‘No, Nev. You’ve got it wrong.’
After Terry had come out of hospital, Linda cried for him every night. The effort of trying to pretend that everything was still exactly as it was before was too much for her. Consequently she was pink-eyed for the big day of her departure, which didn’t bode well. Dot had made her lie down with cucumber rings pressed on her puffed eyes and seemed heartless to Linda when she said, ‘Terry’s done it: he’ll have to live with it.’ It didn’t seem right to Linda. When someone you love blew off their hand, it didn’t seem right to mess around with cucumber rings. But Dot was firm, and her stoicism carried them all through.
Linda eventually appeared in a shocking-pink suit with her hair cut short in a fashionable, scooped wave. She kissed and hugged everyone with excessive enthusiasm, and it was not until the moment before her departure that Sam realized she’d always been there, in the foreground or in the background, a quietly reassuring presence, and he really was going to miss her. He glanced at Derek, standing back from the chatter and the unusually demonstrative behaviour, and he felt a pricking of sympathy.
Linda kissed Clive and Alice, but before hugging her mother and climbing into the car with her father, she took Sam and Terry to one side. ‘Terry,’ she said softly so that the others couldn’t hear. ‘I want you to take care of Sam. You’re all stupid, all of you, but Sam’s the most stupid, and I worry about him more than any of you. So you’ve got to promise me you’ll look out for him. Promise me?’
Sam was surprised by this. He wanted to protest. He wanted to say, ‘Look, he’s the poor fucker with one hand,’ but instead he coloured and said nothing. Terry, embarrassed, brushed his nose with his bandaged stump and looked away.
‘Promise me?’ Linda insisted.
‘Sure,’ said Terry. ‘Yes.’
Then Linda kissed them both before going to Derek. A final hug with Dot, and she climbed into the car. Everyone waved, everyone shouted, everyone blew kisses. Linda was gone.
The adults filtered away, except for Derek, hands in pockets, gazing down the road after her.
‘She’ll be back,’ Alice said brightly.
‘Not as if,’ Terry offered, ‘you weren’t going to see her again.’
Derek looked up. There was malice in his eye. ‘What do you know about it?’ he spat bitterly. ‘You know nothing. You’re just kids. For you I’m just Linda’s boyfriend, someone
to try to take the piss out of. But she’s away and that’s it. I can’t compete where she’s gone. I’m out of it. I can’t compete.’ He got into his Mini, slamming the door. The engine revved angrily and the tyres squealed as he spun the car in the road. Derek accelerated away from them, very fast.
‘You’ve got to understand something, lad,’ Skelton was saying. ‘You just don’t have that kind of power. You don’t have it. I don’t have it. Nobody has it.’
Skelton was trying, and not for the first time, to unburden Sam of his guilt over the business of Terry’s hand. This was not his first appointment with Skelton since the pipe-bomb accident. Indeed, a regular pattern had established itself in Sam’s life. Sam had an annual appointment with his psychiatrist. Skelton had determined that meetings of greater frequency were unnecessary; ‘We just want to measure your skull,’ he’d joked, ‘and keep everyone else happy’ However, any incident in Sam’s life, from being caught smoking to involvement in bomb construction, resulted, through Connie’s insistence, in a further appointment.
Sam had explained the entire business of the evil hand and of the Tooth Fairy’s promise of retribution.
‘Coincidence!’ Skelton hissed. ‘Though I’ll happily assert that you may have had some special insight into what happened before the event. By which I mean you
knew
there were dangers. You
knew
how these damned stupid things are made, presumably by holding them still in one hand and hammering the ends with the other. You knew all this. You foresaw it. That’s just intelligence at work, not some supernatural power. You are
not
responsible!’
‘What about when Terry’s father shot himself and his family?’
‘Maybe you saw something there too. You sensed some danger for your friend, something about his father’s behaviour that was deeply disturbing. You wanted him out of there. The mind is an incredible measuring instrument, Sam. It knows more than you think. It knows more than it should.’
‘How do you know all that?’
‘It’s my job to know.’
‘The Tooth Fairy said Terry owed me his life anyway.’
‘And therefore could afford a hand?’
‘Yes. That’s what the Tooth Fairy told me.’
‘Sod the Tooth Fairy!’ shouted Skelton, at the end of his patience. ‘Why don’t you get that Tooth Fairy and give it a good shagging!’
‘I do. Sometimes.’
‘Yes yes yes. I know you do. You’ve told me. I’m just running out of ideas.’
Skelton was brutally honest with Sam about the limitations of his ability to deal with Sam’s problem. For the psychiatrist, Sam was a unique case. Skelton had encountered plenty of children and adult patients with dangerous imaginary friends, but in his experience these entities either disappeared one day and never came back or developed into classic symptoms of paranoia, schizophrenia or other self-sustaining delusory conditions. Sam seemed to operate perfectly normally except for this one conviction. He had, Skelton had reported a long time ago, never been a danger either to himself or to others. So far.
‘And what about this wonderful . . . Alice, was it? Alice? I’m certain that when you lie down in the grass with this wonderful Alice, you’ll not see this Tooth Fairy again.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘How do I know? I’m paid to know! It’s my job to know! And I don’t mind telling you, I’m disappointed with your progress there. You’ve got to try, son.
Try.
Do you know the secret of success when it comes to women? To
try.
You may
get your face slapped. You may endure the occasional stinging rebuke or withering humiliation. But if you want some apples in your barrow, you’ve got to put your barrow under the apple tree. See? You’ve got to
try!’
‘It’s more impossible than ever now.’
‘Why? Tell me why.’ Skelton was almost crying with frustration.
‘Because that’s what this was all about. Between me and Terry. We both want Alice. That’s why Terry’s hand got blown off.’
‘And that,’ screamed Skelton, ‘is why I said to you that you just
don’t have that power!
God give me strength!’
‘On television,’ said Sam, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose, ‘psychiatrists don’t get all worked up like you do.’
Skelton bared his nicotine-stained teeth. ‘I’m coming to your house with a brick. And I’m going to throw it through your television screen. Now off you go. Make another appointment with Mrs Marsh on the way out. Don’t make any bombs. Have a good year.’
‘Any news on the Interceptor?’ Sam said, as he got out of his chair.
‘Eh? Oh, nothing to report. Everyone I’ve mentioned it to thinks it’s clever but too fanciful. I’m still trying.’
‘You know, I don’t want it patented for myself. I want it for Terry’s father. He invented it.’
‘I knew that.’
‘How? How did you know that?’
‘Get out of here,’ said Skelton.
Sam spent a great deal of time walking in the woods, trying to figure it all out. He knew he should avoid the site where Tooley’s corpse lay mouldering, yet the extraordinarily radiant presence of the carrion flower drew him like a beacon. Sometimes he would stand at a distance of twenty yards,
observing the flower from behind a tree; occasionally he would approach it, circling it, peering at the base of the hollow trunk from which it grew. He wondered which particular part of Tooley’s corpse succoured its roots, whether brains or guts.
One day Sam felt oddly energized. He stood close to the plant, inspecting the purple leaves and the white stamen. It seemed to have reached a certain maturity and, Sam felt, was about to make a spectacular transformation. The fat stamen was ready to burst. The air about it quivered.
Sam experienced a stab of impatience, almost as if it were communicated directly from the plant. He felt drawn to helping Nature along. Using a stick to scrabble among the leaf-mulch at the base of the plant, he uncovered the puffy, poisonous yellow fungus beneath. It had swelled considerably since he was last there and had grown to the size of a small skull. Sam touched his stick to it. The tumorous white sac responded to the pressure with a wheeze of air and swelled visibly. Sam dropped the stick in surprise and stepped back. There followed a second consumptive sigh of air as the venomous sac puffed up still further. The short blasts of air began to accelerate, and slowly the fungus swelled like a football inflated by a bicycle pump. The puffball continued to wheeze and inflate with increasing rapidity, until it began to resolve into an identifiable face. Tooley’s. It was sallow, jaundiced and poisonous, cheeks horribly scarred, eyes oily with hatred.
Still hyperventilating, each breath coming like a sobbing wheeze, Sam jerked up in bed, the crocodile clip of the Nightmare Interceptor tearing from his nostril.
The pond was bulldozed, as threatened. One day two giant yellow earth-movers came in, frightened the fauna, flattened the field and pushed a huge pile of earth into the pond,
reducing it to a third of its recent size. It was all over in a day. The Moodies went up to survey the damage.
They looked on in silent dismay. They felt an inadmissible sense of personal violation. As if someone had stolen something intimate from them while they’d been sleeping. Like a vital organ, such as a lung. Or perhaps a tooth.
Even their old hideout had been destroyed. The place where they had spent so many afternoons, in fair weather or foul, was now a flattened plane of red earth imprinted with thick caterpillar tracks. The trees formerly overhanging the pond were uprooted and piled high for burning. The old Morris seat, springs now exposed through the torn leather, had been casually slung on the top of the pyre. The water in the small pond that remained had been stirred the colour of stewed tea. It seemed impossible that it could continue to sustain the myriad forms of pond life it had supported for years: herons and moorhens and swifts, perch and pike, toads and newts, dragonflies and water-boatmen, snails and spawn, duckweed and spyrogyra.
‘They were only supposed to fill in half !’ Alice’s voice, though subdued, burned with indignation. ‘Surely they can’t get away with that!’
‘What do you suggest we do?’ Clive said bitterly. ‘Dig it out again?’
No one mentioned anything about bombing any more.
Somehow it was more than just the pond that had been taken away. None of them could say what it was exactly, but the event rang for each of them like a bell marking a stage in a terrible race. Something like a whisper, more of a warning signal than a voice, sounded out of the cracked, tracked, hard-packed earth, saying,
This is how it is, this is how it will be, I can change anything at any time, and there is never, ever, any going back.
‘Hey, Clive,’ Terry said. ‘This is yer blues.’
*
Clive had become a living authority on pop music. He’d discovered it was more socially acceptable to show off about the rhythm and blues antecedents of the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds than it was to exhibit comprehensive knowledge of calculus and atomic theory. He didn’t stint himself. He traced lines of influence back to the Delta blues and to Mississippi sharecropper tunes. Whatever it was that the Cream had laid down or John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers were getting on, Clive knew the source. ‘Yeah, but you see, that was a Blind Lemon Jefferson composition . . .’ ‘Oh, yeah, the Robert Johnson number . . .’ ‘Uh huh, Josh White did it first . . .’ ‘Who? . . . No, you’re probably thinking of Howlin’ Wolf.’
It was exasperating for Sam and Terry to be told they were mistakenly thinking of someone they’d never even heard of in the first place – Howlin’
who?
But they knew better than to argue. Clive was never wrong about these things, and he had an entire thesis running in his head. He started buying the music magazines,
Melody Maker
and
New Musical Express,
just to pick, arguments with the rock journalists. He sent vitriolic and sarcastic letters to these journals on a weekly basis, undeterred by the fact that not once did they get published. He also collected in a big way, building up an impressive library of blues records. He took a job pumping petrol after school to pay for the habit. Clive became the boy you never saw without the trademark album sleeve under his arm.
Of the others, it was Alice who was most impressed by his encyclopaedic knowledge of the genre. He loaned his records to her, and they would discuss the stuff for hours, humming tunes, tossing hook lines back and forth. It was deeply irritating to Sam and Terry.
‘It’s pure mood,’ he condescended to explain to them. ‘That’s why Alice and I like it. Deep Mood. It’s Redstone music.’ The casual reference to ‘Alice and I’ went a long way.
Clive’s acne hadn’t disappeared; Thomas Aquinas failed to
produce the desired miracle. It had subsided, however, leaving him with a face permanently inflamed and prematurely aged. When Terry said to him, as they looked upon the filled-in pond, ‘Hey, Clive, this is yer blues,’ and Clive lifted his face in wry recognition, it was Sam who thought how extraordinarily old Clive looked. And when he came to scrutinize Terry and Alice, they too seemed suddenly aged. Not deeply aged, and no older than mid-teenagers should look. But it seemed to Sam as if one moment they had all been fresh-faced children, and life had been irresponsible and adventurous, full of implacable, long hot summers and inconsolably brief, freezing winters, and now suddenly everything you said and did
counted
for something.