The Tooth Fairy

by Graham Joyce

  ‘So he just drove his Mini straight into a wall?’ Clive wanted to know.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Terry. ‘Killed outright.’

  It had been well over a year since Linda had left Derek to go to London. He’d seen her only a couple of times since that day, and his prediction that she’d left him behind had been entirely accurate. He’d been seen sitting alone one night in the lounge of the Gate Hangs Well, drinking heavily. The landlady of the pub, Gladys Noon, had spotted him clutching his car keys at closing time and had tried to dissuade him from driving. But he had gone from there, climbed into his car and put an end to it.

  ‘That’s odd,’ Nev Southall said, when his son reported what Terry had told him. ‘I was drinking in the Gate Hangs Well that night and I saw him drive off. But he had someone with him in the car.’

  ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘Positive.’

  Sam suddenly felt very strange. ‘Who was it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I saw her snuggling up to him in the pub at the tail-end of the evening. A queer-looking girl. She seemed to be whispering in his ear all the time. Then they got up and left together.’

  ‘What did she look like?’

  ‘Small. Curly hair, jet-black. Gypsy-looking and a mouth full of shiny teeth. As I came out of the pub they roared out of the car park. Almost knocked me down. She was in the passenger seat, still talking in his ear. But he was looking dead ahead, as if he was trying to ignore her. Then they sped off down the road.’

  Sam felt a cold sweat bubble on his back. He said nothing.

  ‘The thing is,’ Nev said, ‘there was no mention of any passenger when they scraped him out of the wreck.’

  Sam winced.

  ‘Did you kill Derek?’ he asked the Tooth Fairy in the dead of night. ‘Did you?’

  ‘What do you care about Derek?’ she answered, sneering.

  ‘Did you? Did you kill him? I have to know.’

  ‘When Linda was here, you spent, all your time wishing Derek was out of the way. You and your cronies never stopped giving him a hard time. You hated Derek. If I did or if I didn’t, what’s Derek to you? If I did it, I was doing you a favour.’

  ‘Did you tell him to kill himself ? Did you?’

  The Tooth Fairy wouldn’t answer. She hugged her knees in the dark and curled her lip at him. Her face looked pale and sickly. There was an air of contagion about her, a whiff of carrion. Sam felt an Arctic thrill of fear for everyone around him. It pierced his bones.

  ‘You keep away from me,’ said Sam. ‘I want nothing more to do with you. Do you hear me? Nothing! Nothing!’

  The Tooth Fairy only hugged herself harder and narrowed her eyes at him.

  Some time later Linda made one of her rare visits to Redstone. The mood after Derek’s demise was subdued. No one blamed Linda, but there was some resentment from Dot and Charlie that Linda didn’t honour them more often. Nevertheless, beyond the first evening, after they’d discussed Derek in hushed tones, the old warmth and familiarity soon returned to the hearth. Linda chatted away happily about her exciting new life in London, scattering celebrity names like confetti at a wedding. Most of the names were lost on Dot and Charlie, but they listened attentively, trying to frame a picture of Linda’s milieu.

  ‘Pippa says I should move to a flat in Mayfair. Pippa says I can afford it, so why not?’

  ‘Is that better?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘Mayfair, Dad, Mayfair, as in ‘‘Monopoly’’.’

  Charlie coloured. ‘I know, I know. I’m just asking if it’s better, that’s all.’

  ‘Pippa says you need to live in a place where you might get spotted. Pippa says anybody who’s anybody lives in Mayfair right now.’

  ‘Not Redstone?’ said Terry.

  ‘You’re wearing a lot of make-up these days,’ Dot observed.

  ‘Not more, just different. Pippa said I had to change the way I did it. She said my old make-up style made me look like a barmaid in a working men’s club.’

  Dot, who’d taught Linda how to use make-up, sniffed at that.

  ‘It seems to me,’ Charlie snorted, ‘that Pippa’s got a lot of soap and water up her arse.’ He got out of his seat and left the room.

  Dot looked meaningfully at Linda.

  Several weeks after Linda had returned to London, a picture of her wearing only a man’s collarless shirt appeared in a tabloid newspaper. Her breasts were partly revealed, although the open shirt front decorously covered her nipples. A tantalizing glimpse – but no more than that – was offered of the aureoles of her breasts. Charlie raged and had a day off work. Never again, he said, would he be able to look his workmates in the eyes. Sam, in the privacy of his room, clipped out the photograph and pinned it to the wall over his bed.

  *

  About that time a new English teacher took up a post at Thomas Aquinas. As teachers went, Ian Blythe had uncommonly long hair and a taste for unconventional, herringbone sports jackets. He stopped Clive in the corridor one day. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘That! Under your arm!’

  ‘Sonny Boy Williamson, sir.’

  ‘Give me a look at it! Original American pressing? I had one of these. Got warped in my student days. Any chance I could borrow this to make a tape recording?’

  And so began a friendship, based on the blues, between teacher and pupil. Mr Blythe had a collection of records and tapes exceeding even Clive’s. He also ran, fronted and played at a monthly folk-and-blues club in the back room of the Cock Inn in nearby Frowsley.

  ‘You can come if you like, but you can’t drink,’ Blythe said firmly.

  Clive dragged Sam, Alice and Terry along, and they compensated for not being allowed to drink alcohol by smoking pot en route to the event and by chain-smoking tobacco during it. Some nights the performers were dazzling, some nights they were stinking, and they always had to leave before the end to get the last bus back to Redstone. But it was better than hanging around the streets and infinitely preferable to the desperate remedy of attending a youth club.

  Blythe himself played a respectable blues guitar; only his voice let him down. Clive came dangerously close to getting a crush on the man, so much so that his English, dragging behind his extraordinary ability in maths and the sciences, suddenly caught up. All of his teachers, including Blythe, wanted to propose him for early Oxford entrance exams, but, with his father’s support, Clive steadfastly resisted any new attempt to separate him from the common herd.

  One evening, as they were coming out of the Cock Inn to make their way to the last bus, they were set upon in the dark by six or seven Frowsley youths in a completely unprovoked attack. They had been laughing and joking as they left the pub, and it was Sam who heard someone shout, ‘Fuck off back to Redstone,’ before he felt a half-housebrick rammed into the side of his face. He went down, vaguely conscious of the ensuing scuffle. On his knees, he spat blood and a tooth to the ground. Though dizzy and unable to see clearly, he recognized a familiar face appear before him in slow motion, grinning evilly and reaching for his tooth.

  ‘I’ll have that,’ the Tooth Fairy whispered in his ear.

  Sam was astonished. The Tooth Fairy was one of their assailants. He staggered to his feet and waded in to try to help his friends. Glass broke. Somebody’s nose squelched under his fist before people came running out of the pub to stop the fracas. In the blur of fists and toecaps he saw the Tooth Fairy flailing at Alice. The unknown attackers peeled off into the night. It was all over in under fifteen seconds.

  It was an ugly incident. Alice emerged with a split lip and a bloody mouth. They made their way to the bus shelter still looking over their shoulders. Only Terry was confident they wouldn’t be attacked again. His good fist and his shirt front were covered in blood, and it wasn’t his own. They all felt that they had at least dealt out a return. Sam knew he’d broken someone’s nose and Alice felt she’d given as good as she’d got. Clive had probably taken more punishment than any of them, b
ut he remembered scraping his boot so hard down someone’s shin that he’d felt the skin rip.

  Then the bus driver, frightened by their bloodied condition, refused to allow them on the bus. They had to walk off their adrenalin on the road back to Redstone.

  ‘I’m sure it was a girl,’ Alice said for the fourth time. ‘I’m sure it was girl who punched me in the mouth.’

  Sam knew exactly who it was. I need to talk to Skelton, he thought. It’s spilling over again. It’s getting out of hand.

  The upshot was that the landlord of the Cock Inn banned them from going to his pub ever again, as if they’d been the cause of the brawl. Blythe defended his pupils staunchly – so staunchly that the landlord told him to take his folk-and-blues club elsewhere. Eric Rogers, picking up on the problem, mentioned to Clive an unused back room at the Gate Hangs Well and promised to have a word with the landlady. So Blythe came over to Redstone one evening, charmed the widowed Gladys Noon, and the Frowsley Folk Club became the Redstone Folk Club. Blythe landed a coup on the opening night. Some legendary Black American blues musicians had started to come to England after the Yardbirds had done an unheard-of thing in bringing over Sonny Boy Williamson. Bottleneck guitarist Zoot Salem was billed to appear on opening night. Clive and Alice took money on the door; Terry and Sam were recruited to collect glasses and help with equipment.

  The legendary Zoot turned up in a hired Ford Capri, with no assistance, one guitar and a small PA system, which Sam deferentially carried into the pub. Zoot, still on the road at eighty years old, was a thin, wiry man with a leathery face. Sad, heavy pouches hung under his eyes, and he had a disconcerting habit of frequently putting his hand to his mouth as if to pluck some tiny but irritating object from his tongue. A good-sized audience turned up, and the old man’s bottleneck guitar playing was masterly. Clive, in particular, was mesmerized.

  Sam was enraptured too, but towards the end of the set something happened which made him feel faint. Introducing his next song, Zoot Salem seemed to fasten on Sam with particular intensity. Perhaps Sam imagined it, but Zoot appeared to stare right at him when he said, in a deep and barely coherent Southern drawl, ‘This hyeh song I wrote long time ’go. This hyeh song call ‘‘The Toof Fereh’’.’ Zoot launched into a foot-tapping twelve-bar routine, growling into the microphone, making the strings of his guitar shiver and squeal in protest.

  For Sam the sound receded for a moment, and he felt badly disoriented. Surely he’d misheard? But, no, Zoot had a refrain between each verse in which he chop-muted a chord, stopped playing, closed his mouth around the microphone and rasped, ‘Yo! Yo just a toof fereh, yo!’

  The audience got the idea, joining in the refrain every time it came around. But to Sam it seemed like Zoot was speaking to him, even mocking him. It appeared too that the audience were in on the joke, picking up the line with gusto every time it occurred. He felt hot. He needed air. He had to go outside.

  Sam sat down on one of the unseasonal benches, blinking up at the evening sky. It was a clear, cloudless night. A silver scythe of new moon was bright in the sky. Mars twinkled, orange-yellow, close to the constellation of Leo. He felt better. The song could not have been about him, he decided, since they had continued to sing it long after he’d left the room. He remained outside for a while, breathing steely night air, hearing rapturous applause as Zoot closed his set. Alice came out while Zoot played an encore.

  ‘Here you are.’ She sat down beside him, laying a hand on his arm.

  ‘Here I am.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Sam tapped the side of his head. ‘It’s this. It’s no good.’

  ‘Yes. It’s a problem. That head of yours.’

  ‘Don’t take the piss.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me about it? Why don’t you? You never tell me about it.’

  ‘It’s too . . . It would take too long.’ He wanted to tell her that it was too scary to talk about. He thought he would tell her, one day. But not tonight. He looked up at the sky. ‘Stars are bright.’

  ‘Change subject on me, would you?’

  He looked back at her. ‘I love you, Alice. But you know that.’

  Her eyes searched his face. Then she stood up. ‘Come back inside. Hold my hand.’

  Zoot was well into his third encore. The evening had been a wild success, the landlady was making good sales, the club was up and running. After Zoot denied the crowd a fourth encore, and the drinkers scrambled to the bar for last orders, Sam went to help the old musician with his gear. He needed to get near to the man.

  ‘Why did you write that song?’

  ‘Which song you say?’

  ‘ ‘‘The Tooth Fairy’’.’

  Zoot put a huge, leathery hand on Sam’s shoulder, cocked his head to one side and smacked his lips. ‘Well, I was a-dreaming . . . ummm, ummm. That’s right. This toof fereh come take mah toof. I said, no, you don’t take mah toof . . . ummm? No, sir. I want this here toof for mahself. I wrote the song. Heh, heh, heh!’

  Sam gazed back at the old man. Then Zoot was beleaguered by admirers who pressed forward to talk to him. Before turning away he said, ‘I thank you kindly, young man, for carrying mah guitar.’

  ‘What did he say?’ Clive was frantic to know. ‘Tell me what he said.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Come on!’

  ‘He just said he wrote the song.’

  37

  Condom

  ‘Actually, Sam, you’re not the first person to believe in fairies. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he was a great believer. You and he would get on like a house on fire. He even wrote a book about it.’

  Sam had never seen Skelton looking so haggard, so tired. He’d mentioned to Sam that he was approaching retirement, and Sam had noticed a carelessness about him recently, an untidiness in the office that wasn’t in evidence when he’d first visited Skelton several years ago. Mrs Marsh, his faithful secretary, had lately adopted an air of exasperated patience. Skelton was like a man who, somewhere along the line, had lost the faith and didn’t know why.

  Sam was now old enough to understand too that while he had his Tooth Fairy, Skelton was tormented by his own imps and demons and that they were let out of a bottle called Johnny Walker. Drink never made Skelton dysfunctional or inattentive, but his face was now permanently flushed, and his eyes had a rheumy look. He was also less discreet about taking a drink in his study if the fancy took him. He’d given up pretending. Disappointingly, all plans for the Nightmare Interceptor had long been forgotten.

  ‘He was taken in you know, Conan Doyle. Two little girls faked a photograph of fairies and he believed them. Who’d have thought it? A clever fellow like Conan Doyle.’

  ‘I’ve seen it. It’s rubbish. Anyone can see the picture’s a fake.’

  ‘Not Conan Doyle. Because he believed, Sam. He had the belief, and if you’ve got the belief, you can see anything. God. Communism. Fairies. Psychiatry. We fake our own photographs, do you see? And it seems the cleverer we are, the cruder the forgeries we’re prepared to accept.’

  ‘Look,’ Sam protested, ‘I know what you’re saying. But fairies don’t look like flimsy-winged pixies with names like ‘‘Peapod’’ and ‘‘Butterscotch’’.’

  ‘Correction. Yours doesn’t.’

  ‘But I’m trying to tell you, other people are seeing it and are being affected by it. My dad saw her in the car with Derek. Alice got a punch in the mouth from her. Terry saw her through my telescope. And then Clive and Terry saw . . .’

  ‘Saw what?’ ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I’ve told you about that ‘‘nothing’’.’ Skelton had. He’d taught Sam that when people say ‘nothing’, it was always to hide a highly significant ‘something’.

  ‘Clive and Terry saw it once when we were in the woods.’

  ‘You’re holding something back.’

  ‘I told you about it once. You rubbished what I’d told you.’ Skelton bared his teeth and searched his memory. He shook his head slowly from side t
o side. Then he suddenly remembered. ‘The Dead Scout? Are you talking about the Dead Scout?’ Sam nodded. ‘Do you remember when you used to come here and draw me pictures of gravestones and bats and whatnot?’

  ‘It’s not like that.’ Sam knew it was useless to argue. His entire relationship with Skelton had been like walking through a hall of mirrors where illusion and reality reflected back at each other, infinitely. Dead Scouts could not be distinguished from Tooth Fairies in Skelton’s vision of Sam’s world.

  ‘Sam, I’ll tell you, I’m worried about you. I’m more worried about you now than at any time. I’ve never used words on you before. I avoid psychiatric terms because they’re a kind of incantation which stops people from having to think further. But all this time I have thought this projection of yours was harmless. Fucked-up, I suppose, in your language, but harmless. Now you’re starting to exhibit signs of paranoia. Do you know what that is?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You’re a bright lad, Sam, always have been. Look at this story you told me about the old musician. Can you see how your mind picks up on a coincidence and goes belting down the wing with it? Eh? This is a pattern you must resist.

  ‘I was hoping when I retired next year to close the book on you, without having to pass you on to someone else. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe another head would help. It’s just that you’re so damned different from every other case who ever walked through my door, and I’ll be the first to admit you’ve got me stumped.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t say sorry. I care about you, Sam. I do.’

  Sam looked up at the ravaged old face glowering at him from the other side of the desk. He believed Skelton. ‘You haven’t asked me this time.’

  ‘Asked what?’ said Skelton.

  ‘About Alice.’

  ‘Hallelujah! Don’t tell me you’ve gone and done it? Not finally done the deed?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’