Slam

  Robert blinked, and fiddled with the stud in his ear.

  “Well,” he said. And then he dried up.

  “Oh, you’re a great help,” she said.

  “Well,” he said again. “I share your mother’s, ah, embarrassment. And—”

  “It’s a bit more than bloody embarrassment,” she said.

  “In which case, I’m at something of a loss,” said Robert. “We know that Sam and Alicia have a, a sexual relationship, so…”

  Did we? I thought. I wasn’t sure.

  “Do you?” said Andrea.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Yes,” Alicia said, at exactly the same time.

  “Well, why do you?” said Andrea.

  “Why?” said Alicia.

  “Yes, why?”

  This was turning into the worst conversation of my life. If I had to choose between telling my mum that Alicia was pregnant and talking to Alicia’s parents about why we had sex, I’d definitely have chosen the talk with my mum. That was terrible, but she got over it. I’m not sure I’d ever get over this one.

  “Do you love him? Do you want to be with him? Do you think this relationship has a future? You can’t imagine ever sleeping with anyone else?”

  I didn’t love Alicia, not really. Not like I loved her when I first met her. I liked her, and she was a good mum, but I didn’t really want to be with her. I could easily imagine sleeping with someone else, one day. I didn’t know whether that meant we shouldn’t be together now, but I did know that we had enough to worry about without all that. As I listened to Andrea, I felt sick, because I knew I’d have to put a stop to it, if Alicia didn’t put a stop to it first.

  “Mum, he’s Roof’s dad.”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to screw him,” Andrea said. She was really steaming now. I didn’t get it.

  “Well,” said Robert. “She obviously has to at some stage.”

  “What?” Andrea looked at him like she was going to get a bread knife out of the drawer and cut out his tongue.

  “Sorry. Silly joke. I just meant…You know. If he’s to be the father of her baby.”

  Alicia sniggered.

  “And you think that joke is in good taste, do you?”

  “Well. Good taste and humor don’t always go together.”

  “Spare us a bloody lecture on the theory of comedy. Don’t you see what’s happening, Robert?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not having her wreck her life in the way I wrecked mine.”

  “I’m not wrecking my life,” said Alicia.

  “You don’t think you are,” said Andrea. “You think you’re doing the right thing, sleeping with the father of your children, because you want everyone to be together. And then one decade goes past, and another, and you realize that nobody else would ever want you, and you’ve wasted all this time sticking with something that any sane person would have got out of years before.”

  “Bloody hell, Mum,” said Alicia. “We were only thinking of giving it a go for a while.”

  “I’m not sure you’ve got the point, Alicia,” said Robert quietly. Andrea couldn’t look him in the eye. She’d said way too much, and she knew it.

  There were a lot of tears that night. I went upstairs with Alicia, and said my bit, in as nice a way as I could. I didn’t have to say very much, really. Once I launched in, she just said, “I know, I know,” and started crying. I hugged her.

  “It’s not fair, is it?” she said.

  “No,” I said, but I didn’t really know what wasn’t fair, or why.

  “I wish we could start all over again. We didn’t have the same chances as everyone else,” she said.

  “What sort of chances?”

  “To be together.”

  It seemed to me as though we’d had at least two chances. We had one chance before Roof, for example, and we messed that one up. And then we had another chance after he’d arrived, and that one didn’t go much better. It was hard to see what would be different, if we started all over again. Some people just aren’t meant to be together. Alicia and I were two of them. In my opinion, she didn’t believe what she was saying. She was just trying to be romantic. I didn’t mind. I searched around for something that would do, something right for the moment.

  “Even though I still love you,” I said, “we live in two separate worlds that are not uniting. I don’t want this to be an ugly separation. I think we should both be dedicated to creating the best possible life for Roof. Try and make it as easy as possible for him.”

  She pushed me away and looked at me.

  “Where did all that come from?” she said.

  “Tony Hawk,” I said. “When he split up with Cindy.”

  On my way downstairs I could hear Andrea and Robert going at it. I didn’t poke my head into the kitchen to say good-bye.

  You know when you got whizzed into the future, and you asked your mum to give you marks out of tenfor how you were doing? Well, how many would you give yourself?

  OK. Good question. But I can see why my mum didn’t know how to answer it. I’ll give you two different scores. First, the mark for how I’m getting on with what I’ve got to do every day—college, Roof, all that. I’ll give myself eight out of ten for that. I could do better, but mostly I’m all right. There’s nothing Alicia does with Roof that I can’t do. I can cook for him, and I can put him to bed, read him stories, give him his bath. I work hard, I’m not late, I do as much college work as I can, and so on. I look after Emily sometimes, and I get on all right with Mark and his son. But if you’re asking me to give my life marks out of ten…I’m afraid I couldn’t go any higher than a three. This isn’t what I had in mind. How could it be?

  CHAPTER 20

  I’m woken up by my mobile bleeping. I seem to have woken up on the top deck of a bus going down Upper Street. There’s a pretty girl, nineteen or twenty years old, sitting next to me. She smiles at me, and I smile back at her.

  “Who’s that?” she says. She’s talking about my mobile, which must mean she knows me.

  Oh, man. It looks like he’s whizzed me again. This girl knows me, and I don’t know her, and I don’t know where I’m going on the bus, and…

  “I dunno,” I say.

  “Why don’t you look?”

  I reach in my pocket and bring out my mobile. I don’t recognize it. It’s tiny.

  It’s a text from Alicia.

  “WHERE R U?” it says.

  “What shall I say?” I ask the girl.

  “Why don’t you tell her where U R?” she said. She made a funny face when she said the last bit, so that you knew she was talking in letters, not words.

  “Upper Street,” I said.

  “Brilliant,” she said, and she messed up my hair with her hand.

  “Shall I say that, then?”

  “God,” she said. “If you’re like this now, what are you going to be like when you’re sixty?”

  OK. So I wasn’t sixty yet. That was something.

  “I’ll just text ‘Upper Street,’ then.”

  “There’s not much point,” said the pretty girl. “We’re getting off now anyway.”

  She got up, pressed the buzzer and went downstairs. I followed her. I couldn’t think of one question I was allowed to ask. It sounded to me as though the pretty girl and I were going to meet Alicia. Whose idea was that? If it was mine, I wanted shooting. Did Alicia know the pretty girl was coming? Or was that going to be a surprise?

  We got off at the Green and walked back up the road to a Chinese restaurant I had never seen before, possibly because I’d never been to this part of the future before. It was beginning to feel like I’d been to most other parts.

  There was hardly anyone in the restaurant, so we could see Alicia straightaway. She stood up and waved. She was with a guy about her age, however old she was.

  “We thought you’d crapped out,” Alicia said, and she laughed.

  “Sorry we’re a bit late,” said the pretty girl.

&nbs
p; The guy stood up then too. Everyone was smiling like people in a toothpaste advertisement. In other words, their teeth were smiling, but nothing else. Even I was smiling, and I didn’t know what the hell was going on.

  “This is Carl,” said Alicia. “Carl, Sam.”

  “Hello,” I said. We shook hands. He seemed OK, this Carl, although he looked like he might play in a band. He had long, dark, side-parted hair and a goatee.

  The girls stood and smiled at each other. They were waiting for me to say something, but as I didn’t know the pretty girl’s name, there wasn’t much I could say.

  “No use waiting for him,” said Alicia, and she rolled her eyes. “I’m Alicia.”

  “I’m Alex,” said the pretty girl. And we all sat down. Alex squeezed my knee under the table, I think to tell me that everything was going to be OK.

  I started getting nervous then. I suppose if I hadn’t been in the future, I’d have been nervous all the way down on the bus, thinking about Alex meeting Alicia for the first time. So in a way I’d saved myself half an hour of nerves by not knowing what was going on.

  “How was he?” said Alicia. She was looking at me, and I didn’t even know who he was, let alone how he was, so I sort of waggled my head, something between a nod and a shake. Everyone laughed.

  “What does that mean?” Alex asked.

  I shrugged.

  “As Sam seems to have gone temporarily mad,” said Alex, “I’ll answer. He was lovely. He didn’t want us to go out, though, which is why we’re five minutes late.”

  “He” must be Roof, I thought. We had left Roof somewhere. Was that right? Should we have done that? Nobody seemed to mind, so I had to believe that it was OK.

  “I don’t know how Sam’s mum manages bedtimes when she has both of them on her own,” said Alex.

  “No,” I said, and shook my head. “No” was pretty much the first word I’d said, and it seemed safe enough. You couldn’t go wrong with no. I started to feel cocky. “I couldn’t do it in a million years,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” said Alicia. “You’ve done it loads.” Bollocks. Wrong again.

  “Well, yeah, I know,” I said. “But…it’s hard, isn’t it?”

  “Not for you,” said Alex. “You’re really good at it. So shut up, or it’ll sound like you’re boasting.”

  I felt like boasting. I could do bedtimes for two kids on my own? Roof stayed with me sometimes?

  I shut up then, and listened to what the girls were saying. Carl hardly said a word anyway, what with being in a band and everything, so it looked like I was doing a spot of male bonding by keeping quiet with him. I listened to the girls talking about Roof, and about what they were studying. I’d met Alex on my course, so she did the same as me, whatever that was. Alicia was doing a part-time fashion course at Goldsmiths. She looked great. She looked happy and healthy, and for a moment I felt sad that I’d made her unhappy and unhealthy. I really liked Alex. I’d done well for myself there. She really was pretty, and she was friendly and funny too.

  Every now and again, I learned bits about my life. I learned these things.

  It sounded like I’d gone part-time at college too, so we shared Roof. Plus, I had some kind of job. Plus, I looked after Emily sometimes. What with work, Roof, Emily and college, I didn’t get out much.

  I’d given my skateboard away. Carl was a skater too, and Alicia told him that I’d been good at skating until I’d packed it in. I was sorry. I was sure I must be missing it.

  Roof was up at 5:15 that morning. Alex stayed in bed. So Alex must sleep at mine sometimes. I hoped we used at least three condoms every time we had sex.

  I was in a rush every single minute of every day, and this was my first evening out for ages. And the same went for Alicia, except she didn’t have to look after Emily. Alex seemed to be feeling a bit sorry for me. Maybe Alex only went out with me because she felt sorry for me, I didn’t know. I didn’t care either. I’d take what I could get. She was gorgeous.

  All of it made me feel tired. Things looked OK in this Chinese restaurant with these people, but it was a long way from where I was, way back in the present, to here. There was a lot of work to do, and arguments to have, and kids to take care of, and money to find from somewhere, and sleep to lose. I could do it, though. I could see that. I wouldn’t be sitting here now if I couldn’t do it, would I? I think that’s what Tony Hawk was trying to tell me all along.

 

 

  Nick Hornby, Slam

  (Series: # )

 

 

 

  Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net
Share this book with friends