The Tooth Fairy (13 page)

A Scout was still dangling silently over them. He’d been there all the time, blindfolded and gagged. Clive wanted to leave him, but Terry wouldn’t. They gently lowered the Scout and cut the ropes from around his legs without a word. His hands were still tied behind his back, but before leaving him they took his gag away so that he could shout for help.

Then they left the scene. By now the woods were pitch-dark. They decided to exit the woods by the north side. On
their way they had to scatter from the path to avoid an advancing gang of Scouts hurrying along with a lighted candle in a jar. The Scouts all had a piece of string tied round their arms. A new Wide Game had begun.

They broke out from the woods and sprinted across a ploughed field. Eventually they reached the gymkhana ring. By the time they drew alongside the pond, they were breathless.

‘Get rid of the knife,’ said Clive.

Terry pulled the Swiss Army knife from his pocket. He looked at it sadly.

‘Get rid of it,’ Clive said again. Sam hadn’t spoken since the incident.

Terry flung the knife into the middle of the pond. The black water glooped, sucking the knife into itself. ‘That’s the last time I go to Scouts,’ Terry said.

‘No. We have to go next week. As if everything is normal.’ Clive was already thinking everything through.

Then they went home. Connie and Nev were watching TV when Sam got back. They gave him hell for breaking his glasses.

That night Sam dreamed. She came to him, beautiful and repulsive, her lips stained the colour of a broken damson, her face whited, the black grapes of her nipples and the goblet-breasts visible through her stretched bodice. Her striped leggings were torn at the top of her fleshy thighs to reveal an unguarded zone of white skin and a tight, autumnal thicket of pubic curls streaming an unholy hedgerow scent of earth, fire, nightshade in flower, as she swung a supple leg across him, straddling him, poised, hovering over him, holding off the moment, her vicious and tender gaze pinioning him, moon’s catchlight in her eyes terrorizing him, ah-ah, and he knew it no longer mattered whether she/he/it was dream or substance, since she had now shown herself beyond the limits of his dreamed room, in that gloaming in the woods, in the forest, in the dark, the blade-thing, saving and protecting, borne on a wild-eyed horse, ah-ah, and as the moon spun red outside his window her pale face reflected its red sheen and her coiling, corkscrew fingernails of years and years of uncut growth teased his boy’s chest, a blade, a threat, a promise, but he knew she could at any time gently reach a hand inside his flesh and take a part of him, the thing she wanted, didn’t even have to lower herself on to him, she could hover above him, pulling at his innards as he rose up, trying to leap at her open crotch until he felt the vulcan wave break, course, flow, slip, ruby to silver, cadmium to mercury, blood to molten metal, strange whiff of alchemy, the smell of
her shivering insubstantial body, drawing him in with her un-fleshy succubus divinity, feeding from him, syphoning, leeching, bleeding him until he knew he would never be free of her, never wanted to be free of her, that he was wedded to the Tooth Fairy, and now she had broken free of the bedroom and found her way into the woods she would keep coming and coming and coming.

Sam’s first term at Thomas Aquinas Grammar passed in a perpetual twilight. If Connie and Nev noticed that their son had become withdrawn, they attributed it to the new school. Certainly they didn’t guess that their twelve-year-old was suffering a burden of guilt entirely appropriate for a first-time murderer.

All three of the boys had, since the incident, kept well away not only from Wistman’s Woods but also from the gymkhana field, the football field and the pond. Sam knew for certain that it was only a matter of time before Tooley’s body would be discovered, and their crime would find them out. Every day he got off the school bus outside his home expecting to see a police car parked on the grass verge and to find those same two book-end detectives drinking tea in the kitchen of his home. Every evening before doing his homework he scoured the pages of the
Coventry Evening Telegraph
for reports of a decomposing body unearthed in Wistman’s Woods. That weeks and months went by with no such report did nothing to make the burden more bearable; it only made the knock on the door ultimately more inevitable.

Anticipation of that knock on the door came regularly at three o’clock every morning. Sam would wake up, bathed in perspiration, as the cast-iron knocker fell in the dead of night. He would lie awake in the dark, waiting for his parents to stir or for a second knock to sound through the sleeping
household; but they never would, and it never did. Meanwhile, his studies suffered.

Terry and Sam had returned to Scouts the week following the slaying of Tooley, pale, nervous, but motivated by Clive, who had drilled them on their story. It became possible, in the company of the other two boys, for Sam actually to believe what they had rehearsed over and over. It was only when he was alone that the truth of the event regathered its shape and returned to torment him.

That first week after the Wide Game, Clive had directed Sam to inquire cheerfully after the whereabouts of Tooley. When he failed, Clive himself marched across to the Eagles’ corner of the schoolroom and put the question directly.

‘He ain’t been around,’ said Lance sullenly. ‘Why do you want to know?’

In a way which deeply impressed Sam, Clive made his eyes shine with naïve enthusiasm. ‘I had to give him a cigarette.’

‘Give it me. I’ll pass it on.’

Clive produced a battered fag from his shirt pocket and handed it over.

‘Now piss off.’

Later Sam plucked up courage to ask again. The question, coming from one of his devoted patrol members, was not unnatural. ‘Probably fucked off to London,’ said Lance, swelling in the job of Acting Patrol Leader. Sam gleaned from Lance that Tooley lived with his grandfather, an old man suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. It was the grandfather who had suggested that Tooley had gone off to London, though his testimony was flawed in that he occasionally couldn’t remember Tooley’s name or even who Tooley was. The story squared with Lance’s view, since Tooley had often claimed he would one day jump on a train to Euston station and from there find a job as a drummer in a rock ‘n’ roll band. ‘He was going to take me with him,’ Lance added sadly.

The weeks passed, and the boys attended Scouts faithfully. Only Linda suspected that something unpleasant had happened. The walk to and from Scouts every Tuesday evening was now a dispiriting trudge, conducted mostly in silence. Linda, in her starched, immaculate blues, would try to lighten them with conversation or questions about what they’d accomplished that evening, but it was hard going. Their extreme reticence struck her as odd. It seemed to her that in attending Scouts there was no joy whatsoever for them but that they persisted for some dour and unfathomable purpose. She could never guess, as she tried to make jokes about woggles or to inquire about reef knots, what lay in their hearts.

Lance soon dropped out, and two other boys from the Eagle patrol were promoted to Leader and Second. New boys joined, and Sam found himself bounced up the patrol pecking-order. Then came investiture evening. The three were invested together after having passed all their Tender-foot tests of Observation, Knotting and Firelighting. They were given badges; they made oaths before the flag of the realm; and they were saluted by the rest of the troop.

‘That’s it,’ Clive said quietly on the way home that night. ‘Two more evenings.’

‘Why?’

‘I overheard Skip moaning to one of the Scouters that most of the kids drop out shortly after they’ve been invested. Two more meetings and that’s our lot. We’re done.’

‘What’s that you were saying?’ Linda wanted to know, waiting for them to catch up with her.

‘Scouts,’ Terry said quickly. ‘We were just saying these meetings are a lot of fun.’

The Christmas holidays approached. Sam stood in the ragged queue of schoolchildren waiting for the bus home after school. His mind, as usual, was not on the present scene of
bawling and jostling kids. He wondered if tonight might be the night when the two detectives would be sipping at their second cups of tea the moment he walked in; and he speculated on why the Tooth Fairy had failed to revisit him since the extraordinary night following the murder of Tooley. Suddenly he was buffeted from behind.

His glasses fell off. Luckily he caught them in a reflex movement. ‘Excuse me,’ a sarcastic female voice said, over-loudly, in his ear. By the time he’d replaced his glasses, all he could see was a girl making her way to the back of the disorderly queue. When she reached the snaking tail of the queue, she turned and looked back at him from under a long fringe of brown hair.

It was the girl from the gymkhana. The horse rider. She looked different, younger in her school uniform. Her hair, released from its pony-tail, cascaded over her shoulders, and her fringe was cut in a straight line above her dark eyebrows. The hem of her regulation pleated grey skirt stopped at a non-regulation point several inches above the knee, and when she drew her blazer aside to place a lazy, elegant hand on her hip, the action seemed to advertise a line of thigh just a little too skinny for her black nylons. The expression on her face as she gazed back at Sam was neither hostile nor friendly.

Sam looked away. Instinctively he touched his fingers to his ears, feeling them flame. He had turned, he knew, pink with self-consciousness. It was a relief when the transport arrived, and he was able to join the mêlée pressing to get on to the bus. He took his seat wondering what she was doing there. He knew all the usual faces on the school bus and hers wasn’t one of them.

When her turn came to board the bus she paused in the gangway. For an awful moment Sam thought she was going to sit beside him. Instead she dipped her head towards him, putting her face close to his. She had high cheekbones and
pale-blue eyes, deeply set. Her long hair lightly brushed his arm as she spoke in his ear. ‘I saw you that day.’

Then she was gone, making her way further down the bus.

The girl alighted one stop before Sam’s, about a quarter of a mile away from his home. Struggling but failing to resist the temptation, Sam stared through the window at her as the bus pulled away. But her back was turned as, satchel slung across her shoulder, she walked away in the opposite direction.

Skelton’s concession to Christmas decoration took the form of one tired rope of green glitter pinned to the wall in a slack wave behind his head. A single Christmas card was displayed on his desk. He was smoking a pipe, gazing out of his window when Sam went in.

‘Sit, laddie, sit.’

Skelton had a habit of biting hard on his pipe stem, thus baring his teeth. Some days he wore a tweed suit and some days a baggy, off-white Aran sweater. Today he seemed to be in an informal mood, because it was an Aran-sweater day. His cheeks were swollen and ruddy, his neck the colour of poached lobster. He swayed slightly as he moved across from the window before hoisting himself on to the edge of his large, polished desk, his feet a-dangle, and exposing an inch of hairy leg between his Argyle socks and his corduroy trousers.

‘Biters and bedwetters,’ he said through a mouthful of pipe stem.

Sam looked up.

‘Biters and bedwetters. Which are you?’

Sam looked down.

‘That’s what comes to me, laddie. The one lot goes on to become your common-or-garden psychopath; the other lot become poets, God help us all. Wet your bed recently? Bitten anybody’s face lately?’

‘No.’

‘No? The boy says no. Do I believe him? Aye. Why not? He’s never lied to me yet.’ Skelton waved his pipe stem at an imaginary audience. Sam was so convinced he had to look over his shoulder to check that no one else was in the room. ‘Now then, there’s a young fellow, Timmy Turtle – not his real name, don’t go telling your ma – he was here just yesterday. Stand up and have a look at the chair you’re sitting on. Stand and look.’ Sam did as he was told. A broad stain darkened the upholstery. ‘Don’t worry, it’s dry now. This Timmy Turtle, fourteen years old and still pissing the bed every night. And just when I’m talking to him about it, nice, friendly chat like we’re having now, he pisses his pants again. On my chair.’

Skelton clamped his jaws on his pipe. His teeth clacked against the stem, and he puffed thoughtfully. He snatched his pipe from his mouth and said, ‘Then there’s Mickey the Muncher. Bit his mother – doesn’t have a father, see – then bit his sister, his brother, his aunt, his nurse, his teacher. Then because I wouldn’t let him take a chunk out of me, he had a go at my table leg.’ He pointed with the stem of his pipe. Sam could clearly see marks where the veneer of the table had been bitten down to the internal wood.

‘So, laddie, why am I telling you this? Because I’m thinking, if the lad’s not a biter and he’s not a bedwetter, and he doesn’t fit one or two other minor categories I’ve drawn up over the years, then why in God’s blithering name is he coming to see me?’ Skelton leaned forward, putting his face within inches of Sam’s. The boy got a sweet-rotten blast of whisky and tobacco. The psychiatrist’s eyes were bloodshot. Broken purple veins stood up either side of his nose. ‘Can you answer that for me?’

‘No.’

‘No, he says. No. You see, there’s Mickey the Muncher. Now, sure as God made little green apples, our Mickey has got a great future ahead of him as a homicidal maniac.
Nothing I can do is going to change that. It’s already encrypted. And Timmy Turtle is going to be a whining versifier, which is even worse in my book. I’d lock up all the snivelling poets with the killers if I had my way. But, there again, I can’t do anything about it. So the point is, laddie, if I know what the problem is with these two boys, and I can’t do anything about it, what am I supposed to do with you, whose problem I know nothing about?’