Slam

by Nick Hornby

  And that was it. He went down holding his crotch and swearing, and he rolled around on the floor for a bit, like a World Cup footballer. I couldn’t believe it. Why would you pick a fight with someone if you were that rubbish?

  “You’re dead,” he said, but he was lying on the ground when he said it, so it wasn’t very scary. And by then a few people had come to see what was going on, and a couple of them were laughing at him.

  There was another reason why I wanted to kick him, to tell you the truth. It wasn’t just that I wanted to tell Alicia that I’d had a go back. I also wanted to kick him because I believed everything he’d told me. I reckoned this was the guy that Alicia had gone out with right before we met, and when I thought about it, everything seemed to fit together. She hadn’t dumped him because he was putting pressure on her to have sex. That didn’t make sense. Why would you split up with someone because he wanted to have sex with you, and then have sex with someone else right away? And then…Shit! Bloody hell! What a sucker I’d been!…It was her idea too for us to make love without me putting a condom on straightaway, right? Why? Where did that come from? She said she wanted to feel me better, but the truth was, she was already worried she was pregnant. And that guy had already dumped her! So she had to find some sucker to take the blame as soon as possible! It all made complete sense now. I couldn’t believe how blind I’d been. This happened all the time, blokes finding out that their girlfriends’ kids weren’t theirs. It probably happenedevery time. Look atEastenders. Hardly anyone has ever had a baby inEastenders without changing their mind about who the father is.

  So I went straight home after classes to have a fight with her.

  “How was college?” she said. She was lying on the bed, feeding Roof and watching TV.

  That was pretty much all she did, in those first few weeks.

  “How do you think?” I said.

  She looked at me. She could tell I was in a mood, but she didn’t know what about.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I had a fight,” I said.

  “You?”

  “Yes, me. Why not me?”

  “You’re not like that.”

  “I was today.”

  “What sort of fight? Are you OK?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t start it. He just came at me and I kicked him and…” I shrugged.

  “And what?”

  “And nothing. That was the end of it.”

  “One kick?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And who was he?”

  “I don’t know his name. You might. He says he’s Roof’s dad.”

  “Jason bloody Gerson.”

  “So you know what I’m talking about.”

  Part of me felt like I wanted to throw up. That was the stomach part of me, most probably. And another part of me thought, That’s it, I’m out. It’s someone else’s baby, and I can go home. That was probably more connected with my brain.

  “Would you mind explaining who Jason bloody Gerson is?” I said it quietly, but I didn’t feel quiet. I wanted to kill her.

  “The guy I was seeing before you. The one I stopped seeing because he kept going on about wanting to have sex with me.”

  Any other time, that might have sounded funny. How long ago had that been? Less than a year? And now the girl telling me that she stopped seeing Jason bloody Gerson because he wanted to have sex with her was lying on a bed, breastfeeding a baby.

  “How did you know it was him?”

  “Because I know he goes to your college, and he’s a wanker. It’s just the sort of thing he would say. I’m sorry, sweetheart. That must have been horrible.”

  “Quite neat, though, isn’t it?”

  “What is?”

  “The way it all fits in.”

  “The way what fits in?”

  “I don’t know. Say you got pregnant. And say the bloke who made you pregnant dumped you. You’d need another boyfriend quick, so you could make out it was his baby. And you start sleeping with him straightaway, and then you say to him, ‘Go on, let’s try without a condom, just once’ and…”

  She looked at me. She’d started crying even before I’d finished. I couldn’t look back at her.

  “That’s what you think?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “What are you just saying?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It doesn’t sound like nothing.”

  “I’m just pointing out the facts.”

  “Really. How about these facts? When did we meet?”

  I thought. I could see what she was getting at. I didn’t say anything.

  “About a year ago, right? Because we met at my mum’s birthday party, and it’s her birthday next week.”

  Why hadn’t I worked things out like this on the way home? Why hadn’t I done the sums? Because if I’d done the sums, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble.

  “And how old is Roof?”

  I sort of shrugged, which must have looked to her as if I didn’t know.

  “He’s three weeks old. So unless I’ve just had an eleven-month pregnancy, he can’t be Jason’s, can he? Unless you think I was sleeping with him and you at the same time. Is that what you believe?”

  I shrugged again. Every shrug was making things worse for myself, but the trouble was, I was still angry about Jason, and the fight, and the things he’d said, and I didn’t want to back down. Even though it was now obvious to me that I’d got everything wrong, it was as if I couldn’t change direction. My steering had gone. That thing with the months should have done the trick, really, but it didn’t.

  “So when would I have been sleeping with him? Before breakfast? Because I was seeing you every afternoon and evening.”

  One more shrug.

  “Anyway,” said Alicia, “if that’s how little you trust me, then everything’s pointless, isn’t it? That’s the thing that gets me the most.”

  That would have been a good place to say sorry too, but I didn’t.

  “I think you want everything to be pointless.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Gets you off the hook, doesn’t it?”

  “What does that mean?”

  I understood everything, really. But asking what things meant all the time gave me something to say.

  “I know you don’t want to be here. So what you want is for me to tell you to go home to your mummy. I’m surprised you even bothered fighting Jason. You probably wanted to kiss him.”

  “I’m not bloody—”

  “OH, FOR GOD’S SAKE!” she shouted.“I know you’re not gay!”

  “Are you all right in there?” said Andrea’s voice outside the door.

  “GO AWAY! I’m not talking about your gayness, you fool. God. I so knew you were going to say that. Pathetic. You probably wanted to kiss him because if he was the father, you didn’t need to be here anymore.”

  Oh. That was pretty much exactly what I thought. I didn’t explain that I only kicked Jason bloody Gerson, or did a midair stamp on his balls, because he was coming for me, not because he said he was Roof’s dad.

  “That’s not true,” I said. “I’m glad Roof’s my kid.”

  I didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t. It was all so complicated. Every time I looked at our beautiful baby, I was amazed that I’d had anything to do with him. So yes, I was glad Roof was my kid. But when Jason bloody Gerson said those things, I did want to kiss him, in a not-gay way. So no, I wasn’t glad Roof was my kid. I’d never really had arguments like this before, arguments I couldn’t understand properly, arguments where both sides were right and wrong all at the same time. It was like I’d suddenly woken up to find myself on TH’s skateboard at the top of one of those huge vert ramps. How did I get up here? you’d think. I haven’t been trained for this! Get me down! We went from arguing about which film we wanted to see to arguing about what our lives meant in about ten seconds.

  “You think it’s only your life that’s been fucked up, don’t y
ou? You think I wasn’t really going to have a life, so it doesn’t matter one way or the other if I’ve got a baby,” she said.

  “I know you were going to have a life. You told me you were. You told me you were going to be a model.”

  When you kick someone in the balls, or do a sort of midair stamp, there’s a moment when you think, What did I do that for? Well, I felt exactly the same at that moment. What did I say that for? I knew why she’d told me she wanted to be a model. She’d said it because she wanted to find out if I fancied her. Plus, that was a long time ago, when we were just getting to know each other, and trying to be nice to each other. We’d said all kinds of rubbish then. You should never drag stuff out of a nice conversation and chuck it back in the middle of a nasty one. Instead of one good memory and one bad memory, you’re left with two shitty ones. When I remember how pleased I was when I worked out what Alicia was saying when she told me that…Well, that’s the trouble, isn’t it? I don’t want to remember anymore.

  I didn’t mean anything by it. Or rather, I knew it was a bad thing to say, and I said it to hurt, but it was only after it had come out of my mouth that I started to think about why it was nasty. And as Alicia was lying there crying, I came up with a few reasons.

  It sounded like I was taking the piss. It sounded like I thought she was never pretty enough to be a model.

  It sounded like I thought she was thick, because that’s all she could come up with when we were talking about what we wanted to do.

  It sounded like I was laughing at her for being all podgy and greasy now, and not like a model in any way.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it?” she said when she could speak again. “My mum and dad think you’ve messed me up, and dragged me down, and all that. And I’ve tried to stick up for you. And you and your mum think I’ve messed you up and dragged you down. And I know I wasn’t ever going to be, you know, a rocket scientist or a great writer or any of the things my parents think I can do. But I was going to be something. I don’t mean something incredible. Just something. And what chance do you think I’ve got now? Look at me. So you had a fight at college. Big deal. At least you went to college today. Where have I been? The kitchen and back. So stop it, OK? Stop it with how I’ve messed up your life. You’ve got half a chance. What chance have I got?”

  It was the most she’d said to me for weeks. Months, probably.

  After much too long, I calmed down, and I said sorry a lot, and we hugged, and we even kissed a bit. We hadn’t done anything like that for ages. That was the first fight, though. It made it much easier to have all the others.

  Alicia and Roof went to sleep, and I took my skateboard out for a little while, and when I came back, my mum was there, sitting at the kitchen table with Roof on her lap.

  “Here’s Dadda,” she said. “Alicia let me in, but she’s gone for a walk. I made her go out. I thought she was looking a bit peaky. And there’s no one else here.”

  “Just the three of us, then,” I said. “That’s nice.”

  “How was college?”

  “Yeah, good,” I said.

  “Alicia told me about your bit of trouble.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That. It was nothing.”

  She looked at me. “Sure?”

  “Yeah. Honest.”

  And I was being honest. That really was nothing.

  CHAPTER 17

  A couple of days after the fight at college and the fight with Alicia, my dad called and offered to take me out for something to eat. He’d called me on the day Roof was born, but he still hadn’t bothered to come over and see the baby or anything. He reckoned he had a lot on at work.

  “You can bring the baby if you want,” he said.

  “To the restaurant?”

  “Son,” he said. “You know me. I’ve learned almost nothing from anything I’ve ever done, so I can’t pass much on in the way of advice or anything. But one thing I remember from when we had you is that if you’re a young dad, it’s easier to get served in pubs and that.”

  “Why wouldn’t anyone serve you in a pub?”

  “Not me, you pillock. You. You’re underage. But if you’ve got a baby with you, nobody asks you anything.”

  I didn’t bother telling him that I could get a drink in a restaurant anyway if an adult was with me. Mum was always making me drink a glass of wine with my dinner, in order to teach me about responsible drinking. If he only had one piece of advice for me, it would break his heart to find out it was useless.

  I waited until nobody was around, and then I got Tony Hawk out from under the bed and stuck him on the wall with the old bits of Blu-Tack that were still on the back. He curled up a bit, but he stayed up long enough for me to tell him that my dad was coming round.

  “It came naturally for my dad to do everything to help his kids, but he outdid himself when he started the National Skateboard Association (NSA),” said Tony.

  Tony didn’t often make jokes when we were talking, but this was a good one. I mean, it’s not a joke in the book. His dad really did start the NSA, just because his son was a skater. But it was a joke in this conversation. My dad wouldn’t have started a fire if I was cold.

  “Yeah, well,” I said. “My dad’s not like that. My dad…” I didn’t know where to begin, really. I was embarrassed to say that my dad hated people from Europe and all that.

  “For Frank and Nancy Hawk—thank you for the undying support,” said Tony. That’s what it says right at the beginning ofHawk—Occupation: Skateboarder. And TH’s dad died, so the “undying support” bit shows how much he still thinks of him.

  “If I wrote a book, I wouldn’t mention my dad, even if it was an autobiography,” I said. “I’d say, ‘I was born with just a mum.’”

  “I was an accident; my mom was forty-three years old and my dad forty-five when I popped out,” said Tony.

  He knows I was an accident too. He also knows that my mum and dad were sort of the opposite of his.

  “My dad won’t be forty-five until I’m…” I added it up on my fingers. “Twenty-eight!”

  “Since my parents were fairly old when I came around, they’d outgrown the strict mom-and-pop rearing and slipped into the grandparent mentality,” said Tony.

  “My dad’s not even old enough to be a dad, let alone a grandad,” I said.

  “We spread his ashes in the ocean, but I kept some for later,” said Tony. “My brother and I recently sprinkled the rest throughout the Home Depot.”

  Tony’s dad died of cancer. It’s the saddest part of his book. But I couldn’t understand why he was telling me that when we were supposed to be talking about how useless mine was.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. And I didn’t know what else to say, so I took the poster off the wall, rolled it up, and put it back under the bed.

  So Dad came round, said hello to Alicia, told everyone who would listen that the baby looked exactly like me, and then we put Roof in his basket and took him to the Italian restaurant on Highbury Park. There was a booth at the back with a long leather seat, and we put the basket down there, out of the way. Lots of people came over to look at him.

  “They probably think we’re a couple of poofs who’ve adopted him,” said my dad. This was his way of saying that we looked the same age, even though we didn’t, and we still don’t.

  He ordered two beers, and winked at me.

  “Well,” he said when they came. “I’m drinking a beer with my son and his son. My son and my grandson. Bloody hell.”

  “How does that feel?” I said, for the sake of something to say.

  “Not as bad as I thought it would,” he said. “Probably because I’m not even thirty-five.” He looked over to the next table, where two girls were eating pizzas and laughing. I knew why my dad was looking.

  “Have you seen those two?” he said. “I wouldn’t climb over either of them to get to you.”

  If you were visiting Earth from another planet, you wouldn’t have a clue what my dad was talking about half the time, even
if you’d learned the language. You’d catch on pretty quickly, though. He was either saying he was skint, or that he’d seen someone he fancied, or he was saying rude things about Europeans. He had a million expressions for either, and almost no words for anything else.

  “Oh,” he said. “That’s my other piece of advice. There’s nothing better than a baby for pulling.”

  “Right,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Neither of the girls seemed the slightest bit interested in us, or in Roof.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “You’re thinking, Silly old tosser, what do I want to know that for? I’ve got a girlfriend. But it will come in handy. One day.”

  “Roof might not be a baby by then,” I said.

  He laughed. “You reckon?”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Don’t get me wrong. She’s a lovely girl, Alicia. And her family seem very nice, and all that. But…”

  “But what?” He was really pissing me off.

  “You haven’t got a cat in hell’s chance, have you?”

  I banged my beer glass down on the table, because I was annoyed with him, and one of the women—the one I’d pick, with big brown eyes and long, wavy dark hair—turned round to see what was going on.

  “What is the point of taking me out to tell me all this?” I said. “It’s hard enough as it is.”

  “It’s not just hard, son,” he said. “It’s impossible.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Oh, I’m just guessing. I haven’t got a clue about any of this really. Der.”

  “Yeah, but how do you know about me and Alicia? We’re different people.”

  “Doesn’t matter who you are. You can’t sit in one room with a baby without doing each other’s heads in.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. The day of the fight, we’d started to do each other’s heads in.