Slam

by Nick Hornby

  She turned her back on me, which I think was her way of saying, Sit down! Make yourself at home!

  So I sat down on the bench in the reception. There was a local paper there, so I flicked through it and tried to learn something about my new home, and after a little while I heard Mr. Brady shouting for me.

  “Oi. Stupid boy. Where are you?”

  “That’s me,” I said to the woman.

  “You’d better go and help him, then,” she said. “And I’m not giving you a double room.”

  A single room was twenty quid a night, and Mr. Brady was going to give me twenty quid a day. So I had made it. I could live. And that’s the story of how I got a job and somewhere to sleep in Hastings.

  CHAPTER 8

  I was OK checking into the room and putting my stuff away and all that. It felt weird, of course, being in a strange room in a strange town and breathing fish, but not weird in a bad way. I had a shower, put a T-shirt and boxers on, then lay down on the bed and fell asleep. It was in the middle of the night that everything started to feel bad.

  I’m sure I would have slept straight through if Mr. Brady hadn’t started banging on my door at four o’clock in the morning.

  “Stupid!” he was shouting. “Stupid! Are you in there?”

  I didn’t say anything for a while, because I was hoping he’d just go back to his room if I ignored him. But he kept knocking, and a couple of other guests opened their doors and started threatening him, and he started threatening them back, so I had to get up just to calm everybody down.

  “Come in here,” I said to Mr. Brady.

  “You’re naked,” he said. “I’m not going to employ naked people.”

  I told him that someone with a T-shirt and boxer shorts on wasn’t naked. I didn’t tell him that you couldn’t ask someone never to get undressed just because they worked for you. He wouldn’t come into the room, and he wouldn’t whisper.

  “I’ve lost my remote control,” he said. “Not lost it. I dropped it down the side of the bed and I can’t reach it.”

  “It’s four o’clock in the morning,” I said.

  “This is what you’re being paid for,” he said. “You think I’m paying you twenty pounds a day to push me up and down the stairs a couple of times? I don’t sleep, so you don’t sleep. You don’t sleep when I haven’t got the remote, anyway.”

  I went back into my room, put my jeans on and walked down the corridor with him. His room was huge, and it didn’t smell of fish; it smelled of some chemical that must have been used to kill Germans in the war or something. He had his own bathroom, and he had a TV and a double bed and a sofa. I didn’t have anything like that.

  “Down there,” he said, pointing to the side of the bed next to the wall. “Anything else you feel down there, just leave it. And if you do touch anything, I’ve got a lot of carbolic soap. I bought a job lot.”

  This was one of the most disgusting things anyone has ever said to me, and as I was reaching down, I was actually scared. What did he think might be down there? His dead pet dog? His dead wife? A lot of old pieces of fish that he hadn’t wanted to eat and had been scraping off the plate and down the side of the bed for the last twenty years?

  And that’s when I decided to go home. It was four o’clock in the morning and I was maybe about to feel the rotting remains of a dead dog and I was being paid twenty pounds for a whole day’s work, and that whole day’s work was actually a whole day and half the night, and possibly involved dead dogs. And twenty pounds was exactly what it was costing me to stay in this terrible smelly B&B. Was it possible that rotting dog actually smelled of fish, if it rotted for long enough? I was going to be working all day and half the night for a profit of nought pounds and nought pence.

  So the question I asked myself, as I was groping down the side of a strange old man’s bed, was, Could having a baby be any worse than this? And the answer I gave myself was, No it could not.

  As it turned out, there wasn’t much down there apart from the remote control. I might have felt a sock, and it gave me a fright for a second, but the sock was definitely made out of cotton or wool and not fur or flesh, so it was OK. And I came back up with the remote and gave it to Mr. Brady and he didn’t say thank you and I went back to bed. But I couldn’t sleep. I was homesick. And I felt…well, stupid too. Mr. Brady was right. My mum should have called me Stupid. What had I been thinking?

  I had a pregnant girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend, and I’d run out on her.

  I hadn’t told my mum where I’d gone, and she’d be worried sick, because I’d been away for a night.

  I had really believed that I was going to live in Hastings and become either a putter-upper of giant bowling pins or a lifter-upper of old people who needed to climb a lot of stairs. I had told myself that I could make a living doing these things, and I had also told myself that this was a life that I would enjoy, despite having no friends or family or money.

  It was all stupid, stupid, stupid. Of course, I felt bad about everything, but it wasn’t the guilt that stopped me from sleeping, it was the embarrassment. Can you imagine that? Embarrassment stopping you from sleeping? I was blushing. There was literally too much blood in my face for me to close my eyes. Well, maybe not literally, but that was absolutely what it felt like.

  At six o’clock I got up, got dressed and walked back to the railway station. I hadn’t paid for the room, but then, Mr. Brady hadn’t paid me. He could sort it out. I was going back home to marry Alicia and look after Roof, and I was never going to think about running away again.

  It’s not enough, though, just to decide not to be stupid. Otherwise, why don’t wedecide to be really clever—clever enough to invent something like the iPod and make a lot of money? Or, why don’t we justdecide to be David Beckham? Or Tony Hawk? If you are actually stupid, then you can make as many clever decisions as you like and it won’t help you. You’re just stuck with the brain you were born with, and mine must be the size of a small pea.

  Listen to this.

  First of all, I was pleased that I got home at nine o’clock in the morning, because Mum goes to work at 8:30. So I thought I could make myself a cup of tea and some breakfast, watch daytime TV and say sorry and all that to Mum when she came back. Stupid? Stupid. It turned out that Mum hadn’t gone to work the morning after I’d run away from home without telling her where I’d gone. It turned out that she’d been worrying about me since yesterday afternoon, and hadn’t even gone to bed. Who would have guessed that? You, maybe. And everyone else in the world over the age of two. But not me. Oh, no.

  It gets worse, though. When I turned the corner into our street, there was a police car outside our flat. So I walked down the road wondering who was in trouble, or hoping that nothing bad had happened to Mum, or praying that no burglars had come into the house overnight and taken our DVD player. Stupid? Stupid. Because it turned out that when it got to three o’clock in the morning and Alicia hadn’t heard from me and Mum hadn’t heard from me and nobody could phone me on my mobile because it was at the bottom of the sea, they’d all panicked and brought the law in! Isn’t that amazing?

  Even when I put my key in the lock, I thought I was going to see a flat with no DVD player in it. In fact, the DVD player was the first thing I saw. The second thing I saw was my mum wiping her eyes with a Kleenex, and two policemen. One of the policemen was a woman. And even when I saw Mum wiping her eyes, I thought, Oh, no! What’s happened to Mum?

  She looked at me, and then looked around for something to throw at me, and she found the remote control. She didn’t hit me with it, but if she had, it might have made me go back to Hastings, and I could have spent the whole day going to Hastings and back because of things involving TV remotes, and that would have been funny. Or, at least, funnier than anything else that was happening to me.

  “You stupid, stupid boy,” she said. People were really beginning to notice this stupid thing. “Where have you been?”

  And I just made a sort of sorry face, and sa
id, “Hastings.”

  “Hastings? Hastings?” She was really screaming now. The policewoman who was sitting on the floor by her feet touched her on her leg.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “Well. Do you remember we went there to play mini-golf with the Parrs?”

  “I don’t mean why Hastings! I mean why did you go anywhere?”

  “Have you spoken to Alicia?”

  “Yes. Of course I have. I’ve spoken to Alicia, I’ve spoken to Rabbit, I’ve spoken to your father, I’ve spoken to everyone I could think of.”

  I got distracted for a moment by the idea of my mum talking to Rabbit. I wouldn’t have known how to get hold of him, so I don’t know how she managed it. Also, I wondered whether he’d been tempted to ask her out.

  “What did Alicia say?”

  “She said she didn’t know where you were.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “I didn’t stop to chat with her about the state of your relationship, if that’s what you mean. She was upset, though. What have you done to her?”

  I couldn’t believe it. The only good thing about the last twenty-four hours, as far as I was concerned, was that Alicia would have told Mum she was pregnant, which meant that I didn’t have to. And now it sounded like nothing had happened.

  “Oh.”

  “Where’s your mobile?”

  “Lost it.”

  “Where did you stay?”

  “Just…In a hotel. A B-and-B sort of thing.”

  “How did you pay for it?”

  The policewoman stood up. We’d gone from talking about whether I was dead or alive to talking about how I paid for the B&B, so I suppose she thought she wasn’t needed anymore. To me, that wasn’t professional. I could have just been waiting until she’d gone out the door to tell Mum that I’d sold crack or mugged some pensioners. And then she would have missed the chance of an arrest. Maybe she wasn’t bothered because it all happened in Hastings, and not on her patch.

  “We’ll be getting on,” the policewoman said. “I’ll give you a call later.”

  “Thanks for all your help,” said Mum.

  “Not at all. We’re just happy he’s back safe and sound.”

  She looked at me, and I’m pretty sure the look had a meaning, but I have no idea what it was. It could have been

  be nice to your mum; or

  I know how you paid for that room; or

  now we know you are bad, we’ll be watching you

  FOREVER.

  It wasn’t just good-bye, that’s for sure.

  I was sorry to see them go, because once they’d gone, there was nothing to stop Mum committing illegal acts on me, and I could tell she was in the mood to. She waited until she heard the front door close behind them, and then she said, “Right. What’s all this about?”

  And I didn’t know what to say. Why hadn’t Alicia told Mum she was pregnant? There were lots of different answers to this question, of course, but the answer I chose—because I’m an idiot—was this one: Alicia hadn’t told Mum she was pregnant because she wasn’t pregnant after all. What was my evidence? Especially if you take away the whole whizzing forward into the future thing, which you couldn’t really rely on? My evidence was that Alicia wanted to buy a pregnancy tester. I never got to hear the results of the test because I switched my phone off and then threw it in the sea. Well, loads of people must buy testers and find out they’re not pregnant, right? Otherwise, there’d be no point to them, would there? So if Alicia wasn’t pregnant, there was no need to tell Mum anything about anything. That was the good news. The bad news was that if Alicia wasn’t pregnant, I didn’t have a very good reason for running away from home for a night.

  We sat there.

  “Well?” said Mum.

  “Can I have some breakfast?” I said. “And a cup of tea?”

  I was clever, or as clever as it was possible for a stupid boy to be. I said it in a way that meant, It’s a long story. And it would be a long story, when I’d made it up.

  My mum walked over to me and hugged me, and we went into the kitchen.

  She made me scrambled eggs, bacon, mushrooms, beans and potato waffles, and then she made me exactly the same thing again. And I was starving, because in Hastings I’d had two bags of chips, but one breakfast would have been fine. It was more that while she was cooking and I was eating, I didn’t have to tell her anything. Every now and again, she’d ask me something, like, How did I get to Hastings? or Did I speak to anyone? So I did end up talking about Mr. Brady, and the job I’d got, and the remote-control story, and she was laughing, and everything was OK. But I knew I was just putting things off. I wondered for a moment whether I could manage a third breakfast and a fourth cup of tea, just so that we could stay cozy, but I would have thrown it up again.

  “So?”

  I frowned at my plate, like someone would do if they were about to get something off their chest.

  “I just…I don’t know. I just freaked out.”

  “But about what, sweetheart?”

  “I don’t know. A lot of stuff. Splitting up with Alicia. School. You and Dad.”

  I knew that she’d focus on the last thing first.

  “Me and your dad? But we divorced years ago.”

  “Yeah. I dunno. It was like it suddenly sunk in.”

  Any normal person would just laugh at this. But in my experience, parents want to feel guilty. Or rather, if you make out that you’ve been scarred for life by something that they’ve done, they don’t notice how stupid it sounds. They take it really, really seriously.

  “I knew we should have done things differently.”

  “Like what?”

  “I wanted to see a family counsellor, but of course your dad thought that was bollocks.”

  “Yeah. Well. Too late now,” I said.

  “Ah, but that’s the thing,” said Mum. “It’s not. I read this book about a guy who was tortured by the Japanese fifty years ago, and he couldn’t come to terms with it, so he went to talk to someone. It’s never too late.”

  I wanted to laugh, for the first time in days, but I couldn’t.

  “Yeah. I know. But what you and Dad did…It messed me up, I suppose, but it wasn’t like being tortured by the Japanese. Not really.”

  “No, and it’s not fifty years ago that we got divorced either. So, you know.”

  I didn’t, but I just nodded.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “You hold this baby in your arms, and you look at him, and you think, I don’t want to mess you up. And then what do you do? You mess him up. I can’t believe what a…what a pig’s ear I’ve made of everything.”

  “Oh, it’s OK,” I said. But not very, you know, strongly. I wanted to show that I’d be able to forgive her one day, but not for another ten years or so.

  “Will you come with me to talk to someone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you know?”

  “I don’t know, you know…what I’ve got to say about it all now.”

  “Of course you don’t know. That’s why we’ve got to go to family counselling. All sorts of things will come up that you might not know about. I’ll make your father come too. He’s not as narrow-minded as he was. Carol made him go and talk to someone when they couldn’t have a baby. I’m going to do some research at work. The sooner the better.”

  And she hugged me. I had been forgiven for running away from home because I couldn’t handle my parents splitting up. So that was good. On the bad side, though: I was going to have to sit in a room talking to a stranger about feelings I didn’t have, and I’m not very good at making things up. And also: my mum still had no idea why I’d gone to Hastings for a night, and I couldn’t think of a way to tell her.

  Mum wanted to go to work, and she made me promise that I wouldn’t go anywhere. I didn’t want to go anywhere. I wanted to sit at home watchingJudge Judy andDeal or No Deal all day. But I knew I couldn’t. I knew I had to go to Alicia’s house and see
what was up. I could have called her from our home phone, but something stopped me. I suppose it was the thought of her going off on one on the phone, and me just standing there with my mouth opening and closing. If I was standing in front of her, at least I’d feel like I was a person. On the phone I’d just be an opening and closing mouth.

  My plan was to get the bus to Alicia’s house and hide in the bushes until I could see something that let me know one way or the other what was going on. There were two flaws in the plan, I discovered:

  no bushes

  What actually was there to look at?

  In my mind, I’d been away for a few months, so I thought that what I’d see would be Alicia walking along slowly with a swollen belly, or Alicia stopping somewhere to be sick. But the truth was that I’d only been away for a day and a half, and so when I did see her, she looked pretty much exactly like she did when we met in Starbucks to buy a home testing kit. I was confused by a lot of things. I was confused because I’d spent so much time thinking about Alicia being pregnant. But also, being whizzed into the future hadn’t helped either. I was living in three different time zones at once.

  As there were no bushes, I had to make do with a lamppost opposite her house. This wasn’t much use as a lookout, because the only way I could properly hide was to put my back and head against it and keep still. So of course I couldn’t see anything apart from the house in front of me, which was the house on the other side of the road from Alicia’s house. What was I doing? It was eleven o’clock in the morning, and Alicia was probably at school. And if she wasn’t at school, she was inside a house I wasn’t looking at. And if she came out of the house I wasn’t looking at, then I couldn’t see her anyway. And then Rabbit walked past with his board under his arm. I tried to hide from him, but he saw me, so that just made the hiding seem even more stupid.

  “Who we hiding from?” he said.

  “Oh. Hi, Rabbit.”

  He dropped his board down beside the tree with a clatter.