The Tooth Fairy

by Graham Joyce

  They turned from the notice on the gate and made towards the pond. ‘Really? Would it blow up the football club?’ Sam wanted to know.

  ‘Not exactly. But it would blow a decent hole in the door.’

  Terry scratched his head. Football had stopped for the summer, but he was hoping to get a regular first-team place with Redstone FC for the new season. ‘I don’t think you should do that.’

  ‘All you need,’ Clive chirped happily, ‘is a length of pipe, a couple of rags, sugar and sodium chlorate. Weed-killer to you.’

  ‘Gosh.’

  ‘No,’ said Terry. ‘Do the gymkhana instead.’

  ‘Keep your hands off the gymkhana,’ Alice said fiercely.

  ‘Hey! What’s happened here?’ Sam shouted when they reached their usual hideaway in the bushes alongside the pond. The leather Morris Minor seat had been slashed; an old stool had been thrown in the pond; their tarpaulin shelter had been pulled down; and some empty cider bottles had been smashed on the ground.

  ‘Kids from the estate!’ said Terry.

  ‘Little bastards!’ said Alice.

  ‘Wish I could get my hands on them,’ said Clive. ‘I’d make ’em into pulp.’

  ‘This is ingenious! Damned ingenious!’ Skelton, his large, hairy hands pressed against his thighs, sat on one side of his polished mahogany desk while Sam perched on the chair opposite. The psychiatrist’s sleeves were rolled to his elbows. His window stood open to the warm June air. Between them, in the centre of the desk, stood the Nightmare Interceptor. Sam had finally conceded to Skelton’s requests to bring it in, partly because of Skelton’s scepticism about whether the thing actually existed and partly because he wanted someone in authority to assess its value.

  Skelton’s teeth were like a row of weathered clothes pegs left on a washing line, and he bared them proudly in a huge grin. He put his eyes close to the device, poring over its working parts as if it were too fragile and precious to touch, not merely an old alarm clock attached by wire to a thermostatic switch and a crocodile clip. ‘And you’re certain it works?’

  ‘For all ordinary nightmares, yes. For what you call Tooth Fairy nightmares, no.’

  Skelton waved away the distinction. ‘Do you realize, lad, how many people in this country suffer – I mean, really suffer – from the terror of nightmare? About eight million. Not just bad dreams but sweating, weeping, screaming, paralysing, terrifying nightmares. People who are afraid to go to bed at night. This could help them. Really help them. With a few refinements, of course. And it’s so accursedly simple!’

  ‘It hurts your nose a bit.’

  ‘May I?’ Skelton jabbed a finger at the crocodile clip. Sam shrugged. Skelton delicately plucked it up, opened the spring and let it snap on to his nose. ‘Ow! You’re right.’

  ‘You have to put bits of cotton wool between the clip and your nose. Otherwise you can’t get to sleep to have a nightmare in the first place.’

  ‘I see. I see. So the sensor is here on the clip, is it? Right. Now then. Let’s have a go.’ Skelton proceeded to hyperventilate through his nose. In a few moments the alarm triggered. He tore the clip from his nose and shouted, ‘Hallelujah!’ He got up. With his hands clasped behind his back, he proceeded to walk around and around his desk, chuckling to himself. ‘What we need is someone who can develop this thing. Develop and refine, eh? Develop and refine. I’m going to get in touch with one or two people. We’ll get it patented.’

  ‘It’ll still belong to me,’ Sam said stubbornly.

  Skelton stopped in his tracks. He leaned across and put his face uncomfortably close to Sam’s, close enough for Sam to see a jaundiced halo round each eyeball. He was not pleased. ‘Listen to me, lad. I may be a damned lousy psychiatrist. I may even admit to taking the occasional drink. What I’m not, however, is a bloody thief. What am I not?’

  ‘A bloody thief.’

  Skelton seemed satisfied. He nodded grimly before returning to his chair, grinning all over again. ‘No, this is your toy. We’ll get it patented in your name, Sam. But I’ve got to find someone to take the idea and make it into something more compact and more comfortable.’

  They sat and talked about the Nightmare Interceptor for some time. Sam finally realized that Skelton wasn’t at all interested in stealing the idea; his fascination was genuinely motivated by the potential psychological benefits for some of his patients. Eventually Mrs Marsh put her head round the door and reminded Skelton he was running well over time.

  ‘Golly! You’d better go, lad. Take your toy with you for now. Make another appointment with Mrs Marsh.’ Sam was half-way out of the door before Skelton seemed to remember something. ‘Oh! Now then, before you go, is everything all right with you?’

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘In the sense of your bloody mental health and well-being.’

  ‘Suppose so.’

  ‘No fairies?’

  ‘Not for a long while.’

  ‘Good. Carry on.’

  Shortly after his deliberations with Skelton over the potential of the Nightmare Interceptor, Sam and Terry passed by the cottage behind which Terry used to live. The caravan had been towed away long ago, but the garage workshop remained padlocked and, as far as Sam could tell, untouched since Morris had shot himself, his wife and his baby twins.

  ‘Don’t you ever want to look in there?’ Sam asked Terry.

  Terry coloured and spoke very quietly. ‘Nothing to look at.’

  ‘But there might be stuff in there. Stuff you could use. It belonged to your . . .’ Terry never made reference to his father, and Sam couldn’t bring himself to either. ‘I mean, those things belong to you.’

  ‘They sold off all the good tools and things when they flogged the caravan,’ Terry said. ‘Uncle Charlie said that only junk and clutter got left behind. I’m not bothered.’

  But Sam found himself drawn again to the workshop, even though his last visit to the place had resulted in a gashed wrist, the scar of which he still bore. The place contained demons he had to exorcise, ghosts he needed to lay.

  He knew he was in no danger of being spotted by the old man still living in the cottage. One warm evening Sam squeezed down the side of the garage, looking for the loose window where he had cut his arm all those years ago. The broken pane of glass had never been replaced. The window frame easily swung open, as before. He cocked a leg over the window frame and pushed his head inside. The interior smelled of warm wood and mould. Even the darkness smelled of dust. As far as he could tell, most of Morris’s equipment had been removed, but a few of the old features remained: the aeroplane propeller blade was still strung to the roof; the gutted jukebox rested in the corner along with the husks of penny-arcade machines. But Sam was afraid to climb in. He hung there for a while, half in, half out, unable to overcome either his fear or his memories entirely.

  He pulled himself out of the garage and slipped away, nursing a sense of defeat.

  Midsummer’s Eve, and Redstone and District Social Club were hosting the annual Midsummer Queen beauty competition. Judging was scheduled for seven o’clock that evening. A cash prize of £100 was on offer, plus a weekend holiday for two. The judges were the editor of the Coventry Evening Telegraph; George Crabb, the Coventry City Football Club top goalscorer; and someone or other who manufactured light aircraft.

  Linda had entered.

  Competitors had to appear in daywear, evening wear and swimwear. Because Linda had entered, Clive, Sam and Alice, along with Terry and Linda’s boyfriend Derek, were dragooned into the living room to be an audience on which she could practise and parade her change of clothes. The Social Club conducted its business in a dirty nicotine fug where the tang of sour beer was sharp enough to sting the nostrils. It made no sense to sport swimwear in such a venue, Sam thought, and he said so.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Alice.

  ‘Killjoy,’ said Terry.

  Only Derek agreed with Sam, but the argument was hushed when Linda shyly entered the r
oom modelling her daywear and performed a twirl. Clive and Terry put their fingers in their mouths and wolf-whistled. Linda blushed and smiled. Her face had been carefully made up by Dot, and she wore extraordinarily long false eyelashes and a simple miniskirt. Sam blushed too. Linda was stunning. She was heart-stoppingly desirable and utterly unattainable to him. She saw his blush, and she met his eyes for a moment before he looked away.

  Linda went out and reappeared in a sky-blue swimsuit and white high heels. Sam remembered the shape of Linda’s breasts, purple nipples erect in the moonlight as they had spied on Derek’s Mini from the hedgerow that night. His eyes strayed to the soft mound of her pubis under the stretched, sky-blue cotton of the swimsuit. A cirrus of stray pubic hair was visible at the groin; he wanted to suggest she did something about it, but couldn’t possibly draw attention to such a thing. His cock fattened in his trousers and he shifted uncomfortably in his chair, glancing guiltily at Derek, but Linda’s boyfriend only seemed nonplussed by the whole business.

  ‘Good choice of colour!’ Terry bawled. ‘That’ll get George Crabb going!’

  After she’d modelled her evening wear, the show closed. Derek went out to fiddle with his Mini, getting ready to drive Linda up to the social club. ‘She’s gorgeous,’ said Alice. ‘She’s breathtaking.’

  Terry said, ‘You should enter too, Alice.’

  ‘Ha ha ha. No chance of that.’

  Sam looked hard at her. Alice too was lovely but in a different way. She had beautiful bone structure. Yet her good looks intrigued, where Linda’s comforted. ‘Terry’s right, you know.’

  ‘No,’ said Alice firmly. ‘Linda’s the one.’

  And Alice was right. Linda was the one. All competition withered before her, and Linda was crowned Midsummer Queen. She was photographed wearing a sash and a coronet and again with George Crabb mashing his thick lips against her cheek.

  ‘George Crabb asked her for a date,’ Terry reported the following day, as they waited for the carnival parade to pass. ‘Derek was not happy about that at all. Not at all!’

  ‘Did she say yes?’ Clive wanted to know.

  ‘Christ, no. He’s one ugly footballer, that George Crabb. He looks like he ran into the Main Stand chasing a ball.’

  ‘I knew she’d win,’ Alice said with a sigh. ‘Men would die for someone like Linda.’

  ‘Then there’s area finals and regional finals and national finals,’ Terry said. ‘People said she could go all the way.’

  ‘All the way where?’

  Sam’s question wasn’t answered, as the first lorry appeared, moving slowly in first gear, like a ship chugging between the small crowd of people fringing either side of the main street through Redstone on its way to Coventry. It was a great day. Redstone had hosted the competition and Redstone had provided the winner. The local girl had beaten all comers. The sky was blue, and all was fair. A dozen vehicles lumbered slowly through the street, coal trucks and lemonade lorries and haulage wagons commandeered by disorderly rabbles in fancy dress, this one with a Spanish theme, this one a science-fiction spoof, this one unguessable.

  ‘What are they meant to be?’

  ‘Dunno. Something.’

  And the penultimate lorry, beautifully decked with satin drapes and vast bunches of gladioli, fluttering streamers and bunting a-flapping and a hundred helium-filled, sky-blue balloons, bore Linda, the summer Goddess of Love enthroned, happily waving to all the folk lining the street, her coronet glinting in the sunlight, flanked by her handmaidens of second and third place, waving, all waving, waving. And, seeing her mother and father – Dot and Charlie – and Terry and Derek and the others, Linda got out of her throne and moved to the edge of the lorry to shriek and blow kisses and wave and accept the cheers and the whistles and the acclamation.

  Sam, waving and whistling with the others, stopped suddenly, feeling his smile collapsing and his face falling and some dread part of him inside crumbling to a foul black dust. ‘Don’t,’ he said, very faintly. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘What is it?’ said Alice, seeing Sam. All other eyes were turned on Linda.

  Sam raised a finger close to his face, pointing it in horror at the passing carnival float. Because he saw on the throne the Tooth Fairy, a sooty shadow lolling on the vacated gilded chair. She had resumed her female form again, but her face was a hideous mask, and she wore a crown of ivy leaves and a sash of a thousand beaded teeth, a hollow mockery of the beauty queen waving in innocence to the cheerful crowd.

  ‘I don’t see anything,’ said Alice.

  But even as Alice tried to make sense of Sam’s behaviour, he saw the Tooth Fairy reach out a fetid hand from within its own shadow, extended to touch Linda on the shoulder, ready at any moment to infect her immaculate beauty and her moment of triumph. ‘Leave her alone,’ he whispered. ‘Not Linda. Leave her alone.’

  But the float had already passed on, leaving Sam gazing after it in horror and Alice staring at Sam in dismay.

  31

  Blim-blam Boys

  BLAM! Sam practically saw black printer’s-block letters and an exclamation mark bent across the cloud of smoke as the bomb exploded. The noise of the explosion volleyed across the football field and seemed to die somewhere in the neighbouring woods. Grey-white smoke hung in the air for a while, like buds of cotton.

  It was after six o’clock in the evening, and no one else was around. The football teams had long gone home, and it was too early for courting couples to park their cars in the lane. Impressed by the noise of Clive’s weed-killer pipe bomb, the Moodies emerged from behind the bushes by the pond and strolled over to inspect the damage to the door of the football changing rooms.

  Clive got there first. The bomb had left an acrid smell in the air and a dirty scorch mark on the flagstone under the door. The wooden door itself, though, had sustained no more damage than a nine-inch split in the wood just above the centre of the explosion.

  ‘It’s hardly touched it!’ said Sam.

  ‘I thought,’ said Alice, ‘it was going to blow the door off its hinges.’

  ‘Here’s the casing,’ said Terry, kicking at a still smoking length of gutted pipe. Terry was still ambivalent about the idea of bombing the football club. The season had started, and he’d been passed over for selection when the team coach chose his own son to play in what, everyone acknowledged, was rightfully Terry’s position. The coach had counted Terry’s toes in the showers at the end of the last season and had expressed doubts, never previously mentioned, about Terry’s balance.

  ‘Right,’ Clive had said on hearing of this instance of appalling injustice and pretext for nepotism, ‘we bomb the football club.’

  ‘Seconded,’ Sam concurred.

  ‘Seems fair,’ Alice had agreed. Terry wasn’t sure about all this, but, seriously aggrieved, he went along with the others.

  Clive inspected the pipe. He was slightly apologetic for the ineffectualness of the device. Most of its force seemed to have been concentrated in ripping the pipe open. ‘I don’t know what you expected,’ he said. ‘It was only a thin piece of pipe.’

  ‘Make another, then,’ said Sam.

  ‘We’ll all make one,’ was Clive’s answer. ‘See if you can do better.’

  The following afternoon they gathered in the shed behind Clive’s house. Eric and Betty Rogers were accustomed to Clive and his friends locking themselves in the shed, supposedly meddling with chemistry equipment which, in reality, hadn’t been touched for over a year. It was a regular Moodie venue, with a one-bar electric fire, where they could gather for a cigarette without too much risk of being disturbed. Clive showed them how to use a hacksaw to open a detonation point, how to pack the pipe and how to close the extremities. ‘You have to be particularly careful here,’ Clive said seriously, ‘because if you hammer the ends too hard, a spark can explode the thing in your face.’

  Apart from Alice, who wouldn’t have anything to do with making the devices, they’d all found bits of pipe which they hacksawed into equal
lengths. Clive mixed the weed-killer and sugar, and filled a separate bag for fuses. When the pipe-ends were squeezed shut in a vice they each had a bomb. Clive suggested they personalize the things. He took a pot of white paint and a small brush and painted the words DEEP MOOD on his bomb. Then he looked up at Alice.

  Sam grabbed the brush and painted the words BLIMBLAM BOY on his. ‘What’s that?’ the others wanted to know. Sam shrugged. Alice looked at his pipe. ‘Yours is a bit thin,’ she said. Suddenly everyone was sniggering. ‘Terry’s is the thickest.’

  Terry took the brush and just about squeezed the words ALICE IN THUNDERLAND on to his pipe. He looked up at Alice. She blushed.

  At the onset of dusk they walked to the football field, and after checking no one was around, they crept over to the changing rooms and wedged their individual bombs under the door. Clive laid powder fuses of equal lengths along the ground.

  Alice, invited to ignite the fuses, declined, so the boys lit their own simultaneously. The fuses burned sluggishly with yellow, moth-like flames. The four of them hurried across the field, took cover behind the bushes around the pond and waited. Two of the bombs detonated within a split second of each other, a double-blast which seemed to echo back from the low-lying clouds. After an interval of a few seconds the third pipe bomb made a different sound, a sharp, concentrated crack.

  The Moodies giggled uncontrollably as they ran across the grass to inspect the results. This time the door had been blown off its lower hinge and the nethermost panel had been blasted away. Smoke hung around in the twilight air like ectoplasmic spirits. Clive nodded in satisfaction. He was about to say something when a car pulled up in the gateway to the field, obstructed by the closed gate itself. The four dived behind the building as the car’s headlamps flicked on to full beam. The car reversed slightly and inched forward again to play the headlamps at a different angle, and then again, shining them directly at the building. The four crouched in heart-stopping silence, squeezed into the shadows, inches from the searching beam of light.