Slam

by Nick Hornby

  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.

  “And also, I’m not a girl.”

  “Oh, I worked that out ages ago,” he said. “But I didn’t say anything because I thought it might make you get a haircut.”

  “Well, see you later,” I said.

  “When?”

  “Just…you know. Whenever I see you.”

  “You’ll see me in half an hour.”

  “I won’t be here.”

  “I’ll pay you, you fool. I don’t expect anybody to do anything for nothing. Not these days. Three pounds for an up and down.” He waved at the steps. “Twenty pounds a day if you’ll do as you’re told. I’ve got money. Money’s not the problem. Getting out of that bloody place to spend it is the problem.”

  I’d found a job. My first day in Hastings, and I was in work. I was pretty sure then that I’d be able to get by on my own.

  “Half an hour?” I said.

  “Oh, I thought money would interest you,” he said. “Heaven forbid that anyone would do anything out of the kindness of their hearts.”

  And he shuffled…Well, I was going to say he shuffled off, or he shuffled away, but that wouldn’t be right, because he was going so slowly that he never actually went anywhere. I could have watched him for fifteen minutes and I’d still have been able to spit chewing gum onto his head. So we’ll just leave it like that. We’ll just say that he shuffled.

  I hadn’t even got myself a room yet. I went in, dinged the bell again, and prayed that no other old geezer would appear from nowhere asking for help. Although what if he did? I thought to myself. Maybe I could do better than earn enough money for food and a room.

  Maybe I could make a fortune out of old people. But nobody appeared apart from the lady who ran the place, and she could move under her own steam.

  “How can I help you?” she said. I got why the whole place smelled of fish. Fish don’t smell of fish as much as she did. It was like she’d been boiling cod or whatever for a thousand years.

  “I need a room,” I said.

  “For yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Who?”

  “How old would you say I was?”

  I looked at her. I’d played this game before, with one of my mum’s friends from work. For some reason mum’s friend asked me to guess how old she was and I said fifty-six and she was thirty-one and she started crying. It never ends well. And this woman—she definitely wasn’t, I don’t know, under forty. I don’t think. But she could have been sixty-five. How was I supposed to know? So I stood there, probably with my mouth open.

  “I’ll help you out,” said the woman. “Would you say I’m more than one day old?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Course. You’remuch older than a day.” And even then she sort of frowned a bit at the way I said it, as if I was telling her she was a horrible ancient old witch, whereas all I actually meant was that she wasn’t a newborn baby. I mean, what are you supposed to say to these people? “Oh, you look so young, you could even be a newborn baby not even a day old”? Is that what they want?

  “Right,” she said. “So I wasn’t born yesterday.”

  “No.” Ah. I got it now.

  “And that’s how I know you have a girl waiting outside.”

  A girl! That was too funny. She thought I wanted a room so that I could sleep with a girl in her hotel, when the truth was that I was never going to sleep with anyone for the rest of my life, in case I made her pregnant.

  “Come out and look.”

  “Oh, I know she won’t be standing out on the street. You may be naïve, but I’m sure you’re not actually daft.”

  “I don’t know anyone in Hastings,” I said. I didn’t think I should go into the whole thing with the Parrs. She wouldn’t care about them. “I don’t know anyone in Hastings and I don’t like girls.”

  That was a mistake, obviously.

  “Or boys. I don’t like girls or boys.”

  And that didn’t sound right.

  “I like them as friends. But I’m not interested in sharing a room in a B-and-B with anyone.”

  “So what are you doing here?” she said.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’ll bet it is.”

  “You can bet,” I said. She was annoying me. “You can bet any money.”

  “I will.”

  “Go on then.”

  This was turning into a stupid conversation. Nobody was going to bet anything on how long my story was, and yet we’d ended up talking about that instead of what I wanted to talk about, which was where I was going to spend the night.

  “So you’re
not going to give me a room.”

  “No.”

  “So what am I supposed to do, then?”

  “Oh, there are plenty of other places that will take your money. But we’re not like that here.”

  “I’m working for one of your guests,” I said. I don’t really know why I stuck at it. There were plenty of other places—places that might smell of cabbage, or old bacon fat, or anything other than fish.

  “Is that right?” She was finished with me, and she wasn’t interested. She started tidying up the desk, checking her phone for messages, that sort of thing.

  “Yeah, and I promised him I’d be here to help him up the steps in a few minutes. He’s got one of those frame things.”

  “Mr. Brady?”

  She looked at me. She was scared of him, you could see it.

  “I don’t know his name. He’s just a rude old guy with a frame. I just met him and he asked me to be his assistant.”

  “His assistant. What are you going to do? Help him with his tax and VAT?”

  “No. Help him up and down the steps. Get him stuff, maybe.”

  Obviously I was making up that last bit, because we hadn’t yet had a chance to talk about the job in any detail.

  “Anyway. He warned me about you.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said not to let you throw me out, or he’d cause trouble.”

  “He causes trouble anyway.”

  “So it’s just a question of whether you want any more.”