A car came by, and they instinctively held the cigarettes behind their backs. She jumped off the fence. ‘Let’s go down to the pond. You can’t be seen from the road.’
Sam showed her the tiny sheltered bank where he and the others had dragged the back seat of a wrecked Morris Minor. The leather of the seat was torn and coiled springs had burst through the upholstery.
‘Is this where your gang meets?’
‘What gang?’
‘I knew this was here,’ she said, slumping on the seat.
He sat down next to her. It felt strange. He could smell the same mysterious scent which had confounded and perplexed him before. He sat close to her, yet the tiny space between them might have been a high-voltage electrified fence. The space was skirted with the same respect. It was a cold afternoon, too cold for anyone but dispossessed teenagers to sit outside. The sun was a diffuse yellow disc in the sky, gleaming benevolently through the trees and across the cold, green water of the pond. They smoked their cigarettes in silence. Whoever this girl was, Sam felt both terrified and happy to be with her.
‘Alice,’ she said at last. ‘I’m Alice.’
‘Sam.’
‘I know.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I just know.’
They sucked their cigarettes right down to the filters. Something glooped and splashed in the water. ‘There’s a big pike in this pond. A monster.’
‘You’ve seen it?’
‘Know my friend Terry? When he was a little kid this pike came up out of the water and bit his toes off. Now he walks with a limp.’
‘Yeah. I’ve seen that.’
‘We’ve been trying to catch the pike for years. It’s too clever.’
‘How do you know it’s still there?’
He looked at her. His observation had been slightly wrong first time, he decided. Alice’s eyes were the blue-grey of slate on a pitched and sunlit roof after rain. ‘It’s there. And I’ll know when it’s not.’
‘What were you doing,’ she asked, ‘the day I saw you?’
‘We were about to smash up the hut. But then you came in the Land-Rover and that stopped us. We didn’t do it.’
‘I know that. I already told you.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Because I did it.’
‘You? You did it?’ She blinked her cloudy eyes at him in affirmation. ‘Shit! We had the police round our place for that!’
‘I know. I put ’em on to you.’
‘So! Because of you we all had to start going to the fucking Scouts. And it was because we went to Scouts that . . .’
‘What?’
Sam took off his glasses and looked at her. Suddenly he saw in her the cause of a long cycle of events, the extent of which was too overwhelming for him to feel anything more than exasperation. ‘Nothing. Never mind.’
‘What were you saying about Scouts?’
‘Look, why did you put the police on to us?’
‘To take attention away from me, dummy.’
‘So why did you smash up the place? I mean, when you’re one of the Jolly Jodhpurs set.’
‘I got my reasons.’
Sam was suddenly suspicious. He narrowed his eyes. ‘How come you started catching the school bus out of nowhere?’
‘My mum and dad split up. I moved up here with my mum. We live behind those woods.’
‘Oh, yeah? Show me your teeth.’
‘Huh?’
‘Just do it.’
She flashed him a set of neat white pearls. ‘What’s that for?’
‘Just testing.’
‘You’re weird,’ she said. ‘Really weird. Have another Black Cat.’
Sam accepted his second cigarette of the day. He liked the way Alice tucked her long hair behind her ear before lighting up. He liked the rose-flush on her high cheekbones. He liked the way she stroked her match so lightly against the abrasive side of the matchbox it seemed as if it could never possibly ignite, yet it did.
‘You stare at people,’ Alice said, blowing out smoke.
‘People are strange.’ He couldn’t tell her what he felt: that she fascinated him, that he wanted to creep a little closer to her, close enough to breathe in again that perplexing scent so suggestive of bare, sun-warmed skin, but that the only way he dared approach was by looking at her, searching her person as if she were a riddle with the answer concealed somewhere about her.
She seemed to read his mind. ‘Change jackets,’ she said suddenly. ‘Come on, change.’ She whipped off her own leather jerkin and waited for him to hand over his blue denim jacket. They held each other’s cigarettes while they tried on the jackets, and he contrived to switch the cigarettes so he could taste her lips on the filter. If she noticed, she said
nothing. With the leather jacket he had what he wanted. Impregnated in the pliable fabric was that maddening scent of hers. Even though he couldn’t say what it was, he knew it acted on him the way an apparently silent whistle set at a high frequency acts upon a dog.
Alice got up suddenly. ‘You out tomorrow?’
‘Sure.’
‘Here. Tomorrow. One o’clock.’
‘Wait. I’ll walk down with you.’
‘No. I’m going the other way. See you!’
She was already gone before Sam had scrambled to his feet. The temperature had dropped sharply, and the sky was darkening. The pond, which moments earlier had seemed such an ideal and favoured place, now looked cold and lorn, apt to draw the darkness into its unpleasant depths. He zipped up the leather jacket and was arrested in the act of turning up its Alice-scented collar. Someone was watching him from the other side of the pond. Poised in the twilight, half-hidden among the bushes and trees, the Tooth Fairy stood with one foot in the water and one on the clay bank, shoulders hunched, arms folded tightly. She wore the bright scarlet neckerchief of the Coventry Thirty-ninth. Sam felt a wave of spiteful and poisonous disapproval. The Tooth Fairy met his eyes, then spat into the pond. Sam sank deeper into the collar of Alice’s jacket and left.
‘Where’s your good denim coat?’ Connie wanted to know when he got home. It was the first time she’d referred to it as ‘good’.
‘I swapped it.’
‘What?’
‘Only for a day’
Connie flicked at the fringe dangling from the worn leather sleeves. ‘Well,’ she sniffed, ‘I don’t think much of that one.’
A hand placed over his mouth woke Sam in the middle of the night. The chill from the Tooth Fairy’s body swept across his skin like a contagion. She was naked. Her clothes lay on the floor in an untidy heap. Blue with cold, her skin glittered with hoar-frost. When she decided he wasn’t about to cry out, she reduced the pressure of her hand on his mouth. But she began to explore his lips with her fingers. Her fingers were long and elegant ivory carvings, but her sharp, tapered fingernails were fetid and filthy, black with earth or other dirt upon which he preferred not to speculate. He wished she would keep them away from his mouth. As if guessing his thoughts, she pressed inside his mouth, seeming to count his teeth with loving slowness, teasing the vulnerability of his gums with her nails.
‘I know what you did,’ she breathed. ‘In the woods. I know what you did.’
‘It was you,’ Sam tried to whisper through his crowded mouth. ‘You did it.’
She withdrew her fingers, squeezing his cheeks in her strong hand. ‘Oh, no. I couldn’t have done it without you. We were partners. Just remember that. You let me down and I’ll let you down. I might just tell someone what you did to that poor Scout.’
She slipped between the sheets, pressing her chilled flesh against his. The cold pleasure of her body stung his skin. Still squeezing his cheeks, she crouched over him, forcing her free
hand down on his chest and pressing her lips to his, kissing him deeply. He was aware of her sharply filed teeth as she mashed her lips on his. Then her tongue explored inside his mouth, probing, slippery, like a live fish. She pulled back from him and released his face. ‘Keep away from her. She’s no good.’
‘Who?’ said Sam. ‘Alice?’
‘She’s no good.’
‘You say everyone is no good. You said Skelton is no good. You always say that.’
‘She’ll hurt you, Sam. Believe me. Aren’t I enough for you?’ She smoothed her hand across his belly, reaching for his cock.
‘You’re not real.’
The Tooth Fairy jack-knifed upright, releasing his cock and lashing out at his head with her hand. He managed to avert his face, but not quickly enough to stop her flailing fingernails tearing a thin track of skin from the line of his jaw.
She was already out of his bed, dressing hurriedly, spitting with rage. ‘I know what you did! I know! I could tell someone at any time!’
Sam was left nursing the torn flesh on his face.
‘I’m going to leave you something,’ she hissed. ‘Something for you to show the shrink.’
Then she left by the window.
The next morning Sam woke early, dressed at speed and slipped out of the house wearing Alice’s leather jacket before his mother and father were awake. He didn’t want any questions about the three-inch scratch down the side of his face. He didn’t want to invite further comment about his jacket.
There had been a freeze overnight. The grass and trees and the pavement were sprinkled with white powder-frost. A pallid sun was up, already unpicking the glittering lace-work.
Sam’s sleep had been disturbed by elusive dreams in which his bedroom window swung open and closed, open and closed; and when the window opened it admitted a chilling voice calling to him from varying and unknown distances. A kind of dream residue still clung to his mind like streamers from a bad party. He dug his hands into the jacket pockets and, with hours to kill, stared gloomily at the frost.
The bottoms of the pockets of Alice’s leather jacket were peppered with debris. From one he pulled out strands of tobacco, crumbling nuggets of horse feed, a torn cinema ticket and a twisted fragment of gold foil bearing the italicized word – readable after he’d straightened out the foil –
Gossamer.
He let it all fall to the frozen ground while rummaging in the other pocket. Here he found some torn scraps of what had once been a letter. The slivers of paper were too small and too few to comprise the full letter, but a few words could still be deciphered. He returned the scraps to the pocket and set off for the Bridgewood newsagent’s, one and a half miles away.
He needed to buy cigarettes so that he could casually flip open a box and offer one to Alice, as if it was something he did every day. There was, of course, a nearer shop, but the small detail that Sam was buying cigarettes was certain to get back to his mother. Parents, and mothers in particular, Terry had once observed, were inclined to squawk loudly whenever a teenage boy did anything other than stand still with arms folded. Having scuffed or unpolished shoes, for example, would merit Low Squawk. Borrowing someone else’s jacket would engender Medium-low Squawk. Smashing up the gymkhana hut was Ultra-high Squawk. Smoking cigarettes at the age of twelve was Ultra-high Squawk. Brutally murdering a fellow Scout was rather off the scale.
Thus Sam found himself waiting behind a perfumed young woman who was also buying cigarettes at Bridgewood newsagent’s. When she turned from the counter, she accidentally
bundled into Sam and, on seeing him, she dropped her own just purchased cigarettes. ‘Sam!’
For a moment Sam failed to recognize the young woman. Her hair was brushed back from her face, and she wore a revealing, low-cut mini-dress. A pendant dangled above her breasts, and her thigh-length boots drew attention to a deliciously brief expanse of flesh between their tops and the hem of her skirt. ‘Linda!’
‘You didn’t see me!’ she hissed.
‘Weren’t you supposed to be leading some parade today?’
She blushed. ‘Promise you didn’t see me!’ she repeated. ‘Promise!’ Without waiting for an answer, Linda picked up her cigarettes, swept out of the shop and climbed into a waiting black Austin Mini. Sam peered out of the shop window between the cardboard display units. He didn’t know the driver, but he did see Linda’s Guide uniform neatly folded on the back seat of the car.
‘Twenty Craven A tipped,’ said Sam to the shopkeeper after the car had roared off, belching exhaust fumes.
‘For your dad, are they?’
‘Yes. And a box of matches.’
What was Linda up to? Sam had plenty of time to speculate as he wandered the one and a half miles back to Redstone. Wasn’t she supposed to be leading the Forty-fifths that morning in some kind of Commonwealth parade culminating in a service in Coventry Cathedral? He thought of Linda leading them to school in white gloves, and then leading them to church in white gloves, and then to Scouts, still in white gloves, and he hoped she knew what she was doing.
Sam had to pass by St Paul’s mission church on his way back from Bridgewood. Folk were just leaving after the morning service. He saw Mr Phillips, his old Sunday-school teacher, shaking hands with the last of the departing congregation. Phillips then went back inside the church, closing the door behind him. Sam remembered his dream and
immediately thought of Tooley’s body wedged in the hollow of a tree in the woods, decomposing. Every time he thought of Tooley’s body, he thought of crows pecking out its eyes or of foxes feasting on Tooley’s beefy thighs. He found himself venturing inside the gate.