Slam (5 page)

She didn't want to go to college.

“You do, then?” she said.

“Yeah. Of course.”

“Why ‘of course'?”

“I dunno.”

I did know. But I didn't want to go into all that stuff about the history of my family. If she found out that none of us—my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, nobody—had ever been to college, then she might not have wanted to spend any time with me.

“So what are you going to do?” I asked her. “When you leave school?”

“I don't want to tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you'll think it's bigheaded.”

“How can it be bigheaded? If it's nothing to do with being a bighead?”

“There's more than one way of being a bighead, you know. It doesn't have to involve passing exams and all that.”

I was lost. I couldn't think of a single thing she could say that would make me think she was a bighead, if it didn't involve passing exams, or maybe sport. Suddenly I wasn't even sure what it meant, being a bighead. It meant showing off, right? But didn't it mean showing off about how clever you were? Did anyone ever call TH a bighead because he could do loads of difficult tricks?

“I swear I won't think you're a bighead.”

“I want to be a model.”

Yeah, well, I could see what she meant. She was showing off. But what was I supposed to say? I can tell you, it was a tricky situation. I was going to tell you to avoid ever going out with anyone who says she wants to be a model, but let's face it, that's sort of what we all want, really, isn't it? Someone who looks like a model, but without the flat chest. In other words, if you're with someone who says she wants to be a model, you probably aren't interested in me telling you she's bad news. (Definitely avoid going out with ugly girls who say they want to be models. Not because they're ugly, but because they're mad.)

I didn't know much about modelling then, and I know even less about it now. Alicia was very pretty, I could see that, but she wasn't as thin as a rake, and she had some spots, so I didn't know whether she stood a chance of being the next Kate Moss. Probably not, I reckoned. I also didn't know whether she was telling me this because it really was her ambition, or because she needed to hear me tell her how much I fancied her.

“That's not bigheaded,” I said. “You could be a model easily, if you wanted to be.”

I knew what I was saying. I knew that I'd just increased my chances with Alicia in all sorts of ways. I didn't know who believed what, but it didn't matter really.

We slept together for the first time that night.

 

“Have you got anything?” she said, when it was obvious that we might need something.

“No. Of course not.”

“Why ‘of course not'?”

“Because…I thought we were going to the cinema.”

“And you don't carry anything around with you? Just in case?”

I just shook my head. I knew blokes at school who did that, but they were just showing off, most of them. They did it to look flash. There was this one kid, Robbie Brady, who must have shown me the same Durex box fifteen times. And I'm like, Yeah, well, anyone can
buy
them.
Buying
them isn't a big deal. But I never said anything. I'd always thought that if I needed anything, I'd know well in advance, because that's the way I am. I never go out thinking, Tonight I'm going to shag someone I don't know, so I'd better take a condom with me. I'd always hoped it would all be a bit more planned than that. I'd always hoped that we might have talked about it beforehand, so that when it happened we were both prepared for it, and it would be relaxed, and special. I never liked the sound of the stories I heard from kids at school. They were always pleased with themselves, but it never sounded like the sort of sex you read about, or saw in porn movies. It was always quick, and sometimes they were outside, and sometimes there were other people nearby. I knew I'd rather not bother than do it like that.

“Oh, you're a nice boy,” said Alicia. “My last boyfriend, he always carried a condom around.”

You see? That was exactly what I meant. He always carried one around, and he never got to use it, because Alicia didn't like the way he was trying to put pressure on her. Sometimes condoms really
really
stop you from making babies. If you're the sort of kid that always has one on you, then no one wants to sleep with you anyway. At least I was with someone who wanted to have sex with me. Did that make me any better off, though? Alicia's ex didn't have sex with her because he always carried a condom around; I wasn't going to have sex with her because I didn't. At least she wanted to have sex with me, though. So on the whole I was glad I was me. Which was probably just as well.

“I'm going to go and steal one,” said Alicia.

“Where from?”

“My parents' bedroom.”

She stood up, and started to walk towards the door. She had a vest on, and her knickers, and if anyone saw her, they wouldn't need to be an incredible genius to work out what had been going on in her room.

“You're going to get me killed,” I said.

“Oh, don't be so soppy,” she said, but she didn't explain why a fear of being killed was soppy. To me, it was just common sense.

So I had probably two minutes on my own in her bedroom, lying on her bed, and I spent it trying to remember how we'd got from there to here. The truth was, there wasn't much to it. We came in, said hello to her mum and dad, went upstairs, and that was it, pretty much. We never talked about it. We just did what we wanted to do. I was pretty sure, though, that she wanted to go all the way because of her ex. It wasn't much to do with me. I mean, I don't think she'd have wanted to do it if she hated me. But when she'd said to me at the party that she might change her mind, I could see now that she wanted to get him back for something. It was like a joke on him. He kept asking her, and she kept saying no, and then he got pissed off and dumped her, and so she decided to sleep with the next person who came along, as long as he was half-decent. I had a bet with myself that if we did have sex that night, it wouldn't stay a secret between us. She'd have to find some way of letting him know she wasn't a virgin. That was sort of the point of it.

 

And suddenly I didn't want to do it anymore. I know, I know. There was this beautiful girl I really liked, and she had just taken me up to her bedroom, and she'd made it obvious that we were up there for a reason. But when I'd worked out what was going on, it didn't feel right. There were three of us in her bedroom that night, me, her and him, and I decided that because it was my first time, I'd prefer to keep the numbers down. I wanted to wait until he'd gone, just to make sure she was still interested.

Alicia came back in, holding a small square silver packet.

“Ta-ra!” she said, and she held it up in the air.

“Are you sure it's, you know, all right? It hasn't gone past its sell-by date?”

I don't know why I said this. I mean, I know I said it because I was looking for excuses. But there were lots of excuses I could have used, and this one wasn't a very good one.

“Why shouldn't it be all right?” she said.

“I dunno.” And I didn't.

“You mean because it's my mum and dad's?”

That was what I meant, I suppose.

“You think that they never have sex? So this has been lying around for years?”

I didn't say anything. But that was what I must have been thinking, which was weird, really. Believe me, I knew that people's parents had sex. But I suppose I didn't really know what it was like for parents who were actually together. I was sort of presuming that parents who were together had sex less often than parents who were apart. I seemed to be very confused by the whole subject of condoms. If anyone had one, then I ended up thinking they weren't having sex, and that can't be true all the time, can it? Some of them had to be bought by people who actually used them.

She looked at the wrapper.

“21/05/09, it says.”

(If you're reading this in the future, then I should tell you that all this was happening long before May 21, 2009. We had plenty of time to use that condom, years and years.)

She threw the condom over to me.

“Come on. We haven't got forever.”

“Why not?” I said.

“Because it's getting late, and my mum and dad know you're up here. They'll start banging on the door soon. That's what they usually do if I've got a boy in here and it's late.”

I must have had some kind of a look on my face, because she knelt down by the side of the bed and kissed me on the cheek.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that.”

“How did you mean it, then?”

I was just saying anything that came into my head. I wanted it to get even later than it was, so her mum and dad would start banging on the door and I could go home.

“You don't want to do this, do you?” she said.

“Yeah, course,” I said. And then, “Not really, no.”

She laughed. “So you're not confused or anything, then.”

“I don't know why you want to do it,” I said. “You told me you weren't ready for sex with your ex-boyfriend.”

“I wasn't.”

“So how come you're ready to have sex with me? You don't even know me.”

“I like you.”

“So you didn't like him much, then?”

“No, not really. I mean, I did at first. But then I went off him.”

I didn't want to ask any more questions about all that. None of it made much sense. It was like she was saying that we ought to sleep together quickly, before she stopped liking me—like she knew she wouldn't like me the next day, so we had to do it that night. If you look at it another way, though, everyone is like that. I mean, you sleep with someone because you're not sick of them, and when you're sick of them, you stop.

“If you don't want to do anything, why don't you just go?” she said.

“OK. I will.”

And I stood up, and she started to cry, and I didn't know what to do.

“I wish I'd never said that thing about wanting to be a model. I feel stupid now.”

“Oh, it's nothing to do with that,” I said. “If anything, I think you're out of my league.”

“‘Out of my league'?” she said. “Where did that come from?”

I knew where it came from. It came from having a mum who was sixteen when I was born. If somebody knows about the history of my family, then it's all they can see, and it's all they can hear. I didn't tell her any of that. I sat down on the bed and held her, and when she'd stopped crying she kissed me, and that was how we ended up having sex even though I'd decided not to. If I broke TH's record of twenty-two and a half seconds, it couldn't have been by more than that half-second.

I told TH when I got home. I had to tell someone, but talking about that stuff is hard, so absolutely the best way is to say anything you've got to say to a poster. I think he was pleased. From what I knew of him, he'd have liked Alicia.

I dreamed my
way through school for the next few weeks. I dreamed my way through life, really. It was all just waiting. I can remember waiting for a bus in that first week, the 19 that took me from my house to hers, and suddenly realizing that waiting for a bus was much easier than anything else, because it was all just waiting anyway. When I was waiting for a bus, I didn't have to do anything else but wait, but all the other waiting was hard. Eating breakfast was waiting, so I didn't eat much. Sleep was waiting, so I couldn't sleep much, even though I wanted to, because sleeping was a good way of getting through eight hours or whatever. School was waiting, so I didn't know what anyone was talking about, during the lessons or at break times. Watching TV was waiting, so I couldn't follow the programs. Even skating was waiting, seeing as how I only went skating when Alicia was doing something else.

Usually, though, Alicia wasn't doing anything else. That was the incredible thing. She wanted to be with me as much as I wanted to be with her, as far as I could work out.

We never did much. We watched TV in her room, or sometimes downstairs, especially if her parents were out. We went for walks in Clissold Park. You know that bit in a film when they show couples laughing and holding hands and kissing in lots of different places while a song plays? We were like that, a bit, except we didn't go to lots of different places. We went to about three, including Alicia's bedroom.

We were in Clissold Park when Alicia told me she loved me. I didn't know what to say, really, so I told her I loved her too. It would have seemed rude not to.

“Really?” she said. “You really love me?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I can't believe it. Nobody has ever said that to me before.”

“Have you ever said it to anyone before?”

“No. Course not.”

That explained why nobody had ever said it to her, I thought. Because if someone tells you she loves you, then you're bound to say it back, aren't you? You have to be pretty hard not to.

And anyway, I did love her. Someone like my mum would say, Oh, you're just a kid, you don't know what love is. But I didn't think of anything else apart from being with Alicia, and the only time I felt like I was where I wanted to be was when I was with her. I mean, that might as well be love, mightn't it? The kind of love my mum talks about is full of worry and work and forgiving people and putting up with things and stuff like that. It's not a lot of fun, that's for sure. If that really is love, the kind my mum talks about, then nobody can ever know if they love somebody, can they? It seems like what she's saying is, if you're pretty sure you love somebody, the way I was sure in those few weeks, then you can't love them, because that isn't what love is. Trying to understand what she means by love would do your head in.

 

My mum didn't want me to be with Alicia all the time. She started to worry about it after a couple of weeks. I never told her about the sex, but she knew I was serious, and Alicia was serious. And she knew about the dreaming, because she could see it with her own eyes.

One night, I came back late, and she was waiting up for me.

“How about we stay in tomorrow night? Watch a DVD?” she said.

I didn't say anything.

“Or we can go out, if you want. I'll take you to Pizza Express.”

I still didn't say anything.

“Pizza Express and the cinema. How about that?”

“No, you're all right,” I said, as if she were being nice to me and offering me something. I mean, she was, in a way. She was offering me a pizza and a film. But in another way, she was just trying to stop me doing what I wanted to do, and she knew it, and I knew it.

“Let me put this another way,” she said. “We're going to spend the evening together tomorrow. What would you like to do? Your choice.”

Here's the thing about me. I can't be bad. Maybe you think that sleeping with Alicia was bad, but it didn't feel that way, so it doesn't count as badness. I'm talking about things where I know I'm in the wrong. You see kids at school, and they're cussing out the teachers, and picking fights with other kids who are supposed to be gay, or picking fights with the teachers, and cussing out the kids who are supposed to be gay…I can't do that stuff, and I never could. I'm rubbish at lying, and even worse at stealing. I tried nicking some money out of my mum's bag once, and I felt sick, and put it all back. It's like a disease or something, not wanting to be bad. I mean, I hate Ryan Briggs more than anyone else on earth. He's a horrible, violent, ugly, scary thug. But when I see him punch some kid in the face and take his phone off him, or tell a teacher to fuck off, there's a part of me that envies him, you know? He hasn't got the disease. It's not complicated, being him. Life would be easier if I didn't give a shit, but I do. And I knew that what my mum was asking for wasn't completely out of order. She was asking me to spend one evening away from Alicia, and she was offering me something in return. I tried not to see things this way, her way, but I couldn't, so I was in trouble.

“Can Alicia come?”

“No. That's sort of the point of the evening.”

“Why?”

“Because you're seeing too much of her.”

“Why does it bother you?”

“It's not healthy.”

It's true that I wasn't getting outside very often, but that wasn't what she meant. I didn't know what she did mean, though.

“What does that mean, ‘not healthy'?”

“It gets in the way of things.”

“What things?”

“Friends. Schoolwork. Family. Skating…. Everything. Life.”

The opposite was the truth, because life only happened when I was with Alicia. All the things she was talking about were the waiting things.

“Just one night,” she said. “It won't kill you.”

 

Well, it didn't kill me. I woke up the morning after we'd been to Pizza Express and the cinema, and I was still alive. But it was like one of those tortures you read about that are actually supposed to be worse than death, because you would actually prefer to be dead. I'm sorry if that means I'm showing no respect to people who've actually had that sort of torture, but it's the closest I've come so far. (And that's one of the reasons I will never join the army, by the way. I would really, really hate to be tortured. I'm not saying that people who join the army would like to be tortured. But they must have thought about it, right? So they must have decided that it wouldn't be as bad as other things, like being on the dole, or working in an office. For me, working in an office would be better than being tortured. Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't be happy doing a boring job, like photocopying a piece of paper over and over again, every single day, until I died. But on the whole I'd be happier doing that than having cigarettes put out in my eye. What I'm hoping is those aren't my choices.)

In those few weeks, it was bad enough waking up in the morning and knowing that I wouldn't be seeing her until after school. That was torture. That was pulling out fingernails one by one. But on the Pizza Express day I woke up knowing that I wouldn't see her UNTIL THE END OF THE NEXT DAY, and that was more like the torture that Ryan Briggs, of course, printed off the Internet. I'm not going to go into what it was about. But it involved dogs and balls, and not footballs either. I still have to sort of squeeze my legs together when I think about it.

OK, not seeing Alicia for about forty-two hours wasn't like having your balls et cetera. But it really was like not breathing. Or not breathing properly, like there wasn't enough oxygen in my tank. In all those hours, I couldn't get a good lungful, and I even started to panic a bit, like you would if you were at the bottom of the sea and the surface was a long way away and there were sharks coming at you and…No, that's overdoing it, again. There were no sharks. There were no dogs et cetera, and no sharks. Mum would have to be the shark, and she's really nothing like a shark. She was only trying to buy me a pizza. She wasn't really trying to like rip my liver out with her teeth. So I'll stop there, with the surface being a long way away. Alicia = surface.

“Can I make a phone call?” I said to Mum when I got in.

“Do you have to?”

“Yeah.”

I did. I had to. There was no other way of saying it.

“We're going out soon.”

“It's half past four. Who eats pizza at half past four?”

“Pizza at half past five. Film at half past six.”

“What are we going to see?”

“What about
Brokeback Mountain
?”

“Yeah, right.”

“What does that mean? ‘Yeah, right'?”

“That's what we say. When someone makes a stupid joke or something,” I said.

“Who's making a stupid joke?” she said.

And then I realized she was serious. She actually wanted us to go and see
Brokeback Mountain.
We'd already started calling one of the science teachers at school
Brokeback,
because he was all hunched up, and everybody reckoned he was a gay.

“You know what it's about, don't you?” I said.

“Yes. It's about a mountain.”

“Shut up, Mum. I can't go to see that. I'll get slaughtered tomorrow.”

“You'd get slaughtered if you went to see a film about gay cowboys?”

“Yes. Because why am I going? There's only one answer, isn't there?”

“My God,” said my mum. “Is it really that pathetic at school?”

“Yes,” I said. Because it really was.

We agreed we'd go and see something else, and then I phoned Alicia's mobile, and I just got her answering message. So I left it for a couple of minutes, and then I got her message again, and after that I phoned every thirty seconds or so. Message, message, message. It had never for a moment occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to speak to her, even. And then I started to have, like, dark thoughts. Why didn't she have her phone turned on? She knew I'd be trying to reach her. She knew that today was our bad day. The night before, when I told her about my mum not wanting us to see each other for a night, she'd cried. And now it was like she couldn't be bothered, unless she was seeing somebody else. And I was thinking, you know, Bloody hell. What a bitch. I can't see her for one night and she starts going out with someone else. There are words for girls like that. And actually, if you couldn't go for one night without having sex with someone, then you were a nymphomaniac, weren't you? You had a problem. She was like a crackhead, except instead of crack it was sex.

Really. That was what I was like. And you know what I thought, a little later on, when I'd calmed down a bit? I thought, this isn't healthy. You can't go around calling your girlfriend a bitch and a slag and a nympho just because her charger isn't working. (That was what had happened. She texted me later, when she'd plugged it in to her dad's charger. It was a really nice text too.)

Anyway, I was in a bit of state when I went out, so that wasn't the best start. And we went down to the multiplex to see what was on apart from
Brokeback Mountain,
and there wasn't much. Actually, that's not true. There was a lot I wanted to see, like the 50 Cent film, and
King Kong,
and there was a lot my mum wanted to see, for example the one about gardening and the one about Japanese girls who made their feet small. But there wasn't anything we both wanted to see. And we spent so long arguing that we couldn't sit down for our pizza, so we ended up getting a takeaway and eating it out of the box on the way to the cinema. We saw this really bad movie about a bloke who swallowed a piece of his mobile phone by mistake and it turned out he could intercept everyone's text messages with his brain. And at first he got to meet loads of girls who were being dumped by their boyfriends, but then he got this text message about terrorists trying to blow up a bridge in New York, and he and one of the girls stopped them. I didn't mind it too much. It wasn't boring, anyway. But Mum hated it, and we had an argument afterwards. She said the whole thing about swallowing the mobile phone was ridiculous, but I said that we didn't know what would happen if we swallowed parts of our mobiles, so that wasn't the stupid part. She wouldn't even let me tell her what I thought was the stupid part. She just went off on one about how my mind had been turned to mush by video games and TV.

None of this matters now. The important thing about the evening was that Mum met a guy. I know, I know. It was supposed to be about me and Mum spending some quality time together and me and Alicia not seeing each other. And it turned into something else altogether. To be fair to Mum, her meeting a bloke didn't take up a lot of our time. I didn't even know she'd met a bloke until a couple of days later, when he came round. (Or rather, I knew she'd met a bloke. I just didn't know she'd Met A Bloke, if you know what I mean.) When we were waiting for our takeaway pizzas, they told us to sit at a table near the door that they used for takeaway customers. And while we were waiting, I went to the gents, and when I came back, Mum was talking to this guy sitting at the next table with his kid. They were only talking about pizzas, and which pizza places they liked, and so on. But when our takeaway boxes arrived, I said to Mum, “Oh, you're a fast worker,” and she said, “No, I don't mess about,” and it was all jokey. Except later it turned out it wasn't. She didn't say anything about it at the time, but she knew him from her work. He'd left a couple of years before, and he remembered her, even though they'd never spoken at the office. They worked in different departments. Mum works in Leisure and Culture, and Mark—yes, Mark, like a mark on your trousers—used to work in Health and Social Care. When he first came round, he said that in Islington he never had time for Health.