The Tooth Fairy Read online

  ‘How do you mean?’ The men were always asking the women, ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Swanning around in a sports car when his kid’s shoes are in holes.’

  Though Clive overheard all this, he was not disillusioned by any of it. Terry’s father was Clive’s hero. Even though Clive was, by now, only seven years old, he knew he wanted to be an inventor like Terry’s father. Despite his mother’s assessment, Clive thought Chris Morris looked more like a fox than a swan. Sandy-haired Mr Morris had an early widow’s peak and a way of peering at things that betokened eerie intelligence. His suntanned forearms, so unlike the putty-coloured skin of his own father, were forever advertised by his permanently rolled sleeves.

  Morris was always tossing out home-made toys or cardboard aeroplanes. Where Terry had no use for toys, unless they were made of brightly moulded plastic and came from Woolworth’s, Clive was eternally fascinated by Morris’s dexterity and casual can-do. Meanwhile his own father was slow, lumbering and easy-going, just like Terry. More than once he suspected some error, that they’d been given the wrong fathers. Terry, if asked, would have happily embraced that idea. Clive’s father had recently bought a television set, and Sam’s parents were just about to do the same. Everyone was declaring this the Television Age, while he had to make do with a toy version constructed from cardboard.

  Morris’s workshop was an Open Sesame to Clive’s imagination. Weird specialist tools hung in neat rows on the walls. Shelves were piled with cannibalized bits of engines, sets of old wireless valves, broken penny-arcade machines, springs, pulleys, weights, miles of cable. A genuine propeller blade from an aircraft was suspended from the ceiling, running the length of the roof itself; a double-barrelled shotgun was padlocked to the wall at the back of the garage; and a gutted Wurlitzer jukebox sucked dust into itself in the corner, a rack of black vinyl discs waiting under a perspex canopy for the selection command that would never come.

  But Morris was moody. He would hurl things around his workshop, and language smoked the air like the sparks cascading from his grinding machine. Sometimes he would burst out of the garage, fulminating, scattering children like a prod of lightning, booting stray tricycles or footballs out of his path.

  At other times he would soften to Clive’s interest, encouraging the boy’s attentions. One afternoon, when Linda and the boys had returned from school, he broke off from manipulating bits of cardboard and whipped a tarpaulin cover off a spindly device at the rear of his workshop. Terry had seen it before; bored, he drifted away. Linda too thought she might be asked to get her white gloves dirty, so she went inside the caravan, where her aunt Jane Morris sat with the two-year-old twins, Terry’s brother and sister. Sam and Clive were left to blink at the contraption.

  A bicycle wheel with its spokes removed was mounted on a frame. Once Morris had set the thing in motion, a series of polished, greased rods were lowered by cunning weights, returning to their original position after making a descent and driving the wheel. It was clever, fiendishly clever. It just didn’t seem to do anything.

  ‘Perpetual-motion machine,’ said Morris. ‘They say it can’t be done. But I’m going to do it. I’ve been working on this for seven years.’

  ‘Is it finished?’ Clive was mesmerized.

  Morris looked at the contrivance sadly. ‘Naw. After a while it will stop. Friction, boys, friction. That’s what’s stopping us. All the time. Bloody sodding friction.’ Morris launched into a wild sermon about how the coal and the oil and the fossil fuel wouldn’t last forever, and the scientists had better damn well find an alternative pretty damn quick. He stared at his machine and seemed to be talking to himself. Sam, who couldn’t follow any of it, peeled back to go in search of Terry. Clive, who wanted to understand all of it, watched the wheel rotating as if it could at any moment open a door through Time.

  Then Jane Morris appeared at the entrance to the garage. She was clutching a piece of paper. Her features were set like iron. Anger had drawn a rude geometry all over her face.

  ‘You’d better get the others and go,’ Morris said to Clive. ‘The next world war is about to start.’

  ‘The next world war is about to start,’ Clive told his mother and father that evening.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Terry’s dad looked at his mum and told me the next war is about to start.’

  Eric Rogers laughed; Betty pressed her lips together.

  They were preparing to go to the library. One of the penalties of spawning a gifted child was the twice-weekly visit to the library. Mr and Mrs Rogers suffered in turns the humiliation of being outpaced by their seven-year-old son. They would take five minutes to choose a Western or a romance respectively while Clive demanded the full membership hour. Two days later he would have finished his books, and they’d be compelled to return their own selections unread, just to keep up appearances.

  Books, otherwise, would not have figured largely in the Rogers household. Because of Clive’s special ‘gift’, however, they had been persuaded by a sharp door-to-door salesman to ‘invest’ in a hugely expensive set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It was a serious sacrifice. The books came bound in luxurious white leather. Only after they had arrived and lay stacked in the living-room like two pillars of an occult temple did Eric Rogers grasp why a teak bookcase was touted as an optional extra. It might have comforted him to know that, because of Clive’s rapacious inquiry, theirs was the only set in the city that ever had each and every one of its volumes lifted down from the wall for genuine perusal.

  Clive had discovered science-fiction, so Eric had tried to discover it with him. Sometimes it was heavy going.

  ‘What’s a geiger-counter?’

  ‘Look it up, son. That’s why we bought the Encyclopaedia.’ ‘What’s a positronic tractor beam?’

  ‘Buggered if I know, son. Can’t you look it up?’

  Dusk was settling as Clive and his father made their way to the library. Huge brown leaves, crisp and dry as parchment, floated down from the birch trees. As they approached the cottage where Terry’s caravan was sited, they were distracted by the throaty sound of a roaring engine. Mr Morris’s spoke-wheeled MG spat out of the drive, braking sharply as it hit the road. It was followed down the driveway by Jane Morris, barefoot and running, and wielding a large aluminium saucepan. As the MG sped off, tyres shrieking, the saucepan struck the rear fender, bouncing harmlessly into the road. ‘Wanker!’ she screamed. She was puce with rage. Clive blinked at his father through a cloud of exhaust. ‘You fucking wanker!’ Jane Morris shrieked again.

  Eric Rogers looked as though he was going to say something. Instead he picked up the pan. The burned remnants of someone’s dinner was stuck to the base of it. He handed the pan back to the woman, trying to keep a glint out of his eye. Without a word, Jane Morris retreated to her caravan.

  Clive and his father walked the half-mile to the library in silence. Eric could tell that his son’s mind was worrying away at something. Even at seven years old he had developed a vertical crease just above the bridge of his nose whenever he was thinking hard. Eric’s thoughts were still focused on Jane Morris’s outburst.

  When they reached the library, his son stopped him from going in. An expression of deep anxiety clouded the boy’s face.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘What’s a radioactive isotope?’

  6

  Bad Influence

  At about this time God mysteriously came into the lives of the three boys. God also came into Lanky Linda’s life and, simultaneously, into the orbit of five other local children, all younger than the boys. It happened on a morning when Sam had that day no greater expectation of life than a game of football.

  After breakfast one Sunday morning Sam found himself being buttoned into a suit of clothes he detested. It was a short-trouser suit woven from some shiny, abrasive, synthetic fibre. He’d been trussed in the suit twice before, once for a wedding and once for a christening. Instructed to root out a pa
ir of elasticated garters to hold up his knee-length, cream-coloured stockings, he was then directed to polish his best black shoes until they winked. When he was ready, Connie anointed his head with water and, by dint of over-vigorous brushing, proceeded to plaster his hair to his crown.

  Sam was ready to protest, or at least to ask what lay behind all this preparation, when there came a knock at the front door. Connie opened the door, and Sam was astonished to see Lanky Linda in a spotless white frock and a white pillbox hat, beaming in at him. He was even more astonished to see, behind her and hovering uncertainly at the gate, a motley entourage of small children gathered from the neighbourhood, all groomed, spruced and buffed up in Sunday best. Sam felt an adult hand at his back propelling him outside, and the door was closed – rather too quickly – behind him.

  And there was Terry! And there was Clive! Both looking glum and uncomfortable, Clive’s neck and ears gleaming livid-pink as if someone had recently set about him with sandpaper.

  ‘What?’ said Sam. ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘Come along,’ said Linda proudly, beckoning them all on with her white glove. ‘Come along.’ She set off at a brisk pace but with an air of pride and hauteur clearly distinguishing this from any ordinary school day. The smaller children in the ensemble had to run to keep pace with her.

  ‘What is it?’ Sam asked Clive and Terry, but either they knew no more than he or they were too disgusted to answer.

  ‘It’s a surprise,’ Linda called over her shoulder, and she marched ahead of her flock, poised and serene, her hands held strangely, like someone carrying an invisible orb and sceptre.

  They walked for a quarter of a mile up the hill before Linda halted at a gateway. Sam recognized the building at which she’d stopped. It was a modest timbered hall painted black, with a wooden cross mounted on the roof.

  ‘It’s a church,’ said Sam. ‘A church.’

  Linda beamed in happy confirmation. She held open the gate, ushering everyone inside. A tiny shiver of apprehension chased around the younger children. Linda soothed them, Linda encouraged them and finally Linda led the way to the church door. Organ music played softly within. The three boys brought up the rear and followed the younger children, who were now huddled together in self-protection, inside.

  Sam could not have known, and never would guess at, the small parental conspiracy that had taken place to get them there. One or two parents in the neighbourhood, possibly genuinely concerned about the spiritual education of their children, had formed an alliance with those larger number of parents who would welcome the leisure of a Sunday morning unencumbered by their offspring; and those parents had hatched out the plan to have the very willing Linda march the children up to the mission church of St Paul. Thus while the kids were listening to the strictures of the Apostle, their mothers and fathers could do in bed what only marriage permitted them to do without burning for it.

  Mr Phillips warmly welcomed Linda and all the children into the Sunday school. There were almost thirty other children inside, some of whom they recognized from school, some they didn’t. Mr Phillips, a man with an easy, slack-jawed smile, glittering blue eyes and a shiny, polished pate, took his place in front of the altar to regale them with stories about a Good Samaritan and a Prodigal Son. Sam listened attentively.

  After the service each child was given a stamp and a card on which to stick it. A different stamp, they were assured, was issued each week. That first stamp was an illustration from the doleful tale of the self-same Prodigal Son. The stamps were mildly interesting, but inadequate reward for surrendering a Sunday morning’s football. Yet this new Sunday-morning fixture was clearly compulsory, and the boys wore it week after week with reasonable grace. It was, after all, inordinately difficult for any of them to kick up against God.

  After the fourth week the boys had gravitated to the back row of seats in the church, where they could smirk and whisper and punch each other while Mr Phillips smiled and talked enthusiastically at the front. There were hymns, they ploughed the field and scattered, they hunkered down for prayers. Sam dug his knees in the hassock on the polished wood floor and found he could almost drift to sleep during prayers. Only when he heard everyone sliding their bottoms back on to the pews did he sit up.

  Terry and Clive were slouched to his right. Sleepily opening his eyes he was startled to see the grinning Tooth Fairy sitting at his left. He gasped, and froze. The Tooth Fairy put a finger to his lips, and then touched his ear, indicating that Sam should pay attention to the lesson.

  ‘Today I’m going to tell you the story of the Widow’s Mite,’ intoned Mr Phillips, arms akimbo. He didn’t seem to have spotted the Tooth Fairy. Oval patches of sweat darkened the underarms of his white nylon shirt, and his bald head gleamed under the electric light. His eyes glittered with unimpeachable faith, and his head nodded continually in self-affirmation as he spoke. Sam recognized on the faces of Clive and Terry the disguise of dreamy attentiveness. He looked back at the Tooth Fairy, who winked slyly.

  The Tooth Fairy winked again, jiggling an eyebrow suggestively. Sam was about to dig Terry in the ribs, when he spotted that the Tooth Fairy was nursing something in his lap. He glanced down and what he saw made him snort. The Tooth Fairy had his cock out. It rested lightly in the palm of his hand, unpleasantly white, its glans swollen like a field-mushroom after a night of warm rain. The Tooth Fairy let his jaw drop, once again exposing teeth filed to sharp points, before winking and nodding playfully at Sam. Sam sniggered loudly. Terry turned to look, as did a few other faces from the seats in front. Sam buried his nose in his handkerchief and blew mightily. When he looked back, the Tooth Fairy had gone.

  ‘So even though the Widow made only a tiny, tiny, tiny offering—’ Phillips exhorted the class to understand.

  Sam stuck his elbow in Terry’s ribs. Terry looked over and Sam winked. Now it was Terry’s turn to snigger as he saw Sam’s flaccid cock poking from an unzipped fly.

  ‘So it doesn’t matter how little it is . . .’

  Terry’s shoulders started shaking. Clive popped out of his reverie and wanted to know what was going on. In a second all three of them were choking silently, shoulders quivering. Terry stuffed his handkerchief in his mouth, which only induced further snorting and a small explosion at the back of his sinuses, provoking in turn a green worm of snot to rocket from his nostril. Heads were turning. Linda, up at the front in her white pill-box hat, spun round to offer a glare of disapproval. This only exacerbated the situation. Sam dug his fingernails deep into his own flesh, struggling to control himself; Terry gagged on his handkerchief; and the muscles of Clive’s cheeks inflated to a critical point.

  ‘And that is the meaning of of of . . . Sam, Terry and Clive, I’d like you to stay behind at the end . . . the meaning of the story of the Widow’s Mite.’

  The head was cut off all laughter. Sam shuffled uncomfortably, trying to work his cock back inside his trousers before anyone else noticed. The way Phillips had looked at him intimated that he knew. He knew Sam had been holding his cock. He knew because God had told him. God had told Mr Phillips, and Mr Phillips would tell Linda, and Linda would tell his mother, and his mother would tell his father, and his father would take off his leather belt with the brass buckle and give him a pasting.

  This was how God worked.

  After Sunday school Mr Phillips lined up the three of them in the vestry as the other children filed out of the south door. They were afraid of Mr Phillips, his geniality and deep-down kindness notwithstanding. His connections with vaster powers intimidated them; and after the event they – at least Sam and Terry – were terrified by the gravity of their offence, specifically by the certainty of its becoming public knowledge.

  ‘He knows,’ Sam said as they waited for the others to leave. The vestry smelled of beeswax polish and lavender. On the wall opposite was a painting of Jesus crucified between two thieves.

  ‘He doesn’t,’ said Clive. ‘He can’t.’

  ‘I think he knows,
’ said Terry. ‘I think he does.’

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ said Clive.

  The door opened and Phillips came in. The catch clicked gently as he closed the door behind him. Standing over them with hands on hips, he took off his glasses. ‘Right. I would like to know what it was you found so funny today.’

  Silence.

  ‘Yes, well, I’m quite prepared to stand here all day until you give me an explanation. All day.’

  Silence.

  ‘I’m waiting.’ They all sensed that Phillips had already lost. ‘Come along, Clive, you’re the most sensible one of the three. Giggling like silly little girls. I’m still waiting.’

  Clive cleared his throat. ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want ‘‘sorry’’. I want an explanation.’

  Clive cleared his throat a second time. ‘I think,’ he said, parroting a phrase he’d heard adults use, ‘that we must have found something amusing.’

  ‘Oh. You think you must have found something amusing, did you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I see. And what about Jesus?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I said, what about Jesus?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Yes, what about Him? What about Him when He was dying on the cross for our sins. That’s your sins and my sins. Do you suppose He must have found something amusing?’

  The Tooth Fairy also taught Sam how to hyperventilate. It was a trick he took to school. The story even got into the local newspaper.

  It was a fine, dry afternoon during the school lunch-break, about ten minutes before the bell was scheduled to call everyone back to class. An aeroplane flew by overhead, surprisingly low, almost low enough to see the pilot in the cockpit. Sam stood watching after it, squinting into the sky, still mesmerized by the loud, cylindrical drone of the plane long after all the other children had forgotten it. He stood at the edge of the playground and suddenly remembered what the Tooth Fairy had shown him during the night.