by Nick Hornby
“Oi! Sam! Sam!”
I waved back. I’d never seen her in my life before. She was a black girl, about seventeen or so, and she had a baby with her. She’d taken the baby out of the pram and sat it on her knee while she ate.
“Come and sit here,” she said. I didn’t want to, but what could I do? She might have been my best friend.
I put my food and drink back on the tray and walked across the restaurant to join her.
“How’s it going?” I said.
“Yeah, not so bad. This one was up half the night, though.”
“They’re terrible, aren’t they?” I said. This seemed safe enough. Parents were always saying things like that.
“How’s Roof?” she said. It was definitely Roof. Everyone said so.
“Yeah, all right, thanks.”
“You seen anyone?” she said.
“No,” I said. And then, “Like who?” I was hoping I might recognize a name, and then I’d understand who this girl was, and how I knew her.
“You know, like Holly? Or Nicola?”
“No.” I knew a lot of girls, all of a sudden. “Haven’t seen them for ages.”
She suddenly lifted up her baby and sniffed at its bottom. You had to spend half your life doing that if you had a baby, apparently. “Phwooar. Off we go, young lady.”
She got a bag out from the base of the pram and stood up.
“Can I come with you?” I said.
“To change her nappy? Why?”
“I want to watch you do it.”
“Why? You’re good at it.”
How did she know? Why would I change Roof’s nappy in front of her?
“Yeah, but…I’m sick of the way I do it. I want to try something different.”
“There isn’t much you can do with a nappy,” she said. I just kept my mouth shut and followed her downstairs.
“You’ll have to come in the ladies’, you know that?” she said.
“That’s OK,” I said. It wasn’t OK, really, but the nappy-changing thing was really worrying me. From what I’d seen overnight and this morning, there wasn’t a lot I couldn’t work out for myself. Mostly it just seemed like you had to pick the baby up and take it somewhere, and I could do that. I didn’t even know how to take a baby’s clothes off, though. I was worried about breaking its arms and legs.
There was nobody in the ladies’ anyway, thank God. She pulled this table thing out of the wall and put the baby down on it.
“I just do it like this,” she said.
She sort of ripped off the all-in-one tracksuit thing that babies wear (after she’d done the ripping, I could see there were lots of poppers down the legs and round the bottom bit), then she pulled its legs out and undid the tags on the side of the nappy. Then with one hand she held the legs up, and with the other she wiped its arse with a wet paper hankie thing. The actual crap part wasn’t too terrible. There wasn’t much of it, and it smelled more like milk than dog shit. That was why I hadn’t wanted to do it during the night. I thought it would smell of dog shit, or human shit, anyway, and I’d throw up. My new friend folded the dirty nappy up and put it in this little blue carrier bag with the dirty wet hankies, and then put a new nappy on in about ten seconds flat.
“What do you reckon?” she said.
“Awesome,” I said.
“What?”
“You’re brilliant,” I said, and I meant it.
It was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen. It was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen in a ladies’ toilet, anyway.
“You can do that, though,” she said.
“Can I?” I couldn’t believe it. If I’d learned to do that in a few weeks, then I was a lot cleverer than I thought I was.
There was a bunch of keys in my parka pocket too, so I was able to let myself back in to Alicia’s house, after about twenty minutes of putting the wrong keys in the wrong locks. My mum was already there, sitting at the kitchen table with Roof on her lap. She looked older, my mum, older than a year older, if you see what I mean, and I hoped that the worry lines that had suddenly appeared on her forehead were nothing to do with me. I was so pleased to see her, though. I nearly ran for her, but I might have seen her the day before, so she might have thought it was a bit weird.
“Here’s Dadda,” she said, and of course I looked around to see who she was talking about, and then I laughed as if I’d been joking.
“Alicia let me in, but she’s gone for a walk,” my mum said. “I made her go out. I thought she was looking a bit peaky. And there’s no one else here.”
“Just the three of us, then,” I said. “That’s nice.” That seemed safe enough. Me, my mum and a baby—that had to be nice, didn’t it? But I was still nervous, because I didn’t really know what I was talking about. Maybe I hated Mum, or she hated me, or Roof and Mum hated each other…How was I supposed to know? But she just smiled.
“How was college?”
“Yeah, good,” I said.
“Alicia told me about your bit of trouble.”
It was like a computer game, getting whizzed into the future. You had to think on your feet, really quickly. You were driving fast down a straight road and then suddenly something was coming straight at you and you had to swerve. Why would I be in trouble? I decided I wouldn’t.
“Oh,” I said. “That. It was nothing.”
She looked at me. “Sure?”
“Yeah. Honest.”
And I was being honest, every way you looked at it.
“How are things?” she said.
“Not bad,” I said. “How about yours?” I didn’t want to talk about me, mostly because I didn’t really know about me.
“Yeah, OK,” she said. “Very tired.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh, well.”
“What a pair, eh?” And she laughed. Or she made a noise that was supposed to be something like laughing, anyway. Why were we a pair? What did she mean? I’d heard people like my mum say “What a pair!” one zillion times, and I’d never thought about what it meant before. So now I had to try and remember when and why people said it. Suddenly I could hear it. Last year, or the year before last, depending on what year we were in now, we both got food poisoning from a dodgy takeaway. And I was sick and she was sick and I was sick and she was sick, and we were taking it in turns to lock ourselves in the bathroom to throw up. “What a pair,” she said. And another time…Rabbit and I, coming back from Grind City, and we’d both slammed, and Rabbit had a bloody nose, and I had a graze down the side of my cheek. “What a pair,” she said when she saw us. So people usually said it when something had gone wrong, when two people were sick or injured, when there was some sign that they’d messed up.
“Are we going to take him out for a walk?” my mum said.
“Yeah, that’d be good,” I said.
“So I’d better go to the loo. For the one hundredth time today.”
She lifted Roof up and passed him across the table to me. She was sitting in the window, behind the kitchen table, and so I hadn’t been able to look at her properly. But when she pushed the table out and stood up, I could see she had a football up her jumper. I laughed.
“Mum!” I said. “What are you doing…?” I stopped. That wasn’t a football. My mum wouldn’t have put a football up her jumper. My mum was pregnant.
I made a noise, like “Eeek!”
“I know,” said my mum. “I look massive today.”
I don’t know how I got through the rest of the day, really. I probably seemed weird and spaced out, but the football up my mum’s jumper was just about the last straw for me. I’d had it up to here with the future. I mean, it was fine if you just let it happen, day by day. But missing out chunks of time like this…It was no good. It was doing my head in.
We put Roof in this sort of backpack thing that goes on your front, not your back. I carried him, because Mum couldn’t, and also, I suppose, because he was my kid and not hers, and he made my chest all sweaty, but he stayed asleep. We went to the
park, and walked around the little lake, and I tried not to say anything, so most of the time we were quiet, but every now and again Mum asked me a question. Like, “How are you getting on with Alicia?” Or, “It’s not too difficult, is it, living in someone else’s house?” Or, “Have you thought about what to do when this course finishes?” And I just said, you know, “It’s OK,” or “It’s not so bad,” or “I dunno.” I could imagine it was the sort of thing I might have said anyway, whether I knew the answers or not. We went for a cup of tea, and then I—we, I suppose, if Roof counts as a person—walked Mum home. I didn’t go in. I would have wanted to stay.
On the way back we went for a walk down by the New River, and this guy was there, sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette with one hand and pushing a pram with the other.
“Hello,” he said as we walked past.
“Hello.”
“I’m Giles,” he said. “Remember? From the class?”
I’d never met him before in my life. He was quite posh, much older than me.
“You didn’t come back, did you?” he said.
“I don’t think so,” I said. Not a good answer, I realized as soon as I’d come out with it. I should probably have known whether I went back somewhere or not, even if I hadn’t been for the first time yet.
“What did you have?” he said, nodding at Roof.
“A boy.”
“Called?”
“Oh,” I said. “It’s complicated.” I wasn’t very happy with that as an answer, but I didn’t want to get into the whole Roof nightmare.
He looked at me, but he left it at that.
“You?” I said.
“Yeah, a boy. Joshua. How’s it going?”
“You know,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Can I ask you something? Is your, you know, your partner…Is she happy?”
“Well,” I said. “She seems OK.”
“You’re lucky,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Mine’s in a terrible state,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Cries all the time. Won’t let me touch her.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t mean sex,” he said. “I’m not, you know. After anything.”
“No.”
“It’s just that she won’t let me hold her. She freezes up. And I don’t even think she wants to hold the baby, particularly.”
“Right,” I said.
“I’m at my wits’ end, to be honest. I don’t know what to do.”
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t think that I’d have any advice for him even if I hadn’t been whizzed. I’d need to be about fifty, I thought, before I could deal with this guy and his problems.
“Write to a magazine,” I said.
“Sorry?”
“Like, you know, a women’s magazine.”
I sometimes looked at the problem pages in my mum’s magazines, because you could read about sex without it looking as though you were reading about sex.
He didn’t look impressed.
“It seems a bit more urgent than that,” he said.
“They come out once a month,” I said. “And it’s the middle of the month, so if you wrote to them quickly, you might get in the next issue.”
“Yes. Well. Thanks.”
“That’s OK. We’d better be going,” I said. “See you later.”
I think he wanted to talk some more. But I just walked away.
Nothing much happened in the afternoon or evening. We all ate together, Alicia and her mum and dad and me, and then we all watched TV while Roof slept. I pretended I was interested in the programs, but actually I had no idea what I was looking at. I just sat there feeling homesick and sad and sorry for myself. I missed my old life. And even if I got whizzed back to my own time, my old life wouldn’t be there for much longer. I’d turn on my mobile, and there’d be a text telling me that in a year’s time I’d have a kid, and I’d be living with people I didn’t really know and didn’t like much. I wanted to be whizzed back further than that, to a time when I hadn’t met Alicia and when I wasn’t interested in having sex. If Tony Hawk let me be eleven again, I wouldn’t mess it up a second time. I’d become a Christian or something, one of those people who never do anything. I used to think they were mad, but they’re not, are they? They know what they’re doing. They don’t want to watch TV with someone else’s mum and dad. They want to watch TV on their own, in their bedroom.
We went to bed at ten o’clock, but we didn’t turn the light out then because Alicia had to feed Roof. When she’d finished, she asked me to change him.
“Change him? Me? Now?”
“Have you gone funny again?”
“No,” I said. “Sorry. I was, you know. Just checking I heard you right.”
Just as I was getting out of bed, Roof made a noise like yogurt going down a plughole.
“Bloody hell,” I said. “What was that?”
Alicia laughed, but I meant it.
“Good timing, young man,” she said.
After a while I realized what Alicia meant. She meant that the noise of yogurt going down the plughole was actually the sound Roof made when he was crapping. And now I was supposed to do something about it.
I picked him up and started to walk to the bathroom.
“Where are you going?”
I didn’t know where I was going. Obviously.
“Just…” But I couldn’t think of a good answer, so I left it at that.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Sure.”
But being sure I was all right didn’t help me with where I was going. I stood there.
“Have we run out of nappies?”
Suddenly I noticed Alicia’s old toy box at the end of the bed. When I was last in this room, it was still a toy box, full of old stuff she used to play with when she was a kid. Now it had like this plastic mattress on it, and on the floor beside it there was a bag full of nappies and a box full of those wet tissue things that my friend the black girl had been using in McDonald’s.
Roof was half-asleep. His eyes were rolling around in his head like he was drunk. I undid the poppers on his all-in-one tracksuit, pulled up the legs and undid the Sellotape on the sides of the nappies, like I’d seen the girl do at lunchtime. And then…You probably don’t want to know how to change a nappy. And even if you do, I’m probably not the person to teach you. The point is, I did it, without messing it up too much. I couldn’t remember the last time I was so pleased with myself. Probably when I slept with Alicia for the first time. Which was funny, if you thought about it. First I was proud of myself for sleeping with her. And then I was proud of myself for doing something that happened all because I slept with her.
Maybe that was what TH was trying to do when he whizzed me into the future. Maybe he was trying to teach me how to change nappies. It seemed like the hard way of doing things to me. He could have just sent me to classes.
“You do love me, Sam, don’t you?” Alicia said when Roof was back in his cot and I’d gone back to bed. I just lay there with my back to her, pretending to be asleep. I didn’t know whether I loved her or not. How could I?
It took me a long, long time to get to sleep after that, but when I woke up in the morning, I was in my own bed. It didn’t feel like my own bed anymore, though. Your own bed is usually somewhere you feel safe, but I didn’t feel safe there anymore. I knew everything that was going to happen to me, and it felt like my life was over, however many years I managed to keep breathing. I was a hundred percent sure that Alicia was pregnant. And if it was my life that I’d seen, well, I didn’t want to live it. I wanted my old life back, I wanted someone else’s life. But I didn’t want that one.
CHAPTER 7
The summer before all this happened, Mum and I went on holiday to Spain, and we spent a lot of time hanging out with this English family we met in a bar. They were called the Parrs, and they lived in Hastings, and they were all right. There was a kid called Jamie, who was si
x months older than me, and Jamie had a sister called Scarlett, who was twelve. And Mum liked Tina and Chris, the parents. They used to sit in this English bar, night after night, taking the piss out of English people who only went to English bars. I didn’t get it, but they thought they were funny. A few weeks after we’d come back from holiday, Mum and I went down to Hastings on the train to see them. We played miniature golf on the seafront, and ate fish and chips, and skimmed stones. I liked Hastings. It had the funfairs and the arcades and all that, but it wasn’t too tacky, and it had a little railway that went to the top of the cliffs. We never saw the Parrs again, though. We got a Christmas card from them, but Mum never got round to sending Christmas cards last year, so they sort of gave up on us after that.
And Hastings was the first place I thought of when I woke up that morning, the morning after I’d come back from the future. I was positive that Alicia was pregnant, and I knew I didn’t want to be a father. So I had to move out of London and never come back, and Hastings was the only other place in the whole of England that I knew. We never go anywhere, apart from Spain, and I couldn’t go abroad on my own, with no money and no credit card. So I had breakfast with my mum, and when she’d gone to work, I packed a bag and picked up my skateboard and went to live in Hastings.
I knew I was being a coward, but sometimes you have to be a coward, don’t you? There’s no point in being brave if you’re just going to get destroyed. Say you walked round the corner and there are fifty al-Qaida there. Not even fifty. Five. Not even five. One, with like a machine gun, would be enough. You might not feel good about running for your life, but what are your choices? Well, I had walked around the corner, and there was an al-Qaida with a machine gun, except he was just a baby, and he didn’t actually have a machine gun. But in my world a baby, even without a machine gun, is like a terrorist with a machine gun, if you think about it, because Roof was every bit as deadly to my chances of going to college to do art and design etc. as an al-Qaida operative. And actually, Alicia was another al-Qaida, plus also her mum and dad, plus also my mum, because when she found out, she would literally kill me dead. So that was five al-Qaida waiting round the corner. One would have been enough to send you running off to Hastings or wherever.