The Tooth Fairy (10 page)

Sam looked at the door and then back at Skelton.

Skelton blew smoke from the barrel of his own imaginary gun and offered an evil, conspiratorial smile.

Since Clive had demonstrated the art of masturbation by the pond, Sam developed an easy facility for the habit in the privacy of his bed. His imagination, he discovered, offered considerable aid and encouragement to the practice. Female volunteers were numerous. Actresses were easily persuaded to step forward from the TV screen, their enthusiasm matched by one or two of the prettier female teachers at Thomas Aquinas Grammar, and indeed some of the older girls seen around the school were equally pliant. He did make the occasional concession to the girls who were his immediate contemporaries, in that he would stand on a table before a small, energized crowd of them and masturbate for their enjoyment and edification; they in turn would gaze back in awed fascination and amusement, daring each other to touch the object of interest. It was during the performance of these fantasies that he could achieve the unspeakably satisfying throb Clive had earlier described. But it was a dry throb and not at all the fountain to which Clive had attested.

Then one night it came.

Sam was asleep and dreaming. He was hiding in the gymkhana pavilion. The doors of the pavilion had been blasted away by a bomb, and the girl in jodhpurs and riding boots was searching for him. Outside the pavilion a huge white horse grazed noisily. Beyond the horse he could see the woods and the pond, gleaming in a yellow light, all strangely
out of proportion. The girl spotted him through the chink between the crossed poles of his hiding place, and their eyes locked. She put a hand to her mouth, backing away slowly, reaching for the reins of the grazing horse. Mounting the horse, she kicked it on. At first the animal resisted, until finally she urged it inside the pavilion. Suddenly the horse jumped, its forelegs stretching towards him. Miraculously it passed through the three-inch gap into his hiding place.

And he was awake, back in his own bed; but the horse had completed its jump through the open window of his bedroom. Still on its back, the girl rider steadied the horse before slipping down from the saddle, shimmying slightly to advertise the sword-like slimness of her thighs in her tight, tight jodhpurs. She took off her riding hat, swishing her long, dark hair like a horse’s tail as it fell free. Only then did Sam become aware that his own hand was grasping his swollen cock in a vice-like grip. Fire scourged his bowels, and there was a lazy tickling in his testicles. Something ominous was about to happen.

‘This is a dream,’ he told himself.

Then he woke up, and the girl and the horse were gone. His window was open to the night air. Someone was watching him at the foot of the bed. The Tooth Fairy, after a long absence, was back.

Sam was astonished at how the Tooth Fairy had changed. The outfit was almost the same, with mustard-and-green striped tights and heavy boots. But the face was completely remodelled. It was less heavy; the features were finer, the eyes softer. And when the Tooth Fairy smiled at him, the teeth, although still filed to sharp points, were whiter and smaller. The Tooth Fairy had grown taller and yet had lost weight, exhibiting a trim, lithe frame except around the hips and the buttocks, which had plumped considerably. And even as he looked, Sam saw the unmistakable paired cupolas straining under the tight-fitting black tunic.

‘You’re a . . .’

The Tooth Fairy’s long eyelashes blinked at him. I’m a what?’

‘I mean you’re . . . but I thought you were a . . .’

‘Talk sense or don’t talk at all.’ The voice hadn’t got any higher, but it was now a purr instead of a growl.

‘You’re a girl!’

The smile vanished from the Tooth Fairy’s face. ‘I swear I’m going to kill you one day for the things you say.’

‘But I always thought—’

‘Stop! Don’t say another word!’

‘It’s just that—’

This time the Tooth Fairy stepped up to him and placed her fingers against his mouth. ‘You can be so hurtful, Sam. So hurtful.’ She sat down on the side of the bed, crossing her legs, her nylon tights hissing as one leg brushed another. Sam smelled a new perfume on her fingertips. It was a fragrance he associated with the moist earth at springtime, with woodland bluebells; and there was another, more ambiguous, marine odour.

The Tooth Fairy took her hand from his mouth and looked at him hard, her dark eyes squinting slightly. She quickly removed her tunic, letting her full breasts fall free. Sam looked at the dark buds of her nipples and the surrounding bruise-coloured aureoles. The question was settled beyond dispute. One breast was slightly smaller than the other, and the strange new scent streamed from her body. His breath came shorter. It was the closest the Tooth Fairy had ever been, and he was simultaneously attracted and repelled by her physicality. She was grotesquely beautiful.

‘You’ve got something I want,’ she said.

His mouth dried.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Something Skelton gave to you. I can’t tell you how important it is that you give it to me.’

‘Skelton?’ He remembered the imaginary gun.

‘That old bastard knows nothing. Believe me, I know everything you two say to each other. I have to have it, Sam. I have to have it.’ She was almost pleading with him. ‘Give it to me.’

‘You’re too dangerous.’

‘Anything I’ve ever done to you, I didn’t mean it, Sam. It’s just the way it works out sometimes.’

‘I haven’t got it. Skelton just gave me an imaginary—’

‘You’re hiding it under the bedclothes, Sam.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Let me see. I’m going to have a look.’

Sam was paralysed as she slowly peeled back the bedclothes. She leaned closer so she could see in the dark, and that mysterious new scent broke like a soft wave, a cloying musk, an admixture of tidal odours, marsh gas, mushrooms dipped in honey, an intoxicating smell of corruption and inspiration commingled. He thought he would faint.

‘My God,’ she said peering at the swollen penis still gripped in his fist. ‘My God. So that time has come.’

Sam cringed with terror and humiliation, but his cock responded to the threat of her proximity by engorging still further inside his closed fist. He could feel her breath condensing on his face. Still gazing at his cock with fascination, she extended her little finger towards it. Sam tried to shrink back from the long, manicured, polished fingernail. His breath came shorter, and still shorter, as contact between her fingernail and his cock seemed imminent.

Did she touch? Did the outstretched fingernail make contact? He never knew. The moment was blotted out by a booming thunderclap of the heart. Some exquisitely fine elasticity linking brain and bowel snapped and a canal opened, flooding like the slow-fast, fast-slow lava flow of some primeval subterranean pool, pumping from the agonized cock still squeezed in his fist. The explosion blew the Tooth Fairy clean out of the window, shattering the glass and
the window frame together. There was a long, aching moment of void, before a spiced wind rushed to fill the vacuum, reassembling the window frame and all the glass, fragment by fragment, like a film playing backwards but without the Tooth Fairy.

Sam lay in the dark, feeling in his hand the hot sting of his first seed. Slowly his breath came back to him. He lifted his hand to the pencil-beam of moonlight stealing through the crack in the curtains. It glowed dully, silvery. He blew gently on his hand to cool his fingers.

‘I didn’t do it!’ Sam swore. He was close to tears. ‘It wasn’t us.’

‘Because if I thought you had done it . . .’ Nev Southall fingered his belt buckle to show Sam what to expect. Saturday morning’s ritual bacon, eggs and black pudding had been spoiled. The greasy odour of smoked rashers turned cold in the frying pan hung in the air.

‘Bringing the police to the door!’ Connie’s voice was shrill.

‘It wasn’t us!’ Sam repeated for the ninth or tenth time.

Meanwhile a similar scene was taking place at Terry’s house. Moody Linda was washing up at the kitchen sink while her mother and father gave her adopted cousin a grilling.

‘I swear it wasn’t us,’ Terry said, saucer-eyed with innocence. ‘I swear it.’

‘Because I’d knock you through that bloody wall if you did.’ Uncle Charlie wasn’t fooling.

‘I didn’t! We didn’t!’

Moody Linda, growing more beautiful by the day, turned from the washing-up and stunned Terry by saying, ‘It couldn’t have been Terry, Clive or Sam, because all three of them were here with me that afternoon.’

Terry’s Aunt Dot turned and looked at her with astonishment. ‘Well, why didn’t you say that? Why didn’t you speak up when the police were here?’

The twice-played scene was ready to be repeated at the
Rogers household. Betty answered the door to two book-end police detectives, both with darts-player physiques. ‘Mornin’,’ one said cheerfully, bringing in the milk and newspapers. Eric had yesterday’s
Sporting Life
spread across the breakfast table. He paused in the act of marking form with a ballpoint pen.

The two police officers accepted chairs at the kitchen table, but passed up the offer of a mug of tea. ‘Just had a brew at Mr and Mrs Southall’s. Lovely cup, eh, Jim?’

‘Lovely cup.’

Five minutes later Eric planted himself at the foot of the stairs and bawled up at Clive. ‘Get dressed and get down here, NOW!’

Clive appeared, hair a-quiff, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He blinked at the two strangers staring at him and looked back at his father with a quizzical expression.

‘You little sod!’ Eric threatened a backhand.

Clive ducked. ‘What? What?’

Betty, recognizing that Eric was likely to hang their son in the morning before trying him in the afternoon, intervened. ‘Where were you Sunday afternoon? What were you doing?’

‘Just dossing about,’ Clive protested.

‘Dossin’ about? Dossin’ about?’
Certain of Clive’s teenage expressions were guaranteed to pitch Eric into a frenzy, and this was one of them. ‘I don’t want to hear dossin’ a-bloody-bout! I want to know where you were, who you were with and what you were doing. Now, I want an answer!’

Clive squinted at the two detectives. They were saying nothing. Both sat back on their chairs, heads tilted slightly to one side, looking at him from beneath eyebrows cocked high and ready to disbelieve his every word. He struggled to remember. ‘I was with Sam and Terry.’

‘And?’

‘We were just . . .’ He was about to say ‘dossing around’ but he changed his mind. ‘We were here. Then we were at Terry’s. I don’t remember . . . it was raining.’

‘Did you go up the gymkhana field?’

‘Not last Sunday, no. There was no gymkhana last Sunday.’

‘No,’ said Eric. ‘And some little bastards smashed the gymkhana hut to smithereens, didn’t they? Smashed it all up. Broke all the equipment. Burned the jumps. Wrecked all the canteen crockery and poked out every single window in the place. Twenty-six windows.’

‘Twenty-eight,’ corrected one of the officers helpfully.

‘It wasn’t us!’ shouted Clive.

‘You were SEEN!’ Eric jabbed a finger dangerously near Clive’s face. ‘Your names were given to the POLICE!’

‘Who did? Who gave our names? It wasn’t US! It wasn’t!’

And so the scene which began at Sam’s house and was repeated at Terry’s was replicated exactly at Clive’s. The policemen said almost nothing, surrendering it all to the boys’ parents. Whether the boys had actually been spotted in
flagrante
in the act of vandalism or whether general inquiries had simply turned up their names was never clarified. Perhaps they had no hard evidence, or conceivably all they wanted to do was to scare the boys into yielding still further information. Whatever their strategy, they remained quiet spectators and then simply withdrew at an appropriate moment, in each case leaving the boys to a further hour on the parental griddle.

‘The thing that gets me,’ Terry said later as the three made their way together up to the pond, ‘is that after a while I started to think that we
had
done it.’

‘Me too.’

‘And me.’

There was a long pause before Sam said, ‘We didn’t do it, did we?’

Terry and Clive stopped dead and looked at him. ‘Don’t be stupid. What do you mean?’

‘Of course we didn’t do it. Not unless you did it on your own.’

‘No,’ said Sam. ‘What I meant was: is there a way we might have done it without knowing we did it?’

Terry walked on in disgust. ‘Somebody look at his head.’

‘Yeah,’ said Clive, ‘somebody look at his head.’

‘So who did do it?’ Sam wanted to know.

‘Good question.’

‘Shall we go to the gymkhana field and take a look?’ Clive suggested.

‘That’s fucking stupid,’ Terry spat. ‘That’s what they mean by returning to the scene of the crime.’

‘But we’re not!’ Clive defended. ‘That’s exactly it. We didn’t do it! So how can we be returning to the scene of the crime, since we weren’t there in the first place?’

‘I know that. You know that. We all know that. But they think we did it. So to
them
we’ll be returning to the scene of the crime.’