It was a gift for Sam, sure enough. His name was spelled out on the paper but with each letter written in tiny crosses. Something about the parcel made him feel instantly uneasy, so he spirited it upstairs and hid it under his bed. Then he came back down for the ceremonial unwrapping of the presents, which is where things began to go wrong.
‘What did he do with it?’ Clive wanted to know. He was drawing on a sheet of cartridge paper with Terry’s new Spirograph, a toy that produced mindlessly beautiful spirals.
‘He wore it for a while, as if it was a great joke,’ Sam recounted glumly, ‘but after ten minutes he said it made his head sweat.’ They were sitting on the floor in Terry’s room, Charlie and Dot being the most tolerant of the three sets of parents on a day when it was too bitterly cold outside to consider their normal, purposeless trawl of the streets.
Downstairs Dot and Charlie were watching an afternoon film on television in the company of Linda and her boyfriend, Derek, who was an astonishing twenty years old, four full years older than Linda. Dot and Charlie had revised their early outrage, deciding that it was better to welcome Derek into their home, where they could keep an eye on the pair, rather than have them driving around and parking his Mini in country lanes at night. Clive and Sam made sure they got a good look at this Derek when they came in. He was a tall, stooping character with long sideburns, a large nose and a fairly extravagant sense of dress. He referred to himself as a Mod. Charlie used the word dandy. When they later remarked they couldn’t see what Linda saw in him, it was Terry who pointed out that he’d ‘got a Mini’ after all. Now, downstairs, Derek was looking somewhat uncomfortable holding hands with Linda, watching TV with his hipster jeans crossed at the ankles and still wearing a paper hat from a Boxing Day cracker.
‘So for Christmas,’ Clive taunted, ‘you bought your dad a plastic Beatle wig?’
‘It’s true: they make your head sweat,’ Terry said helpfully. ‘I’ve tried one.’
‘The thing is—’ Sam began.
‘And you got your mum a moustache mug? Wow.’
‘I just don’t know how they got mixed up.’
‘But,’ Terry cut in, ‘whose presents did they get mixed up with?’
‘What?’
‘If you reckon they got mixed up, they must-a got mixed up with things you intended for someone else.’
‘No,’ Sam said unhappily. ‘Nothing was what I bought. I remember getting bath oil for Mum and Argyle socks for Dad. Then someone changed them for a plastic Beatle wig and a moustache mug.’
‘Has your mum got a moustache?’ said Clive.
‘Fuck off.’
‘You fuck off.’
‘So who changed them?’ Terry asked, reasonably.
Sam couldn’t shake off the picture of his mother’s face. Connie had unwrapped her moustache mug and looked up at her son with such a mixture of bafflement and disappointment, wanting to laugh but her instincts checked by sensitive restraint and dismay, that her expression would be branded on his memory for the rest of his days. Nev, too, had been made momentarily speechless by his gift but had tried hard to rescue the situation by squeezing the shiny black plastic wig over the crown of his head and mouthing, inaccurately, the words to ‘Love, love me do’.
How long this might have gone on was anyone’s guess, but the moment was interrupted when Aunt Madge and Uncle Bill arrived, on their way to Christmas dinner with their daughter’s family. It was just before they got up to leave that Madge, sixty-eight that year and not too sprightly on her feet, thanked Sam for the ‘thoughtful’ gift she’d opened that morning.
‘What was it?’ Connie asked pointedly.
Madge said that though she’d never played the guitar, and indeed didn’t have a guitar, there was a first time for everything, and the book would surely come in handy one day. ‘What was it called?’ Madge often needed help from Bill in remembering things.
‘Bert Weedon Invites You to Play Guitar in a Day,’
Bill recalled precisely. Bill, who as an RAF pilot had been shot down in the war, also thanked Sam for his Christmas gift. ‘Scout neckerchief and woggle. Colours of the Coventry Thirty-ninth, unless I’m mistaken.’ He said this without blinking and with no trace of evaluation in his voice.
Before visiting, it emerged, Bill and Madge had called in on Sam’s Aunt Bettie and Uncle Harold, with whom Sam had exchanged gifts on Christmas Eve. Bald Uncle Harold had
received from Sam a hairnet. Bettie, a silent dog whistle. This last, they all agreed, would have been a useful gift but for one problem: no dog.
As they were departing, Uncle Bill pulled Sam aside and secretly pressed the neckerchief into his hand. ‘I’m a bit old for Scouts, Sam, but thank you all the same,’ he whispered. Bewildered, Sam looked at the neckerchief in his hand and quickly stuffed it into his pocket.
After Bill and Madge had departed, Connie and Nev stared hard at their son, whose only recourse was to blink back at them, until Nev took off his plastic Beatle wig. ‘This is making my head itch,’ he said. ‘Let’s get on with dinner.’
Sam took off upstairs to examine the neckerchief. Unlike his own abandoned neckerchief, resting there on the wardrobe shelf, lovingly washed and pressed by Connie, this one was grubby and sweat-soiled. The gold embossment on the leather woggle had been effaced by use. It was, without doubt, Tooley’s neckerchief. It bore his smell.
It was a warning from the Tooth Fairy. A reminder.
He took the neckerchief outside. While Nev carved the turkey and Connie made the gravy, he doused the neckerchief in paraffin and burned it at the top of the garden. The charred woggle he threw into the dustbin.
Sam himself had better luck with Christmas gifts received. Among other things, Connie and Nev had, indeed, bought him a sizeable telescope which he set up in his bedroom, angled at Mars. Terry, meanwhile, had new football boots and a full Coventry City FC football strip, the shirt of which he now wore. Clive had a chemistry set so big it had to be rigged up in the shed outside, which Eric Rogers was already calling the Stink Box. Clive was still a little swollen-headed after his rub with the Russian Grand Master, with whom he had come close to forcing a draw. The Grand Master, having simultaneously eliminated most of the players in the first half-hour, striding rapidly from table to table and moving his
pieces almost without thinking, had congratulated Clive and had something to say to the boy.
‘He said,’ Clive reported to the others, ‘ ‘‘Don’t underestimate your opponents, but don’t overestimate them either.’’ ’
‘What did he mean by that?’ asked Terry.
‘It means,’ said Sam, ‘that Clive tries to outsmart himself.’
Clive stopped twiddling with the Spirograph. ‘Are you seeing that tart over the holidays?’
‘What?’ said Sam.
‘That tart. Are you seeing her?’
‘You mean Alice?’
‘That’s the tart’s name, isn’t it?’
‘She’s not a tart.’
‘She’s a bit of all right,’ put in Terry. ‘I certainly wouldn’t mind.’
‘I haven’t seen her. She hasn’t been around.’
‘She’s a tart,’ Clive said again, nastily. ‘A slag.’
‘No she’s not,’ said Sam.
‘A
bag
. A
slut
. A
dog
.’
‘Cut it out!’
‘Why?’
‘Just cut it out!’
‘Come on,’ said Terry, not liking the way things were developing. ‘Let’s go downstairs and give Derek a hard time.’
The heart-piercing cold weather of Christmas translated itself into snow for New Year’s Eve. It fell outside Sam’s window, at first in wind-blown whorls and spirals and curlicues and finally in large, soft, slowly falling flakes. Sam lay on his bed for most of the morning, watching it. Occasionally his attention turned to the unwrapped Christmas gift. He ran his fingers across the green-and-yellow foil, searching for a seam, a flap, a way in without tearing the paper. Then he would look out again at the deep feathering and the crumpled clouds promising more snow.
‘Every new snowflake is ridden by a Tooth Fairy,’ a perverse voice said, somewhere inside him.
By early afternoon the wind had swept the snow into impressive, narcotic drifts. Then it stopped. Sam hid the unwrapped gift back under his bed and dressed for the outdoors. He tied a scarf around his neck, pulled on his coat and set out.
Connie called him back. ‘Where you going?’
‘Out.’
‘Not in those shoes you’re not.’
He was grateful no one was around to see him wearing rubber boots. The boots squeaked against the snow as he trudged up the lane. There was no other sound. The snow numbed the earth, muffled it and drained it of all colour, making everything simple. He felt exhilarated with nothing to feel excited about, courageous with nowhere to go.
The frozen pond was deceptively carpeted with snow. He thought about the pike trapped under it and tried, but failed, to kick a hole in the ice with the heel of his rubber boot. Looking across the field, he saw the dense, dark woods beyond. It had been a long time since he’d been in the woods.
At the edge of the trees, his feet broke through snow-covered tangles of dead bramble, bracken and leaf-mould. The earth under the snow was moist and brown, rich and curranty like a cake beneath a layer of marzipan. Breaking through the outlying trees, he found the woods made anew. Nothing stirred, and all noise from beyond the woods was baffled by the density of snow on the trees. The woods were stunned. It was a moment in closed time, a dream of ecstatic paralysis, a phase of Creation in which the trees waited impatiently to take on colour, sound, texture.
Sam felt like an intruder offered a glimpse of the miraculous. He stumbled along like a dreamer, trying to follow paths he should have known easily, losing his way, finding it again. A fire burned in the middle of the woods, and he was looking for it. Not a fire with orange flames, crackling and smoking as it burned, not that sort of fire, but one burning with tender rage, flames invisible, heat impalpable: the fire of something in a state of slow decay.
Then he found it. A hollow in the stump of an oak, obscured by bushes, partially covered over by brambles and broken branches, as if someone had dragged a pile of woodland debris across the tree hollow to hide something . . .
He gasped, and his breath came out like a low bark because at first it seemed as if there
were
orange flames, three feet high, licking from the hollow, wavering against the white snow. Then he realized he was looking not at fire but at the brilliant orange winter coat of a dog-fox, balanced on the rim of the stump, dipping its muzzle into the hollow, chewing vaguely and without interest.
Sam’s rasping bark made it turn around. The fox looked over its shoulder at him with yellow, conspiratorial eyes, hardly startled. It skipped off the stump before trotting nimbly through the snow, disappearing behind the scrub.
Sam looked back at the hollow trunk, his heart hammering. Had the fox uncovered the thing he feared most? He dithered between approaching the tree stump and running away: he felt he should cover anything exposed by the fox and yet dared not bring himself to look.
‘Hey! What are you doing?’
He spun round. It was Alice. She wore her leather jacket and suede mittens and a long scarf wound round and round her neck. Her nose was pinched and blue. Sam felt he was going to retch.
‘Fancy meeting you here!’
‘Fancy,’ Sam said.
‘You all right? You look sort of funny.’
She was huddled inside her jacket. Her cheeks were ruddy, and her blue eyes were bright with reflected chips of ice. Sam saw she was still wearing baseball boots, and all he could think of saying was, ‘Bumpers.’
‘So?’
‘I can’t believe you’re wearing Bumpers in the snow.’
‘So? I can’t believe you’re wearing Wellingtons.’
Sam still felt as if he might be violently sick. ‘Got any ciggies?’
‘Plenty!’
The nausea began to subside. ‘Come on. Let’s go back up by the pond.’
Sam was relieved to get out of the woods. They walked side by side, talking about what they did over Christmas, where they’d been, what presents they’d been given. When they reached the pond, the car seat was covered with six inches of
snow. They didn’t bother to clear it before sitting down and lighting up.
‘What were you doing in the woods?’ Alice wanted to know.
‘Walking,’ said Sam.
‘Me too. Sometimes I like it. Just walking. On my own. Mostly on my own.’
He exhaled a thick blue plume of smoke.
‘That’s good: you’re smoking properly now. When I first met you, you didn’t even know how to smoke. Anyway, I don’t mean you. I was glad to see you in the woods. I just mean, there you are, walking on your own in the woods, and you don’t know who you’re going to see. It could be anyone. Or anything. But I’m glad it was you.’
‘When did you get back?’
‘Yesterday. We were supposed to stay over New Year, but my mum had an argument with my uncle. So here I am.’
‘What did they fall out about?’
Alice shrugged irritably, blew smoke and stood up. ‘Something about cooking. It’s too cold to sit around,’ she said stamping her feet. ‘What are you doing tonight?’