Read Online Slam by Nick Hornby - Free Book Online Page B

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?
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    A couple of nights after that, Alicia came round for dinner, and it was OK. More than OK, really. She was nice to my mum, and my mum was nice to her, and they made jokes about how useless I was, and I didn’t mind, because I was glad that everyone was happy.
    But then Alicia asked my mum about what it was like having a baby at sixteen, and I tried to change the subject.
    â€œYou don’t want to hear about all that,” I said to Alicia.
    â€œWhy don’t I?”
    â€œBoring,” I said.
    â€œOh, it wasn’t boring, I can tell you,” said my mum, and Alicia laughed.
    â€œNo, but it’s boring now,” I said. “Because it’s over.”
    It was a stupid thing to say, and I regretted it the moment it came out of my mouth.
    â€œOh well,” said my mum. “That’s the whole of history, written off, then. Bor-ing.”
    â€œYeah, well, it is,” I said. I didn’t mean that, really, because there are lots of bits of history that aren’t boring, like World War Two. But I didn’t want to back down.
    â€œAnd also,” said my mum, “it’s not over. You’re still here and I’m still here and there are sixteen years between us and it’ll be like that forever. It’s not over.”
    And I sat there wondering whether it was not over in ways she couldn’t even begin to guess.

CHAPTER 4
    It’s not that things started to go wrong between me and Alicia. It just stopped being as good. I can’t really explain why, not properly. I just woke up one morning and didn’t feel the same way. I didn’t like not feeling the same way, because it was a good feeling, and I felt flat without it, but it had gone, and there was nothing I could do to bring it back. I even tried to pretend it was still there, but the trying just seemed to make it worse.
    Where did it go? It was like there had been a lot of food on a plate in front of us, and we ate it all really quickly, and then there was nothing left. Maybe that’s how couples stay together: they’re not greedy. They know that what they have in front of them has to last a long time, so they kind of pick at it. I hope it’s not like that, though. I hope that when people are happy together, it feels as though someone keeps piling seconds and thirds on their plates. That night, the night after I hadn’t seen her, it felt as though we’d be together for the rest of our lives, and even that wouldn’t be long enough. And then two or three weeks later, we were bored with each other. I was bored, anyway. We never did anything but watch TV in her room and have sex, and once we’d had sex, we never had much to say to each other. We’d get dressed, put the TV back on, and then I’d kiss her good night and then go through the same routine the next night.
    Mum noticed even before I did, I think. I started skating again, and I tried to make out that wanting to skate was just normal and natural, and thinking about it, it probably was. If we hadn’t gone off each other, if we hadn’t split up, then somehow we would have found some kind of routine, I suppose. In the end I’d have gone back to skating and playing skating games on the Xbox and all that. It