It was Connie’s sister Aunt Bettie and Uncle Harold who’d arrived, bearing gifts and the ebullience of a little alcohol. Along with sandwiches and pickles, Bettie accepted a cup of tea; Harold, his bald head as smooth and shiny as one of the pink baubles on Connie’s tree, preferred a glass of whisky. Sam was handed a neatly wrapped gift. ‘Not to be opened until Christmas Day!’ shrieked Bettie as if reading what, every year, she scribbled on the label. Kisses were exchanged. Though his Aunt Bettie was very much one of his favourites, the challenge not to wipe the wet kiss off his face remained until after she had gone.
Sam tried but failed to slip upstairs unnoticed and was summoned back as his school progress, shoe and collar size were publicly addressed by the four adults. The issue of Sam fundamentally structured the visit. The adults might wander from the subject, catch up on gossip about other relatives; or Harold in particular might insert some remark inscrutable to Sam which brought mirth to the company; but the topic of conversation would always return to Sam.
And with every minute urging the evening on to midnight, the leather football of anxiety inflating in Sam’s stomach was pumped still further. He knew that the Tooth Fairy could begin the proceedings at any moment. He also knew that she was awaiting the opportunity of his greatest humiliation.
The matter of the graffiti came up. Everyone was becalmed, regarding him steadily until Bettie broke the silence with a lament on the degeneration of the nation’s youth. ‘Anyone with hair over their ears,’ she ventured, referring to the growing fashion, ‘should be thrown in jail.’
‘You’ve got hair over your ears,’ Harold pointed out, winking at the company and making everyone but Sam laugh.
Bettie slapped his leg playfully. ‘Any man, I mean. Teenage boys goin’ around looking like girls.’
Sam was just about included in this category. ‘Yes,’ said Harold. ‘You don’t know whether to love ’em or hate ’em.’
More laughter. They regarded Sam steadily again, as if deciding whether to love him or hate him. Bettie asked, ‘Is he still seeing that chap?’
Bettie was one of the few aunts in whom Connie had confided that her son occasionally had to see a psychiatrist, and in parlour-speak the psychiatrist had become encoded as ‘that chap’. In Sam’s ears, however, the phrase was always delivered with a certain ominous ring far worse than the actual word it avoided.
‘What chap?’ Harold wanted to know. Bettie gave him a
look. ‘Oh, that chap,’ Harold cottoning on. He winked at Sam. ‘Waste of time. Sam don’t need to see no chap.’
‘Go upstairs and get your presents for Auntie Bettie and Uncle Harold,’ said Connie.
Even though he knew this was a cue for Connie to brief Bettie on the latest from that chap, Sam was grateful for the opportunity to make a break. It was a while before he returned with their Christmas gifts, by which time his aunt and uncle were struggling into their coats.
‘Merry Christmas, merry Christmas. Are you going to midnight mass?’ Bettie wanted to know.
‘Yes,’ said Connie.
‘No,’ said Sam.
Bettie grabbed him and saturated him with more kisses. ‘Oh, you
must
go to midnight mass! Promise me you’ll go to midnight mass, sweetheart!’ Bettie was of a religious bent. She was the sort who, without remembering a word of scripture, dressed the church every Harvest Festival and cried when everyone told her how beautiful it was. She kissed him again. ‘I’m not going to let you go till you say you’ll go with your mother. I’m going to keep kissing you till you say yes.’
She meant what she said. ‘There’s only one way out.’ Harold laughed.
Then it occurred to him that perhaps church was the only safe place to be at midnight. He would be protected. The Tooth Fairy wouldn’t make a move while the congregation celebrated midnight mass. Not in a church full of people. Not in a place of hymns and prayers and sermons and candles and light. The Tooth Fairy wouldn’t dare. The Tooth Fairy would be neutralized. She might even be banished to hell.
‘Maybe,’ said Sam, and then, ‘yes, yes, all right.’
Nev, as usual, declined to join them at midnight mass. He lay on the couch watching TV, a glass of amber ale at hand, and cracking Brazil nuts with a silver implement as they prepared
to leave the house. He cheerfully admitted to lacking Connie’s religious instincts. Sam thought he caught a trace of irony in his father’s voice just before they left. ‘Have a lovely time,’ he said, and loudly cracked another Brazil nut.
Midnight mass began at eleven thirty, and it was bitterly cold when Sam and Connie walked up to the church. A thick canvas of frost had rolled across the world in a single, perfect sheet. It laminated the cars parked in the street; it stretched across the road and the kerbstones and the garden fences and over the hedgerow. The night was black and moonless, muffled in the freezing mist, barely penetrated by the street lights sparkling faintly on the frozen pavements.
A few cars had drawn up by the church, and folk were chatting by the gate before going in. Yellow light blazed from the windows, the only bright colour available in the evening’s silvery darkness. Mr Phillips, who as well as being a Sunday-school teacher was sidesman to the vicar conducting the service, greeted them warmly as they entered. He seemed genuinely pleased to see Sam. An unmistakable aura of anticipation was gathering over the congregation, as if they genuinely expected something to happen.
No sooner had they taken their seats than the organ pulsed on a deep, resounding note. There was the sound of knee-joints cracking as everyone rose to their feet and took up the first hymn, ‘Hark! the herald-angels sing’. Connie, scrambling to find the page in the hymn-book, sang in a high, tremulous voice. Sam, by contrast, occasionally opened and closed his mouth with an approximation of the words.
The service was conducted by the Reverend Peter Evington, resplendent in his vestments, lisping slightly, his bald head glistening under the overhead lights. After a few words the congregation stood again for ‘O come, all ye faithful’. Half-way into the first verse Sam, hearing a tapping from overhead, looked up at the skylight directly above him.
A leaden cloud passed across his heart. Don’t do this, he
thought. Not here. Not tonight. For the Tooth Fairy had the side of her face pressed flat against the skylight, her sooty curls tumbling over her head. Her mouth was open and her filed teeth reflected the light from inside the church. Meanwhile her fingers, with their extraordinary corkscrewing nails, cantered over the glass like the fall of a horse’s hooves. Sam saw one or two people in front of him crane their necks upwards, still singing throatily, to see where the tapping came from. Sam buried his red face deeper in his hymn-book.
The crescendo of the carol drowned out the noise from the roof. Before the next verse started up, it had disappeared. He looked up. The Tooth Fairy had gone. She had gone. Thank God, he thought. Thank God.
But as the next verse progressed there came a loud and impressive banging, this time not from overhead but at a window not more than six feet away. She was back, hammering hard on the glass, grimacing at him. Worse, she’d been joined by others like herself. Sam could see, across the Tooth Fairy’s shoulder, two or three other sooty forms, vaguely female, with laughing eyes and toothy, open mouths, urging her on, pointing provocatively and flicking back their lank, black hair. One of them leaned across her and rapped hard, with white knuckles, on the window.
Several members of the congregation stopped singing and lowered their hymn-books, looking around to see where the disturbance was coming from. Sam didn’t know if they could see what he could see. Perhaps they just didn’t know where to look . . . But the consternation of the disturbed worshippers cut through the carol like a ghost ship through a safe harbour. The carol began to die out all across the church as the rapping continued. Now everyone was sweeping the roof with their eyes, trying to detect the source of the noise. The organ stopped.
The rapping on the glass came louder and still louder. The
congregation fell deadly silent. Of all those present only Sam seemed able to see who was responsible for the disruption.
Then the organ started up again, and, with someone bravely leading from the front, the singing recommenced. Everyone joined in with augmented vigour. By effort of conjoined wills and mighty lungpower, it seemed, the congregation succeeded in obliterating the commotion, for when they reached the end of the carol there was no more disturbance. Everyone stood in silence for an unnecessary length of time, waiting, listening, straining, before, on the given signal, they resumed their seats in a shuffling and fluttering of coat hems that sounded like wind among leaves.
There was a cough, and another, before the Reverend Peter Evington, jowls sagging slightly, a little pink from the exertion of singing, began to sermonize. Sam looked at his watch. It was a minute or so before twelve. Although the service tended not to register the precise moment of midnight and the manifestation of the Holy Spirit in this world, Sam had a dread feeling that he knew someone who would. A reptile claw dragged at his bowels.
Sam checked the windows. The urchin faces had all gone, banished by the freezing cold. Frost had formed on all the external glass. The sky outside seemed as malignant as the breath of an ice-giant. The vicar’s words, however, offered little warmth. His educated vowels were shrill against the comfort of his congregation’s regional accents; his story seemed numb, hollowed by repetition; and the exhausted cadences of his speech paralysed the magic of the midnight ritual. Sam lost focus on the words spoken but was brought to his senses by renewed hammering, this time on the church door.
This was no tapping or rapping, but a deep, resonant booming, loud and violent against the oak. Sam glanced at his mother. She looked more afraid than he’d ever known
her to be. So too did other members of the congregation. A sudden contagion of fear was in the air.
The Reverend Peter Evington stopped abruptly. Mr Phillips and another grim-faced man hurried to the door and went outside. In a few minutes they returned, the grim-faced man closing the door securely behind him as Phillips went forward and spoke a few words in the vicar’s ear. He coughed into his hand before resuming his sidesman’s position.
‘A few children, we think,’ said Evington evenly, ‘possibly another creed, attempting to disrupt our service.’
Sam tried to offer his mother a reassuring smile. Connie clutched the collars of her coat and glanced around nervously. Evington was still speaking when the banging recommenced, louder this time. The church walls shuddered. Exasperated, Evington gave a signal to the organist. All stood to sing another hymn, loudly and at a slightly hysterical pitch. But the banging on the door did not abate. It resounded through the church like muffled cannon, penetrating the currents of the hymn with deep, doomy, slow thumping. Mr Phillips and some more men went outside again as the singers redoubled their efforts. The banging continued, even after some of the men had returned, shaking their heads.
Sam knew in his heart that he could stop it. All he had to do was to walk to the front of the church, stand before the altar and confess. There was blood on his hands. He had to bow his head and admit to them that he had murdered another boy in the woods. He would confess to them where it had happened. He would lead them to the place. Then it would all be over. The Tooth Fairy would no longer have this terrible power over him, and she and her cohorts would stop what they were doing.
He would do it. Now. He would lay down his hymn-book and walk to the altar. He looked at his mother’s set and
frightened face. She trilled the hymn neurotically along with the rest of the congregation. As he stepped into the aisle, she looked up from her hymn-book. Something in his deathly expression made her stop singing instantly and caused her own face to turn white. She reached out and touched his arm, offering him a quizzical expression.
‘The telescope,’ he croaked. ‘Did you get it?’
Appalled and confused by the condition of her son, Connie nodded. Then she pulled him back into the pew beside her, returning to her singing with desperately augmented vigour. Sam felt faint. He put his nose back into his hymn-book and made his jaw work along with everyone else’s, trying to lose himself in the singing, letting his weak voice rise like thin smoke to the rafters.
The booming became fainter and fainter. Finally it disappeared altogether.
There was no repetition of the disturbance, and the rest of the service continued in peace. At the end everyone shook hands and wished each other a happy Christmas. They filed out one by one, and Evington shook everyone’s hand, simultaneously grasping their forearms with his left hand in a way that made Sam wince. No one commented on what had happened. It was as if they preferred not to admit that anything unusual had taken place. But Sam knew everything was out of kilter. There was a curve of panic, a disguised hysteria in the voices of the Christmas well-wishers before they went home.
‘Well,’ said his mother when they’d cleared the church gate. They walked home together in silence.
‘How was it?’ Nev Southall asked sleepily. A dish of Brazil-nut shells lay broken in front of him and the room had a beery tang.
‘Teenagers,’ said Connie darkly.
‘Teenagers.’
After a disastrous Christmas Day, one package remained unopened. It had appeared under the tree with all the other gift-wrapped presents and packages. It came in unusual pale-green-and-yellow-striped wrapping paper, and the most distinctive thing about it was the invisibility of any folds. Sam’s own gifts to other folk, despite his best efforts, were invariably scruffy parcels, ragged and uneven at the extremities, lashed together with so much Sellotape that a pair of shears was usually required just to get them open. But the paper around this particular package, a rectangular box, showed signs of being neither folded nor stuck.