Slam (4 page)

“I'll see what I'm up to,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“Well, you know. I've got homework some nights. And I usually do quite a lot of skating over the weekends.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Anyway. Do I have to find someone to come with me?”

She looked at me as if I was mad, or stupid.

“What do you mean?”

“I don't want to go to the cinema with you and your boyfriend,” I said. Do you see my clever plan? This was my way of finding out what was going on.

“If I had a boyfriend, I wouldn't be asking you, would I? If I had a boyfriend, you wouldn't be sitting here now, and neither would I, probably.”

“I thought you had a boyfriend.”

“Where did you get that from?”

“I dunno. Why haven't you, anyway?”

“We split up.”

“Oh. When?”

“Tuesday. I'm heartbroken. As you can tell.”

“How long had you been going out?”

“Two months. But he wanted to have sex with me, and I wasn't ready to have sex with him.”

“Right.”

I looked at my shoes. Five minutes ago she didn't want me to know what music she listened to, and now she was telling me about her sex life.

“So maybe he'll change his mind,” I said. “About wanting sex, I mean.”

“Or maybe I will,” she said.

“Right.”

Was she saying that she might change her mind about being ready for sex? In other words, was she saying that she might have sex with me? Or was she saying that she might change her mind about having sex with him? And if that was what she meant, where did that leave me? Was it possible that she'd go out with me, but at any moment she might decide that the time had come to go off and sleep with him? This seemed like important information, but I wasn't sure how to go about getting it.

“Hey,” she said. “Want to go up to my room? Watch some TV? Or listen to some music?”

She stood up and pulled me to my feet. What was this, now? Had she already changed her mind about being ready for sex? Is that what we were going upstairs for? Was I about to lose my virginity? I felt like I was watching some film I didn't understand.

 

I'd been close to having sex a couple of times, but I'd chickened out. Having sex when you're fifteen is a big deal, if you've got a thirty-two-year-old mum. And this girl Jenny I was seeing kept saying that everything would be all right, but I didn't know what that meant, really, and I didn't know whether she was one of those girls who actually wanted a baby, for reasons that I could never understand. There were a couple of young mums at my school, and they acted like a baby was an iPod or a new mobile or something, some kind of gadget that they wanted to show off. There are many differences between a baby and an iPod. And one of the biggest differences is, no one's going to mug you for your baby. You don't have to keep a baby in your pocket if you're on the bus late at night. And if you think about it, that must tell you something, because people will mug you for anything worth having, which means that a baby can't be worth having. Anyway, I wouldn't sleep with Jenny, and she told a few of her friends, and for a while people shouted things at me in the corridors and that. And the next boy who went out with her…Actually, I don't want to tell you what he said. It was stupid and disgusting and it made me look bad, and that's all you need to know. After that I started to take skating a lot more seriously. It meant I could spend more time on my own.

 

As we were going up the stairs to her bedroom, I had this fantasy that Alicia would close the door, and look at me, and start to get undressed, and to tell you the honest truth, I wasn't sure how I'd feel about that. I mean, there was a plus side, obviously. But on the other hand, she might expect me to know what I was doing, and I didn't. And my mum was downstairs, and who was to say that she wouldn't come looking for me at any moment? And Alicia's mum and dad were downstairs, and also I had a feeling that if she did want to have sex, it was a lot to do with this boy she'd just dumped, and not so much to do with me.

I needn't have worried. We went into her room, and she closed the door, and then she remembered that she was halfway through this film called
The Forty-Year-Old Virgin,
so we watched the rest of that. I sat in this old armchair she's got in there, and she sat on the floor between my legs. And after a little while, she leaned against me so that her back was pressing into my knees. That was what I remembered later. It felt like a message. And then when the film had finished, we went downstairs, and my mum was just starting to look for me, and we went home.

But as we were walking up the road, Alicia came running after us in her bare feet, and she gave me this black-and-white postcard of a couple kissing. I stared at the picture, and I must have been looking a bit clueless, because she rolled her eyes and said, “Turn it over.” And on the back was her mobile number.

“For the cinema tomorrow,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Right.”

And when she'd gone, my mum raised her eyebrows up as far as they would go, and said, “So you're going to the cinema tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Looks like it.”

And my mum laughed, and said, “Was I right? Or was I right?”

And I said, “You were right.”

 

Tony Hawk lost his virginity when he was sixteen. He'd just skated in a contest called The King of the Mount at a place called Trashmore in Virginia Beach. He says in his book that he lasted half as long as a run in a vert contest. A run in a vert contest takes forty-five seconds. So he lasted twenty-two and a half seconds. I was glad he'd told me. I never forgot those figures.

 

The next day was Sunday, and I went down to Grind City with Rabbit. Or rather, I saw Rabbit at the bus stop, so we ended up going together. Rabbit can do tricks I can't—he's been doing gay twists for ages, and he was right on the edge of being able to do a McTwist, which is a 540-degree turn on a ramp.

When I try to talk to Mum about tricks, she always gets muddled up by the numbers. “Five hundred forty degrees?” she said when I was trying to describe a McTwist. “How the hell do you know when you've done five hundred forty degrees?” As if we spend our time counting the degrees one by one. But a 540 is just 360 plus 180—in other words, it's just a turn and a half. Mum seemed disappointed when I put it like that. I think she hoped that skating was turning me into some kind of mathematical genius, and I was doing calculations in my head that other kids could only do on a computer. TH, by the way, has done a 900. Maybe if I tell you that's basically impossible, you'll start to see why he should have a country named after him.

McTwists are really hard, and I haven't even begun thinking about them yet, mostly because you end up eating a lot of concrete while you're practising. You can't do it without slamming every couple of minutes, but that's the thing about Rabbit. He's so thick that he doesn't mind how much concrete he eats. He's lost like three hundred teeth skating. I'm surprised the people who run Grind City don't put his teeth on the tops of walls to stop people getting in at night, the way some people use bits of broken glass.

I didn't have a good day, though. I was distracted. I couldn't stop thinking about the evening at the cinema. I know it sounds stupid, but I didn't want to turn up with a big fat bloody lip, and statistics show that fat lips tend to happen to me more on a Sunday than on any other day of the week.

Anyway, Rabbit noticed that I was just messing around with a few ollies, and he came over.

“What's up? Lost your bottle?”

“Kind of.”

“What's the worst that can happen? That's how I think about it. I've been to casualty like fifteen times because of skating. The worst bit is on the way to the hospital, because that hurts. You're lying there all groaning and moaning, and blood everywhere. And you think, Is it worth it? But then they give you something to take the pain away. Unless you're unconscious. Then you don't need it. Not for a while.”

“Sounds good.”

“It's just my philosophy. You know. Pain can't kill you. Unless it's really bad.”

“Yeah. Thanks. Something to think about there.”

“Is there?” He seemed surprised. I don't suppose anyone had ever told Rabbit he'd given them something to think about. It was because I wasn't really listening.

I wasn't going to say anything, because what's the point of talking to Rabbit? But then I realized that it was killing me, not telling anyone about Alicia, and if I didn't talk to him, I'd have to go home and talk to Mum or to TH. Sometimes it doesn't matter who you talk to, as long as you talk. That's why I spend half my life talking to a life-sized poster of a skater. At least Rabbit was a real person.

“I met this girl.”

“Where?”

“Does that matter?” I could see that it was going to be a frustrating conversation.

“I'd like to try and picture the scene,” said Rabbit.

“My mum's friend's party.”

“So is she like really old?”

“No. She's my age.”

“What was she doing at the party?”

“She lives there, “I said. “She—”

“She lives at a party?” Rabbit said. “How does that work?”

I was wrong. It was much easier explaining things to a poster.

“She doesn't live at a party. She lives in the house where the party was. She's my mum's friend's daughter.”

Rabbit repeated what I'd just said, as if it was the most complicated sentence in the history of the world.

“Hold on…Your mum's…friend's…daughter. OK. I've got it.”

“Good. We're going out tonight. To the cinema. And I'm worried about getting my face all smashed up.”

“Why does she want to smash your face up?”

“No, no. I didn't mean I was worried about
her
smashing my face up. I'm worried about getting my face smashed up here. A bad slam. And then, you know. I'll look terrible.”

“Gotcha,” said Rabbit. “Is she pretty?”

“Very,” I said. I was sure that was true, but by then I couldn't remember what she looked like. I'd spent so much time thinking about her that I no longer had a clear picture of her in my mind.

“Ah, well,” said Rabbit.

“What does that mean?”

“Let's face it, you're not all that, are you?”

“No, I'm not. I know. But thanks for building up my confidence,” I said.

“Thinking about it, I reckon you might do better if you actually do smash your face up,” said Rabbit.

“How d'you work that out?”

“Well, see, say you go along with, you know, a couple of black eyes, or even a broken nose. You can tell her you look bad because of the skating. But if you go along looking just like that…What excuse have you got? None.”

I'd had enough. I'd tried talking to Rabbit, but it was hopeless. And it wasn't just hopeless—it was depressing too. I was really nervous about going to the cinema with Alicia. In fact, I couldn't remember ever feeling as nervous about anything, ever, apart from maybe my first day at primary school. And this fool was telling me that the only way I was going to stand any kind of chance was to make my face all bloody and swollen, so that she couldn't see what I really looked like.

“You know what, Rabbit? You're right. I'm not going to mess about. Acid drops and gay twists, all afternoon.”

“Top man.”

And then, while he was watching me, I picked up my board and walked straight out the gate and into the street. I wanted to talk to TH.

 

On the way home, I realized that I hadn't even arranged anything with Alicia yet. When the bus came, I went up to the top deck and sat right at the front, on my own. Then I got her postcard out of my pocket and dialled her number.

She didn't recognize my voice when I said hello, and for a moment I felt sick. What if I'd made all this up? I hadn't made up the party. But maybe she hadn't pressed against me the way I remembered it, and maybe she only said something about the cinema because—

“Oh, hi,” she said, and I could hear her smiling. “I was worried that you weren't going to call.” And I stopped feeling sick.

 

Listen: I know you don't want to hear about every single little moment. You don't want to know about what time we arranged to meet, or any of that stuff. All I'm trying to say is it was really special, that day, and I can remember just about every second of it. I can remember the weather, I can remember the smell of the bus, I can remember the little scab on my nose I was picking at while I was talking to her on my mobile. I can remember what I said to TH when I got home, and what I wore to go out, and what she was wearing, and how easy it was when I saw her. Maybe some people would think that because of what happened later, it was all just tacky and grubby, typical modern teenager stuff. But it wasn't. It was nothing like that at all.

 

We didn't even go to a film. We started talking outside the cinema, and then we went for a Frappuccino in the Starbucks next door, and then we just sat there. Every now and again one of us said, “We'd better go, if we're going.” But neither of us made any move to leave. It was her idea to go back to her place. And, when the time came, it was her idea to have sex. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I think before that night I was a bit scared of her. She was beautiful, and her mum and dad were quite posh, and I was afraid she'd decide that just because I was the only person of her age at her mum's party, it didn't mean we had to go out together. The party was over. She could talk to who she wanted now.

But she wasn't scary, not really. Not in the posh way. She wasn't really what you'd call a brainbox. Or maybe that's not fair, because it wasn't like she was stupid. But seeing as her mum was a councillor and her dad taught at university, you'd think she'd be doing better at school. She spent half the evening talking about the lessons she'd been thrown out of, and the trouble she'd got into, and the number of times she'd been grounded. She'd been grounded the night of the party, which was why she was there. All that stuff about wanting to meet me was bollocks, as I'd suspected.