The Tooth Fairy Read online

  ‘You start telling shrinks about us and we’re in deeper shit than we already were – are. It won’t help.’ The Tooth Fairy exuded a sweet, unpleasant, mushroom-like odour. Sam couldn’t take his eyes from the creature’s erect cock. Straining from the swart bush of black curls, it was unpleasantly white and marbled with prominent veins. Sam was mesmerized into wanting to touch it and yet simultaneously repulsed by the terrifying organ.

  The Tooth Fairy suddenly noticed the focus of Sam’s attention, and it made him swagger. Dragging a hand through his dark locks, he tilted his head to one side and narrowed his eyes. ‘Wanna touch it?’

  ‘No.’

  The Tooth Fairy ran a moist, raspberry-coloured tongue across his lips, smiling provocatively. ‘Go on. You know you want to.’

  Sam’s eyes locked again on the marbled cock. In stark contrast to the white stalk of the penis, the head was damsonand-blackcurrant, almost splitting at the skin, ready to puncture.

  ‘Want to kiss it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just a lick. One sweet lick.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Go on. Make it pop.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t know what it’s for, do you?’ The Tooth Fairy sneered. ‘Shit-scared of it, aren’t you?’

  Sam looked into the Tooth Fairy’s eyes. For a few moments they held each other’s unblinking gaze. At last the Tooth Fairy sighed, and Sam felt a critical moment had passed. The Tooth Fairy folded his arms, and the monstrous erection began to subside. ‘Listen while I tell you why I’m here. It’s about the shrink. Find a way out, or things will take a dive. I’m warning you.’

  ‘You cut my arm.’

  ‘For which I’m deeply sorry. Things got out of hand, and you had no right to be in that place. But those shrinks are going to put a mark on you much worse than that little scratch on your arm. Believe me. I haven’t lied to you yet.’

  Leaving out the erotic element of the encounter, Sam reported this conversation verbatim to the specialist, an imposing but hearty Caledonian with butter-coloured hair and nicotine-stained fingertips. The Tooth Fairy chose that moment to make a brief appearance at the psychiatrist’s window, shaking his head in dismay, an event Sam had considered it wiser to leave out of his report.

  Sam stared glumly into the pond. ‘How long did you say this takes?’

  Terry sat to his right, his right cheek muscle twitching slightly as diligently he worked away. Clive sat on his left, eyes closed, a distant expression of studied concentration moulding his features. ‘As long as it takes,’ said Clive.

  Terry had returned from his six weeks on the east coast looking strangely diminished and with a faint burr lodged in his accent. Some profound change had taken place in the boy, which Sam and Clive could detect but not identify. Often in moments of laughter Terry would seem to ‘catch’ himself and would be overtaken by a strange, self-conscious fluttering of the eyelashes, after which his eyebrows would knit fiercely, as if he were persecuted by a brief but intense migraine. These flashing visits of petit mal would cause his pals to look away in embarrassment; though they sensed their origins, both the cause and the condition were off-limits for discussion, even for boys who would normally ruthlessly attack any weakness in the scramble for advantage known as growing up. No one ever told Clive and Sam that what happened to Terry’s parents was a taboo subject. They understood that the matter was not open for debate in the same way in which you understand your friend’s eyes are not for gouging nor his belly for disembowelling.

  The arrangement for Terry to stay with his Aunt Dot and cousin Linda was put on an apparently permanent basis, though the other two boys never questioned Terry about this either. Meanwhile Terry had brought back from the east coast a new harvest of nightmares. The old bad dreams had been replaced by new ones, and the new ones were bad enough to precipitate his own crisis. Night after night he awoke screaming, inconsolable, terrified, until he too was taken to his local GP, who bounced him in turn into the consulting room of a specialist. Terry too was having his head looked at, and it was a matter of considerable joy to the two boys to find out that their heads were being looked at by the very same Aran-sweatered, nicotine-sallowed psychiatrist, Skelton.

  And then Clive too had to have his head looked at, but for different reasons and by a different specialist. Clive’s abilities as a ‘gifted child’ proved to be more and more disruptive in the classroom. Teachers did not take kindly either to being corrected or to having their arguments amplified. Clive was examined, tested, interviewed and tested again. His reward for demonstrating exceptional intelligence was to be taken away from his dearest friends and placed in a special school, run, it was said, by more specialists. It was Clive who had come up with the new group name. Both Terry’s Aunt Dot and Sam’s mother had separately advised them, in lowered tones, not to mention to anyone about seeing specialists. Clive, however, made it a badge of honour. ‘We’ve all had our heads looked at. We’re the Heads-Looked-At Boys.’

  And they were.

  ‘Goons! They’re all freaks and goons!’ Clive had protested after his first week at the Epstein Foundation for Gifted Children. He was truly appalled. If this was what it meant to be gifted, he understood instantly that there was neither honour nor pride in it. ‘Freaks and goons! They’ve all got glasses and – sorry, Sam, not like yours, I mean thick glass like at the bottom of a pop bottle and some of ’em even have brown lenses in their glasses – and long fingers, I’ve noticed they’ve all got fingers probably nine inches long. Then there’s this kid called Frank, who’s ten years old with a beard, honest.’

  This bearded Frank had told Clive about wanking, and Clive had immediately passed on the information to the other Heads-Looked-At Boys, a gift from the school of gifted children.

  ‘Mine’s starting to feel a bit sore,’ Sam complained.

  ‘And mine,’ said Terry. His right cheek muscle continued to flex, as if attached by some mysterious ligament to the cock he was busily stroking. Clive, meanwhile, continued to pump at his own cock while mentally engaged in some esoteric form of astral travel.

  ‘And it’s gone a purplish-reddish colour.’

  ‘Mine’s more pinkish-brownish.’

  Without missing a stroke, Clive opened his eyes and said, ‘Frank says if you keep at it long enough, then this white spunk squirts three feet in the air, and it absolutely kills you and—’

  ‘If it kills you, what’s the point?’ Terry asked, reasonably.

  ‘Not kills you, that is, it doesn’t kill you, but it kills you in a way that feels incredible, Frank says.’

  ‘I’m not sure about this Frank. He sounds like a—’

  Sam’s words were cut off when they heard a rustle in the grass behind them. ‘What are you doing?’ said a girl’s voice. The three boys toppled forward, squirming on the ground at the pond’s edge, stuffing themselves back in their trousers, clutching at their midriffs.

  It was Lanky Linda, or rather Moody Linda; less lanky now that, approaching fourteen, she was filling out her height but increasingly disposed towards moodiness. Terry kept up a running report on her moods for the other two, plus a steady commentary on her bra size, underwear and sanitary towels.

  Linda had become a teenager. It was a word which all the adults around seemed, when uttering it, to underline. There was a frisson, exasperation and a note of distaste in the word. A teenager. Something clearly happened to you when you became a teenager. You carried this word like a hump on your back; it was a mark of infamy. ‘Now that she’s a teenager . . .’ they would say, as if what they really meant was ‘Now that she’s a vampire . . .’ or ‘Now that she’s a werewolf . . .’

  And the white gloves had been discarded in favour of miniskirts, and patent-leather shoes, and American-tan tights, and belts with huge buckles; and her sleek, black hair was styled in a Jean Shrimpton cut that had literally made her father weep. There were also reports from Terry of boyfriends, potential or otherwise, hovering in the background. Na
mes were named, and the thought of Linda necking with these people left the boys uncertain whether to giggle or puke. And now here Linda was, her face made up to an astonishing wax finish, her eyelids painted marine-blue, her lips a peelable, cherry-pink gloss, demanding to know what they were doing, the query put in a way which answers itself, the tone betraying that the poser of the question can see the answer perfectly well, and would rather not, but feels compelled to say something, anything to mask an evident surprise. Linda’s dog Titch, a whippet-cross, stood with its head on one side, as if it too was looking for sensible answers to reasonable questions.

  ‘Having a pee,’ Clive said quickly, scrambling to his feet.

  ‘Having a pee sitting down?’ For one horrible moment it seemed that Linda was going to insist on debating the point. Sam got up and affected to be fascinated by the high-pressure valve on one of the wheels of the dumper truck. Clive and Terry turned away, cheeks flaming. Mercifully, Linda changed the subject by addressing Terry. ‘Dad says he wants you to come and wheelbarrow some sand.’

  Terry’s Uncle Charlie was building an extension to their house, chiefly to give Terry a room of his own since he currently shared with Linda’s two younger brothers. ‘I’ll be along in a minute.’ He couldn’t look his cousin in the eye.

  Linda surveyed the ploughed field and the partially infilled pond. ‘Shame,’ she said. ‘Shame they did this.’ Then she turned and walked back the way she came.

  The boys were silent for a minute or two. Clive sniggered. Sam, fiddling with the valve on the dumper wheel, snorted too. Then came a mighty blast of pressurized air from the valve as it opened, spraying a fan of white foam at Sam’s face. The other two boys shouted and cheered at the sudden release of pressure. Clive picked up a rock and tossed it at the cab window of the JCB, webbing the thick glass. Terry found an old newspaper in the cab. He stuffed it under the driver’s seat, took a box of matches from his pocket and ignited the paper.

  ‘Let’s help Terry move that sand,’ said Clive.

  They sprinted home.

  11

  In the Saddle

  After the eleven-plus they transferred their attentions from the football-club changing rooms to the gymkhana pavilion. Over the past two years they’d poked out the football club’s windows on a regular basis, gouged holes in the door, committed the offence of breaking and entering in order to scribble on the nude pin-ups tacked to the walls and wrecked the internal plumbing of the showers.

  Perhaps it was the eleven-plus itself that provoked this change in policy. Sam and Terry had sat the exam side by side. ‘If you pass, you go to Thomas Aquinas Grammar School,’ Terry reasoned, ‘which has a shit football team. Fail, and you go to Redstone Secondary, which cleaned up the A, B and C leagues last season.’

  Sam found a question which asked them to Describe a recent holiday you have taken with your family. Before setting out to answer it, he looked over at his friend. Terry had laid down his pen and his eyelashes fluttered furiously. Sam passed, Terry failed. Clive, having breezed the eleven-plus exam when he was only seven, had no need to sit it again. He was to stay on at the Epstein Foundation.

  ‘With the geeks and the freaks,’ he said staring grimly into the pond. They sat with their backs to the football pitch. The football club kept in readiness a net on a long pole for hooking the ball out of the water.

  ‘So that’s it then,’ Terry said. ‘I’m thick, so I go to Redstone. You’re bright, so you go to Epstein, and Sam’s—’

  ‘Mediocre,’ said Clive, ‘so he goes to grammar school.’

  ‘Fuck off, Epstein egg-head,’ said Sam.

  ‘You fuck off.’

  ‘You fuck off.’

  ‘Let’s leave the football buildings,’ Terry broke into the gay banter, ‘and give the gymkhana pavilion some hammer instead.’

  ‘Why?’

  Terry rubbed his chin judiciously. Now that it was settled he was going to Redstone Secondary, he was aware that one or two of the senior boys played for Redstone Football Club, and that one day he might too. ‘Football is for ordinary folk. Gymkhana is for the snotty bastards. We play football.’

  ‘I don’t play fucking football,’ Clive objected. ‘You two play fucking football, but I don’t.’

  ‘No,’ Terry agreed. ‘You play three-dimensional chess while composing music along with boys from another planet. Fucking egg-head.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘You fuck off.’

  ‘You fuck off’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Sam. ‘We move on to gymkhana.’

  ‘So your reasons are proto-political,’ said Clive.

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘You fuck off.’

  ‘You’re out-voted,’ said Terry. ‘It’s decided.’

  ‘Who said this is a democracy? It isn’t. Heard of intelocracy?’

  ‘?’

  ‘Government by the brains,’ Clive continued. ‘I get three votes. Sam gets two votes. Terry, with his school for turnip-toppers, gets one vote.’

  ‘Have you heard of punch-in-the-mouth-ocracy?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘You fuck off.’

  ‘You fuck off.’

  But power in this group, true power, rested in the hands of the one who had the stamina to say, ‘Fuck off’ more times and more vigorously than the next man. Clive, who didn’t give a hoot whether they wrecked the football rooms or the gymkhana pavilion, surrendered early to the new political order.

  The sun made intermittent stabs between wind-chased clouds. The gymkhana ring was just two fields away. They ducked under the barbed-wire dividing the fields, crossing between the crimson-and-white and black-and-white painted poles of the show-jumps. Stepping around the ramshackle wooden toilets, they paused to squint through knot-holes large enough, it was remarked, to watch women taking a piss if the opportunity arose. Beyond that was the large timber pavilion, with its stainless-steel tea-urn and storage area to the rear. The pavilion backed on to marshy, soot-coloured ancient woods, a close-knit copse breathing odours of fungus and decomposed leaf into the Saturday afternoon sky.

  ‘And a big hand for Abigail,’ cheered Clive as they passed the empty commentary box, before drawing abreast of the pavilion.

  Forcing an entry was easy. Terry, standing on Sam’s shoulders, broke a pane of glass and reached in to release a small horizontally opening window. Scrambling inside, he opened a larger window at the side of the pavilion, through which the other two followed. Working on a scale of one to five, they had just agreed on some level-two vandalism before a Land-Rover sped through the open gate at the uppermost corner of the field. The vehicle revved its engine through the mud and bumped across the grass towards the pavilion.

  The boys froze. Then thawed, and there was an ecstatic scurrying as they buried themselves under the painted poles and simulated brick-blocks at the back of the storage area. They scrambled into holes only rats could have found. The dust was still settling when the padlocked door was rattled from the other side. A heavy bolt shot back, and they heard a man’s deep voice. Sam’s range of vision was restricted to a pair of muddy green Wellingtons and the knees of corduroy trousers, followed by a pair of slender legs in jodhpurs and riding boots. A pile of sticks tied with cloth pennants tumbled to the ground. The two pairs of legs went out again but returned in the space of a few heartbeats. A pile of plastic hoops clattered to the floor. Sam’s glasses were hanging off his head, suspended by one ear.

  ‘Hello,’ said the man’s voice. ‘What’s this, then? I see it. They’ve broken the swining window.’

  ‘Did they get in?’ said a girl’s voice.

  ‘Look at that! Little swines! Wish I could catch ’em. I’d make ’em into pulp! I would! Make ’em into pulp!’

  There was the sound of the entry window being bumped shut. Then the heavy Wellingtons trooped out again, and there was a manly shout from outside. The jodhpurs and boots trotted after the Wellingtons. Then the riding boots came back in again, and the jodhpu
rs kneeled on the ground as a pile of numbered armbands with string-ties slithered to the floor. A girl not much older than Sam collected the armbands and shuffled them into a neat pile. She was wearing a baggy woollen jumper, threadbare at both elbows. Her long, dark hair was tied behind her head. She looked up and her slate-blue eyes locked with Sam’s.

  Sam was wedged behind a pole painted with black and white hoops. He knew that only the band of his eyes was visible. If he blinked, she would recognize what she was seeing, and if he closed his eyes he would give them all away. He tried to make himself black and white, to conjure a badger’s stripes across his face, feel himself as a piece of painted wood. The Tooth Fairy, he knew, could have accomplished such a trick. Still on her knees, the girl continued to stare back at him. In her eyes he identified both confusion and recognition. Sam felt an insect, perhaps a wood louse or a spider, crawl inside his collar and down his back.

  The driver of the Land-Rover sounded his horn. The girl scrambled to her feet and went out. The bolt shot in its cradle, and the sound was followed by the rattle of hasp and padlock. Then the Land-Rover moved off, the sound of its engine diminishing slowly.

  ‘Could be a trap,’ Sam warned the others in a low whisper.

  Five breathless, heart-stopped, insect-crawled minutes passed before Sam exploded from his bolt-hole, snorting dust, scattering poles and tearing off his shirt.

  ‘Close,’ said Terry, emerging from the pile, face streaked with pitch.

  ‘Too close,’ said Clive, escaping from a crate. Sam was still twisting and clawing at his bare back. ‘At least they didn’t see us.’

  The next day they returned to the scene of their almost-crime to pour scorn on the gymkhana. They had to pass the Sunday school on their way. Mr Phillips was just emerging from the gate, looking rather pleased with himself. ‘Hello! Haven’t seen you chaps in a good while!’ The boys’ answer was to smirk and to avoid eye-contact as they passed. Each of them sensed Mr Phillips watching their necks a good way up the road.