Slam (20 page)

 

The contractions stayed the same for a bit, and then slowed down, and then they stopped altogether for a couple of hours. The nurse was cross with us for coming in too early, and told us to go home, but Alicia's mum wasn't having any of that, and shouted at her. We wouldn't have shouted at her. We would have gone home, and Alicia would have ended up having the baby on the bus. When the contractions stopped, Alicia dozed off, which is when I went for a walk and bought my Coke.

She was still asleep when I got back. There was one chair in the room, and Alicia's mum was sitting on it. She was reading a book called
What to Expect When You're Expecting.
I sat down on the floor and played the bricks game on my mobile. We could hear a woman having a really hard time next door, and the noise made whatever was in my stomach turn to mush. Sometimes you know you will remember moments forever, even if there's nothing much happening.

“It's OK,” said Alicia's mum after a while.

“What?”

“Everything. The waiting. The noise next door. It's all life.”

“I suppose.”

She was trying to be nice, so I didn't tell her that was what was bothering me. I didn't particularly want life to be like that. I didn't want the woman next door to be making those noises. I didn't want Alicia to have to make those noises, whenever it was she started again. I didn't even know if I wanted Roof.

“It's funny,” said Andrea. “The last thing you want when you've got a sixteen-year-old daughter is a grandchild. But now it's happening, it's really OK.”

“Yeah,” I said, because I didn't know what else to say, apart from, Well, I'm glad it's OK for you. Except I couldn't think of any way to say it that wouldn't have sounded sarcastic.

“I'm fifty,” she said. “And if Alicia had her baby when I had her, then I'd be sixty-eight. And I'd be old. I mean, I know you think I'm old now. But I can run, and play games, and…Well, it will be fun. So there's a part of me that's glad this has happened.”

“Good.”

“Is there a part of you?”

I thought about it. It wasn't like I didn't know what I wanted to say. What I wanted to say was, No, not really. Even though I met my son when I got whizzed into the future, and he seemed like a really nice kid, and so it feels terrible to say that I don't want him. But I don't feel like a dad, and I'm too young to be a dad, and I don't know how I'm going to cope with the next few hours, let alone the next however many years. But I couldn't say that, could I? Because how could I explain about the future and TH and all that?

Maybe that's why I got whizzed. Maybe Tony Hawk was just stopping me from saying something I might have regretted one day. I know why Andrea wanted to talk. The waiting made everything seem like we only had a little bit of time to say what was on our minds, as if we were going to die in this room. And if it had been a film, I would have told her how much I loved Alicia, and loved our baby, and loved her, and we would have cried and hugged and Alicia would have woken up and the baby would have popped out, just like that. But we weren't in a film, and I didn't love hardly any of those people.

 

I don't know what to say about the rest of it. Alicia woke up soon afterwards, and the contractions started again, and this time they were for real. There's a lot of counting when you have a baby. You count the time between the contractions, and then you count the centimeters. The mother's cervix dilates, which means the hole gets bigger, and the nurse tells you how big it's got, and when it gets to ten centimeters, then you're off. I'm still not sure what the cervix is. It doesn't seem to come up in normal life.

Anyway, Alicia got to ten centimeters without any trouble, and then she stopped sounding like a donkey and started sounding like a lion which is having one of its eyes poked out with a stick. And it wasn't just that she sounded angry either. She actually was angry. She called me names and her mum names and my mum names, and she called the nurse names. It sounded to me like the names she was calling me were worse than the names she was calling the others, which is why Andrea kept having to stop me from walking out the door, but to be honest I might just have been looking for an excuse to leave. It didn't seem like a place where a happy thing could be happening. It seemed more like a place where bombs explode and legs come off and old ladies dressed in black start screaming.

For a long while, you could see the baby's head. I didn't, because I didn't want to look, but it was there, Andrea said, which meant the baby would be coming soon. But then it didn't come soon, because it got stuck, so then the nurse had to cut something. I'm making it sound as though it all happened quickly, but it didn't, until that part. But when the nurse cut whatever it was she cut, the baby just slithered straight out. It looked terrible. It was covered in stuff, blood and slime and I think even some of Alicia's shit, and its face was all squashed. If I hadn't seen it already, I would have thought there was something wrong with it. But Alicia was laughing, and Andrea was crying, and the nurse was smiling. For a moment, I felt nothing.

But then Alicia said, “Mum, Mum. What's this music?”

I hadn't even noticed there was anything playing. We'd had Andrea's CD on repeat for hours, and I'd sort of blocked it out. I had to look at the CD machine to hear a man singing a slow song and playing the piano. It wasn't the sort of thing I'd normally listen to. But then the sort of thing I normally listened to was good for skating to, and absolutely useless for having a baby to.

“I don't know the name of the song,” she said. “But the singer's name is Rufus Wainwright.”

“Rufus,” said Alicia.

I don't know why that got me more than the part where he came slooshing out, but it did. I lost it, then.

“What are you crying for?” said Alicia.

“Because we've just had a baby,” I said.

“Der,” she said. “You've only just noticed?”

And the truth was, I had.

My mum came in about an hour after Roof was born. Andrea must have called her, because I hadn't. I'd forgotten. She came in puffing and panting because she'd been too excited to wait for the lift. “Where is he? Where is he? Let me at him,” she said.

She said it in a funny voice, pretending to be desperate, but she was only pretending to be pretending. She really was desperate, you could tell. She didn't look at Alicia or me or Andrea—not at our faces, anyway. Her eyes were going all over the room looking for any small bundle that might have been a baby. In the end she found the bundle on my chest, and she snatched him away from me.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “It's you.”

I didn't understand what she meant at first. I thought she was saying “It's you!” like you do to someone you've never met before but you've heard a lot about, or someone you haven't seen for a long time and didn't expect to see. So I thought she was being all emotional about meeting him. But what she meant was that Roof looked just like me. Andrea had already said he looked just like Alicia and Rich and about fifteen other people in her family, so I'd have been pretty confused if I'd thought that any of them were worth listening to. They weren't, though, not then. They'd pretty much gone mad. They spoke fast, and they laughed a lot, and sometimes they'd start crying almost before they'd finished laughing. So you weren't really going to get an honest opinion about anything.

My mum held him close and then held him at a distance so that she could look again.

“How was it?” she said, without taking her eyes off the baby's face.

I let Alicia explain about the contractions going away and painkillers and the baby getting stuck, and I just listened. And as I listened, I watched them, and I started to get all muddled up as to who was who. Alicia seemed older than my mum, all of a sudden, because she'd had her baby, and my mum was still a few months away, and my mum was asking her questions, and Alicia had all the answers. So my mum was Alicia's younger sister, and my mum was my sister-in-law. And that made sense, because Andrea seemed so much older than my mum, so it was hard to think of them as Roof's two grandmothers. Andrea seemed more like my mum's mum. And I didn't really know who I was. That's a weird feeling, not knowing what you are to anybody in the room, especially if you're sort of related to all of them.

“He's called Rufus,” I said.

“Rufus,” said my mum. “Oh. Right.”

She didn't like it, you could tell.

“Someone called Rufus was singing when he was born,” I explained.

“Could be worse, then, couldn't it? He might be called Kylie. Or Coldplay. Coldplay Jones.”

At least my mum was the first to do it. Over the next few weeks, I heard that joke about ten thousand times. “Could have been worse, then, couldn't it? He might have been called Snoop. Or Arctic Monkey. Arctic Monkey Jones.” Or Madonna, or Sex Pistol, or Fifty Cent, or Charlotte. They usually choose the name of a woman singer and the name of a band, although sometimes they change the woman for a rapper. And they always put the surname on after they've said the name of the band, just to show how funny it would be. “Or Sex Pistol. Sex Pistol Jones.” They don't put the surname after the name of the woman singer, because that's not so funny. “Or Charlotte. Charlotte Jones.” Charlotte Jones is just a normal girl's name, isn't it? There's no joke there. Anyway, they always say it, and I always feel I have to laugh. In the end, I stopped telling people why he was called Rufus, because I was afraid I was going to end up stoving someone's head in.

It was the surname, though, that got Andrea's attention.

“Or Burns,” she said.

My mum didn't get it, I think because “burns” is a normal word, like “runs” or, you know, “pukes.” When you hear the word “burns,” you think of stuff burning before you think of any member of Alicia's family. We don't, not now, but we used to, and most normal people would.

“Sorry?”

“Burns,” said Andrea. “Coldplay Burns.”

Andrea was being serious about Roof's second name. We'd never had this conversation, and we were going to have it sooner or later, although an hour after his birth seemed to be too much on the sooner side. But even though it was a serious conversation, it was hard not to laugh. It was the way she said it. She was concentrating on the surname, so she said the first name as if it was normal.

“You said Coldplay
Jones,
but he's going to be Coldplay
Burns,
isn't he?” Andrea said.

I caught Alicia's eye. She was trying hard not to giggle too. I don't know why we thought we couldn't. Maybe it was because we could tell that they were both so serious. But if we'd giggled, we could have stopped them.

“Unless Alicia and Sam get married in the next few weeks, and Alicia takes Sam's name. Either of which scenario seems highly unlikely,” Andrea continued.

My mum smiled politely. “I think in these cases you can choose the surname, can't you? Anyway. We don't want to argue about it now.”

“I don't think there's anything to argue about, is there? I'm sure we all want to give this child the best possible start in life, and…”

Oh, man. Alicia and I have had arguments about her mum. Alicia says that she's really OK, but she just speaks without thinking sometimes. I don't know if that makes sense. I mean, a lot of people speak without thinking, I can see that. But whether they're a nice person or not really depends on what comes out, doesn't it? Because, you know, if you say something racist to someone without thinking, it must mean you're a racist, mustn't it? Because that means you've got to think all the time to stop yourself saying racist things. In other words, the racism's in there all the time, and you need your brain to stop it. Andrea's not a racist, but she is a snob, because she needs to think long and hard to stop herself saying snobby things. What did that mean, that stuff about Roof needing the best possible start in life? The obvious answer is, it didn't mean anything. It didn't really matter whether he was called Coldplay Jones or Coldplay Burns. You'd have thought that being called Coldplay anything would be the problem, ha ha. But there's no difference in the surnames, is there? You've got no idea whether Mr. Burns is posher than Mr. Jones just from reading their names on a list.

But that wasn't what she meant. It was all about the families, wasn't it? She was trying to say that Rufus Jones would leave school at sixteen to be a dad, and get some rubbish job and no GCSEs, and probably start taking crack. But Rufus Burns would, I don't know, go to university and become a doctor or a prime minister or whatever.

“I'm sorry,” said my mum. “Can you explain that?”

“I would have thought it's obvious,” said Andrea. “No offense, but—”

“No offense?” said my mum. “How do you work that out? How can what you're about to say not be offensive?”

“I'm not offering an opinion about your family,” said Alicia's mum. “I'm just talking about the facts.”

“And what are the facts about this baby?” said my mum. “He's not an hour old yet.”

It was like a horror movie, or something out of some Bible. Two angels, one good and one bad, fighting over the soul of a tiny baby. My mum was the good angel, and I'm not just saying that because she was my mum.

Just then, even before Andrea could tell us the facts about this baby, Alicia's dad walked in. He could tell there was an atmosphere, because he said “Hello” quite quietly, as if even that one word might set someone off somewhere.

“Hi, Robert,” said my mum. And she stood up, kissed him on the cheek, and handed him Roof. “Congratulations.”

Robert held him for a moment and got a bit teared up.

“How was it?” he said.