Slam

by Nick Hornby

  I walked into the living room, and there was this little blond boy with long curly hair like a girl, watching some Australian people singing with a dinosaur. He turned round and saw me, then came running at me, and I had to catch him or he would have smashed his face against the coffee table.

  “Dadda!” he said, and I swear, my heart stopped beating for a couple of seconds. Dadda. It was all too much, meeting my sister and my son all on the same day. It would be too much for anybody. I’d met him before, last time I’d visited the future, but he wasn’t much, then, and I’d hardly gone anywhere near him. He’d done my head in last time. He was doing my head in now, but in a good way.

  I swung him round for a bit, and he laughed, and when I’d stopped swinging him, I had a look at him.

  “What?” said Alicia.

  “Nothing. Just looking.”

  He looked like his mum, I thought. Same eyes and mouth.

  “I can have a ice cream if I’m a good boy.”

  “Is that right?”

  “After the doctor.”

  “OK. And then we’ll go on the swings.”

  Roof started crying, and Alicia looked at me as if I was an idiot.

  “You don’t have to go on the swings,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “Not if you don’t want to.”

  I didn’t have a clue what that was all about, but I could tell I’d made a mess of something.

  “Did you just forget?” Alicia hissed at me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry.”

  You really need to live your life, and not just zoom in and out of it. Otherwise you never know what’s going on.

  “Anyway. Just keep him for as long as you can. I feel terrible.”

  We put Roof in the buggy to go to the Health Center, except of course I couldn’t do the straps up, so Alicia had to help me, but she didn’t seem surprised at how useless I was. She asked me when I was going to learn how to do it. I was quite pleased to realize that I was usually useless, because then I didn’t have to explain why I could do it one day and not the next. When we got out of the house, though, he started kicking up a fuss and trying to wriggle out. I knew he could walk, because I’d seen him run across the room when he jumped at me, so I fiddled around with the straps until something clicked, and let him run up the street. Then I realized he was going to charge straight into the road, so I had to catch him up and stop him. After that I made sure I was holding his hand.

  My mum was right. He could have talked for Brazil, let alone England. Everything we passed, he said, “Look at that, Dadda!” And half the time you couldn’t see what the hell he was talking about. Sometimes it was a motorbike or a police car; sometimes it was a twig or an old Coke can. At first I tried to think of something to say about these things, but what is there to say about a Coke can? Nothing much.

  There were loads of people in the Health Center. A lot of the people in there were parents with sick-looking kids, kids with coughs, kids with a fever, kids who were just slumped over their mothers’ shoulders. I was glad Roof wasn’t sick like that. I’m not sure I could have handled it. I waited at the reception desk while Roof went off to look through a box of toys in the waiting area.

  “Hello,” said the woman behind the desk.

  “Hello,” I said. “We’ve come for the inoculation and jab and immunization.”

  The woman laughed. “Probably just one of them today, eh?”

  “If that’s OK,” I said.

  “Who’s ‘we,’ anyway?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sorry. Him.” I pointed at Roof.

  “Right. And who’s he?”

  Oh, bloody hell, I thought. I don’t really know my kid’s name. I was sure I wasn’t the best dad in the world, but the feeling I’d got from Alicia and Roof when I went to pick him up was that I wasn’t the worst either. Not knowing your kid’s name, though…that wasn’t good. Even the worst dad in the world knows his kid’s name, which made me worse than the worst dad in the world.

  If Roof was his name, then his initial was “R.” And his second name was either my second name or Alicia’s second name. So it was either Jones or Burns.

  “R. Jones,” I said.

  She looked on a list, and then looked on a computer screen.

  “Nothing here for that name,” I said.

  “R. Burns,” I said.

  “May I ask who you are?”

  “I’m his dad,” I said.

  “But you don’t know his name?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “No.”

  She looked at me. She obviously didn’t think that was a good enough explanation.

  “I forgot we used his mum’s second name,” I said.

  “First name?”

  “I call him Roof,” I said.

  “What does everyone else call him?”

  “We all call him Roof.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I think I’d better come back tomorrow,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said the woman. “When you’ve got to know him a bit better. Spend a little quality time with him. Have a father-son bonding session. Ask him his name, stuff like that.”

  On the way to the park, I asked Roof his name.

  “Rufus,” he said.

  Rufus. Of course it was. I wish I’d asked him on the way there, instead of on the way out. He didn’t seem surprised that I’d asked. He just seemed pleased that he got the answer right. I suppose kids are always being asked stuff they already know.

  I couldn’t wait to find out how I’d ended up agreeing to call my kid Rufus. I still had my heart set on Bucky.

  “Rufus,” I said. “If Mummy asks whether the injection hurt, just tell her you were a brave boy, OK?”

  “I was a brave boy,” he said.

  “I know,” I said.

  He still hasn’t had that jab.

  The reason Roof didn’t like swings at the moment was that he’d been hit on the head by one last time I took him to the park. I let him run in front of one, from the sound of it, and it had clonked him right on the nose. He told me all this as we were walking through the park gates. I felt terrible. He was such a beautiful little boy, and you’d think I could take better care of him than that.

  I suppose that ever since I’d found out Alicia was pregnant, I’d only really worried about myself. I’d worried about how it was going to mess up my life, and what my mum and dad were going to say to me, and all that sort of thing. But I’d already had to stop Roof from running into the road, and I’d seen all those sick kids at the Health Center. And now I’d found out that he’d half knocked himself out in the park. I wasn’t old enough for all this worry, I didn’t reckon. But then, who was? My mum worried all the time, and she was old enough. Being old enough didn’t help. Maybe most people didn’t have babies when they were my age because then there’d be one small part of their lives when they could worry about other things, like jobs and girlfriends and football results.

  We played in the sandpit for a little while, and then he went down the slide a few times, and then he had a ride on one of those wooden horses that have a big spring coming out of the bottom of them so you can wobble around. I could remember sitting on them when I was a kid. I was pretty sure I could remember sitting on this one. I hadn’t been in this playground for about five years, but I didn’t think anything had changed since I used to play in it.

  I had twenty quid in my pocket. Roof had his ice cream, so then I had nineteen quid, and then we walked all the way from Clissold Park to Upper Street, just for something to do. And then he wanted to go in this toy shop, and I thought, Well, we can just look, can’t we? And then he wanted this helicopter thing that was £9.99, and I told him he couldn’t have it, and he just threw himself down on the floor and screamed and started banging his head. So then I had nine quid left. And then we walked past the cinema, and they were showing this kids’ film calledDressing Salad. From the poster, it looked like a kind of Wallace and Gromit rip-off about vegetables. So of course, he wanted
see it, and when I looked, the first performance was just starting. And I thought, Well, it’s a good way of killing a couple of hours. It cost £8.50 for the two of us, so I had fifty pence left.

  We walked into the cinema, and up on the screen there was this giant talking tomato trying to run away from a bottle of mayonnaise and a saltshaker.

  “I don’t like it, Dadda,” Roof said.

  “Don’t be silly. Sit down.”

  “I DON’T LIKE IT!” he yelled. There were only about four people in there, but they all turned round.

  “Let’s just—”

  The giant tomato ran straight at the camera shouting, and this time Roof just screamed. I grabbed him and we went out into the foyer. I’d spent twenty quid in about twenty minutes.

  “Can I have some popcorn, Dadda?” Roof said.

  I took him back to Alicia’s. She’d got dressed while we were out, and she looked better, although she still didn’t look good.

  “That was all you could manage?” she said.

  “He wasn’t feeling well. After the jab and everything.”

  “How did it go?” she said.

  “How did it go, Roof?” I asked him.

  He looked at me. He didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. He’d forgotten what we rehearsed.

  “At the doctor’s?”

  “They had a fire engine,” he said.

  “Were you brave?” I said.

  He looked at me again. You could tell he was trying to remember something, but he had no idea what it was.

  “I was a brave fireman,” he said.

  “Oh, well,” said Alicia. “He doesn’t seem too upset by it all.”

  “No,” I said. “He was good.”

  “Do you want lunch with us? Or have you got to get off?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You know.”

  I was hoping she did, because I didn’t.

  “I’ll see you soon, Roof.”

  It was true, sort of. If I got whizzed back to the present when I went to bed that night, which is what happened last time, then I’d see him in a few weeks, when he was born. That made me feel weird. I wanted to hug him, and say something about looking forward to meeting him, but if I did that, then maybe Alicia would guess that I didn’t really belong in the future, which of course wasn’t the future for her. That would have been a hard thing to guess, but she’d still have thought that there was something not quite right about me telling my kid that I was looking forward to meeting him.

  He blew me a kiss, and Alicia and I laughed, and I walked backwards down the path so that I could look at him for a bit longer.

  I went home, and nobody was in, and I lay on my bed and looked at the ceiling and felt stupid. Who wouldn’t want to visit the future and see what everyone was up to? But here I was, in the future, and I couldn’t think of anything to do. The trouble was, it wasn’t really thefuture future. If anyone ever asked me what the future was like, I could only tell them that I had a baby sister and a two-year-old kid, which wouldn’t be the most amazing news anyone had ever heard.

  I don’t know how long I was lying there thinking, but after a little while Mum came in with Emily and a load of shopping, and I helped her put it away while Emily sat in her little rocking chair thing and watched us.

  I suddenly needed to know something. Actually, I needed to know a lot of things, like what was I supposed to do all day. But what I ended up asking was this.

  “Mum. How am I doing?”

  “All right,” she said. “You haven’t dropped anything, anyway.”

  “No, no. Not with the putting away. How am I doing in, like, life?”

  “What do you want? Marks out of ten?”

  “If you like.”

  “Seven.”

  “Right. Thanks.”

  Seven sounded all right. But it didn’t really tell me what I needed to know.

  “You pleased with that?” she said. “Too high? Too low?”

  “It sounds about right,” I said.

  “Yeah, I thought so.”

  “Where would you say I lost the three points?”

  “What are you asking me, Sam? What’s this all about?”

  What was it all about? What I wanted to know, I suppose, was whether the future was worth waiting for, or whether it was going to be a lot of trouble. There wasn’t anything I could do about it one way or the other, but it would be useful to find out whether Rubbish was right. Had I screwed everything up?

  “Do you think things will turn out OK?” I said. I didn’t know what things I was talking about, or what OK meant. But it was a start.

  “Why? What sort of trouble are you in?”

  “No, no, it’s nothing like that. As far as I know. I just mean, with Roof and all that. College. I dunno.”

  “I think you’re doing as well as can be expected,” said Mum. “That’s why I gave you seven.”

  “As well as can be expected”? What did that mean?

  And I suddenly saw that even in the future, you still wanted to know what was going to happen. So as far as I could work out, TH hadn’t helped me at all.

  Later on I went down to The Bowl with my board, and nobody seemed too surprised, so I obviously hadn’t given up skating. And I told Mum and Mark I didn’t want to eat with them, even though I was starving, because I couldn’t really talk to them about yesterday or today or tomorrow. I messed around in my room, played on my Xbox, listened to music, and went to bed. And when I woke up, I didn’t have Hawk cargo pants or a Hawk burning T-shirt anymore, so I knew I was back in my own time.

  CHAPTER 13

  So you know everything. There’s nothing more for me to say. I don’t know whether you thought I was making up that stuff about the future, or whether you thought I’d lost it, but it doesn’t really matter now, does it? We had a baby called Rufus, in real life. So there you are. End of story.

  So now you’re probably thinking, If this is the end of the story, why doesn’t he shut up so that I can get on with something else? The truth is that when I said that you knew everything…it’s sort of true, in terms of the facts. I mean, there are a few dots to join up. But we had a baby, Mum had a baby, Alicia and I lived together in her bedroom and then stopped living together. It’s just that there comes a point where the facts don’t matter anymore, and even though you know everything, you know nothing, because you don’t know what anything felt like. That’s the thing about stories, isn’t it? You can tell someone the facts in ten seconds, if you want to, but the facts are nothing. Here are the facts you need forThe Terminator: in the future, supercomputer robots want to control the earth and destroy the human race. The only hope we have in the year 2029 is the leader of the resistance. So the robots send Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is the Terminator, back in time to kill the leader of the resistance before he has even been born. That’s pretty much it. Also, a member of the resistance travels back in time to protect the mother of the future leader. That’s why there’s so much fighting. So you’ve got defenceless mother of future leader plus resistance fighter against Arnold the Terminator. Did you enjoy those facts? No. Of course you didn’t, because you felt nothing, so you didn’t care. I’m not saying that the story of Alicia and Roof and me is as good asThe Terminator. I’m just saying that if you stick to the facts, then the whole point of a story has disappeared. So here’s the rest of it.

  One thing you should know is that I had a bad slam, down at The Bowl. I never hurt myself down there, because it’s only for messing about in, The Bowl. If I was going to hurt myself, you’d think it would be down at Grind City, where there’s proper skating, by proper skaters, and not round the corner from my house, where you go for five minutes before your tea.

  It wasn’t really my fault, although I suppose I would say that, wouldn’t I? I’m not even sure if it was officially a slam. What happened was this. The only way you can make skating at The Bowl even a tiny bit interesting is if you approach it from the side and do an air, or something even flasher if you feel up
to it, over the three steps and straight into The Bowl. The Bowl needs to be empty, obviously, but even if it’s dark you can see and hear anyone in there from a long way off. Or rather, you can see and hear them as long as they’re not sleeping in the middle of The Bowl, using their board as a pillow. That was what Rabbit was doing, although I didn’t know that until I was midair and about to land on his gut. Is that a slam? If someone’s asleep like that?

  Nobody in the world could have stayed on the deck in that sort of situation, so I wasn’t blaming my skills. I was blaming Rabbit, though, and I did blame him, when the breath returned to my body, and the pain shooting up and down my wrist had eased off a bit.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Rabbit?”

  “What am I doing?” he said. “Me? What about you?”

  “I was skating, Rabbit. In The Bowl. That’s what it’s for. Who goes to sleep in the middle of a concrete bowl? Where people skate?”

  Rabbit laughed.

  “It’s not funny. I might have broken my wrist.”

  “No. Yeah. Sorry. I was laughing because you thought I was asleep.”

  “What were you doing then?”

  “I was just dozing.”

  “What’s the bloody difference?”

  “I hadn’t actually gone to bed there. That would be weird.”

  I just walked away. You need to be in the right mood to talk to Rabbit, and I wasn’t in the right mood.

  My mum ended up taking me to get my wrist X-rayed, just in case. We had to wait ages, just to be told that there wasn’t really anything wrong with it, apart from it hurting like hell.

  “I don’t think you can do this anymore,” said Mum while we were waiting. I didn’t know what she was talking about. Do what? Wait in hospitals? Go places with her?

  I looked at her, to show that I didn’t understand her.

  “Skating,” she said. “I’m not sure you can skate anymore. Not for the time being, anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because for the next two years, your life is going to be pushing and carrying. And Alicia won’t thank you if you break a limb and you can’t do anything.”