The Tooth Fairy (9 page)

‘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 jodhpurs 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.

It was a dry, blustery day, and the early-morning rain had not discouraged the fifty or sixty pony-riders who’d spread their horse-boxes and towing vehicles around the gymkhana ring like pioneers of the Western prairie. Some kind of game was in progress, involving the pennanted sticks Sam had seen, from his hiding place, dumped on the pavilion floor.

Most of the pony-riders were either younger than the boys or in their early teens. Terry thought it was hilarious to go from cluster to cluster of the girl riders asking for a fictitious Abigail.

‘Excuse me, have you seen Abigail?’ Very polite.

‘No,’ they would reply, already looking suspicious, twitching their reins. ‘Abigail who?’

‘Well, if you see Abigail, could you tell her not, under any circumstances, to use the toilets over there?’

‘STAND!’ they would bark at their nervous ponies. ‘Stand! Why?’

‘It’s just that there are some boys going round looking through the holes in the wood when people are using the toilets. I think she ought to know – I mean, it’s not very nice is it? – so I’d be grateful if you’d tell her. Thanks very much.’

The girls would flick a glance at the toilets and then look back at Terry as he walked away, and he would sense – rather, he would
know
– that the girls would be calculating when they last used the toilets or when they would next need to. Although the novelty of this exercise quickly wore off for Sam and Clive, Terry could have cheerfully continued the game all afternoon.

They bought lemonade from the refreshments counter inside the pavilion. ‘You’ve got a broken window,’ Clive observed to the lady engaged in serving.

‘Vandals,’ she said, opening the till.

‘I wish I could get ’em,’ said a red-faced man with a cloth cap and green Wellington boots. Purple veins in his cheeks seemed set to explode. ‘I’d make ’em into pulp.’

‘It’s so senseless,’ Clive pointed out, accepting his change.

‘They must be sick,’ Sam added.

They slurped their lemonade and watched the competitors without interest. The commentator’s disembodied voice requested a big hand for Lucinda on Shandy. Terry left them to go to the toilet. While pissing he glanced up and saw an eye looking at him through a knot-hole. The eye disappeared, to be replaced by another one.

When he came out two girls in jodhpurs, holding their
riding hats in their hands, were giggling at him. ‘Fucking perverts,’ he growled.

He found the other two standing near a practice jump, hoping to see someone fall off. Ponies cantered up in regular order to leap the bales of straw. Terry was about to tell them about the giggling girls when he heard pounding hooves accelerating behind them. ‘Out of the way!’ a rider screamed. The boys scattered as a horse twice the size of most of the ponies galloped between them and cleared the practice jump by at least three feet. The rider reined in the horse, turned it in a circle and walked it back towards them.

It was a girl. She wore cream-coloured jodhpurs and a tweed hacking jacket. Her long, dark hair was stuffed into a net under her peaked riding hat. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes blazed.

‘Could have killed us!’ bellowed Clive.

‘Then
don’t
stand in the
middle
of the practice ring, stupid!’

The horse loomed overhead. She sat six feet above them, twisting in her saddle, struggling to restrain the excited, walleyed animal. Sam recognized the girl with whom he had locked eyes when he was hiding in the pavilion. He instinctively took off his glasses, and then put them back on again. ‘Just watch where you’re going.’

‘You stay there if you’re
dumb
enough to want to get
trampled
.’ She spurred on the horse with the heels of her gleaming black riding boots, and the boys had to part a second time to get out of her way.

‘Bitch,’ shouted one of the boys, but she was already cantering away.

‘Slut!’

‘Tart!’

‘Slag!’

They were silent, gazing after her as she disappeared inside the competition ring.

‘She’s fucking gorgeous,’ breathed Sam.

‘Yeah,’ Terry agreed, still in awe.

‘Yes,’ said Clive, doubtfully.

‘How long have I been seeing you now?’ Skelton made a cursory flick through the file in his hands.

Sam shrugged. He wasn’t certain if it was three years or four. Terry had stopped seeing Skelton after the first year, when his nightmares began to subside. Sam, however, had taken Clive’s advice.

Indeed, Sam had never objected at all to having his head looked at. It meant, after you’d endured an hour answering pointless questions and drawing pictures for the nicotine-stained psychiatrist, a respite from school. When Terry had been ‘cured’, thereby losing his bonus holiday, Clive had advised Sam how to secure a day off school indefinitely. ‘Next time he asks you, draw a picture of your own gravestone.’

So Sam had done just that. After the usual round of tedious and baffling questions about his mother and father, Skelton had given him a pencil and a large sheet of cartridge paper, instructing him to draw a scene ‘with water’. Sam had hastily scribbled a picture of a pond surrounded by trees, under which was beautifully rendered a Celtic-cross gravestone, shadowed with lush moss and tangled with ivy. His name was engraved in the stone.

SAMUEL SOUTHALL

REST IN PEACE

GNAWED TO DEATH BY A TOOTH FAIRY

For good measure, Sam had included a bat swooping towards the headstone and a skull pierced by a dagger resting alongside the grave mound. Skelton had taken the sheet of paper and studied it closely. ‘Good,’ he’d said in a disturbingly quiet voice, ‘good, very good.’ Then he’d made extensive notes as Sam sat playing with his thumbs. Appointments had quickened in frequency after that offering and had then thinned out to one meeting every twelve weeks over the last three years. With Skelton now flicking through the manila folder and asking him how long it had been, Sam wondered if it was time to sketch another gothic picture.

Placing the folder flat on the large, polished oak desk, Skelton came from behind it to plump heavily in the armchair next to Sam. Crossing his legs, he placed his fingertips together, prayer-like, under his chin. He exuded stale tobacco. ‘Are we still seeing the Tooth Fairy?’

Sam croaked an answer. He had to say it again. ‘Yes.’

‘How often?’ Skelton’s answer was met with a shrug. The Scotsman thrust out his jaw, exposing the yellowing, stone tablets of his own lower teeth. He seemed barely to have enough room in his mouth for them. ‘Often, occasionally or rarely?’

‘Occasionally.’

‘And does he still instruct you not to tell me about him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Always?’

‘Yes.’

Skelton tilted his head radically to one side, fluttering his eyes closed, as if listening to far-away music. Suddenly he jerked upright. ‘What?’

‘I didn’t say anything,’ Sam insisted, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

‘Quite. I think it’s time we said goodbye to this Tooth Fairy, don’t you?’ Sam shrugged another answer. Skelton mimicked with a return shrug. ‘Yes, farewell to the
spiritus
dentatus
, methinks, God speed, safe journey,
bon voyage
, mind how ye go, be on yer way, old chap, only goodbye. What say you? Hmmm?’

Sam looked at his shoelaces.

Skelton reached behind him and snatched a pencil from a pot on the table. He held it up for Sam to see. ‘Look at this, laddie.’ The pencil had been sharpened to a needlepoint. Skelton held the pencil aloft, carefully displaying it as though about to perform some conjuring trick. Suddenly he snapped it into two pieces, a clean break. He looked deep into Sam’s eyes.

Sam looked back, trying to match Skelton for deepness. It had been a perfectly good pencil.

‘See that?’ said the psychiatrist. ‘Easy.’ He reached over and plucked another from the pot. ‘Can you do it?’ He presented the pencil to the boy with both hands, proffering it as if it were Excalibur.

Sam snapped the pencil in two and handed it back.

Skelton accepted the broken pencil. ‘Yes, yes, yes, and farewell to the Tooth Fairy. Don’t you agree? We’ve had enough of him. There are important changes going on in your life. Changes, Sam. Things you don’t even know about. Hormones, good God. No room for this Tooth Fairy. We’ve got to make space for other things. What other things? I hear you ask. Well, girls, life, beer and skittles. Understand me?’

Sam nodded briefly. Skelton placed the broken bits of pencil on his desk. ‘Suppose I freely give you a gun. Here it is. Take it.’ The psychiatrist held out an empty hand. ‘Go on, lad, take it, don’t be afraid. It won’t go off in your hand. Take it!’

Sam held out his hand, and Skelton clapped it with the leathery palm of his own in an aggressive handshake. ‘Good. Feel its weight, that’s it. Aim it, go on. NO! NOT AT ME! That’s better, point it over there. That thing is loaded with a silver bullet, which is what you need for dispatching Tooth
Fairies and the like. Right, so you know what to do next time this wretched Tooth Fairy appears. You know what to do, yes?’

‘What?’

Skelton pointed another imaginary gun at the door and fired off a round. ‘You kill him, laddie. You kill him.’