Slam (19 page)

Alicia was five months pregnant when it was time to take our GCSEs, and seven months pregnant when we got our results. Hers were terrible, really, and mine were OK, and none of it mattered much to us either way by then. But I still had to listen to Alicia's mum going on about how badly everything had affected her, and how unfair it was that the boys just float through everything as if it wasn't happening. I didn't bother telling her that when I first met Alicia, she told me she wanted to be a model. That wasn't what her mum and dad wanted to hear. That wasn't the picture of her they wanted to see.

So we spent the summer working out what we were going to do, and waiting. The working out what we were going to do took about ten minutes. I enrolled in a sixth-form college, and Alicia decided to take the year out, and go back to studying when the baby was a year old. The waiting, though…. That took up the entire two months. We couldn't do anything about it.

I was skating
down at The Bowl on my own, and suddenly my mum appeared. She was all out of breath, but that didn't stop her from yelling at me for not having my mobile switched on.

“It is switched on,” I said.

“So why don't you answer it?”

“It's in my jacket pocket.”

I pointed at my jacket, which was on the stone bench right by The Bowl.

“What's the use of that?”

“I was going to have a look at it in a minute,” I said.

“That's a fat lot of use when you've got a pregnant girlfriend,” she said.

We were both of us wasting time arguing about how often I should look at my mobile, except only Mum knew we were wasting time, because she had information which she hadn't yet passed on.

“What are you doing here, anyway?”

I must have known why she'd run from the house all the way down to The Bowl, but for some reason I was blocking it out. Actually, we can all guess the reason. I was scared to death.

“Alicia's in labor!” Mum shouted, as if I'd not been letting her tell me for the previous two minutes. “You've got to run!”

“Right,” I said. “Right. OK.”

I picked up my board and I sort of started running, except I was running on the spot. It was like I was revving up my engine. The thing was, I didn't know where to run.

“Where shall I run?”

“Alicia's house. Quick.”

I can remember feeling a bit sick when she said I had to run to Alicia's. I'd been having these little daydreams and nightmares about the birth in those last four weeks. My nightmare was that Alicia's mum and dad weren't around when she went into labor, and she'd have the baby on a bus or in a minicab, and I'd be with her, not knowing what to do. My daydream was that I was out somewhere, and I got a message to say that Alicia had had the baby, and they were both safe and well, and I'd missed the whole thing. So when Mum told me I had to run to Alicia's, I knew that I hadn't missed the whole thing, and there was still a chance that the baby would be born on the top deck of the number 43.

As I ran past Mum, she grabbed me and kissed me on the cheek.

“Good luck, sweetheart. Don't be scared. It's an amazing thing.”

 

I can remember what I was thinking when I was pelting along Essex Road towards Alicia's house. I was thinking, I hope I don't get too sweaty. I didn't want to be stinky while I was doing whatever it was I had to do. And then I was thinking, I hope I don't get too thirsty. Because even though we had a bottle of water in the emergency bag we'd packed to take to the hospital, I couldn't start chugging out of that, could I? That was Alicia's water. And I couldn't ask the nurses for a glass of water, because they were supposed to be looking after Alicia, not me. And I couldn't sneak off to the toilets and stick my mouth under the tap, because Roof would almost certainly choose those five minutes to be born. So you could say that I was worrying about me, not about Alicia and the baby, except the reason I was worrying about me was that I knew I wasn't supposed to worry about me.

 

Alicia's mum answered the door. Andrea. Andrea answered the door.

“She's in the bath,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Right.” And I walked past her and sat down in the kitchen. I mean, I didn't sit down like I was making myself at home. I was nervous, so I just sat sideways on one of the kitchen chairs and started drumming my foot on the floor. But Alicia's mum still looked at me as if I'd gone mad.

“You don't want to see her?” she said.

“Yeah. But she's in the bath,” I said.

Andrea started laughing.

“You're allowed to go in,” she said.

“Really?”

“Oh, my God,” she said. “The father of my daughter's baby has never seen her naked.”

I blushed. I was pretty sure I'd seen all of her. I just hadn't seen it all at once.

“You're about to see an awful lot,” she said. “I really wouldn't worry about seeing her in the bath.”

I stood up. I still wasn't sure.

“Do you want me to come with you?”

I shook my head and went upstairs. Even then I was hoping the bathroom door might be locked.

 

Alicia and I still hadn't had sex since we'd got back together. So over the last few months I'd sort of lost touch with what she looked like under her baggy T-shirts and her brother's jumpers, if you know what I mean. I couldn't believe it. She just wasn't the same person. Her stomach looked like she had a two-year-old in there, and her breasts were about five times the size they'd been the last time I'd seen them. Just about every part of her looked like it was going to burst.

“Eight minutes,” she said. Her voice was all funny too. It sounded deeper and older. In fact, she suddenly looked like she was about thirty, and I felt as though I were seven. We were going in opposite age directions fast. I didn't know what the eight-minutes bit was all about, so I ignored it.

“Will you time them now?”

She nodded at her watch. I didn't know what to do with it.

We had been to pregnancy classes, although you'd never have thought it to look at me. After the disaster in Highbury New Park, where all our classmates were teachers or grey-haired people, Mum found us something more suitable at the hospital. There were people there our age, more or less. That's where I met the girl who showed me how to change a nappy in the McDonald's toilets. And that's where I met all those girls she talked about that day, Holly and Nicola and them. There weren't that many dads. Anyway, the teacher at the hospital told us about timing contractions and all that. But first of all, Mum comes down to The Bowl to tell me that Alicia's gone into labor, and then I charge round to Alicia's house, and then I go into the bathroom to find a nude woman who looks nothing like Alicia in the bath…For a little while, everything went right out of my head. She could tell I didn't understand what she wanted, so she shouted at me.

“Time the contractions, you fuckwit,” she said. She didn't say it in a nice way either. She was angry and frustrated, and I nearly chucked the watch into the bath and went home. Over the next twelve hours, I nearly went home about five hundred times.

Suddenly, she made this terrible, terrible noise. She sounded like an animal, although I couldn't tell you which animal, because I don't know much about wildlife and all that. The closest to it I've ever heard was a donkey, in a field next to our hotel in Spain. The watch nearly ended up in the bath again, this time because I nearly jumped out of my skin.

“What was that?” she said.

I looked at her. She didn't know? She thought there was someone else in the room? Or a donkey?

“It was…It was you,” I said. I didn't like saying it. It sounded rude.

“Not the noise, you fucking fucking moron,” she said. “I know that was me. The timing. How many minutes?”

I was relieved that I hadn't understood, because that meant she wasn't going mad. On the other hand, I didn't know how many minutes it was, and I knew she'd be angry with me.

“I don't know,” I said.

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” she said. “Why the bloody bastard hell not?”

They warned us in the classes about the bad language. The woman said that our partners might call us names and say things they didn't mean, because of the pain and all that. I'd got the idea that she wasn't going to start swearing until the pushing bit, though, so this wasn't a good sign.

“You didn't tell me when the last one was,” I said. “So I can't tell you.”

She started to laugh then. “I'm sorry,” she said. “You're right.”

And then she reached for my hand, and squeezed it, and she said, “I'm glad to see you.” And she started crying a bit. “I'm really scared.”

And I know it sounds stupid, but one of the things I'm most proud of in my life is that I didn't say, “Me too.” I felt like saying it, of course. It was already frightening, and it hadn't even started yet. I just said, “It'll be fine,” and squeezed her hand back. It wasn't much use, what I said. But it was better than saying “Me too” and bursting into tears and/or running away to Hastings. That wouldn't have been much use to her.

 

Her mum took us to the hospital, and Alicia didn't have the baby in the car. She wanted her mum to go at ninety miles an hour, and nought miles an hour over the speed bumps. If you have ever been in a car in London, or anywhere else, probably, you will already know that you can't even drive ninety miles an hour at three o'clock in the morning, partly because of the traffic, and partly because there are speed bumps every six inches. And it wasn't three o'clock in the morning anyway. It was three o'clock in the afternoon. In other words, we travelled at about three miles an hour, which was too slow when we weren't going over the speed bumps and too fast when we were. I wanted to tell Alicia to stop making the donkey noise, because it was making me nervous, but I knew I couldn't.

I needn't have worried about being thirsty. There was a sink in our cubicle at the hospital, and anyway, we had plenty of time. At one point, there was so little happening that I went out of the hospital and down the road to buy a Coke and a bar of chocolate. I was expecting everything to be, you know, “Push! Push! I can see the head!” with me running around from…Actually, I didn't know where I'd be running from or to. One side of Alicia to the other, I suppose. Anyway, I needn't have worried about not having time to go to the gents for some water, and I needn't have worried about having to stop the car and deliver the baby outside a post office or somewhere. How many babies are born in this country every year? (About six hundred thousand is the answer. I just looked it up on the Internet.) And how many of those are born on a bus, or by the side of the road? About two or three. (That's a guess. I tried to look it up. I put “Babies born on buses in UK” into Google, but my search did not match any documents.) That's why you read about them in the paper sometimes: because they're special. It's slow, labor. Slow and then fast. Unless you're having one of the babies born on the bus.

Anyway, the nurse came to meet us at the door of the maternity unit and showed us to our cubicle, and Alicia lay down on the bed. Her mum gave her a massage, and I unpacked the bag we'd got ready ages ago. They told us at the classes to pack a bag. I'd packed clean underwear and a T-shirt, and Alicia had packed some clothes too. And we had a load of crisps and biscuits and water. We'd also put in a portable CD player and some music. The woman at the pregnancy class said that music was good for relaxing you, and we'd spent ages choosing songs and burning CDs. Even Alicia's mum had made one, which we thought was a bit weird, but she said we might thank her for it. I plugged the CD player in and put on my CD, which probably seems a bit selfish to you. But my thinking was that nobody would mind my music too much at the beginning, so I could get it out of the way. And as it was all loud and fast skate music, it might give Alicia some energy. The first song was “American Idiot” by Green Day.

“Turn that off before I kill you,” she said. “I don't want to hear about American idiots.” So that was the end of my music. I put her CD on.

“What is that shit?” she said. “It's horrible.”

Her CD was mostly R&B, with a bit of hip-hop thrown in. And the very first song was Justin Timberlake, “Sexy Back,” which she'd got into when she went to these pregnant dance classes. Nobody wants to hear the word “sex” while they're having a baby, just like you don't want to watch a McDonald's advert when you're throwing up, and I'd told her not to choose it. We'd had an argument about it.

“I told you this wouldn't be any good,” I said. I couldn't resist it. I knew it wasn't the right time, but I knew I'd been right to tell her.

“This isn't mine,” said Alicia. “You must have put this on.”

“That is such a lie,” I said. I was really angry. I didn't like Justin Timberlake (and I still don't), so I wasn't happy about her saying that he was my choice. But it was the unfairness that got me most of all. I'd told her it was shit! I'd told her it wouldn't be right for her labor! And now she was telling me it was all my idea.

“Let it go,” said Andrea.

“But she was the one who wanted it!”

“Drop it.”

“It wasn't me,” said Alicia. “It was you.”

“She's not dropping it,” I said. “She's not letting it go.”

Andrea came up to me and put her arm around my shoulder and whispered in my ear.

“I know,” she said. “But you have to. For the next however many hours we're in here, we all do what she says, and agree with what she says, and get her what she wants. OK?”

“OK.”

“This is good practice,” she said.

“For what?”

“Having a kid. You have to let things go about fifty times a day.”

Something clicked when she said that. I knew that Alicia was about to have a baby. I'd even met the baby, kind of. But when we were in the hospital, having the baby seemed like the whole point of everything, and once it was out, then our jobs were done, and we could eat any crisps we had left over all at once and go home. But that was just the beginning, wasn't it? Yes, we'd be going home. But we'd be going home with the baby, and arguing with each other about Justin Timberlake and with the baby about whatever, all the time, forever. It was easy to let the Justin Timberlake thing go when I thought about that.

“Shall I put my CD on?” said Andrea.

Nobody said anything, so she did, and it was perfect, of course. We didn't know what anything was, but it was sweet, and quiet, and sometimes there was what I would call classical music mixed in, and if any of it was about sex and booty and all that, then they were singing about it in ways we didn't understand, which was fine. Neither of us was sure about having Alicia's mum at the birth. But we would have been in trouble without her. I'd have stomped off home in a rage before Roof was born, leaving Alicia with the stupid music that she chose driving her mental while she was trying to have a baby. The truth was, we needed a parent, not a kid.