Slam

by Nick Hornby

“Do you want a hand?”

  “A hand?”

  “I’ve got nothing to do. I might as well help out. Shall I hide with you? Or find somewhere else?”

  “Maybe somewhere else,” I said. “There isn’t really room for two behind a lamppost.”

  “Good point. Why are we hiding, anyway?”

  “We don’t want the people in that house there to see us.”

  “Right. Cool. Why don’t we just go home? They’ll never see us there.”

  “Why don’t you go home, Rabbit?”

  “You don’t have to be like that. I know when I’m not wanted.”

  If Rabbit knew when he wasn’t wanted, he’d be living in Australia by now. But it wasn’t his fault that I’d run away from my pregnant girlfriend and I didn’t have the guts to knock on her door.

  “I’m sorry, Rabbit. I just think I should do this on my own.”

  “Yeah. You’re right. I never really understood what we were up to anyway.”

  And he went.

  After Rabbit had gone, I changed my tactics. I moved round to the other side of the lamppost and leaned against it that way. So I was pretty much staring through the window of her sitting room, and if anyone was in there and wanted to come out and talk to me, then they could. Nobody did. Phase Two of my mission was over, and I couldn’t see how there could be a Phase Three, so I walked back to the bus stop. I spent the rest of the day watchingJudge Judy andDeal or No Deal and eating rubbish food which I paid for out of the money that was supposed to support me in my new life in Hastings. That was just one of the great things about coming home. I could spend the rest of my forty pounds in one day on crisps if I wanted to.

  Just before Mum got home from work, I realized that I could have done something apart from lean on one side of the lamppost and then the other side of the lamppost. I could have knocked on Alicia’s door, and asked whether she was pregnant, and how she was, and how her parents were. And then I could have got on with the next part of my life.

  But I didn’t want to do that yet. I had seen what the next part of my life looked like when I was whizzed into the future, and I didn’t like the look of it one bit. If I sat at home and watched TV, then the next part of my life would never come.

  CHAPTER 9

  And for may be two days, it worked, and I felt powerful. I could stop time! At first, I was careful: I didn’t go out, didn’t answer the phone, not that it ever rung much anyway. I told Mum I had picked up a bug from the crappy hotel and coughed a lot and she let me stay off school. I ate toast, and messed around on You-Tube, and designed a new T-shirt for Tony Hawk. I hadn’t spoken to him since I got back. I was a little scared of him now. I didn’t want to go back to the place that he’d sent me the last time we talked.

  On the third day, there was a knock at the door, and I answered it. Mum buys stuff off Amazon sometimes, and because there’s nobody in, we had to go to the sorting office to collect it on Saturdays, so I thought I’d save us a trip.

  But it wasn’t the postman. It was Alicia.

  “Hello,” she said. And then she started crying. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t say hello back, didn’t ask her in, didn’t touch her. I thought of the phone at the bottom of the sea, and how this was like all the phone messages and texts coming at once.

  I woke up, finally. I pulled her indoors, made her sit down at the kitchen table, asked her if she wanted a cup of tea. She nodded, but she kept crying.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Do you hate me?”

  “No,” I said. “No. No way. Why should I hate you?”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Hastings.”

  “Why wouldn’t you call me?”

  “Threw my phone in the sea.”

  “Do you want to know the results of the pregnancy test?”

  “I think I can guess.”

  And even then, when I said it, with her crying and coming round to my house during the day and all the millions of other things that told me there was bad news, my heart started to beat faster. Because there was still a one-in-a-trillion chance that she was going to say, “I’ll bet you can’t,” or “No, that’s not it at all.” It wasn’t all over yet. How was I to know that she wasn’t upset about us splitting up, or her parents splitting up, or some new boyfriend being horrible to her? It could have been anything.

  But she just nodded.

  “Do your mum and dad want to kill me?”

  “God, I haven’t told them,” she said. “I was hoping you’d do that with me.”

  I didn’t say anything. OK, so I’d only been in Hastings for one night, but nothing had happened while I was there at all, and that had been half the point of me going: so that things would happen. So that my mum could find out from Alicia’s parents, and get upset. But then she’d get worried about me disappearing and forgive me. I wanted to go back to Hastings. I was wrong about the job with Mr. Brady being just as bad as or even worse than having a baby. It wasn’t. Having a baby was going to kill my mum and Alicia’s mum and dad and probably me and Alicia, and there wasn’t anything you could feel down the side of Mr. Brady’s bed that was going to do that much damage.

  “What are you going to do?” I said.

  She was quiet for a while.

  “Can you do me a favor?” she said. “When we talk about this, can you say ‘we’?”

  I didn’t understand, and I made a face to show her I didn’t.

  “You said, ‘What areyou going to do?’ And it should be, ‘What arewe going to do?’”

  “Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”

  “Because…Well, I’ve been thinking about this. The splitting up doesn’t matter, because it’s your baby too, right?”

  “I suppose. If you say so.”

  In just about every film or TV program I’ve ever seen, the bloke says that at some point in these situations. I didn’t even mean anything by it, really. I was just saying the lines you say.

  “I knew you’d be like that,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “I knew you’d try to wriggle out of it. Boys always do.”

  “Boys always do? How many times have you been in this situation, then?”

  “Fucking go and fuck yourself.”

  “Fucking go and fuck yourself,” I said back, in a silly voice.

  The kettle boiled. I took a long time getting mugs out and dunking tea bags and pouring milk and throwing tea bags away.

  Before I go on with this conversation, I have to stop and say this: I’m eighteen years old now. I was just sixteen when this conversation happened. So it was only two years ago, but it feels more like ten years ago. It feels like that not just because a lot has happened since then, but also because the boy who was talking to Alicia that afternoon…he wasn’t sixteen. He wasn’t just two years younger than the person who’s talking to you now. It feels now, and it even felt then, as though that boy was eight or nine years old. He felt sick, and he wanted to cry. His voice wobbled just about every time he tried to say anything. He wanted his mum, and he didn’t want his mum to know.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Alicia had stopped crying for a bit, but now she was at it again, so I had to say something.

  “Not a very good start, is it?”

  I shook my head, but the word “start” made me feel even worse. She was right, of course. This was a start. But I didn’t want it to be a start. I wanted this to be the worst of it, and the end, and it wasn’t going to be.

  “I’m going to keep the baby,” she said.

  I sort of knew that, because of the night and day I’d spent in the future, so it was funny to think this was news. To tell you the truth, I’d forgotten there was any choice.

  “Oh,” I said. “What happened to ‘we’?”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “You just told me I should be talking about whatwe’re going to do. And now you’re telling me whatyou’re going to do.”

  “It’s different, isn’t it?”

  “Why?�
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  “Because while the baby’s in here, it’s my body. When it comes out, it’s our baby.”

  There was something that felt not quite right about what she was saying, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

  “But what are we going to do with a baby?”

  “What are we going to do with it? Look after it. What else can you do with it?”

  “But…”

  Later, cleverer people than me would come up with some arguments. But right then, I couldn’t think of anything. It was her body and she wanted the baby. And then when we had the baby we would look after it. There didn’t seem like there was much else to say.

  “When you going to tell your mum and dad?”

  “We.When are we going to tell my mum and dad.”

  We. I was going to sit there while Alicia told her mum and dad something that would make them want to kill me. Or maybe she was going to sit there while I told them something that would make them want to kill me. When I ran away to Hastings, I’d sort of worked out that things were going to be bad. I just hadn’t worked out how bad.

  “OK. We.”

  “Some girls don’t tell their parents for ages. Not until they have to,” she said. “I’ve been reading stuff on the Net.”

  “Sounds sensible,” I said. Wrong.

  “You reckon?” And she made a snorting noise. “Sounds sensible to you, because you just want to put it off.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “What are you doing tonight?” she said.

  “Tonight’s no good,” I said, not too quickly, but not too slowly either.

  “Why?”

  “I said”—What did I say, what did I say?—“I’d go with”—Who? Who? Who?—“my mum to”—Where? Where? Shit—“This work thing she’s got on. Everyone always goes with someone and she always goes on her own, so I told her ages ago—”

  “Fine. Tomorrow night?”

  “Tomorrow night?”

  “You don’t want to put it off, remember?”

  Oh, but I did. I really did. I wanted to put it off forever. I just knew I wasn’t allowed to say so.

  “Tomorrow night,” I said, and even the sound of the words coming out of my mouth made me want to go to the toilet. I couldn’t imagine what my guts would feel like in twenty-four hours’ time.

  “Promise? You’ll come round after school?”

  “After school. Promise.”

  Tomorrow night was hundreds of years away. Something would have changed by then. “Are you going out with anyone?” Alicia said.

  “No. God. No.”

  “Me neither. That sort of makes things easier, doesn’t it?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Listen,” said Alicia. “I know you got sick of me—”

  “No, no. It wasn’t that,” I said. “It was…” But I couldn’t think of anything, so I stopped.

  “Whatever,” she said. “But I know you’re OK. So if this had to happen with someone, I’m glad it was you.”

  “Even though I ran away?”

  “I didn’t know you’d run away. I just knew you weren’t at school.”

  “I couldn’t handle it,” I said.

  “Yeah, well. Neither could I. Still can’t.”

  We drank our tea, and tried to talk about other things, and then she went home. When she’d gone, I puked into the kitchen sink. Too many breakfasts, I suppose. And even though I wasn’t talking to TH, I suddenly heard his voice. “I sat on the toilet while shakily holding a trash can in front of my face as my stomach contents blew out my nose and mouth with equally impressive force,” he said. Funny what you think of at times like that, isn’t it?

  I missed talking to TH, but what was happening in the present was bad enough, so I really didn’t want to know anything that might happen to me in the future. Instead of chatting with him, I read his book again. Even though I’d read it a thousand times, there were still things in there that I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten how he asked Erin to marry him, for example, that thing with the coyotes and the flashlight. Maybe it wasn’t so much that I’d forgotten it. Maybe it was more that I’d never found it that interesting before. It had never meant that much to me. His first marriage was just about bearable when I was fourteen or fifteen, because every now and again you meet someone you think about marrying. I was pretty sure I was going to marry Alicia for the first couple of weeks, for example. But you’re not really thinking about second marriages when you’re that age, in my opinion. Now, though, it was like my first marriage, which hadn’t actually yet started, was over, and we had a kid, and it was all a mess. So reading about TH and Erin was helpful, because TH had married Cindy and had Riley and they’d got over it. TH and Erin were the future. If I ever survived this mess, I’d never get married again, I was absolutely positive about that. But maybe there’d be something on the other side. Something to look forward to. Something like Erin, except not Erin, or any other woman or girl.

  And this is whyHawk—Occupation: Skateboarder is such a brilliant book. Whenever you pick it up, there’s something in it that helps you with your life.

  When Mum came back from work, she told me we were going straight out again, because someone at the council had put her in touch with a family counsellor, and because this counsellor was a friend of a friend, we could jump the queue, and we had an appointment at 6:30.

  “What about tea?” I said. It was the only thing I could think of, but even I could see it wouldn’t be enough to get me out of going.

  “Curry afterwards. The three of us can go out and talk.”

  “The three of us? How do we even know we’ll get on with this counsellor?”

  “Not the counsellor, you muppet. Your dad. I persuaded him to drive down. Even he could see it was serious, you running away.”

  Well, it couldn’t really have been any more of a disaster, could it? My whole family was going to see someone to talk about problems we didn’t have. The problems we did have, though, they didn’t know about, and they weren’t going to find out about. It would be funny, if anything was ever going to be funny again.

  The lady’s name was Consuela, which was enough to put my dad into a bad mood from the very first minute. I don’t know if you could call Dad a racist, because I’ve never heard him say anything bad about black people or Muslims or Asians. But he hates pretty much anyone from Europe. He hates the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Italians…For some reason, he hates anyone who comes from somewhere you might want to go on holiday. He has been to all these places on holiday. He always says that he didn’t start it, and that they hated him first, but I went on one or two of those holidays with him, and that’s not true. Each time, he got off the plane and started sulking. We’ve all tried talking to him about it, but we never get anywhere. It’s his loss, anyway. Last year he went to Bulgaria, but that wasn’t any better, he said. The truth is that he hates going abroad, so it’s a good thing that Africa and other places where black people live are so far away, otherwise he’d be a proper racist, and we’d all have to stop talking to him.

  We couldn’t even pretend that Consuela wasn’t Spanish, because she had a Spanish accent. Every time she said “yust” instead of “just” or something like that, you could almost see the steam coming out of Dad’s ears.

  “So,” she said. “Sam. You ran from home, is that right?”

  “Ran away,” my dad said.

  “Thank you,” said Consuela. “I occasionally makes mistakes with my English. I’m from Madrid.”

  “I’d never have guessed,” said Dad, all sarcastic.

  “Thank you,” said Consuela.

  “So,” she said. “Sam. Can you explain why you ran?”

  “Yeah, well,” I said. “I was telling Mum. School was getting on top of me, and then I…I dunno. I just started to feel bad about Mum and Dad splitting up.”

  “And when did they split up?”

  “Only about ten years ago,” said Dad. “So it’s early days yet.”

&
nbsp; “Yes, go on,” said Mum. “A little bit of gentle piss-taking will help.”

  “He doesn’t give a monkey’s about us splitting up anymore,” said Dad. “It wasn’t because of us he buggered off to Hastings. Something’s going on that he’s not telling us about. He’s pinched something. He’s been taking drugs. Something.”

  He was right, of course. But he was being right in a really, really annoying way. He was presuming that I was telling lies about something because he’s a bad-tempered bastard who always thinks the worst of everyone.

  “So what do you think that is, Dave?” said Consuela.

  “I dunno. Ask him.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “What’s the point of asking me? I don’t know what he’s been up to.”

  “We’re asking you because these sessions give everyone a chance for saying their minds,” said Consuela.

  “Oh, I get it,” said Dad. “We’ve all decided it’s all my fault already.”

  “When did she say that?” said Mum. “You see? This is what he’s like. You can’t talk to him. No wonder Sam ran off.”

  “So it is my fault,” said Dad.

  “Can I say something?” I said. “Is that allowed?”

  Everyone shut up and looked guilty. All this was supposed to be about me, and nobody was paying me any attention. The only problem was I didn’t really have anything useful to say. The only thing worth saying was that Alicia was pregnant, and this wasn’t the time or the place.

  “Oh, never mind,” I said. “What’s the point?” And then I folded my arms and looked at my shoes, like I was never going to speak again.

  “Is that your feeling?” said Consuela. “That there’s no point in saying anything?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “He doesn’t feel like that at home,” said Mum. “Just here.”

  “Except that his feelings about your divorce and so on are a bit surprising to you. So maybe he doesn’t talk so much at home than you think.”

  “How does someone Spanish end up working for the council, anyway?” said my dad. If he’d been listening to what she’d actually been saying, instead of the mistakes in her English, he could have had a go at Mum back. Consuela had just pointed out that Mum didn’t seem to know much about me. But that’s Dad all over. Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if I’d gone off to Barnet to live with Dad instead of Mum. Would I have ended up hating Spanish people like him? I probably wouldn’t have been a skater, because there isn’t as much concrete where he lives. And he wouldn’t have been interested in me drawing all the time. So I probably would have been worse off. On the other hand, I’d never have met Alicia. Not meeting Alicia would have been good. Not meeting Alicia beat everything.