by Nick Hornby
“Do you think I’m behaving badly?” I said to him.
“I was an idiot and wanted more freedom,” he said. “(Read: I wanted to spend more time with girls on the road.)” I knew what he was talking about. He was talking about when his girlfriend Sandy moved in with him and then moved out again. That’s in his book, which is why he said “Read” and why there are bits in brackets. Was he telling me that I was an idiot? Was it stupid, wanting more freedom? I couldn’t work it out. Maybe he wasn’t telling me anything. Maybe I’d just read his book too many times.
CHAPTER 5
The funny thing was, going out with Alicia had done me no end of good at school, especially with girls. A few people had seen me with her at the cinema, and they’d told other people that I was with this beautiful girl, and I think it made everyone look at me in a new way. It was as if Alicia gave me a makeover. I think that was how I ended up going to McDonald’s with Nikki Niedzwicki on the night before my sixteenth birthday. (That’s how it’s spelt. She wrote it down for me when she gave me her mobile number.) She was exactly the sort of girl who wouldn’t have looked twice at me before Alicia. She went out with older boys, usually, probably because she looked five years older than any of us. She spent a lot of money on clothes, and you never saw her without makeup on.
When we went to McDonald’s, she told me she wanted a baby, and I knew that I wouldn’t be having sex with her ever, not even with five condoms on.
“What for?” I said.
“I dunno. I like babies? There isn’t anything I really want to study at college? And I can always get a job when my baby’s older?” She’s one of those people that ask questions all the time. They drive me nuts.
“My mum had a baby when she was sixteen.”
“Yeah, see, that’s what I mean,” she said.
“What?”
“Well, you’re probably more like mates, aren’t you, you and your mum? That’s what I want with my kid. I don’t want to be like fifty when he’s sixteen? You can’t go out with them then, can you? To clubs and that? Because you’d be like an embarrassment?”
Oh, yeah, I wanted to say. That’s what it’s like. Clubbing, clubbing, clubbing. If you can’t go clubbing with your mum, then what use is she? I wanted to go home, and for the first time since we’d split up, I missed Alicia. Or at least, I felt nostalgic. I remembered how great it had been, the evening when we hadn’t gone to the cinema because we’d had too much to say to each other. Where had all those words gone? They got sucked into Alicia’s TV. I wanted them back.
I walked Nikki home, but I didn’t kiss her. I was too scared. If she got pregnant sometime in the next couple of weeks, I didn’t want her to have any saliva or anything that she could use in evidence against me. You can’t be too careful, can you?
“Have I done the wrong thing?” I said to TH when I got home. “Do you think I should still be with Alicia?”
“If something in my life didn’t revolve around skating, then I had a hard time figuring it out,” said TH. He was talking about Sandy again, his first real girlfriend, but it might have been his way of saying, “How the hell do I know? I’m only a skater.” Or even, “I’m only a poster.” I decided he was telling me that I should stick to skating for the time being, and leave girls alone. After my evening with Nikki, that seemed like pretty good advice.
I never had the chance to put it into action, though. The next day, my sixteenth birthday, my life started to change.
The day began with cards and presents and doughnuts—Mum had already been to the bakers by the time I woke up. My dad was supposed to be coming over for tea and cake in the afternoon, and in the evening, believe it or not, Mum and I were going to go to Pizza Express and the cinema. I got the first text from Alicia straight after breakfast—it just said “I NEED2C U URGENT A xx.”
“Who was that?” said Mum.
“Oh, no one.”
“Is that a Miss No One?” said Mum. She was probably thinking of Nikki, because she knew we’d been out the previous evening.
“Not really,” I said. I knew it didn’t make any sense, because either someone was a girl or they weren’t, unless you’re talking about men who dress up as girls, but I didn’t care. Part of me was panicking. It wasn’t my head so much as my guts—I think my guts knew what it was about, even if my head didn’t. Or pretended it didn’t. I’d never forgotten that time when something half-happened when I hadn’t put anything on. The part of me that was panicking because of the text had never really stopped panicking since the half-happening day.
I went and locked myself in the bathroom and texted her back. I said, “NOT2DAY MY BIRTHDAY Sxx.” If I got something back from that, then I knew I was in trouble. I flushed the loo and washed my hands, just to make Mum think I’d actually been doing something, and even before I’d opened the door my phone beeped again. The text just said “URGENT,OUR STARBUCKS 11AM .” And then all of me knew—guts, head, heart, fingernails.
I texted back “OK.” I didn’t see how I could do anything else, even though I wanted to do anything else.
When I went back into the kitchen, I wanted to sit on my mum’s lap. I know that sounds stupid and babyish, but I couldn’t help it. On my sixteenth birthday, I didn’t want to be sixteen, or fifteen, or anyteen. I wanted to be three or four, and too young to make any kind of mess, apart from the mess you make when you scribble on walls or tip your food bowl upside down.
“I love you, Mum,” I said when I sat down at the table.
She looked at me as if I’d gone mad. I mean, she was pleased, but she was pretty surprised.
“I love you too, sweetheart,” she said. I tried not to get choked up. If Alicia was going to tell me what I thought she was going to tell me, I reckoned it would be a long time before Mum said that again. It might be a long time before she even felt it.
All the way there, I was doing all kinds of deals, or trying to. You know the sort of thing: “If it’s OK, I’ll never skate again.” As if it had anything to do with skating. I offered never to watch TV again, and never to go out again, and never to eat McDonald’s again. Sex never came up, because I already knew I was never going to have sex again, so that didn’t seem like a deal God would be interested in. I might as well have promised Him that I wouldn’t fly to the moon, or run down Essex Road naked. Sex was over for me, forever, no doubt.
Alicia was sitting at the long counter in the window with her back to everyone. I saw her face as I was walking in, without her seeing me, and she looked pale and frightened. I tried to think of some other things that could make her that way. Maybe her brother was in trouble. Maybe her ex-boyfriend had threatened her, or threatened me. I wouldn’t mind taking a beating, I thought. Even if it was a serious beating, I’d be better in a few months, probably. Say he broke both my arms and both my legs…I’d be walking around again by Christmas.
I didn’t go over and say hello straightaway. I got in the queue to buy myself a drink. If my life was about to change, then I wanted the old life to last for as long as possible. There were two people in front of me, and I hoped they had the longest and most complicated orders Starbucks had ever heard of. I wanted someone to order a cappuccino with all the bubbles taken out by hand, one by one. I felt sick, of course, but it was better to feel sick without knowing for sure. In the queue I could still imagine that it was only going to be a beating, but once I’d spoken to her, that would be that.
The woman in front of me wanted a cloth to wipe up some orange juice her kid had spilled on the table. It took no time at all. And I couldn’t think of a difficult drink. I asked for a Frappuccino. At least the ice takes a long time. And then when I’d got my drink, there was nothing else to do except go and sit next to Alicia at the counter.
“Hello,” I said.
“Happy birthday,” she said. And then, “I’m late.”
I understood straightaway what she meant.
“You were here before me, even,” I said. I couldn’t resist it. I wasn’t trying to
be funny, and I wasn’t being thick. I was just putting off the moment, hanging on to the old Sam. I didn’t want the future to come, and what Alicia was about to say was the future.
“I’m late with my period,” she said, straightaway, and that was it. The future had arrived.
“Right,” I said. “I thought you were going to say that.”
“Why?”
I didn’t want to tell her I’d always been worried about that one time.
“It’s the only thing I could think of that could be this serious,” I said. She seemed to accept that.
“Have you been to the doctor’s?” I said.
“What for?”
“I dunno. Isn’t that what you do?” I was trying to speak in a normal voice, but nothing would come out right. I sounded all quivery and croaky. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried, but I was pretty close to crying now.
“No, I don’t think so. I think you buy a pregnancy test,” she said.
“Well, have you done that?”
“No. I wanted you to come with me.”
“Have you told anyone?”
“Oh, yeah. Course. I’ve told everyone. Fucking hell. I’m not stupid.”
“How late are you?”
“Three weeks.”
Three weeks sounded very late to me, but what did I know?
“Have you ever been three weeks late before?” I said.
“No. Nowhere near.”
And then I’d run out of questions. I’d run out of questions that I could actually ask, anyway. I wanted to ask things like, “Am I going to be OK?” “Are your parents going to kill me?” “Do you mind if I go to college anyway?” “Can I go home now?” Stuff like that. But these were all questions about me, and I was pretty sure that I was supposed to ask questions about her. Her and it.
“Can you just buy pregnancy tests in a chemist’s?” There. That was another good question. I didn’t care whether you could or couldn’t, but it was something to say.
“Yeah.”
“Are they expensive?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s go and have a look.”
We slurped the last bits of our drinks through the straws and slammed the cups down on the counter both at the same time. I still think about that sometimes. I’m not sure why. Partly it’s because the slurping noise sounded childish, and yet we were making it because we were in a hurry to find out whether we were going to be parents. And partly it’s because when we put the cups down at exactly the same moment, it seemed like a good sign. It wasn’t, though. Maybe that’s why it’s stuck in my memory.
There was a little chemist’s next door to the Starbucks, so we went in there, but we got out quick when Alicia saw a friend of her mum’s in there. She saw us too, this woman, and you could tell she thought we’d gone in to buy condoms. Ha! Condoms! We were way beyond condoms, missus! Anyway, we realized that we could never go into a chemist’s that size—not just because we might have been spotted, but because neither of us would be able to ask for what we wanted. Condoms were bad enough, but pregnancy tests were in a different class of trouble and embarrassment altogether. We walked on to the Superdrug round the corner, because it seemed like we wouldn’t stick out there.
The cheapest one was £9.95.
“How much have you got?” Alicia said.
“Me?”
“Yes. You.”
I fished about in my pockets.
“Three quid. You?”
“A fiver and…sixty pence in change. One of us is going to have to go home for more money.”
“If you’d told me as soon as I came in,” I said, “I wouldn’t have bought that drink.” I knew she couldn’t have told me as soon as I came in, because she didn’t know I was there, and I didn’t want her to know I was there.
“Doesn’t matter now, does it? Who’s going home?”
“I can’t,” I said. “I’ve already disappeared once. I can’t disappear again. I’m supposed to be spending the day with my mum and dad.”
She sighed. “OK. Wait here.”
“I’m not standing here for half an hour.” Alicia lived ten minutes’ walk away. Ten minutes there, ten minutes back, ten minutes to persuade whoever was there to cough up.
“Go back to Starbucks, then. But don’t buy a drink. We can’t afford it.”
“Can’t you just get a fiver? So I don’t have to stay here without a drink?”
She sighed again, and swore to herself, but she didn’t say no.
I went back to Starbucks, spent my three quid, waited twenty-five minutes, and then went home. And I turned my mobile off, and left it turned off.
My birthday is one of the only days of the year when you’ll catch my mum and dad in the same room together. They pretend they’re all friends together now, and the past is the past, and all that, but they never see each other unless it’s a special occasion involving me. If I’d been the star of the football team, or, I don’t know, the violinist in the school orchestra or something, they’d probably have turned out to see me. But luckily for them, I don’t do anything apart from have birthdays. I’ve entered a couple of skating competitions, but I never tell Mum and Dad about them. Tournaments are hard enough without worrying about whether those two are arguing about who said what to who fifteen years ago.
I was in a right state for my birthday tea, as you can imagine. All they seemed to talk about was what it was like when I was a baby, and even though they try not to go on about how hard it was, there’s always a story about my mum sitting her exams at school while my gran jiggled me up and down in the corridors. (She failed her maths because she needed to feed me in the middle, and even then I wouldn’t settle.) When they come out with these stories, one of them always says something like, “Well I’m glad we can laugh about it now…” If you think about it, that means there wasn’t much laughing back then. That particular birthday was the first time I’d been able to see just how unfunny it must have been. And when they weren’t talking about how hard it was when I was little, they were talking about how I’d grown up, and they couldn’t believe how quickly the time had gone, and blah blah. And that didn’t help either. I didn’t feel grown up—I still wanted to crawl onto my mum’s lap—and the time hadn’t gone quickly. They were talking about my whole life, which seemed to me to have lasted forever. And if Alicia was pregnant, that meant…I didn’t want to think about that. I didn’t want to think about tomorrow, or the day after, let alone the next sixteen years.
I couldn’t eat any cake, of course. I told them my stomach wasn’t good, and Mum remembered me rushing off to the toilet after breakfast, when I had to send Alicia a text. So I sat there, and picked at my food, and listened to them tell stories, and fiddled around with the mobile in my pocket. I wasn’t ever tempted to put it on, though. I just wanted one more day of my old life.
I blew the candles out.
“Speech!” said my dad.
“No.”
“Shall I make one, then?”
“No.”
“Sixteen years ago today,” said my dad, “your mum was in the Whittington Hospital, making a lot of noise.”
“Thanks,” said my mum.
“I got there late because I was on a job with Frank, God rest his soul, and I didn’t have a mobile then, and it took ages for anyone to track me down.”
“Is Frank dead?” said Mum.
“No, but I don’t see him anymore, do I? Anyway, I got a bus going up Holloway Road, and you know what that’s like. We just sat there. So I had to jump off and leg it, and by the time I got there, I was cream crackered. Seventeen years old and I was wheezing like an old man. I was still smoking roll-ups then. Anyway. I sat down on one of the old flower bed things outside the hospital to get my breath back, and—”
“I love this story,” said Mum. “We hear it every year. And every year there’s no place either for Sam or his mother. There was only one hero that day. There was only one person who suffered for his firstborn. And
it was the man who ran all the way up the Holloway Road.”
“Last time I looked, women hadn’t completely taken over the world,” said my dad. “Men are still allowed to speak. Probably when your next birthday comes around, son, we’ll all be in prison with gags on. But let’s enjoy our freedom while it lasts.”
You look at my mum and dad now, and you can’t believe they ever lived in the same borough in the same century, let alone got married. Let alone…Well, we don’t need to think about that. She went one way and he went another way, and…Actually, that’s not true. My mum stayed here, and my dad went to Barnet. But my mum has come a long way, and my dad has gone nowhere.
They’ve only got one thing in common, and that one thing is talking to you now. They wouldn’t even be speaking if it wasn’t for me, and I can’t say that makes me feel proud, really. Some people shouldn’t speak to each other.
You could tell what I spent the afternoon thinking about. It was like it wasn’t my birthday anymore. It was somebody else’s, someone who hadn’t even been born yet. There were three of us that afternoon. How many would be there for my seventeenth?
We didn’t go out in the evening in the end. I told Mum I was still sick. We watched a DVD and she ate scrambled eggs on toast, and then I went up to my room to talk to Tony.
“Alicia might be pregnant,” I said to him. And then, “I’m shitting myself.”
“She called to tell me she’d taken the test and that I was going to be a dad,” said TH.
“How did you feel?” I asked him. I knew the answer, but I wanted to keep the conversation going.