by Graham Joyce
The Tooth Fairy plucked the silver bullet from its mouth and displayed it in a mallet-sized fist. Then it stood up. The smile evaporated. Two feet taller than the sweating psychiatrist, it towered above him, exuding palpable malice and a stench of venom.
‘Now it’s my turn,’ said the Tooth Fairy. It brought the massive hammer of its fist across Skelton’s face in a backhand swing. Skelton was thrown off his feet, dashing his skull on the corner of his oak desk. The Tooth Fairy turned to Sam. It raised an imaginary gun to its lips, blew smoke from the barrel and offered Sam a conspiratorial smile.
Terry and Sam were delayed one Friday evening on their way to the Blues and Folk Club at the Gate. Sam had called round for Terry, only to find Charlie and Dot in a state of agitation while Terry was talking to Linda on the telephone. Linda was upset about something, but no one could determine the nature of her problem. Both Charlie and Dot had tried to talk to her, without penetrating the mystery, and now Terry was having a go.
Terry held out the phone for Sam. He’d mentioned to Linda that Sam had arrived and was waiting in the hall, and now Linda wanted to speak to him, urgently it seemed. Linda was obviously in tears on the other end of the line, but she wasn’t making any sense. This went on for some time. Eventually Sam handed the phone on to Charlie.
‘Look, my darling, you can always come home, any time you like,’ Charlie soothed. ‘No, my sweetheart, no one’s saying you’ve got to come home. I was just . . . No, my flower . . . No . . . your mother never said that . . . and she never said that you said that . . .’
‘Come on,’ Terry whispered to Sam, ‘let’s get out of here.’
The club was already filling up when they arrived. A three-piece electric band of drums, bass and organ was setting up battered amplifiers on the tiny stage. Alice and Clive were busy taking money on the door.
‘Late for class,’ said Ian Blythe. ‘Could you two set up a couple more tables at the back? We might have a crowd in tonight.’
‘What’s the band called?’ Terry wanted to know. Band names had gone crazy back in the late sixties; he was compiling a list of the worst ones who’d appeared at the club, to compete with How in the Blitz and Yampy Cow.
‘Spy V Spy. From London.’
Blythe was right. The club filled to capacity again, and it was standing-room only when Spy V Spy broke into their first number. It was standard gut-bucket blues with pitched vocals and some filigree organ effects. Fine, Clive would say, but not worth bringing all the way from London. Sam noticed some people he wanted to talk to in the corner of the room, and ten minutes had gone by before Clive came over to him and yanked his arm.
‘Come here,’ Clive hissed in his ear.
‘What’s the rush? I’m talking.’
‘Come here!’
Clive had turned very pale. His eyes had a strange cast, and Sam knew he shouldn’t argue. Excusing himself from his company, he followed Clive to the door.
A desk and two chairs were set up at the entrance. Terry was waiting for them there. His face was white. ‘What is it?’ Alice was saying. She appealed to Sam. ‘What’s the matter?’
Clive ignored her. He grabbed Sam’s wrist, hard. ‘What do you see?’ Sam looked around. Everyone in the club was intent on talking, buying beer or watching the band. It seemed, by all accounts, an average night at the Gate Hangs Well, everyone enjoying themselves.
‘Will someone tell me what the hell is going on?’ Alice protested.
‘No,’ said Clive. ‘The band! Look at the band!’
Sam squinted between the bobbing heads of some youths standing forward of the entrance area. He saw nothing remarkable about the trio on stage. The organist’s tight blond perm looked suspiciously like it might have been dyed or highlighted. The bass player pursed his lips unpleasantly as he worked his fingers up and down the frets. There was little to note.
‘The drummer!’ Terry shrieked in his ear. ‘Look at the fucking drummer!’
Sam looked but still couldn’t see anything remarkable. The drummer was a fat guy with a beard, drumming competently, if a little lazily, relying perhaps too much on the snare. Then he looked up, flashing a gap-toothed smile at the audience, and the light caught a certain degenerate expression in his eyes. No, thought Sam. It can’t be.
Clive sidled up. ‘Take away the beard.’
Alice had given up and had gone to talk to Blythe.
‘It’s not possible,’ Sam spluttered. ‘It can’t be him.’
‘It’s him,’ said Terry. ‘It’s him all right.’
Sam visualized the face without the beard. A sharp smell of the woods in autumn cut through the pub tang of sour ale and dead nicotine. There was no mistake. Now he could see that leering face in a scouting beret and with a neckerchief at the throat. ‘This means . . . What this means is . . .’
‘Yes,’ said Terry.
‘Yes,’ said Clive. ‘He must have crawled away from it.’
‘What is it, boys?’ Ian Blythe wanted to know. He regularly treated them to a couple of beers out of the takings, and he was offering three foaming pints on a tray. Alice stood behind him, looking suspicious. ‘You all look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘What do you know about this band?’ Sam said quickly.
Blythe shrugged. ‘Not much. Got ’em through the usual newsletter. Drummer told me he’s a local boy, first time back since he went to London some years ago.’
The boys stared in disbelief. After muting his organ and repeating a couple of chords, the permed organist leaned forward and began to introduce his band. ‘We got Chaz Myers on bass . . .’ A polite ripple of applause encouraged Chaz to launch into a tedious bass solo, running his fingers up and down the frets as organ and drums dutifully faded. ‘And we got Tooley Bell on drums . . .’ Another polite ripple as Tooley grinned happily at the audience, an upper canine missing. Tooley bashed happily away for his moment of limelight.
‘Hey, where you going?’ Blythe shouted, as Sam pushed his way out of the room. Terry and Clive followed quickly behind. ‘What about this beer?’ Blythe called after them.
The Gate Hangs Well had a lawn in front, with a phoney gazebo and rustic tables and benches for the summer months. Sam flung himself, face-down, on the damp grass between the tables. His body quivered.
‘You all right?’ Terry asked, worried.
‘Sam, come on,’ said Clive.
But Sam was sniggering. Then he snorted violently, and his sniggering turned into full-throated, manic laughter. He rolled on his back, kicking his legs in the air, laughing like a man in a padded cell. Terry fell to the ground, hugging Sam with his one good hand, wrapping his legs around Sam’s and laughing with him. Clive dived on both of them, and in a second the three were rolling round on the grass, hugging each other and roaring hysterically.
Blythe came outside with Alice. Spy V Spy were building up to a standard blues climax for one of their numbers. They could hear Tooley artlessly bashing his cymbals on the Big Finish. The thought of him lashing out with his sticks only made them howl with vicious merriment. ‘What have you been taking?’ Blythe said disapprovingly. The question only made them laugh louder, more uncontrollably. They squeezed their ribs, gagging for breath.
‘Stop!’ squeaked Terry. ‘Stop!’
‘Can’t,’ Clive gasped. ‘Caaaaaaannnnn’t.’
‘Hooooohooohooohooo,’ went Sam.
‘You guys want to be more careful. I’m serious. This drugs business is no joke,’ Blythe said sharply. Then he turned and went back inside.
Alice waited patiently until the hooting and the laughter had subsided. Eventually the three of them were able to draw themselves partially upright, leaning against each other like defeated marathon runners. ‘So? Are you going to let me in on it?’
Sam looked at Alice. Recovering his breath and his composure, he managed to tell her, ‘The Drummer. He’s the Dead Scout.’
And the hysterical laughter started up again.
40
White
Cube
It was a considerable relief to be acquitted, by events, of being a murderer. For Terry and Clive the commencement of that summer seemed particularly heady, balmier than all summers hitherto, benign, scented and laden with extra promise. Alice, unfortunately, was encumbered with having to revise for her final A-level exams, but for the others dark chains had been taken from their backs.
But not, for Sam, the darkest and heaviest chain.
No longer in fear of tripping over a corpse at least, Sam enjoyed solitary walking in the woods again. He found the place where the original incident had happened and speculated that Tooley had only been unconscious when they’d dumped him in the hollow stump. He’d obviously recovered, gone home to lick his wounds and decided to make the break for London, just as his sidekick had suggested at the time. That night at the Gate, when they’d recovered from laughing, Clive, Terry and Sam had deliberately pressed in on Tooley to see if he recognized them. Terry even presented him with a pint of beer at the end of the evening, chatting genially. It was agreed that he did eye Sam strangely as the band’s equipment was carried out of the pub, but nothing was said. Before leaving Tooley had looked back at Sam, holding his head to one side like a puzzled dog, but then he’d climbed in the van with the other members to return to London.
Meanwhile London was sending back another of its migratory children. The first time Charlie and Dot understood the nature of Linda’s predicament was when they were telephoned by a Harley Street doctor. He had been treating Linda for exhaustion, he explained, and recommended that Linda come home for complete rest, where she could be properly looked after.
‘Exhaustion?’ Charlie had managed to ask.
‘I don’t like the expression nervous breakdown,’ the doctor had said suavely. ‘I don’t find it helpful.’
Charlie and Dot went to meet Linda from the train at Coventry station. Dot burst into tears when Linda stepped down from the carriage. Looking painfully thin, her hair hanging limply at the side of her gaunt face, she stood on the platform trying to tug her heavy suitcase behind her. What had London done to Linda? Her eyes were devoid of sheen, her skin had given up its ambrosial glow. She looked old and yet girlish at the same time. Her golden crown lay in twisted fragments on the platform at her feet. Choking back a huge stone in his throat, Charlie stepped forward and hugged her.
He took charge. He picked up her suitcase and led her and Dot along the crowded platform and out to his waiting car. They asked no questions of her, having been advised by their local GP, in whose care she was placed, not to press. After a few days a bill arrived from the Harley Street doctor, addressed to Charlie. He opened it, and his stomach turned.
‘What is it?’ Dot wanted to know.
‘Nothing to worry about.’
Charlie brooded on it for some days. He calculated that if he took out all of his savings and sold his car, he might be able to cover half of the bill. Then he got hold of Linda’s address book and rang her agency. He was put through to Pippa Hamilton.
‘Is that Miss Pippa?’
‘Speaking.’
A curve in the woman’s voice had him incandescent with rage before the conversation had even begun. ‘I’m Linda’s father.’
‘Linda? How is the poor darling? I do hope she’s better.’
‘Is she owed?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Has she got any money due to her? From the agency?’
‘I’m afraid not. She is rather a silly with money.’
‘A bill came. From a doctor in London.’
‘Yes, he’s a friend, actually. We were lucky to get his services.’
‘How long had he been seeing her?’
There was a pause. ‘Quite some time. Actually.’
Something in that last word sent Charlie cold. ‘I’m going to come and see you.’
‘There’s no need—’
‘Yes. I’m coming. And after what I’ve done to you, the only use you’ll be to anybody is if one of them fancy models of yours wants to wear you up on the catwalk.’ There was a silence, and he put the phone down.
After his hands had stopped trembling, he took the bill and wrote on it ‘To be paid by the Pippa Hamilton Modelling Agency’, addressed an envelope and took it out for posting. Charlie knew that Pippa Hamilton had sensed this was no idle threat. He never heard anything about the bill again.
It slowly emerged that the high life and the low life made bedfellows in Linda’s celebrity world. After an unhappy love affair, she’d started using slimming pills with an amphetamine base, and someone had taught her how to pop barbiturates to offset the sleep disruption caused by the uppers. More significantly, Linda had been carrying a huge burden of unexpressed guilt over the death of Derek. The champagne-and-pills parties were an effective way of blotting out her desperate unhappiness. Most of her pills were obtained from the very Harley Street doctor who had telephoned her home when the crisis occurred.
These were the explanations offered concerning Linda’s ‘exhaustion’. But Sam recalled the day Linda had won her first beauty-queen title, and he remembered the Tooth Fairy reaching out to touch her with a fetid hand.
He wanted to see the Tooth Fairy. He wanted to interrogate her, to ask what putrid influence she might have exercised over Linda’s life in London. He was still convinced that his ‘affliction’ was always capable of leaking into the lives of those people he cared about most. But he didn’t have – had never had – the ability to summon the Tooth Fairy at will. She came when she wanted to, and these days she came more erratically than ever. He remained terrified of the malign influence she might have over the hitherto unblemished life of his sister Linda Alice. On bad nights the voice still came, darkly offering him a solution.
‘So, then, it’s goodbye Sam.’ Skelton thrust out a bear-like paw that wanted shaking. His other arm was in a sling. He still had a large plaster on the side of his head.
Signs were that the psychiatrist had already started packing. Files were stacked on chairs; journals had been lifted down from the oak bookcase and dumped in cardboard boxes. He had opted for an early retirement. ‘I’ve been letting one or two people down lately,’ he said. ‘Particularly that last time you came in. I had a bit of a fall. Don’t remember a deal about it, to be honest.’
‘You can’t remember anything?’
‘You know what they say: when the drink’s in, the wits are out.’
‘Perhaps you don’t want to remember?’
‘Well, you’ve a learned a bit of psychology from me, if nothing else. Eh, laddie? Anyway I thought I’d better get out. Let someone in who knows what they’re talking about. I’m no use.’
‘You were a lifeline,’ said Sam.
‘I really did enjoy our wee sessions. Though I don’t say I’ve been the slightest help to you in your plight.’
‘You have.’
‘I’m rather sorry I never found a use for that Nightmare Interceptor contraption of yours. Do you still have the thing?’
‘It’s around.’
Skelton scratched his head with his good arm. ‘It has a certain potential, one feels. Hang on to the thing. I wouldn’t want you to throw it away. Still, dreams have been a wee bit out of fashion lately. There’s a younger chap coming in here. Different ideas. Neuro-physiology – know what that is? Me neither, and I don’t care to. I’ve passed on your case notes, and I’ve indicated that it may be necessary for you to see him. He’ll look at the file and decide.’
‘I don’t much fancy seeing someone else.’
‘I know what you mean. Gets to be a cosy habit, doesn’t it, these little meetings? I sometimes wonder if that’s part of the problem. Yes, I wonder if we keep our demons in orbit for each other.’
Glumly Sam thought of his own demon. ‘Paranoia?’ he asked brightly.
‘Aye, we support each other’s paranoia. Listen, there’s not a lot wrong with you, son. Deep down, I mean. Let’s just say you’re different.’
‘I almost
forgot.’ Sam reached inside his sports bag and produced a boxed gift for Skelton. It had been Connie’s idea.
Skelton opened the box and withdrew a bottle of Johnny Walker. He examined the red label as if it was a work of art, then held the bottle up to the window. ‘Look at the light in that, Sam. Look at the amber light. See what I mean?’ he said, spinning the top off the bottle and pouring them both a small measure. ‘About keeping each other’s demons in orbit? Only yesterday I decided to go teetotal.’
It was Clive who managed to obtain the stuff, through his music-collecting contacts.
‘Oh, it’s you three. I shouldn’t let you in because she’s studying for some exam or other.’ Alice’s mother, still in her dressing-gown and smelling of sleep, pushed a straying grey curl out of her eye. Leaving the door open, she turned her back on them, calling over her shoulder. ‘She’s in her bedroom.’
Alice sat cross-legged on the bed. Her hair was tied back in a pony-tail. School books were strewn over the bed. ‘I’m so fed up. Just look what a beautiful day it is outside, and I’ve got to do this.’
‘Leave it. Come with us.’
‘I’ve got an exam next week.’
‘You don’t want to do too much,’ said Terry.
‘Can’t pour a quart into a pint pot,’ said Sam.
‘What you need is a break,’ said Clive. ‘Something to take you out of yourself.’ He opened his fist and presented, on the flat of his palm, four sugar cubes.
Alice peered closely at the sugar cubes. They looked entirely harmless. ‘I’ve heard it’s a long trip,’ she said doubtfully.
‘Only eight hours,’ Clive said brightly.
Terry was first to snatch up one of the cubes. ‘Down the hatch,’ he said, and popped it in his mouth.
‘I keep trying to count us,’ said Alice. ‘And every time I count us I get five.’
Clive tried. He got the same result. ‘Wait a minute!’ he giggled, counting again. Again he got the same result. ‘Wait! Wait! This is ridiculous!’
Terry tried. He also came up with five. He shook his head and started over. ‘But there’s me and Sam and you two, and that’s four.’