Slam (9 page)

“Ruth,” I said.

“Nah. Ruth? That's not right.”

“Roof?”

“That's it. Roof. Funny name. What was that about, then?”

“I don't know. Alicia's idea.”

“I was wondering about whether it was, you know, where…What's the word?”

“I don't know.”

“You know Brooklyn Beckham?”

“Yeah.”

“They say that's where he was, you know…”

“You're losing me, Rabbit.”

“David Beckham and Posh Spice have sex in Brooklyn. And nine months later they have a baby. What's the word? Brooklyn was somethinged in Brooklyn.”

“Conceived.”

“Exactly. I was wondering whether yours was conceived on the roof.”

“Oh. No.”

“Just an idea,” said Rabbit.

“So you've seen me a fair bit over here?” I asked him.

“Yeah.”

“But I don't live here anymore.”

“No. You moved over to your girlfriend's place when she had the baby, I heard.”

“How did you hear that?”

“I think you told me. What's all this about? Why don't you know nothing about your own life?”

“I'll be honest with you, Rabbit. What's happened is, I've been like whizzed forward a year in time.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. Just today. So in my head, it's still a year ago. And I don't know what's happened to me. I didn't even know I had a kid, so I'm kind of freaking out. I need help. Any information you can give me.”

“Right. Well. Information.”

“Yeah. Anything you think might help.”

“Who'd just won
Celebrity Big Brother
before you got whizzed?”

“It's not that sort of stuff I'm looking for, to be honest, Rabbit. I'm trying to find out what's happened to me. Not to, you know, the world.”

“That's all I know. You had a baby and you moved into your girlfriend's house. And then you disappeared.” And he made a disappearing noise, like,
Pfffft.

I felt a little shiver then, as if I really had ceased to exist.

“So it's good to see you haven't,” said Rabbit. “Because you wouldn't be the first person I knew who'd dematerialized. There was this kid called Matthew, and I was watching him one day, and he just…”

“Thanks, Rabbit. I'll see you later.” I wasn't in the mood.

“Oh. Yeah. Right.”

 

On the way back to Alicia's, I found two two-pound coins in my pocket, so I stopped in McDonald's to get something to eat. I couldn't remember how much a cheeseburger and fries cost last time I was in there, but it didn't seem to have gone up by much. It wasn't a thousand pounds, or anything like that. I could afford a Coke as well, and I still had some money left over. I sat down at a table on my own and started to unwrap my burger, but before I could take a bite, this girl started waving at me.

“Oi! Sam! Sam!”

I waved back. I'd never seen her in my life before. She was a black girl, about seventeen or so, and she had a baby with her. She'd taken the baby out of the pram and sat it on her knee while she ate.

“Come and sit here,” she said. I didn't want to, but what could I do? She might have been my best friend.

I put my food and drink back on the tray and walked across the restaurant to join her.

“How's it going?” I said.

“Yeah, not so bad. This one was up half the night, though.”

“They're terrible, aren't they?” I said. This seemed safe enough. Parents were always saying things like that.

“How's Roof?” she said. It was definitely Roof. Everyone said so.

“Yeah, all right, thanks.”

“You seen anyone?” she said.

“No,” I said. And then, “Like who?” I was hoping I might recognize a name, and then I'd understand who this girl was, and how I knew her.

“You know, like Holly? Or Nicola?”

“No.” I knew a lot of girls, all of a sudden. “Haven't seen them for ages.”

She suddenly lifted up her baby and sniffed at its bottom. You had to spend half your life doing that if you had a baby, apparently. “Phwooar. Off we go, young lady.”

She got a bag out from the base of the pram and stood up.

“Can I come with you?” I said.

“To change her nappy? Why?”

“I want to watch you do it.”

“Why? You're good at it.”

How did she know? Why would I change Roof's nappy in front of her?

“Yeah, but…I'm sick of the way I do it. I want to try something different.”

“There isn't much you can do with a nappy,” she said. I just kept my mouth shut and followed her downstairs.

“You'll have to come in the ladies', you know that?” she said.

“That's OK,” I said. It wasn't OK, really, but the nappy-changing thing was really worrying me. From what I'd seen overnight and this morning, there wasn't a lot I couldn't work out for myself. Mostly it just seemed like you had to pick the baby up and take it somewhere, and I could do that. I didn't even know how to take a baby's clothes off, though. I was worried about breaking its arms and legs.

There was nobody in the ladies' anyway, thank God. She pulled this table thing out of the wall and put the baby down on it.

“I just do it like this,” she said.

She sort of ripped off the all-in-one tracksuit thing that babies wear (after she'd done the ripping, I could see there were lots of poppers down the legs and round the bottom bit), then she pulled its legs out and undid the tags on the side of the nappy. Then with one hand she held the legs up, and with the other she wiped its arse with a wet paper hankie thing. The actual crap part wasn't too terrible. There wasn't much of it, and it smelled more like milk than dog shit. That was why I hadn't wanted to do it during the night. I thought it would smell of dog shit, or human shit, anyway, and I'd throw up. My new friend folded the dirty nappy up and put it in this little blue carrier bag with the dirty wet hankies, and then put a new nappy on in about ten seconds flat.

“What do you reckon?” she said.

“Awesome,” I said.

“What?”

“You're brilliant,” I said, and I meant it.

It was the most incredible thing I'd ever seen. It was the most incredible thing I'd ever seen in a ladies' toilet, anyway.

“You can do that, though,” she said.

“Can I?” I couldn't believe it. If I'd learned to do that in a few weeks, then I was a lot cleverer than I thought I was.

 

There was a bunch of keys in my parka pocket too, so I was able to let myself back in to Alicia's house, after about twenty minutes of putting the wrong keys in the wrong locks. My mum was already there, sitting at the kitchen table with Roof on her lap. She looked older, my mum, older than a year older, if you see what I mean, and I hoped that the worry lines that had suddenly appeared on her forehead were nothing to do with me. I was so pleased to see her, though. I nearly ran for her, but I might have seen her the day before, so she might have thought it was a bit weird.

“Here's Dadda,” she said, and of course I looked around to see who she was talking about, and then I laughed as if I'd been joking.

“Alicia let me in, but she's gone for a walk,” my mum said. “I made her go out. I thought she was looking a bit peaky. And there's no one else here.”

“Just the three of us, then,” I said. “That's nice.” That seemed safe enough. Me, my mum and a baby—that had to be nice, didn't it? But I was still nervous, because I didn't really know what I was talking about. Maybe I hated Mum, or she hated me, or Roof and Mum hated each other…How was I supposed to know? But she just smiled.

“How was college?”

“Yeah, good,” I said.

“Alicia told me about your bit of trouble.”

It was like a computer game, getting whizzed into the future. You had to think on your feet, really quickly. You were driving fast down a straight road and then suddenly something was coming straight at you and you had to swerve. Why would I be in trouble? I decided I wouldn't.

“Oh,” I said. “That. It was nothing.”

She looked at me. “Sure?”

“Yeah. Honest.”

And I was being honest, every way you looked at it.

“How are things?” she said.

“Not bad,” I said. “How about yours?” I didn't want to talk about me, mostly because I didn't really know about me.

“Yeah, OK,” she said. “Very tired.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, well.”

“What a pair, eh?” And she laughed. Or she made a noise that was supposed to be something like laughing, anyway. Why were we a pair? What did she mean? I'd heard people like my mum say “What a pair!” one zillion times, and I'd never thought about what it meant before. So now I had to try and remember when and why people said it. Suddenly I could hear it. Last year, or the year before last, depending on what year we were in now, we both got food poisoning from a dodgy takeaway. And I was sick and she was sick and I was sick and she was sick, and we were taking it in turns to lock ourselves in the bathroom to throw up. “What a pair,” she said. And another time…Rabbit and I, coming back from Grind City, and we'd both slammed, and Rabbit had a bloody nose, and I had a graze down the side of my cheek. “What a pair,” she said when she saw us. So people usually said it when something had gone wrong, when two people were sick or injured, when there was some sign that they'd messed up.

“Are we going to take him out for a walk?” my mum said.

“Yeah, that'd be good,” I said.

“So I'd better go to the loo. For the one hundredth time today.”

She lifted Roof up and passed him across the table to me. She was sitting in the window, behind the kitchen table, and so I hadn't been able to look at her properly. But when she pushed the table out and stood up, I could see she had a football up her jumper. I laughed.

“Mum!” I said. “What are you doing…?” I stopped. That wasn't a football. My mum wouldn't have put a football up her jumper. My mum was pregnant.

I made a noise, like “Eeek!”

“I know,” said my mum. “I look massive today.”

 

I don't know how I got through the rest of the day, really. I probably seemed weird and spaced out, but the football up my mum's jumper was just about the last straw for me. I'd had it up to here with the future. I mean, it was fine if you just let it happen, day by day. But missing out chunks of time like this…It was no good. It was doing my head in.

We put Roof in this sort of backpack thing that goes on your front, not your back. I carried him, because Mum couldn't, and also, I suppose, because he was my kid and not hers, and he made my chest all sweaty, but he stayed asleep. We went to the park, and walked around the little lake, and I tried not to say anything, so most of the time we were quiet, but every now and again Mum asked me a question. Like, “How are you getting on with Alicia?” Or, “It's not too difficult, is it, living in someone else's house?” Or, “Have you thought about what to do when this course finishes?” And I just said, you know, “It's OK,” or “It's not so bad,” or “I dunno.” I could imagine it was the sort of thing I might have said anyway, whether I knew the answers or not. We went for a cup of tea, and then I—we, I suppose, if Roof counts as a person—walked Mum home. I didn't go in. I would have wanted to stay.

On the way back we went for a walk down by the New River, and this guy was there, sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette with one hand and pushing a pram with the other.

“Hello,” he said as we walked past.

“Hello.”

“I'm Giles,” he said. “Remember? From the class?”

I'd never met him before in my life. He was quite posh, much older than me.

“You didn't come back, did you?” he said.

“I don't think so,” I said. Not a good answer, I realized as soon as I'd come out with it. I should probably have known whether I went back somewhere or not, even if I hadn't been for the first time yet.

“What did you have?” he said, nodding at Roof.

“A boy.”

“Called?”

“Oh,” I said. “It's complicated.” I wasn't very happy with that as an answer, but I didn't want to get into the whole Roof nightmare.

He looked at me, but he left it at that.

“You?” I said.

“Yeah, a boy. Joshua. How's it going?”

“You know,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Can I ask you something? Is your, you know, your partner…Is she happy?”

“Well,” I said. “She seems OK.”

“You're lucky,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Mine's in a terrible state,” he said.

“Oh.”

“Cries all the time. Won't let me touch her.”

“Oh.”

“I don't mean sex,” he said. “I'm not, you know. After anything.”

“No.”

“It's just that she won't let me hold her. She freezes up. And I don't even think she wants to hold the baby, particularly.”

“Right,” I said.

“I'm at my wits' end, to be honest. I don't know what to do.”

“Oh,” I said. I didn't think that I'd have any advice for him even if I hadn't been whizzed. I'd need to be about fifty, I thought, before I could deal with this guy and his problems.

“Write to a magazine,” I said.

“Sorry?”

“Like, you know, a women's magazine.”

I sometimes looked at the problem pages in my mum's magazines, because you could read about sex without it looking as though you were reading about sex.

He didn't look impressed.

“It seems a bit more urgent than that,” he said.

“They come out once a month,” I said. “And it's the middle of the month, so if you wrote to them quickly, you might get in the next issue.”