by Graham Joyce
‘Why?’ said Terry.
‘Because,’ he spat, ‘everyone thinks I did it. And every time they walk past it they think of me.’
‘So why don’t you?’ said Sam.
‘Terrific! So if I clear up, then that would be like admitting to the thing, wouldn’t it? It don’t matter if I leave the paint or if I clean it up: I’m dead in the water either way.’
‘You could explain to people,’ Sam said.
‘Sure,’ Clive said sarcastically. ‘I could put a note through everyone’s door saying I didn’t do it, but because of my devotion to the neighbourhood I’m going to put it all right. Great idea!’
Sam adjusted his glasses on his nose. Terry said, ‘Here comes the bus.’
By the time they’d got into the city, a twenty-minute bus ride later, each of them was disgusted with the company of the other. Terry was angling to go to a department store, where a Coventry City footballer was appearing in public to open a new sports department. Only out of decency did he invite the other two along.
‘I’d rather watch snot congeal,’ said Clive.
‘You got plenty of that lately,’ Terry fired over his shoulder, already gone.
Clive had his own appointment with a visiting Russian Grand Master of chess. The Russian was in town to play twenty-four local challengers simultaneously, and Clive had earned the right to be one of them. Thus Sam was abandoned. He stood at the top of the town under the Lady Godiva clock, wondering where to go. He’d come here expressly to accomplish the tedious chore of Christmas shopping. It was a bitterly cold day. Tiny flurries of wind-blown frost never quite graduated to what might have been called snow.
On the stroke of noon, the clock above him began to strike. The mechanical Lady Godiva whirred forth precariously, but the third stroke of the timepiece clonked hollowly as Lady Godiva wobbled to an unexpected halt. Sam looked up. Godiva’s enamel buff skin seemed to chafe visibly in the cold air. Peeping Tom had just managed to insert a nose between his half-opened shutters. The mechanism, either frozen or failed, continued to clonk ineffectively until, before the job was completed, it too gave up the ghost.
Sam looked around. No crowd had gathered. Shoppers marched briskly past, huddled into heavy coats, faces deranged by the imperative of seasonal spending. No one seemed particularly dismayed by the dysfunction of Lady Godiva and Peeping Tom or even of the town clock. The public simply proceeded, with appalling dedication.
Sam was astonished. Why did no one rush out to fix the clock? Why didn’t crowds of outraged and stubborn Coventrians form a large, unruly scrum and demand an immediate restoration of the city’s timepiece? But that was it. If something was wrong, they simply put their heads down and went on without righting it. He was appalled by humanity’s capacity to allow a broken thing to go unfixed.
‘It’s just a clock,’ said a voice behind him.
Sam turned. Sitting on the steps of the bank beneath the clock, her knees drawn up under her chin, was the Tooth Fairy. Sam felt a compression in his bowels and, for a moment, a painful ringing in his ears. The street tilted slightly.
‘Did you ask them? About the telescope?’ She was wearing a red-and-white Santa cap, and she had acquired a leather motorcycle jacket, several sizes too big. Huddled inside the jacket, her gloved fists pressed against her face and her nose blue with cold, she looked up at him, waiting for an answer. Her striped leggings were holed at the thigh. A disc of white flesh bulged from the hole in the stretched fabric. Sam gazed back up at the stopped clock, squeezed his eyes shut and then looked back at her. She was still there.
‘Well?’
The Tooth Fairy had appeared one night with a request. She wanted Sam to ask his parents for a telescope for Christmas. She didn’t insist; she merely pointed out that she had abetted him in the woods. For that, she said, Sam owed her something, and that something was a telescope. On the contrary, she suggested, if a telescope didn’t arrive, she would prepare a spectacular means of exposing Sam’s crime.
She shivered. ‘I’m freezing. Can’t we go inside somewhere?’
Sam ignored her and walked away, very fast, towards the pedestrianized shopping precinct. She trotted at his heels. ‘Did you ask for it? The telescope? Did you?’
Sam didn’t look back.
‘Because if you didn’t, you know what’s going to happen. I’m going to tell everyone about your dirty little secret in the woods. Christmas Eve. On the stroke of midnight. I’m going to tell your folks. What a Christmas Box that would be! That’s what I’m going to do.’
Sam swung sharp left into a large department store, where the air inside was stale and warm. ‘That’s better,’ she said.
‘Mum, Dad, Aunt Madge, Uncle Bill, Aunt Mary, Aunt Bettie.’ He chanted his Christmas shopping list like a rhyme or prayer for holding off his fear. Hastily selecting a gift from a counter, he paid for it and moved on quickly before taking an escalator to the next floor. He carefully avoided the floor displaying the telescopes. Connie had already priced them for him, and they were prohibitively expensive. Sam was sensitive to his parents’ limited means. There was no conceivable way he could ask his parents about it a second time.
‘I could help you choose your presents,’ said the Tooth Fairy, jogging to keep pace. ‘I’ve got loads of ideas.’
‘Dad, Aunt Madge, Uncle Bill . . .’
‘Look at that! You know, that kind of thing really makes me want to do something violent! Just look at that!’ The Tooth Fairy had stopped dead and was jabbing an angry finger at the corner of the store. A huge Christmas tree dominated one end of the store, resplendent with lights and shimmering baubles and golden bows. At the top of the tree a Barbie-doll fairy in a white crinoline waved a mechanical starred wand benevolently over the heads of shoppers passing obliviously beneath. The Barbie-fairy seemed to be the focus for this outburst.
The Tooth Fairy was puce in the face, spitting with rage. ‘I feel like going over there and pulling the whole thing down. I could too! I could pull the whole thing down!’ She jabbed a corkscrewed fingernail in the direction of the tree. Sam saw that her fingers were stained red.
‘Red paint!’ Sam gasped.
‘What?’ Puzzled, the Tooth Fairy looked at her hands. ‘My hands are just cold.’
‘Why are you fucking up my life?’ Sam hissed. ‘Why? Why?’
An elderly lady loaded with shopping bags stopped and stared at him, open-mouthed. He bustled away, putting a distance between himself and the Tooth Fairy.
‘Where are you going?’ she shouted. ‘Telescopes are on the next floor.’
‘Aunt Mary, Aunt Bettie, Mum, Dad, Aunt Madge . . .’
‘You wait, you little shit! You just fucking wait!’ She bellowed across the department store. ‘Midnight on Christmas Eve! I’m going to tell them all! I’m going to tell them everything.’
The weathermen predicted a white Christmas that year, but the Tooth Fairy woke Sam in the middle of the night just to tell him that the weathermen were wrong, and by Christmas Eve it still hadn’t snowed. The house was full of seasonal favourites: tangerines, Brazil nuts, boxes of chocolate liqueurs with glossy foil wrappings, tins of biscuits, packets of ‘Eat Me’ dates which wouldn’t be touched until late February. A nylon tree had been decorated and placed in the front window.
‘What a sad-looking thing!’ Connie looked doubtfully at their own fairy. Half of her blonde hair had fallen in tufts from her head, her white dress was yellowing with age and her wings had been creased in storage. ‘Perhaps we’ll have to get you a new dress,’ she said stroking it affectionately.
‘Don’t talk to it,’ Sam said in disgust.
‘Got to talk to Fairy, haven’t we, Fairy? Fairy’s been in her box all year, so we love to have a little talk, don’t we, Fairy? Don’t we?’
‘Can’t we have a star instead?’
‘Oh, Sam! We can’t just throw Fairy away like that. You’ve been on the tree since I was a little girl, haven’t you, darling?’
�
�Stop talking to it!’
Which only encouraged Connie to launch into a nauseating dialogue while holding the fairy like a glove-puppet. She even affected a squeaking, wheedling voice for the fairy, which made Sam grit his teeth. He was rescued from wanting to do violence to the tree-fairy by the rap of the cast-iron knocker at the front door. A taste of grey cinders came into his mouth as he thought of the Tooth Fairy’s threat to reveal his crime that very evening.
Christmas saw a string of visitors, mostly relatives, some of whom elicited a warmer welcome than others. There were large, perfume-drenched aunts in floral-print dresses who imprinted red lipstick on Sam’s blushing cheeks, and thin, whey-faced aunts in catalogue-frocks who preferred, thank you, to sit on a hard-backed chair. They arrived with fat and thin uncles, often but not always the converse of themselves. The fat uncles might unbutton their waistcoats and let their opinions spread all across the room. The thin ones might have very little to say between consulting their wristwatches.
It was Connie’s sister Aunt Bettie and Uncle Harold who’d arrived, bearing gifts and the ebullience of a little alcohol. Along with sandwiches and pickles, Bettie accepted a cup of tea; Harold, his bald head as smooth and shiny as one of the pink baubles on Connie’s tree, preferred a glass of whisky. Sam was handed a neatly wrapped gift. ‘Not to be opened until Christmas Day!’ shrieked Bettie as if reading what, every year, she scribbled on the label. Kisses were exchanged. Though his Aunt Bettie was very much one of his favourites, the challenge not to wipe the wet kiss off his face remained until after she had gone.
Sam tried but failed to slip upstairs unnoticed and was summoned back as his school progress, shoe and collar size were publicly addressed by the four adults. The issue of Sam fundamentally structured the visit. The adults might wander from the subject, catch up on gossip about other relatives; or Harold in particular might insert some remark inscrutable to Sam which brought mirth to the company; but the topic of conversation would always return to Sam.
And with every minute urging the evening on to midnight, the leather football of anxiety inflating in Sam’s stomach was pumped still further. He knew that the Tooth Fairy could begin the proceedings at any moment. He also knew that she was awaiting the opportunity of his greatest humiliation.
The matter of the graffiti came up. Everyone was becalmed, regarding him steadily until Bettie broke the silence with a lament on the degeneration of the nation’s youth. ‘Anyone with hair over their ears,’ she ventured, referring to the growing fashion, ‘should be thrown in jail.’
‘You’ve got hair over your ears,’ Harold pointed out, winking at the company and making everyone but Sam laugh.
Bettie slapped his leg playfully. ‘Any man, I mean. Teenage boys goin’ around looking like girls.’
Sam was just about included in this category. ‘Yes,’ said Harold. ‘You don’t know whether to love ’em or hate ’em.’
More laughter. They regarded Sam steadily again, as if deciding whether to love him or hate him. Bettie asked, ‘Is he still seeing that chap?’
Bettie was one of the few aunts in whom Connie had confided that her son occasionally had to see a psychiatrist, and in parlour-speak the psychiatrist had become encoded as ‘that chap’. In Sam’s ears, however, the phrase was always delivered with a certain ominous ring far worse than the actual word it avoided.
‘What chap?’ Harold wanted to know. Bettie gave him a look. ‘Oh, that chap,’ Harold cottoning on. He winked at Sam. ‘Waste of time. Sam don’t need to see no chap.’
‘Go upstairs and get your presents for Auntie Bettie and Uncle Harold,’ said Connie.
Even though he knew this was a cue for Connie to brief Bettie on the latest from that chap, Sam was grateful for the opportunity to make a break. It was a while before he returned with their Christmas gifts, by which time his aunt and uncle were struggling into their coats.
‘Merry Christmas, merry Christmas. Are you going to midnight mass?’ Bettie wanted to know.
‘Yes,’ said Connie.
‘No,’ said Sam.
Bettie grabbed him and saturated him with more kisses. ‘Oh, you must go to midnight mass! Promise me you’ll go to midnight mass, sweetheart!’ Bettie was of a religious bent. She was the sort who, without remembering a word of scripture, dressed the church every Harvest Festival and cried when everyone told her how beautiful it was. She kissed him again. ‘I’m not going to let you go till you say you’ll go with your mother. I’m going to keep kissing you till you say yes.’
She meant what she said. ‘There’s only one way out.’ Harold laughed.
Then it occurred to him that perhaps church was the only safe place to be at midnight. He would be protected. The Tooth Fairy wouldn’t make a move while the congregation celebrated midnight mass. Not in a church full of people. Not in a place of hymns and prayers and sermons and candles and light. The Tooth Fairy wouldn’t dare. The Tooth Fairy would be neutralized. She might even be banished to hell.
‘Maybe,’ said Sam, and then, ‘yes, yes, all right.’
Nev, as usual, declined to join them at midnight mass. He lay on the couch watching TV, a glass of amber ale at hand, and cracking Brazil nuts with a silver implement as they prepared to leave the house. He cheerfully admitted to lacking Connie’s religious instincts. Sam thought he caught a trace of irony in his father’s voice just before they left. ‘Have a lovely time,’ he said, and loudly cracked another Brazil nut.
Midnight mass began at eleven thirty, and it was bitterly cold when Sam and Connie walked up to the church. A thick canvas of frost had rolled across the world in a single, perfect sheet. It laminated the cars parked in the street; it stretched across the road and the kerbstones and the garden fences and over the hedgerow. The night was black and moonless, muffled in the freezing mist, barely penetrated by the street lights sparkling faintly on the frozen pavements.
A few cars had drawn up by the church, and folk were chatting by the gate before going in. Yellow light blazed from the windows, the only bright colour available in the evening’s silvery darkness. Mr Phillips, who as well as being a Sunday-school teacher was sidesman to the vicar conducting the service, greeted them warmly as they entered. He seemed genuinely pleased to see Sam. An unmistakable aura of anticipation was gathering over the congregation, as if they genuinely expected something to happen.
No sooner had they taken their seats than the organ pulsed on a deep, resounding note. There was the sound of knee-joints cracking as everyone rose to their feet and took up the first hymn, ‘Hark! the herald-angels sing’. Connie, scrambling to find the page in the hymn-book, sang in a high, tremulous voice. Sam, by contrast, occasionally opened and closed his mouth with an approximation of the words.
The service was conducted by the Reverend Peter Evington, resplendent in his vestments, lisping slightly, his bald head glistening under the overhead lights. After a few words the congregation stood again for ‘O come, all ye faithful’. Half-way into the first verse Sam, hearing a tapping from overhead, looked up at the skylight directly above him.
A leaden cloud passed across his heart. Don’t do this, he thought. Not here. Not tonight. For the Tooth Fairy had the side of her face pressed flat against the skylight, her sooty curls tumbling over her head. Her mouth was open and her filed teeth reflected the light from inside the church. Meanwhile her fingers, with their extraordinary corkscrewing nails, cantered over the glass like the fall of a horse’s hooves. Sam saw one or two people in front of him crane their necks upwards, still singing throatily, to see where the tapping came from. Sam buried his red face deeper in his hymn-book.
The crescendo of the carol drowned out the noise from the roof. Before the next verse started up, it had disappeared. He looked up. The Tooth Fairy had gone. She had gone. Thank God, he thought. Thank God.
But as the next verse progressed there came a loud and impressive banging, this time not from overhead but at a window not more than six feet away. She was back, hammering hard on th
e glass, grimacing at him. Worse, she’d been joined by others like herself. Sam could see, across the Tooth Fairy’s shoulder, two or three other sooty forms, vaguely female, with laughing eyes and toothy, open mouths, urging her on, pointing provocatively and flicking back their lank, black hair. One of them leaned across her and rapped hard, with white knuckles, on the window.
Several members of the congregation stopped singing and lowered their hymn-books, looking around to see where the disturbance was coming from. Sam didn’t know if they could see what he could see. Perhaps they just didn’t know where to look . . . But the consternation of the disturbed worshippers cut through the carol like a ghost ship through a safe harbour. The carol began to die out all across the church as the rapping continued. Now everyone was sweeping the roof with their eyes, trying to detect the source of the noise. The organ stopped.
The rapping on the glass came louder and still louder. The congregation fell deadly silent. Of all those present only Sam seemed able to see who was responsible for the disruption.
Then the organ started up again, and, with someone bravely leading from the front, the singing recommenced. Everyone joined in with augmented vigour. By effort of conjoined wills and mighty lungpower, it seemed, the congregation succeeded in obliterating the commotion, for when they reached the end of the carol there was no more disturbance. Everyone stood in silence for an unnecessary length of time, waiting, listening, straining, before, on the given signal, they resumed their seats in a shuffling and fluttering of coat hems that sounded like wind among leaves.
There was a cough, and another, before the Reverend Peter Evington, jowls sagging slightly, a little pink from the exertion of singing, began to sermonize. Sam looked at his watch. It was a minute or so before twelve. Although the service tended not to register the precise moment of midnight and the manifestation of the Holy Spirit in this world, Sam had a dread feeling that he knew someone who would. A reptile claw dragged at his bowels.