by Graham Joyce
Anticipation of that knock on the door came regularly at three o’clock every morning. Sam would wake up, bathed in perspiration, as the cast-iron knocker fell in the dead of night. He would lie awake in the dark, waiting for his parents to stir or for a second knock to sound through the sleeping household; but they never would, and it never did. Meanwhile, his studies suffered.
Terry and Sam had returned to Scouts the week following the slaying of Tooley, pale, nervous, but motivated by Clive, who had drilled them on their story. It became possible, in the company of the other two boys, for Sam actually to believe what they had rehearsed over and over. It was only when he was alone that the truth of the event regathered its shape and returned to torment him.
That first week after the Wide Game, Clive had directed Sam to inquire cheerfully after the whereabouts of Tooley. When he failed, Clive himself marched across to the Eagles’ corner of the schoolroom and put the question directly.
‘He ain’t been around,’ said Lance sullenly. ‘Why do you want to know?’
In a way which deeply impressed Sam, Clive made his eyes shine with naïve enthusiasm. ‘I had to give him a cigarette.’
‘Give it me. I’ll pass it on.’
Clive produced a battered fag from his shirt pocket and handed it over.
‘Now piss off.’
Later Sam plucked up courage to ask again. The question, coming from one of his devoted patrol members, was not unnatural. ‘Probably fucked off to London,’ said Lance, swelling in the job of Acting Patrol Leader. Sam gleaned from Lance that Tooley lived with his grandfather, an old man suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. It was the grandfather who had suggested that Tooley had gone off to London, though his testimony was flawed in that he occasionally couldn’t remember Tooley’s name or even who Tooley was. The story squared with Lance’s view, since Tooley had often claimed he would one day jump on a train to Euston station and from there find a job as a drummer in a rock ‘n’ roll band. ‘He was going to take me with him,’ Lance added sadly.
The weeks passed, and the boys attended Scouts faithfully. Only Linda suspected that something unpleasant had happened. The walk to and from Scouts every Tuesday evening was now a dispiriting trudge, conducted mostly in silence. Linda, in her starched, immaculate blues, would try to lighten them with conversation or questions about what they’d accomplished that evening, but it was hard going. Their extreme reticence struck her as odd. It seemed to her that in attending Scouts there was no joy whatsoever for them but that they persisted for some dour and unfathomable purpose. She could never guess, as she tried to make jokes about woggles or to inquire about reef knots, what lay in their hearts.
Lance soon dropped out, and two other boys from the Eagle patrol were promoted to Leader and Second. New boys joined, and Sam found himself bounced up the patrol pecking-order. Then came investiture evening. The three were invested together after having passed all their Tender-foot tests of Observation, Knotting and Firelighting. They were given badges; they made oaths before the flag of the realm; and they were saluted by the rest of the troop.
‘That’s it,’ Clive said quietly on the way home that night. ‘Two more evenings.’
‘Why?’
‘I overheard Skip moaning to one of the Scouters that most of the kids drop out shortly after they’ve been invested. Two more meetings and that’s our lot. We’re done.’
‘What’s that you were saying?’ Linda wanted to know, waiting for them to catch up with her.
‘Scouts,’ Terry said quickly. ‘We were just saying these meetings are a lot of fun.’
The Christmas holidays approached. Sam stood in the ragged queue of schoolchildren waiting for the bus home after school. His mind, as usual, was not on the present scene of bawling and jostling kids. He wondered if tonight might be the night when the two detectives would be sipping at their second cups of tea the moment he walked in; and he speculated on why the Tooth Fairy had failed to revisit him since the extraordinary night following the murder of Tooley. Suddenly he was buffeted from behind.
His glasses fell off. Luckily he caught them in a reflex movement. ‘Excuse me,’ a sarcastic female voice said, over-loudly, in his ear. By the time he’d replaced his glasses, all he could see was a girl making her way to the back of the disorderly queue. When she reached the snaking tail of the queue, she turned and looked back at him from under a long fringe of brown hair.
It was the girl from the gymkhana. The horse rider. She looked different, younger in her school uniform. Her hair, released from its pony-tail, cascaded over her shoulders, and her fringe was cut in a straight line above her dark eyebrows. The hem of her regulation pleated grey skirt stopped at a non-regulation point several inches above the knee, and when she drew her blazer aside to place a lazy, elegant hand on her hip, the action seemed to advertise a line of thigh just a little too skinny for her black nylons. The expression on her face as she gazed back at Sam was neither hostile nor friendly.
Sam looked away. Instinctively he touched his fingers to his ears, feeling them flame. He had turned, he knew, pink with self-consciousness. It was a relief when the transport arrived, and he was able to join the mêlée pressing to get on to the bus. He took his seat wondering what she was doing there. He knew all the usual faces on the school bus and hers wasn’t one of them.
When her turn came to board the bus she paused in the gangway. For an awful moment Sam thought she was going to sit beside him. Instead she dipped her head towards him, putting her face close to his. She had high cheekbones and pale-blue eyes, deeply set. Her long hair lightly brushed his arm as she spoke in his ear. ‘I saw you that day.’
Then she was gone, making her way further down the bus.
The girl alighted one stop before Sam’s, about a quarter of a mile away from his home. Struggling but failing to resist the temptation, Sam stared through the window at her as the bus pulled away. But her back was turned as, satchel slung across her shoulder, she walked away in the opposite direction.
Skelton’s concession to Christmas decoration took the form of one tired rope of green glitter pinned to the wall in a slack wave behind his head. A single Christmas card was displayed on his desk. He was smoking a pipe, gazing out of his window when Sam went in.
‘Sit, laddie, sit.’
Skelton had a habit of biting hard on his pipe stem, thus baring his teeth. Some days he wore a tweed suit and some days a baggy, off-white Aran sweater. Today he seemed to be in an informal mood, because it was an Aran-sweater day. His cheeks were swollen and ruddy, his neck the colour of poached lobster. He swayed slightly as he moved across from the window before hoisting himself on to the edge of his large, polished desk, his feet a-dangle, and exposing an inch of hairy leg between his Argyle socks and his corduroy trousers.
‘Biters and bedwetters,’ he said through a mouthful of pipe stem.
Sam looked up.
‘Biters and bedwetters. Which are you?’
Sam looked down.
‘That’s what comes to me, laddie. The one lot goes on to become your common-or-garden psychopath; the other lot become poets, God help us all. Wet your bed recently? Bitten anybody’s face lately?’
‘No.’
‘No? The boy says no. Do I believe him? Aye. Why not? He’s never lied to me yet.’ Skelton waved his pipe stem at an imaginary audience. Sam was so convinced he had to look over his shoulder to check that no one else was in the room. ‘Now then, there’s a young fellow, Timmy Turtle – not his real name, don’t go telling your ma – he was here just yesterday. Stand up and have a look at the chair you’re sitting on. Stand and look.’ Sam did as he was told. A broad stain darkened the upholstery. ‘Don’t worry, it’s dry now. This Timmy Turtle, fourteen years old and still pissing the bed every night. And just when I’m talking to him about it, nice, friendly chat like we’re having now, he pisses his pants again. On my chair.’
Skelton clamped his jaws on his pipe. His teeth clacked against the stem, and he puffed thou
ghtfully. He snatched his pipe from his mouth and said, ‘Then there’s Mickey the Muncher. Bit his mother – doesn’t have a father, see – then bit his sister, his brother, his aunt, his nurse, his teacher. Then because I wouldn’t let him take a chunk out of me, he had a go at my table leg.’ He pointed with the stem of his pipe. Sam could clearly see marks where the veneer of the table had been bitten down to the internal wood.
‘So, laddie, why am I telling you this? Because I’m thinking, if the lad’s not a biter and he’s not a bedwetter, and he doesn’t fit one or two other minor categories I’ve drawn up over the years, then why in God’s blithering name is he coming to see me?’ Skelton leaned forward, putting his face within inches of Sam’s. The boy got a sweet-rotten blast of whisky and tobacco. The psychiatrist’s eyes were bloodshot. Broken purple veins stood up either side of his nose. ‘Can you answer that for me?’
‘No.’
‘No, he says. No. You see, there’s Mickey the Muncher. Now, sure as God made little green apples, our Mickey has got a great future ahead of him as a homicidal maniac. Nothing I can do is going to change that. It’s already encrypted. And Timmy Turtle is going to be a whining versifier, which is even worse in my book. I’d lock up all the snivelling poets with the killers if I had my way. But, there again, I can’t do anything about it. So the point is, laddie, if I know what the problem is with these two boys, and I can’t do anything about it, what am I supposed to do with you, whose problem I know nothing about?’
‘Don’t know,’ Sam said helpfully.
Skelton reached behind him, grabbing a manila file. He flicked through, almost uninterested. ‘Seen this fairy chappie recently?’
‘No.’
‘Hmmm. What about lasses?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Lasses. Any lasses on the scene yet? Any sign of ’em?’
Sam shrugged.
‘Girls,’ said Skelton. He pronounced the word ‘girruls’, biting hard on his pipe. ‘You see, I think all your problems will be over as soon as those naughty wee lasses come into play.’ Then he stared hard and long at Sam, so hard and long that Sam was forced to look away.
The discomfort was relieved by the appearance of Skelton’s secretary, bearing a tea tray with biscuits. ‘Is there an extra ginger snap for the boy, Mrs Marsh? It is Christmas, after all, and me and young Sam here are having a bit of a heart-to-heart. Facts of life, isn’t that right, Sam?’
Mrs Marsh laid down her tray and looked at Sam as if he’d been caught stealing apples. Sam coloured.
‘Thank you, Mrs Marsh, thank you.’ After his secretary had left the room, Skelton resumed. ‘So no lasses, eh? You might think about getting a move-on in that department. Advice, laddie: he who hesitates is lost.’
‘I want to confess,’ said Sam. ‘Eh? What? Confess what?’
‘I want to confess to a murder.’ ‘What? You’re a murderer now?’ He poured the tea and gave Sam a cup. Then he reached into his desk drawer, and as his hand withdrew, it passed across his own cup. Sam heard a small splash of liquid.
‘Yes.’
‘Hold on, laddie. Don’t misunderstand me. Just because you don’t bite people or puddle your bed doesn’t make you an inferior person. You don’t get ten points and a gold star with me for being a murderer.’
‘No. I killed someone.’
Skelton chuckled. ‘I’m on to you, Sonny Jim. You don’t think I was fooled by that lovely Celtic cross and the bat coming out of your grave, do you? We call that attention-seeking round here. But, you see, I knew that you knew that I knew. The reason I kept you on is that I want to know why you’re busy pretending to be disturbed. ‘‘Rest in peace’’, indeed. That’s a Catholic song, and you’re no more a left-footer than I am!’
‘It’s true. I killed someone.’
The psychiatrist folded his arms and bit hard on his pipe. ‘Right then. Let’s be hearing it.’
Sam felt a sudden weight fold in on him. The room darkened slightly. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked louder. He focused on the exposed, hairy inch of leg above Skelton’s Argyle socks and thought of Tooley lying buried under leaves in a tree hollow in the woods. He had come today determined to tell Skelton all about it. But now, as he looked at the hairy flesh and listened to the sound of him chomping on his pipe, it suddenly seemed less than a convincing idea.
He looked up at the window, half expecting, half hoping to see the Tooth Fairy, ready with advice. But there was no help from any quarter. The Tooth Fairy, who had watched him through the same window on previous occasions, wasn’t there. ‘You gave me the gun,’ Sam said suddenly.
‘What? I gave you what?’
‘A gun. You gave it to me last time I was here.’
Skelton suddenly tired of the game. ‘Laddie, I’ve never given you a gun in my life. What in God’s name are you jabbering about?’
‘Last time I was here!’ Sam protested, loud with indignation.
Skelton, taken aback by Sam’s outburst, scratched his head. ‘You mean . . .’ He blew the smoke from an imaginary gun.
‘Yes!’
‘Aha! And it worked, by golly! You shot and killed him?’
‘Her.’
‘Her?’
‘He became a she.’
‘Aha! Aha! And she’s dead now? Killed by a silver bullet?’
Sam shook his head. ‘She came back. Worse than ever.’
Skelton looked defeated. He checked his watch and buzzed through to his secretary. ‘Mrs Marsh, make another appointment for this boy. He’s cleverer than we thought.’ He turned back to Sam. ‘I was hoping to send you away from here for the last time. But listen, laddie. I’m on to you. Hear that? Skelton is on to you.’
The door opened and Mrs Marsh stood waiting, the usual signal for him to leave. She was still looking at Sam as if he’d been caught doing something really quite forgivable.
‘And have yourself a nice Christmas,’ Skelton called. Sam turned in time to see Skelton bite on his pipe and reach a hand into his desk drawer.
Mrs Marsh closed the door behind him.
18
Odour of the Female
It was the last day of term before the Christmas break. Sam stood in the bus queue, braced and ready for the girl to jolt him with her satchel. Every day for the last week she had bumped him from behind, hissing, ‘I saw you,’ in his ear before taking her place further along the line. Today he was waiting for her. He was ready to bump back.
It was not as if Sam was going to make a fight of it. In any case, the bumping had been rather restrained, but there was still something intimidating about the girl. All he knew of her was that she was in the study year above him, and whenever she pushed into him and whispered those three words, he felt more disconcerted than threatened. What discomfited him most was not what she said, nor even the accusing way she looked at him. It was something else. It was the smell of her.
There was always a whiff of shampoo in her long hair, then a deeper, second smell, like a scent which was nothing like the flowery perfumes used by his mother or, these days, by Linda. It was perhaps more like sweet yoghurt, he decided; then, no, he thought it had more of a salty tang; but, no, it was like a yeast extract; no no no, the task of pinpointing it was maddening, but whatever it was like, it possessed the extraordinary power to arrest him, to make his muscles seize and his body stiffen. And because of that, because he was always momentarily paralysed by these actions of hers en passant, he was inevitably too slow to respond and was consequently left feeling foolish. But today he was ready for her.
She didn’t come. The day before he had also been ready for her, and yet in the one moment when he’d slackened his guard and looked away, that was when she’d bumped him from behind. But today she didn’t seem to be around. Sam relaxed. The bus arrived; he climbed aboard and took a seat. As the bus was about to leave the girl jumped on and swung into the seat next to Sam.
Every sinew went into a state of alert, every muscle locked instantly. For an inflated momen
t Sam stopped breathing. He knew it was ridiculous, but he felt himself in the presence of abstract danger. The girl kept her eyes averted, fumbling with the straps of her satchel, putting away her bus pass. Flicking her hair from her eyes, she turned to him. ‘Where’s the short trousers?’
His ears burned. ‘Where’s the pratty jodhpurs and the kiddie’s rosette?’
‘Touchy.’
Her unruly scent drove him crazy. It made his blood itch. He caught himself scratching his arm. Her satchel had rucked her skirt up around her thighs. He hated her proximity; he wanted to jump out of the seat and climb over her. He felt trapped. ‘Actually I don’t go any more.’
‘To Scouts? Excitement too much, was it?’
‘You could say that.’
They sat in silence for some distance. She started stroking her long hair, one handful over the other. It streamed perfume. Looking into her lap, she said, very softly, ‘I saw you.’ The tip of her tongue tapped her upper lip. ‘In the hut. Hiding.’
He waited a while before answering. At least it was not the incident in the woods she had seen. ‘I didn’t do it.’
Now she looked up at him. Her pale, slate-blue eyes were unblinking. ‘But I saw you.’
‘I know you did. But I didn’t do it. Why have you started taking this bus?’
‘Pardon me. You’re not the only one allowed to take the bus.’
‘I only wondered . . .’
‘Well, don’t.’
Silence. They stared ahead. The bus crunched through its gears.
‘Are you going to tell anyone?’ said Sam.
‘Tell anyone?’
‘About seeing me. In the gymkhana hut.’
‘I thought you said you didn’t do it.’
‘I did say that. Are you going to?’
‘I don’t know. I might. It all depends.’
