He wasn’t sure that he was happy with the change.
‘Finished,’ Alice casually announced on the bus home from school one day, referring to her boyfriend. ‘We’re finished.’
Seated behind Sam and Alice, Clive’s ears pricked up. Sam’s attention was fixed on Alice, so he couldn’t possibly see Clive’s ears, even so he knew instantly that his friend’s ears had stiffened with interest. Perhaps the air around Clive quivered slightly and became hotter, or cooler, by one degree. It was just one of those things it was possible to know.
Sam was no less interested. He wanted to ask whether this meant that Alice’s mother had also ‘finished’ with the sports-car-driving boyfriend from London. Instead he asked, ‘Did you finish with him, or did he finish with you?’
‘Mutual agreement,’ Alice said, looking out of the window. ‘We both thought it was for the best.’ Then she glanced back at him with a look that told him she’d been dumped.
Sam thought the proper thing to do was to mouth some words of sympathy, but he couldn’t because his heart was inexpressibly gladdened. His blood started singing in his veins. He readjusted his glasses on his nose and tried to disguise the faint twitchings of a smile. ‘You’re better off without him. He was too old for you.’
Alice said nothing. Clive didn’t know Sam had once encountered Alice’s boyfriend. ‘You’ve met him?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘What
was
he like, you mean. A rodent. A weasel.’
Alice said nothing. ‘You never told me you met him,’ Clive protested.
‘No,’ said Sam. ‘I never told you.’
It had been his secret. He collected secrets about Alice the way some people collect matchbox labels. He hoarded scrupulously all small intimacies and confidentialities concerning her but was not above releasing small examples of privy information to Terry and Clive, to confirm his superior bonding with Alice. He’d never told them that he’d met this boyfriend, or that he’d once read snippets of a letter, or that he’d found evidence of a gossamer nature or, indeed, about the bizarre triangular relationship – which he himself didn’t even understand – involving Alice’s mother.
‘What about your mother?’
Clive’s interest fibrillated again. A damp, homicidal film formed over Alice’s eyes. ‘It’s all over,’ she said meaningfully to Sam. ‘
All
over.’
Now that this new development had been announced, he understood exactly why he had been so guarded about all this information. It wasn’t simply respect for Alice and protection of her private matters that had guided him: he’d been motivated by advantage. As the bus sped home that day he knew Clive would soon tell Terry what he’d just heard, and that between the three of them the gloves would come off, and that it would be
game
on for Alice.
Sam made a sly assessment of her as she gazed sadly out of the window. She was not strikingly beautiful, yet she was irresistible: her dark hair tumbled over an ivory-pale neck, reaching almost to the half tennis-ball convexity of her breasts. Something about the school tie knotted carelessly at her throat made him want to cradle her, and her teasing habit of tracing her slender white fingers along her black-nylon-clad thighs provoked him beyond all endurance. It didn’t seem at
all ridiculous to him that he wanted nothing more than to marry Alice.
And so, he suspected, did Terry and Clive.
Alice, however, was keeping her options open. It was never certain that she even considered Sam, Terry or Clive as conjugal options.
‘Do you want to come with me to a football match?’ Terry asked her one day.
She squinted at him doubtfully. ‘Football? Are the others going?’
‘No.’
‘Then I don’t think I’d like it.’
‘Let’s go to your place and play some blues records,’ Clive suggested.
‘OK. Get Terry and Sam to come too.’
‘Oh. Why?’
‘It’ll be more fun.’
Sam remembered Skelton and took a deep breath. ‘Want to go and see a film on Saturday?’
‘Have you asked Terry and Clive?’
‘Well, no.’
‘You mean just me and you in the back row or something?’
‘Or something.’
‘Hmm. Fruity.’
Which wasn’t a no, but it wasn’t exactly a yes either. While the three boys watched each other like nervous hares around Alice, she seemed quite dexterous at avoiding the conferment of particular favours or finding herself alone with any one of them. They, on the other hand, were prepared to jump through hoops of fire to be with Alice or simply to ensure none of the others enjoyed the advantage of being alone with her. Consequently they found themselves involved in activities alien to the very fibres of their souls.
‘Pull it! Just pull it back!’ Alice screamed at Terry.
‘I’m trying! It’s not easy with one hand!’
Clive’s horse seemed to want to go home. ‘No! Not that way! Make it come round!’ Alice was almost at the end of her tether. Their ineptitude dismayed her.
Then Sam’s decided to sit down. ‘It doesn’t want to go,’ he said lamely.
‘Make
it fucking go! You have to
make
it go!’
She turned her own horse and trotted back to Sam’s grey mare, thwacking its haunches with her riding crop. The mare got up. ‘Don’t let her do that again!’ Then she cantered off after Clive, grabbing the reins of his chestnut mount and bringing it back in line. Meanwhile Terry’s dun was still munching grass from the hedgerow, unchecked.
Fifteen minutes into the hack and they’d only managed to cover a few hundred yards. Alice had been careful to find quiet nags for all three, but none of the horses were accustomed to trekking, and she’d underestimated the terror and incompetence of teenage boys in the face of livestock.
‘What is the matter with you? I’ve taken seven-year-old girls out on these horses! You have to
make
them do what
you
want to do!’
‘WHOA!’ screamed Terry when his dun stopped chewing grass and tried to take a bite out of Clive’s chestnut.
The chestnut wheeled round in a tight circle. Clive dragged the bit too hard to his left side. ‘Fuckfuckfuckfuck!’
‘Calm down! Don’t panic it!’
‘You said control it!’
‘I didn’t say rip its mouth out with the bit!’ Alice was leaning precariously from her own horse, holding Terry’s reins in one hand and grasping Clive’s in the other. Sam’s horse at least was now standing upright again and waiting obediently. Alice’s riding hat fell off and bounced on the Tarmac of the country lane. Her hair fell forward and across a face pink with exasperation and exertion. Her pert buttocks, delineated by tight-fitting jodhpurs, rose out of the leather
saddle and were offered to the air as she struggled to bring the other two horses under control. The sight of Alice’s bottom so presented gave Sam an instant and unexpectedly ferocious erection.
While he was still considering what he would like to do to Alice, someone leapt roughly on his horse from behind, hugging Sam at the waist and violently kicking the horse in its flanks. The grey reared in the air, whinnying and snorting, before galloping two hundred yards along the country lane, breaching the hedgerow and racing into a small copse. Terrified, Sam let go of the reins and knitted his fingers in the horse’s mane instead. It only seemed to make the horse bolt faster.
‘I LOVE HORSES!’ shrieked the Tooth Fairy over his shoulder. Twisting branches lashed at Sam’s face as they thundered through the thickening copse. The Tooth Fairy squealed with laughter, reaching a hand for his groin and pushing her wet tongue in his ear. Sam saw a low branch flashing towards him at head height. He ducked, flattening himself against the horse’s stretched, thick-veined neck. The Tooth Fairy sprang out of the saddle and grabbed the onrushing branch. Sam looked back to see her swinging herself up on the branch, laughing and shouting something incomprehensible, her words lost to the wind in his ears. The horse swerved suddenly, and Sam felt himself pitched out of the saddle, speeding through the air and coming to a sudden stop at the base of an oak.
Badly winded, he must have passed out for a moment because when he came to, Alice was dismounting and hurrying towards him. His own horse stood idly nearby.
‘Are you all right? Are you hurt?’
‘I’m all right.’
‘This is a disaster,’ said Alice. ‘A disaster. I’m not bringing you three riding again.’
Sam was still too winded to say what he would have liked to have said.
But the pattern was repeated. When the school organized a caving expedition in the spring term, available to both third- and fourth-formers, Sam and Clive found themselves crawling through slime and freezing waters in the sink-holes of the Derbyshire Dales. Neither of them had any particular fascination for grubbing around in dark, wet underground cavities, but Alice had wanted to go. Luckily for Terry, he was excluded from joining in this particular trip, but Sam had been marshalled by fear that Clive might go with Alice if he declined, and Clive too had to go, knowing that Sam would if he didn’t.
Even though it was springtime, it was very cold wriggling through the potholes of the Dales. They spent most of the time crawling on hands and knees, with the nose of one or other of them just inches behind Alice’s bottom. Alice, of course, delighted in the caving experience. Clive had a moment of terror when he became wedged in a narrow shaft, unable to move forwards or backwards. Sam too had a nasty scare when he was separated from the others and his carbide lamp went out, and he had no means of relighting it. He consoled himself that at least the Tooth Fairy wasn’t there, gloating in the darkness of the cavern. And then Alice reappeared to light his lamp, and he remembered why he was in that awful place.
That summer Alice introduced a new element into the proceedings. They sat around what was left of the pond. Some of its flora and fauna had revived, but it had nothing of its original character. It had lost the ability to distil the atmosphere around it, to draw from the air and offer back tranquillity. The pond was still alive, but it was in a state of shock. They rested on its warm clay banks one early evening after school, and Alice produced a small, foil package.
‘Where did you get that?’
‘My boyfriend left it behind. I don’t think he’s coming back for it.’
‘Have you done it before?’
‘Sure. It’s no big deal.’
Terry shook his head doubtfully. ‘No. Not for me.’
‘Me neither,’ said Sam.
‘Definitely not,’ said Clive. ‘I’ve heard too many stories.’
Alice shrugged. ‘Don’t mind if I do, eh?’
No one said anything. They watched, spellbound, as Alice stuck three cigarette papers together, split a cigarette, unwrapped the foil to produce what looked like a shiny chip of boot polish, singed it with her cigarette lighter and crumbled some of the stuff into her reefer. She neatly finished off crafting a slim, elegant product by popping a piece of cardboard torn from the cigarette-paper cover in the end of the joint. It was so expert, it looked like she’d been doing it for years. Something ‘glooped’, unnoticed, in the pond. Alice shrugged at the boys. ‘I make them for my mother.’
‘For your
mother?’
Alice lit up. ‘She loves it.’ Puff, puff, wince. She held the smoke back in her lungs and croaked, ‘She says it helps her to write the romantic verse on the greetings cards.’ Then she exhaled mightily, holding the smoking joint out for one of the others to take.
‘No,’ said Terry.
‘Count me out,’ said Sam.
‘Absolutely not,’ said Clive.
Clive went ghostly white and curled up on the bank; Terry was virulently sick into the pond; and Sam, flushed, feverish and feeling he had to get away from the others to straighten out his head, took a walk across the field, his feet seeming to lift too high each time he took a step. The last thing he heard
before leaving them was Alice saying, ‘I suppose you three don’t want me to roll another one?’
Sam found a clump of deep, sweet-smelling grass and sprawled in it. He felt nauseous, and his heart thumped unpleasantly. But he was overwhelmed by the rich, fresh odours of the earth: hayseed and dandelion, mushroom and dew, soil and root and the spangled green grass.
‘I told you,’ said the Tooth Fairy. ‘She’s dangerous, that Alice. I warned you years ago. You think I’m trouble, but watch out! She’ll lead you over the edge of a cliff.’
Sam squinted up. The Tooth Fairy was smiling down at him, chewing on a blade of grass. She was completely naked, and her skin was tinged green, reflecting in a polished sheen the brilliant clarity of the grass.
‘And you’re dumb enough to follow her over in the hope of a kiss on the way down.’
Then Sam perceived that the Tooth Fairy was composited from grass and wasn’t made of skin and bone at all. She lay on her back, blending perfectly with the dry, herbal stalks and the pricking ears of yellow-green grass until finally it was impossible to distinguish her from the vegetation itself. Sam sat upright, feeling the vomit rising from deep in his gut. When it spewed forth it looked as if he’d been eating grass. The Tooth Fairy was gone, and he heard Alice calling his name.