The Tooth Fairy Part 14

'Bert Weedon Invites You to Play Guitar in a Day,' Bill recalled precisely. Bill, who as an RAF pilot had been shot down in the war, also thanked Sam for his Christmas gift. 'Scout neckerchief and woggle. Colours of the Coventry Thirty-ninth, unless I'm mistaken.' He said this without blinking and with no trace of evaluation in his voice.

Before visiting, it emerged, Bill and Madge had called in on Sam's Aunt Bettie and Uncle Harold, with whom Sam had exchanged gifts on Christmas Eve. Bald Uncle Harold had received from Sam a hairnet. Bettie, a silent dog whistle. This last, they all agreed, would have been a useful gift but for one problem: no dog.

As they were departing, Uncle Bill pulled Sam aside and secretly pressed the neckerchief into his hand. 'I'm a bit old for Scouts, Sam, but thank you all the same,' he whispered. Bewildered, Sam looked at the neckerchief in his hand and quickly stuffed it into his pocket.

After Bill and Madge had departed, Connie and Nev stared hard at their son, whose only recourse was to blink back at them, until Nev took off his plastic Beatle wig. 'This is making my head itch,' he said. 'Let's get on with dinner.'

Sam took off upstairs to examine the neckerchief. Unlike his own abandoned neckerchief, resting there on the wardrobe shelf, lovingly washed and pressed by Connie, this one was grubby and sweat-soiled. The gold embossment on the leather woggle had been effaced by use. It was, without doubt, Tooley's neckerchief. It bore his smell.

It was a warning from the Tooth Fairy. A reminder.

He took the neckerchief outside. While Nev carved the turkey and Connie made the gravy, he doused the neckerchief in paraffin and burned it at the top of the garden. The charred woggle he threw into the dustbin.

Sam himself had better luck with Christmas gifts received. Among other things, Connie and Nev had, indeed, bought him a sizeable telescope which he set up in his bedroom, angled at Mars. Terry, meanwhile, had new football boots and a full Coventry City FC football strip, the s.h.i.+rt of which he now wore. Clive had a chemistry set so big it had to be rigged up in the shed outside, which Eric Rogers was already calling the Stink Box. Clive was still a little swollen-headed after his rub with the Russian Grand Master, with whom he had come close to forcing a draw. The Grand Master, having simultaneously eliminated most of the players in the first half-hour, striding rapidly from table to table and moving his pieces almost without thinking, had congratulated Clive and had something to say to the boy.

'He said,' Clive reported to the others, ' ''Don't underestimate your opponents, but don't overestimate them either.'' '

'What did he mean by that?' asked Terry.

'It means,' said Sam, 'that Clive tries to outsmart himself.'

Clive stopped twiddling with the Spirograph. 'Are you seeing that tart over the holidays?'

'What?' said Sam.

'That tart. Are you seeing her?'

'You mean Alice?'

'That's the tart's name, isn't it?'

'She's not a tart.'

'She's a bit of all right,' put in Terry. 'I certainly wouldn't mind.'

'I haven't seen her. She hasn't been around.'

'She's a tart,' Clive said again, nastily. 'A slag.'

'No she's not,' said Sam.

'A bag. A s.l.u.t. A dog.'

'Cut it out!'

'Why?'

'Just cut it out!'

'Come on,' said Terry, not liking the way things were developing. 'Let's go downstairs and give Derek a hard time.'

23.

Demise of the Purple Thistle Club The heart-piercing cold weather of Christmas translated itself into snow for New Year's Eve. It fell outside Sam's window, at first in wind-blown whorls and spirals and curlicues and finally in large, soft, slowly falling flakes. Sam lay on his bed for most of the morning, watching it. Occasionally his attention turned to the unwrapped Christmas gift. He ran his fingers across the green-and-yellow foil, searching for a seam, a flap, a way in without tearing the paper. Then he would look out again at the deep feathering and the crumpled clouds promising more snow.

'Every new snowflake is ridden by a Tooth Fairy,' a perverse voice said, somewhere inside him.

By early afternoon the wind had swept the snow into impressive, narcotic drifts. Then it stopped. Sam hid the unwrapped gift back under his bed and dressed for the outdoors. He tied a scarf around his neck, pulled on his coat and set out.

Connie called him back. 'Where you going?'

'Out.'

'Not in those shoes you're not.'

He was grateful no one was around to see him wearing rubber boots. The boots squeaked against the snow as he trudged up the lane. There was no other sound. The snow numbed the earth, m.u.f.fled it and drained it of all colour, making everything simple. He felt exhilarated with nothing to feel excited about, courageous with nowhere to go.

The frozen pond was deceptively carpeted with snow. He thought about the pike trapped under it and tried, but failed, to kick a hole in the ice with the heel of his rubber boot. Looking across the field, he saw the dense, dark woods beyond. It had been a long time since he'd been in the woods.

At the edge of the trees, his feet broke through snow-covered tangles of dead bramble, bracken and leaf-mould. The earth under the snow was moist and brown, rich and curranty like a cake beneath a layer of marzipan. Breaking through the outlying trees, he found the woods made anew. Nothing stirred, and all noise from beyond the woods was baffled by the density of snow on the trees. The woods were stunned. It was a moment in closed time, a dream of ecstatic paralysis, a phase of Creation in which the trees waited impatiently to take on colour, sound, texture.

Sam felt like an intruder offered a glimpse of the miraculous. He stumbled along like a dreamer, trying to follow paths he should have known easily, losing his way, finding it again. A fire burned in the middle of the woods, and he was looking for it. Not a fire with orange flames, crackling and smoking as it burned, not that sort of fire, but one burning with tender rage, flames invisible, heat impalpable: the fire of something in a state of slow decay.

Then he found it. A hollow in the stump of an oak, obscured by bushes, partially covered over by brambles and broken branches, as if someone had dragged a pile of woodland debris across the tree hollow to hide something . . .

He gasped, and his breath came out like a low bark because at first it seemed as if there were orange flames, three feet high, licking from the hollow, wavering against the white snow. Then he realized he was looking not at fire but at the brilliant orange winter coat of a dog-fox, balanced on the rim of the stump, dipping its muzzle into the hollow, chewing vaguely and without interest.

Sam's rasping bark made it turn around. The fox looked over its shoulder at him with yellow, conspiratorial eyes, hardly startled. It skipped off the stump before trotting nimbly through the snow, disappearing behind the scrub.

Sam looked back at the hollow trunk, his heart hammering. Had the fox uncovered the thing he feared most? He dithered between approaching the tree stump and running away: he felt he should cover anything exposed by the fox and yet dared not bring himself to look.

'Hey! What are you doing?'

He spun round. It was Alice. She wore her leather jacket and suede mittens and a long scarf wound round and round her neck. Her nose was pinched and blue. Sam felt he was going to retch.

'Fancy meeting you here!'

'Fancy,' Sam said.

'You all right? You look sort of funny.'

She was huddled inside her jacket. Her cheeks were ruddy, and her blue eyes were bright with reflected chips of ice. Sam saw she was still wearing baseball boots, and all he could think of saying was, 'b.u.mpers.'

'So?'

'I can't believe you're wearing b.u.mpers in the snow.'

'So? I can't believe you're wearing Wellingtons.'

Sam still felt as if he might be violently sick. 'Got any ciggies?'

'Plenty!'

The nausea began to subside. 'Come on. Let's go back up by the pond.'

Sam was relieved to get out of the woods. They walked side by side, talking about what they did over Christmas, where they'd been, what presents they'd been given. When they reached the pond, the car seat was covered with six inches of snow. They didn't bother to clear it before sitting down and lighting up.

'What were you doing in the woods?' Alice wanted to know.

'Walking,' said Sam.

'Me too. Sometimes I like it. Just walking. On my own. Mostly on my own.'

He exhaled a thick blue plume of smoke.

'That's good: you're smoking properly now. When I first met you, you didn't even know how to smoke. Anyway, I don't mean you. I was glad to see you in the woods. I just mean, there you are, walking on your own in the woods, and you don't know who you're going to see. It could be anyone. Or anything. But I'm glad it was you.'

'When did you get back?'

'Yesterday. We were supposed to stay over New Year, but my mum had an argument with my uncle. So here I am.'

'What did they fall out about?'

Alice shrugged irritably, blew smoke and stood up. 'Something about cooking. It's too cold to sit around,' she said stamping her feet. 'What are you doing tonight?'

'Nothing.'

'It's New Year's Eve.'

'So?'

'Aren't your folks going out?'

Sam knew that Connie and Nev would be cheering in the New Year at the Working Men's Social Club. Every year, for as long as he could remember, they had come home giddy about half an hour after midnight, wearing cardboard policemen's or pirates' hats, and Nev would jog through the house holding aloft a piece of coal and a penny. 'Probably.'

'I could come round.' So startled was Sam by the idea that he just looked at her. She tossed away her cigarette b.u.t.t. It hissed in the snow. 'Not unless you want me to.'

'No. It's OK.'

'I'll bring a bottle of Woodp.e.c.k.e.r.'

'Great.'

'See you later, then.'

The sky was already shading from turquoise to mauve as Alice left. Sam trudged home through the snow in a state of blended terror and excitement. He kicked off his boots and went straight upstairs to his room, lying down flat on his bed to compose himself. After a few moments he reached under the bed for the unwrapped package, turning it this way and that under the yellow glare of his bedside light.

Alice is coming, an inner voice kept saying, Alice is coming.

Tea was early that evening. Connie bustled around, trying to get ready in time so they could 'get up there and get a seat'. She accused Nev of taking too long in the bath, and Nev blamed her for taking too long at the mirror. Sam kept his head down as his parents infected the household with an hysterical level of personal preparation. Connie finally appeared in a pink nimbus of scent and hair-spray. Nev's skin had about it a strange, scrubbed sheen.

'Make yourself a sandwich,' called Connie, simultaneously spotting a ladder in her stocking and thundering back upstairs to change it. 'We'll never get a seat. You can watch The Purple Thistle Club on TV. You like that.'

'Help yourself to a gla.s.s of ginger wine,' Nev shouted from the hallway, giving his hair-oil a last-minute check in the mirror, 'while you're watching The Purple Thistle Club.'

'Clive or Terry might pop round,' Sam said lightly.

Nev came in from the hall and thrust a huge, scrubbed forefinger between Sam's eyes. 'No messing,' he said, repeating the phrase to cover all possibilities. 'And that means No Messing.'

'They might not come,' Sam said innocently. 'But they might.'

'Get on,' said Connie opening the front door, 'or we won't get a seat.'

The door closed behind them.

Sam scratched his head. He switched on the TV, and switched it off again. He plumped up a couple of cus.h.i.+ons on the sofa. Then he found two tall gla.s.ses, placed them at the ready and sat with a straight back, hands resting on his knees, waiting.

After half an hour he began to feel self-conscious. He went upstairs to the bathroom and found Nev's aftershave, liberally splas.h.i.+ng his face with the disgracefully pungent lotion. After that he stripped off his s.h.i.+rt and sponged his armpits. The doorbell rang.

b.u.t.toning on his s.h.i.+rt, he ran to the front window and, looking down, he saw Clive and Terry staring expectantly at the door. He waited. Terry leaned forwards and rang the doorbell a second time. Sam glanced at the clock. It was eight thirty.

Sam had made no arrangement to see either of them that evening but had a fair idea they would show up. He moved back through the bedroom and waited silently at the top of the stairs, holding his breath. The letterbox flap was pushed open and Sam heard Terry call his name. He heard them discussing where he might be as their voices trailed away. He prayed they wouldn't run into Alice on her way there.

By nine thirty he decided she wasn't coming. He poured himself a gla.s.s of ginger wine, switched on the TV and felt a deep draught of loneliness. On screen The Purple Thistle Club Hosts Hogmanay would be at it for hours. A bale of straw had been dragged into the studio, somehow to denote the Caledonian flavour of the evening, and he was staring uninterestedly at the antics of a grown man in a kilt when there came a gentle tapping at the window. He drew back the curtains. Alice was at the window, framed by the snow and the wintry dark.

'I nearly didn't come,' she said, handing him a bottle of Woodp.e.c.k.e.r.

'Shall I take your coat?'

'No. First my mum was going out. Then she wasn't. Then she was. Then she wasn't. Then someone rang to beg her, which was what she really wanted, so she went out. I was going to phone you and tell you.'

'We don't have a phone. Did she go to the Working Men's Club?'

'You're joking.' She slumped on the sofa and flicked back her long hair. 'She wouldn't be seen dead in such a place. G.o.d, you're not watching that, are you?'

They switched off The Purple Thistle Club and Alice showed Sam how to find the waveband of the pirate station Radio Caroline on the radio. Alice sat on the edge of the sofa, her arms dangling between her legs, looking like she might get up and leave at any moment. Sam produced the gla.s.ses, but she waved them away. 'Tastes better from the bottle,' she said, demonstrating with a hefty swig before pa.s.sing the cider to him.

After a while she relaxed back into the sofa but always keeping an eye on him. She had a habit of c.o.c.king her head to one side. Then she released her long brown hair from its pony-tail. Her hair fell over her face, and she watched him from behind it with sparkling pale-blue eyes. 'Want a ciggie?'

'Naw. My folks don't smoke. They'd smell it when they get back. High Squawk.'