Slam

by Nick Hornby

  My mum didn’t want me to be with Alicia all the time. She started to worry about it after a couple of weeks. I never told her about the sex, but she knew I was serious, and Alicia was serious. And she knew about the dreaming, because she could see it with her own eyes.

  One night, I came back late, and she was waiting up for me.

  “How about we stay in tomorrow night? Watch a DVD?” she said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Or we can go out, if you want. I’ll take you to Pizza Express.”

  I still didn’t say anything.

  “Pizza Express and the cinema. How about that?”

  “No, you’re all right,” I said, as if she were being nice to me and offering me something. I mean, she was, in a way. She was offering me a pizza and a film. But in another way, she was just trying to stop me doing what I wanted to do, and she knew it, and I knew it.

  “Let me put this another way,” she said. “We’re going to spend the evening together tomorrow. What would you like to do? Your choice.”

  Here’s the thing about me. I can’t be bad. Maybe you think that sleeping with Alicia was bad, but it didn’t feel that way, so it doesn’t count as badness. I’m talking about things where I know I’m in the wrong. You see kids at school, and they’re cussing out the teachers, and picking fights with other kids who are supposed to be gay, or picking fights with the teachers, and cussing out the kids who are supposed to be gay…I can’t do that stuff, and I never could. I’m rubbish at lying, and even worse at stealing. I tried nicking some money out of my mum’s bag once, and I felt sick, and put it all back. It’s like a disease or something, not wanting to be bad. I mean, I hate Ryan Briggs more than anyone else on earth. He’s a horrible, violent, ugly, scary thug. But when I see him punch some kid in the face and take his phone off him, or tell a teacher to fuck off, there’s a part of me that envies him, you know? He hasn’t got the disease. It’s not complicated, being him. Life would be easier if I didn’t give a shit, but I do. And I knew that what my mum was asking for wasn’t completely out of order. She was asking me to spend one evening away from Alicia, and she was offering me something in return. I tried not to see things this way, her way, but I couldn’t, so I was in trouble.

  “Can Alicia come?”

  “No. That’s sort of the point of the evening.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re seeing too much of her.”

  “Why does it bother you?”

  “It’s not healthy.”

  It’s true that I wasn’t getting outside very often, but that wasn’t what she meant. I didn’t know what she did mean, though.

  “What does that mean, ‘not healthy’?”

  “It gets in the way of things.”

  “What things?”

  “Friends. Schoolwork. Family. Skating…. Everything. Life.”

  The opposite was the truth, because life only happened when I was with Alicia. All the things she was talking about were the waiting things.

  “Just one night,” she said. “It won’t kill you.”

  Well, it didn’t kill me. I woke up the morning after we’d been to Pizza Express and the cinema, and I was still alive. But it was like one of those tortures you read about that are actually supposed to be worse than death, because you would actually prefer to be dead. I’m sorry if that means I’m showing no respect to people who’ve actually had that sort of torture, but it’s the closest I’ve come so far. (And that’s one of the reasons I will never join the army, by the way. I would really, really hate to be tortured. I’m not saying that people who join the army would like to be tortured. But they must have thought about it, right? So they must have decided that it wouldn’t be as bad as other things, like being on the dole, or working in an office. For me, working in an office would be better than being tortured. Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t be happy doing a boring job, like photocopying a piece of paper over and over again, every single day, until I died. But on the whole I’d be happier doing that than having cigarettes put out in my eye. What I’m hoping is those aren’t my choices.)

  In those few weeks, it was bad enough waking up in the morning and knowing that I wouldn’t be seeing her until after school. That was torture. That was pulling out fingernails one by one. But on the Pizza Express day I woke up knowing that I wouldn’t see her UNTIL THE END OF THE NEXT DAY, and that was more like the torture that Ryan Briggs, of course, printed off the Internet. I’m not going to go into what it was about. But it involved dogs and balls, and not footballs either. I still have to sort of squeeze my legs together when I think about it.

  OK, not seeing Alicia for about forty-two hours wasn’t like having your balls et cetera. But it really was like not breathing. Or not breathing properly, like there wasn’t enough oxygen in my tank. In all those hours, I couldn’t get a good lungful, and I even started to panic a bit, like you would if you were at the bottom of the sea and the surface was a long way away and there were sharks coming at you and…No, that’s overdoing it, again. There were no sharks. There were no dogs et cetera, and no sharks. Mum would have to be the shark, and she’s really nothing like a shark. She was only trying to buy me a pizza. She wasn’t really trying to like rip my liver out with her teeth. So I’ll stop there, with the surface being a long way away. Alicia = surface.

  “Can I make a phone call?” I said to Mum when I got in.

  “Do you have to?”

  “Yeah.”

  I did. I had to. There was no other way of saying it.

  “We’re going out soon.”

  “It’s half past four. Who eats pizza at half past four?”

  “Pizza at half past five. Film at half past six.”

  “What are we going to see?”

  “What aboutBrokeback Mountain ?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “What does that mean? ‘Yeah, right’?”

  “That’s what we say. When someone makes a stupid joke or something,” I said.

  “Who’s making a stupid joke?” she said.

  And then I realized she was serious. She actually wanted us to go and seeBrokeback Mountain. We’d already started calling one of the science teachers at schoolBrokeback, because he was all hunched up, and everybody reckoned he was a gay.

  “You know what it’s about, don’t you?” I said.

  “Yes. It’s about a mountain.”

  “Shut up, Mum. I can’t go to see that. I’ll get slaughtered tomorrow.”

  “You’d get slaughtered if you went to see a film about gay cowboys?”

  “Yes. Because why am I going? There’s only one answer, isn’t there?”

  “My God,” said my mum. “Is it really that pathetic at school?”

  “Yes,” I said. Because it really was.

  We agreed we’d go and see something else, and then I phoned Alicia’s mobile, and I just got her answering message. So I left it for a couple of minutes, and then I got her message again, and after that I phoned every thirty seconds or so. Message, message, message. It had never for a moment occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to speak to her, even. And then I started to have, like, dark thoughts. Why didn’t she have her phone turned on? She knew I’d be trying to reach her. She knew that today was our bad day. The night before, when I told her about my mum not wanting us to see each other for a night, she’d cried. And now it was like she couldn’t be bothered, unless she was seeing somebody else. And I was thinking, you know, Bloody hell. What a bitch. I can’t see her for one night and she starts going out with someone else. There are words for girls like that. And actually, if you couldn’t go for one night without having sex with someone, then you were a nymphomaniac, weren’t you? You had a problem. She was like a crackhead, except instead of crack it was sex.

  Really. That was what I was like. And you know what I thought, a little later on, when I’d calmed down a bit? I thought, this isn’t healthy. You can’t go around calling your girlfriend a bitch and a slag and a nympho just because her charg
er isn’t working. (That was what had happened. She texted me later, when she’d plugged it in to her dad’s charger. It was a really nice text too.)

  Anyway, I was in a bit of state when I went out, so that wasn’t the best start. And we went down to the multiplex to see what was on apart fromBrokeback Mountain, and there wasn’t much. Actually, that’s not true. There was a lot I wanted to see, like the 50 Cent film, andKing Kong, and there was a lot my mum wanted to see, for example the one about gardening and the one about Japanese girls who made their feet small. But there wasn’t anything we both wanted to see. And we spent so long arguing that we couldn’t sit down for our pizza, so we ended up getting a takeaway and eating it out of the box on the way to the cinema. We saw this really bad movie about a bloke who swallowed a piece of his mobile phone by mistake and it turned out he could intercept everyone’s text messages with his brain. And at first he got to meet loads of girls who were being dumped by their boyfriends, but then he got this text message about terrorists trying to blow up a bridge in New York, and he and one of the girls stopped them. I didn’t mind it too much. It wasn’t boring, anyway. But Mum hated it, and we had an argument afterwards. She said the whole thing about swallowing the mobile phone was ridiculous, but I said that we didn’t know what would happen if we swallowed parts of our mobiles, so that wasn’t the stupid part. She wouldn’t even let me tell her what I thought was the stupid part. She just went off on one about how my mind had been turned to mush by video games and TV.

  None of this matters now. The important thing about the evening was that Mum met a guy. I know, I know. It was supposed to be about me and Mum spending some quality time together and me and Alicia not seeing each other. And it turned into something else altogether. To be fair to Mum, her meeting a bloke didn’t take up a lot of our time. I didn’t even know she’d met a bloke until a couple of days later, when he came round. (Or rather, I knew she’d met a bloke. I just didn’t know she’d Met A Bloke, if you know what I mean.) When we were waiting for our takeaway pizzas, they told us to sit at a table near the door that they used for takeaway customers. And while we were waiting, I went to the gents, and when I came back, Mum was talking to this guy sitting at the next table with his kid. They were only talking about pizzas, and which pizza places they liked, and so on. But when our takeaway boxes arrived, I said to Mum, “Oh, you’re a fast worker,” and she said, “No, I don’t mess about,” and it was all jokey. Except later it turned out it wasn’t. She didn’t say anything about it at the time, but she knew him from her work. He’d left a couple of years before, and he remembered her, even though they’d never spoken at the office. They worked in different departments. Mum works in Leisure and Culture, and Mark—yes, Mark, like a mark on your trousers—used to work in Health and Social Care. When he first came round, he said that in Islington he never had time for Health.

  We walked home. We had our argument about the film, and then Mum tried to talk to me about Alicia.

  “There’s nothing to say,” I said. And then, “That’s why I didn’t want to come out. Because I didn’t want to have A Talk.” I said it like that, so you could hear the capital letters. “Why couldn’t we just go out? And talk about nothing?”

  “So when can I talk to you?” she said. “Because you’re never at home.”

  “I’ve got a girlfriend,” I said. “That’s it. That’s all there is to say. Go on. Ask me. Ask me whether I’ve got a girlfriend.”

  “Sammy…”

  “Go on.”

  “Am I allowed a follow-up question?” she said.

  “One.”

  “Are you having sex?”

  “Areyou ?” I said.

  What I meant was, You can’t ask that. It’s too personal. But since she’d split up with Useless Steve, she hadn’t been seeing anyone, so she didn’t mind answering.

  “No,” she said.

  “Well, were you having sex?”

  “What does that mean?” she said. “Are you asking me if I’ve ever had sex? Because I would have thought you’re the answer.”

  “Shut up,” I said, because I was embarrassed. I wished we hadn’t started on this.

  “Let’s forget about me. What about you? Are you having sex?”

  “No comment. My business.”

  “So that’s a yes.”

  “No. It’s a no comment.”

  “You’d tell me if you weren’t.”

  “No I wouldn’t. Anyway. All this was your idea.”

  “What was?”

  “Alicia. You thought I’d like her, so you made me come to that party. And I did like her.”

  “Sam, you know that having you when I did—”

  “Yeah, yeah. It fucked up your life.”

  I never usually use the f-word in front of her, because she gets upset. Not about the f-word itself, especially, but she starts to beat herself up for being a teenage mother who couldn’t bring her kid up properly, and I hate that. I think she’s done a pretty good job. I mean, I’m not the worst kid in the world, am I? But I swore because I wanted her to think that she’d upset me, even though she hadn’t, really.

  It’s weird, knowing that me being born messed her up. It doesn’t bother me, really, for two reasons. First of all, it wasn’t my fault, it was hers—hers and Dad’s, anyway. And second, she’s not messed up anymore. She’s caught up, more or less, on all the things she missed because of me. You could even argue that she’s overtaken herself. She wasn’t any great shakes at school, she says, but she was so unhappy about not finishing her education that she pushed herself twice as hard as she would have done. She went to evening classes, got qualifications, got a job at the Council. I’m not saying it was a good idea, her having me when she did, but it only ruined a small part of her life, not her whole life. It’s always there, though. And if I want to get out of something—like a conversation about whether I’d had sex with Alicia—then I can just say, all sad and bitter, that I fucked up her life. And whatever it is I’m trying to get out of is forgotten about. I’ve never told her that I feel out of everyone’s league because of what happened.

  “Oh, Sam, I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s OK.” But I said it all sort of heroic, so that she’d know it wasn’t OK. “But that isn’t what you’re worried about anyway, is it?” I said.

  “I don’t know what I’m worried about. Can I meet her properly?”

  “Who?”

  “Alicia. Can she come round for something to eat one night?”

  “If you want.”

  “I’d like that. I wouldn’t be so scared of her then.”

  Scared of Alicia! I think I can see it now, although I wouldn’t have been able to come out with it properly then. My mum was worried about things changing, her being left on her own, me becoming a part of someone else’s life and someone else’s family, me growing up and not being her little boy anymore, me becoming someone else…All of these things or some of them, I don’t know. And we couldn’t have known it then, but she was right to worry. I wish she’d worried me, really. I wish she’d taken me home that night and locked me in my bedroom and thrown away the key.

  So the next night, it was like neither of us had been able to breathe for two days, and so we took deep lungfuls of each other, and we said stupid things to each other, and generally acted like we were Romeo and Juliet and the whole world was against us. I’m talking about me and Alicia, by the way, not me and my mum. We talked as if my mum had taken me away from London for a year, whereas what she’d actually done was taken me to Pizza Express and the cinema for an evening.

  You know that thing I was saying before? About how telling a story is more difficult than it looks, because you don’t know what to put where? Well, there’s a part of the story that belongs here, and it’s something that no one else knows, not even Alicia. The most important part of this story—the whole point of this story—doesn’t happen for a little while. And when it happened in real life, I made out that I was shocked and amazed and upset. And I
was definitely shocked and upset, but I couldn’t in all honesty say I was amazed. It happened that night, I know it. I never said anything to Alicia, but it was my fault. Well, obviously it was my fault mostly, but she’s got to take a tiny part of the blame. We’d been messing about without putting anything on, because she said she wanted to feel me properly, and…Oh, I can’t talk about this stuff. I’m blushing. But something happened. Half-happened. I mean, it definitely didn’t happen properly, because I was still able to pull out and put a condom on and pretend as though everything was normal. But I knew that it wasn’t quite normal, because when the thing that’s supposed to happen finally happened, it didn’t feel right, because it had already half-happened before. And that’s the last time I’m ever going, you know, down there.

  “Are you OK?” said Alicia. She never normally asked, so something must have been different. Maybe it felt different for her, or maybe I acted different, or maybe I seemed quiet and distracted afterwards, I don’t know. And I said I was fine, and we left it at that. I wonder if she ever worked out that it was that night. I don’t know. We never mentioned it again.

  What’s incredible to me is that you can keep out of trouble pretty much every minute of your life apart from maybe five seconds, and that five seconds can get you into the worst trouble of all, just about. It’s amazing, when you think about it. I don’t smoke weed, don’t cuss out teachers, I don’t get into fights, I try to do my homework. But I took a risk, for a few seconds, and that turns out to be worse than any of the rest put together. I once read an interview with a skater, I forget who, and he said that the thing he couldn’t ever believe about sport was how much concentration it took. You could be doing the best skating of your life, and the moment you started to realize that you were doing the best skating of your life, you were eating concrete. Skating well for nine minutes and fifty-five seconds wasn’t good enough, because five seconds was plenty of time to make a complete jerk of yourself. Yeah, well, life’s like that too. It doesn’t seem right to me, but there you go. And how bad is it, what I did? Not so bad, right? It’s a mistake, that’s all. You hear about boys who refuse to wear condoms, and you hear about girls who think it’s cool to have a baby at fifteen…. Well, those aren’t mistakes. That’s just stupidity. I don’t want to spend the whole time moaning about life being unfair, but how comes their punishment is the same as mine? That can’t be right, can it? It seems to me that if you never wear a condom, then you should get triplets, or quintuplets. But it doesn’t work like that, does it?