Slam (10 page)

“Yes. Well. Thanks.”

“That's OK. We'd better be going,” I said. “See you later.”

I think he wanted to talk some more. But I just walked away.

 

Nothing much happened in the afternoon or evening. We all ate together, Alicia and her mum and dad and me, and then we all watched TV while Roof slept. I pretended I was interested in the programs, but actually I had no idea what I was looking at. I just sat there feeling homesick and sad and sorry for myself. I missed my old life. And even if I got whizzed back to my own time, my old life wouldn't be there for much longer. I'd turn on my mobile, and there'd be a text telling me that in a year's time I'd have a kid, and I'd be living with people I didn't really know and didn't like much. I wanted to be whizzed back further than that, to a time when I hadn't met Alicia and when I wasn't interested in having sex. If Tony Hawk let me be eleven again, I wouldn't mess it up a second time. I'd become a Christian or something, one of those people who never do anything. I used to think they were mad, but they're not, are they? They know what they're doing. They don't want to watch TV with someone else's mum and dad. They want to watch TV on their own, in their bedroom.

 

We went to bed at ten o'clock, but we didn't turn the light out then because Alicia had to feed Roof. When she'd finished, she asked me to change him.

“Change him? Me? Now?”

“Have you gone funny again?”

“No,” I said. “Sorry. I was, you know. Just checking I heard you right.”

Just as I was getting out of bed, Roof made a noise like yogurt going down a plughole.

“Bloody hell,” I said. “What was that?”

Alicia laughed, but I meant it.

“Good timing, young man,” she said.

After a while I realized what Alicia meant. She meant that the noise of yogurt going down the plughole was actually the sound Roof made when he was crapping. And now I was supposed to do something about it.

I picked him up and started to walk to the bathroom.

“Where are you going?”

I didn't know where I was going. Obviously.

“Just…” But I couldn't think of a good answer, so I left it at that.

“Are you sure you're all right?”

“Sure.”

But being sure I was all right didn't help me with where I was going. I stood there.

“Have we run out of nappies?”

Suddenly I noticed Alicia's old toy box at the end of the bed. When I was last in this room, it was still a toy box, full of old stuff she used to play with when she was a kid. Now it had like this plastic mattress on it, and on the floor beside it there was a bag full of nappies and a box full of those wet tissue things that my friend the black girl had been using in McDonald's.

Roof was half-asleep. His eyes were rolling around in his head like he was drunk. I undid the poppers on his all-in-one tracksuit, pulled up the legs and undid the Sellotape on the sides of the nappies, like I'd seen the girl do at lunchtime. And then…You probably don't want to know how to change a nappy. And even if you do, I'm probably not the person to teach you. The point is, I did it, without messing it up too much. I couldn't remember the last time I was so pleased with myself. Probably when I slept with Alicia for the first time. Which was funny, if you thought about it. First I was proud of myself for sleeping with her. And then I was proud of myself for doing something that happened all because I slept with her.

Maybe that was what TH was trying to do when he whizzed me into the future. Maybe he was trying to teach me how to change nappies. It seemed like the hard way of doing things to me. He could have just sent me to classes.

 

“You do love me, Sam, don't you?” Alicia said when Roof was back in his cot and I'd gone back to bed. I just lay there with my back to her, pretending to be asleep. I didn't know whether I loved her or not. How could I?

 

It took me a long, long time to get to sleep after that, but when I woke up in the morning, I was in my own bed. It didn't feel like my own bed anymore, though. Your own bed is usually somewhere you feel safe, but I didn't feel safe there anymore. I knew everything that was going to happen to me, and it felt like my life was over, however many years I managed to keep breathing. I was a hundred percent sure that Alicia was pregnant. And if it was my life that I'd seen, well, I didn't want to live it. I wanted my old life back, I wanted someone else's life. But I didn't want that one.

The summer before
all this happened, Mum and I went on holiday to Spain, and we spent a lot of time hanging out with this English family we met in a bar. They were called the Parrs, and they lived in Hastings, and they were all right. There was a kid called Jamie, who was six months older than me, and Jamie had a sister called Scarlett, who was twelve. And Mum liked Tina and Chris, the parents. They used to sit in this English bar, night after night, taking the piss out of English people who only went to English bars. I didn't get it, but they thought they were funny. A few weeks after we'd come back from holiday, Mum and I went down to Hastings on the train to see them. We played miniature golf on the seafront, and ate fish and chips, and skimmed stones. I liked Hastings. It had the funfairs and the arcades and all that, but it wasn't too tacky, and it had a little railway that went to the top of the cliffs. We never saw the Parrs again, though. We got a Christmas card from them, but Mum never got round to sending Christmas cards last year, so they sort of gave up on us after that.

 

And Hastings was the first place I thought of when I woke up that morning, the morning after I'd come back from the future. I was positive that Alicia was pregnant, and I knew I didn't want to be a father. So I had to move out of London and never come back, and Hastings was the only other place in the whole of England that I knew. We never go anywhere, apart from Spain, and I couldn't go abroad on my own, with no money and no credit card. So I had breakfast with my mum, and when she'd gone to work, I packed a bag and picked up my skateboard and went to live in Hastings.

 

I knew I was being a coward, but sometimes you have to be a coward, don't you? There's no point in being brave if you're just going to get destroyed. Say you walked round the corner and there are fifty al-Qaida there. Not even fifty. Five. Not even five. One, with like a machine gun, would be enough. You might not feel good about running for your life, but what are your choices? Well, I had walked around the corner, and there was an al-Qaida with a machine gun, except he was just a baby, and he didn't actually have a machine gun. But in my world a baby, even without a machine gun, is like a terrorist with a machine gun, if you think about it, because Roof was every bit as deadly to my chances of going to college to do art and design etc. as an al-Qaida operative. And actually, Alicia was another al-Qaida, plus also her mum and dad, plus also my mum, because when she found out, she would literally kill me dead. So that was five al-Qaida waiting round the corner. One would have been enough to send you running off to Hastings or wherever.

 

I had forty pounds that I'd been saving for a pair of Kalis Royals, but all skate stuff was going to have to wait until I was set up in Hastings with a job and a flat and all that. Forty pounds would get me to Hastings, and I reckoned I could find a bed-and-breakfast place to stay in, and then I wanted to get a job on the seafront doing something cool. There was this giant outdoor ten-pin bowling thing that I'd played on with Jamie Parr, and the guy who ran it was OK. He might give me a job, I thought. Or I could look after the boats on the boating lake. Or I could work in the arcade, giving people change, although that wouldn't be my top choice. There were loads of things I could do, anyway, and all of them were better than changing Roof's nappy and living with Alicia's mum and dad.

 

I went to Charing Cross on my Oyster card, so that was free, and then it cost me twelve quid from Charing Cross to Hastings, which left me with twenty-eight pounds plus a few coins I had in my pocket, including maybe three pound coins. This was the beauty of emigrating to Hastings rather than say Australia. I'd already dealt with all my travel expenses and I still had thirty-one pounds left. Also, I left home at about nine-thirty and I was there by lunchtime the same day.

 

I walked through the town to the seafront, which took about ten minutes, and bought some chips from one of the fish-and-chip shops near the miniature golf course. I suppose it made me a bit sad, watching the families playing golf, because that's what I'd been doing a year ago. I watched a kid of about my age playing with his mum and his younger brother, and you could tell he had no troubles. He was trying to get the ball up the slope at the eighth hole, and it kept rolling back to him, and his mum and his brother were laughing at him, and he threw his club down and sat on the wall, so in a way he did have troubles; in fact, there was a moment when he looked over to me, sitting on the bench eating my bag of chips, and you could see he was thinking, I wish I was him. Because I must have looked like I had no troubles. I wasn't in a sulk like him, and nobody from my family was laughing at me, and the sun was on my face. And then I didn't feel quite as sad, because all those things were true, and I had come to Hastings to escape my troubles, which meant that they were all back in London, and not here by the seaside. And as long as I didn't turn on my mobile, which would be full of bad messages, bad news, my troubles would stay in London.

“Oi!” I shouted at the kid. “Will you watch my stuff?”

I pointed at the skateboard and my bag, and he nodded. And then I got up, walked across the pebbles down to the sea and threw my mobile phone as far into the water as I could. Easy. Everything gone. I went back to the bench and spent a happy thirty minutes on my deck.

 

There was nobody playing on the giant ten-pin bowling game, and the bloke who ran it was sitting in his little booth, smoking and reading the paper.

“Hello,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows, or at least I think he did. That was his way of saying hello back. He didn't look up from the paper.

“Do you remember me?”

“No.”

Of course he wouldn't remember me. Stupid. I was nervous, so I wasn't being very sharp.

“Do you need any help?”

“What does it look like?”

“Yeah, but it gets busy, though, doesn't it? I played here last year and there was a queue.”

“And then what would you do? If there was a queue? People just stand there. It's no skin off of my nose. I don't need no riot police.”

“No, no, I wasn't thinking of the queue. I was thinking, you know, you might have been looking for someone to put the skittles back up and all that.”

“Listen. There isn't really a job for me here, let alone anyone else. If you want to put skittles back up, you're welcome, but I wouldn't be paying you for it.”

“Oh. No. I'm looking for work. A job. Money.”

“Then you've come to the wrong place.”

“Do you know anyone else?”

“No, I meant, the wrong town. Look.”

He waved his hand down the seafront, still without looking up from his paper. There was the miserable kid playing miniature golf, nobody on the boating lake, nobody on the trampolines, four or five families waiting for the miniature railway, a couple of old ladies sipping tea at the café.

“And the weather's good today. When it rains, it all calms down a bit.” And he laughed. Not a big laugh, just a “Ha!”

I stood there for a moment. I knew I wasn't going to get a job in Hastings doing graphic design or whatever. I wasn't aiming too high. But I did think I'd be able to get some work for the summer from one of those places. Nothing fancy, just forty quid in cash at the end of the day, sort of thing. I thought back to last year, to the day we spent with the Parrs eating ice creams and playing on the giant ten-pin bowling game. There was nobody on the seafront then either. I'd somehow managed to forget about that. Or maybe I had remembered, but I didn't see what it had to do with anything. I just thought that it would be a boring job, waiting for people to come. It didn't really occur to me that there wouldn't be a job at all.

 

I asked at a couple of the other places. I went to the fairground, and a couple of chip shops, and even at the little railway that went up the cliff, but there was nothing at any of them, and most of the people there made the same sort of joke.

“I was wondering how I was going to cope today,” said the man at the cliff railway. He was leaning on the counter, looking at a fishing-rod catalogue. He had no customers.

“I've got a good job for you,” said the guy on the trampolines. “Go and round up some children. You might have to go to Brighton. Or London.” He was playing some card game on his mobile phone. He had no customers either.

“Fuck off,” said the man who ran the fruit machines in the arcade. That wasn't really a joke, though.

 

I had chips for tea, and then I started looking for somewhere to stay. What I was really looking for was a place to live, seeing as I couldn't go home ever again, but I tried not to look at it that way. There were loads of little bed-and-breakfast places if you walked far enough out of the city centre, and I chose the grottiest-looking one, because I was pretty sure that was all I'd be able to afford.

It smelt of fish inside. There are lots of parts of Hastings that smell of fish, and most of the time you don't mind. Even the smell of rotting fish down by the tall black fishermen's huts is OK, I think, because you understand that it has to be that way. If there are fishing boats, there are going to be rotting fish, and fishing boats are all right, so you can put up with anything that comes with them. But the smell of fish inside the Sunnyview B&B was different. It was the sort of fish smell you get inside some old people's houses, where it seems as though fish have got into the carpets and the curtains and their clothes. The rotting-fish smell out by the fishermen's huts is a sort of healthy smell, even though the fish aren't very healthy, obviously, otherwise they wouldn't be rotting. But when it's soaked into curtains, it doesn't seem healthy at all. You feel like putting the neck of your T-shirt over your mouth, like you do when someone breaks out a killer fart, and breathing that way.

There was a bell on the reception desk, so I pinged it, but nobody came for a while. I watched one of the ancient guests walk down the hallway towards the door on one of those frame things.

“Don't just stand there, young lady. Open the door for me.”

I looked around, but there was no one else behind me. He was talking to me, and even if he'd called me “young man,” he'd have been rude. How was I to know he wanted the door opened? But he hadn't called me “young man,” he'd called me “young lady”—because of my hair, I suppose, seeing as I don't wear a skirt or spend my whole life texting people.

I opened the door for him and he just kind of grunted and walked past me. He couldn't go much further, though, because there were like twenty steps down from the front door to the street.

“How am I going to get down there?” he said angrily. He looked at me as if I'd built the steps myself, in the last two hours, just to keep him away from the public library or the chemist or the betting shop or wherever it was he wanted to go.

I shrugged. He was pissing me off. “How did you get in?”

“My daughter!” he shouted, like if there was one fact in the world everyone knew, even more than they knew that David Beckham is the capital of France or whatever, it was that this old geezer's daughter shoved him up some steps on his frame into a bed-and-breakfast.

“Shall I go and get her?”

“She's not here, is she? Good God. What do they teach you in schools now? Not common sense, that's for sure.”

I wasn't going to offer to help him. First of all, it looked like it would take about two hours. And second of all, he was a miserable old bastard and I didn't see why I should put myself out.

“Aren't you going to help me, then?”

“OK.”

“Yes. I should think so. It says something about young people today that I even had to ask.”

I know what some of you would say. You'd say, Sam's too nice! This old bloke was rude to him and he still agreed to get him down the steps! But I know what the rest of you would say too. The rest of you would say, If he was halfway decent, he wouldn't even be in Hastings! He'd be back in London, looking after his pregnant girlfriend! Or ex-girlfriend! So the rude old guy was sort of God's punishment! And to tell you the truth, I'd agree with this last lot. I didn't want to be messing around with pensioners. But it was still better than dealing with everything that would be going on back home. I suddenly thought of the mobile at the bottom of the sea, bleeping away with its messages, and the fish all freaking out.

It didn't take two hours to get him down onto the street, but it did take about fifteen minutes, and fifteen minutes can seem like two hours if you've got your hands buried deep in some old guy's armpits. He moved the frame down step by step while I stopped him from falling forwards or backwards. The forwards bit was the hardest to stop, and the scariest to think about. Falling backwards, he'd have only hurt his bum, if anything, although more likely he would have just squashed me. It was a long way down, though, and there were a lot of steps, and if he'd gone down that way, I reckon things would have just fallen off him, legs and arms and ears, because they didn't seem very firmly connected to his body.

Every time he lurched forwards, he shouted, “That's it! I'm going! You've killed me! Thanks for nothing!” You'd think he'd have realized that if he could spit all that out, then he wasn't going anywhere. Anyway, we got to the bottom, and he started to shuffle himself down the hill towards town, but then he stopped and turned.

“I'll be about half an hour,” he said. That was obviously a lie, because in half an hour he'd have moved about seven paving stones, but that wasn't the point. The point was that he was expecting me to wait for him.

“I won't be here in half an hour,” I said.

“You do as you're told.”

“Nah,” I said. “You're too rude.”

I don't normally talk back, but you have to make an exception for people like that. And I wasn't at school anymore, or even at home, and if I was going to make a life for myself in Hastings, then I had to talk back, otherwise I'd just be standing outside bed-and-breakfasts for the rest of my life waiting for old people.