The Tooth Fairy Part 12

'All talk,' said Alice. 'You're all talk. I'll match anything you do. But that's just it. You won't do anything.'

'You don't have to do anything,' Sam said acidly. 'You just have to be f.u.c.ked-up in the head.'

'Good.' She took off the denim jacket and lobbed it at Sam. 'Now give me my leather back. I've got to go.'

Reluctantly Sam handed Alice's jacket back to her. She put it on, pushed her way through the bushes and was gone, leaving behind her a unique silence, a rippling silence like the one that follows a stone tossed in a pond.

'Who is she, then?' Terry said after a while.

'Alice,' said Sam.

20.

Deep Mood The following morning, on the first day of the school's Christmas holidays, Sam lay abed consulting a dictionary.

Gossamer n. & adj. light, filmy substance; the webs of small spiders, floating in calm air or over gra.s.s; a thread of this; something flimsy; delicate gauze He heard from downstairs a knocking at the back door. After a moment his mother came into his bedroom. 'Terry's here for you.'

Sam dressed, went to the bathroom, squashed a wet flannel against his face and went downstairs, still blinking. Terry stood in the hallway, wearing gloves and scarf, his left foot turned inwards. 'You won't believe this,' he whispered. He fidgeted nervously while Sam ate a dish of breakfast cereal.

'What is it?' said Sam when they'd got outside.

'See for yourself.'

Terry led him towards Clive's house. After two hundred yards they pa.s.sed a tall, white-painted picket fence. Sam stopped in his tracks. Daubed in red paint, in broad letters three feet high, were the words REDSTONE MOODIES.

'Who . . . ?' said Sam.

'There's more. Follow me.' On the bus shelter further along the street, the same words: REDSTONE MOODIES. Then again a little further, on the white-painted side of the local pub, the Gate Hangs Well. And on the brick wall running beneath the window of the newsagent's. And on another garden fence. What's more, the large sign outside the library was overpainted with the words YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE REDSTONE.

'Jesus!'

'It doesn't stop here,' said Terry.

The graffiti ran on for half a mile. The artist, or the author, had obviously got bored at some point and started to introduce variations in the language. Royle's sweetshop was particularly targeted, splashed with the words DEEP MOOD and FINE MOOD. The same slogans cropped up intermittently, so the perpetrator, running out of walls and windows had painted the pavement. Even the church was daubed DEEP MOOD.

'Why,' Sam wailed, 'do I think this is going to come back on us?'

'Uncle Charlie saw it this morning. He questioned me about it, but then he said he didn't think that even we were stupid enough to do it right on our own doorstep.'

'I don't feel we should even be out on the streets.'

'Why? You didn't do it. Did you?'

' 'Course I didn't do it.'

'You certain?'

Sam stopped Terry with a look. 'You think I did it?'

'No, I suppose not.'

'You think Clive did it?'

'No.'

They were unable to call on Clive because he wasn't home. They knew he was spending that day, even though he was still not quite thirteen years old, sitting a degree-level examination.

'Perhaps you're right,' said Terry. 'We shouldn't be on the streets. They'll all think it was us.'

'I'm not going home.'

'All right, we'll go to my place.'

But when they got back to Terry's house, there were recriminations of another order, and for once the boys were not the target of parental outrage. In the lounge, Linda was in tears. Charlie and Dot stood over her, looking wronged, angry and bewildered all at the same time. The Chief Guide had called to say how disappointed she'd been that Linda hadn't turned up to lead the Commonwealth parade, and how everyone had missed her, and was everything all right? Dot and Charlie, who only the day before had seen her leave the house in her Guiding gear, and had indeed welcomed her return that evening in the same smart uniform, were dumbfounded.

Then it had all come out.

Linda's head was buried under cus.h.i.+ons. She was weeping bitterly. Charlie was shouting irrationally. 'You can't have boyfriends,' he stammered, 'if you're going to study! You can't!' Linda was, that year, preparing to sit her O-level exams. It had been widely a.s.sumed that she would stay on at school for A-levels.

'We don't know anything about this boyfriend!' Terry's Aunt Dot's voice was raised to a queer pitch. 'Nothing at all!'

'I'm sick of the Guides!' Linda shrieked through her cus.h.i.+ons and her hot tears. 'Sick of the Guides!'

'You can't be a scholar and have boyfriends!' Charlie bawled again. There was something odd about the way he brandished the antiquated word 'scholar', as if the sitting of A-levels implied the taking of certain vows. 'You just can't do it!'

'Nothing's been said about this boyfriend! We know nothing about him!' Dot turned to Terry and Sam, who were observing all this from the hallway. Her eyes bulged like those of a frightened horse. 'Do you two know anything about this boyfriend?'

'No,' they said together.

'And who carried the flag?' Dot wanted to know. 'At the parade, who was it that carried the flag?'

No one seemed to know whether the argument was about the Guides, Boyfriends, Completing One's Studies or Carrying the Flag. Linda swept away the cus.h.i.+ons and ran out of the room, shouldering Terry and Sam aside. She stomped upstairs and slammed her bedroom door behind her. Charlie ran half-way up the stairs after her. 'You can't! You can't do it!' He came back down the stairs, nostrils flaring, eyes rolling. He wagged a trembling finger at the boys. 'You can't be a scholar and have boyfriends!'

'We don't want boyfriends,' Terry said. He had to step back smartly to avoid Uncle Charlie's backhand.

Charlie stormed back into the lounge, s.n.a.t.c.hed up a newspaper and slumped into an armchair. The newspaper practically ignited in his hands.

'Do you know anything about this boyfriend?' Dot asked them again. 'Do you know anything?'

'Of course I didn't do it,' said Alice. 'What do you think I am?'

'You admitted to me you smashed up the gymkhana hut that time,' Sam put it to her.

'I had a reason. You told me you smashed the football pavilion, right? Does that prove you painted ''Redstone Moodies'' all over the place? Anyway, why would I? I'm not one of your gang.'

'Yes, you are.'

'Who said?'

'I said.'

Alice shook her head.

This conversation took place three days after the morning the graffiti had been discovered. Both Sam and Terry had received another visit from the police this time by the local uniformed bobbie called Sykes as had Clive. Sykes had turned up on a bicycle, wanting to know what Sam knew about the incident.

'Do you know this girl called Alice?' Sykes had asked.

'Yes.'

'Has she got anything to do with it?'

'No.'

Nev Southall, listening and with his arms folded very tight, put in, 'It's hardly likely to be a girl now, is it?'

'Hardly,' said Sykes, pocketing a notepad on which he'd written nothing. 'But Sam's friend Clive said it would be this Alice.'

'Clive said that?' Sam bridled.

'Oh, yes. But that was only after we'd found the paint.'

'What paint?'

'We found the tin of red paint at the bottom of Clive's garden.'

So that was that. Clive was found out, fair cop. He was officially cautioned, though not charged with an offence. Sykes told him he was lucky not to be dragged before a juvenile court and sent to Borstal. He also told him that the reason why he personally wasn't going to give Clive a b.l.o.o.d.y good hiding was because Eric Rogers had done the job already, judging by the bruise on Clive's cheekbone. Sam never told Alice anything about Clive trying to switch the blame to her, but he did wonder why Clive clever-clever Clive could have been so inexpressibly dumb as to leave the incriminating paint at the bottom of his garden. He was certain Clive wouldn't have done that. But then he believed Alice too.

'Swear it wasn't you.'

'What?' said Alice. 'All right! I swear on all that's holy! I swear on anything you want me to swear on! Is that enough for you?'

They sat by the pond, sharing a cigarette. The water had formed a thin skin of ice. They both agreed it was too cold to sit around, so they went to their respective homes. It was the last time Sam was to see Alice until after Christmas. She was going with her mother to stay with relatives.

'See you after, then,' said Sam.

'Sure.' She flicked her long fringe out of her eyes. He thought her eyes were slightly red-rimmed. 'See you after.'

He watched her walk across the frosted field, hands dug deep, deep into the pockets of her leather jacket.

21.

Christmas Eve 'Someone put it there,' Clive said bitterly. The bruise on his cheek had changed hue to plum and marmalade.

'St.i.tched up like a kipper,' said Terry. It was a phrase he'd heard on TV.

'But who would do that?' said Sam. 'Who would deliberately leave the paint in your garden?'

'Yeah,' Clive said. 'Who?'

They stood under the Corporation bus shelter, waiting for the bus into town. The words DEEP MOOD sprayed on the side of the shelter didn't help. No one had made any effort to get rid of the graffiti, and indeed most of them would stay untouched for eighteen months or more. Clive was scandalized that the police, or the munic.i.p.ality, or the parish council, or the community itself hadn't made strenuous efforts to clear up. He almost felt like cleaning the place up or painting over the words himself, he said.

'Why?' said Terry.

'Because,' he spat, 'everyone thinks I did it. And every time they walk past it they think of me.'

'So why don't you?' said Sam.

'Terrific! So if I clear up, then that would be like admitting to the thing, wouldn't it? It don't matter if I leave the paint or if I clean it up: I'm dead in the water either way.'

'You could explain to people,' Sam said.

'Sure,' Clive said sarcastically. 'I could put a note through everyone's door saying I didn't do it, but because of my devotion to the neighbourhood I'm going to put it all right. Great idea!'

Sam adjusted his gla.s.ses on his nose. Terry said, 'Here comes the bus.'

By the time they'd got into the city, a twenty-minute bus ride later, each of them was disgusted with the company of the other. Terry was angling to go to a department store, where a Coventry City footballer was appearing in public to open a new sports department. Only out of decency did he invite the other two along.

'I'd rather watch snot congeal,' said Clive.

'You got plenty of that lately,' Terry fired over his shoulder, already gone.

Clive had his own appointment with a visiting Russian Grand Master of chess. The Russian was in town to play twenty-four local challengers simultaneously, and Clive had earned the right to be one of them. Thus Sam was abandoned. He stood at the top of the town under the Lady G.o.diva clock, wondering where to go. He'd come here expressly to accomplish the tedious ch.o.r.e of Christmas shopping. It was a bitterly cold day. Tiny flurries of wind-blown frost never quite graduated to what might have been called snow.

On the stroke of noon, the clock above him began to strike. The mechanical Lady G.o.diva whirred forth precariously, but the third stroke of the timepiece clonked hollowly as Lady G.o.diva wobbled to an unexpected halt. Sam looked up. G.o.diva's enamel buff skin seemed to chafe visibly in the cold air. Peeping Tom had just managed to insert a nose between his half-opened shutters. The mechanism, either frozen or failed, continued to clonk ineffectively until, before the job was completed, it too gave up the ghost.

Sam looked around. No crowd had gathered. Shoppers marched briskly past, huddled into heavy coats, faces deranged by the imperative of seasonal spending. No one seemed particularly dismayed by the dysfunction of Lady G.o.diva and Peeping Tom or even of the town clock. The public simply proceeded, with appalling dedication.

Sam was astonished. Why did no one rush out to fix the clock? Why didn't crowds of outraged and stubborn Coventrians form a large, unruly scrum and demand an immediate restoration of the city's timepiece? But that was it. If something was wrong, they simply put their heads down and went on without righting it. He was appalled by humanity's capacity to allow a broken thing to go unfixed.

'It's just a clock,' said a voice behind him.

Sam turned. Sitting on the steps of the bank beneath the clock, her knees drawn up under her chin, was the Tooth Fairy. Sam felt a compression in his bowels and, for a moment, a painful ringing in his ears. The street tilted slightly.