The Tooth Fairy Read online

  ‘Yes. I can see you.’

  ‘That’s bad. Real bad.’

  Sam nodded a silent yes. He didn’t know why it was bad, but he knew it was better to agree.

  The intruder was squinting hard at Sam, as if puzzling what to do next. ‘And you can hear me. Obviously obviously obviously. Bad.’ The sharpened teeth gleamed electric-blue again in the moonlight. There was a tiny crackle as the figure placed a finger on the bed-post. Sam felt the crackle ride to the nape of his neck and fan his hair. The intruder was discharging static.

  Sam suddenly had an idea who the figure was. ‘You’ve come for the tooth, haven’t you?’ He was dismayed by the Tooth Fairy’s appearance. If he did have an image of a Tooth Fairy in his head before that night, it was of a fragile lady three inches tall, lace-winged, with an acorn-cup for a hat. Not a thug in heavy boots. ‘You want the tooth, don’t you?’

  ‘Shhh! Don’t wake the house! How come you were able to see me? How did you spot me? Don’t answer. Wait.’ The Tooth Fairy held up a beautifully manicured hand, five ivory fingers outstretched, a thin silver ring on each. ‘How many fingers do you see?’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘This is bad. Real bad.’ The Tooth Fairy held a finger and thumb to the bridge of its nose. It seemed to be thinking hard. ‘This is the worst of all possible situations. The worst.’

  ‘Don’t you want the tooth?’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘The tooth. Don’t you want it?’ Sam held out the tiny incisor in the palm of his hand.

  The Tooth Fairy got up and looked at the proffered tooth for a long time before accepting it. Sam felt a tiny prod of static as they touched. The Tooth Fairy retreated to the window, holding the tooth up to the faint light of the moon. ‘Do you realize how much trouble we’re in? Both of us? You’ve seen me! Do you know what a thing like this means?’ The fairy rotated the Tooth in the weak light.

  ‘Don’t shout! You’ll wake Mum and Dad.’

  ‘Fuck ’em!’

  The venom imparted in this remark shocked Sam to his bowels. ‘I’ll tell them!’

  The Tooth Fairy approached the bed. Reaching out a hand towards Sam’s face, it closed those long, elegant but strong fingers around the boy’s mouth. Again a prod of cold static. The hand twisted the slack flesh of his cheeks violently, the sharp fingernails clawing at his face. ‘And you’ll tell them you saw the Tooth Fairy? They’ll think you’re fucking crazy. Know what they do with crazies?’

  There was a bump from the adjacent room and the sound of bedsprings.

  The hand dropped. ‘Shit!’ said the Tooth Fairy, climbing up on the bed and stepping a heavy black boot on the windowsill. ‘I’m gone.’

  ‘Wait! You didn’t give me anything! For the tooth!’

  The Tooth Fairy looked back, appalled. Darting a glance out of the window, it seemed trapped for a moment, writhing between escape and some unimpeachable contract. They heard footsteps from the next room. Fumbling frantically in a pocket, the fairy produced a silver sixpence and flicked it in the air. It winked in the dull moonlight as it fell, spinning. The sixpence dropped lightly on the pillowcase before disappearing clean through the pillow. Sam slid a hand under the pillow but stopped when the fairy barked violently at him, ‘Leave it until morning, kiddiwinks. You heard me! Leave it until the morning!’

  A door-hinge whined, a floorboard creaked. The Tooth Fairy hoisted itself on to the windowsill.

  ‘Will I see you again?’ Sam said.

  ‘You’ll wish you didn’t.’ The Tooth Fairy leapt out of the window as Sam’s bedroom door opened. Light from the hall streamed into the room. It was Sam’s mother. She switched on the bedside lamp.

  ‘You all right, Sam? I thought I heard you talking in your sleep. Did you open the window?’

  She closed it and drew the curtains. Smoothing his pillow again, she kissed him lightly on the forehead before pulling the blankets up under his chin.

  ‘Go back to sleep,’ she said.

  3

  Mist

  Since her cousin’s caravan lay en route, Lanky Linda collected Terry every morning to walk him to school. Terry then insisted on rounding up first Sam and then Clive for the last half-mile straggle. Linda suffered for this. Almost eleven years old, she sensed keenly and intuitively the mysterious veil drawing back, the curtain that would give way to the sublime and transcendent state of adulthood. But this insight made her act strangely. Lately she had taken to wearing white lace gloves to and from school every day. Her parents summarized her condition as moody. When she wasn’t known as Lanky Linda she was known as Moody Linda.

  It was painful for her, trembling on the threshold of maturity as she was, to have to escort three ugly, bawling, runny-nosed boys to school and then back again, so that the prospect and the retrospect of the day, and everything between, was sullied. It was like an exquisite form of punishment meted out by the gods of Ancient Greece. The boys were always ten or fifteen yards behind her, dragging chains, voicing abuse, spoiling the dazzling purity of her white, white gloves.

  ‘You’ll be late!’ Linda screamed through the mist. ‘Late for school!’

  An early autumn fog draped the fields and the hedgerows and the pavements like fine muslin cloth. The houses, the bus shelters and the telegraph poles had lost all definition. The bloodless silver-grey world needed a transfusion of colour. But the hedgerows were jewelled and spangled with spider’s webs, gossamer nets dripping silver balls of moisture. Linda made the mistake that morning of bending a twig into a sprung loop, a tool for collecting webbing from the hedgerows. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Fairy wings.’

  The three boys were enormously impressed by this trick. Linda felt so encouraged that the boys now realized she had a store of knowledge to offer that she taught them all how to make a twig loop, so they could collect fairy webs for themselves.

  ‘Late! Late! You’ll be late!’ she screamed again. They were now boisterously intent on thoroughly denuding the webbing from the 200-yard stretch of hedgerow. A kind of competition developed among them, poking and twirling, jabbing and twisting. It was a scene of carnage and plunder, in which the boys were cheerfully responsible for a local ecological catastrophe.

  ‘Stop!’ Linda bellowed. They ignored her. ‘STOOOPPPP! STOOOOOOPPPPPPPP!’

  They stopped. Linda was red in the face. The boys regarded her with astonishment. But now she’d succeeded in winning their attention she didn’t know what to say to them. ‘If you take too much of that spider’s web,’ she said, ‘you know what happens.’

  ‘What?’ said Sam. ‘What happens?’

  Linda was obviously thinking on her feet. ‘Fairy wings. Nothing left. For fairies. To make their wings.’

  ‘Ha!’ spat Terry. He flobbed a tiny white ball of spittle and contempt into the gutter.

  ‘And,’ Linda almost shouted, ‘spiders catch flies.’

  ‘So?’ said Clive.

  ‘Then there will be an epidemic of flies. Millions and millions of flies. And you know what that means.’

  ‘What?’ said Sam.

  ‘What?’ said Terry.

  ‘Plague.’ Linda turned on her heels and marched in the direction of school. She stopped after a few yards and turned back. The three boys stared at her with appalled, bulging eyes.

  It was Clive who broke the silence. Clive, at moments like this, had a smile like the lace in an old-style football. Anyone could be forgiven for wanting to boot it. ‘Are you certain?’ he challenged.

  Linda felt her cheeks flaming. Her white-lace gloves flew to her face. She narrowed her eyes and smiled evilly. ‘Bubonic plague. If you don’t believe me, why don’t you just try it? Go on.’

  But the point had been won. Linda turned again and set off at a brisk pace. The boys hurried behind her in chastened silence. When they reached the sweet shop before taking the turning for the school, they each abandoned their twig loops of grey webbing. In any event the webs had surrendered all of their beauty. They were no longer silver or gossamer or
sparkling. As the school handbell was heard to ring from the playground, they were discarded at the roadside with the dirty sweet wrappers and the fallen leaves.

  4

  Eyes

  Sam woke up feeling cold. His bedroom window was open, and the chill of autumn had settled on the room like icing sugar. Outside stars were scattered across the sable dark, and the moon was dying into its left-hand cup. Luxuriant odours of night, of the dropped fruit of the damson tree in the garden, of rotting rain-mashed leaves, invaded his bedroom. These smells had marched in on the boots of the figure who sat hunched against the far wall.

  Sam shuddered. But the Tooth Fairy seemed exhausted. He or she – and Sam was still unable to discriminate – was hugging one knee. One foot stuck out at the end of the familiar mustard-and-green striped trousers, displaying to Sam the patterned sole of a huge boot. Weak moonlight glimmered in shiny eyes that had been observing Sam for some time.

  ‘We’re in a lot of trouble.’

  Sam sat up. ‘Why?’ Whenever he tried to speak to the Tooth Fairy his heart swelled and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.

  ‘Have you ever been in trouble?’

  Sam thought about it. He knew what it was like to hear a raised voice. He even knew what it was like to feel a virile slap hard enough to leave a giant red hand-impression on the back of his leg. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean big, bad trouble. I mean deep shit.’

  When the other kids at school used words like ‘shit’, it meant nothing. When he occasionally overheard adults using such language – and the creature in the room talked like an adult even if it didn’t look like one – then the words became frightening. They became real.

  ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  The creature snorted. ‘Didn’t do anything,’ it mimicked nastily. The Tooth Fairy had a habit of choking on its own cynical humour, so that certain words squeezed out with a tiny cough. ‘You want to know what you did? You saw me, that’s what you did. You’re still seeing me now. That’s enough, kiddiwinks. That’s enough for anyone.’

  ‘I can’t help it.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  When the creature said ‘fuck’, its teeth bared. As before, a perfect set of dentures were filed to sharp points. The enamel shone with dull, blue luminosity. The Tooth Fairy spat a tiny white ball of spittle on to the carpet.

  ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’

  The Tooth Fairy squinted at him for a long time. ‘Would you like me to hurt you?’

  ‘I just wanted to know.’

  ‘You ask me that again and I’ll bite your face off. I mean it.’

  The Tooth Fairy sat between him and the door. Sam felt his eyes watering. He wanted to shout for his mother, but now he was too afraid of the beast in his room.

  ‘Calm down. I was only pretending to be mad. Shit. I’m sorry. Just calm down. I’ve got to think of a way out of this for both of us. I meant what I said when I told you we were both in trouble. Bad things are going to happen if we’re not careful. Bad things.’

  The Tooth Fairy scrambled to its feet. It was agitated, moving around the room, touching Sam’s things. It stroked a long, elegant and beringed finger across the curve of his football. It twisted the ear of his furry white rabbit. Stumbling against the plastic Crusader fort on the floor, the Tooth Fairy kicked out viciously, sending the fort skittering across the floor, toy soldiers plummeting from its battlements.

  ‘I found my sixpence,’ Sam tried lamely. ‘Under the pillow. The morning after you came.’

  The Tooth Fairy released a thin howl of rage and exasperation, digging the fingernails of one hand into the palm of the other. Sam was terrified to see that the fairy had drawn its own blood. ‘Fuck! Fuck! Why did you do that? Why? Do you know when I found out you could see me, I nearly put your eyes out? I nearly did that! I could do it now!’

  The creature pointed a trembling finger at Sam as it spoke. A mounting rage exploded and it scrambled across the room, leaping on to Sam’s bed, pinning him by its bony knees. It leaned across him and exhaled sharply, the full force of the breath striking Sam in the right eye. There was a sharp odour again of bird droppings and horse’s stables commingled with damsons and fresh mown grass and a painful, stinging sensation in his eye.

  Sam shrieked. It was too much for him. His terror broke. ‘Muuuuummmm!!!! Eeeeeeeeeehhh!!! Daaaaaaaadddddd!’ His scream turned high-pitched.

  The Tooth Fairy leapt back, aghast. ‘No no no! I shouldn’t have done that. I’ll have to pay for that! No no no! Stop screaming! Just stop screaming!’

  ‘Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeehhhhhh!!!’

  Movement could be heard in the next bedroom. A muffled thump.

  The fairy placed its ringed fingers across Sam’s mouth. ‘Stop this! If you ever tell them, it will be worse for both of us!’

  His parents’ bedroom door squealed at the hinge. Footsteps padded on the landing between their room and his. A floorboard creaked. Sam bit hard on the fingers closing his mouth. The Tooth Fairy leapt back in astonishment, staring at the tiny crescent of tooth marks on its finger. It looked at the bedroom door.

  ‘Don’t ever tell them!’ the creature hissed before leaping on to the windowsill. ‘Don’t ever!’ With that it escaped into the night.

  Sam’s bedroom door opened. Light flooded the room. It was his father, hair tousled, unshaved, eyes like a schoolboy’s marbles dug up from the garden. ‘What’s all the shouting about?’

  Sam tried to speak but his breath came too short. He tried to say, ‘Tooth Fairy,’ but all that came from his mouth was a convulsive sob. He was hyperventilating.

  ‘Come on, Sam. You’ve been having a nightmare. A nightmare. Now it’s gone, eh? All right now. All right now.’ His father stroked his hair. ‘You’re soaked in sweat, old lad. Soaked. You just go back to sleep because it’s all right now.’

  Tucking the sheets in, his father looked up at the window. ‘It’s freezing in here. No wonder.’ He closed the window, securing the catch.

  ‘Leave the light on,’ said Sam.

  His father hesitated. ‘I’ll leave the hall light on and the door open. Or you’ll never get back to sleep.’

  Sam closed his eyes in an act of compliance, opening them again as soon as his father had gone. He scrambled out of bed and peered through the window. The moon shone palely on the blue-grey slate rooftops of the neighbouring houses. He let the curtain fall back and turned to gather up his toy fort. It was broken on one side. His ragged troops of assorted crusaders, US cavalrymen, paratroopers and Red Indians lay scattered across the floor, vanquished by armies of nightmare. He left them to die where they had fallen.

  Sam’s eye, where the Tooth Fairy had blasted him with noxious vapours, was sore. He climbed back into bed, and after a short while he was asleep again.

  *

  The evening following the second appearance of the Tooth Fairy, Sam was sunk in a chair, quietly gazing into a picture-book. He became aware that his mother’s gaze was fixed on him. He looked up at her, and her hard stare didn’t falter. Neither did she smile, so he let his eyes dip back into the picture-book, still aware, at the periphery of his vision, of his mother’s attention.

  ‘That boy’s got a cast,’ he heard his mother whisper.

  Nev grunted apathetically from behind his newspaper.

  ‘He has,’ said Connie. ‘Look.’

  The newspaper dipped slowly, until Nev’s eyes and nose appeared above the headlines. ‘What?’

  Sam pretended blissful unawareness of this attention.

  ‘His right eye. It turns inward slightly.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘It’s got to be looked at.’

  Defeated, Nev let his newspaper dip into his lap. ‘If that boy’s not artistic, then he’s autistic, or whatever the bloody word is. And if he’s not double-jointed, he’s blind in one bloody eye.’

  ‘I didn’t say he was blind. I said he’d got a cast.’

  ‘Why don’t you leave the kid alone instead of picking an
d pulling at him all the time?’

  Connie wasn’t to be placated. ‘Sam. Put your book down. Put it down. Now look at me. Now look at the door without moving your head.’

  Sam did as instructed. His mother crouched over him, her eyes owlish and full of overweening concern. His father looked resigned and sympathetic.

  ‘No,’ Connie insisted. ‘It’s got to be looked at.’

  5

  Friction

  Terry’s father’s occupation continued to be a mystery to the entire neighbourhood. When anyone asked he told people – and Terry often repeated the answer – that he was an inventor. But he might as well have declared himself a ufologist or an astrophysicist, so lost in the sky was the idea.

  ‘Inventor of what?’ would be the inevitable response.

  ‘Whatever needs inventing’ was his stock reply.

  Chris Morris worked at this putative inventing in a garage workshop adjacent to his old caravan. If neighbours such as Sam’s father Nev or Clive’s father Eric ever speculated about the nature of the inventions, perhaps their minds conjured with contraptions poised to outmode the internal combustion engine or turned to space-age devices such as hand-held TV sets. In reality, Morris’s inventions were more likely to take the form of cut-out cardboard models commissioned for the back of breakfast cereal packets or display units for grocery stores.

  ‘Whatever it is,’ Clive overheard his father say once, ‘it can’t pay much if they have to live in a rust-bucket caravan.’

  ‘Unless he spends it all on other things.’ Betty Rogers clamped her lips tight, as if she knew something.