The two had put on weight, and one had greyed around his sideburns, but Sam recognized the two police detectives who had turned up at the house some years ago to ask questions about vandalism. ‘No. They’re out shopping.’
‘Can we come in?’
But the second detective intervened. ‘He’s a minor,’ he said in a low voice.
The first one smiled at Sam affably. ‘Look. You don’t have to say yes if you don’t want to. But could we sit in our car and have a chat?’
Sam put on his shoes. As they walked down the garden path one of the policemen said, ‘Have we met before?’
‘Don’t think so,’ said Sam.
‘Explosions,’ said the first detective, as the car door clicked shut. They sat in the front, Sam in the back. The driver watched Sam through his rear-view mirror. ‘They make us nervous.’
‘Yes.’
‘You know what a terrorist is?’
‘Yes.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Fourteen.’
‘Fourteen. Well, you don’t look like a terrorist to me. But Ma Casey didn’t look like a bankrobber. And causing explosions is a serious offence. What could you get for causing explosions, Bill?’
The second detective continued to look at Sam through his mirror. He whistled. ‘Ten years. Fifteen years.’
‘As much as that? As much as fifteen years? That’s longer than Sam here has been on this earth.’
‘Serious offence,’ said Bill.
‘Know anything about explosions, Sam?’
‘No. I wouldn’t know how to make a bomb.’
‘Oh, so they’re bombs, are they? What sort of bombs?’
‘I don’t know what sort. If there are explosions, they must come from a bomb.’ Sam couldn’t stop himself exhaling a huge breath of air.
‘No, you get all sorts of explosions, don’t you, Bill?’
‘All sorts.’
‘See, Sam, someone thought they saw you. Though they admit they might have been mistaken. Do you think that was it? They were mistaken?’ Sam nodded. ‘You saying you weren’t there that night?’
‘What night?’
The big smile suddenly went from the detective’s face. He stared at Sam without a word for some time. Sam was sitting on his hands and they were sticking to the leather upholstery. The detective leaned over the seat and opened Sam’s door. ‘OK.’
‘Can I go?’
There was no answer from the unsmiling detective. Sam got out of the car and walked up to the house without looking back. Slamming the door behind him, he ran to the toilet and was violently sick. After he’d cleaned himself up, he sneaked a look through his parents’ bedroom window. The car with the two detectives was still parked outside the house. They waited there for half an hour before driving away.
Sam pulled on his jacket and hurried up to the pond. He wanted to find out if any of the others had been visited. At first he thought none of his friends was around, but as he approached their hideaway he heard the low murmur of voices. Backing off, he crept around the bushes. There he had a full view of Alice and Terry sitting on the slashed Morris Minor seat. They were talking in hushed, intimate tones, Terry’s lips hovering inches from Alice’s. Then Sam noticed
Terry’s hand. Crab-like, it rested casually over her left breast, the fingers flexing lightly as Terry and Alice continued to talk. For the second time that day Sam’s stomach turned over.
Backing, unheard, out of the bushes, Sam raced across the field and cleared the gate. He marched across the neighbouring fields in bitter blindness, wiping his glasses on his shirt, blinking at the clear September skies. His feet marched him in the direction of the woods, not slowing until he reached the trees’ perimeter. He ducked into the woods, following twisting paths almost sightlessly, wanting to break into a run, his breath coming short. He had to fight down a tightening in his chest, a constriction that threatened to climb into his throat and strangle him.
Finally his raging emotions flung him, like a stone from a catapault, into a familiar clearing. There he saw a hollow stump stuffed with ferns and broken branches. A sinister, purple flower grew from out of the stump, its vulgar, thick, white stamen nodding lightly in the breeze. He approached slowly.
The flower was rooted in a rich mulch of leaves, decomposing under the branches that he, Clive and Terry had heaped over the deep hollow. This time there was no mistaking the location. Somewhere under there was Tooley’s rotting corpse. Sam plucked up a broken branch of elm. Trembling, he poked at the leaf-mulch mouldering at the base of the plant.
His stick turned over a dark and juicy pap of rotting leaves, revealing, as it did so, a puffy yellow fungus beneath. A host of wood lice, mites and black beetles spilled out, crawling over the spores of the corrupt-looking fungus. A glistening grub with skin like white leather sucked on the root of the plant. Disgusted, Sam let his stick fall, and stepped back. He scowled again at the plant the Tooth Fairy had called a carrion flower. The purple-black and nightshade-blue petals
were tightly wreathed, and the fat, white stamen was dusted with touch-me-if-you-dare saffron pollen. He wanted to recover his stick and slash the plant to the ground, but he was reluctant to handle the elm branch again, as if it had been contaminated. He was afraid that the plant somehow possessed preternatural powers of retribution. Moreover he sensed that the Tooth Fairy was there in the woods, watching him.
Sometimes it seemed as if she was always, always with him.
At last he came to his senses and went home.
Sam lay on his bed all afternoon. When his mother eventually tapped on the door, he pretended to have been sleeping. He ate his tea in silence and then told Connie he was going to spend the evening studying the stars through his telescope.
Which is what he did, knowing he could lose himself in the galaxies. The telescope seemed even clearer since it had been repaired. The night sky was cloudless, and the constellations were strong, and he didn’t have to think about Alice and Terry. He trailed a satellite, and watched a meteor shower, and made notes in his book.
‘Come down,’ said a voice in his ear. ‘Come down a little to Andromeda. I want to show you something beautiful.’
He didn’t even remove his eye from the viewfinder. He altered the angle of his telescope as instructed.
‘Hold it there – perhaps another degree. So. Am I forgiven yet?’
‘You did hurt me. You hurt me badly.’
‘I’ve decided I’m going to help you. I’ve always paid you, haven’t I? From the first tooth? Come here. Lie down with me.’
He took her hand, and she led him to the bed, and they lay down together. She cradled him in her arms, whispering,
whispering. ‘I’m going to smooth away all obstacles. I’m going to help you with Alice.’
‘How?’
‘I’m going to help you. Terry won’t lay his hand on her again. You’ll see.’
He fell asleep in her arms. When he woke in the middle of the night she was gone, but his window was open, as it always used to be when he was a small child.
The next day was a Sunday. Sam decided he’d better tell Clive and Terry that he’d been visited by the police. First he went to Terry’s house. Half-way up the path he could smell breakfast cooking, and in the kitchen he found Terry’s Uncle Charlie, unshaved and still in his vest, poking slices of bacon around a frying pan. ‘He’s messing about in the garage,’ Charlie said sleepily, without looking up.
Sam, hearing the dull clonk of activity within, tried to let himself into the garage. It was bolted from the inside. He tapped on the door and announced himself. There came the sly whisper of a bolt withdrawing on the other side of the door before Terry let him in.
‘Bolt it after you,’ said Terry.
There was a workbench at the end of the garage. Terry had a rag wrapped around one end of a length of plumbing pipe. ‘Looks like a hefty piece,’ Sam said, eyeing the pipe bomb.
‘Alice is going to love this one,’ said Terry. He picked up a hammer and brought it down on the rag-end of the pipe.
Sam thought Terry’s technique a bit dangerous, and said so. ‘Shouldn’t you use a vice to close that?’
‘Too thick. Needs some wallop.’ Terry swung his hammer down on the pipe. There was another dull clonk.
‘Listen, Terry. The police came round to my house. About the bombs.’
Terry lowered his hammer, letting it dangle at his side. He looked at Sam in astonishment.
‘Yesterday’
Terry’s eyes fell to the hammer in his hand and then to his bomb. He weighed the hammer before giving the tail of his bomb another swipe. ‘Suppose we’d better give it a rest, then.’
‘Suppose so.’
‘Maybe make this the last one for a while.’
‘Better not to do any more at all.’
Terry looked sadly at his latest model. He hadn’t even had time to come up with a name for it. He turned back to the workbench. Holding the bomb steady with his left hand, he tried to compress the near end of the pipe with a series of vigorous short, sharp raps. Sam noted how Terry’s fingers closed delicately over the other end of the pipe bomb, the way they’d fastened over Alice’s breast.
‘I’m going to tell Clive,’ said Sam. ‘You coming?’
‘I’ll finish up here. I’m meeting Alice up at the pond at twelve. See you there later.’
Sam shrugged and left. As he passed by the kitchen window Charlie, still in his vest, offered him a mock farewell salute. Sam could still hear Terry tapping away in the garage.
Sam had gone less than a hundred yards when he heard the bomb explode.
Sam, Alice and Clive sat by the pond that afternoon. After the bare facts had been established, they sat in utter stillness, each cocooned in a private and eerie silence. They gazed into the pond, watching fine concentric circles, almost invisible, rippling slowly out from the centre of the pond and breaking at the clay bank. It seemed astonishing that such ripples could be generated without even a pebble being tossed into the water, and yet there they were, barely discernible yet
undeniable, as if answering some deep and unknowable disturbance at the very heart of the pond.
They sat from three o’clock in the afternoon until twilight began to descend, slowly, in graded instalments. The water sucked gently at the dusk, dark calling to dark, until the blackness itself seemed to creep out of the pond and make its way on land, until the water of the pond and the land surrounding it had reached an equivalence, an uneasy truce.
‘It’s getting dark,’ one of them said. It could have been any of them, it didn’t matter. But the words spoken seemed to radiate in concentric waves from a still, small centre, travelling to some bleak, unknown and terrifying shore.
One week after Terry came out of hospital, Linda left home for London. The event of Terry blowing off his own left hand eclipsed some of the leave-taking and the drama which might have occurred. As it was, there were tears and tribulations and misgivings and last-minute doubts. But now, in the grand scheme of things, cast against a background of juvenile boys blasting off their own limbs, a young woman leaving home seemed so much less to get upset about. After all, she was over eighteen. After all, she was of age. After all, London wanted her.
The recriminations about Terry’s accident had still not ended when they assembled at Linda’s house to wave her goodbye. Charlie had polished his car, all ready to drive her to the station. Derek, deprived even of that last privilege, had had to say his goodbyes up the country lane the evening before. He cut a sorry figure, standing slightly apart from the rest of the assembled group, like a bit-actor with no lines. Clive, Sam and Alice, all unbearably subdued, had come along at Linda’s request. They leaned against the gate, making weak jokes and trying not to look at the cauterized and bandaged stump of Terry’s wrist. Connie and Nev, always friendly with Charlie and Dot, had also turned up for the send-off.
After the nature of the accident and the circumstances of the bomb-making had been unravelled, people had reacted differently. Clive’s father Eric slammed Clive up against the
wall and hit him, hard, bruising the boy’s cheek. It had been only the second time he had ever, in anger, laid a hand upon his son. Nev, however, went strangely quiet and took to staring at his son as if Sam were the most loathsome species of insect ever hatched out by the perversity of Nature; Connie meanwhile interrogated him, uselessly, and sometimes hysterically, and above all interminably.
Yet while most bewildered parents might try to explain an offspring’s delinquency in terms of the mesmeric evil of peers, Charlie and Dot never seemed to reserve any blame for either Clive or Sam. One night, while Terry was still in hospital, Sam drank three bottles of cider and turned up, blubbering, on Charlie’s doorstep, claiming exclusive responsibility for the accident. Charlie took him in and, unable to make head nor tail of Sam’s wild stories or even to fathom why exactly Sam felt personally responsible, he offered Sam a cigarette and talked him down. After that he took Sam home and privately suggested to Nev that he go easy on the lad, that the boy was suffering badly.
‘Suffering?’ Nev had shaken his head. ‘Suffering? He should suffer.’
‘That boy feels a lot, Nev. He feels things.’
‘He should feel my fists, that’s what.’