by Nick Hornby
“It was just Rabbit being stupid,” I said.
“Yeah, like we’ve never been in casualty before.”
It’s true there have been one or two broken bits and pieces, fingers and toes. Nothing that would stop me being able to cart a baby around.
“I’m not going to pack it in.”
“You’re being irresponsible.”
“Yeah, well,” I said. “I never asked to have a kid.”
My mum didn’t say anything. She could have said a lot, but she didn’t. And I kept skating, and I didn’t have any more falls. But that was only because I was lucky. And because Rabbit didn’t use The Bowl to kip in after that.
Mark moved in not long before I moved out. Can a person be the opposite of another person? If he can, then Mark is the opposite of Dad, in every way, apart from they’re both English guys of the same height and color, with similar tastes in women. You know what I’m saying. They were opposite in every other way. Mark liked Europe, for example, and the people that lived there. And sometimes he turned the TV off and opened a book. And he read a newspaper with words in it. I liked him. I liked him enough, anyway. And I’m glad he was around for Mum. She was going to be a thirty-two-year-old grandmother—apregnant thirty-two-year-old grandmother—which was a step backwards for her. And Mark was a step forwards. So she’d end up exactly where she was before, which is better than it could have been.
Mum got round to telling me she was pregnant, eventually. She told me not so long after she knew, but quite a long time after I knew. Sometimes I wish I could have said, “Look, don’t worry about it. I think I got whizzed into the future, so I know everything already.” That’s how I felt when Mum was trying to get up the courage to tell me about her baby.
To be honest, I think I would have worked it out even if I hadn’t been whizzed, because she and Mark were so useless at hiding it all. It began right before I moved out, and Mum stopped drinking her glass of wine with dinner. I wouldn’t have known that a lot of women don’t drink alcohol when they’re pregnant, especially in the first few weeks, if it hadn’t been for Alicia. But I did know, and Mum knew I knew, so she poured herself a glass of wine every night and didn’t touch it, as if that would somehow fool me. The thing was, it was my job to clear away the supper things, so for about five evenings on the trot, I picked up her full glass of wine off the table and said, “Mum, do you want this?” And she’d go, “No, thanks, I don’t really fancy it. Mark, do you want it?” And he’d say, “If I must,” and sip it while he was watching TV. It was all mad. If I hadn’t cottoned on, I would have said something—you know, “Mum, why do you pour yourself a glass of wine every night and not drink it?” And she would have probably started drinking water with dinner. But because I knew what it was about, I didn’t say anything.
And then one morning, Mark offered me and Mum a lift, because he had to take the car in to work, and he was going to drive past my school and her work. And we were late, because she was in the bathroom being sick. I could hear her being sick, and Mark could hear her being sick. And because he knew why, and I knew why, nobody said anything. Does that make sense? He didn’t say anything because he didn’t want to be the one to tell me. And I didn’t want to say anything because I wasn’t supposed to know.
I looked at Mark, and he looked at me, and we might as well have been listening to a dog barking, or a DJ on the radio, anything that you hear all the time and never feel the need to say anything about. And then there was this really loud heave, and I made a face without meaning to, and Mark noticed, and he said, “Your mum’s not feeling so well.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
“Are you OK?” Mark said when she came out.
And she gave him a shut-up look, and said, “I couldn’t find my phone.”
And Mark said, “I just told Sam you weren’t feeling very well.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because you were throwing up so loud that the walls were shaking,” I said.
“We’d better have a chat,” she said.
“I can’t now,” said Mark. “I really have to go to this meeting.”
“I know,” said Mum. “Have a good day.” She kissed him on the cheek.
“Call me later,” he said. “Let me know, you know…”
“I’ll be fine,” I said when he’d gone. “Whatever you want to tell me, I won’t be bothered.”
And then suddenly I had this terrible thought. Supposing that I was wrong, and the future was wrong, and Mum was about to tell me that she had some terrible illness? Cancer or something? I’d just told her I wouldn’t be bothered.
“I mean, if it’s good news I won’t be bothered,” I said. “If it’s bad news, I’ll be bothered.” And then that sounded stupid, because everyone’s bothered by bad news, and people are usually pleased if it’s good news.
“If it’s good news I’ll be pleased or not bothered,” I said. “And if it’s bad news I’ll be bothered.”
My dad used to say that if you were in a hole you should stop digging. It was one of his favorite expressions. It meant that if you were in a mess, you shouldn’t make it any worse. He was always saying it to himself. “If you’re in a hole, Dave, stop digging.” I stopped digging.
“Have you guessed?” said Mum.
“I hope so.”
“What does that mean?”
“If I’m wrong, then there’s something really wrong with you.”
“No, there’s nothing wrong with me.”
“Right then,” I said. “So I’ve guessed.”
“You guessed before,” she said.
“Yeah. I guessed wrong that time.”
“But why did you keep guessing I was pregnant? I never thought I’d have another kid.”
“Man’s intuition,” I said.
“Men don’t have any intuition,” she said.
“This one does,” I said.
It wasn’t really true, if you thought about it logically, and left the future out of it. I’d been completely wrong the first time, and the second time I’d watched her not drinking her wine and listened to her throwing up in the bathroom. You didn’t need much intuition for that.
“Are you really not bothered?” she said.
“Really,” I said. “I mean, it’s all good. They’ll be friends, won’t they?”
“I hope so. They’ll be the same age, anyway.”
“What will they be to each other?”
“I was working this out,” she said. “My baby will be your baby’s aunt or uncle. And my grandchild will be a few months older than my child. I’m four months, and Alicia’s eight.”
“Mad, isn’t it?” I said.
“Must happen a lot,” Mum said. “I just didn’t think it would happen to us.”
“How do you feel about it?” I said.
“Yeah. Good. I mean, at first I didn’t think I’d want to keep it. But then I don’t know…This is the time, isn’t it?”
“For you, maybe.”
And I laughed, to show I was joking.
Suddenly, my mum wasn’t my mum anymore. We were friends who’d got themselves into the same stupid place in the same year. It was a weird time in my life, really, if you threw the trips to the future in there as well. Nothing was fixed properly. Things could happen whenever they wanted to, instead of whenever they were supposed to, like in some science fiction movie. We can all laugh about it now, but…Actually, that’s not true. We can only laugh about it on a really, really good day.
I worked out that there were two futures. There’s the one I got whizzed to. And then there’s thereal future, the one you have to wait to see, the one you can’t visit, the one you can only get to by living all the days in between…It had become less important. It had nearly disappeared, in fact. One bit of it had, anyway. Before Alicia got pregnant, I used to spend a lot of time thinking about what was going to happen to me. Who doesn’t? But then I stopped. It felt like, I don’t know…Last year, some kids at a school do
wn the road went on some climbing holiday in Scotland, and it all went wrong. They’d stayed out too late, and the teacher wasn’t an experienced enough climber, and it got dark and they were stuck on this ledge, and they had to be rescued. So how many of those kids on the ledge that night were thinking, Shall I do English literature or French for A-level? Do I want to be a photographer or a Web designer? I’ll bet none of them. That night, their future was, you know, a bath, a toasted sandwich, a hot drink. A phone call home. Well, having a pregnant girlfriend when you’re still at school is like that all the time. Alicia and I were on a ledge, sort of, and we were thinking about Roof coming (but we didn’t call him Roof then), and sometimes about the first week of his life, but not much more, not much further than that. We hadn’t given up hope. It was just a different kind of hope, for different sorts of things. We hoped that everything would somehow sort of maybe turn out not too bad.
But the thing was, we still had to do something about the future, because that’s how you spend half your time when you’re sixteen, isn’t it? People—schools and colleges and teachers and parents—want to know what you’re planning to do, what you want, and you can’t tell them that what you want is for everything to be OK. You can’t get any qualifications for that.
Alicia was five months pregnant when it was time to take our GCSEs, and seven months pregnant when we got our results. Hers were terrible, really, and mine were OK, and none of it mattered much to us either way by then. But I still had to listen to Alicia’s mum going on about how badly everything had affected her, and how unfair it was that the boys just float through everything as if it wasn’t happening. I didn’t bother telling her that when I first met Alicia, she told me she wanted to be a model. That wasn’t what her mum and dad wanted to hear. That wasn’t the picture of her they wanted to see.
So we spent the summer working out what we were going to do, and waiting. The working out what we were going to do took about ten minutes. I enrolled in a sixth-form college, and Alicia decided to take the year out, and go back to studying when the baby was a year old. The waiting, though…. That took up the entire two months. We couldn’t do anything about it.
CHAPTER 14
I was skating down at The Bowl on my own, and suddenly my mum appeared. She was all out of breath, but that didn’t stop her from yelling at me for not having my mobile switched on.
“It is switched on,” I said.
“So why don’t you answer it?”
“It’s in my jacket pocket.”
I pointed at my jacket, which was on the stone bench right by The Bowl.
“What’s the use of that?”
“I was going to have a look at it in a minute,” I said.
“That’s a fat lot of use when you’ve got a pregnant girlfriend,” she said.
We were both of us wasting time arguing about how often I should look at my mobile, except only Mum knew we were wasting time, because she had information which she hadn’t yet passed on.
“What are you doing here, anyway?”
I must have known why she’d run from the house all the way down to The Bowl, but for some reason I was blocking it out. Actually, we can all guess the reason. I was scared to death.
“Alicia’s in labor!” Mum shouted, as if I’d not been letting her tell me for the previous two minutes. “You’ve got to run!”
“Right,” I said. “Right. OK.”
I picked up my board and I sort of started running, except I was running on the spot. It was like I was revving up my engine. The thing was, I didn’t know where to run.
“Where shall I run?”
“Alicia’s house. Quick.”
I can remember feeling a bit sick when she said I had to run to Alicia’s. I’d been having these little daydreams and nightmares about the birth in those last four weeks. My nightmare was that Alicia’s mum and dad weren’t around when she went into labor, and she’d have the baby on a bus or in a minicab, and I’d be with her, not knowing what to do. My daydream was that I was out somewhere, and I got a message to say that Alicia had had the baby, and they were both safe and well, and I’d missed the whole thing. So when Mum told me I had to run to Alicia’s, I knew that I hadn’t missed the whole thing, and there was still a chance that the baby would be born on the top deck of the number 43.
As I ran past Mum, she grabbed me and kissed me on the cheek.
“Good luck, sweetheart. Don’t be scared. It’s an amazing thing.”
I can remember what I was thinking when I was pelting along Essex Road towards Alicia’s house. I was thinking, I hope I don’t get too sweaty. I didn’t want to be stinky while I was doing whatever it was I had to do. And then I was thinking, I hope I don’t get too thirsty. Because even though we had a bottle of water in the emergency bag we’d packed to take to the hospital, I couldn’t start chugging out of that, could I? That was Alicia’s water. And I couldn’t ask the nurses for a glass of water, because they were supposed to be looking after Alicia, not me. And I couldn’t sneak off to the toilets and stick my mouth under the tap, because Roof would almost certainly choose those five minutes to be born. So you could say that I was worrying about me, not about Alicia and the baby, except the reason I was worrying about me was that I knew I wasn’t supposed to worry about me.
Alicia’s mum answered the door. Andrea. Andrea answered the door.
“She’s in the bath,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Right.” And I walked past her and sat down in the kitchen. I mean, I didn’t sit down like I was making myself at home. I was nervous, so I just sat sideways on one of the kitchen chairs and started drumming my foot on the floor. But Alicia’s mum still looked at me as if I’d gone mad.
“You don’t want to see her?” she said.
“Yeah. But she’s in the bath,” I said.
Andrea started laughing.
“You’re allowed to go in,” she said.
“Really?”
“Oh, my God,” she said. “The father of my daughter’s baby has never seen her naked.”
I blushed. I was pretty sure I’d seen all of her. I just hadn’t seen it all at once.
“You’re about to see an awful lot,” she said. “I really wouldn’t worry about seeing her in the bath.”
I stood up. I still wasn’t sure.
“Do you want me to come with you?”
I shook my head and went upstairs. Even then I was hoping the bathroom door might be locked.
Alicia and I still hadn’t had sex since we’d got back together. So over the last few months I’d sort of lost touch with what she looked like under her baggy T-shirts and her brother’s jumpers, if you know what I mean. I couldn’t believe it. She just wasn’t the same person. Her stomach looked like she had a two-year-old in there, and her breasts were about five times the size they’d been the last time I’d seen them. Just about every part of her looked like it was going to burst.
“Eight minutes,” she said. Her voice was all funny too. It sounded deeper and older. In fact, she suddenly looked like she was about thirty, and I felt as though I were seven. We were going in opposite age directions fast. I didn’t know what the eight-minutes bit was all about, so I ignored it.
“Will you time them now?”
She nodded at her watch. I didn’t know what to do with it.
We had been to pregnancy classes, although you’d never have thought it to look at me. After the disaster in Highbury New Park, where all our classmates were teachers or grey-haired people, Mum found us something more suitable at the hospital. There were people there our age, more or less. That’s where I met the girl who showed me how to change a nappy in the McDonald’s toilets. And that’s where I met all those girls she talked about that day, Holly and Nicola and them. There weren’t that many dads. Anyway, the teacher at the hospital told us about timing contractions and all that. But first of all, Mum comes down to The Bowl to tell me that Alicia’s gone into labor, and then I charge round to Alicia’s house, and then I go into
the bathroom to find a nude woman who looks nothing like Alicia in the bath…For a little while, everything went right out of my head. She could tell I didn’t understand what she wanted, so she shouted at me.
“Time the contractions, you fuckwit,” she said. She didn’t say it in a nice way either. She was angry and frustrated, and I nearly chucked the watch into the bath and went home. Over the next twelve hours, I nearly went home about five hundred times.
Suddenly, she made this terrible, terrible noise. She sounded like an animal, although I couldn’t tell you which animal, because I don’t know much about wildlife and all that. The closest to it I’ve ever heard was a donkey, in a field next to our hotel in Spain. The watch nearly ended up in the bath again, this time because I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“What was that?” she said.
I looked at her. She didn’t know? She thought there was someone else in the room? Or a donkey?
“It was…It was you,” I said. I didn’t like saying it. It sounded rude.
“Not the noise, you fucking fucking moron,” she said. “I know that was me. The timing. How many minutes?”
I was relieved that I hadn’t understood, because that meant she wasn’t going mad. On the other hand, I didn’t know how many minutes it was, and I knew she’d be angry with me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she said. “Why the bloody bastard hell not?”
They warned us in the classes about the bad language. The woman said that our partners might call us names and say things they didn’t mean, because of the pain and all that. I’d got the idea that she wasn’t going to start swearing until the pushing bit, though, so this wasn’t a good sign.
“You didn’t tell me when the last one was,” I said. “So I can’t tell you.”
She started to laugh then. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right.”
And then she reached for my hand, and squeezed it, and she said, “I’m glad to see you.” And she started crying a bit. “I’m really scared.”