Slam by Nick Hornby

of some of the ones I’ve invented, and some of them are hilarious to look back on and wonder what I was thinking at the time.”
    I looked at him. I knew what he was talking about: skate tricks. He says that right at the end of the book, before going through all the tricks from back in the day. But why bring that up? I didn’t want to know about skate tricks.
    â€œYeah, well, thanks a lot, man,” I said. I was cross with him. You couldn’t talk to him about serious stuff, even though he was a dad himself. I was trying to tell him that the whole world was about to end, and he wanted to tell me about kickflip McTwists and half-cab frontside blunt reverts. I decided to take the poster down whether Alicia was pregnant or not. It was time to move on. If he was so great, how come he couldn’t help me? I’d been treating him like a god, but he wasn’t a god. He was nothing. Just a skater.
    â€œHow the park locals stopped themselves from beating me up I’ll never know,” said TH. “I could be a real idiot sometimes.”
    â€œYou said it,” I told him.
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    And then TH played a strange trick on me, so he probably is a god after all.

CHAPTER 6
    I know this sounds stupid, but normally, you know when things have happened to you, don’t you? Well, I don’t. Not anymore. Most of the story I’m telling you happened to me for sure, but there are a couple of little parts, weird parts, I’m not absolutely positive about. I’m pretty sure I didn’t dream them up, but I couldn’t swear that on Tony Hawk’s book, which is my bible. So we’re about to come to one of these parts now, and all I can do is tell it straight. You’ll have to make your own minds up. Suppose you were abducted by aliens during the night, and dumped back in your bed before breakfast. If that happened to you, you’d be sitting there eating your cereal the next morning and thinking, Did that really happen? And you’d be looking around for evidence. That’s how I feel. I didn’t find any evidence, and I’m still looking.
    Here’s what I think happened. I can’t remember going to bed, or falling asleep; all I remember is waking up. I woke up in the middle of the night. I wasn’t in my own bed, and there was someone in the bed with me, and there was a baby crying.
    â€œOh, shit.” The person in bed with me was Alicia.
    â€œYour turn,” she said.
    I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know where I was or even when I was, and I didn’t know what “Your turn” meant.
    â€œSam,” she said. “Wake up. He’s awake. Your turn.”
    â€œRight,” I said. And then, “My turn for what?”
    â€œHe can’t need feeding again,” she said. “So he either needs winding or he has a dirty nappy. He hasn’t been changed since we went to bed.”
    So this baby had to be mine, and he was a boy. I had a son. This is what I got for not turning my mobile on. I felt sick with shock, and I couldn’t speak for a little while.
    â€œI can’t,” I said.
    â€œWhat do you mean, you can’t?”
    â€œI don’t know how.”
    I could see that from her point of view that must have sounded weird. I hadn’t had much time to work all this out, but Alicia must have gone to bed with a different Sam, right? She must have gone to bed with someone who at least knew he was a father. And if he knew he was a father, then presumably he’d winded a baby, and changed a nappy. The trouble was, I wasn’t that Sam. I was the old Sam. I was the Sam who’d turned his mobile off so that he wouldn’t find out if his ex-girlfriend was pregnant or not.
    â€œAre you awake?”
    â€œNot really.”
    She whacked me with her elbow. She got me right in the ribs.
    â€œOw.”
    â€œYou awake now?”
    â€œNot really.”
    I knew I was going to get another whack, but the