Slam

by Nick Hornby

  And I know it sounds stupid, but one of the things I’m most proud of in my life is that I didn’t say, “Me too.” I felt like saying it, of course. It was already frightening, and it hadn’t even started yet. I just said, “It’ll be fine,” and squeezed her hand back. It wasn’t much use, what I said. But it was better than saying “Me too” and bursting into tears and/or running away to Hastings. That wouldn’t have been much use to her.

  Her mum took us to the hospital, and Alicia didn’t have the baby in the car. She wanted her mum to go at ninety miles an hour, and nought miles an hour over the speed bumps. If you have ever been in a car in London, or anywhere else, probably, you will already know that you can’t even drive ninety miles an hour at three o’clock in the morning, partly because of the traffic, and partly because there are speed bumps every six inches. And it wasn’t three o’clock in the morning anyway. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. In other words, we travelled at about three miles an hour, which was too slow when we weren’t going over the speed bumps and too fast when we were. I wanted to tell Alicia to stop making the donkey noise, because it was making me nervous, but I knew I couldn’t.

  I needn’t have worried about being thirsty. There was a sink in our cubicle at the hospital, and anyway, we had plenty of time. At one point, there was so little happening that I went out of the hospital and down the road to buy a Coke and a bar of chocolate. I was expecting everything to be, you know, “Push! Push! I can see the head!” with me running around from…Actually, I didn’t know where I’d be running from or to. One side of Alicia to the other, I suppose. Anyway, I needn’t have worried about not having time to go to the gents for some water, and I needn’t have worried about having to stop the car and deliver the baby outside a post office or somewhere. How many babies are born in this country every year? (About six hundred thousand is the answer. I just looked it up on the Internet.) And how many of those are born on a bus, or by the side of the road? About two or three. (That’s a guess. I tried to look it up. I put “Babies born on buses in UK” into Google, but my search did not match any documents.) That’s why you read about them in the paper sometimes: because they’re special. It’s slow, labor. Slow and then fast. Unless you’re having one of the babies born on the bus.

  Anyway, the nurse came to meet us at the door of the maternity unit and showed us to our cubicle, and Alicia lay down on the bed. Her mum gave her a massage, and I unpacked the bag we’d got ready ages ago. They told us at the classes to pack a bag. I’d packed clean underwear and a T-shirt, and Alicia had packed some clothes too. And we had a load of crisps and biscuits and water. We’d also put in a portable CD player and some music. The woman at the pregnancy class said that music was good for relaxing you, and we’d spent ages choosing songs and burning CDs. Even Alicia’s mum had made one, which we thought was a bit weird, but she said we might thank her for it. I plugged the CD player in and put on my CD, which probably seems a bit selfish to you. But my thinking was that nobody would mind my music too much at the beginning, so I could get it out of the way. And as it was all loud and fast skate music, it might give Alicia some energy. The first song was “American Idiot” by Green Day.

  “Turn that off before I kill you,” she said. “I don’t want to hear about American idiots.” So that was the end of my music. I put her CD on.

  “What is that shit?” she said. “It’s horrible.”

  Her CD was mostly R&B, with a bit of hip-hop thrown in. And the very first song was Justin Timberlake, “Sexy Back,” which she’d got into when she went to these pregnant dance classes. Nobody wants to hear the word “sex” while they’re having a baby, just like you don’t want to watch a McDonald’s advert when you’re throwing up, and I’d told her not to choose it. We’d had an argument about it.

  “I told you this wouldn’t be any good,” I said. I couldn’t resist it. I knew it wasn’t the right time, but I knew I’d been right to tell her.

  “This isn’t mine,” said Alicia. “You must have put this on.”

  “That is such a lie,” I said. I was really angry. I didn’t like Justin Timberlake (and I still don’t), so I wasn’t happy about her saying that he was my choice. But it was the unfairness that got me most of all. I’d told her it was shit! I’d told her it wouldn’t be right for her labor! And now she was telling me it was all my idea.

  “Let it go,” said Andrea.

  “But she was the one who wanted it!”

  “Drop it.”

  “It wasn’t me,” said Alicia. “It was you.”

  “She’s not dropping it,” I said. “She’s not letting it go.”

  Andrea came up to me and put her arm around my shoulder and whispered in my ear.

  “I know,” she said. “But you have to. For the next however many hours we’re in here, we all do what she says, and agree with what she says, and get her what she wants. OK?”

  “OK.”

  “This is good practice,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “Having a kid. You have to let things go about fifty times a day.”

  Something clicked when she said that. I knew that Alicia was about to have a baby. I’d even met the baby, kind of. But when we were in the hospital, having the baby seemed like the whole point of everything, and once it was out, then our jobs were done, and we could eat any crisps we had left over all at once and go home. But that was just the beginning, wasn’t it? Yes, we’d be going home. But we’d be going home with the baby, and arguing with each other about Justin Timberlake and with the baby about whatever, all the time, forever. It was easy to let the Justin Timberlake thing go when I thought about that.

  “Shall I put my CD on?” said Andrea.

  Nobody said anything, so she did, and it was perfect, of course. We didn’t know what anything was, but it was sweet, and quiet, and sometimes there was what I would call classical music mixed in, and if any of it was about sex and booty and all that, then they were singing about it in ways we didn’t understand, which was fine. Neither of us was sure about having Alicia’s mum at the birth. But we would have been in trouble without her. I’d have stomped off home in a rage before Roof was born, leaving Alicia with the stupid music that she chose driving her mental while she was trying to have a baby. The truth was, we needed a parent, not a kid.

  The contractions stayed the same for a bit, and then slowed down, and then they stopped altogether for a couple of hours. The nurse was cross with us for coming in too early, and told us to go home, but Alicia’s mum wasn’t having any of that, and shouted at her. We wouldn’t have shouted at her. We would have gone home, and Alicia would have ended up having the baby on the bus. When the contractions stopped, Alicia dozed off, which is when I went for a walk and bought my Coke.

  She was still asleep when I got back. There was one chair in the room, and Alicia’s mum was sitting on it. She was reading a book calledWhat to Expect When You’re Expecting. I sat down on the floor and played the bricks game on my mobile. We could hear a woman having a really hard time next door, and the noise made whatever was in my stomach turn to mush. Sometimes you know you will remember moments forever, even if there’s nothing much happening.

  “It’s OK,” said Alicia’s mum after a while.

  “What?”

  “Everything. The waiting. The noise next door. It’s all life.”

  “I suppose.”

  She was trying to be nice, so I didn’t tell her that was what was bothering me. I didn’t particularly want life to be like that. I didn’t want the woman next door to be making those noises. I didn’t want Alicia to have to make those noises, whenever it was she started again. I didn’t even know if I wanted Roof.

  “It’s funny,” said Andrea. “The last thing you want when you’ve got a sixteen-year-old daughter is a grandchild. But now it’s happening, it’s really OK.”

  “Yeah,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say, apart from, Well, I’m glad it’s OK for you. Except I couldn’t think of any w
ay to say it that wouldn’t have sounded sarcastic.

  “I’m fifty,” she said. “And if Alicia had her baby when I had her, then I’d be sixty-eight. And I’d be old. I mean, I know you think I’m old now. But I can run, and play games, and…Well, it will be fun. So there’s a part of me that’s glad this has happened.”

  “Good.”

  “Is there a part of you?”

  I thought about it. It wasn’t like I didn’t know what I wanted to say. What I wanted to say was, No, not really. Even though I met my son when I got whizzed into the future, and he seemed like a really nice kid, and so it feels terrible to say that I don’t want him. But I don’t feel like a dad, and I’m too young to be a dad, and I don’t know how I’m going to cope with the next few hours, let alone the next however many years. But I couldn’t say that, could I? Because how could I explain about the future and TH and all that?

  Maybe that’s why I got whizzed. Maybe Tony Hawk was just stopping me from saying something I might have regretted one day. I know why Andrea wanted to talk. The waiting made everything seem like we only had a little bit of time to say what was on our minds, as if we were going to die in this room. And if it had been a film, I would have told her how much I loved Alicia, and loved our baby, and loved her, and we would have cried and hugged and Alicia would have woken up and the baby would have popped out, just like that. But we weren’t in a film, and I didn’t love hardly any of those people.

  I don’t know what to say about the rest of it. Alicia woke up soon afterwards, and the contractions started again, and this time they were for real. There’s a lot of counting when you have a baby. You count the time between the contractions, and then you count the centimeters. The mother’s cervix dilates, which means the hole gets bigger, and the nurse tells you how big it’s got, and when it gets to ten centimeters, then you’re off. I’m still not sure what the cervix is. It doesn’t seem to come up in normal life.

  Anyway, Alicia got to ten centimeters without any trouble, and then she stopped sounding like a donkey and started sounding like a lion which is having one of its eyes poked out with a stick. And it wasn’t just that she sounded angry either. She actually was angry. She called me names and her mum names and my mum names, and she called the nurse names. It sounded to me like the names she was calling me were worse than the names she was calling the others, which is why Andrea kept having to stop me from walking out the door, but to be honest I might just have been looking for an excuse to leave. It didn’t seem like a place where a happy thing could be happening. It seemed more like a place where bombs explode and legs come off and old ladies dressed in black start screaming.

  For a long while, you could see the baby’s head. I didn’t, because I didn’t want to look, but it was there, Andrea said, which meant the baby would be coming soon. But then it didn’t come soon, because it got stuck, so then the nurse had to cut something. I’m making it sound as though it all happened quickly, but it didn’t, until that part. But when the nurse cut whatever it was she cut, the baby just slithered straight out. It looked terrible. It was covered in stuff, blood and slime and I think even some of Alicia’s shit, and its face was all squashed. If I hadn’t seen it already, I would have thought there was something wrong with it. But Alicia was laughing, and Andrea was crying, and the nurse was smiling. For a moment, I felt nothing.

  But then Alicia said, “Mum, Mum. What’s this music?”

  I hadn’t even noticed there was anything playing. We’d had Andrea’s CD on repeat for hours, and I’d sort of blocked it out. I had to look at the CD machine to hear a man singing a slow song and playing the piano. It wasn’t the sort of thing I’d normally listen to. But then the sort of thing I normally listened to was good for skating to, and absolutely useless for having a baby to.

  “I don’t know the name of the song,” she said. “But the singer’s name is Rufus Wainwright.”

  “Rufus,” said Alicia.

  I don’t know why that got me more than the part where he came slooshing out, but it did. I lost it, then.

  “What are you crying for?” said Alicia.

  “Because we’ve just had a baby,” I said.

  “Der,” she said. “You’ve only just noticed?”

  And the truth was, I had.

  My mum came in about an hour after Roof was born. Andrea must have called her, because I hadn’t. I’d forgotten. She came in puffing and panting because she’d been too excited to wait for the lift. “Where is he? Where is he? Let me at him,” she said.

  She said it in a funny voice, pretending to be desperate, but she was only pretending to be pretending. She really was desperate, you could tell. She didn’t look at Alicia or me or Andrea—not at our faces, anyway. Her eyes were going all over the room looking for any small bundle that might have been a baby. In the end she found the bundle on my chest, and she snatched him away from me.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “It’s you.”

  I didn’t understand what she meant at first. I thought she was saying “It’s you!” like you do to someone you’ve never met before but you’ve heard a lot about, or someone you haven’t seen for a long time and didn’t expect to see. So I thought she was being all emotional about meeting him. But what she meant was that Roof looked just like me. Andrea had already said he looked just like Alicia and Rich and about fifteen other people in her family, so I’d have been pretty confused if I’d thought that any of them were worth listening to. They weren’t, though, not then. They’d pretty much gone mad. They spoke fast, and they laughed a lot, and sometimes they’d start crying almost before they’d finished laughing. So you weren’t really going to get an honest opinion about anything.

  My mum held him close and then held him at a distance so that she could look again.

  “How was it?” she said, without taking her eyes off the baby’s face.

  I let Alicia explain about the contractions going away and painkillers and the baby getting stuck, and I just listened. And as I listened, I watched them, and I started to get all muddled up as to who was who. Alicia seemed older than my mum, all of a sudden, because she’d had her baby, and my mum was still a few months away, and my mum was asking her questions, and Alicia had all the answers. So my mum was Alicia’s younger sister, and my mum was my sister-in-law. And that made sense, because Andrea seemed so much older than my mum, so it was hard to think of them as Roof’s two grandmothers. Andrea seemed more like my mum’s mum. And I didn’t really know who I was. That’s a weird feeling, not knowing what you are to anybody in the room, especially if you’re sort of related to all of them.

  “He’s called Rufus,” I said.

  “Rufus,” said my mum. “Oh. Right.”

  She didn’t like it, you could tell.

  “Someone called Rufus was singing when he was born,” I explained.

  “Could be worse, then, couldn’t it? He might be called Kylie. Or Coldplay. Coldplay Jones.”

  At least my mum was the first to do it. Over the next few weeks, I heard that joke about ten thousand times. “Could have been worse, then, couldn’t it? He might have been called Snoop. Or Arctic Monkey. Arctic Monkey Jones.” Or Madonna, or Sex Pistol, or Fifty Cent, or Charlotte. They usually choose the name of a woman singer and the name of a band, although sometimes they change the woman for a rapper. And they always put the surname on after they’ve said the name of the band, just to show how funny it would be. “Or Sex Pistol. Sex Pistol Jones.” They don’t put the surname after the name of the woman singer, because that’s not so funny. “Or Charlotte. Charlotte Jones.” Charlotte Jones is just a normal girl’s name, isn’t it? There’s no joke there. Anyway, they always say it, and I always feel I have to laugh. In the end, I stopped telling people why he was called Rufus, because I was afraid I was going to end up stoving someone’s head in.

  It was the surname, though, that got Andrea’s attention.

  “Or Burns,” she said.

  My mum didn’t get it, I think because “burns” is a
normal word, like “runs” or, you know, “pukes.” When you hear the word “burns,” you think of stuff burning before you think of any member of Alicia’s family. We don’t, not now, but we used to, and most normal people would.

  “Sorry?”

  “Burns,” said Andrea. “Coldplay Burns.”

  Andrea was being serious about Roof’s second name. We’d never had this conversation, and we were going to have it sooner or later, although an hour after his birth seemed to be too much on the sooner side. But even though it was a serious conversation, it was hard not to laugh. It was the way she said it. She was concentrating on the surname, so she said the first name as if it was normal.

  “You said ColdplayJones, but he’s going to be ColdplayBurns, isn’t he?” Andrea said.

  I caught Alicia’s eye. She was trying hard not to giggle too. I don’t know why we thought we couldn’t. Maybe it was because we could tell that they were both so serious. But if we’d giggled, we could have stopped them.

  “Unless Alicia and Sam get married in the next few weeks, and Alicia takes Sam’s name. Either of which scenario seems highly unlikely,” Andrea continued.

  My mum smiled politely. “I think in these cases you can choose the surname, can’t you? Anyway. We don’t want to argue about it now.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything to argue about, is there? I’m sure we all want to give this child the best possible start in life, and…”

  Oh, man. Alicia and I have had arguments about her mum. Alicia says that she’s really OK, but she just speaks without thinking sometimes. I don’t know if that makes sense. I mean, a lot of people speak without thinking, I can see that. But whether they’re a nice person or not really depends on what comes out, doesn’t it? Because, you know, if you say something racist to someone without thinking, it must mean you’re a racist, mustn’t it? Because that means you’ve got to think all the time to stop yourself saying racist things. In other words, the racism’s in there all the time, and you need your brain to stop it. Andrea’s not a racist, but she is a snob, because she needs to think long and hard to stop herself saying snobby things. What did that mean, that stuff about Roof needing the best possible start in life? The obvious answer is, it didn’t mean anything. It didn’t really matter whether he was called Coldplay Jones or Coldplay Burns. You’d have thought that being called Coldplay anything would be the problem, ha ha. But there’s no difference in the surnames, is there? You’ve got no idea whether Mr. Burns is posher than Mr. Jones just from reading their names on a list.