The Tooth Fairy Part 17

'It's just hormones,' said Terry.

'That's just a word. You and Sam have got hormones. No, it's that f.u.c.king school. It's all boys, for one thing, and that don't help. You two go to mixed schools and look: no f.u.c.king acne.'

'We got loads of kids with zits in our school!'

But Clive wouldn't listen. 'It's what's inside you, trying to find a way out. If you've got something wrong inside, believe me, it'll find a way out.'

'And writing your name in blood on a piece of skin is going to cure your acne?' Sam asked unsympathetically.

'It's called an autopergamene, not that I expect you to know that. It means ''self-parchment''.'

Clive was an unhappy boy. He was due to sit an early Oxford entry examination to demonstrate that he was capable of entering university six years ahead of everyone else. Then a teacher at his school had remarked drily that the main advantage of going to either Oxford or Cambridge was that they taught you how to sneer at other people without their ever suspecting.

'You already do that,' Terry had said, when Clive reported this perception. 'So I'd say you should go.'

The remark had stung Clive. He was acutely self-conscious about the way in which he had been part.i.tioned from his two friends, even though they themselves attended different schools. He felt he had lost something. He was perplexed by the ease with which Terry and Sam related to people outside their circle. He envied the way they could be relaxed around girls. He was puzzled by the way they could both talk to Alice without immediately exciting conflict because he couldn't.

Clive drew blood from his thumb on the end of the pin and wrote his initials on the flake of skin. When the job was completed, he buried the autopergamene in the earth at the side of the pond. 'I'm prepared to try anything,' he said.

Sam woke one morning and found a Scout's beret in the middle of the floor. He felt a dredger move across his heart. He picked up the beret, and the room tilted precariously.

It was not his own Scout's beret. He didn't need to be certain it wasn't his to check the wardrobe shelf where his own green beret, khaki shirt and shorts and red neckerchief lay neatly and obsolescently folded, even though that was exactly what he did. In any event, the beret which had appeared on the floor was of a larger size than his. It was grubbier, the leather rim cracked and split. It smelled distinctly of hair-oil, of decomposing leaf and woodland mulch. It reeked, unspeakably, overwhelmingly, heart-stoppingly, of the dead Scout.

It was Tooley's beret.

Sam looked across at the window. It was ajar. He remembered the Tooth Fairy threatening that she would one day leave something to 'show the shrink'. His next instinct was to burn the thing, exactly as he had done with the neckerchief. He hid the beret under his bed until he was able to steal more paraffin from his father's toolshed. He took the fuel in a lemonade bottle up to the pond. There, alone, he burned the beret to a crisp and kicked the cinders into the water.

'Eat that,' he told the pike.

Meanwhile no day went by, on the bus to and from school, when Sam didn't look into Alice's eyes to try to divine a hint of special intimacy. He knew she hadn't forgotten the kiss. His intuition informed him that she knew how keenly he waited for some sign from her and that she even knew that he took pathetic comfort from every smile she gave him. His intuition also told him that something external was acting as a block.

One Friday afternoon, on the bus home from school, it came out.

'What're you doing this weekend?'

Alice yawned and looked out of the window. 'Seeing my boyfriend.'

Sam recovered quickly. 'You never said you had a boyfriend.'

'You never asked.'

The news was crushing and humiliating. The journey continued in silence for some way, until Sam, clinging to a shred of dignity by trying to sound only vaguely interested, said, 'Anyone I know?'

'No.' Then after a while Alice volunteered some information. 'He works in London. I only see him occasionally. When he gets to drive up this way.'

When he gets to drive up this way? thought Sam. Here was Alice, fourteen years old, merely a year older than himself, and she had a regular boyfriend who worked in London and drove a car. 'How b.l.o.o.d.y old is he?'

'Twenty-two.'

Sam was disgusted. How could she think of going with someone so cadaverously old? His mind flashed back to the sc.r.a.ps of letter he'd found in the pocket of her leather jacket and to a crumpled piece of foil. 'Light filmy substance?' he said.

'What?'

'Webs of small spiders? Something flimsy?'

'What are you talking about?'

'Wouldn't you like to know?'

'You're mad. Totally insane.' She rang the bell to stop the bus. 'Do you want to come to my place?'

Alice's place? Sam had only ever seen Alice's house from the outside. 'When?'

'Tomorrow. Come round in the afternoon.'

'I thought you were seeing your boyfriend?'

'Come anyway.'

So Sam finally got to meet Alice's mother. Alice was the only person Sam knew who lived in a detached cottage with an impressive, tree-lined gravel driveway. The cottage, however, was in need of renovation. Closer inspection revealed a roof in disarray and patches of rendering on the side of the house that had fallen. When he arrived at the place a Jaguar sports model in racing green stood smarting on the gravel. The wrought-iron knocker in the shape of a dog's head rapped weakly on the door. Alice answered.

Sam had for some time been curious about the character of Alice's mother, June. A former chorus-line dancer, she was now a writer, Alice had said. She made a living from composing the rhymes inside greeting cards. Sam felt slightly intimidated by the idea of meeting a writer. It was like being forewarned that the person you are about to encounter has a hunched back or one eye and a withered hand.

The room into which he was shown, however, was disappointing. He'd antic.i.p.ated an exhibition of overt bohemianism in the writer's habitat; at least there should have been a human skull on the mantelpiece or an Egyptian sarcophagus in the hallway. Instead there were acres of chintz, flock wallpaper and a mahogany upright piano standing against the wall. June Brennan satisfied some expectations, in that although her face was heavily rendered with make-up, she hadn't yet managed to clamber out of her nightdress. She was reclining on the sofa, sipping white wine from a gla.s.s flute. Her bare feet rested on the lap of a young man.

'Who's this?' she asked, not altogether unfriendly. The young man looked up at Sam. He had tight, blond curls and a Mediterranean suntan. A humourless smile bent his lips slightly as Alice introduced them.

'This is Sam.'

'We're honoured, Samuel,' said June raising her gla.s.s. There was a slur in her voice. 'She doesn't usually bring her boyfriends heyah.' This last word cracked like a whip on a horse's flanks. Whatever meaning was in it was lost on Sam. It was two o'clock on Sat.u.r.day afternoon, he noted, and Alice's mother was sloshed. 'Take Samuel upstairs, Alice. Go and play Monopoly or whatever.'

'Come on,' Alice said glumly.

Sam had never before had a good look inside a girl's bedroom. Terry and he had once snooped inside Linda's boudoir, but they'd been caught and unceremoniously bundled out. Alice's walls were covered with colour-magazine pop-star pin-ups: Animals, Kinks, Yardbirds, the Who, some white-haired guy called Heinz. Her dressing table was festooned with riding rosettes and small trophies. A box record-player lay open on the floor, a disc already on the turntable. Alice set the stylus, turned up the volume and closed her bedroom door. The Troggs belted out 'With a Girl Like You' as she and Sam squatted on the floor.

'Take no notice. She's always like that.'

'Always p.i.s.sed?'

'Mostly That's why I haven't brought you here before.'

'So why did you today?' Alice shrugged. She turned to the dressing-table mirror and began brushing her hair vigorously. 'For a minute,' said Sam, 'I thought that bloke downstairs was your boyfriend.'

'He is.'

'Really?' Sam blurted. 'Looked more like your mother's boyfriend.'

Alice's eyes blazed briefly in the mirror. She let the brush fall into her lap. 'It's complicated. She doesn't know.'

The record stopped, and in the silence Sam heard the ratchets of his own mind figuring out the complication. Alice leaned across and lifted the record arm from above the spindle, so that the same disc could repeat. 'I like to play the same one over and over. It really gets on her nerves.'

'Why don't you get a boyfriend more your own age?'

'What? From somewhere round here? Everyone in Redstone is backwards.'

He had to agree. Everyone in Redstone was backwards. He also had a pretty good idea why he'd been paraded that afternoon. 'Do you?'

'Do I what?'

'Light filmy substance. Something flimsy.'

'What?'

'Not worth crying all night over.'

'I hate it when you talk like this.'

He wanted to tell her he'd read the fragments of her letter to he suspected the young man downstairs. Instead he said, 'Do you know what an autopergamene is?'

'No.'

'Got a pin? I'll show you.' The record stopped, the stylus arm lifted and returned. There were a few seconds of empty vinyl hiss before the record started over again.

Alice held her autopergamene up to the light with a pair of tweezers. Her initials ALB were finely traced in blood on the fragment of skin. It was fascinating, for about fifteen seconds. Then she carefully laid it down on the dressing table. 'I'll make us some coffee.' She got up and bounced down the stairs.

Sam took a matchbox from his pocket and, with tweezers, he pressed the two sc.r.a.ps of skin together. Then he dropped them in the matchbox. After that he opened a window. He would tell Alice a breeze had blown the 'self-parchment' away. The Tooth Fairy stole teeth from him, and she stole s.e.m.e.n. He would steal skin and blood from Alice. It crossed his mind that the Tooth Fairy might not like this act of magic, this blasphemous autopergamene. She might be angry. He shivered.

Alice returned with two mugs of instant coffee. 'I just heard something on the news,' she said. 'On the television. Downstairs. It was in the woods. They just found a body in Wistman's Woods. Hey! Are you all right? Sam, are you all right?'

27.

Nemesis After Sam left Alice, he went directly to Clive's house. His hand trembled as he let the knocker fall at the front door. No lights were on in the house, and it was rather obvious that no one was home. Despite this, he knocked loudly three times. Finally he went around to the back of the house, desperately thinking how he might leave Clive a warning message. He leaned his head against the wall, pressing his face to the rough pebble-dash, thinking he was going to be sick. The angle of the wall tilted precariously.

He looked up. The small window of Clive's bedroom was propped open. It occurred to him that if he climbed on to the flat roof below the bedroom, he might squeeze inside the window and leave a note for Clive. Finding some housebricks in the garden, he carefully piled them one on top of the other. By stepping up on the housebricks, he was able to hoist his chin over the lip of the flat roof. Then the house-bricks toppled under his feet, his chin slamming against the roof. He fell back, spitting blood and nursing his jaw. A loosened canine wobbled in his mouth.

He gave up on the idea of breaking into Clive's bedroom. Careful to conceal any signs of his visit, he returned the bricks to where he'd found them, closed the gate behind him and made for Terry's house. His legs seemed to act independently of him, moving him along in jerky, inept strides. A pa.s.sing stranger gave him a sidelong glance.

At Terry's house he'd been trained to use the back entrance. There stood Terry's Aunt Dot with the door wide open, flapping at kitchen smoke with a tea-towel. A chip pan had almost caught fire. Dot didn't have much time for him: didn't he know Terry had gone to the football match? With Dot still flapping her tea-towel Sam backed away.

Expecting to see a squadron of police cars drawn up outside his house, blue rotary lights quartering the air, he was shivering violently by the time he got home. He tried to slip up to his bedroom unnoticed but met Connie on her way downstairs. He stood paralysed, one foot set on the bottom step.

'You're back,' Connie said.

'Have they been?'

'Who?'

'Anyone.'

Connie suddenly noticed he was shivering. She put a hand on his brow. 'You've got a temperature. You're burning up. Get up them stairs and let's get you into bed. What have you been doing all day?'

Connie made Sam climb into bed. She brought him a hot drink and two aspirin tablets. He pretended to fall asleep immediately. Connie looked in on him and touched his brow again before turning off the light. She closed the door softly behind her and went downstairs. Sam lay shivering in the dark for some time.

Then the Tooth Fairy came.

And the Tooth Fairy had changed.

It manifested as a scintillating light on the floor, a few feet from Sam's bed. Sam recognized it as the Tooth Fairy in diminutive form, no more than an inch high. His fever raced as he beheld the sparkling vision. Then the light died, and the figure ballooned rapidly, a shadow filling out the available s.p.a.ce, its head and shoulders impacting heavily against the bedroom ceiling. Its female form had gone.

The androgynous shadow regarded him steadily with a glittering, baleful eye. The black tangle of corkscrew locks quivered in the dark. The old smell was back, the rancid odour of the childhood fairy, smells of the stables and the fields, but with a new, chemical odour, a smell of corrosion, a whiff of burning. The Tooth Fairy's clothes hung in rags, the striped leggings barely visible.

The Tooth Fairy no longer could it be referred to as she moved across the room, reaching its huge head towards him. In the diminishing s.p.a.ce of the room the filed teeth gleamed, menacing, predatory, moving closer. Sam felt the venomous breathing on his neck. 'You shouldn't have done that.'

'Done what?'

'Autopergamene. Blood-and-skin thing. Shouldn't have done that. Haven't I looked after you?' The Tooth Fairy clutched the matchbox in which Sam kept the autopergamene and the twist of hair stolen from Alice's comb. 'Haven't I?'

'Yes.'

'Haven't I protected you? Haven't I been the one?'

'Yes.'

'I'm going to tell them you did it. Did you get the beret?'

'Please don't.'

'Then you're going to have to pay. It's my turn.'

'No. Please.'

'Blood and skin, Sam. Blood and skin.'

'Please!'

The Tooth Fairy reached out with a poisonous, claw-like hand, grasping him by the windpipe, forcing his head back on to the pillow. Sam kicked, and the Tooth Fairy placed a huge choking knee on his chest near his throat. Sam couldn't breathe. His throat rasped. He couldn't cry out. The Tooth Fairy reached inside his mouth with putrid fingers, grabbing at a loose tooth with thumb and forefinger. A searing white-heat of pain exploded in his head as tooth root snagged on nerve. Sam tried to scream as the Tooth Fairy waggled the tooth violently back and forth, but the grip on his windpipe stopped all but the faintest gasp. Pain detonated in shock waves again and again, each beat an electrically charged microflash of agony.

Then the tooth erupted, in a hideous e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, into the Tooth Fairy's hand. Cold air rushed to fill the gum cavity left behind. The Tooth Fairy's fist closed around the b.l.o.o.d.y tooth before it was consigned to the matchbox. Sam heard a roaring wind and saw the Fairy slavering in triumph before he lost consciousness.

'Laryngitis,' said the doctor breezily, stuffing the tentacles of a stethoscope into his battered leather bag. Sam lay in bed with his eyes closed while the doctor spoke to Connie. 'He's got laryngitis. That's why his throat is so inflamed and his voice is hoa.r.s.e. Try to get him to drink as much as possible. Don't worry if he starts babbling. He's slightly delirious, but the antibiotics will eventually bring down his temperature.' The doctor had been in the house under a minute, and now he was gone, leaving Connie and Nev looking at each other. 'I suppose they don't like being called out on a Sunday,' said Connie.