by Nick Hornby
“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 winsPop 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, “Notall 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.
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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.
Mum said hello to Andrea, Alicia’s mum, and then Andrea made me walk over to where Alicia was sitting to say hello. Alicia didn’t look like she wanted to say hello. She was sprawled out on a sofa looking at a magazine, even though it was a party, and when her mum and I came up to her, she acted like the most boring evening of her life just took a turn for the worse.
I don’t know about you, but when parents do that pairing-off thing to me, I decide on the spot that the person I’m being set up with is the biggest jerk in Britain. It wouldn’t matter if she looked like Britney Spears used to look, and thought thatHawk—Occupation: Skateboarder was the best book ever written. If it was my mum’s idea, then I wasn’t interested. The whole point of friends is that you choose them yourself. It’s bad enough being told who your relations are, your aunts and uncles and cousins and all that. If I wasn’t allowed to choose my friends either, I’d never speak to another person again, probably. I’d rather live on a desert island on my own, as long as it was made of concrete, and I had a board with me. A desert traffic island, ha ha.
Anyway. It was all right if I didn’t want to speak to someone, but who did she think she was, sitting there pouting and looking the other way? She’d probably never even heard of Tony Hawk, or Green Day, or anything cool, so what gave her the right?
I thought about outsulking her. She was sitting on the sofa, sunk down low, her legs stretched out, and looking away from me towards the food table on the wall opposite. I sunk down in the same way, stretched my legs out, and stared at the bookshelf by my side. We were so carefully arranged that we must have looked like plastic models, the sort of thing you can get in a Happy Meal.
I was making fun of her, and she knew it, but instead of sulking harder, which would have been one way to go, she decided to laugh instead. And when she laughed, I could feel some part of me flip over. All of a sudden, I was desperate to make this girl like me. And as you can probably tell, my mum was right. She was officially gorgeous. She could have got a certificate for gorgeousness from Islington Council, if she wanted, and she wouldn’t even have had to get her mum to pull strings. She had—still has—these enormous grey eyes that have caused me actual physical pain once or twice, somewhere between the throat and the chest. And she’s got this amazing straw-colored hair that always looks messy and cool at the same time, and she’s tall, but she’s not skinny and flat-chested like a lot of tall girls, and she’s not taller than me, and then there’s her skin, which is whatever, like the skin of a peach and all that…I’m hopeless at describing people. All I can say is that when I saw her, I was angry with Mum for not grabbing me by the throat and shouting at me. OK, she gave me a tip-off. But it should have been much more than that. It should have been, like, “If you don’t come, you’ll regret it every single minute for the rest of your life, you moron.”
“You’re not supposed to be looking,” I said to Alicia.
“Who said I was laughing at what you were doing?”
“Either you were laughing at what I was doing or you’re off your head. There’s nothing else here to laugh at.”
That wasn’t strictly true. She could have been laughing at the sight of her dad dancing, for a start. And there were loads of trousers and shirts that were pretty funny.
“Maybe I was laughing at something I remembered,” she said.
“Like?”
“I dunno. Loads of funny things happen, don’t they?”
“So you were laughing at all of them, all at once?”
And we went on like that for a bit, messing around. I was starting to relax. I’d got her talking, and once I’ve got a girl talking, then she is doomed, and there can be no escape for her. But then she stopped talking.
“What’s the matter?”
“You think you’re getting somewhere, don’t you?”
“How can you tell that?” I was shocked. That was exactly what I thought.
She laughed. “When you started talking to me
, there wasn’t a single muscle in you that was relaxed. Now you’re all…” And she threw out her arms and legs, as if she was doing an impression of someone watching TV on the sofa at home. “Well, it’s not like that,” she said. “Not yet. And it might not ever be.”
“OK,” I said. “Thanks.” I felt about three years old.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said. “I just meant, you know, you’ve got to keep trying.”
“I might not want to keep trying.”
“I know that’s not true.”
I turned to look at her then, to see how serious she was, and I could tell she was half teasing, so I could just about forgive her for saying it. She seemed older than me, which I decided was because she spent a lot of time dealing with boys who fell in love with her in two seconds flat.
“Where would you rather be right now?” she asked me.
I wasn’t sure what to say. I knew the answer. The answer was, there wasn’t anywhere I’d rather be. But if I told her, I’d be dead.
“I dunno. Skating, probably.”
“You skate?”
“Yeah. Not ice-skating. Skateboarding.” I know I said I’d never use that word again, but sometimes I need it. Not everyone is as cool as me.
“I know what skating is, thank you.”
She was scoring too many points. Soon I’d need a calculator to add them all up. I didn’t want to talk about skating, though, until I knew what she thought of it.
“How about you? Where would you rather be?”
She hesitated, as if she was about to say something embarrassing.
“Actually, I’d like to be here, on this sofa.”
For the second time, it was as though she knew what I was thinking, except this time it was even better. She had worked out the answer I wanted to give, and she was passing it off as her own. Her points score was about to go into the billions.
“Right here. But with nobody else in the room.”
“Oh.” I could feel myself start to blush, and I didn’t know what to say. She looked at me and laughed.
“Nobody else,” she said. “That includes you.”