Slam

by Nick Hornby

  “Me and your mother, we ended up like brother and sister. And not even in a good way either. There was no incest or anything like that.”

  I made a face. His jokes were horrible, most of the time. Incest, gay adoption, he didn’t care.

  “Sorry. But you know what I mean. We were just watching this thing. You. And going, you know, Is he breathing? Has he pooed? Does he need changing? That’s all we ever said. We never looked at each other. When you’re older, it’s OK, because there was usually a time before all that, and you can see a time after. But when you’re sixteen…I’d only known your mum five minutes. It was mental.”

  “Where did you live?” I’d never asked either of them before. I knew we hadn’t been in our house forever, but I’d never been interested in what had gone on before I could remember anything. Now that time seemed worth knowing about.

  “With her mum. Your gran. We probably killed her off. All the crying.”

  “Mum was saying the other day I was a good baby. Like Roof.”

  “Oh, you were as good as gold. No, it was her that was doing all the crying. We got married when we found out about you, so it was different. More pressure, sort of thing. And your gran’s place was tiny. Do you remember it?”

  I nodded. She died when I was four.

  “But, you know. It wasn’t so different really. A room’s a room, isn’t it? All I’m saying is that nobody is expecting you to stick at it. Stick at being a dad, or you’ll have me to answer to….” I tried not to laugh at my useless dad telling me to be a good dad or else. “But the other thing…Don’t let it kill you. Relationships don’t last five minutes anyway at your age. When you’ve got a kid as well, that should cut it down to three minutes. Don’t try and make it last the rest of your life if you can’t even see how you’re going to get through till tea time.”

  My dad is probably the least sensible adult I know. He’s probably the least sensibleperson I know, apart from Rabbit, who doesn’t really count as a person. So how come he was the only one who said anything that made any sense in that entire year? Suddenly I understood why TH had told me that story about his dad’s ashes. He was trying to get me to treat my own dad as if he were a proper dad, someone who might have something interesting to say to me, someone who might actually be useful. If TH had tried to do that on any other day of my life, it would have been a complete waste of time. But then, that’s why TH is a genius, isn’t it?

  On the other hand, maybe if my dad hadn’t said all that, Alicia and I wouldn’t have had an argument when we got home. She wanted to know where we’d put Roof in the car, and I said we’d put his basket on the backseat and driven really slowly, and she went nuts. She said things about my dad, which normally I wouldn’t have minded, but because he’d been helpful, I stuck up for him. And sticking up for him meant saying a load of things about Alicia’s mum and dad that I probably shouldn’t have gone into.

  I don’t think my dad had anything to do with the fight we had a couple of days later, though. That was about me sitting on the remote control and not moving, so the channels just changed all the time. I can’t remember why I did that. It was probably because I could see it was driving her mad. And my dad definitely didn’t have anything to do with the fight we had the day after that, which was about a T-shirt that had been on the floor in the bedroom for about a week. That one was all my fault. The T-shirt part of it was, anyway. It was Alicia’s T-shirt, but I’d borrowed it, and I was the one who’d chucked it on the floor when I took it off. But because it was her shirt, I just left it there. I wasn’t thinking, Oh, that’s not my shirt. And I wasn’t thinking, Oh, I’m not picking it up, even though I’ve been wearing it, because that’s not my shirt. I just didn’t see it, because it wasn’t mine, in the same way that you never see shops that aren’t interesting, dry cleaners and estate agents and so on. It didn’t register. In my opinion, though, it didn’t need to end up the way it did, with every single item of clothing in the room being thrown on the floor and trampled on.

  Everything was getting out of hand. It was like a teacher losing control of a class. It was all right for a while, and then one thing happened, and another, and then things started happening every day, because there was nothing to stop them happening. They were easy.

  When I went back home, it wasn’t anything to do with the fights. That’s what we told ourselves, anyway. I went down with a heavy cold, and I was coughing and sneezing half the night, and I kept waking Alicia up when she needed all the sleep she could get. And she wasn’t happy about me picking Roof up and passing my germs on to him either, even though her mum said it was good for his immune system.

  “I’ll sleep on the sofa in the living room if you want,” I said.

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Wouldn’t you prefer a bed? What about sleeping in Rich’s room?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That might work.” I know I wasn’t sounding very enthusiastic. “It’s next door, though, isn’t it?”

  “Oh. You mean I’d still hear you.”

  “Probably.”

  We both pretended to think hard. Was anyone going to be brave enough?

  “You could always go back to your old room,” said Alicia. And she laughed, just to show what a mad idea it was.

  I laughed too, and then pretended that I’d seen something she hadn’t.

  “It wouldn’t kill us for one night,” I said.

  “I see what you mean.”

  “Just till I’ve stopped coughing half the night.”

  “You sure you don’t mind?”

  “I think it makes sense.”

  I left that day, and I never went back. Whenever I go round to see Roof, her family always ask me how my cold’s coming along. Even now, after all this time. Do you remember when I got whizzed into the future that second time? When I took Roof for his injections? And Alicia said, “I’ve actually got a cold,” and laughed? That was what she was laughing at.

  The first night back was sad. I couldn’t get to sleep, because it was too quiet in my bedroom. I needed Roof’s breathing noises. And it didn’t seem right, him not being there, which meant that my own bedroom, the bedroom I’d slept in just about every night of my life, didn’t seem right either. I was home, and I wanted to be home. But home was somewhere else now too, and I couldn’t be in both of the places at once. I was with my mum, but I couldn’t be with my son. That makes you feel weird. It’s felt weird ever since.

  “Did your father say something to you when you went out for a pizza?” my mum said when I’d been home a couple of nights.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It just seems like a bit of a coincidence. You go out with him and then suddenly you’re back home.”

  “We had a talk.”

  “Oh, gawd,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want you listening to him.”

  “He was all right. He said I didn’t have to live there if I didn’t want to.”

  “He would say that, wouldn’t he? Look at his track record.”

  “But that’s exactly what you said.”

  She was quiet for a bit.

  “I was saying it from a mother’s point of view, though.”

  I looked at her to see if she was joking, but she wasn’t.

  “What point of view was he saying it from?”

  “Not a mother’s, that’s for sure. I mean, obviously. But not a father’s either. A bloke’s.”

  I suddenly thought about Roof and Alicia and me, all arguing like this one day. Maybe it was all a mess that just went on forever. Maybe Alicia would always be angry with me about my cold, so that even if we agreed—like my mum and dad agreed now—she wouldn’t ever agree that we agreed.

  “Anyway,” she said, “you’re only here because you’ve got a cold.”

  “I know.”

  “So it’s nothing to do with what your dad was on about.”

  �
��I know.”

  “So.”

  “Yeah.”

  On the night I went home with a cold, I went straight into my room to talk to Tony Hawk. I’d taken the poster with me, of course.

  “I just have a bit of a cold,” I told him. “So I’ve come home for a few days.”

  “I knew that even though I still loved Cindy, we lived in two separate worlds that were not uniting,” said Tony. “In September of 1994 we split up. Unfortunately it took this event to make us realize the importance of parenthood.”

  I looked at him. Fair enough, he’d seen right through the cold straightaway. But I really didn’t need him telling me about the importance of parenthood. What else was there in my life, apart from Roof? I went to college about once a bloody month, I never had time to go skating, and all I ever talked about was the baby. I was disappointed in him. He wasn’t making me think at all.

  “It was never an ugly separation,” he said. “We were both dedicated to creating the best possible life for Riley.”

  “Thanks for nothing,” I said.

  But the thing about TH is, there’s always more to what he says than you can see.

  CHAPTER 18

  There’s loads of stuff about teenagers having babies on the Internet. I mean, there’s loads of stuff about everything on the Internet, isn’t there? That’s the great thing about it. Whatever your problem is, it’s on there somewhere, and it makes you feel less alone. If your arms have suddenly turned green, and you want to talk to other people your age who’ve got green arms, you can find the right website. If I decided I could only have sex with Swedish maths teachers, I’m sure I could find a website for Swedish maths teachers who only wanted to have sex with English eighteen-year-olds. So it wasn’t really surprising that you could find all the information you wanted about teenagers and pregnancy, if you think about it. Having a kid when you’re a teenager isn’t like having green arms. There are more of us than there are of them.

  Most of the stuff I found was just kids like me complaining. I couldn’t blame them, really, because we had a lot to complain about. They complained because they had nowhere to live, no money, no work, no way of getting work without paying someone more than they could ever earn to look after their kids. I didn’t feel lucky very often, but I felt lucky when I read this stuff. Our parents would never chuck us out.

  And then I found this little book full of facts that the prime minister had written some of. Most of them were pointless—for example, it said that most teenagers got pregnant by accident, DER!!!!!!! And some of them were funny—like, one in ten teenagers couldn’t remember if they’d had sex the night before or not, which is pretty incredible if you think about it. I think this meant that one in ten teenagers had got so blasted the night before that they didn’t know what had gone on. I don’t think it meant they were just forgetful, like when you can’t remember whether you packed your games kit. I wanted to run and tell Mum about this one. You know, “Mum, I know I shouldn’t have done it. But at least I remembered I’d done it the next day!”

  I learned that Britain had the worst teenage pregnancy rates in Europe, which by the way means we have the highest. It took me a while to realize that. For a moment I thought they might mean it the other way, that our teen pregnancy rates were low and the prime minister wanted us to do better. And I learned that after fifteen years or so, eighty percent of teenage fathers lose touch with their kids completely. Eighty percent! Eight out of ten! Four out of five! That meant that in fifteen years’ time, the chances were that I wouldn’t have anything to do with Roof. I wasn’t having that.

  I was angry when I left the house, and I was still angry when I got to Alicia’s. I knocked on her door way too hard, and Andrea and Rob were angry with me even before they let me in. I probably shouldn’t have gone, but it was already about nine or so, and she was asleep by ten, so I didn’t have time to calm myself down. The way I looked at things, it wasn’t going to be me who stopped seeing Roof. The only way I was going to lose touch with him was if Alicia stopped me from seeing him and moved away and didn’t tell me where she’d gone. So it was all going to be her fault.

  “What on earth is all the racket about?” said Andrea when she came to the door.

  “I need to see Alicia,” I said.

  “She’s in the bath,” said Andrea. “And we’ve only just got Roof off to sleep.”

  I didn’t know whether I was allowed to see Alicia in the bath anymore. On the day Roof was born, Andrea more or less made me go into the bathroom. Since then, I’d lived with her and then moved out again, although we hadn’t actually split up, or even talked about splitting up, even though I think we both knew what was going to happen. So what did all that mean? Was it OK to see Alicia naked or what? This was the sort of thing the prime minister should be writing about on the Internet. Never mind whether you could remember whether you’d done it the night before or not. The night before was over. It was too late for the night before. We wanted to know about all the nights after, the nights when you wanted to talk to a naked girlfriend or ex-girlfriend and you didn’t know whether there should be a door in the way or not.

  “So what shall I do?” I said to Andrea.

  “Go and knock on the door,” she said.

  It was, I had to admit, a pretty sensible answer. I went upstairs and knocked on the door.

  “I’ll be out in a second,” said Alicia.

  “It’s me.”

  “What are you doing here? Is your cold better?”

  “No,” I said. Except I was quick enough to make it sound more like “Doe,” to show I was still blocked up. “I need to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  I didn’t want to talk about not knowing Roof in fifteen years’ time through a bathroom door.

  “Can you come out? Or can I come in?”

  “Oh, bloody hell.”

  I heard her get out of the bath, and then the door opened. She was wearing a dressing gown.

  “I thought I was going to get ten minutes to myself.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What is it?”

  “You want to talk in here?”

  “Roof’s asleep in our room. My room. Mum and Dad are downstairs.”

  “You can get back in the bath if you want.”

  “Oh, what, so you can have a good look?”

  I’d only been here two minutes and she was really getting on my nerves. I didn’t want to look at anything. I wanted to talk about whether I was going to lose touch with my son. I asked her whether she wanted to get back in the bath because I felt bad about interrupting it.

  “I’ve got better things to look at than you,” I said. I don’t know why I chose those particular words. I think I may even have got it wrong, and missed out some words, like, “do than.” “I’ve got better things to do than look at you,” I might have meant. I was angry with her, and she was sounding cocky. It was my way of saying, you know, You’re not all that.

  And then I said, “People.” I said “people” because Alicia isn’t a thing.

  “What does that mean?”

  “What I said.”

  I didn’t think she could have taken it another way, you see.

  “So you’re already seeing someone else? Sleeping with another girl?”

  I didn’t say anything straightaway. I couldn’t understand how she’d got from there to here.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You little shit. ‘Oh, I’ve got a cold.’ You liar. Get out. I hate you.”

  “Where did you get that from?” We were both shouting now.

  “You’ve got better people to look at? Well go and bloody look at them.”

  “No, I—”

  She wouldn’t let me speak. She just started pushing me out of the door, and then Andrea came running up the stairs.

  “What the hell is going on here?”

  “Sam came round to tell me he was going out with someone else.”

  “Charming,” said Andr
ea.

  “You can forget all about seeing Roof,” said Alicia. “I’m not letting you near him.”

  I couldn’t believe it. It was all completely insane. Half an hour ago I’d been worried about losing touch with Roof in fifteen years’ time, and I’d come round to talk to Alicia about it, and I’d lost touch with him straightaway, on the first day of the fifteen years. I felt like strangling her, but I just turned around and started to walk away.

  “Sam,” said Andrea. “Stay here. Alicia. I don’t care what Sam has done. You are never to make threats like that unless something extremely serious has happened.”

  “And you don’t think that’s serious?” said Alicia.

  “No,” said Andrea. “I don’t.”

  It all got sorted out. Alicia got dressed, and Andrea made us both a cup of tea, and we sat down at the kitchen table and talked. That makes it sound more intelligent than it really was. They let me speak, and I was finally allowed to tell them that I wasn’t going out with anyone else, and I didn’t want to go out with anyone else, and all that stuff about better people to look at came from nowhere and meant nothing. And then I explained that I’d come round angry because of what the prime minister had said in his report or whatever it was, that I was going to lose touch with Roof and I didn’t want to.

  “So it was sort of ironic that Alicia tried to stop you seeing him tonight,” Andrea said. And Alicia sort of laughed, but I didn’t.

  “How does it happen?” I said. “How do all those dads lose touch with their kids?”

  “Things get hard,” said Andrea.

  I couldn’t imagine how hard things would have to get before I stopped seeing Roof. It felt like I couldn’t stop seeing him, like it wouldn’t be physically possible. It would be like not seeing my own feet.

  “What things?”

  “How many of those fights do you think you could have before you gave up on Roof? Fights like the one you had tonight?”

  “Hundreds,” I said. “Hundreds and hundreds.”

  “OK,” she said. “Say you have two of those a week for the next ten years. That’s a thousand. And you’ve still got five years to go before you get to fifteen years. Do you see what I mean? People give up. They can’t face it. They get tired. One day, you might hate Alicia’s new boyfriend. You might have to move to another part of the country for work. Or abroad. And when you come home to visit, you might get depressed that Roof doesn’t really recognize you…. There are loads of reasons.”