The Tooth Fairy

by Graham Joyce

  After several minutes the car reversed into the road and drove away. They emerged from hiding, sighing and shaking their cramped limbs. ‘That was close,’ said Clive. His face was smeared with charcoal or soot from something he’d pressed his cheek against in the dark. They all started giggling again, hysterically.

  ‘Let’s go to my place and play some records,’ Alice said. Elated, they walked to Alice’s, all talking simultaneously. The bombs had exalted them. They stumbled across the dark fields in an afterglow. Then Sam, bringing up the rear, stopped talking.

  He saw that Terry had his left arm around Alice’s shoulders. Alice was making no effort to resist. She even seemed to lean towards Terry, staggering through the long grass. Terry’s hand resting on her left shoulder gleamed pale and white in the dark, like some alien thing not attached to his arm, an insect or a creature with a life of its own, maggoty, flexing occasionally and unpleasantly. They crossed barbed-wire fences and a stream to get to Alice’s house, and after each obstacle Terry’s arm found its way back around Alice’s shoulders.

  In the dark, throughout the buoyant journey, none of the others noticed Sam’s silence.

  A different kind of explosion was happening at Terry’s house, and it was happening around Linda. Things had moved so rapidly after the triumph of the Midsummer Queen beauty competition that Charlie and Dot were reeling. They went around in an abstracted daze, not knowing quite how to share Linda’s excitement. On the one hand, they clearly appreciated what a compliment to them it was to have bred such a beautiful and personable daughter; on the other they realized that their only reward for this achievement was to have her snatched, prematurely it seemed, away from them.

  Linda was going to leave home. Linda was going to live in London.

  Three weeks after the citywide competition staged at Redstone Social Club, Linda walked away with the area trophy. And then in August she carried off the regional crown. Her photograph, having appeared in several newspapers both near and far, attracted many eyes. All kinds of ‘work’ seemed to come with the beauty-queen territory: snipping ribbons to open new shops; kicking off footballs to commence charity games; pushing piles of pennies over the bar in pubs. Everyone wanted Linda. Linda Linda Linda. What’s more, they were prepared to pay good money to get her.

  The American company Chrysler had bought out Humber and were launching a new car that autumn. Linda was contracted to stand by the new saloon in a mini-skirt while press and company photographers aimed their cameras. Ironically her father, working in the paintshop at the car factory, had sprayed the very same vehicle before the assembly line began to turn them out in quantity. Charlie went with her to watch her receive all this attention. He felt self-conscious and uncomfortable in collar and tie in the executive lounge and showroom, standing with his manager and all his middle-ranking factory superiors as the cameras flashed and the male jokes ricocheted off the polished body of the gleaming new saloon. For three hours of this ‘work’ Linda was paid almost the equivalent of Charlie’s wage packet for a month. The irony was not lost on Linda, who tried to make a gift of the entire cheque to Charlie and Dot, though they refused to accept it.

  Then, a few weeks before the Moodies began their bombing campaign, Linda was invited to model some clothes in London. She was asked by the illustrious Pippa Hamilton Modelling Agency to spend three days in the capital, accommodated in a hotel at their expense. Linda was on her way.

  ‘It’s all too fast,’ Charlie complained. ‘It’s all happening too fast.’

  ‘It’s an opportunity, Dad!’

  ‘Your studies are going to suffer!’ Dot whined.

  Linda, having completed her A-levels, was set to attend teacher-training college in Derby within a couple of weeks. ‘But this job might lead to even more work. Who knows?’

  ‘That’s not real work,’ countered Charlie.

  ‘But look at the letter, Dad! For three days’ work they want to pay me half what you earn in a year!’

  Linda regretted saying this as soon as it was out. She hadn’t meant to demean, merely to persuade, to recruit her father’s support. But Charlie had no answer. He looked away, and Dot looked at Linda and Linda looked at the floor. ‘Anyway, I want you and Mum to come to London with me.’

  Charlie cheered up, and relented. ‘No, my sweetheart. But you and your mum can go to London and have a nice time. And don’t come back without a whole weight of shopping bags.’

  Linda squealed with delight and ran to the telephone to let Derek in on the good news. Charlie went upstairs to his and his wife’s bedroom, where he closed the door behind him. He lay down on the bed and wept for the first time in eighteen years, since the day Linda had been born.

  The expedition to London was a great success. Linda met Pippa Hamilton in person, and though Dot thought the woman a gorgon, Linda was bowled over. A letter soon followed, in which Pippa raved and raved about some photographs and in which Linda was invited to place herself on the agency’s books. Pippa would personally oversee her career, it said, and if the answer was yes, then Linda should waste no time in making arrangements to move to London.

  ‘What about college?’ said Derek.

  ‘It can be put off for a year, can’t it, Derek?’ Dot asked.

  ‘Yep,’ Derek said glumly. Derek knew it was all over bar the shouting, and the crying, and the talk of how much she could earn for doing so little, and the cancellation of a place at teacher-training college in Derby. Linda was London-bound.

  ‘Don’t brood on it,’ said the Tooth Fairy. ‘I told you she’d hurt you.’

  Sam lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling. It was a warm Sunday afternoon. The others would be up by the pond, smoking cigarettes, cracking thin jokes. He wanted to be there, to be close to Alice, but he couldn’t bear to witness her burgeoning relationship with Terry. He felt disembowelled every time Terry’s hand was allowed to stray casually across her clothes, to stroke her hair, to brush the exposed skin of her arm. So far he’d managed to conceal his feelings entirely. No one knew how he was suffering.

  Except the Tooth Fairy.

  ‘At least you know now what it’s like,’ she said. ‘Now you know what it is to feel jealousy.’

  ‘Jealousy?’ Sam said bitterly. ‘Why should you feel jealous?’

  ‘Because you’re all I have. You make me come here, and then you want someone else! I never want to come here: it’s like a bad dream for me. And when you want Alice or Linda instead of me, I feel like I’m dying. I get sick inside. I choke. I sob. I bleed for you. My life ebbs away. What do you expect me to do? You’re all I have here!’

  Sam couldn’t understand her when she railed against him like this.

  She softened. ‘Am I forgiven?’ The Tooth Fairy’s female aspect had been restored. She sat on the bed, her long fingers laid upon his thigh. She was revitalized, renewed. Those black eyes shone like a beetle’s carapace again; her pale skin was dear and unblemished. Her mass of black curls seemed full of stars as, awaiting an answer, she moistened her lips with her tongue.

  Suddenly it dawned on him. ‘You use my teeth to heal yourself, don’t you?’ said Sam. ‘That’s how it works, isn’t it? You take something of mine and it helps you.’

  ‘Yours or someone else’s. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. There are different sides to me. It’s not even something which I control. You have to understand that. The first time, the first tooth, is supposed to put an end to it. But you saw me – I don’t know how. You saw me, and we were both doomed.’ She got up and trained his telescope on the woods. Fiddling with the focusing ring, she said, ‘I’ve always had your interests at heart, Sam.’

  ‘You’re so fucking generous.’ He was becoming bolder in his dealings with the Tooth Fairy. ‘I don’t know why you care.’

  ‘This is not a one-way thing, you know. You may think I’m your nightmare, but you in turn are my nightmare. It’s your moods that pull me here. So is it too much if I ask you to love me instead of Alice? Is that too much
? There! Found it!’

  ‘Found what?’

  ‘Stop playing with your cock and come and look.’

  Sam got off the bed and dragged himself over to the telescope. He squinted through the eyepiece as the Tooth Fairy held the instrument steady. She had focused on a spot among the trees in Wistman’s Woods. All Sam could see was a blur of branches and a brown shadow in the centre of the lens. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Keep looking.’

  At last the trees became more defined, and the brown shadow began to assume shape, changing hue as it did so. Finally it resolved. Sam was looking at a strange, long-stemmed woodland plant with a purple trumpet-flower. It looked vaguely poisonous. Growing inside the sinister purple trumpet was a fat, erect stamen, white and tuber-like, waving slightly in the breeze.

  ‘Very rare,’ said the Tooth Fairy. ‘In fact, those babes only grow where there’s a corpse in the soil. To fertilize it. Honest.’

  Sam looked hard at the base of the plant. It was growing out of a hollow trunk stuffed with ferns and branches. ‘What sort of plant is it?’

  ‘It’s got lots of names. We call it a carrion flower.’ She giggled. ‘But I think I’d call it Tooley’s Revenge.’

  Sam pushed past her and returned to his bed. He lay down and thought of Terry’s arm draped around Alice and of his hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Don’t brood,’ said the Tooth Fairy. ‘It hurts me when you brood.’

  The bombing campaign was stepped up in the weeks leading up to Linda’s departure. The football club’s changing rooms were the target of two more bombs (one called PLUG and the other called SKUNK, both inexplicably). Others were detonated in various venues, such as under the railway bridge, in the gymkhana field’s commentary-box and, most pointlessly of all, in a half-oildrum floated on the pond.

  Sam kept a watchful eye on signs of a quickening relationship between Terry and Alice. What he saw was difficult to interpret. The hand – the dread hand of his friend – would occasionally scuttle around her shoulder and would rest there for as long as Alice allowed it. And at these times there was no doubting the special intimacy developing between the two. But at other times Alice would squeeze up against Sam, rest an ivory finger on his thigh, provocatively share a cigarette. It was as if she was telling him he wasn’t excluded or perhaps that she had yet to make her choice. Only Clive seemed to exist outside this troublesome formula, and then even his resolve collapsed.

  In trying to throw off the quirky character and geeky scent smeared on him by the Epstein Foundation, Clive took to wearing blue jeans and baseball boots, out-smoking all three of them and doing hard-case things to show how mean he was. Like embedding razor blades in the trees’ branches to booby-trap their ‘den’ against the kids from the estate who’d roughed up the place. Alice objected, and she and Terry privately went around afterwards taking out as many as they could find. And it was no coincidence, given Alice’s deep interest in pop music, that Clive became fascinated by, and authoritative on, the subject. He exchanged discs with Alice and dropped names like Syd Barrett and Captain Beefheart, names Sam and Terry had never heard of. But when he turned up with a pipe bomb one day and was wearing a fringed leather jacket just like Alice’s, Sam knew that Clive had got it just as bad, if not worse.

  ‘Wow! Great jacket!’ said Alice. ‘Can I try it on?’

  So Alice and Clive swapped jackets for a couple of hours. Sam knew what that meant. They had swapped skins. Clive would get Alice’s scent. And ever afterwards that lunacy-inspiring glandular pipe bomb would continue to detonate just under his nose and yet just out of range.

  Clive had gone over; and from that day Alice might choose to snuggle up to, or link arms with, or even nuzzle against, any one of the three of them. She called them her three ‘protectors’ and distributed her favours in almost equal measure. But if extra favour was to be apportioned anywhere, it went to Terry. Sam wondered, in the private, aching chambers of his heart, if Alice had shown Terry the secret of the Gossamer.

  One Saturday morning Sam thought an episode in his life was being replayed. The only difference was that Connie and Nev were out shopping when the doorbell rang and Sam answered it to two oddly familiar faces.

  ‘Mornin’!’ said one of the two men, picking up a bottle of milk from the doorstep. ‘Your parents in?’

  The two had put on weight, and one had greyed around his sideburns, but Sam recognized the two police detectives who had turned up at the house some years ago to ask questions about vandalism. ‘No. They’re out shopping.’

  ‘Can we come in?’

  But the second detective intervened. ‘He’s a minor,’ he said in a low voice.

  The first one smiled at Sam affably. ‘Look. You don’t have to say yes if you don’t want to. But could we sit in our car and have a chat?’

  Sam put on his shoes. As they walked down the garden path one of the policemen said, ‘Have we met before?’

  ‘Don’t think so,’ said Sam.

  ‘Explosions,’ said the first detective, as the car door clicked shut. They sat in the front, Sam in the back. The driver watched Sam through his rear-view mirror. ‘They make us nervous.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know what a terrorist is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Fourteen.’

  ‘Fourteen. Well, you don’t look like a terrorist to me. But Ma Casey didn’t look like a bankrobber. And causing explosions is a serious offence. What could you get for causing explosions, Bill?’

  The second detective continued to look at Sam through his mirror. He whistled. ‘Ten years. Fifteen years.’

  ‘As much as that? As much as fifteen years? That’s longer than Sam here has been on this earth.’

  ‘Serious offence,’ said Bill.

  ‘Know anything about explosions, Sam?’

  ‘No. I wouldn’t know how to make a bomb.’

  ‘Oh, so they’re bombs, are they? What sort of bombs?’

  ‘I don’t know what sort. If there are explosions, they must come from a bomb.’ Sam couldn’t stop himself exhaling a huge breath of air.

  ‘No, you get all sorts of explosions, don’t you, Bill?’

  ‘All sorts.’

  ‘See, Sam, someone thought they saw you. Though they admit they might have been mistaken. Do you think that was it? They were mistaken?’ Sam nodded. ‘You saying you weren’t there that night?’

  ‘What night?’

  The big smile suddenly went from the detective’s face. He stared at Sam without a word for some time. Sam was sitting on his hands and they were sticking to the leather upholstery. The detective leaned over the seat and opened Sam’s door. ‘OK.’

  ‘Can I go?’

  There was no answer from the unsmiling detective. Sam got out of the car and walked up to the house without looking back. Slamming the door behind him, he ran to the toilet and was violently sick. After he’d cleaned himself up, he sneaked a look through his parents’ bedroom window. The car with the two detectives was still parked outside the house. They waited there for half an hour before driving away.

  Sam pulled on his jacket and hurried up to the pond. He wanted to find out if any of the others had been visited. At first he thought none of his friends was around, but as he approached their hideaway he heard the low murmur of voices. Backing off, he crept around the bushes. There he had a full view of Alice and Terry sitting on the slashed Morris Minor seat. They were talking in hushed, intimate tones, Terry’s lips hovering inches from Alice’s. Then Sam noticed Terry’s hand. Crab-like, it rested casually over her left breast, the fingers flexing lightly as Terry and Alice continued to talk. For the second time that day Sam’s stomach turned over.

  Backing, unheard, out of the bushes, Sam raced across the field and cleared the gate. He marched across the neighbouring fields in bitter blindness, wiping his glasses on his shirt, blinking at the clear September skies. His feet marched him in the direction of the woods, not slow
ing until he reached the trees’ perimeter. He ducked into the woods, following twisting paths almost sightlessly, wanting to break into a run, his breath coming short. He had to fight down a tightening in his chest, a constriction that threatened to climb into his throat and strangle him.

  Finally his raging emotions flung him, like a stone from a catapault, into a familiar clearing. There he saw a hollow stump stuffed with ferns and broken branches. A sinister, purple flower grew from out of the stump, its vulgar, thick, white stamen nodding lightly in the breeze. He approached slowly.

  The flower was rooted in a rich mulch of leaves, decomposing under the branches that he, Clive and Terry had heaped over the deep hollow. This time there was no mistaking the location. Somewhere under there was Tooley’s rotting corpse. Sam plucked up a broken branch of elm. Trembling, he poked at the leaf-mulch mouldering at the base of the plant.

  His stick turned over a dark and juicy pap of rotting leaves, revealing, as it did so, a puffy yellow fungus beneath. A host of wood lice, mites and black beetles spilled out, crawling over the spores of the corrupt-looking fungus. A glistening grub with skin like white leather sucked on the root of the plant. Disgusted, Sam let his stick fall, and stepped back. He scowled again at the plant the Tooth Fairy had called a carrion flower. The purple-black and nightshade-blue petals were tightly wreathed, and the fat, white stamen was dusted with touch-me-if-you-dare saffron pollen. He wanted to recover his stick and slash the plant to the ground, but he was reluctant to handle the elm branch again, as if it had been contaminated. He was afraid that the plant somehow possessed preternatural powers of retribution. Moreover he sensed that the Tooth Fairy was there in the woods, watching him.

  Sometimes it seemed as if she was always, always with him.

  At last he came to his senses and went home.

  Sam lay on his bed all afternoon. When his mother eventually tapped on the door, he pretended to have been sleeping. He ate his tea in silence and then told Connie he was going to spend the evening studying the stars through his telescope.

  Which is what he did, knowing he could lose himself in the galaxies. The telescope seemed even clearer since it had been repaired. The night sky was cloudless, and the constellations were strong, and he didn’t have to think about Alice and Terry. He trailed a satellite, and watched a meteor shower, and made notes in his book.