The Tooth Fairy (22 page)

Sam realized that somewhere among the appalling information imparted to him Skelton had suddenly stopped treating him like a boy. In his mind, perplexity and gratitude struggled for supremacy. ‘I understand.’

‘Good. Now clear off. I’ve got to think up some bloody silly big words to write about you in this here file.’ Sam was out of the door before Skelton called him back. ‘Hey. If you have a change of heart about that contraption you mentioned, that Nightmare thing, I’d like to see it. That is, if the object actually exists.’

‘It does exist.’

‘Well, I’d like a squint. And I promise not to tell anyone.’

Sam said nothing, gently closing the door behind him. Mrs Marsh looked up at him with her irritating smile of faint disapproval. Sam opened his mouth and burped whisky at her.

At the earliest opportunity Sam tested Skelton’s advice. Having waited until his parents were out, he entered their bedroom, kneeled at the side of the bed, plunged both hands between mattress and base and ran his splayed fingers to right and left. The fingers of his left hand closed around a small cardboard wallet.

Skelton was correct.

There was one foil package left in the wallet. Sam dithered. He examined the package and read the instructions. He was unsure whether to risk taking the only remaining condom. The front door slammed as his parents returned. Sam stuffed the condom in the wallet, shoving it back under the mattress before getting out of the room.

Some days after that Sam found himself in the woods, on
his way to see Alice. Ever since the day on which he’d observed the fox chewing at the snow-covered tree hollow, Alice had encouraged him to meet with her there in the woods. He had resisted, for obvious reasons. But she’d been particularly insistent, pressing even. She’d promised a surprise for him. They had arranged to rendezvous at a clearing where they’d once shared a cigarette.

The moment Sam passed into the fringes of the woods he sensed that something was wrong. Tempted at that point to turn back, Sam found Alice’s allure to be stronger than his anxiety, and he pressed on. The snow had completely gone, and the crisp, cold wind had dried the debris-strewn paths between the oaks and the birches. It was mid-afternoon. The sky semed to have darkened early, and the woods were already absorbing a sooty endowment of darkness to come.

Up ahead he could see Alice waiting for him at the edge of the clearing. She wore her leather jacket and her scarf and mittens. She leaned her back against an oak, and one knee was drawn up so that the heel and sole of her shoe was pressed flat against the bark of the tree. On spotting him, she took a nervous pull on her cigarette.

‘Hi,’ she said over-loudly. ‘How are you today?’

There was something stilted and unnatural about the question: as if it actually required an answer. Sam stopped in his tracks. Alice didn’t seem to want to look him in the eye. She flicked her fringe and took another drag on her cigarette.

‘What’s this about a surprise?’ said Sam.

‘Come here. I’ll show you.’ She stubbed her cigarette butt out on the tree. Her face was flushed. The light about her gloamed lilac, a warning.

Sam stepped closer. ‘What’s the surprise?’

Two shadowy figures stepped from behind a tree. ‘We are,’ said one of them.

It was Tooley. He was dressed in his Scout uniform, as was his companion. Only the red neckerchief was missing.
Tooley’s face was hideously scarred. A livid crescent deformed his cheek as if a horseshoe, still red and glowing from the furnace, had branded its mark there. His dark eyes smoked with hatred.

Sam turned quickly, running directly into the arms of Lance and another youth. ‘No, you don’t,’ said Lance. He flashed Sam a familiar smile, exposing his appalling crooked and blackened teeth. Sam kicked out wildly, but Tooley leapt at him, grabbing his hair. They easily wrestled him to the floor.

‘I see you’ve met my old friend Alice,’ said Tooley.

‘Strip him,’ said Alice.

The four Scouts stripped him naked. Alice watched almost with uninterest as they tied him to an oak tree. When they finished, Alice came over and made a contemptuous examination of Sam’s cock, curling her lip at what she saw, flicking it hard with her sprung finger before turning away.

Alice delved into her pocket for a packet of cigarettes. She gave one to each of them, offering each a light in turn. They all sucked hard on the cigarettes.

‘Get a nice hot red cone,’ Tooley instructed, examining the lighted end of his own cigarette before giving it another passionate suck. ‘A nice red tip.’

Understanding what they were about to do, Sam pissed himself with fright. Together they advanced on him, lighted cigarettes held like darts and levelled at his face, chest and genitals.

‘Wait,’ said Alice. Holding her own cigarette aside, she cupped his balls in the palm of her free hand. Then she smiled. Her teeth gleamed silver in the strange, lilac light. They were filed to wickedly sharp points. Opening her jaws, she leaned into his crotch to bite, and as she did so Sam heard an alarm bell ringing far, far away.

He woke up, still hyperventilating. The crocodile clip
slipped from his nostril as he sat upright in bed. He silenced the alarm of the Nightmare Interceptor.

It was the same appalling dream. He’d had the dream several times before, and he knew he would have it again. Then in shame he realized he’d pissed the bed in his sleep. He despaired.

Sam spent many evening hours in his bedroom observing the winter skies through his telescope. Connie thought he spent too much time up there. In ways she was unable to articulate, she thought it wasn’t good for him. Nev retorted by asking her why they’d bought him such a damned expensive telescope for Christmas if they didn’t want him to use it.

But then they didn’t know he had company

When he watched the stars the Tooth Fairy was always subdued, languid, affectionate. She would lean against his side, draping an arm over his shoulder or resting a hand on his leg, gently stroking his thigh with her long fingernails. And she would instruct him in the wiles of the coursing stars.

‘Castor, the white one, and Pollux, the orange one. The Gemini twins, who are not twins at all. And if you had a bigger telescope, you’d see that Castor is a beautiful double star. Now swing right over to the west because it’s time to say goodbye to Pegasus for a while before she dips below the horizon.’

Sam would gaze in silence and in splendid awe.

‘And Andromeda?’

‘In three nights Andromeda will be well placed.’

Often Sam would sit naked at the window of his darkened room, and as the stars made passage across the night sky her hand would stray and dip towards his genitals, teasing his balls or brushing against his cock. And, as the stars blazed, his cock would engorge with barely solicited blood, until it too
pointed at the stars. Trembling, with his eye squeezed against the viewer, he would be seized by an image of the Tooth Fairy, naked. And though he might try to shut it out of his mind, the image would eclipse even the stars in the lens. He would scent her sitting next to him, and he might detect a slight flexing of her limbs, and he would know that she knew. And often he would imagine, against some complaining instinct within him, slowly undressing the Tooth Fairy, his hands and limbs almost paralysed with anticipation of the revelation lying beneath her clothes.

‘You want to see me naked?’ she murmured shyly on one occasion.

He leaned back from the telescope, staring directly ahead without answer, which for her was answer enough. There was a whisper of garments slowly removed, a toss of her hair, the hiss of nylon as it rolled along her slender thighs and a slight shimmy at the periphery of his vision as she stepped free of her underwear. Then he looked at her.

Sam was deeply shocked. He was also intimidated by her raw physicality, as she shifted her weight very slightly from one foot to the other, gently pushing her pelvis towards him, measuring his reaction. The dense, dark bush at the top of her legs, in contrast with her creamy flesh, was a stellar explosion in negative light. The coils and curlicues of her pubic hair launched like twisting flares scattered by an energy burst at the carnal source of this astonishing black light. Her aggressively offered cunt was appalling, beautiful, devouring. He felt momentarily blinded.

It was as if a third force had entered the room. First there was him, and then there was the Tooth Fairy, and then she’d undressed and unleashed into the room this ravenous power, this insatiable maw; and he understood for the first time that one’s initial impression of the locus of a person residing in their face, their eyes, their talking mouth was childish and staggeringly incorrect, that a brute third force was guiding
and misguiding them. Voracious carnality lived and fed and thrived in the shadows, under the water. The insight tolled in him like a bell, and it made him afraid. He was paralysed by the vulgarity of the truth, but he understood dimly that what he was afraid of was life itself.

On that first occasion her cool fingers closed deftly around his erect cock, and she led him, like a creature on a chain, to his bed. She seemed to reach a decision, softening her brutal assault on him. ‘Who do you want me to be? I’ll be anyone but Alice.’

‘You’re jealous.’

‘She takes you away from me.’

‘Can you be anyone?’

‘For you, yes.’

‘Be Linda.’

‘Linda? You want me to be Linda?’

‘Yes.’

And she would be Linda, lying back on his bed, naked, smiling, open to him. She would smell the way Linda smelled, and she would take on the voice of Linda. He would lie down on top of her and ease himself inside her, ejaculating almost as soon as he felt the warmth of her thighs under him. And always, after he had come, the Tooth Fairy would be gone, leaving only the indentation in the pillow where her head had been and the sheets glistening wet with starlike semen.

Clive peeled back a piece of skin from his fingertip. He’d punctured the skin repeatedly with a pin until he had enough purchase to roll back a fragment half the size of a postage stamp. Now he had to draw some blood to write his initials on the skin. He pricked his thumb with the pin. Sam and Terry watched with appalled fascination.

Around the time Clive had been scheduled to take his special exam, his face exploded in a distressing case of acne.
Various people were full of advice about what he should do, how he should wash more diligently and what he should or should not eat. Someone at his school had even told him that his acne was caused by excessive masturbation. Clive, however, had the good sense to consult Terry and Sam about this last matter, both of whom were acne-free and yet admitted openly and candidly that they had become chronic masturbators.

Despite his level-headedness over this particular matter, Clive held certain irrational views. He blamed his acne, for example, on attendance at the Epstein School. ‘Three-quarters of the pupils at Epstein have got terrible acne,’ he said bitterly, tossing a pebble in the pond. ‘Three-quarters!’

The pond was fringed with snowdrops, and the sky was a bleached blue. The depths of the pond had taken on a bracken colour, and a gentle breeze brought with it a premonition of spring.

‘It’s just hormones,’ said Terry.

‘That’s just a word. You and Sam have got hormones. No, it’s that fucking school. It’s all boys, for one thing, and that don’t help. You two go to mixed schools and look: no fucking 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 partitioned 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.