Slam (13 page)

He was right, of course. But he was being right in a really, really annoying way. He was presuming that I was telling lies about something because he's a bad-tempered bastard who always thinks the worst of everyone.

“So what do you think that is, Dave?” said Consuela.

“I dunno. Ask him.”

“I'm asking you.”

“What's the point of asking me? I don't know what he's been up to.”

“We're asking you because these sessions give everyone a chance for saying their minds,” said Consuela.

“Oh, I get it,” said Dad. “We've all decided it's all my fault already.”

“When did she say that?” said Mum. “You see? This is what he's like. You can't talk to him. No wonder Sam ran off.”

“So it is my fault,” said Dad.

“Can I say something?” I said. “Is that allowed?”

Everyone shut up and looked guilty. All this was supposed to be about me, and nobody was paying me any attention. The only problem was I didn't really have anything useful to say. The only thing worth saying was that Alicia was pregnant, and this wasn't the time or the place.

“Oh, never mind,” I said. “What's the point?” And then I folded my arms and looked at my shoes, like I was never going to speak again.

“Is that your feeling?” said Consuela. “That there's no point in saying anything?”

“Yes,” I said.

“He doesn't feel like that at home,” said Mum. “Just here.”

“Except that his feelings about your divorce and so on are a bit surprising to you. So maybe he doesn't talk so much at home than you think.”

“How does someone Spanish end up working for the council, anyway?” said my dad. If he'd been listening to what she'd actually been saying, instead of the mistakes in her English, he could have had a go at Mum back. Consuela had just pointed out that Mum didn't seem to know much about me. But that's Dad all over. Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if I'd gone off to Barnet to live with Dad instead of Mum. Would I have ended up hating Spanish people like him? I probably wouldn't have been a skater, because there isn't as much concrete where he lives. And he wouldn't have been interested in me drawing all the time. So I probably would have been worse off. On the other hand, I'd never have met Alicia. Not meeting Alicia would have been good. Not meeting Alicia beat everything.

“Is a problem for you that I'm Spanish?”

“No, no,” said my dad. “I was just wondering.”

“I marry-ed an Englishman a long time ago. I have been living here since many, many years.”

Dad made a face at me without her noticing, and I nearly laughed. It was a brilliant face, really, because it was a face that said, Well, why is her English so bloody useless then? And that's a hard face to make.

“But please. Sam has many problems, it sounds. We need to talk about them in the time we have.”

Many, many problems.

“Sam, also you said school is a problem.”

“Yeah.”

“Can you explain?”

“Not really.” And I stared at my shoes again. It was going to be much easier than I thought, wasting this hour.

 

Afterwards, the three of us had to go out and eat and talk some more. We went for a curry, and when they'd brought the papadums, my mum started up again.

“Did you find that helpful?”

“Yeah,” I said. And that was true, sort of. If there had been any problems with school or Mum and Dad splitting up, that would have been exactly the right sort of place to talk about it all. The trouble was, I didn't have any problems like that, but I couldn't blame Consuela for that, and neither could anyone else.

“What about Alicia?” said my mum.

“Who's Alicia?” said my dad.

“This girl Sam was seeing. She was pretty much your first serious girlfriend, I'd say. Isn't that right?”

“S'pose.”

“But you're not with her now?” Dad asked.

“Nah.”

“Why not?”

“Dunno. Just…”

“So there's nothing in the timing?” said Mum.

“What timing?”

“First you split up with Alicia and then you take off to Hastings.”

“Nah.”

“Really?”

“Well, you know.”

“Ah! Finally!” said my dad. And then he had a go at my mum again. “See, why didn't you bring that up in there?”

“He hasn't said it was anything to do with anything.”

“He did! He just said, ‘Well, you know'! That's as close as he ever comes to saying anything! In Sam language, what he just said was, That girl really screwed me up and I couldn't handle it and I cleared off.”

“Is that what you just said?” my mum asked. “Is that what ‘Well, you know' means in Sam language?”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

I didn't feel like I was lying. At least we were talking about the person who mattered, as opposed to things that didn't matter, like school and their divorce. So I felt a kind of relief. And she had screwed me up, Alicia, sort of, in a way. And I definitely couldn't handle it.

“What good was running off going to do you?” said my dad. Which was a fair question, really.

“I didn't want to live in London anymore.”

“So you went to Hastings for good?” said my mum.

“Well. Not really. 'Cos I came back. But yeah, I thought I was going for good.”

“You can't leave town every time someone dumps you,” said my dad. “You've got a lifetime of this stuff. You'd be living in a lot of different towns.”

“I feel bad because I introduced them,” said Mum. “I didn't think it would cause all this trouble.”

“But how did you think it was going to help?” said Dad. “Moving to Hastings?”

“I knew I wouldn't see her down there.”

“Is she local, then?”

“Where do you think she's from? New York? When do kids ever go out with someone who isn't local?” said Mum.

“I can't make head or tail of this,” said my dad. “I'd understand if you'd knocked her up or something. But—”

“Oh, that's lovely,” said Mum. “That teaches him responsibility, doesn't it?”

“I didn't say it would be the right thing, did I? I just said I'd understand. Like, that would be some kind of explanation.”

He was right again. It would be some kind of explanation. Maybe the best explanation.

“People do strange things when they've had their hearts broken. But you wouldn't know about that.”

“Oh, here we go again.”

“You weren't dying of a broken heart when we split up, were you? You didn't disappear off anywhere. Apart from to your girlfriend's.”

And they were off again.

Sometimes, listening to my mum and dad talking was like being a spectator in a stadium when people are running the ten thousand meters in the Olympics. They go round and round and round and round, and there's one bit each lap where they pass right in front of you, and you're really close to them. But then they disappear off round the bend and they're gone. When Dad started talking about me knocking Alicia up, it was like he'd jumped the perimeter fence and was coming straight for me. But then he got distracted and rejoined the race.

 

I went back to school the next day, but I didn't speak to anyone, didn't listen to anything, didn't pick up a pen the whole day. I just sat there, with things churning over and over in my head and in my stomach. Some things I thought were

• I'm going back to Hastings.
  
• It didn't make any difference that I'd been to Hastings before. I could go anywhere. Any seaside town.
  
• What is a good name for a baby? (And then a lot of baby names, like Bucky, Sandro, Rune, Pierre-Luc. I just basically went through a list of cool skaters in my head.) One thing I knew, and one thing I'd learned from the future: Roof was a rubbish name. Nothing would ever change my mind about that. You know how in
  The Terminator
  they're trying to protect the unborn baby who will one day go on to save the world? Well, my mission was to prevent my unborn baby from being called Roof.
  
• Will Alicia's mum and dad actually attempt to attack me? Physically? It wasn't only my fault.
  
• My mum. I didn't really have any thoughts or questions, so much. I just kept thinking of what she'd look like when I told her. When she said that thing about her heart breaking the night before, it made me sad, because I knew that I was going to break her heart too. That meant the whole of our family would have broken her heart.
  
• Did I have to go and watch the baby being born, because I was the dad? I didn't want to. I'd seen a baby being born on TV and it was terrible. Would Alicia make those noises? Could I ask her not to?
  
• What was I going to do to make some money? Would all our parents pay for everything?
  
• And when I got whizzed into the future, was that really the future? Was I going to live with Alicia at her mum and dad's house? Was I going to share a bed with her?
  

None of it went anywhere, but I couldn't get rid of it either. It just stayed in there. I was like one of those guys who work at the funfairs—I hopped off one teacup, jumped onto the next one, spun that around and made people (in other words, me) frightened, and moved on. At lunchtime I went up to the chip shop with some people from my class, but I didn't eat anything. I couldn't. It felt like I'd never eat anything again. Or not until Pierre-Luc was born, and Alicia had stopped making that noise.

 

As I walked out of school at the end of the day, I could see Alicia waiting for me on the other side of the road. I started to feel annoyed that she didn't trust me, but seeing as I'd disappeared on her once, you could hardly blame her. And anyway, she was pleased to see me, and she smiled, and I remembered why we'd gone out in the first place. All that seemed like a long time ago now, though. She looked older, for a start. Older and paler. She was pretty white.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello. Are you OK?”

“Not really,” she said. “I spent the morning throwing up, and I'm scared stiff.”

“Do you want to go and get something to drink first? Starbucks or somewhere?”

“I'd probably throw up again. I could drink some water. Water might be OK.”

You had to say that it was worse for her than it was for me. I was feeling scared sick, and so was she. I couldn't really pretend I was more scared than she was. In fact, seeing as I was even more afraid of telling my mum than of telling her mum and dad, then she was probably feeling the worst about what we were about to do. And on top of all that, she had baby sickness too. I could have gone to Starbucks and managed a caramel Frappuccino, with cream on top, but I could see that if she tried to drink one of those, it would come up again pretty quickly. When I thought about that, I didn't want one either.

We took the bus to hers, and went straight up to her room, because nobody else was around yet. She sat in the armchair, and I ended up sitting between her feet. I hadn't been in her room since the future, and in the future it was different. (That sounds weird, doesn't it? It should be, “In the future things
will be
different,” shouldn't it? But if I say that, it means what I saw was definitely the future, and I'm not a hundred percent about that. So I'm going to stick with talking about the future like it was the past.) Anyway, the
Donnie Darko
poster that wasn't there in the future was back, not that it had ever been away yet. I was pleased to see it.

“How do you know they're coming straight home?” I said.

“I asked them to. They know I haven't been happy, and I said I wanted to talk to them.”

She put on some sad, slow music that made my watch seem to stop. It was a woman singing about somebody who had left her and she was remembering all these things about him like his smell and his shoes and what he had in his jacket pockets if you put your hand in there. There wasn't anything she didn't remember, it sounded like, and the song lasted forever.

“Do you like this?” she said. “I've been playing it a lot.”

“It's all right,” I said. “Bit slow.”

“It's supposed to be slow. It's a slow song.”

And we went quiet again, and I started to think about living in this room with her and a baby, listening to slow, sad music. It wouldn't be so bad. There were worse things. I wouldn't be in here all the time, would I?

We heard the door slam underneath us, and I stood up.

“We'll stay up here until they're both home,” said Alicia. “Otherwise I know what will happen. My mum will make us talk before my dad's home, and then we'll have to go through it all twice.”

My heart was banging away so hard that if I'd lifted up my T-shirt and had a look down the front, I'd probably have been able to see my chest moving, like there was a little man trapped in there.

“What are you doing?” said Alicia.

What I was doing was, I was looking down my T-shirt to see if there was a little man trapped down there. I didn't really know what I was doing anymore.

“Nothing,” I said.

“This is going to be hard,” she said, as if me looking down my T-shirt was going to make it harder.

“I won't look down there when we're telling them,” I said, and she laughed. It was nice to hear.

“Alicia?” her mum shouted.

“Ignore it,” Alicia whispered, as if I was going to come out of her bedroom and say something.

“Alicia? Are you up there?”

“She came in with someone about half an hour ago,” her dad shouted. He'd been in all the time, having a bath or reading in his bedroom or something.

She walked out of her room and I followed her.

“We're here,” she said.

“Who's we?” said her mum, all cheerful. And then, not so cheerful, as she saw us coming down the stairs, “Oh. Sam. Hello.”