Slam (15 page)

And her dad looked at her, and then he smiled, sort of, and so did my mum, and it was all over.

 

The first thing Mum said when they'd all gone was, “Do you think it's just bad luck? Or are we stupid?”

I was conceived because my mum and dad didn't use contraception. So what I wanted to say was, You were stupid, and I was unlucky. But I thought it was probably best not to. And anyway, I couldn't really tell whether I'd been stupid or not. Probably I had. One thing it doesn't say on the side of a condom packet is
WARNING
!
YOU MUST HAVE AN IQ OF A BILLION TO PUT THIS ON PROPERLY
!

“Bit of both, I expect,” I said.

“It doesn't have to ruin your life,” she said.

“I ruined yours.”

“Temporarily.”

“Yeah. When I'm your age, everything will be OK.”

“Ish.”

“And then my baby will have a baby.”

“And I'll be a great-grandmother, age forty-eight.”

We were sort of being jokey with each other, but we weren't happy-jokey. We were both staring at the ceiling trying not to cry.

“Do you think she'll change her mind about having it?”

“I dunno,” I said. “I don't think so.”

“You're not leaving school,” she said.

“I don't want to. Anyway, she's not having the baby until November or something. I can do my GCSEs at least.”

“Then what?”

“I don't know.”

I hadn't spent an awful lot of time thinking about what I was going to do with my life. I'd thought about college, and that was about it. And Alicia hadn't ever thought about her future, as far as I knew. Maybe that was the secret. Maybe people who had it all worked out…maybe they never got pregnant, or made anyone pregnant. Perhaps none of us, Mum and Dad and Alicia and I, had ever wanted the future badly enough. If Tony Blair knew that he wanted to be prime minister when he was my age, then I'll bet he was careful with his condoms.

“Your dad was right, wasn't he?”

“Yeah,” I said. I knew what she was talking about. She was talking about what had happened at Consuela's.

“That's why you went to Hastings?”

“Yeah. I was going to move there and never come back.”

“You did the right thing in the end, anyway.”

“I suppose.”

“Do you want me to tell him?”

“My dad? Would you?”

“Yeah. You owe me, though.”

“OK.”

I didn't mind owing her for that. There was no chance I'd ever be able to pay her back for everything else, so that was just a bit extra on top that she wouldn't even remember.

Here are some
things that happened in the next few weeks.

 

My mum told my dad, and he laughed. Really. OK, that wasn't the first thing he did. He called me a few names first, but you could tell he was doing it because he knew he was supposed to. And then he laughed, and then he said, “Bloody hell, my grandchild's going to be able to watch me playing Sunday League. Had you thought of that?” And I was going to say, “Yeah, that was the first thing me and Alicia said to each other,” but seeing as this was my dad, he'd probably have thought we were being serious. “I'm really going to look after myself now,” he said. “Forget about seeing me play. He can play with me. Two of our players are fifty. And we've got this really good fifteen-year-old keeper. So if your kid's any good, he could be playing alongside me. I'll only be forty-nine when he's fifteen. He might have to move to Barnet, though. And drink in the Queen's Head.” It was all stupid, but it was better than a bollocking. And then he said that he'd help us out if we needed help.

 

They found out at school. I was in the toilets, and this kid came up and asked me whether it was true, and I just made this stupid face while I tried to work out what to say, and then I said, “I dunno.”

And he said, “Well, you should find out, man, because that's what she's telling people. My mate goes out with someone from her school, and everyone knows there.”

And when I asked her about telling people, she said she'd told one person, and that person was dead as of that minute. Anyway, once this kid knew, everyone knew. So I went home and told Mum, and she called up the school, and we went in to talk to them. If I was asked to write down one word which described the reactions I got from the head and the teachers, that word would be “interested.” Or maybe “excited.” Nobody had a go at me. Maybe they thought that wasn't their job. Anyway, it turned out that the school had just introduced a strategy for teen pregnancies, but they had never had a chance to use it before, so they were pleased, really. Their strategy was to tell me that I could still come to school if I wanted, and to ask me whether we had enough money. And then to ask me to fill out a form to tell them whether I was happy with their strategy.

 

Alicia and I went to hospital for a scan, which is where you look at the baby on an X-ray machine and they tell you everything is normal, if you're lucky. They told us everything was normal. And also they asked whether we wanted to know the sex of the baby, and I said no and she said yes, and then I said I didn't care either way, really, and they told us it was a boy. And I wasn't really surprised.

 

Alicia and I kissed on the way back from the scan.

 

I suppose this last bit is headline news, really. I mean, you could say that everything was headline news, in a way. A year ago, if you'd told me that the teachers at school weren't too bothered about me making someone pregnant, I'd have said that there were about ten pieces of headline news in that one sentence. I'd have said it's one of those days when they have to make the news longer, and the program on afterwards is late, and they say, “And now, a little later than advertised…” But none of it seemed such a big deal now. Alicia and I kissing, though, that was something new. Or rather, it was new again, because there had been a time when it was old. (And before that, a time when it was new for the first time.) You know what I mean, anyway. It was a new development. And a good one too. If you were going to have a baby with someone, then it was better to be on kissing terms with them, on the whole.

It was different with Alicia now. It changed when she stuck up for me and my mum at our house. I could see that she wasn't just an evil girl who wanted to destroy my life. I hadn't even realized that I'd been thinking of her that way until she told her dad to back off, but a part of me must have been, because it was like she came out of a shadow, and I was like, She's not terrible! It was my fault just as much as it was hers! Probably more my fault! (A long time later, someone told me about something called a morning-after pill, which you can get from your doctor if you're worried that for example your condom might have come off. So if I'd owned up that night, the night that something half-happened and then half-happened again, none of this would have happened. So if you look at it that way, it was 150% my fault and maybe 20% hers.) And also, she was still very pretty. And also, her looking so ill made me want to look after her better. And also, everything was a bit of a drama, and I couldn't imagine spending any time with people who weren't on the stage with me.

And then when we came out of the hospital after the scan, she just put her hand in mine, and I was glad. It wasn't that I was in love with her or anything. But it's a weird thing, seeing your kid inside someone, and it needed some kind of, I don't know, celebration or something. And there aren't many ways you can celebrate when you're walking down a street near a hospital, so a bit of hand-holding was about as close as we could get to making sure the moment was something special.

“You OK?” she said.

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

“Is it all right if I do this?”

“What?”

And she squeezed my hand, to let me know what the what was.

“Oh. Yeah.”

And I squeezed her hand back. I'd never got back together with anyone before. Whenever I'd split up with anyone, I'd stayed split up, and I'd never really wanted to see them again. There was one couple at school who were always splitting up and getting back together, and I'd never understood it, but I could see it now. It was like coming back to your house when you'd been on holiday. Not that anything had been much of a holiday since we were last together. I'd been to a seaside town, but I hadn't had a lot of fun there.

“You got sick of me, didn't you?” she said.

“Didn't you get sick of me too?”

“Yeah. I suppose. A bit. We saw each other too much. Didn't see anyone else. I don't mean, you know, boys. Or girls. Just friends.”

“Yeah. Well, I know what. Let's have a baby. That's a good way of, you know, seeing less of each other,” I said.

She laughed.

“That's what my mum and dad said. I mean, not exactly that. But when they were trying to talk me into having an abortion, they said, ‘You'll have to see Sam for the rest of your life. If he wants to stay in touch with his kid.' I hadn't thought of that. If you are a proper father, I'll know you forever.”

“Yeah.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“I dunno.” And after I'd said it, I did know. “Actually, I like it. I like the idea of it.”

“Why?”

“I dunno.” And after I'd said it, I did know. Maybe I should never say anything, I thought. I should just listen to the questions and answer them on text or e-mail when I got home. “Well. It's because I've never thought of the future that much before. And I like knowing something about it. I don't know if I like the reason I'll know you forever. The baby and all that. But even if we're only friends—”

“Do you think you might want to be more than friends?” And that's when I stopped and kissed her, and she kissed me back, and she cried a bit.

So on that day, two things happened that made what I'd seen that night when I got whizzed into the future more likely. We found out she was having a boy. And we got back together.

I wasn't stupid. The chances of staying together weren't that good, really. We were a long way from being grown-ups. My mum split from Dad when she was twenty-five, which means they were together for ten years or so, and I'd never managed ten months. Maybe not even ten weeks. What it felt like was, there was this big hump in the road coming up, i.e. the baby. And we needed a bit of a push to get us over that hump. And maybe getting back together would do it. The thing about humps in the road, though, is that you go up and then you come down again, and you can coast down the other side. Did I say I wasn't stupid? Ha! What I didn't know then was that there wasn't another side. You just have to keep pushing forever. Or until you run out of steam.

 

We saw each other a lot, after the scan. We did homework round each other's houses, or watched TV with my mum or her mum and dad. But we never disappeared off upstairs to have any sex. When we went out before, we had sex a lot. Alicia didn't feel like it. I felt like it sometimes, but I was serious about never having sex again, so even though some parts of me were interested, my head wasn't. Sex was bad news. Alicia said that you couldn't get pregnant while you were pregnant, which is why people are never three or four months older than their brothers or sisters, which I suppose I knew, really, if I'd thought about it. But she wasn't telling me that because she was trying to persuade me. She just read it to me out of a book. She was reading a lot of books about it all.

She wanted to find out more about…Well, about everything, more or less. There wasn't much we knew about anything. So Alicia's mum arranged for us to go to classes called NCT classes, which stands for Something Childbirth Something. Alicia's mum said she'd found it very useful when she was pregnant. They were supposed to teach you how to breathe and what to take to the hospital and how to tell when you're actually having a baby and all that.

We met outside the place, which was one of those big old houses in Highbury New Park. I got there early because Alicia said I had to be there before her, because she didn't want to stand there on her own, but I didn't know when she was going to be there, so I got there forty-five minutes early to be on the safe side. I played the Tetris game that was on my new mobile phone until people started arriving, and then I watched them.

They were different from us. They all came in cars, and every single person was older than my mum. Or at least, they looked older, anyway. They didn't do themselves any favors with the way they dressed. Some of the men had suits on, I suppose because they had come after work, but the ones that didn't wore old combat trousers with cord jackets. The women all wore big hairy jumpers and puffa jackets. Lots of them had grey hair. They looked at me as if they thought I was going to sell them crack, or mug them. I was the one with the mobile phone. They didn't look worth mugging to me.

“I'm not going in there,” I said to Alicia when she turned up. You could see she was pregnant now, and she moved much more slowly than she used to. She'd still have beaten any of the other women in a race, though.

“Why not?”

“It's like a school staff room in there,” I said.

And then the moment I said that, one of the teachers from school turned up with her husband. She'd never taught me for anything, and I wasn't even sure what subject she was. I hadn't seen her around for ages. Languages, I thought. But I recognized her, and she recognized me, and I think she must have heard about me, because she looked surprised and then not surprised, like she suddenly remembered.

“Hello. Is it Dean?” she said.

“No,” I said. And I didn't say anything else.

“Oh,” she said, and walked through the gate.

“Who was that?” said Alicia.

“Teacher from school,” I said.

“Oh, Christ,” said Alicia. “We don't have to go in. We could try somewhere else.”

“No, you're all right,” I said. “Let's see how it goes.”

We walked through the front door and up the stairs, and then into this big room with a carpet and loads of beanbags. Nobody was talking much, but when we turned up, they all went dead quiet. We didn't say anything either. We sat down on the floor and looked at the walls.

After a while a woman walked in. She was small and a bit fat and she had loads and loads of hair, so she looked like one of those little dogs that people put coats on. She noticed us straightaway.

“Hello,” she said. “Who are you with?”

“Her,” I said, and pointed at Alicia.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh. Sorry. I thought you'd come…Anyway. That's great. Nice to see you.”

I blushed and didn't say anything. I wanted to die.

“We might as well all introduce ourselves,” she said. “I'm Theresa. Terry.” And then she pointed at me, and I nearly but not quite said “Sam.” It probably sounded like “Er.” Or maybe “Um.” Alicia was next to get the pointed finger, and she took the piss, and talked like she was on
Balamory
or something.

“Hello, everyone. I'm Alicia,” she said, in a singsong voice. Nobody laughed. It seemed to me that we needed a lot of classes about other things before we needed pregnancy classes. We needed a class about how to behave when you went to a pregnancy class, for a start. Neither of us had ever sat in a room full of a load of adults we didn't know. Even walking into the room and sitting down felt weird. What were you supposed to do when everyone went quiet and stared at you?

When everyone had said their names, Terry divided us up into groups, boys and girls. Men and women, whatever. We were given a big piece of cardboard, and we were told to talk about what we expected from fatherhood, and someone was supposed to write the things we said down with a marker pen.

“OK,” said one of the men in a suit. And then he held the marker pen out to me. “Do you want to do the honors?”

He was probably only trying to be nice, but I wasn't having that. I'm not the best speller in the world, I wasn't having them all laughing at me.

I shook my head, and looked at the wall again. There was a poster of a naked pregnant woman in the place I was staring at, so then I had to look at another bit of wall, otherwise they all would have thought that I was staring at her boobs, and I wasn't.

“So. What do we expect from fatherhood? I'm Giles, by the way,” said the man in the suit. I recognized him then. It was the man I met when I was out on my walk with Roof, when I got whizzed into the future. He looked different with a suit on. I felt a bit sad for him. Here, he was all excited and happy. Judging from the state of him when I met him, it was all going to go wrong. I looked over at the women and tried to guess which one was his wife. There was one who seemed nervous and neurotic. She was talking a lot and chewing her hair. I decided it was her.