Slam

by Nick Hornby

  I wasn’t stupid. The chances of staying together weren’t that good, really. We were a long way from being grown-ups. My mum split from Dad when she was twenty-five, which means they were together for ten years or so, and I’d never managed ten months. Maybe not even ten weeks. What it felt like was, there was this big hump in the road coming up, i.e. the baby. And we needed a bit of a push to get us over that hump. And maybe getting back together would do it. The thing about humps in the road, though, is that you go up and then you come down again, and you can coast down the other side. Did I say I wasn’t stupid? Ha! What I didn’t know then was that there wasn’t another side. You just have to keep pushing forever. Or until you run out of steam.

  We saw each other a lot, after the scan. We did homework round each other’s houses, or watched TV with my mum or her mum and dad. But we never disappeared off upstairs to have any sex. When we went out before, we had sex a lot. Alicia didn’t feel like it. I felt like it sometimes, but I was serious about never having sex again, so even though some parts of me were interested, my head wasn’t. Sex was bad news. Alicia said that you couldn’t get pregnant while you were pregnant, which is why people are never three or four months older than their brothers or sisters, which I suppose I knew, really, if I’d thought about it. But she wasn’t telling me that because she was trying to persuade me. She just read it to me out of a book. She was reading a lot of books about it all.

  She wanted to find out more about…Well, about everything, more or less. There wasn’t much we knew about anything. So Alicia’s mum arranged for us to go to classes called NCT classes, which stands for Something Childbirth Something. Alicia’s mum said she’d found it very useful when she was pregnant. They were supposed to teach you how to breathe and what to take to the hospital and how to tell when you’re actually having a baby and all that.

  We met outside the place, which was one of those big old houses in Highbury New Park. I got there early because Alicia said I had to be there before her, because she didn’t want to stand there on her own, but I didn’t know when she was going to be there, so I got there forty-five minutes early to be on the safe side. I played the Tetris game that was on my new mobile phone until people started arriving, and then I watched them.

  They were different from us. They all came in cars, and every single person was older than my mum. Or at least, they looked older, anyway. They didn’t do themselves any favors with the way they dressed. Some of the men had suits on, I suppose because they had come after work, but the ones that didn’t wore old combat trousers with cord jackets. The women all wore big hairy jumpers and puffa jackets. Lots of them had grey hair. They looked at me as if they thought I was going to sell them crack, or mug them. I was the one with the mobile phone. They didn’t look worth mugging to me.

  “I’m not going in there,” I said to Alicia when she turned up. You could see she was pregnant now, and she moved much more slowly than she used to. She’d still have beaten any of the other women in a race, though.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s like a school staff room in there,” I said.

  And then the moment I said that, one of the teachers from school turned up with her husband. She’d never taught me for anything, and I wasn’t even sure what subject she was. I hadn’t seen her around for ages. Languages, I thought. But I recognized her, and she recognized me, and I think she must have heard about me, because she looked surprised and then not surprised, like she suddenly remembered.

  “Hello. Is it Dean?” she said.

  “No,” I said. And I didn’t say anything else.

  “Oh,” she said, and walked through the gate.

  “Who was that?” said Alicia.

  “Teacher from school,” I said.

  “Oh, Christ,” said Alicia. “We don’t have to go in. We could try somewhere else.”

  “No, you’re all right,” I said. “Let’s see how it goes.”

  We walked through the front door and up the stairs, and then into this big room with a carpet and loads of beanbags. Nobody was talking much, but when we turned up, they all went dead quiet. We didn’t say anything either. We sat down on the floor and looked at the walls.

  After a while a woman walked in. She was small and a bit fat and she had loads and loads of hair, so she looked like one of those little dogs that people put coats on. She noticed us straightaway.

  “Hello,” she said. “Who are you with?”

  “Her,” I said, and pointed at Alicia.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh. Sorry. I thought you’d come…Anyway. That’s great. Nice to see you.”

  I blushed and didn’t say anything. I wanted to die.

  “We might as well all introduce ourselves,” she said. “I’m Theresa. Terry.” And then she pointed at me, and I nearly but not quite said “Sam.” It probably sounded like “Er.” Or maybe “Um.” Alicia was next to get the pointed finger, and she took the piss, and talked like she was onBalamory or something.

  “Hello, everyone. I’m Alicia,” she said, in a singsong voice. Nobody laughed. It seemed to me that we needed a lot of classes about other things before we needed pregnancy classes. We needed a class about how to behave when you went to a pregnancy class, for a start. Neither of us had ever sat in a room full of a load of adults we didn’t know. Even walking into the room and sitting down felt weird. What were you supposed to do when everyone went quiet and stared at you?

  When everyone had said their names, Terry divided us up into groups, boys and girls. Men and women, whatever. We were given a big piece of cardboard, and we were told to talk about what we expected from fatherhood, and someone was supposed to write the things we said down with a marker pen.

  “OK,” said one of the men in a suit. And then he held the marker pen out to me. “Do you want to do the honors?”

  He was probably only trying to be nice, but I wasn’t having that. I’m not the best speller in the world, I wasn’t having them all laughing at me.

  I shook my head, and looked at the wall again. There was a poster of a naked pregnant woman in the place I was staring at, so then I had to look at another bit of wall, otherwise they all would have thought that I was staring at her boobs, and I wasn’t.

  “So. What do we expect from fatherhood? I’m Giles, by the way,” said the man in the suit. I recognized him then. It was the man I met when I was out on my walk with Roof, when I got whizzed into the future. He looked different with a suit on. I felt a bit sad for him. Here, he was all excited and happy. Judging from the state of him when I met him, it was all going to go wrong. I looked over at the women and tried to guess which one was his wife. There was one who seemed nervous and neurotic. She was talking a lot and chewing her hair. I decided it was her.

  After a little while all these words started flying out of the men.

  “Satisfaction.”

  “No sleep!” (“Ha ha.” “Too right.”)

  “Love.”

  “A challenge.”

  “Anxiety.”

  “Poverty!” (“Ha ha.” “Too right.”)

  “Focus.”

  And loads of other words. I didn’t understand a single thing anyone said. When we’d finished, Giles handed the big piece of cardboard back to Terry and she started reading the words out and they all started talking about them. I got distracted by the marker pen. I know I shouldn’t have done it, and I don’t know why I did, but it was just lying there on the carpet, and everyone was distracted by the conversation, so I put it in my pocket. Afterwards, I found out that Alicia had swiped hers too.

  “We’re never going back there,” I said to Alicia afterwards.

  “You don’t have to persuade me,” she said. “They were all so old. I mean, I know we’re young. But some of them had grey hair.”

  “Why did she send us there?”

  “She said we’d meet nice people. She said she’d met lots of friends there, and they used to go to Starbucks together with their babies. Except I don’t think they had Starbucks then
. Coffee, anyway.”

  “I’m not going to Starbucks with teachers. Or any of those people.”

  “We’ll have to go to classes where there are people like us. Teenagers,” said Alicia.

  I thought about that girl I’d gone out with once, who said she wanted a baby soon, and wondered whether she’d be in a class like that.

  “The trouble is,” I said, “the people in that sort of class…They’d be stupid, wouldn’t they?”

  Alicia looked at me and laughed, except it was the sort of laugh you do when something’s not funny.

  “And how clever are we, do you think?”

  When I got back home after that class, Mum was sitting watching TV with Mark. He spent a lot of time at ours now, so I wasn’t surprised to see him or anything, but when I came in, Mum got up and switched off the TV and said that she had something she wanted to talk about with me. I knew what it was, of course. I’d been doing some sums. If I really had seen the future that night, then I reckoned TH had whizzed me forward a year. So there could only be five or six months between Alicia’s baby and Mum’s baby. Roof had been four months old in the future, and Mum had looked big to me, so perhaps she’d been eight months pregnant. Which meant that her baby would be born when Roof was five months old. And Alicia was five months pregnant now, so…

  “Do you want to talk in private?” said Mark.

  “No, no,” said Mum. “We’ll have plenty of time on our own to talk things through. Sam, you know Mark and I have been seeing a lot of each other.”

  “You’re pregnant too,” I said.

  Mum looked shocked, and then she burst out laughing.

  “Where did that come from?”

  I didn’t think there was any point in trying to explain, so I just shook my head.

  “Is that what you’re worried about?”

  “No. Not worried. Just…At the moment, when people have news, that seems to be what it is.”

  “I’ve just thought,” said Mum. “If I had another baby, then he or she would be younger than yours. My child would be younger than my grandchild.” And she and Mark laughed.

  “Anyway. No,” she said. “That’s not the news. The news is, how would you feel if Mark moved in. Well, that was a question, not news. We’re not telling you he’s moving in. We’re asking. How would you feel if Mark moved in? Question mark?”

  “And if it’s a problem for you, we’ll forget about it,” said Mark.

  “But he’s been spending a lot of time here, and…”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know Mark, and I didn’t particularly want to share a house with him, but I wasn’t sure I was going to be living there for much longer anyway. Not if the future was right.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “You must think more than that,” said Mum. And of course she was right, I did. I thought a lot of things. For example

  Why would I want to live with someone I don’t know?

  And so on.

  In other words, I had one big question and a lot of smaller questions involving televisions, bathrooms and dressing gowns, if you understand what I mean by dressing gowns. And his kid. I didn’t want to get stuck with him.

  “I don’t want to get stuck with his kid,” I said.

  “Sam!”

  “You asked me what I was thinking. That was what I was thinking.”

  “Fair enough,” said Mark.

  “It sounded rude, though,” said my mum.

  “I just meant that I’m going to have enough babysitting on my plate,” I said.

  “It’s not babysitting if it’s your baby,” she said. “That’s just called ‘being a parent.’”

  “He lives with his mum,” said Mark. “You won’t have to look after him.”

  “OK, then. Fine.”

  “So you’re saying it’s all right as long as you don’t have to put yourself out,” said Mum.

  “Yeah. More or less.”

  I didn’t see why I should have to put myself out. It wasn’t my idea, him coming to live with us. The truth was, he was going to move in whatever I said, I could tell. And anyway, if it wasn’t him, there’d be somebody else, one day. And that might be worse, because we could end up going to live with him and, I don’t know, his three kids and his Rottweiler.

  Listen. I’ve got no problem with people getting divorced. If you can’t stand someone, then you shouldn’t have to be married to them. It’s obvious. And I wouldn’t have wanted to grow up with my mum and dad arguing all the time. To be honest, I wouldn’t have wanted to grow up with my dad full stop. But the trouble is that divorce leaves you open to stuff like this. It’s like going out in the rain with only a T-shirt on, isn’t it? You increase the chances of catching something. The moment your dad’s out of the house, then there’s a possibility of someone else’s dad moving in. And then things can start getting weird. There was this kid at school who didn’t hardly know anyone he lived with. His dad moved out, some other bloke with two daughters moved in, his mum didn’t get on with the two daughters. She met someone else, moved out, didn’t take her son with her, and this kid found himself stuck with three people he hadn’t even met a year before. He didn’t seem that bothered, but I wouldn’t have liked it much. Home is supposed to be home, isn’t it? A place where you know people.

  And then I remembered that according to the future I was going to end up living with a lot of people I didn’t know.

  CHAPTER 11

  I didn’t call Alicia’s dad Mr. Burns anymore. I called him Robert, which was better, because every time I said Mr. Burns, I thought of an ancient bald bloke who owned the Springfield nuclear reactor. And I didn’t call Alicia’s mum Mrs. Burns either. I called her Andrea. We were on first-name terms.

  They had obviously decided that they were going to Make An Effort with me. Making An Effort meant asking me how I was feeling about everything every couple of days, and what was worrying me. Making An Effort meant laughing for an hour if I said something that wasn’t absolutely deadly serious. And Making An Effort meant Talking About The Future.

  They started Making An Effort around the time they stopped trying to talk Alicia into having an abortion. They tried talking to both of us, and they tried talking to me, and they tried talking to her. All of it was a waste of time. She wanted the baby. She said it was the only thing she’d ever wanted, which made no sense to me, but at least it made her sound serious. And every time Robert and Andrea tried talking to me, I said, “I see what you mean. But she won’t do it.” And then it got to the stage where you could see the bump, which was close to when you weren’t allowed to have an abortion anymore, and they gave up.

  I knew what they thought of me. They thought I was some hoodie chav who’d messed up their daughter’s future, and they sort of hated me for it. I know it sounds funny, but I could understand that. I mean, I certainly hadn’t helped, had I? And the hoodie chav bit, that was just their ignorance. The important bit was that their plans for Alicia had gone up in smoke. I don’t really think they had any actual plans, to be honest, but whatever plans they had didn’t involve a baby. People like them didn’t have a pregnant daughter, and they couldn’t get their heads around it, you could see that. But they were trying, and part of the trying was trying to treat me like part of the family. That was why they asked me to live with them.

  I was round there for supper, and Alicia was going on about this book she was reading about how a baby could learn ten languages if you taught it early enough. And Andrea wasn’t really listening, and then she said, “Where are you going to live when the baby’s born?”

  And we looked at each other. We’d already decided. We just hadn’t told them.

  “Here,” said Alicia.

  “Here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Both of you?” said Robert.

  “Which both?” said Alicia. “Me and Sam? Or me and the baby?”

  “All three of you then.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow,” said Andrea. �
��Right. OK.”

  “What did you think was going to happen?” said Alicia.

  “I thought you’d be living here with us, and Sam would come and visit,” said Andrea.

  “We’re together,” said Alicia. “So if we don’t live here, we’ll have to live somewhere else.”

  “No, no, darling, of course Sam’s welcome here.”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “He is. Really. But you’re very young to be living as man and wife under your parents’ roof.”

  When she put it like that, Alicia’s idea sounded completely insane. Man and wife? Man? Wife? I was going to be a man? And Alicia was going to be my wife? I don’t know if you ever play word-association games, like where someone says “fish” and you say “chips” or “sea” or “finger.” But if someone said to me, “man,” I would have said things like “beer” or “suit” or “shave.” I didn’t wear a suit or shave, although I had drunk beer. And now I was going to have a wife.

  “Don’t be melodramatic, Andrea,” said Robert. “She means that she’ll be sharing a room with Sam and the baby. At least for the time being.”

  That didn’t sound much better, really. I had never shared a room with anyone since I was nine, when I used to go on sleepovers. I stopped because I could never get to sleep with someone else fidgeting in the next bed. This was all beginning to sound real. Real and terrible.

  “Maybe you should see how it goes with Sam living up the road,” said Andrea.

  “If you want me to be unhappy, we could do that,” said Alicia.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Robert. “Not everything we say or do is calculated to destroy your life, you know. Sometimes, just very occasionally, we try and think about what’s best for you.”

  “Very occasionally,” said Alicia. “Very, very occasionally.”

  “I was being sarcastic.”

  “And I wasn’t.”

  “Do you know, Sam, how terrible it is sharing a bedroom with somebody?”