by Graham Joyce
‘Come down,’ said a voice in his ear. ‘Come down a little to Andromeda. I want to show you something beautiful.’
He didn’t even remove his eye from the viewfinder. He altered the angle of his telescope as instructed.
‘Hold it there – perhaps another degree. So. Am I forgiven yet?’
‘You did hurt me. You hurt me badly.’
‘I’ve decided I’m going to help you. I’ve always paid you, haven’t I? From the first tooth? Come here. Lie down with me.’
He took her hand, and she led him to the bed, and they lay down together. She cradled him in her arms, whispering, whispering. ‘I’m going to smooth away all obstacles. I’m going to help you with Alice.’
‘How?’
‘I’m going to help you. Terry won’t lay his hand on her again. You’ll see.’
He fell asleep in her arms. When he woke in the middle of the night she was gone, but his window was open, as it always used to be when he was a small child.
32
Ripples
The next day was a Sunday. Sam decided he’d better tell Clive and Terry that he’d been visited by the police. First he went to Terry’s house. Half-way up the path he could smell breakfast cooking, and in the kitchen he found Terry’s Uncle Charlie, unshaved and still in his vest, poking slices of bacon around a frying pan. ‘He’s messing about in the garage,’ Charlie said sleepily, without looking up.
Sam, hearing the dull clonk of activity within, tried to let himself into the garage. It was bolted from the inside. He tapped on the door and announced himself. There came the sly whisper of a bolt withdrawing on the other side of the door before Terry let him in.
‘Bolt it after you,’ said Terry.
There was a workbench at the end of the garage. Terry had a rag wrapped around one end of a length of plumbing pipe. ‘Looks like a hefty piece,’ Sam said, eyeing the pipe bomb.
‘Alice is going to love this one,’ said Terry. He picked up a hammer and brought it down on the rag-end of the pipe.
Sam thought Terry’s technique a bit dangerous, and said so. ‘Shouldn’t you use a vice to close that?’
‘Too thick. Needs some wallop.’ Terry swung his hammer down on the pipe. There was another dull clonk.
‘Listen, Terry. The police came round to my house. About the bombs.’
Terry lowered his hammer, letting it dangle at his side. He looked at Sam in astonishment.
‘Yesterday’
Terry’s eyes fell to the hammer in his hand and then to his bomb. He weighed the hammer before giving the tail of his bomb another swipe. ‘Suppose we’d better give it a rest, then.’
‘Suppose so.’
‘Maybe make this the last one for a while.’
‘Better not to do any more at all.’
Terry looked sadly at his latest model. He hadn’t even had time to come up with a name for it. He turned back to the workbench. Holding the bomb steady with his left hand, he tried to compress the near end of the pipe with a series of vigorous short, sharp raps. Sam noted how Terry’s fingers closed delicately over the other end of the pipe bomb, the way they’d fastened over Alice’s breast.
‘I’m going to tell Clive,’ said Sam. ‘You coming?’
‘I’ll finish up here. I’m meeting Alice up at the pond at twelve. See you there later.’
Sam shrugged and left. As he passed by the kitchen window Charlie, still in his vest, offered him a mock farewell salute. Sam could still hear Terry tapping away in the garage.
Sam had gone less than a hundred yards when he heard the bomb explode.
Sam, Alice and Clive sat by the pond that afternoon. After the bare facts had been established, they sat in utter stillness, each cocooned in a private and eerie silence. They gazed into the pond, watching fine concentric circles, almost invisible, rippling slowly out from the centre of the pond and breaking at the clay bank. It seemed astonishing that such ripples could be generated without even a pebble being tossed into the water, and yet there they were, barely discernible yet undeniable, as if answering some deep and unknowable disturbance at the very heart of the pond.
They sat from three o’clock in the afternoon until twilight began to descend, slowly, in graded instalments. The water sucked gently at the dusk, dark calling to dark, until the blackness itself seemed to creep out of the pond and make its way on land, until the water of the pond and the land surrounding it had reached an equivalence, an uneasy truce.
‘It’s getting dark,’ one of them said. It could have been any of them, it didn’t matter. But the words spoken seemed to radiate in concentric waves from a still, small centre, travelling to some bleak, unknown and terrifying shore.
33
Cucumber Rings
One week after Terry came out of hospital, Linda left home for London. The event of Terry blowing off his own left hand eclipsed some of the leave-taking and the drama which might have occurred. As it was, there were tears and tribulations and misgivings and last-minute doubts. But now, in the grand scheme of things, cast against a background of juvenile boys blasting off their own limbs, a young woman leaving home seemed so much less to get upset about. After all, she was over eighteen. After all, she was of age. After all, London wanted her.
The recriminations about Terry’s accident had still not ended when they assembled at Linda’s house to wave her goodbye. Charlie had polished his car, all ready to drive her to the station. Derek, deprived even of that last privilege, had had to say his goodbyes up the country lane the evening before. He cut a sorry figure, standing slightly apart from the rest of the assembled group, like a bit-actor with no lines. Clive, Sam and Alice, all unbearably subdued, had come along at Linda’s request. They leaned against the gate, making weak jokes and trying not to look at the cauterized and bandaged stump of Terry’s wrist. Connie and Nev, always friendly with Charlie and Dot, had also turned up for the send-off.
After the nature of the accident and the circumstances of the bomb-making had been unravelled, people had reacted differently. Clive’s father Eric slammed Clive up against the wall and hit him, hard, bruising the boy’s cheek. It had been only the second time he had ever, in anger, laid a hand upon his son. Nev, however, went strangely quiet and took to staring at his son as if Sam were the most loathsome species of insect ever hatched out by the perversity of Nature; Connie meanwhile interrogated him, uselessly, and sometimes hysterically, and above all interminably.
Yet while most bewildered parents might try to explain an offspring’s delinquency in terms of the mesmeric evil of peers, Charlie and Dot never seemed to reserve any blame for either Clive or Sam. One night, while Terry was still in hospital, Sam drank three bottles of cider and turned up, blubbering, on Charlie’s doorstep, claiming exclusive responsibility for the accident. Charlie took him in and, unable to make head nor tail of Sam’s wild stories or even to fathom why exactly Sam felt personally responsible, he offered Sam a cigarette and talked him down. After that he took Sam home and privately suggested to Nev that he go easy on the lad, that the boy was suffering badly.
‘Suffering?’ Nev had shaken his head. ‘Suffering? He should suffer.’
‘That boy feels a lot, Nev. He feels things.’
‘He should feel my fists, that’s what.’
‘No, Nev. You’ve got it wrong.’
After Terry had come out of hospital, Linda cried for him every night. The effort of trying to pretend that everything was still exactly as it was before was too much for her. Consequently she was pink-eyed for the big day of her departure, which didn’t bode well. Dot had made her lie down with cucumber rings pressed on her puffed eyes and seemed heartless to Linda when she said, ‘Terry’s done it: he’ll have to live with it.’ It didn’t seem right to Linda. When someone you love blew off their hand, it didn’t seem right to mess around with cucumber rings. But Dot was firm, and her stoicism carried them all through.
Linda eventually appeared in a shocking-pink suit with her hair cut short in a fashi
onable, scooped wave. She kissed and hugged everyone with excessive enthusiasm, and it was not until the moment before her departure that Sam realized she’d always been there, in the foreground or in the background, a quietly reassuring presence, and he really was going to miss her. He glanced at Derek, standing back from the chatter and the unusually demonstrative behaviour, and he felt a pricking of sympathy.
Linda kissed Clive and Alice, but before hugging her mother and climbing into the car with her father, she took Sam and Terry to one side. ‘Terry,’ she said softly so that the others couldn’t hear. ‘I want you to take care of Sam. You’re all stupid, all of you, but Sam’s the most stupid, and I worry about him more than any of you. So you’ve got to promise me you’ll look out for him. Promise me?’
Sam was surprised by this. He wanted to protest. He wanted to say, ‘Look, he’s the poor fucker with one hand,’ but instead he coloured and said nothing. Terry, embarrassed, brushed his nose with his bandaged stump and looked away.
‘Promise me?’ Linda insisted.
‘Sure,’ said Terry. ‘Yes.’
Then Linda kissed them both before going to Derek. A final hug with Dot, and she climbed into the car. Everyone waved, everyone shouted, everyone blew kisses. Linda was gone.
The adults filtered away, except for Derek, hands in pockets, gazing down the road after her.
‘She’ll be back,’ Alice said brightly.
‘Not as if,’ Terry offered, ‘you weren’t going to see her again.’
Derek looked up. There was malice in his eye. ‘What do you know about it?’ he spat bitterly. ‘You know nothing. You’re just kids. For you I’m just Linda’s boyfriend, someone to try to take the piss out of. But she’s away and that’s it. I can’t compete where she’s gone. I’m out of it. I can’t compete.’ He got into his Mini, slamming the door. The engine revved angrily and the tyres squealed as he spun the car in the road. Derek accelerated away from them, very fast.
34
Yer Blues
‘You’ve got to understand something, lad,’ Skelton was saying. ‘You just don’t have that kind of power. You don’t have it. I don’t have it. Nobody has it.’
Skelton was trying, and not for the first time, to unburden Sam of his guilt over the business of Terry’s hand. This was not his first appointment with Skelton since the pipe-bomb accident. Indeed, a regular pattern had established itself in Sam’s life. Sam had an annual appointment with his psychiatrist. Skelton had determined that meetings of greater frequency were unnecessary; ‘We just want to measure your skull,’ he’d joked, ‘and keep everyone else happy’ However, any incident in Sam’s life, from being caught smoking to involvement in bomb construction, resulted, through Connie’s insistence, in a further appointment.
Sam had explained the entire business of the evil hand and of the Tooth Fairy’s promise of retribution.
‘Coincidence!’ Skelton hissed. ‘Though I’ll happily assert that you may have had some special insight into what happened before the event. By which I mean you knew there were dangers. You knew how these damned stupid things are made, presumably by holding them still in one hand and hammering the ends with the other. You knew all this. You foresaw it. That’s just intelligence at work, not some supernatural power. You are not responsible!’
‘What about when Terry’s father shot himself and his family?’
‘Maybe you saw something there too. You sensed some danger for your friend, something about his father’s behaviour that was deeply disturbing. You wanted him out of there. The mind is an incredible measuring instrument, Sam. It knows more than you think. It knows more than it should.’
‘How do you know all that?’
‘It’s my job to know.’
‘The Tooth Fairy said Terry owed me his life anyway.’
‘And therefore could afford a hand?’
‘Yes. That’s what the Tooth Fairy told me.’
‘Sod the Tooth Fairy!’ shouted Skelton, at the end of his patience. ‘Why don’t you get that Tooth Fairy and give it a good shagging!’
‘I do. Sometimes.’
‘Yes yes yes. I know you do. You’ve told me. I’m just running out of ideas.’
Skelton was brutally honest with Sam about the limitations of his ability to deal with Sam’s problem. For the psychiatrist, Sam was a unique case. Skelton had encountered plenty of children and adult patients with dangerous imaginary friends, but in his experience these entities either disappeared one day and never came back or developed into classic symptoms of paranoia, schizophrenia or other self-sustaining delusory conditions. Sam seemed to operate perfectly normally except for this one conviction. He had, Skelton had reported a long time ago, never been a danger either to himself or to others. So far.
‘And what about this wonderful . . . Alice, was it? Alice? I’m certain that when you lie down in the grass with this wonderful Alice, you’ll not see this Tooth Fairy again.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘How do I know? I’m paid to know! It’s my job to know! And I don’t mind telling you, I’m disappointed with your progress there. You’ve got to try, son. Try. Do you know the secret of success when it comes to women? To try. You may get your face slapped. You may endure the occasional stinging rebuke or withering humiliation. But if you want some apples in your barrow, you’ve got to put your barrow under the apple tree. See? You’ve got to try!’
‘It’s more impossible than ever now.’
‘Why? Tell me why.’ Skelton was almost crying with frustration.
‘Because that’s what this was all about. Between me and Terry. We both want Alice. That’s why Terry’s hand got blown off.’
‘And that,’ screamed Skelton, ‘is why I said to you that you just don’t have that power! God give me strength!’
‘On television,’ said Sam, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose, ‘psychiatrists don’t get all worked up like you do.’
Skelton bared his nicotine-stained teeth. ‘I’m coming to your house with a brick. And I’m going to throw it through your television screen. Now off you go. Make another appointment with Mrs Marsh on the way out. Don’t make any bombs. Have a good year.’
‘Any news on the Interceptor?’ Sam said, as he got out of his chair.
‘Eh? Oh, nothing to report. Everyone I’ve mentioned it to thinks it’s clever but too fanciful. I’m still trying.’
‘You know, I don’t want it patented for myself. I want it for Terry’s father. He invented it.’
‘I knew that.’
‘How? How did you know that?’
‘Get out of here,’ said Skelton.
Sam spent a great deal of time walking in the woods, trying to figure it all out. He knew he should avoid the site where Tooley’s corpse lay mouldering, yet the extraordinarily radiant presence of the carrion flower drew him like a beacon. Sometimes he would stand at a distance of twenty yards, observing the flower from behind a tree; occasionally he would approach it, circling it, peering at the base of the hollow trunk from which it grew. He wondered which particular part of Tooley’s corpse succoured its roots, whether brains or guts.
One day Sam felt oddly energized. He stood close to the plant, inspecting the purple leaves and the white stamen. It seemed to have reached a certain maturity and, Sam felt, was about to make a spectacular transformation. The fat stamen was ready to burst. The air about it quivered.
Sam experienced a stab of impatience, almost as if it were communicated directly from the plant. He felt drawn to helping Nature along. Using a stick to scrabble among the leaf-mulch at the base of the plant, he uncovered the puffy, poisonous yellow fungus beneath. It had swelled considerably since he was last there and had grown to the size of a small skull. Sam touched his stick to it. The tumorous white sac responded to the pressure with a wheeze of air and swelled visibly. Sam dropped the stick in surprise and stepped back. There followed a second consumptive sigh of air as the venomous sac puffed up still further. The short blast
s of air began to accelerate, and slowly the fungus swelled like a football inflated by a bicycle pump. The puffball continued to wheeze and inflate with increasing rapidity, until it began to resolve into an identifiable face. Tooley’s. It was sallow, jaundiced and poisonous, cheeks horribly scarred, eyes oily with hatred.
Still hyperventilating, each breath coming like a sobbing wheeze, Sam jerked up in bed, the crocodile clip of the Nightmare Interceptor tearing from his nostril.
The pond was bulldozed, as threatened. One day two giant yellow earth-movers came in, frightened the fauna, flattened the field and pushed a huge pile of earth into the pond, reducing it to a third of its recent size. It was all over in a day. The Moodies went up to survey the damage.
They looked on in silent dismay. They felt an inadmissible sense of personal violation. As if someone had stolen something intimate from them while they’d been sleeping. Like a vital organ, such as a lung. Or perhaps a tooth.
Even their old hideout had been destroyed. The place where they had spent so many afternoons, in fair weather or foul, was now a flattened plane of red earth imprinted with thick caterpillar tracks. The trees formerly overhanging the pond were uprooted and piled high for burning. The old Morris seat, springs now exposed through the torn leather, had been casually slung on the top of the pyre. The water in the small pond that remained had been stirred the colour of stewed tea. It seemed impossible that it could continue to sustain the myriad forms of pond life it had supported for years: herons and moorhens and swifts, perch and pike, toads and newts, dragonflies and water-boatmen, snails and spawn, duckweed and spyrogyra.
‘They were only supposed to fill in half !’ Alice’s voice, though subdued, burned with indignation. ‘Surely they can’t get away with that!’