by Nick Hornby
But that wasn’t what she meant. It was all about the families, wasn’t it? She was trying to say that Rufus Jones would leave school at sixteen to be a dad, and get some rubbish job and no GCSEs, and probably start taking crack. But Rufus Burns would, I don’t know, go to university and become a doctor or a prime minister or whatever.
“I’m sorry,” said my mum. “Can you explain that?”
“I would have thought it’s obvious,” said Andrea. “No offense, but—”
“No offense?” said my mum. “How do you work that out? How can what you’re about to say not be offensive?”
“I’m not offering an opinion about your family,” said Alicia’s mum. “I’m just talking about the facts.”
“And what are the facts about this baby?” said my mum. “He’s not an hour old yet.”
It was like a horror movie, or something out of some Bible. Two angels, one good and one bad, fighting over the soul of a tiny baby. My mum was the good angel, and I’m not just saying that because she was my mum.
Just then, even before Andrea could tell us the facts about this baby, Alicia’s dad walked in. He could tell there was an atmosphere, because he said “Hello” quite quietly, as if even that one word might set someone off somewhere.
“Hi, Robert,” said my mum. And she stood up, kissed him on the cheek, and handed him Roof. “Congratulations.”
Robert held him for a moment and got a bit teared up.
“How was it?” he said.
“She was brilliant,” said Andrea.
“It’s you,” said Robert, and I knew what it meant this time. It meant that the baby looked exactly like Alicia.
“Has he got a name yet?”
“Rufus,” I said. “Roof.”
“Roof?” said Alicia. And she laughed. “I like that. Where did you get that from?”
“I dunno,” I said. “I thought…” I was going to say, I thought everyone called him that, but I stopped myself.
“Rufus,” said her dad. “Yeah. Good. It suits him.”
“Rufus Jones,” said Alicia.
You don’t need to know about the fights and the tears that came after that. But she stuck to it, and Rufus Jones he was and still is, from that day on. It was Alicia’s way of saying something to me, and to my mum. I’m not sure what, exactly. But it was something good.
CHAPTER 15
Rufus was born on September the twelfth. If Alicia’s contractions hadn’t stopped, he would have been born on September the eleventh, which wouldn’t have been great, really, except loads of people must have been born on September the eleventh since September the eleventh. Anyway, there was enough to worry about, without worrying about things that didn’t happen.
On September the thirteenth, I moved in to Alicia’s house. She went home after lunch, and I went back to my house and got some stuff, and Mum and Mark gave me a lift round the corner. I felt sick for more or less the whole day. I suppose it must have been homesickness, but how would I know, seeing as I’d never really been away from home for very long? I’d gone on a few holidays with Mum, and I’d spent a night in Hastings, and that was about it.
“You just have to see how it works out,” Mum said. “It’s not forever, is it? Nobody’s expecting you to stay there until, you know…Until, well…For long.” I didn’t blame her for giving up on the sentence. There wasn’t a way of finishing it.
She was right. I knew that, somewhere inside. But how long was not forever? A couple of days? A week? A year?
I remembered what my dad said when he gave up smoking. He said, “What you have to ask yourself all the time is, Do I want a fag now, this second? Because if you don’t, then don’t have one. And if you think you can survive that second, then you’re on to the next second. And you have to live like that.” That’s what I’d tell myself. Do I want to go home now, this very minute? And if I think I can stick it out for one more minute, I’ll move on to the next one. I’d try not to worry about tomorrow, next week, next month.
It wasn’t a very relaxing way to live, though, was it? Not in your own home.
Andrea let us all in, and we went into Alicia’s bedroom. We’d decorated it a bit over the summer, just like I knew we would. We’d taken down theDonnie Darko poster, and put up the pink alphabet thing, so the room wasn’t as purple as it had been. Alicia was lying on the bed, feeding Roof.
“Look, Roof,” she said. “It’s Daddy. He’s come to live with us.”
She was trying to sound cute, I suppose, but it didn’t make me feel much better. It wouldn’t have been so bad if Roof had looked round and gone, you know, “Hooray! Daddy!” But he didn’t, because he was one day old.
“Stay with you,” said my mum.
“Live with us,” said Alicia.
A lot of things don’t seem worth arguing about to me. At school, you hear rubbish about who’s going to mash who all the time. Arsenal will mash Chelsea. Chelsea will mash Arsenal. And I think, you know, just let them play each other. And then it’s a draw half the time anyway. It was the same here. Nobody knew. Let the future just happen, I thought. Which was a new thing for me to think, seeing as I’d spent half my life wondering and worrying about what was going to happen.
There wasn’t room for everyone, but nobody moved. Mum and I sat down on the end of the bed. Andrea hovered in the doorway. Mark leaned against the wall next to the door. Nobody said anything, and we all pretended to watch Roof feed, which meant looking at Alicia’s breasts. I suppose that didn’t matter if you were Mum or Andrea, but it was more difficult if you were a guy. I’d had a bit of practice at avoiding breasts in that NCT class, but then it was a poster. Alicia’s were real. Obviously. I looked at Mark. He didn’t seem bothered, but I couldn’t work out whether that was just an act, and really he was embarrassed. The thing was, if you looked away—like I had just done, to see where Mark was looking—it showed that you were thinking about it, which was just as embarrassing. So either way you ended up feeling you were doing something wrong.
“He’s all restless now,” said Alicia. “I think there are too many people around.”
“I’ll wait outside,” said Mark quickly, so I knew he’d had enough of staring at the ceiling. My mum and Andrea didn’t seem to have heard her.
“Me too,” I said.
“You don’t have to go,” said Alicia. “You live here.”
Mum didn’t say anything, but I could see she was thinking about it. That was all she was thinking about, though. She obviously wasn’t thinking about whether Alicia was dropping a subtle hint about who should go and who should stay.
“I said, YOU LIVE HERE,” Alicia said again.
“So do I,” said Andrea.
“Not here you don’t,” said Alicia. “Not in this room.”
“Neither does Sam,” said Mum. “He’s just staying for a while.”
“I think what Alicia is saying,” I said, “is she wants everyone to go apart from me.”
“And Roof,” she said in a baby voice.
“I can take a hint,” said my mum, which was funny, seeing as she’d had to be told that she’d missed one. “Call me later,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek.
And then Mum and Andrea left, and closed the door behind them.
“So,” said Alicia. “Here we are, Roof. Mummy and Daddy. This is your whole family.”
And she laughed. She was excited. My lunch started to shift around in my stomach, as if it wanted to go home with Mum and Mark.
I hadn’t brought much with me, just a couple of bags full of jeans and T-shirts and underwear. I did bring my TH poster with me, though, and I could see that was a mistake as soon as I put it down on the bed.
“What’s that?”
“What?”
“On the bed?”
“This?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, just, you know. Is he feeding OK?”
“Yeah. And no, I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
“I don�
��t know what that is. The poster.”
“Oh, just…” I’d already asked about Roof feeding OK. There didn’t seem to be much else to say, apart from what she wanted to know.
“It’s my Tony Hawk poster.”
“You want to put it up in here?”
“Oh. In here. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“So why did you bring it?”
What could I say? I never told Alicia I talked to TH. She still doesn’t know. And that day, the day I moved in with my girlfriend and my son, wasn’t the day to tell her either.
“Mum said she was going to throw it away if I left it at home. I’ll put it under the bed.”
And that was where it stayed, apart from when I needed it.
CHAPTER 16
I woke up in the middle of the night. I wasn’t in my own bed, and there was someone in the bed with me, and there was a baby crying.
“Oh, shit.” I recognized the voice. The person in bed with me was Alicia.
“Your turn,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know where I was or even when I was, and I didn’t know what “Your turn” meant. I’d been dreaming about entering a skate tournament in Hastings. You had to skate up and down the steps outside the hotel I’d stayed in.
“Sam,” she said. “Wake up. He’s awake. Your turn.”
“Right,” I said. I knew what my turn meant now, and I knew where and when I was. Roof was about three weeks old. We couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t with us. Every night we slept as though we hadn’t slept for months; every night we were woken up after one or two or, if we were lucky, three hours, and we didn’t know where we were or what was making the noise, and we had to remember everything all over again. It was weird.
“He can’t need feeding,” she said. “He had one about an hour ago, and I’ve got nothing left. So he either needs winding or he has a dirty nappy. He hasn’t been changed for hours.”
“I keep making a mess of it,” I said.
“You’re better at it than me.”
This was true. Both things were true. I kept making a mess of it, but I was better than Alicia. I liked being better than Alicia. I just sort of presumed that she’d be better than me, but she can’t ever seem to get the nappy tight enough, and Roof’s poo always leaks through the nappy and onto his all-in-one vest. I lay there feeling pleased with myself, and went straight back to sleep.
“Are you awake?” she said.
“Not really.”
She whacked me with her elbow. She got me right in the ribs.
“Ow.”
“You awake now?”
“Yeah.”
The feeling of the pain in my ribs was familiar, and for a moment I couldn’t think why. Then I remembered that she’d whacked me like that the night I got whizzed into the future. This night was that night. I’d caught myself up. Everything was the same, but everything was different.
Alicia put the bedside light on and looked at me to see if I was awake. I remembered that when I’d seen her the night I got whizzed, I’d thought she looked terrible. She didn’t look terrible to me now, though. She looked tired, and her face was puffy, and her hair was greasy, but she’d been like that for a while, and I’d got used to it. She was different, I could see that. But so was everything else. I don’t think I’d have liked her so much if she’d stayed the same. It would have been like she wasn’t taking Roof seriously.
I got out of bed. I was wearing a T-shirt of Alicia’s and the pair of boxer shorts I put on that morning, or whatever morning it was. The baby was sleeping in a little cot at the end of the bed. He was all red in the face from crying.
I bent down and put my face near him. The last time, when I knew nothing, I was breathing through my mouth to stop myself from smelling anything, before I knew that baby poo smells nice, almost. “Yeah, he needs changing.”
In the future, I’d pretended he hadn’t needed changing, even though I was sure he did. But I didn’t need to now. I put him on the changing table, unbuttoned his sleep suit and his vest, pulled them both back above his bum, opened the nappy and wiped him. Then I folded the nappy up, put it in a bag, put a new one on and buttoned him back up again. Easy. He was crying, so I picked him up and put him against my chest and jiggled him, and he went quiet. I knew how to hold him without his head jerking about. I sang to him a bit too, just made-up stuff. He liked it, I think. At least, he seemed to go back to sleep quicker if I did my singing.
Alicia went back to sleep, and I was alone in the dark with my son on my chest. Last time, I was confused, and I stood in the dark asking myself all those questions. I still remember what they were. Yes, I lived here now, and we were just about surviving. We got on each other’s nerves, but the baby distracted us. What sort of a dad was I? Not bad, so far. How did Alicia and I get on? Pretty good, although it was sort of like we were at school, working together in pairs on some biology project that went on all day and all night. We never really looked at each other. We just sat side by side, looking at the experiment. Roof wasn’t like a dissected frog or whatever, though. For a start he was a living thing, and he changed from minute to minute. And also, you can’t really go all gooey over a dissected frog, unless you are a sicko.
I put Roof back in his cot and climbed into bed and Alicia put her arms around me. She was warm, and I pushed into her. Roof suddenly made this sort of stuttering breathing noise and then started snoring. Something I’ve noticed is that Roof’s noises make the room seem more peaceful. You wouldn’t think it would work like that, would you? You’d think that the only way a bedroom can seem peaceful in the middle of the night is if nobody is making any noise. I think what it is, though, is that you’re so frightened a baby’s going to suddenly stop breathing that all his snuffles and stutters sound like your own heartbeat, something that tells you all is right with the world.
“You do love me, Sam, don’t you?” Alicia said.
I remembered the last time, back in the future, and how I’d said nothing. I knew more now.
“Yeah,” I said. “Of course.”
I still didn’t know whether that was true. But I did know it was more likely to come true if I said it, because she’d like me more, and I’d like her more, and eventually we might love each other properly, and life would be easier if that happened.
Here’s a funny thing. You go into the future, and afterwards you think, Well, I know about that now. But like I said before: if you don’t know how something feels, then you don’t know anything. The future looked terrible when I went there before. But once I was on the inside of it, it really wasn’t so bad.
And then about three hours after I’d decided that, all the wheels started to come off.
That morning, I went to college, for about the third time in three weeks. The last time I’d been, a week or so after Roof was born, I’d got into a fight. I never get into fights. I never got bullied, and I never bullied anyone, and I never cared enough about anything at school to want to thump anyone.
I was talking to another kid from my old school outside a classroom, and this kid with gelled hair came up to us and just stood there listening to us. I nodded hello, but he didn’t seem to want to be friendly.
“What are you fucking nodding at?” he said, and then did an impersonation of me nodding, which was actually more like an impersonation of a special-needs person headbutting someone. “What’s that supposed to be?”
And I knew, straightaway, that I was going to have to fight him. I knew I was going to get hit, anyway. I didn’t know whether I was going to hit him back, which is something I’d have to do if there was going to be a fight, as opposed to just me getting a beating. I didn’t know why he was going to hit me, but there was no doubt where this conversation was going. You could smell it. He couldn’t have calmed down even if he wanted to, which he didn’t.
“Anyway,” he said. “Thanks for looking after my kid. Saved me a few quid.”
It took me a while to work out what he was talk
ing about. Who’s his kid? I was thinking. When was I looking after someone’s kid?
“It is mine, though, you know that, don’t you?”
“Sorry. I don’t know what—”
“Yeah, well, you don’t know fucking much, do you?”
I wanted him to ask me an ordinary question, one I could say yes or no to. I mean, I could have said no to that last one, because it was obviously true that I didn’t know much. But saying no, I could tell, wasn’t going to do me a lot of good.
“He doesn’t even know what I’m talking about,” he said to the kid I used to go to school with. “Alicia’s baby, you mug. She told you it was yours.”
Ah. Right.
“Who are you, then?” I said.
“Doesn’t matter who I am,” he said.
“Well,” I said. “It does matter if you’re the father of Alicia’s baby. I’m sure Alicia would be interested, for a start. And me. What’s your name?”
“Wouldn’t mean anything to her, probably. She’s such a slag she wouldn’t remember.”
“So how come you’re so sure he’s your kid then? Could be anyone’s.”
For some reason, this seemed to make him angry, even though I was just pointing out the obvious. There wasn’t much logic to anything he said, and there wasn’t much logic to what pissed him off.
“Come on then,” he said, and he started towards me. Seeing as he wasn’t very bright, I was pretty sure that he was going to be good at fighting, and that I was going to get a pasting. I thought I’d get one in first, just so that I could tell Alicia I’d fought back. I lifted my foot, and as he got near, I got him in the balls. It wasn’t a kick, really. It was more like a midair stamp, because I got him with the sole of my shoe.