even so. This is what he said.

“Yo, Sam,” he said.

Did I tell you that my name is Sam? Well, now you know.

“All right?”

“How's it going, man?”

“OK.”

“Right. Hey, Sam. I know what I was gonna ask you. You know your mum?”

See what I mean about Rabbit being thick? Yes, I told him. I knew my mum.

“Is she going out with anyone at the moment?”

“My mum?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you want to know whether my mum's going out with anyone at the moment?” I asked him.

“Mind your own business,” he said. And he was blushing.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Rabbit wanted to go out with my mum! I suddenly had this picture of coming in to the flat and seeing the two of them curled up on the sofa, watching a DVD, and I couldn't help but smile. My mum wasn't the best judge of boyfriends, but she wasn't that stupid.

“What's funny?” said Rabbit.

“No, no, nothing. But…How old do you think my mum is?”

“How old? I don't know.”

“Guess.”

He looked into space, as if he were trying to see her up there.

“Twenty-three? Twenty-four?”

This time I didn't laugh. Rabbit was such a moron that it sort of went beyond laughing.

“Well,” I said. “I'll give you a hand. How old am I?”

“You?”

He couldn't see the connection.

“Yeah, me.”

“I dunno.”

“OK. I'm fifteen.”

“Right. So what?”

“So. Say she was twenty when she had me.” I wasn't going to say how old she really was. It might not have been old enough to put him off.

“Yeah.” Suddenly he got it. “Oh, man. She's your mum. I never twigged. I mean, I knew she was your mum, but I never did, like, the sums…. Shit. Listen, don't tell her I was asking, OK?”

“Why not? She'd be flattered.”

“Yeah, but, you know. Thirty-five. She's probably a bit desperate. And I don't want a thirty-five-year-old girlfriend.”

I shrugged. “If you're sure.”

And that was it. But you can see what I'm saying, can't you? Rabbit's not the only one. My other friends would never say anything, but I can tell from how they talk to her that they think she's OK. I can't see it, but then, you never can if someone's related to you, can you? It doesn't matter what I think, though. The point is that I've got a thirty-two-year-old mother that people—
people of my age
—fancy.

 

Here's the other thing I wanted to say. The story of my family, as far as I can tell, is always the same story, over and over again. Someone—my mum, my dad, my grandad—starts off thinking that they're going to do well in school, and then go to college, maybe, and then make pots of money. But instead, they do something stupid, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to make up for the mistake they made. Sometimes it can seem as though kids always do better than their parents. You know—someone's dad was a coal miner, or whatever, but his son goes on to play for a Premiership team, or wins
Pop Idol,
or invents the Internet. Those stories make you feel as though the whole world is on its way up. But in our family, people always slip up on the first step. In fact, most of the time they don't even find the stairs.

There are no prizes for guessing the mistake my thirty-two-year-old mother made, and the same goes for my thirty-three-year-old father. My mum's dad made the mistake of thinking he was going to be a footballer. That was how he was going to make pots of money. He was offered a youth-team place at Queen's Park Rangers, back in the days when the Rangers were good. So he packed up school and signed on, and he lasted a couple of years. Nowadays they make kids do exams, he says, so that they've got something to fall back on if they don't make it. They didn't make him do anything, and at eighteen he was out, with no skills and no training. My mum reckons she could have gone to university, but instead she was married just before her seventeenth birthday.

Everyone thought I was going to do something stupid with skating, and I kept trying to tell them there wasn't anything stupid I could do. Tony Hawk turned pro when he was fourteen, but even in California he couldn't make any money out of it for a while. How was I going to turn pro in Islington? Who was going to pay me? And why? So they stopped worrying about that, and started worrying about school instead. I knew how much it meant to them. It meant a lot to me too. I wanted to be the first person in the history of our family to get a qualification in something while they were still at school. (My mum got a qualification after she'd left, but that's because she messed up school by having me.) I'd be the one to break the pattern. Mrs. Gillett asking me whether I'd thought of doing art and design at college…that was a big thing. I went straight home and told Mum. I wish I'd kept it to myself now.

 

Alicia didn't go to my school. I liked that. I've been out with people from school before, and sometimes it seems childish. They write you notes, and even if they're not in your class, you bump into them like fifty times a day. You get sick of them before you've even been anywhere, just about. Alicia went to St. Mary and St. Michael, and I liked hearing about teachers I didn't know and kids I would never meet. There seemed more to talk about. You get bored being with someone who knows every zit on Darren Holmes' face.

Alicia's mum knew my mum from the council. My mum works for the council, and Alicia's mum is a councillor, which is like being the prime minister, except you don't rule over the whole country. You just rule over a tiny bit of Islington. Or Hackney, or wherever. It's a bit of a waste of time, to be honest. It's not like you get to drop bombs on Osama bin Laden or anything like that. You just talk about how to get more teenagers to use the libraries, which is how Mum met Alicia's mum.

Anyway, it was Alicia's mum's birthday, and she was having a party, and she asked my mum. And she also asked my mum to bring me along. According to my mum, Alicia had said she'd like to meet me. I didn't believe it. Who says stuff like that? Not me. And now I know Alicia, not her either. I'd like to meet TH, and Alicia would like to meet, I don't know, Kate Moss or Kate Winslet or any famous girl who has nice clothes. But you don't go round saying you'd like to meet the son of somebody your mum knows from council meetings. Alicia's mum was trying to find some friends for her, if you ask me. Or at least, she was trying to find some friends, maybe even a boyfriend, that she approved of. Well, that all went wrong, didn't it?

I don't really know why I went, thinking about it. Actually, that's not quite true. I went because I said to my mum that I didn't want to go, and I didn't want to meet any girl that she liked. And my mum said, “Believe me, you do.”

And she was dead serious when she said it, which surprised me. I looked at her.

“How do you know?”

“Because I've met her.”

“And you think she's someone I'd like?”

“As far as I can tell, she's someone every boy likes.”

“You mean she's a slag?”

“Sam!”

“Sorry. But that's what it sounds like.”

“That's exactly what I didn't say. I was very careful. I said every boy likes her. I didn't say she likes every boy. Do you see the difference?”

Mum always thinks I'm being sexist, so I try to be careful—not only with her, but with everyone. It seems to make a difference to some girls. If you say something that isn't sexist to the right sort of girl, she likes you more. Say one of your mates is going on about how girls are stupid, and you say, “Not
all
girls are stupid,” then it can make you look good. There have to be girls listening, though, obviously. Otherwise it's a waste of time.

Mum was right, though. She hadn't said that Alicia was a slag. She'd just said that Alicia was hot, and it is different, isn't it? I hate it when she catches me out like that. Anyway, it got me interested. Mum describing someone as hot…it sort of made it official, somehow. I really wanted to see what someone who was officially hot looked like, I suppose. That still didn't mean I wanted to talk to her. But I did want to look.

I wasn't interested in a girlfriend, I didn't think. I hadn't been out with anyone for longer than seven weeks, and about three of those seven didn't count, because we didn't really see each other. I wanted to dump her, and she wanted to dump me, so we avoided each other. That way, we stayed undumped. Otherwise, it's just been a couple of weeks here and three weeks there. I knew that later on I'd have to try harder than that, but I thought I was happier skating with Rabbit than sitting in McDonald's not saying anything to somebody I didn't know very well.

 

My mum got dressed up for the party, and she looked OK. She was wearing a black dress, and a bit of makeup, and you could tell she was making an effort.

“What do you think?” she said.

“Yeah. All right.”

“Is that all right in a good way, or all right in an OK way?”

“A bit better than OK. Not as good as actually good.”

But she could tell I was joking, so she just kind of swiped me round the ear.

“Appropriate?”

I knew what that meant, but I made a face like she'd just said something in Japanese, and she sighed.

“It's a fiftieth-birthday party,” she said. “Do you think I'll look right? Or out of place?”

“Fiftieth?”

“Yes.”

“She's fifty?”

“Yes.”

“Bloody hell. So how old's her daughter, then? Like, thirty or something? Why would I want to hang out with a thirty-year-old?”

“Sixteen. I told you. That's normal. You have a baby when you're thirty-four, which is what I should have done, and then when she's sixteen you're fifty.”

“So she was older than you are now when she had this girl.”

“Alicia. Yes. And like I said, it's not weird. It's normal.”

“I'm glad you're not fifty.”

“Why? What difference does it make to you?”

She was right, really. It didn't make an awful lot of difference to me.

“I'll be thirty-three at your fiftieth.”

“So?”

“I'll be able to get drunk. And you won't be able to say anything.”

“That's the best argument I've ever heard for having a kid at sixteen. In fact, it's the only argument I've ever heard for having a kid at sixteen.”

I didn't like it when she said things like that. It always felt like it was my fault, somehow. Like I'd persuaded her I wanted to come out eighteen years early. That's the thing about being an unwanted baby, which is what I was, let's face it. You've always got to remind yourself it was their idea, not yours.

 

They lived in one of those big old houses off of Highbury New Park. I'd never been in one before. Mum knows people who live in places like that, because of work and her book group, but I don't. We only lived about half a mile from her, but I never used to have any reason to go up Alicia's way until I met her. Everything about her place was different from ours. Hers was big and we lived in a flat. Hers was old and ours was new. Hers was untidy and a bit dusty, and ours was tidy and clean. And they had books everywhere. It's not that we didn't have books at home. But it was more like Mum had a hundred and I had thirty. They had about ten thousand each, or that's what it looked like. There was a bookcase in the hallway, and more going up the stairs, and the bookcases all had books shoved on top of them. And ours were all new, and theirs were all old. I liked everything about our place better, apart from I wished we had more than two bedrooms. When I thought about the future, and what it was going to be like, that's what I saw for myself: a house with loads of bedrooms. I didn't know what I was going to do with them, because I wanted to live on my own, like one of the skaters I saw on MTV once. He had this ginormous house with a swimming pool, and a pool table, and a miniature indoor skate park with padded walls and a vert ramp and a half-pipe. And he had no girlfriend living there, no parents, nothing. I wanted some of that. I didn't know how I was going to get it, but that didn't matter. I had a goal.