The Tooth Fairy Part 10

It was not as if Sam was going to make a fight of it. In any case, the b.u.mping had been rather restrained, but there was still something intimidating about the girl. All he knew of her was that she was in the study year above him, and whenever she pushed into him and whispered those three words, he felt more disconcerted than threatened. What discomfited him most was not what she said, nor even the accusing way she looked at him. It was something else. It was the smell of her.

There was always a whiff of shampoo in her long hair, then a deeper, second smell, like a scent which was nothing like the flowery perfumes used by his mother or, these days, by Linda. It was perhaps more like sweet yoghurt, he decided; then, no, he thought it had more of a salty tang; but, no, it was like a yeast extract; no no no, the task of pinpointing it was maddening, but whatever it was like, it possessed the extraordinary power to arrest him, to make his muscles seize and his body stiffen. And because of that, because he was always momentarily paralysed by these actions of hers en pa.s.sant, he was inevitably too slow to respond and was consequently left feeling foolish. But today he was ready for her.

She didn't come. The day before he had also been ready for her, and yet in the one moment when he'd slackened his guard and looked away, that was when she'd b.u.mped him from behind. But today she didn't seem to be around. Sam relaxed. The bus arrived; he climbed aboard and took a seat. As the bus was about to leave the girl jumped on and swung into the seat next to Sam.

Every sinew went into a state of alert, every muscle locked instantly. For an inflated moment Sam stopped breathing. He knew it was ridiculous, but he felt himself in the presence of abstract danger. The girl kept her eyes averted, fumbling with the straps of her satchel, putting away her bus pa.s.s. Flicking her hair from her eyes, she turned to him. 'Where's the short trousers?'

His ears burned. 'Where's the pratty jodhpurs and the kiddie's rosette?'

'Touchy.'

Her unruly scent drove him crazy. It made his blood itch. He caught himself scratching his arm. Her satchel had rucked her skirt up around her thighs. He hated her proximity; he wanted to jump out of the seat and climb over her. He felt trapped. 'Actually I don't go any more.'

'To Scouts? Excitement too much, was it?'

'You could say that.'

They sat in silence for some distance. She started stroking her long hair, one handful over the other. It streamed perfume. Looking into her lap, she said, very softly, 'I saw you.' The tip of her tongue tapped her upper lip. 'In the hut. Hiding.'

He waited a while before answering. At least it was not the incident in the woods she had seen. 'I didn't do it.'

Now she looked up at him. Her pale, slate-blue eyes were unblinking. 'But I saw you.'

'I know you did. But I didn't do it. Why have you started taking this bus?'

'Pardon me. You're not the only one allowed to take the bus.'

'I only wondered . . .'

'Well, don't.'

Silence. They stared ahead. The bus crunched through its gears.

'Are you going to tell anyone?' said Sam.

'Tell anyone?'

'About seeing me. In the gymkhana hut.'

'I thought you said you didn't do it.'

'I did say that. Are you going to?'

'I don't know. I might. It all depends.'

'Depends on what?'

'On you. It all depends on you.' She got up out of her seat, swinging her satchel over her shoulder, and rang the bell for the bus to stop. After getting off, she didn't glance back at Sam, who looked hard at her through the window.

After they'd stopped attending Scouts, everyone became disgusted with the Heads-Looked-At Boys.

'I don't know what's the matter with you lot,' Eric Rogers complained. 'You mope around, you never go anywhere. What's got into you?'

'Good money thrown away on perfectly good Scout uniforms,' Connie Southall protested. 'And you were doing so well. I don't understand any of you.'

'What's happened to you lot?' said Terry's Uncle Charlie with irritating cheeriness. 'I've never seen you so miserable. Terry's like a wet weekend; Sam's got a face as long as a gasman's mackintosh; and Clive looks like a Cleethorpes donkey on Bank Holiday Monday. What a moody bunch! What happened? Did somebody die?'

'Leave them,' said Linda, certain now that something untoward had happened at Scouts. 'It's just a phase.' Linda was no longer Moody Linda. She was blossoming by the day into something gorgeous, something special. She had left her moods behind her; indeed, it could be said she had pa.s.sed on the baton of moodiness to the boys. She was preparing, too, to turn her back on the Guides. She was sixteen and rumours of boyfriends smoked the air. Somehow in all that she had taken on the mantle of defender, interpreter and apologist for the three boys who, all her life, had been a vexation. 'A phase they're going through.'

It was Sat.u.r.day morning. Uncle Charlie offered to take the boys to Highfield Road to see Coventry City play Wolver-hampton Wanderers, but only Terry showed any enthusiasm. When Aunt Dot enjoined them to help Terry tidy his room, Clive and Sam made their excuses.

Outside the house Sam said, 'What shall we do now?'

'I'm going home,' Clive said sullenly.

'That's right,' Sam said disparagingly, 'go and play with your chemistry set.'

'f.u.c.k off.'

'You f.u.c.k off'

'No, you f.u.c.k off.'

Clive went home, leaving Sam to mope alone. Not wanting to return home himself, he shuffled dispiritedly up the lane. The pond had recently been fenced off from the road after the land had been bought outright by Redstone Football Club. Golden, pine-scented and unseasoned timber had already dulled to become a drab yellow fence ringing the land. It was another violation, another marking off of the boundaries of childhood geography. Together the three boys had tried to kick a part of the fence down, but it proved too st.u.r.dy for their efforts.

Someone was sitting on the new fence as Sam approached. He stopped in his tracks. The Tooth Fairy was there, her feet hooked on to the lower bars of the fence, her hands held limply between her thighs. Sam felt the claw in the pit of his stomach, a dredging in his bowels. The familiar flutter of fear whenever the Tooth Fairy appeared coated his mouth. It squeezed his heart. Each encounter always seemed worse than the last, and each meeting with her left him more in dread of the next.

He was about to retreat, to turn away, when a flicker of movement from the figure on the fence made him gasp. He was mistaken. It wasn't the Tooth Fairy at all. It was the girl, the girl on the school bus. She was looking at him. How could he have been mistaken?

She saw him hesitate. Now he had to go on. He couldn't let her think that the sight of her was enough to make him turn back. He proceeded slowly, avoiding eye contact, but he knew she was staring at him. As he drew abreast of her he looked up, self-consciously nodding in recognition. Coolly, she nodded back. Not until he'd gone several yards past her did she call out to him.

'Where are you going?'

He stopped and turned, having nothing to say. He tried to think of a clever remark, but none came to him.

'Don't you know? Don't you know where you're going? That seems dumb!' He shrugged. 'Come here,' she said.

He found himself stupidly obeying. When he reached the fence, she c.o.c.ked her head to one side, squinting at him through her long hair. She wore jeans and baseball boots and a leather jacket with fringes hanging from the arms. 'Aren't you going to tell me where you're going?'

'I'm not going to smash up the gymkhana hut, if that's what you mean.'

'I didn't mean that.'

'I didn't do it. It wasn't me.'

'I know you didn't. Want a ciggie?' She held out a box of Craven A, with a black cat on it. Sam, who detested cigarettes, having sampled a few along with Clive and Terry, found himself taking one from the box and accepting a light. He climbed up on the fence beside her and put the lighted cigarette to his mouth.

'You didn't inhale. It's pointless if you don't inhale.' She almost seemed to want the cigarette back. Just to demonstrate, she gave a pa.s.sionate suck on her own cigarette, held down the smoke, tilted her head back and exhaled a vertical stream. Sam took another drag, inhaling as much as he could bear.

A car came by, and they instinctively held the cigarettes behind their backs. She jumped off the fence. 'Let's go down to the pond. You can't be seen from the road.'

Sam showed her the tiny sheltered bank where he and the others had dragged the back seat of a wrecked Morris Minor. The leather of the seat was torn and coiled springs had burst through the upholstery.

'Is this where your gang meets?'

'What gang?'

'I knew this was here,' she said, slumping on the seat.

He sat down next to her. It felt strange. He could smell the same mysterious scent which had confounded and perplexed him before. He sat close to her, yet the tiny s.p.a.ce between them might have been a high-voltage electrified fence. The s.p.a.ce was skirted with the same respect. It was a cold afternoon, too cold for anyone but dispossessed teenagers to sit outside. The sun was a diffuse yellow disc in the sky, gleaming benevolently through the trees and across the cold, green water of the pond. They smoked their cigarettes in silence. Whoever this girl was, Sam felt both terrified and happy to be with her.

'Alice,' she said at last. 'I'm Alice.'

'Sam.'

'I know.'

'How do you know?'

'I just know.'

They sucked their cigarettes right down to the filters. Something glooped and splashed in the water. 'There's a big pike in this pond. A monster.'

'You've seen it?'

'Know my friend Terry? When he was a little kid this pike came up out of the water and bit his toes off. Now he walks with a limp.'

'Yeah. I've seen that.'

'We've been trying to catch the pike for years. It's too clever.'

'How do you know it's still there?'

He looked at her. His observation had been slightly wrong first time, he decided. Alice's eyes were the blue-grey of slate on a pitched and sunlit roof after rain. 'It's there. And I'll know when it's not.'

'What were you doing,' she asked, 'the day I saw you?'

'We were about to smash up the hut. But then you came in the Land-Rover and that stopped us. We didn't do it.'

'I know that. I already told you.'

'How did you know?'

'Because I did it.'

'You? You did it?' She blinked her cloudy eyes at him in affirmation. 's.h.i.t! We had the police round our place for that!'

'I know. I put 'em on to you.'

'So! Because of you we all had to start going to the f.u.c.king Scouts. And it was because we went to Scouts that . . .'

'What?'

Sam took off his gla.s.ses and looked at her. Suddenly he saw in her the cause of a long cycle of events, the extent of which was too overwhelming for him to feel anything more than exasperation. 'Nothing. Never mind.'

'What were you saying about Scouts?'

'Look, why did you put the police on to us?'

'To take attention away from me, dummy.'

'So why did you smash up the place? I mean, when you're one of the Jolly Jodhpurs set.'

'I got my reasons.'

Sam was suddenly suspicious. He narrowed his eyes. 'How come you started catching the school bus out of nowhere?'

'My mum and dad split up. I moved up here with my mum. We live behind those woods.'

'Oh, yeah? Show me your teeth.'

'Huh?'

'Just do it.'

She flashed him a set of neat white pearls. 'What's that for?'

'Just testing.'

'You're weird,' she said. 'Really weird. Have another Black Cat.'

Sam accepted his second cigarette of the day. He liked the way Alice tucked her long hair behind her ear before lighting up. He liked the rose-flush on her high cheekbones. He liked the way she stroked her match so lightly against the abrasive side of the matchbox it seemed as if it could never possibly ignite, yet it did.

'You stare at people,' Alice said, blowing out smoke.

'People are strange.' He couldn't tell her what he felt: that she fascinated him, that he wanted to creep a little closer to her, close enough to breathe in again that perplexing scent so suggestive of bare, sun-warmed skin, but that the only way he dared approach was by looking at her, searching her person as if she were a riddle with the answer concealed somewhere about her.

She seemed to read his mind. 'Change jackets,' she said suddenly. 'Come on, change.' She whipped off her own leather jerkin and waited for him to hand over his blue denim jacket. They held each other's cigarettes while they tried on the jackets, and he contrived to switch the cigarettes so he could taste her lips on the filter. If she noticed, she said nothing. With the leather jacket he had what he wanted. Impregnated in the pliable fabric was that maddening scent of hers. Even though he couldn't say what it was, he knew it acted on him the way an apparently silent whistle set at a high frequency acts upon a dog.

Alice got up suddenly. 'You out tomorrow?'

'Sure.'

'Here. Tomorrow. One o'clock.'

'Wait. I'll walk down with you.'

'No. I'm going the other way. See you!'