‘Nothing.’
‘It’s New Year’s Eve.’
‘So?’
‘Aren’t your folks going out?’
Sam knew that Connie and Nev would be cheering in the New Year at the Working Men’s Social Club. Every year, for as long as he could remember, they had come home giddy about half an hour after midnight, wearing cardboard policemen’s or pirates’ hats, and Nev would jog through the house holding aloft a piece of coal and a penny. ‘Probably.’
‘I could come round.’ So startled was Sam by the idea that he just looked at her. She tossed away her cigarette butt. It hissed in the snow. ‘Not unless you want me to.’
‘No. It’s OK.’
‘I’ll bring a bottle of Woodpecker.’
‘Great.’
‘See you later, then.’
The sky was already shading from turquoise to mauve as Alice left. Sam trudged home through the snow in a state of blended terror and excitement. He kicked off his boots and went straight upstairs to his room, lying down flat on his bed to compose himself. After a few moments he reached under the bed for the unwrapped package, turning it this way and that under the yellow glare of his bedside light.
Alice is
coming
, an inner voice kept saying,
Alice is coming
.
Tea was early that evening. Connie bustled around, trying to get ready in time so they could ‘get up there and get a seat’. She accused Nev of taking too long in the bath, and Nev blamed her for taking too long at the mirror. Sam kept his head down as his parents infected the household with an hysterical level of personal preparation. Connie finally appeared in a pink nimbus of scent and hair-spray. Nev’s skin had about it a strange, scrubbed sheen.
‘Make yourself a sandwich,’ called Connie, simultaneously spotting a ladder in her stocking and thundering back upstairs to change it. ‘We’ll never get a seat. You can watch
The Purple Thistle Club
on TV. You like that.’
‘Help yourself to a glass of ginger wine,’ Nev shouted from the hallway, giving his hair-oil a last-minute check in the mirror, ‘while you’re watching
The Purple Thistle Club.’
‘Clive or Terry might pop round,’ Sam said lightly.
Nev came in from the hall and thrust a huge, scrubbed forefinger between Sam’s eyes. ‘No messing,’ he said, repeating the phrase to cover all possibilities. ‘And that means
No Messing.
’
‘They might not come,’ Sam said innocently. ‘But they might.’
‘Get on,’ said Connie opening the front door, ‘or we won’t get a seat.’
The door closed behind them.
Sam scratched his head. He switched on the TV, and switched it off again. He plumped up a couple of cushions on the sofa. Then he found two tall glasses, placed them at the ready and sat with a straight back, hands resting on his knees, waiting.
After half an hour he began to feel self-conscious. He went upstairs to the bathroom and found Nev’s aftershave, liberally splashing his face with the disgracefully pungent lotion. After that he stripped off his shirt and sponged his armpits. The doorbell rang.
Buttoning on his shirt, he ran to the front window and, looking down, he saw Clive and Terry staring expectantly at the door. He waited. Terry leaned forwards and rang the doorbell a second time. Sam glanced at the clock. It was eight thirty.
Sam had made no arrangement to see either of them that evening but had a fair idea they would show up. He moved back through the bedroom and waited silently at the top of the stairs, holding his breath. The letterbox flap was pushed open and Sam heard Terry call his name. He heard them discussing where he might be as their voices trailed away. He prayed they wouldn’t run into Alice on her way there.
By nine thirty he decided she wasn’t coming. He poured himself a glass of ginger wine, switched on the TV and felt a deep draught of loneliness. On screen
The Purple Thistle Club Hosts Hogmanay
would be at it for hours. A bale of straw had been dragged into the studio, somehow to denote the Caledonian flavour of the evening, and he was staring uninterestedly at the antics of a grown man in a kilt when there came a gentle tapping at the window. He drew back the curtains. Alice was at the window, framed by the snow and the wintry dark.
‘I nearly didn’t come,’ she said, handing him a bottle of Woodpecker.
‘Shall I take your coat?’
‘No. First my mum was going out. Then she wasn’t. Then she was. Then she wasn’t. Then someone rang to beg her, which was what she really wanted, so she went out. I was going to phone you and tell you.’
‘We don’t have a phone. Did she go to the Working Men’s Club?’
‘You’re joking.’ She slumped on the sofa and flicked back her long hair. ‘She wouldn’t be seen dead in such a place. God, you’re not watching
that,
are you?’
They switched off
The Purple Thistle Club
and Alice showed Sam how to find the waveband of the pirate station Radio Caroline on the radio. Alice sat on the edge of the sofa, her arms dangling between her legs, looking like she might get up and leave at any moment. Sam produced the glasses, but she waved them away. ‘Tastes better from the bottle,’ she said, demonstrating with a hefty swig before passing the cider to him.
After a while she relaxed back into the sofa but always keeping an eye on him. She had a habit of cocking her head to one side. Then she released her long brown hair from its pony-tail. Her hair fell over her face, and she watched him from behind it with sparkling pale-blue eyes. ‘Want a ciggie?’
‘Naw. My folks don’t smoke. They’d smell it when they get back. High Squawk.’
‘We’ll go and stand outside.’
They went out to the back garden and lit up. All clouds had been chased from the sky, and the snow was made blue-white by a brilliant three-quarter moon. It was cold. Sam felt the air icy on his lungs. They stood in the snow and smoked.
When they came in again, Alice took off her jacket and
reached for the cider. Her lips popped on the mouth of the bottle. The Kinks came on the radio playing ‘Waterloo Sunset’. ‘I love this,’ said Alice.
‘Yeah,’ said Sam. He’d never heard it before.
‘You’re slow, aren’t you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Never mind. You’re just slow. You’re all right, though. Just slow.’
Sam told Alice about his unopened package.
‘You don’t know who it’s from?’
‘No.’
‘Well, open it.’
Sam went and fetched the package from upstairs. He sat next to her on the sofa and showed her how it appeared to have no folds and no flaps. ‘That’s nothing. They have a machine, in a shop in the town, does that. It’s no big deal.’
Sam was disappointed. ‘I didn’t know that.’ He could smell her hair, her skin. Yoghurt. Salt. Yeast. The scent of her, the proximity, made his hands tremble fractionally.
‘Aren’t you gonna open it?’
‘I dunno. I—’
‘Want me to open it?’
‘No, I’ll do it.’ He fumbled with the paper, ultimately tearing it. Inside was a beat-up grey cardboard box. He opened it, and the contents slid into his hand.
‘Looks like a bomb,’ said Alice.
‘No,’ said Sam, staring at the contraption. ‘It’s not a bomb. It’s a Nightmare Interceptor.’
Sam tried to explain to her what the machine was supposed to do. He even clipped the sensor to his nose by way of demonstration. What he couldn’t explain was who had found it, wrapped it and left it under the Christmas tree.
‘Weird,’ laughed Alice. ‘Bit like you, really. Weird. Pass the cider.’
Sam learned a bit more about Alice and her mother as the
Radio Caroline DJ burbled happily. Her mother, according to Alice, was an alcoholic who had once worked in the chorus line at the Hippodrome Theatre but who had driven Alice’s father away. Her old man was a telecommunications engineer who travelled to places like Saudi Arabia. It all sounded fabulously exotic and sordid at the same time. Since her parents’ divorce, money had become a lot tighter, and inevitably her horse-riding was threatened. She and her mother were unable to maintain her horse any longer. ‘That’s why I wrecked the gymkhana that time. I was so upset, I went crazy for a while. But I’m all right now. I get to ride other people’s horses. It’s not so bad.’
When they’d finished the cider, they polished off the bottle of ginger wine. Sam had an attack of the hiccups.
‘I know how to cure that,’ Alice said.
‘I’m not standing on my head.’
‘No, it’s not that. Want me to show you?’
‘Sure.’
‘Keep still. Ready?’
‘Yes.’
She reached across and pressed her hand hard on his crotch. The hiccups stopped instantly. He gazed into her eyes. Her face was neutral, impassive.
The Radio Caroline DJ suddenly became ebullient, announcing the countdown to midnight. Alice jumped out of her seat. ‘Got to get home before Mum does, or I’ll get hell.’ She threw on her coat, and Sam followed her to the door. When she opened it, an icy blast of crisp midnight air blew inside the house.
‘That’s the New Year in,’ said Sam.
She turned back to him, grabbing the collars of his shirt, cocking her head on one side. ‘Do I get a New Year kiss?’ Without waiting for an answer she pressed her mouth lightly on his. Sam felt his lips tingle. Then, only for a second, she
pressed her tongue gently into his mouth. An instant later she was gone, hurrying down the snow-covered path.
‘Happy New Year,’ Sam told her departing shadow.
‘Aren’t you afraid to look at her? Not just a little bit?’
‘No,’ said Sam, trying to focus.
‘I would be. You look at the Medusa and she turns you to stone. Anyway, you’re way out. You need to move closer to the zenith.’
Sam squinted into the eyepiece and elevated the angle of his telescope at the constellation of Perseus, looking for Algol, the ‘Demon Star’.
‘You’re still way out. The eclipse will have happened before you get there.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘Because the stars are my sisters and brothers.’
‘No, I meant how can you tell from where you’re sitting?’
The Tooth Fairy sat cross-legged on Sam’s bed, picking at the ever-widening hole in her striped leggings. Her heavy boots had left an imprint of February rain and decomposed leaf on his clean bedspread. ‘I’ve told you before: I have a map of the night sky tattooed on the inside of my skin.’ She scrambled off the bed and joined him at the window, gently moving him aside. Without looking into the eyepiece she elevated the telescope another degree.
Sighting through the telescope again, Sam felt her arm settle gently on his shoulder. ‘Is that it?’
‘That’s it. Be patient. Any moment now.’
Sam watched, waiting patiently. Finally Algol, the binary star representing the head of Medusa, moved into eclipse and
faded to minimum light. It was like heaven winking back at him. ‘Wow!’ said Sam.
‘She’s dangerous, Sam.’
‘It’s just mythology!’
‘I’m not talking about Algol. I’m talking about Alice.’
‘Alice?’ Sam drew back from the telescope and looked at the Tooth Fairy in surprise. Her eyes swam with starlight. ‘Don’t you like her?’
In the weeks since Alice had kissed him, Sam had been visited by the Tooth Fairy many times, and almost invariably on the occasions when he looked through the telescope in the quiet of his room. At these times the Tooth Fairy seemed to reflect his mood exactly; he discovered that if he could be relaxed with her, she could be with him. Though he remained afraid of her volatile and unpredictable nature, he was learning how not to provoke her, while she was capable of surprising tenderness, and even affection, towards him.
‘I’m not saying that. I’m not saying I don’t like her. In fact, there are many things about her I do like. But she’s dangerous, and that’s the point.’
‘You’re
dangerous! What about that stunt you pulled at Christmas?’
‘You still haven’t forgiven me for that? So your uncle got a hairnet. So what?’
‘I’m not talking about the presents. I mean what happened at the church.’
Unexpectedly the Tooth Fairy looked sad. ‘You have no idea how lonely it is at Christmas.’ She changed the subject hurriedly. ‘Come on. Angle your telescope towards the southern horizon. Sirius is gleaming.’
The Tooth Fairy’s eyes were turned up to the night sky, but her renewed interest in the stars was fake. She was grieving over something about which she could never speak, and Sam surprised himself when his heart squeezed for her. He put his eye to the glass.
‘Sirius is Greek. It means the ‘‘Shining One’’ or the ‘‘Scorching One’’. I never told you before – it’s my star name. Sirius.’ As she uttered her name, Sam thought he saw the star glimmer with needles of ultraviolet, golden and crimson light. She sighed. ‘There’s too much light. All of this unnatural electrical light streaming from your cities, it pollutes the night sky. You suffer. You all suffer without knowing it.’
‘Suffer from what?’
‘From loss of stars.’
Sam felt intimidated by the Tooth Fairy when she was in this mood. He drew back from his telescope and made notes in the journal he’d been keeping since he’d started using the telescope. He looked at his wristwatch and noted what he’d seen. ‘I’ve got to see Skelton again,’ he told her.