Slam

  Robert looked at her.

  “Sorry, but it’s the truth,” said Andrea. “The lack of sleep. The farting and snoring.”

  “I don’t fart or snore,” said Alicia.

  “You don’t know what you do,” said Andrea. “Because you’ve never shared a bed with anybody. And you don’t know what a baby will do to you.”

  “No one’s stopping you from moving out,” said Robert.

  “You think I haven’t thought of it?” said Andrea.

  “Well, this is a good example, I must say,” said Andrea. “Welcome, Sam. Come and join our happy family.”

  If I had been Robert or Andrea, I would have said, Don’t you see? This is what it’s like? Man and wife? Let Sam stay with his mum! He can see the baby all day, every day! But they didn’t say that. They must have thought it, but they didn’t say it, however much I wanted them to.

  I needed my skateboard.

  When I got home that night, I went straight to my room to pick up my board. I hadn’t used it since my trip to Hastings. It was leaning on the wall underneath my poster of TH, and I could tell that he was disappointed in me.

  “I’ve had a lot on my plate,” I said.

  “I didn’t want the responsibility of including someone so closely in my life and have her involved on all different levels,” said Tony. I didn’t want to get involved in a conversation, so I just picked up the board and ran.

  Rubbish was down at The Bowl, on his own, doing a few tricks. I hadn’t seen him since I’d found out about Alicia, but he didn’t ask where I’d been, because he knew. He knew about the baby, anyway. Nobody had ever talked about me before, as far as I knew, because what was there to talk about? I’d never done anything. People found out stuff about me because I told them, not because they were telling each other. Now everybody knew my business, and it was weird.

  “How’s it going?” he said. Rubbish was practising his rock-and-rolls. He hadn’t got any better.

  “Yeah, well. You know.”

  I was doing a 5-0 grind in The Bowl, pretending as though I was concentrating on it more than I was.

  “You’re screwed, aren’t you?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Sorry. But you are.”

  “Thanks again.”

  “Sorry. But—”

  “You weren’t going to tell me I’m screwed for a third time, were you?”

  “So explain why you’re not.”

  “I can’t explain why I’m not. Because I am.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Sorry. Again. I’ve just realized.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. When somebody tells a kid our age that he’s screwed, he’s usually not, is he? Not really. I mean, maybe it will end up with him getting a slap. Or a bollocking from a teacher. But it isn’t going to ruin their life, is it? Something little happens and it’s over. But you becoming a father…That’s serious, isn’t it? I mean, you really are—”

  “Don’t say it again. Really. Otherwise you’re screwed. Old-school. In other words, I’ll have to give you a slap.”

  I never hit anyone, but he was doing my head in.

  “Sorry. I mean, sorry I nearly said it again. And I’m sorry for all that’s happened.”

  “Why, was it your fault? Was it actually you that got Alicia pregnant?”

  I was joking, but because I’d just offered to give him a slap, he looked worried.

  “I’ve never even met her. I just meant, you know. Bad luck.”

  “Yeah. Well.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “About what?”

  “I dunno. About anything.”

  “I haven’t got a clue.”

  I was enjoying the feeling of the decks mashing against the concrete, mostly because I knew what I was doing. It was the first time I’d known what I was doing for ages. Rubbish was rubbish at grinds and rock-and-rolls and pretty much everything, but I still wanted to be him. I wished that skate tricks were all I had to worry about. I used to be like Rubbish, except I could do the tricks. From where I was standing, that looked like the perfect life. I’d had the perfect life, and I hadn’t realized it, and now it was over.

  “Rubbish,” I said.

  He ignored me. The trouble with being called Rubbish is you don’t always know when someone’s talking to you.

  “Rubbish. Listen to me.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your life is perfect. Did you know that?”

  Right at that second, he bailed. He smashed his knees right into the concrete bench, came off the board, and lay on the ground swearing and trying not to cry.

  “Did you know that?” I said again. “Perfect. I’d give anything to be you right at this second.”

  He looked at me to see if I was laughing at him, but I wasn’t. I meant it. I’d slammed too. I’d never had a slam like this, though. The wheels had come off the trucks, the trucks had come off the deck, and I’d shot twenty feet into the air and gone straight into a brick wall. That’s what it felt like, anyway. And there wasn’t even a mark on me.

  “Andrea called,” Mum said later. I stared at her.

  “Alicia’s mum,” she said.

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “She said you and Alicia are planning to live together at her house when the baby’s born.”

  I looked at my shoes. I hadn’t ever properly noticed that the holes for the laces were red round the outside.

  “You didn’t want to talk to me about this?”

  “Yeah. I was going to.”

  “When?”

  “Today. Now. If you hadn’t got in first. You beat me to it by ten seconds.”

  “You think this is all a joke?”

  It’s true I was joking about when I was going to tell her. But the point of my joke was that nothing was funny, really, and I was trying to be brave. I was taking everything so seriously that making a joke seemed like the nearest I could get to being a hero. I thought she’d see that, and love me for it.

  “No,” I said. “Sorry.” There was no point in explaining it all. She wasn’t going to think I was being heroic.

  “Do you want to live at Alicia’s house?”

  “It’s gone past what I want, hasn’t it?”

  “No,” she said. “You mustn’t think that. You’re a kid. You’ve got your whole life in front of you.”

  “Is that what you felt when you got pregnant?”

  “No. Course not. But…”

  “But what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “But what?”

  “Well. I didn’t have a choice, did I? I was carrying you around with me. I couldn’t escape.”

  “You mean blokes can get out of it?”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My mum! Telling me I should run!

  “I’m not saying you can get out of it. I’m not suggesting that you run away to Hastings. That would be pathetic.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t go all high and mighty about blokes not getting out of it five minutes after you tried to do exactly that.”

  There wasn’t much I could say.

  “I’m saying, you know, go there every day. Look after your kid. Be a father to him. Just…don’t live in Alicia’s bedroom.”

  “She wants me to. And there’s a lot of getting up in the night and burping and all that, isn’t there? Why should she have to do that on her own?”

  “Has she seen your bedroom? You can’t hardly live with yourself, let alone someone else. You going to throw your dirty underwear all over her floor? Have you thought about all of that?”

  I hadn’t thought of any of it. And there wasn’t any point anyway.

  I talked to TH again last thing that night.

  “What am I going to do?” I said. “Don’t go on about your life. I’m fed up of hearing about your life. Tell me about my life. Say, ‘Sam, this is what you’ve got to do about Alicia and the baby,’ and then just give me some answers.”
r />   “Riley demanded a change in our lifestyles, and Cindy and I figured out a way to make it all work,” he said.

  Riley was his son. I wasn’t interested in his son.

  “What did I just tell you?” I said. “It’s no use to me, all that business about Riley. I’m not a world-famous skater. You’re not listening to me.”

  “How the park locals stopped themselves from beating me up I’ll never know. I could be the biggest idiot without realizing it.”

  We’d been here before. I realized he said this when he was frustrated with me, when he thought I was being an idiot. And when he was frustrated, he whizzed me.

  I went to bed. But I didn’t know when I was going to wake up.

  CHAPTER 12

  Mum woke me up by banging on my bedroom door. I knew I was in trouble when I started looking around for something to wear. I picked my jeans off the floor, then went to get a shirt out of my wardrobe and found a load of stuff I hadn’t seen before—Hawk cargo pants and a couple of cool Hawk T-shirts that I’d wanted for a while, that one with the Hawk emblem, and the other one with the Hawk logo in flames. I knew it was the future straightaway. And the first thing I noticed about the future was that I wasn’t living at Alicia’s place. I put on the burning Hawk T-shirt and went out into the kitchen.

  Mark was there with a baby. It looked like a girl. And she wasn’t a tiny baby. She was sitting up in a baby seat and eating what looked like mashed-up Weetabix with a spoon.

  “Here he is,” said Mark. “Here’s your big brother.”

  I was prepared. I knew who she was, and where I was, and everything like that. I’d been in the future before. But when Mark said that, I felt quite emotional. I was a big brother. She was my little sister. I’d been an only child all my life, and suddenly there was this new person. And she liked me too. She started smiling and then opened her arms like she wanted me to pick her up. I went over to her.

  “She hasn’t finished yet,” said Mark.

  He didn’t know it was a big deal for me to meet my sister. He probably saw me last night and I probably saw her last night and for Mark this was just a tiny moment, one of a million tiny moments. Not for me, though. This wasn’t a tiny moment at all.

  It was different, meeting this baby. Meeting Roof had been a shock, in a lot of ways. I didn’t know about being whizzed then, so that was a shock. And I didn’t know for sure that Alicia was pregnant, so meeting your own son even before you were a hundred percent that your girlfriend or even ex-girlfriend was going to have a baby…that would be a shock for anyone. Plus, I didn’t know what I felt about having a son. Or rather, I did know how I felt, and how I felt was bad. But this baby wasn’t my baby, she was my little sister, and nothing about her was going to make me feel sad or worried.

  I wanted to know her name.

  “Come on, dumpling. Eat up. Daddy’s got to go to work.”

  “Where’s Mum?”

  I suddenly remembered that kid at school who didn’t know anyone he lived with. Maybe Mum had gone, and I lived with Mark and a baby whose name I didn’t know.

  “She’s in bed. This one was up half the night.”

  “Roof.” “This one.” “Dumpling.” Why didn’t people ever call babies their real names?

  “Is she all right?” I said.

  “Yeah. Fine. Just a menace.”

  “Can I feed her?”

  Mark looked at me. I guessed that I didn’t offer to do things like that very often.

  “Course. You got time?”

  I remembered now the thing I hated most about the future, apart from being scared that I’d never get back to my own time. In the future, you never knew what you were supposed to be doing when.

  I shrugged.

  “What you got on?”

  I shrugged again.

  “College? Roof?”

  He was still called Roof, then. He seemed to be stuck with it.

  “The usual,” I said.

  “So you haven’t got time.”

  “Will I see her later?” I said.

  “She’ll be here,” said Mark. “She lives here.”

  “And so do I,” I said.

  It was more of a question, really, but he didn’t know that.

  “You’ve woken up sharp,” said Mark. “If you already know where you live, there’ll be no stopping you today.”

  I smiled, to show I knew he was joking. There wasn’t much else I knew.

  Mum came into the kitchen in her dressing gown, looking sleepy, and older, and fatter. I’m sorry if that sounds rude, but it’s the truth. She walked over and kissed the baby on the top of her head. The baby didn’t seem that bothered.

  “Everything OK?”

  “Yeah,” said Mark. “Sam just offered to feed her.”

  “Blimey,” said Mum. “Are you broke again?”

  I felt in my pockets. There was a note in there.

  “No, I think I’m all right.”

  “I was being sarcastic.”

  “Oh.”

  “Have you woken up daft?”

  “Mark just said I’d woken up sharp.”

  “I was being sarcastic too,” said Mark.

  I hated being like this. It seemed to me that if TH was going to whiz me into the future, he should at least sit me down and tell me some things first. Like where I went to college, and what my sister’s name was. Basic stuff. If you’re sitting in a room with your sister and you don’t know her name, you feel stupid, even if she is only a baby.

  “That’s your mobile,” said Mum.

  I listened. All I could hear was a cow mooing.

  “That’s just a cow,” I said.

  “Yeah, that was hilarious the first time,” said Mum.

  I listened again. It really sounded like a cow. Except the mooing went, “Moo moo, moo moo…. Moo moo, moo moo….” Like a telephone. It wasn’t a real cow, because what would a real cow be doing in my bedroom? I could see what had happened. What had happened was, I had downloaded a ringing tone that sounded like a cow, sometime between the present and the future, for a laugh. I wasn’t sure how funny it really was.

  I found my phone in my jacket pocket.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Bee.”

  “Oh. Hello, Bee.” I wasn’t sure who Bee was, but it sounded a bit like Alicia. You couldn’t be sure of anything, though, when you were in the future.

  “Bee. Not Bee.”

  “Bee not Bee? What does that mean?”

  “It’s Alicia. And I’ve got a cold. So I’m trying to say, you know, ‘It’s Alicia,’ except I’m saying ‘It’s Bee,’ and it comes out as ‘It’s Bee.’”

  “Me.”

  “Yes. Bloody hell. Have you woken up stupid?”

  “Yes.” It just seemed easier to admit it.

  “Anyway. I know you were supposed to be going to college, but I’m really not well, and Mum and Dad aren’t around, and I was going to take him for his jab this morning. So can you do it?”

  “Jab?”

  “Yes. His thingy. Inoculation. Immunization. Injection.”

  That sounded like a lot of stuff for a little kid.

  “Anyway. Can you do it?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. You. His father. We can’t put it off again.”

  “Where is it?”

  “The Health Center. Up the road.”

  “OK.”

  “Really? Thanks. I’ll see you in a bit. He needs to get out somewhere. He’s been up for hours and he’s doing my head in.”

  My mum had taken over the feeding now. The baby smiled and stretched out her arms to me again, but Mum told her she had to wait.

  “How old are kids when they have their jab?”

  “What jab?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, it depends what jab, doesn’t it?”

  “Does it?”

  “Are you talking about Roof?”

  “Yeah. Alicia said she wanted to take him for his jab now. He should have had it
months ago, but she wasn’t sure. So how old are they normally?” I was trying to find out how old my son was. And also how old I was.

  “Fifteen months?”

  “Right.”

  So Roof was a few months older than fifteen months. Fifteen months was a year and three months. He might be nearly two, or more than two, even. So I was eighteen. I was going to buy a paper on the way to Alicia’s so I could see the date, and then I’d know whether I could drink in a pub legally.

  “I’ve got to take him this morning. Alicia’s not well.”

  “Do you want me and Emily to come with you?”

  “Emily?”

  “What, you want me to leave her here?”

  “No, no. Just…Anyway,” I said. “No. You’re all right. I’ll take him to the swings or something.”

  Kids of nearly or just over two could go on swings, couldn’t they? That’s who those little swings were for, wasn’t it? What else could a two-year-old do? I didn’t have a clue.

  “Mum. Is Roof good at talking? In your opinion?”

  “He could talk for England.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Why? Has someone said something?”

  “No, no. But…”

  But I didn’t know whether he could talk, or two-year-olds could talk, or anything. And I couldn’t tell her that either.

  “I’ll see you later,” I said. “See you, Emily.”

  And I kissed my baby sister on the head. She cried when I left.

  Alicia looked terrible. She was in a dressing gown, and her eyes were streaming, and her nose was red. It was quite good, really, because I was getting the impression that we weren’t together anymore, what with me living back at home and so on, and I was sad. Back in the present, we’d been getting on OK, and I was starting to fancy her again, just like I did when we first met. Her looking like this…it made the breakup easier.

  “I’ve actually got a cold,” she said, and laughed. I looked at her. I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “Maybe I caught it off you,” she said, and laughed again. I was worried that she’d had some kind of nervous breakdown.

  “He’s watching TV,” she said. “I haven’t had the energy to do anything else with him.”