The Tooth Fairy (21 page)

‘The head-shrink man? He’s a star-killer too. He’s a real fucking Medusa. There are snakes coming out of his head. You can’t see them, but I can.’

‘He’s all right. Mum and Dad told him what happened with the Christmas gifts. He’s made an extra appointment.’

‘So I brought that on, did I? I never wanted that. Listen: I fear him, that one. I fear him more than Alice. Between them they’re coming for me.’

‘Will you always be around?’

‘No. Because you don’t want me. You make it easy for them.’ She turned her eyes sky-ward, and he saw that she was crying. The faint light from the sky starbursted on a tear.

Suddenly there was something appallingly human about her. Her tights were ripped and holed, exposing small areas of white, fleshy thigh, and the wool of her bodice was unravelling under her tunic. Her boots were scuffed, and it occurred to him that, apart from the Santa cap and motorcycle jacket that day in Coventry, she’d worn the same clothes from the moment he first saw her and that the garments were slowly disintegrating.

‘I didn’t mean to make you sad.’

‘I’m dying, Sam,’ she said. ‘I’m dying.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he tried again. ‘I honestly never meant to make you sad.’

He reached out to touch her shoulder, but she stiffened, tossing her head back like a horse. Quickly wiping away her tears, she bared her pointed teeth at him, snarling, ‘Fuck you. Get away from me.’ Without warning, she sprang on to the windowsill, sending his telescope clattering. Sam scrambled to catch the telescope as she opened the window, able only to watch her leap into the blackness of the night. He leaned out into the sharp, February air to see where she’d gone, but there was no sign of her, neither down nor up.

Sam slammed his window shut. His heart hammered. Reaching under his bed, he found the box containing the Nightmare Interceptor. He clipped the sensor to his nostril and hyperventilated through his nose until the alarm clock was triggered. He switched it off quickly so as not to alert his parents.

He disconnected the crocodile clip from his nose and went over to his astronomical journal, which was lying open on the table. Underneath the date he’d written:
In the constellation of Perseus, Algol eclipsed at 11.45 p.m. Sirius brilliant in colours. Can we recover from Loss of Stars?
On his bedcover was a sooty bootprint.

So he hadn’t been dreaming. The Nightmare Interceptor had proved that. Unless he’d been dreaming about using the Nightmare Interceptor. He closed the curtains and climbed into bed. Before settling down to sleep, he reached out and pulled the curtain aside to look out again at the night sky.

Sirius dulled on the southern horizon.

Meanwhile the kiss hung in the air for months, like an aerial spirit. Offered at midnight betokening a new year, with Alice’s tongue inserted between his lips at some hazy time dividing the first and the last radio-broadcast chimes of Big Ben, it neither belonged to the dying old year nor yet was it properly born into the celebratory nascence of the new. So it hung, frozen in time, over the threshold of Sam’s house, neither in nor out, unacknowledged, the unhatched kiss.

It was never spoken of. Sam certainly never mentioned it to either Terry or Clive. In any event, Terry would have waggled his eyebrows suggestively, and Clive would have curled his lip. Despite the fact that Alice and he sat together most days on the bus to school and back, discussing many things, the subject was never broached. The magical kiss was like the Brazil nuts and the ‘Eat Me’ dates: it seemed to have no place in the world beyond its seasonal novelty.

But again it wasn’t a dream. She
had
kissed him. His tongue
had
tingled. His hand
did
tremble. Though the issue could grow no further, the moment could never be taken away. So Sam lived with it, this mystical half-way state of being kissed; and he developed, every time he saw Alice, the nervous habit of pushing his spectacles higher up the bridge of his nose.

The most extraordinary thing was the way in which some of the people around him seemed to suspect vaguely or to guess exactly. Connie had taken to watching him very closely
since the holiday season. He might turn suddenly and catch his mother staring at him, her face etched with concern. Then one evening at Terry’s house Linda had said something to him that caused him to blush outright. Not that this was unusual. Lovely Linda’s unfolding beauty was unstoppable. She wore pink lipstick and enticing perfume even around the house; her increasingly short skirts trumpeted her dazzling, sword-slim thighs; and her full breasts, straining against the white cotton of her blouse, provoked a pang every time he saw her. Sam didn’t know how Terry could bear to live so close to her. Each time he saw Linda in a new outfit he would eventually be compelled to return home and go to his room for a frenzied bout of masturbation.

‘You look different somehow.’ Linda had laid a light and fragrant finger on his reddening cheek. She was wearing thigh-length patent-leather boots and a black leather miniskirt. ‘What have you been up to?’

‘Sam always looks like he’s found a quid and lost a fiver,’ chuckled Terry’s Uncle Charlie.

‘That’s right,’ Linda said thoughtfully, still looking hard at Sam. ‘You look like you found something and then lost it again.’

Sam stood up, pushing his glasses higher up the bridge of his nose. ‘I have to be getting back home.’

‘Ask her if she’s got a friend for Terry,’ said Linda. Sam turned furiously. ‘Joke,’ she said.

But Skelton was the worst, and the most perceptive.

Sam’s next appointment with Skelton was brought forward because of the Christmas-gifts fiasco. Connie had complained to her GP that Sam’s visits to the psychiatrist were proving useless. The local doctor had responded to this complaint by arranging an extra session of uselessness, which, oddly enough, appeared to satisfy Connie.

Skelton too seemed to have gone through subtle but discernible changes in the holiday period. He sat behind his
desk, licking his finger and slowly turning the pages in a file when Sam was shown into the familiar office. His face was pink with capillaries exploded at the surface of his skin, and his flaxen hair was brushed up in a greasy quiff. His ivory and nicotine-stained teeth jutted out further than ever when he spoke.

‘Tsk, tsk, tsk. Sam, my boy, what have I told you about not buying your uncle a hairnet for Christmas? Eh?’

‘Nothing,’ Sam said, suddenly emboldened.

Skelton glanced up from the file. ‘Correct! I’ve told you nothing. Was that unfair of me, laddie? Not warning you about that, I mean. Not telling you not to buy a hairnet for your uncle’s tonsure?’

‘No.’

‘Right. Right. So what’s all this bloody nonsense about dog whistles and bloody Beatle wigs?’

‘It wasn’t my fault. Someone switched them on me. Switched the presents, I mean. I brought socks for people and bath salts and all the usual stuff. Then they got switched.’

‘Oh, I see. A kind of joke. And who, Sam, in your estimable opinion, did the switching?’

Sam shrugged. ‘Probably the same person who left me the Interceptor.’

‘The Interceptor?’

‘Yes. The Nightmare Interceptor.’

Skelton tossed aside his file and folded his hands together. ‘Tell me about this Nightmare Interceptor.’

So Sam told him at length how he’d first been shown the contraption by Chris Morris, Terry’s dead father who’d shot himself and his wife and babies because of the wasps in the jamjar; and how Sam had broken into the shed and tried to steal the Nightmare Interceptor the day the Tooth Fairy slashed his arm; and how for a while he’d used the Nightmare Interceptor whenever the Tooth Fairy came around, to
test for dreaming, but it always failed, proving conclusively that the Tooth Fairy wasn’t a dream.

After Sam had finished Skelton regarded him steadily, thrusting out his jaw and baring his lower teeth. ‘Can I see this contraption?’

‘No,’ said Sam.

‘Aha! So it’s like the Tooth Fairy? Only you can see it?’

‘No. I mean, I don’t want you to see it.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m going to patent it one day and sell it. It might make me some money. So I don’t want every Tom, Dick and Harry having a look at it.’

Skelton’s eyes widened. Then he smiled to himself. ‘There is no bloody Nightmare bloody Interceptor is there, laddie?’

‘Yes, there is.’

‘Admit it.’

‘There is.’

‘Admit there’s no such thing.’

‘There is. It’s not like the Tooth Fairy.’

‘Ah! So you admit there’s no Tooth Fairy?’

‘That’s not what I meant. I knew that you were thinking about what I was thinking. The Tooth Fairy is real, but only I can see it. Anyone can see the Nightmare Interceptor.’

Skelton got up out of his chair. ‘Laddie, there’s something changed about you. Now what is it, I wonder?’

Skelton prowled back and forth in a half-circle behind Sam’s chair. Sam felt his neck flushing hot. Skelton leaned his ruddy face over Sam’s shoulder, seeming to sniff the region of his neck. Sam got a whiff of whisky and pipe tobacco.

Skelton’s nostrils twitched vigorously. ‘Hmmmmmm.’ He made a low humming sound, ‘Hmmmmmm. That’s it! That’s it! I should have known! There’s a
girrul!
Admit it to me, wee man, there’s a
girrul!
I can smell her, this
girrul!
’

Sam said nothing.

Skelton withdrew his face. ‘Tee-hee-hee! A
girrul!
Tee-heehee! Am I right? Don’t be bashful, young Sam, there’s no one more pleased than me. I disapprove not in the slightest. Hear me? Not in the slightest! On the contrary, me and this lovely
girrul
together can put an end to your problems. Me and this
girrul
can kick that Tooth Fairy into touch! Now, could you just give her a name for me?’

Silence.

‘Please? Pretty please?’

‘Alice.’

‘Alice! Hurrah for Alice! This calls for a celebration!’ Skelton marched to his door, flung it open and called to his secretary. ‘No disturbances now, Mrs Marsh. See to it, please!’ Closing the door, he went to his desk drawer, taking out a half-bottle of whisky and two sticky-looking tumblers. ‘A wee nip only for a young lad like you, but this is an important occasion, man to man.’ He poured two glasses, splashing a larger measure for himself, pushing the smaller glass into Sam’s hand. ‘Here’s to all the
girruls,
from this first one to the last one, all those lovely, lovely
girruls
who save us boys from the rack and thumbscrew of ourselves. Drink, laddie, drink!’

Sam took his cue from Skelton and sank the whisky in a single gulp. The amber fluid scorched his throat and squeezed tears from his eyes, but he wanted to show the hoary psychiatrist that he could respond to being treated like an adult.

‘See all those books?’ Skelton waved his empty tumbler at the rows of psychiatric journals and psychoanalytical textbooks. ‘There’s not one of ’em can do anything for you, right now, that a good
girrul
can’t do. In your case. I’m not saying that’s true in all the cases that come before me, understand, but in your case.

‘Now, then, you do know what it’s for? Hmmm? You’ve worked out for yourself that it’s not for stirring your tea
with? Not for measuring your pastry, what? Well, my advice to you is to get this lovely . . . Alice was it? . . . get this lovely Alice and stick it in, with her consent, of course, as often as she’ll allow. Now, do you know what a johnny is?’

Sam screwed up his face.

‘What? Thirteen years old and you don’t know what a johnny is? Here. Look at this.’ Skelton rooted through his drawer, fishing from it a small, foil package. He waved the thing under Sam’s nose. Then he laid it on the desk. Sam could see the word ‘Gossamer’ scripted on the foil, exactly like something he’d found in Alice’s jacket.

‘Now, laddie, I can’t give you this. I would, but if your mammy found out, all hell would break loose, and I’d be drummed out of the Brownies and no mistake. Why? Because you’re only thirteen years old. Now, I know, and you know, that you’re perfectly ready for this. That’s the truth. I’m paid to find the truth. It’s my job to find the truth. But the trouble with my job is that after finding the truth, I’m under an obligation not to tell it to anyone. They – that is, those outside this room – don’t want to hear the truth. But this is the Truth Room, which is why I’m telling you this. The Truth Room.

‘I’ll tell you where you can get one of these for yourself. You could get these at a chemist’s, but you’d only go in there and come out with a bottle of Lucozade, so here’s what you do. You wait until your mammy and daddy are out, you go up to their bedroom and you slide your hand between the mattress and the base of the bed, somewhere up the top towards the pillow. Right? You’ll find ’em, sure as eggs is eggs.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Got any brothers or sisters?’

‘No.’

‘Then you’ll find ’em. Take one and one only – they tend to come in packs of three, God knows why, as if three jumps
a night is some kind of national sporting average. Anyway, your old man will just think he miscounted. That’s all. Off you go now. And not a word about this to anyone else, understand? Not a bloody word.’