Slam

“TH…he wasn’t me. But he was who I wanted to be, so that makes him the best version of myself, and that can’t be a bad thing, to have the best version of yourself standing there on a bedroom wall and watching you. It makes you feel as if you mustn’t let yourself down.”

Tony Hawk is a symbol of the type of person Sam aspires to be, and of Sam’s own isolation in his adolescence as he struggles to relate with people around him. Having the poster on his wall motivates Sam to improve himself both in his skating and in his life, and it allows him to talk through things with himself from a more comfortable position.

“Listen: I know you don’t want to hear about every single little moment. You don’t want to know about what time we arranged to meet, or any of that stuff. All I’m trying to say is it was really special, that day, and I can remember just about every second of it.”

Sam often addresses the reader and refers directly to the narrative as it unfolds. In his attempts to create what he views as a typical and smoothly flowing story, he leaves out the irrelevant details that are not necessary to form a complete understanding of the plot and of Sam’s own conflicts and experiences. Sam’s relationship with Alicia does not unfold in a picture-perfect, stereotypical fashion, and this is partly shown in the way that Sam recalls how special his first few weeks with Alicia were despite the fact that they eventually broke up. Even though he is only 18 as he narrates, he had to grow up fast and realizes that something can be meaningful without being permanent.

“If somebody knows about the history of my family, then it’s all they can see, and it’s all they can hear.”

Sam’s family history is a source of shame and embarrassment for him, even though he does not personally judge his mother for having a child young. He is painfully aware of the way that society at large views teenage parenthood through a negative lens and regrets the way that his mum’s decision to have a child at 16 is something which continues to cast a shadow over his life. This becomes especially evident in the way that Alicia’s parents treat Sam and his mother.

“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.”

At age 16, Sam learns How a Few Seconds Can Change Everything. After having unprotected sex with Alicia, Sam soon finds out that she is pregnant and planning to keep the pregnancy. Everything about Sam’s future is instantly altered, and he comes to realize that the future is ever-changing and unpredictable.

“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.”

Sam uses a simile to compare his relationship with Alicia to eating too fast. As teenagers, they were both overcome by emotion and physical drives, and ended up spending every free minute together. Having this experience allowed Sam to learn the importance of taking things slowly and of “rationing” a relationship in the same way a person rations food so that whatever keeps it going does not soon run out. This is just one of many points of wisdom that indicate how Sam is growing up.

“If having sex regularly meant listening to Alicia’s dad being snobby, and giving up skating, and never seeing mates, then I wasn’t sure how much I wanted it. I wanted a girlfriend who’d sleep with me, but I wanted a life as well.”

Even before Sam finds out that Alicia is pregnant and he will be tied to her in some way for the rest of their lives, Sam starts to feel suffocated and as though his relationship with Alicia is taking up all of his time. He stops seeing his friends and skating, and on top of this, can sense that Alicia’s parents don’t approve of him due to the fact that his mother was a teenage parent.

“Actually, I don’t want to tell you what [she] said. You’ll end up feeling sorry for her, which isn’t what I want.”

After Sam finds out that Alicia is pregnant, he immediately tries to cut her out of his life and disappear. It is clear he looks back on this moment in his life with shame, as he doesn’t want to reveal just how hurt Alicia was by his actions. Here, Sam openly admits to trying to manipulate the reader’s perception of him and his circumstances, and Sam attempts to detract from his total inability to navigate teenage parenthood at this stage.

“I didn’t feel grown up—I still wanted to crawl onto my mum’s lap.”

Suddenly, Sam is thrust into adulthood after one decision changed the course of his life. Sam feels caught between the typical dichotomy of youth, but to a more extreme extent. He knows he has to grow up but desperately wants to cling to his childhood for as long as possible. This manifests in his running away, avoiding Alicia, and procrastinating in telling his family the news.

“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.”

When Sam starts to explain to the reader about his experiences with being thrust into the future, he isn’t sure how to start, what to say, or whether it even happened for sure. He uses a metaphor to compare the feeling of seeing the future with no explanation to being abducted by aliens, because it is like being sent to another world.

“If it was my life that I’d seen, well, I didn’t want to live it. I wanted my old life back, I wanted someone else’s life. But I didn’t want that one.”

In his first experience with seeing the future, Sam is thrust directly into the stresses of parenthood. He wakes up in the middle of the night and has to soothe his son, who he has never even met before. The vision haunts Sam, as he becomes convinced that parenthood is a horrible experience that not only ruins his own life, but his relationship as well.

“It feels now, and it even felt then, as though that boy was eight or nine years old. He felt sick, and he wanted to cry. His voice wobbled just about every time he tried to say anything. He wanted his mum, and he didn’t want his mum to know.”

Sam feels lost and terrified as he holds onto the secret of Alicia’s pregnancy. He runs away and behaves erratically, throwing his phone away and refusing to talk to Alicia. Sam looks back on this period of his life and feels as though the child in him was manifesting one last time, as though it was nearly impossible for him to let go of the freedom and simple pleasures of his old life and accept the life of teenage parenthood.

“What it felt like was, there was this big hump in the road coming up, i.e. the baby. And we needed a bit of a push to get us over that hump. And maybe getting back together would do it. The thing about humps in the road, though, is that you go up and then you come down again, and you can coast down the other side. Did I say I wasn’t stupid? Ha! What I didn’t know then was that there wasn’t another side. You just have to keep pushing forever. Or until you run out of steam.”

Sam uses a simile to compare Navigating Teenage Parenthood with Alicia to going over endless bumps in the road. There is no relief in sight; instead, he knows that all he can do is get used to this new way of existing and push forward as long as possible. Sam also uses humor to self-deprecate, speaking colloquially to the reader.

“The trouble is divorce leaves you open to stuff like this. It’s like going out in the rain with only a T-shirt on, isn’t it? You increase the chances of catching something.”

Sam compares the uncertainty that follows breakups and divorces to being unprepared for bad weather. His mother wants her new boyfriend to move in, and Sam realizes he knows almost nothing about Mark. Sam’s skepticism of relationships is also evident in this quote.

“I went to bed. But I didn’t know when I was going to wake up.”

After several episodes involving waking up at different points in time, Sam learns that he can no longer predict what is coming next. He was never certain about his future, but always desperate for some answer to cling to; now, he gains the strength to accept that the future is not known, and that all he can do is deal with whatever is coming next.

“It’s just that there comes a point where the facts don’t matter anymore, and even though you know everything, you know nothing, because you don’t know what anything felt like. That’s the thing with stories, isn’t it?”

Sam discusses the flaws in storytelling and how the reader/listener will never get to fully grasp what the protagonist experienced. He starts to realize that no matter how he tells the story, it can never be told with the accuracy of experiencing it.

“I worked out that there were two futures. There’s the one I got whizzed to. And then there’s the real future, the one you have to wait to see, the one you can’t visit, the one you can only get to by living all the days in between…It had become less important. It had nearly disappeared, in fact.”

Sam comes to develop a unique understanding of the future after his experiences of seeing various possible outcomes of his own life. He realizes that in reality, the future is unpredictable, and all he can do is live each day the best he can. He no longer worries about what may or may not happen, because he knows How a Few Seconds Can Change Everything.

“If it had been a film, I would have told her how much I loved Alicia, and loved our baby, and loved her, and we would have cried and hugged and Alicia would have woken up and the baby would have popped out just like that. But we weren’t in a film, and I didn’t love hardly any of those people.”

Sam’s story contains some stereotypical aspects of teenage parenthood but is unlike the clichés that one might see in movies or television where everything works out perfectly and the family is united and happy in the end. While Sam’s future did not turn out exactly like this, his own reality is one which he finds acceptable, albeit not ideal.

“I didn’t really know who I was. That’s a weird feeling, not knowing what you are to anybody in the room, especially if you’re sort of related to all of them.”

Sam is in the delivery room with Alicia, Rufus, his mum, Mark, and Alicia’s parents. He looks around at everyone and realizes that his family tree has become beautifully complex, and that the lines between the usual roles in a family are quite blurred. His mum’s child is going to be about the same age as his own son, for example. Sam does not feel shame about his family anymore, and part of this is due to the way Alicia stood up for him over the course of her pregnancy.

“She was trying to say that Rufus Jones would leave school at sixteen to be a dad, and get some rubbish job and no GCSEs, and probably start taking crack. But Rufus Burns would, I don’t know, go to university and become a doctor or a prime minister or whatever.”

Alicia’s parents harbor prejudice against Sam and his family due to the fact that Sam’s mother was a teenage parent, and now Sam is as well. They feel that there must be something inherently wrong with the family and fail to see that Sam is a relatively well-adjusted and well-intentioned person—his mother did not fail in raising him. Alicia’s parents play into the idea of pre-ordained paths in life based on one’s family history.

“A lot of things don’t seem worth arguing about to me.”

Sam is a passive person who often just lets things happen to him without speaking up or trying to change the course of what may follow. In some ways, this works in his favor, as Alicia is grateful for his willingness to accept her decision to keep their pregnancy; however, at times Sam’s passivity leads to him failing to stand up for himself or relying on others to do it for him.

“I learned that after fifteen years or so, eighty percent of teenage fathers lose touch with their kids completely. Eighty percent! Eight out of ten! Four out of five! That meant that in fifteen years’ time, the chances were that I wouldn’t have anything to do with Roof. I wasn’t having that.”

Sam researches some basic statistics on teenage parenthood in the United Kingdom and is dismayed to find that the vast majority of teenage fathers eventually lose touch with their children. Sam decides he will be the one to buck stereotypes and remain an important presence in his son’s life, but moments later it occurs to him that he has no way of knowing whether he’ll succeed.

“We’d have no problem getting through the fifteen years if we could just stay here, saying nothing, watching a kid grow up.”

Sam watches over his son with Alicia and her mother, and they all marvel at the beautiful boy before them. Sam feels a deep love for his son and knows that he is the best thing that could have come out of such a complicated situation.

“It’s going to be the middle of the story for a long time, as far as the eye can see, and I suppose there are lots of twists and turns to come.”

Sam narrates his life like a story and compares it to a narrative with an ending that is so far off in the distance, it cannot yet be comprehended. He realizes How a Few Seconds Can Change Everything, and that expecting to know the future is pointless. He has grown up and adjusted to his new life as a parent.