‘And some say it’s bad luck,’ Nev laughed.
Connie laughed too. ‘Sam, you’ve gone white as a sheet.’
‘Look at her, Sam,’ Nev said oafishly. ‘She’s gorgeous!’
Sam looked. The baby opened its brilliant blue eyes for him and stared back, as if stunned by the horrifyingly sensual beauty of the universe into which it had been delivered without consultation. There, reflected in the mirror of the baby’s tiny black pupil, was the yellow-eyed Tooth Fairy, gazing out at him. Sam’s fear for his sister’s innocence was glacial. He had done something to mark her, to bring trouble and difficulty to her, to invite wicked fairies to gather at the foot of the maternity bed.
All attention was on the baby. Sam turned to see the Tooth
Fairy waiting, unnoticed, behind them all, arms folded. Sam wanted to ask what this new thing meant. He was prepared to make a deal that would allow him to sacrifice himself in order to protect his sister.
‘Paranoia,’ said the Tooth Fairy, and disappeared.
Later Sam left the hospital and went looking for the Tooth Fairy. He’d never been able to make her appear at his bidding. She came whenever she wanted to come and always on her own terms. He had no way of changing that. His search took him back to Chris Morris’s locked and abandoned workshop. He remembered that the Tooth Fairy had once appeared there, although with disastrous consequences, and he wondered if she would do so again. Waiting until dusk, he slipped unseen down the side of the garage, swung open the loose window frame and climbed inside.
Terry had been correct. Any of Morris’s remotely valuable gear had been sold off. Only junk remained. Sam folded an old sheet, and sat down in the dark. Dust settled, and after a few moments his eyes adjusted to the available light.
The workshop still reeked of Morris’s brittle, neurotic energy. Sam imagined too that he could still smell the man’s hair-oil and his tobacco. But it had been almost a decade since Morris had taken his shotgun to his family. The wall-bracket where the shotgun had been mounted was still intact.
‘I hate this place. Why do you bring me here?’ The Tooth Fairy was crouching under the shotgun bracket, shivering.
‘You have to leave her alone. My baby sister. I can’t have you going near her.’
‘You put her there, Sam. It was your doing.’
‘Why the tooth? Why did you do that?’
‘It was one you gave me, a long time ago. You took it back. Never really let go of it, did you? Why didn’t you just let go of it, all those years ago, instead of keeping me here?’
‘I don’t keep you here. And if you don’t stay away from her, I have the solution.’
The Tooth Fairy froze. Then she smiled. ‘You’d do that? You’re prepared to do that to yourself to keep me out of it?’
Sam nodded.
‘You don’t understand anything,’ said the Tooth Fairy. There were tears in her eyes. ‘You don’t dream me. I dream you. You’re
my
nightmare, Sam. Please let me go. I hate this place. Morris is here. Please let me go.’
Exhausted, confused, Sam closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the Tooth Fairy had gone. He shuddered. He was losing himself. He hardly knew whether the conversation had taken place at all. But the Tooth Fairy was right. Morris’s breath was on the place. He was afraid that if he stayed, he would certainly encounter Morris’s ghost. In one specific way, he felt he already had. In one precise way, Morris had already spoken to him.
He got out the way he came in. On returning home he said to himself, ‘I think we should call the baby Linda Alice.’
In the moments between sleeping and waking, in the airless workshop where thoughts are forged into words, there came to Sam a voice, speaking out of the dark, intimate, reassuring, reasonable. Suicide, said the voice from the dark, suicide.
Linda came home again the following spring. People started to remark that she was looking a little tired. She’d lost weight, and she turned up in an Afghan coat, which Charlie detested. Charlie asked her if she’d slaughtered the garment in one of the nearby fields, and he made other hurtful comments about her appearance, the true meaning of which was obvious. He didn’t like what he was seeing. He wasn’t happy that his daughter appeared to be turning into ‘some sort of hippy’. She was twenty-one years old, and it broke Charlie’s heart that she had a life of her own.
It was unusual for Sam to find so much tension in the generally warm household, but relations became more strained with each visit. ‘Get me out of here,’ Linda said to Sam and Terry one evening. ‘I need a drink.’
The gang was called together, and they took Linda into the city for a night out. For them the evening had a gala air about it. Linda’s name had been romantically linked in the press with Gregg Austen, lead guitarist and front man for the Craft. She’d been pictured with him, and Clive in particular couldn’t wait to pose a mouthful of questions.
She bridled. ‘He’s a shit, Clive. Some of these people are not as interesting as they look. Let’s just leave it at that.’
So they left it at that. Sam observed that Linda’s hands had developed a slight tremble as she drew hard on her cigarette. She told them about London and she dropped famous names – not to impress them but to offer a flavour of her lifestyle – and they all realized how much they’d missed her. Terry took a chance and tapped her knee, offering her a small joint under the table.
‘My God,’ she said, accepting it, ‘civilization has come to Redstone.’
‘Don’t slag off the place,’ Terry said.
‘I think if I had to live here all my life,’ she said breezily, ‘I’d get a gun and blow my head off.’
Everyone tried to avoid looking at Terry, whose eyelashes fluttered madly. He was struggling to control the tic that had been with him since he was seven years old. Sam heard the shotgun blasts somewhere far off, and he looked desperately at Linda.
‘I can’t believe I said that,’ Linda said. ‘After all this time of not . . . I can’t believe I said that.’ She tried to recover the situation with a mirthless laugh and, almost by way of apology, fished a small, golden snuffbox from her handbag, flipped it open and placed it on the table. It contained a dozen or so pink pills. ‘Be my guest, everyone.’
They gazed at the pills but didn’t avail themselves.
‘No?’ said Linda, taking one for herself and snapping the box shut. ‘Hey, let’s go to a nightclub. Come on, I’m paying.’
In the nightclub Linda was in a dancing mood. She danced frenetically with Sam, with Clive, with Terry and with Alice. They couldn’t keep up with her. She bought rounds of Buck’s Fizz. Her mood was as buoyant under the pink and ultraviolet lights of the nightclub as it was flat in her parents’ house. She repeatedly kissed them all and told them, individually and collectively, how much she loved and missed them. She disappeared into the toilets with Alice and the two came out giggling hysterically. She fell into conversation easily with anyone and everyone but used the group expertly to fend off the fascinated attentions of other men.
Sam wanted to slow-dance with Alice, but Terry grabbed her first. Instead Linda grasped his hand and led him on to the dance floor. She smelled of some wildly expensive perfume.
‘What about Alice?’ she asked, laughing.
‘What about her?’
‘Who is she with? You, Terry or Clive?’
‘It’s a moot point. She keeps us all at arm’s length.’
‘She’s too fast for all of you.’
‘Do you dislike her?’
‘Dislike her? I love her! I love all of you! You’re wonderful young people! I wish, I really wish, you would all come to live in London with me.’
The thought seemed to make her sad. Then she cheered up suddenly, skipped to the bar and returned with yet another round of Buck’s Fizz. At the death of the evening she danced a final slow dance with Sam, almost falling asleep in his arms. Suddenly she stopped dancing and looked at him through half-closed eyes. ‘There are demons,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘In the woods, in the trees. At night. I’ve seen them in the bushes. In Redstone. In London too, probably.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Who are we anyway?’ she asked dozily.
‘Eh? I’m Sam. You’re Linda.’
The music stopped, the disc jockey wished everyone a safe journey home. ‘No. I mean, who are we?’
Sam shrugged. ‘We’re the Redstone Moodies.’
She looked at him as if this remark were profound, philosophical and apposite to everything in her experience up to that point in time. Grabbing his collar, she threw her head back and cackled loudly. ‘That’s right!’ she screamed. ‘We’re THE REDSTONE MOODIES!’ Then she laughed again, leaning back on her heels and dragging on Sam’s lapels. ‘THE REDSTONE MOODIES!’
An irritated bouncer in an evening suit and bow-tie marched across the dance floor. ‘Haven’t you got homes to go to?’ he bellowed.
While they waited in the taxi rank, Alice admired Linda’s Afghan coat. ‘It’s gorgeous!’
Linda took the coat off. ‘Have it. It’s yours.’
‘I can’t take your coat!’
She draped it over Alice’s shoulders and kissed her passionately on the lips. ‘I want you to have it. I love you. I love all of you.’
The taxi dropped Linda and Terry first. Linda paid, tipping over-generously. As the cab moved on, Clive said, ‘Anyone know what was in those pink pills?’
Sam made three feeble efforts to fix an appointment with Skelton, as the voice whispering in the dark appeared with greater frequency. He couldn’t speak about his feelings to anyone else. Certainly not to his mother or father: he didn’t want them burdened with any new anxieties about their daughter, and yet he was terrified by the idea that he had blighted his tiny sister’s life. And not to Alice, who distanced herself from him when he was subject to morose moods. With her he struggled to keep things light, bidding all the time for an easy humour he didn’t feel. Clive and Terry, as potential sympathetic listeners, were beyond the pale.
‘What’s the matter with you lately, Sam? Get a grip.’
‘Yeah, get sorted out, for chrissakes.’
He took to watching over his baby sister for signs of the Tooth Fairy’s threatened transfer of attention and became obsessed by the shocking vulnerability of the small child. He scoured the house looking for sharp objects, broken glass, pins which he might remove from her path; he wedged doors open so that she might not trap her fingers; the sight of boiling water made him feverish with alarm for her. The entire home was a rigged and booby-trapped maze of hazards. A stinging lash lurked behind every seemingly innocent chair and cushion.
Each time Sam had tried to telephone Skelton, something in Mrs Marsh’s voice on the other end of the line had made
him hang up without speaking. Finally, without permission, he took an afternoon off school and went to Skelton’s offices.
Mrs Marsh was absent from her usual place at the reception. Her desk was cleared and spotlessly tidy, as if she too had taken the afternoon off. Sam went to Skelton’s room and listened outside the door. With no sound of any session in progress, he turned the handle and quietly opened the door.
Skelton was at his seat but slouched with his head on the desk blotter. An empty bottle of scotch and a glass stood on the table beside his head. Noiselessly closing the door behind him, Sam crossed the room and took his traditional seat opposite Skelton. He gazed at the sleeping figure for some time.
‘He’s too far gone,’ said the Tooth Fairy. ‘Do you want me to wake him up?’
‘Yes,’ said Sam. ‘Wake him.’
The Tooth Fairy moved over to Skelton and put her mouth close to his ear. She spoke a single word, unheard by Sam, stepped back and dragged a second chair across the room so that she could sit beside Sam.
Skelton twitched. His eyes opened. Slowly lifting his head from his desk, he smacked his lips and focused his rheumy gaze on Sam. Then he looked at the Tooth Fairy with a quizzical expression, and then beyond her, as if the room was full of strangers or as if he had been shanghaied and brought to this place against his will.
‘What?’ he said. ‘What was that?’
‘He’s in danger,’ said the Tooth Fairy. ‘He’s in danger of killing himself. He wants you to talk to him.’
‘What? What’s that, laddie?’
‘I didn’t say anything,’ said Sam.
Peering hard at them, Skelton rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Sam? Is it that time of the year already?’
‘No. I needed to see you.’
Skelton scowled at his empty whisky bottle. ‘Did you see Mrs Marsh? No one gets past Mrs Marsh.’
‘She’s gone.’
‘In disgust, no doubt.’ He gestured at the Tooth Fairy. ‘Who’s this?’
‘ ‘‘Who’s this?’’ indeed,’ sneered the Tooth Fairy. ‘To think I used to be afraid of you.’
Skelton stood up slowly, still massaging the back of his leathery neck, squinting from one to the other of them. ‘I hope this isn’t who I think it is.’
‘Who?’ said the Tooth Fairy. ‘Who do you think I am?’
From behind his desk Skelton came prowling with a lion’s stealth. His stride was superbly slow. ‘Stop this, laddie,’ he whispered. ‘You’d better stop this now.’ He paced warily behind the Tooth Fairy, watching her with a baleful, glittering eye. He swayed dangerously. Then he moved behind Sam’s chair. Sam could feel the man’s breath on his neck, savour the rot of whisky.