Slam

by Nick Hornby

  “Is a problem for you that I’m Spanish?”

  “No, no,” said my dad. “I was just wondering.”

  “I marry-ed an Englishman a long time ago. I have been living here since many, many years.”

  Dad made a face at me without her noticing, and I nearly laughed. It was a brilliant face, really, because it was a face that said, Well, why is her English so bloody useless then? And that’s a hard face to make.

  “But please. Sam has many problems, it sounds. We need to talk about them in the time we have.”

  Many, many problems.

  “Sam, also you said school is a problem.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you explain?”

  “Not really.” And I stared at my shoes again. It was going to be much easier than I thought, wasting this hour.

  Afterwards, the three of us had to go out and eat and talk some more. We went for a curry, and when they’d brought the papadums, my mum started up again.

  “Did you find that helpful?”

  “Yeah,” I said. And that was true, sort of. If there had been any problems with school or Mum and Dad splitting up, that would have been exactly the right sort of place to talk about it all. The trouble was, I didn’t have any problems like that, but I couldn’t blame Consuela for that, and neither could anyone else.

  “What about Alicia?” said my mum.

  “Who’s Alicia?” said my dad.

  “This girl Sam was seeing. She was pretty much your first serious girlfriend, I’d say. Isn’t that right?”

  “S’pose.”

  “But you’re not with her now?” Dad asked.

  “Nah.”

  “Why not?”

  “Dunno. Just…”

  “So there’s nothing in the timing?” said Mum.

  “What timing?”

  “First you split up with Alicia and then you take off to Hastings.”

  “Nah.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, you know.”

  “Ah! Finally!” said my dad. And then he had a go at my mum again. “See, why didn’t you bring that up in there?”

  “He hasn’t said it was anything to do with anything.”

  “He did! He just said, ‘Well, you know’! That’s as close as he ever comes to saying anything! In Sam language, what he just said was, That girl really screwed me up and I couldn’t handle it and I cleared off.”

  “Is that what you just said?” my mum asked. “Is that what ‘Well, you know’ means in Sam language?”

  “Yeah, I suppose.”

  I didn’t feel like I was lying. At least we were talking about the person who mattered, as opposed to things that didn’t matter, like school and their divorce. So I felt a kind of relief. And she had screwed me up, Alicia, sort of, in a way. And I definitely couldn’t handle it.

  “What good was running off going to do you?” said my dad. Which was a fair question, really.

  “I didn’t want to live in London anymore.”

  “So you went to Hastings for good?” said my mum.

  “Well. Not really. ’Cos I came back. But yeah, I thought I was going for good.”

  “You can’t leave town every time someone dumps you,” said my dad. “You’ve got a lifetime of this stuff. You’d be living in a lot of different towns.”

  “I feel bad because I introduced them,” said Mum. “I didn’t think it would cause all this trouble.”

  “But how did you think it was going to help?” said Dad. “Moving to Hastings?”

  “I knew I wouldn’t see her down there.”

  “Is she local, then?”

  “Where do you think she’s from? New York? When do kids ever go out with someone who isn’t local?” said Mum.

  “I can’t make head or tail of this,” said my dad. “I’d understand if you’d knocked her up or something. But—”

  “Oh, that’s lovely,” said Mum. “That teaches him responsibility, doesn’t it?”

  “I didn’t say it would be the right thing, did I? I just said I’d understand. Like, that would be some kind of explanation.”

  He was right again. It would be some kind of explanation. Maybe the best explanation.

  “People do strange things when they’ve had their hearts broken. But you wouldn’t know about that.”

  “Oh, here we go again.”

  “You weren’t dying of a broken heart when we split up, were you? You didn’t disappear off anywhere. Apart from to your girlfriend’s.”

  And they were off again.

  Sometimes, listening to my mum and dad talking was like being a spectator in a stadium when people are running the ten thousand meters in the Olympics. They go round and round and round and round, and there’s one bit each lap where they pass right in front of you, and you’re really close to them. But then they disappear off round the bend and they’re gone. When Dad started talking about me knocking Alicia up, it was like he’d jumped the perimeter fence and was coming straight for me. But then he got distracted and rejoined the race.

  I went back to school the next day, but I didn’t speak to anyone, didn’t listen to anything, didn’t pick up a pen the whole day. I just sat there, with things churning over and over in my head and in my stomach. Some things I thought were

  I’m going back to Hastings.

  It didn’t make any difference that I’d been to Hastings before. I could go anywhere. Any seaside town.

  What is a good name for a baby? (And then a lot of baby names, like Bucky, Sandro, Rune, Pierre-Luc. I just basically went through a list of cool skaters in my head.) One thing I knew, and one thing I’d learned from the future: Roof was a rubbish name. Nothing would ever change my mind about that. You know how inThe Terminator they’re trying to protect the unborn baby who will one day go on to save the world? Well, my mission was to prevent my unborn baby from being called Roof.

  Will Alicia’s mum and dad actually attempt to attack me? Physically? It wasn’t only my fault.

  My mum. I didn’t really have any thoughts or questions, so much. I just kept thinking of what she’d look like when I told her. When she said that thing about her heart breaking the night before, it made me sad, because I knew that I was going to break her heart too. That meant the whole of our family would have broken her heart.

  Did I have to go and watch the baby being born, because I was the dad? I didn’t want to. I’d seen a baby being born on TV and it was terrible. Would Alicia make those noises? Could I ask her not to?

  What was I going to do to make some money? Would all our parents pay for everything?

  And when I got whizzed into the future, was that really the future? Was I going to live with Alicia at her mum and dad’s house? Was I going to share a bed with her?

  None of it went anywhere, but I couldn’t get rid of it either. It just stayed in there. I was like one of those guys who work at the funfairs—I hopped off one teacup, jumped onto the next one, spun that around and made people (in other words, me) frightened, and moved on. At lunchtime I went up to the chip shop with some people from my class, but I didn’t eat anything. I couldn’t. It felt like I’d never eat anything again. Or not until Pierre-Luc was born, and Alicia had stopped making that noise.

  As I walked out of school at the end of the day, I could see Alicia waiting for me on the other side of the road. I started to feel annoyed that she didn’t trust me, but seeing as I’d disappeared on her once, you could hardly blame her. And anyway, she was pleased to see me, and she smiled, and I remembered why we’d gone out in the first place. All that seemed like a long time ago now, though. She looked older, for a start. Older and paler. She was pretty white.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello. Are you OK?”

  “Not really,” she said. “I spent the morning throwing up, and I’m scared stiff.”

  “Do you want to go and get something to drink first? Starbucks or somewhere?”

  “I’d probably throw up again. I could drink some water. Water m
ight be OK.”

  You had to say that it was worse for her than it was for me. I was feeling scared sick, and so was she. I couldn’t really pretend I was more scared than she was. In fact, seeing as I was even more afraid of telling my mum than of telling her mum and dad, then she was probably feeling the worst about what we were about to do. And on top of all that, she had baby sickness too. I could have gone to Starbucks and managed a caramel Frappuccino, with cream on top, but I could see that if she tried to drink one of those, it would come up again pretty quickly. When I thought about that, I didn’t want one either.

  We took the bus to hers, and went straight up to her room, because nobody else was around yet. She sat in the armchair, and I ended up sitting between her feet. I hadn’t been in her room since the future, and in the future it was different. (That sounds weird, doesn’t it? It should be, “In the future thingswill be different,” shouldn’t it? But if I say that, it means what I saw was definitely the future, and I’m not a hundred percent about that. So I’m going to stick with talking about the future like it was the past.) Anyway, theDonnie Darko poster that wasn’t there in the future was back, not that it had ever been away yet. I was pleased to see it.

  “How do you know they’re coming straight home?” I said.

  “I asked them to. They know I haven’t been happy, and I said I wanted to talk to them.”

  She put on some sad, slow music that made my watch seem to stop. It was a woman singing about somebody who had left her and she was remembering all these things about him like his smell and his shoes and what he had in his jacket pockets if you put your hand in there. There wasn’t anything she didn’t remember, it sounded like, and the song lasted forever.

  “Do you like this?” she said. “I’ve been playing it a lot.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Bit slow.”

  “It’s supposed to be slow. It’s a slow song.”

  And we went quiet again, and I started to think about living in this room with her and a baby, listening to slow, sad music. It wouldn’t be so bad. There were worse things. I wouldn’t be in here all the time, would I?

  We heard the door slam underneath us, and I stood up.

  “We’ll stay up here until they’re both home,” said Alicia. “Otherwise I know what will happen. My mum will make us talk before my dad’s home, and then we’ll have to go through it all twice.”

  My heart was banging away so hard that if I’d lifted up my T-shirt and had a look down the front, I’d probably have been able to see my chest moving, like there was a little man trapped in there.

  “What are you doing?” said Alicia.

  What I was doing was, I was looking down my T-shirt to see if there was a little man trapped down there. I didn’t really know what I was doing anymore.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “This is going to be hard,” she said, as if me looking down my T-shirt was going to make it harder.

  “I won’t look down there when we’re telling them,” I said, and she laughed. It was nice to hear.

  “Alicia?” her mum shouted.

  “Ignore it,” Alicia whispered, as if I was going to come out of her bedroom and say something.

  “Alicia? Are you up there?”

  “She came in with someone about half an hour ago,” her dad shouted. He’d been in all the time, having a bath or reading in his bedroom or something.

  She walked out of her room and I followed her.

  “We’re here,” she said.

  “Who’s we?” said her mum, all cheerful. And then, not so cheerful, as she saw us coming down the stairs, “Oh. Sam. Hello.”

  We sat around the kitchen table. There was a lot of messing around with tea and milk and sugar and biscuits, and I was beginning to wonder whether they’d guessed, and all the business with the kettle and so on was just a way of hanging on to their old life just a little bit longer. It was like me throwing my mobile into the sea. The longer someone’s not telling you what you don’t want to hear, the better. It wouldn’t have been hard to guess, really. What could the two of us have wanted to say? We split up a while ago, so we weren’t going to tell them we wanted to get married. And Alicia hadn’t been anywhere, so we weren’t going to tell them that we’d already run off somewhere and got married. What was there left?

  “What’s on your mind?” said Alicia’s dad.

  Alicia looked at me. I cleared my throat. Nobody said anything.

  “I’m going to have a baby,” I said.

  I don’t think I need to tell you that I wasn’t trying to be funny. It just came out wrong. I think it was because Alicia had given me that little lecture about how everything had to be “we” from now on. I’d taken it too seriously. I knew the baby wasn’t just hers, but now I’d overdone it, and made it so that the baby was just mine.

  Whatever the reason, we couldn’t have had a worse start. Because Alicia made a kind of snorting sound, which was her trying not to laugh. I’d said something stupid because I was nervous, and Alicia had wanted to laugh because she was nervous, but her dad didn’t take any notice of our nerves. He just went nuts.

  “You think this is FUNNY?” he shouted, and I realized that they had guessed. In films, and I think probably in life too, people go quiet when they hear bad news. Or they repeat the last word. You know, “Ababy ?” But he didn’t do that. He just started shouting. Alicia’s mum wasn’t shouting, though. She started crying, and sort of slumped on the kitchen table with her arms over her head.

  “And we’re keeping it,” said Alicia. “I’m not getting rid of it.”

  “Don’t be so ridiculous,” said her dad. “You can’t care for a baby at your age. Either of you.”

  “Plenty of girls my age do,” said Alicia.

  “Not girls like you,” said her dad. “Usually they’ve got more sense.”

  “Do you hate us?” said her mum suddenly. “Is that what this is about?”

  “Mum, you know I don’t hate you,” said Alicia.

  “I’m talking to him,” said her mother. And then, when I looked at her, all confused, she said, “Yes. You.”

  I just shook my head. I didn’t know what else to do.

  “Because this stops her getting away, doesn’t it?”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about, really.

  “How do you mean?” I said.

  “How do you mean?” she said, in a stupid voice that I think was supposed to show I was thick.

  “He’s got nothing to do with it,” said Alicia. And then, before her parents could say anything, she said, “Well, something to do with it. But it was my decision to keep the baby. He didn’t want to, I don’t think. And also, I’d already got away. He didn’t want to be with me.”

  “How did this happen?” said her mum. “I presumed you were having sex. I didn’t think you were too stupid to use contraception.”

  “We did use contraception,” said Alicia.

  “So how did this happen?”

  “We don’t know.”

  I knew, but I didn’t really want to go into all that stuff about things half-happening just at the wrong time. It didn’t really matter now.

  “And what makes you think you want a baby? You couldn’t look after a goldfish.”

  “That was years ago.”

  “Yes. Three years ago. You were a kid then, and you’re a kid now. God. I don’t believe we’re having this conversation.”

  “What happened to the goldfish?” I said. But everyone ignored me. It was a stupid question. What happened to her goldfish was probably the same thing that happened to my goldfish, and everybody else’s goldfish. You don’t sell them, or have them adopted, do you? They all get flushed down the toilet in the end.

  “What about your mother, Sam? What does she think?”

  “She doesn’t know yet.”

  “Right. Let’s go and talk to her. Now. All of us.”

  “That’s not fair, Mum,” said Alicia.

  I didn’t think it was fair
either, but I couldn’t think of a reason why it wasn’t.

  “Why is it ‘snot fair’?” said her mum. She put on another silly voice, this time one that was supposed to show that Alicia was a whiny little girl.

  “Because we should have the chance to tell her without you being there. She’s not here now, is she? When we told you?”

  “Can I ask you something, Sam?” said Alicia’s dad. He hadn’t spoken for a while.

  “Yeah. Course.”

  “I remember your mother at the party where you met Alicia. She’s very pretty, isn’t she?”

  “I dunno. S’pose, yeah.”

  “Young and pretty.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How old is she?”

  “She’s…Well, yeah, she’s thirty-two.”

  “Thirty-two. So she was sixteen when you were born.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Don’t you people ever learn anything?”

  They did come with us in the end. They calmed down, and Alicia’s mum told her dad off for what he’d said, and he apologized. I knew I wasn’t going to forget it, though. “You people.” Which people? The people who have babies when they’re sixteen? What kind of people are they? It was my idea that we all went together. I was afraid. It wasn’t as if I thought my mum would do anything to me. I was just afraid of how miserable she was going to be. Of all the things she was afraid of, this was probably number one. It would be better, I thought, if she’d always been afraid of me getting hooked on drugs, and I turned up with a syringe sticking out of me. At least she could pull it out. It would be better if she’d always been afraid of me being decapitated, and I turned up with my head tucked under my arm. At least I’d be dead. So I was hoping that if the four of us turned up on the doorstep, she’d have to put a lid on it, at least until they’d gone. Oh, everything was in the short term. That was the only way I could think. If I went to Hastings, I could put things off for a day. If Alicia’s mum and dad came with me to my house to tell my mum I’d made their daughter pregnant, it wouldn’t be quite so terrible for an hour or so. I couldn’t bear to think about the proper future, so I just tried to make things better for the next twenty minutes or so, over and over again.