The Tooth Fairy Part 23

'Maybe you saw something there too. You sensed some danger for your friend, something about his father's behaviour that was deeply disturbing. You wanted him out of there. The mind is an incredible measuring instrument, Sam. It knows more than you think. It knows more than it should.'

'How do you know all that?'

'It's my job to know.'

'The Tooth Fairy said Terry owed me his life anyway.'

'And therefore could afford a hand?'

'Yes. That's what the Tooth Fairy told me.'

'Sod the Tooth Fairy!' shouted Skelton, at the end of his patience. 'Why don't you get that Tooth Fairy and give it a good s.h.a.gging!'

'I do. Sometimes.'

'Yes yes yes. I know you do. You've told me. I'm just running out of ideas.'

Skelton was brutally honest with Sam about the limitations of his ability to deal with Sam's problem. For the psychiatrist, Sam was a unique case. Skelton had encountered plenty of children and adult patients with dangerous imaginary friends, but in his experience these ent.i.ties either disappeared one day and never came back or developed into cla.s.sic symptoms of paranoia, schizophrenia or other self-sustaining delusory conditions. Sam seemed to operate perfectly normally except for this one conviction. He had, Skelton had reported a long time ago, never been a danger either to himself or to others. So far.

'And what about this wonderful . . . Alice, was it? Alice? I'm certain that when you lie down in the gra.s.s with this wonderful Alice, you'll not see this Tooth Fairy again.'

'How do you know that?'

'How do I know? I'm paid to know! It's my job to know! And I don't mind telling you, I'm disappointed with your progress there. You've got to try, son. Try. Do you know the secret of success when it comes to women? To try. You may get your face slapped. You may endure the occasional stinging rebuke or withering humiliation. But if you want some apples in your barrow, you've got to put your barrow under the apple tree. See? You've got to try!'

'It's more impossible than ever now.'

'Why? Tell me why.' Skelton was almost crying with frustration.

'Because that's what this was all about. Between me and Terry. We both want Alice. That's why Terry's hand got blown off.'

'And that,' screamed Skelton, 'is why I said to you that you just don't have that power! G.o.d give me strength!'

'On television,' said Sam, pus.h.i.+ng his spectacles up the bridge of his nose, 'psychiatrists don't get all worked up like you do.'

Skelton bared his nicotine-stained teeth. 'I'm coming to your house with a brick. And I'm going to throw it through your television screen. Now off you go. Make another appointment with Mrs Marsh on the way out. Don't make any bombs. Have a good year.'

'Any news on the Interceptor?' Sam said, as he got out of his chair.

'Eh? Oh, nothing to report. Everyone I've mentioned it to thinks it's clever but too fanciful. I'm still trying.'

'You know, I don't want it patented for myself. I want it for Terry's father. He invented it.'

'I knew that.'

'How? How did you know that?'

'Get out of here,' said Skelton.

Sam spent a great deal of time walking in the woods, trying to figure it all out. He knew he should avoid the site where Tooley's corpse lay mouldering, yet the extraordinarily radiant presence of the carrion flower drew him like a beacon. Sometimes he would stand at a distance of twenty yards, observing the flower from behind a tree; occasionally he would approach it, circling it, peering at the base of the hollow trunk from which it grew. He wondered which particular part of Tooley's corpse succoured its roots, whether brains or guts.

One day Sam felt oddly energized. He stood close to the plant, inspecting the purple leaves and the white stamen. It seemed to have reached a certain maturity and, Sam felt, was about to make a spectacular transformation. The fat stamen was ready to burst. The air about it quivered.

Sam experienced a stab of impatience, almost as if it were communicated directly from the plant. He felt drawn to helping Nature along. Using a stick to scrabble among the leaf-mulch at the base of the plant, he uncovered the puffy, poisonous yellow fungus beneath. It had swelled considerably since he was last there and had grown to the size of a small skull. Sam touched his stick to it. The tumorous white sac responded to the pressure with a wheeze of air and swelled visibly. Sam dropped the stick in surprise and stepped back. There followed a second consumptive sigh of air as the venomous sac puffed up still further. The short blasts of air began to accelerate, and slowly the fungus swelled like a football inflated by a bicycle pump. The puffball continued to wheeze and inflate with increasing rapidity, until it began to resolve into an identifiable face. Tooley's. It was sallow, jaundiced and poisonous, cheeks horribly scarred, eyes oily with hatred.

Still hyperventilating, each breath coming like a sobbing wheeze, Sam jerked up in bed, the crocodile clip of the Nightmare Interceptor tearing from his nostril.

The pond was bulldozed, as threatened. One day two giant yellow earth-movers came in, frightened the fauna, flattened the field and pushed a huge pile of earth into the pond, reducing it to a third of its recent size. It was all over in a day. The Moodies went up to survey the damage.

They looked on in silent dismay. They felt an inadmissible sense of personal violation. As if someone had stolen something intimate from them while they'd been sleeping. Like a vital organ, such as a lung. Or perhaps a tooth.

Even their old hideout had been destroyed. The place where they had spent so many afternoons, in fair weather or foul, was now a flattened plane of red earth imprinted with thick caterpillar tracks. The trees formerly overhanging the pond were uprooted and piled high for burning. The old Morris seat, springs now exposed through the torn leather, had been casually slung on the top of the pyre. The water in the small pond that remained had been stirred the colour of stewed tea. It seemed impossible that it could continue to sustain the myriad forms of pond life it had supported for years: herons and moorhens and swifts, perch and pike, toads and newts, dragonflies and water-boatmen, snails and sp.a.w.n, duckweed and spyrogyra.

'They were only supposed to fill in half !' Alice's voice, though subdued, burned with indignation. 'Surely they can't get away with that!'

'What do you suggest we do?' Clive said bitterly. 'Dig it out again?'

No one mentioned anything about bombing any more.

Somehow it was more than just the pond that had been taken away. None of them could say what it was exactly, but the event rang for each of them like a bell marking a stage in a terrible race. Something like a whisper, more of a warning signal than a voice, sounded out of the cracked, tracked, hard-packed earth, saying, This is how it is, this is how it will be, I can change anything at any time, and there is never, ever, any going back.

'Hey, Clive,' Terry said. 'This is yer blues.'

Clive had become a living authority on pop music. He'd discovered it was more socially acceptable to show off about the rhythm and blues antecedents of the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds than it was to exhibit comprehensive knowledge of calculus and atomic theory. He didn't stint himself. He traced lines of influence back to the Delta blues and to Mississippi sharecropper tunes. Whatever it was that the Cream had laid down or John Mayall's Bluesbreakers were getting on, Clive knew the source. 'Yeah, but you see, that was a Blind Lemon Jefferson composition . . .' 'Oh, yeah, the Robert Johnson number . . .' 'Uh huh, Josh White did it first . . .' 'Who? . . . No, you're probably thinking of Howlin' Wolf.'

It was exasperating for Sam and Terry to be told they were mistakenly thinking of someone they'd never even heard of in the first place Howlin' who? But they knew better than to argue. Clive was never wrong about these things, and he had an entire thesis running in his head. He started buying the music magazines, Melody Maker and New Musical Express, just to pick, arguments with the rock journalists. He sent vitriolic and sarcastic letters to these journals on a weekly basis, undeterred by the fact that not once did they get published. He also collected in a big way, building up an impressive library of blues records. He took a job pumping petrol after school to pay for the habit. Clive became the boy you never saw without the trademark alb.u.m sleeve under his arm.

Of the others, it was Alice who was most impressed by his encyclopaedic knowledge of the genre. He loaned his records to her, and they would discuss the stuff for hours, humming tunes, tossing hook lines back and forth. It was deeply irritating to Sam and Terry.

'It's pure mood,' he condescended to explain to them. 'That's why Alice and I like it. Deep Mood. It's Redstone music.' The casual reference to 'Alice and I' went a long way.

Clive's acne hadn't disappeared; Thomas Aquinas failed to produce the desired miracle. It had subsided, however, leaving him with a face permanently inflamed and prematurely aged. When Terry said to him, as they looked upon the filled-in pond, 'Hey, Clive, this is yer blues,' and Clive lifted his face in wry recognition, it was Sam who thought how extraordinarily old Clive looked. And when he came to scrutinize Terry and Alice, they too seemed suddenly aged. Not deeply aged, and no older than mid-teenagers should look. But it seemed to Sam as if one moment they had all been fresh-faced children, and life had been irresponsible and adventurous, full of implacable, long hot summers and inconsolably brief, freezing winters, and now suddenly everything you said and did counted for something.

He wasn't sure that he was happy with the change.

35.

New Activities 'Finished,' Alice casually announced on the bus home from school one day, referring to her boyfriend. 'We're finished.'

Seated behind Sam and Alice, Clive's ears p.r.i.c.ked up. Sam's attention was fixed on Alice, so he couldn't possibly see Clive's ears, even so he knew instantly that his friend's ears had stiffened with interest. Perhaps the air around Clive quivered slightly and became hotter, or cooler, by one degree. It was just one of those things it was possible to know.

Sam was no less interested. He wanted to ask whether this meant that Alice's mother had also 'finished' with the sports-car-driving boyfriend from London. Instead he asked, 'Did you finish with him, or did he finish with you?'

'Mutual agreement,' Alice said, looking out of the window. 'We both thought it was for the best.' Then she glanced back at him with a look that told him she'd been dumped.

Sam thought the proper thing to do was to mouth some words of sympathy, but he couldn't because his heart was inexpressibly gladdened. His blood started singing in his veins. He readjusted his gla.s.ses on his nose and tried to disguise the faint twitchings of a smile. 'You're better off without him. He was too old for you.'

Alice said nothing. Clive didn't know Sam had once encountered Alice's boyfriend. 'You've met him?'

'Yeah.'

'What's he like?'

'What was he like, you mean. A rodent. A weasel.'

Alice said nothing. 'You never told me you met him,' Clive protested.

'No,' said Sam. 'I never told you.'

It had been his secret. He collected secrets about Alice the way some people collect matchbox labels. He h.o.a.rded scrupulously all small intimacies and confidentialities concerning her but was not above releasing small examples of privy information to Terry and Clive, to confirm his superior bonding with Alice. He'd never told them that he'd met this boyfriend, or that he'd once read snippets of a letter, or that he'd found evidence of a gossamer nature or, indeed, about the bizarre triangular relations.h.i.+p which he himself didn't even understand involving Alice's mother.

'What about your mother?'

Clive's interest fibrillated again. A damp, homicidal film formed over Alice's eyes. 'It's all over,' she said meaningfully to Sam. 'All over.'

Now that this new development had been announced, he understood exactly why he had been so guarded about all this information. It wasn't simply respect for Alice and protection of her private matters that had guided him: he'd been motivated by advantage. As the bus sped home that day he knew Clive would soon tell Terry what he'd just heard, and that between the three of them the gloves would come off, and that it would be game on for Alice.

Sam made a sly a.s.sessment of her as she gazed sadly out of the window. She was not strikingly beautiful, yet she was irresistible: her dark hair tumbled over an ivory-pale neck, reaching almost to the half tennis-ball convexity of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Something about the school tie knotted carelessly at her throat made him want to cradle her, and her teasing habit of tracing her slender white fingers along her black-nylon-clad thighs provoked him beyond all endurance. It didn't seem at all ridiculous to him that he wanted nothing more than to marry Alice.

And so, he suspected, did Terry and Clive.

Alice, however, was keeping her options open. It was never certain that she even considered Sam, Terry or Clive as conjugal options.

'Do you want to come with me to a football match?' Terry asked her one day.

She squinted at him doubtfully. 'Football? Are the others going?'

'No.'

'Then I don't think I'd like it.'

'Let's go to your place and play some blues records,' Clive suggested.

'OK. Get Terry and Sam to come too.'

'Oh. Why?'

'It'll be more fun.'

Sam remembered Skelton and took a deep breath. 'Want to go and see a film on Sat.u.r.day?'

'Have you asked Terry and Clive?'

'Well, no.'

'You mean just me and you in the back row or something?'

'Or something.'

'Hmm. Fruity.'

Which wasn't a no, but it wasn't exactly a yes either. While the three boys watched each other like nervous hares around Alice, she seemed quite dexterous at avoiding the conferment of particular favours or finding herself alone with any one of them. They, on the other hand, were prepared to jump through hoops of fire to be with Alice or simply to ensure none of the others enjoyed the advantage of being alone with her. Consequently they found themselves involved in activities alien to the very fibres of their souls.

'Pull it! Just pull it back!' Alice screamed at Terry.

'I'm trying! It's not easy with one hand!'

Clive's horse seemed to want to go home. 'No! Not that way! Make it come round!' Alice was almost at the end of her tether. Their inept.i.tude dismayed her.

Then Sam's decided to sit down. 'It doesn't want to go,' he said lamely.

'Make it f.u.c.king go! You have to make it go!'

She turned her own horse and trotted back to Sam's grey mare, thwacking its haunches with her riding crop. The mare got up. 'Don't let her do that again!' Then she cantered off after Clive, grabbing the reins of his chestnut mount and bringing it back in line. Meanwhile Terry's dun was still munching gra.s.s from the hedgerow, unchecked.

Fifteen minutes into the hack and they'd only managed to cover a few hundred yards. Alice had been careful to find quiet nags for all three, but none of the horses were accustomed to trekking, and she'd underestimated the terror and incompetence of teenage boys in the face of livestock.

'What is the matter with you? I've taken seven-year-old girls out on these horses! You have to make them do what you want to do!'

'WHOA!' screamed Terry when his dun stopped chewing gra.s.s and tried to take a bite out of Clive's chestnut.

The chestnut wheeled round in a tight circle. Clive dragged the bit too hard to his left side. 'f.u.c.kf.u.c.kf.u.c.kf.u.c.k!'

'Calm down! Don't panic it!'

'You said control it!'

'I didn't say rip its mouth out with the bit!' Alice was leaning precariously from her own horse, holding Terry's reins in one hand and grasping Clive's in the other. Sam's horse at least was now standing upright again and waiting obediently. Alice's riding hat fell off and bounced on the Tarmac of the country lane. Her hair fell forward and across a face pink with exasperation and exertion. Her pert b.u.t.tocks, delineated by tight-fitting jodhpurs, rose out of the leather saddle and were offered to the air as she struggled to bring the other two horses under control. The sight of Alice's bottom so presented gave Sam an instant and unexpectedly ferocious erection.

While he was still considering what he would like to do to Alice, someone leapt roughly on his horse from behind, hugging Sam at the waist and violently kicking the horse in its flanks. The grey reared in the air, whinnying and snorting, before galloping two hundred yards along the country lane, breaching the hedgerow and racing into a small copse. Terrified, Sam let go of the reins and knitted his fingers in the horse's mane instead. It only seemed to make the horse bolt faster.

'I LOVE HORSES!' shrieked the Tooth Fairy over his shoulder. Twisting branches lashed at Sam's face as they thundered through the thickening copse. The Tooth Fairy squealed with laughter, reaching a hand for his groin and pus.h.i.+ng her wet tongue in his ear. Sam saw a low branch flas.h.i.+ng towards him at head height. He ducked, flattening himself against the horse's stretched, thick-veined neck. The Tooth Fairy sprang out of the saddle and grabbed the onrus.h.i.+ng branch. Sam looked back to see her swinging herself up on the branch, laughing and shouting something incomprehensible, her words lost to the wind in his ears. The horse swerved suddenly, and Sam felt himself pitched out of the saddle, speeding through the air and coming to a sudden stop at the base of an oak.

Badly winded, he must have pa.s.sed out for a moment because when he came to, Alice was dismounting and hurrying towards him. His own horse stood idly nearby.

'Are you all right? Are you hurt?'

'I'm all right.'