The Tooth Fairy.

Graham Joyce.

To Christopher Fowler.

1.

Pike.

Clive was on the far side of the green pond, torturing a king-crested newt. Sam and Terry languished under a vast oak, offering their chubby white feet to the dark water. The sprawling oak leaned out across the mirroring pond, dappling the water's surface with clear reflections of leaf and branch and of acorns ripening slowly in verdant cups.

It was high summer. Pigeons cooed softly in the trees, and Olive's family picnicked nearby. Two older boys fished for perch about thirty yards away. Sam saw the pike briefly. At first he thought he was looking at a submerged log. It hung inches below the surface, utterly still, like something suspended in ice. Green and gold, it was a phantom, a spirit from another world. Sam tried to utter a warning, but the apparition of the pike had him mesmerized. It flashed at the surface of the water as it came up to take away, in a single bite, the two smallest toes of Terry's left foot.

The thing was gone before Terry understood what had happened. He withdrew his foot slowly from the water. Two tiny crimson beads glistened where his toes had been. One of the beads plumped and dripped into the water. Terry turned to Sam with a puzzled smile, as if some joke was being played. As the wound began to sting, his smile vanished and he began to scream.

Clive's mother and father, in charge that afternoon, were lying on the gra.s.s, he with his head in her lap. Sam ran to them. Clive's father lifted his head to see what the commotion was all about.

'Terry's been bitten by a green fish,' said Sam.

Clive's father scrambled to his feet and raced along the bank. Terry was still screaming, holding his foot. Mr Rogers kneeled to part Terry's hands, and the colour drained from his face. Instinctively he put Terry's tiny foot to his mouth and sucked at the wound.

Clive's mother quickly joined her husband at the scene. The two boys who'd been fishing laid down their rods and wandered over to take a look. 'What happened? Did he fall in?'

Clive was still on the other side of the pond. Sam called him over. Mr Rogers, hands trembling, fumbled for a handkerchief. He tied it around the bleeding foot, lifted Terry in his arms and jogged back towards the housing estate.

Clive arrived, breathless. 'What is it?'

'Come on,' his mother said sharply, as if Clive were somehow to blame. She gathered up her picnic blanket and marched the boys from the field. The two older boys were still asking what had happened, but she was tight-lipped.

Sam followed behind her, understanding that Terry was only five and life had taken away two of his toes, presumably for ever. He hoped for better luck for himself.

Clive's father jogged the half mile to Terry's caravan. There Terry lived with his mother and father and with his twin brothers, who were not yet nine months old. The Morrises inhabited a rust-bucket Bluebird caravan in an untidy garden behind a cottage. They paid a small ground-rent to the owner of the cottage, an old man who never came out of his house. Sam lived in one of a row of semi-detached houses running up to the cottage, seven street-numbers away from Terry.

The caravan rested on a pile of red housebricks where the wheels should have been. It b.u.t.ted up against a hedge, as far from the cottage as possible. Holes made by various animals and marauding children punctured the hedge, behind which sprawled a scrubby piece of waste ground. Whatever status Mr Morris had dropped by living in a caravan he reclaimed by owning a sports car. Sam's father certainly couldn't afford a car in those days, and neither could Clive's old man. It seemed to the boys something of an injustice that both Clive's and Sam's fathers worked in a car factory and didn't possess a car, yet Terry's father, whose work was a mystery to everyone, was the proud owner of a spoke-wheeled, soft-top MG glinting in the yard alongside the rusting caravan.

That Sunday afternoon, Eric Rogers carried the still blubbering Terry down from the pond and s.n.a.t.c.hed open the caravan door to find the Morrises engaged in a private act. The twins slumbered in their cot. Mr Morris swore as Mr Rogers backed out with his whimpering bundle, yelling that they should come and take care of their son. Chris Morris emerged wild-eyed, struggling with the zip of his trousers. Moments later he'd bundled Terry into the back of the MG and was revving the engine. Mrs Morris, coitally crimson, stepped out of the caravan in a faded silk dressing-gown, her mahogany curls spilling everywhere, insisting she go with them. Then she remembered the twins snoozing in the cot. Mr and Mrs Morris started screaming at each other before Mr Morris sped off to the City General Hospital.

But what could be done? At the casualty ward they dressed Terry's tiny foot and gave him an anti-teta.n.u.s jab. They stroked his golden hair and told him to be a brave soldier. They had no spare toes to offer.

'A pike?' the doctor repeated in disbelief. 'A pike, you say?'

Nev Southall, Sam's father, saw the green MG return from the hospital. Having heard the story from Sam, he dithered for fifteen minutes before going round to see how things were with the boy. He found Chris Morris in a state of high agitation, lashing a Stanley knife to a broom handle.

'How's the kid, Chris?'

'Sleeping.'

'What are you doing?'

'I'm going up the road and I'm going to get that pike.'

Nev looked at the Stanley knife and the pole and at the net Morris had spread out on the floor, and his heart sank. If there was something he knew a thing or two about, it was catching fish. 'Not with that thing you won't.'

'It's all I've got.' Chris slung the pole and the net in the back of his car.

Nev knew it was a hopeless waste of time, that pike number among the most difficult of fish to catch, even with good tackle. But he couldn't let Chris go back up to the pond alone. 'Wait. I've got some gear. Let's try to do it properly.'

Nev picked up a couple of rods and reels, a good-sized landing net and his basket of equipment. With Sam in the back of the sports car they roared up the lane to the pond. It was already after five o'clock in the afternoon. The sun had become a pallid yellow disc floating low in the sky, flooding the pond with diffuse light. Sam showed them where the incident had happened.

'You could fish this for years and not get him,' Nev said, setting up the rods. Chris Morris wasn't listening. He was staring into the dark waters, landing net poised, as if he thought the pike might oblige by leaping into it.

Sam noticed that his father did all the talking and Terry's father said nothing. He just kept staring into the gloomy pond-water. Dusk came. Nev felt he'd made his gesture. He'd had enough of this nonsense.

'Another day, Chris,' he said. 'Another day.'

'You go on home,' said Terry's father. 'Just leave me the net. I'll drop it back to you.'

'You sure?'

'I'm sure.'

So Nev and Sam left Chris Morris prowling the darkening bank of the pond and made their way down the lane on foot.

'Will he catch the pike?' Sam said, well after they were out of earshot.

'Not a chance in h.e.l.l,' said his father.

2.

Teeth Where Terry limped, Clive flew. Clive, torturer of newts, was what was popularly known as a 'gifted' child. If his parents had been nuclear scientists or Oxbridge dons, this 'gift' might have seemed less like a curse to his father Eric, who toiled on the a.s.sembly line at the Humber works, and to his mother Betty, who served part-time in the local Co-op, slicing bacon and stacking shelves.

Tolerating aggressive correction from anyone younger than oneself is difficult at any time, but Clive's habit of improving his parents' imperfect store of knowledge began when he was four years old, shortly before the time Terry lost two of his toes to a pike. By the time Clive went to school it was widely trumpeted that he could read the daily newspaper. Whether this meant that, like most adults, he dipped into the tabloids every morning while only half awake, or that he scrutinized the quality broadsheets from political comment to sports report and then completed the crossword before breakfast, was not known. But by the time he was five he was said to read newspapers.

At six he entered a compet.i.tion run by NASA for schoolchildren. Yuri Gagarin had completed the first s.p.a.ce orbit; John Glenn was accomplishing similar things for the Americans; and NASA was consulting six-year-olds in the English industrial Midlands about its s.p.a.ce programme. How such a compet.i.tion ever came to Clive's attention at that age is a mystery in itself, but schoolchildren were invited to suggest experiments which might be conducted by presumably bored astronauts as they orbited the planet. Clive suggested that they take spiders into s.p.a.ce to see if the condition of weightlessness affected the spinning of webs. NASA went for it.

Because he won the NASA compet.i.tion, Clive and his parents were to be flown to Cape Canaveral to witness the launch of the next manned s.p.a.ce flight. His picture appeared in the Coventry Evening Telegraph, huge spider's web. What was celebrity in the adult world was the worst kind of notoriety in the school playground. At school he was promptly dubbed 'Spiderboy' and kicked by every kid in the yard. He hated the nickname, letting fly a punch in the mouth to anyone who used it on him, and was dealt a few punches in the mouth by way of return.

It was while they were walking home from school one afternoon Terry, Clive and Sam, led by Terry's older cousin Linda that Clive gave Sam the dig in the mouth which loosened the milk tooth that was to go on to cause so much confusion.

'Spiderboy!' Sam had said, for no apparent reason.

Clive fisted Sam on the jaw, motivated more by habit than by genuine outrage.

Sam stopped dead in his tracks. Clive, expecting a scuffle, did too. Terry drew up short. 'What is it?'

Sam spat a milk incisor, slightly bloodied at the root, into his hand.

'Soz,' said Clive, genuinely horrified at what he'd done. They were, after all, friends. 'Soz.'

'It's all right,' said Sam a little shakily. 'It was already loose.'

Cousin Linda, always ten yards ahead, permanently mortified at having to wet-nurse three small boys, exhorted them to catch up.

'Put it under your pillow,' Terry said. 'Get a tanner from the Tooth Fairy.'

'There's no evidence to suggest,' Clive said, 'that Tooth Fairies actually exist.'

'Every time I lost one I got sixpence,' Terry shouted.

'But what did you get when you lost your toes?' Clive argued. 'Nothing.'

'I got five quid in a bank savings book. Five quid.'

'That was from your dad,' Sam said. 'It's different. Tooth Fairies aren't interested in toes. And, anyway, the pike had the toes.'

'Five quid!' Terry was hurt. The pike episode had left him with a limp.

'There is a way to find out,' Clive insisted. 'Put it under your pillow, but don't say anything to your mum or dad.'

'What are you shouting about?' Linda wanted to know when they caught up with her.

'Sam's tooth fell out,' Clive said quickly.

'Is there such a thing as a Tooth Fairy?' Sam asked.

Linda quickly redefined the distance between her and the knot of small boys. 'Just don't swallow it. Otherwise a tooth tree will grow in your stomach.'

'What?' the three boys said at once.

'A tooth tree,' she called over her shoulder. 'Growing in your gut.'

Sam kept his fist tightly closed over the tooth, as if some malignant spirit might want to twist his arm up and force the tooth back into his mouth. He was silent the rest of the way home.

Sam never mentioned the incisor to either his mother or his father. If they thought he was particularly quiet that evening, they reserved comment. In any event, Sam was considered a distracted boy, given to self-absorption and daydreams and unnatural fits of staring.

'Miles away,' his mother Connie would often remark. 'Miles away. Do you think that boy is autistic?'

'Autistic?' Nev lowered his Coventry Evening Telegraph. 'What's autistic?'

Connie tried to recall something she'd read in a magazine. 'Well, sort of miles away all the time.'

Nev didn't believe in anything he couldn't p.r.o.nounce. He regarded his son watching television, his own features wrinkling in rough a.s.sessment. Sam, always aware of the way in which they talked across him, pretended not to hear.

'Nah,' said his father, retreating behind his paper.

That night Sam examined the tooth by the light of his bedside lamp. The ivory peg was stained slightly yellow near the root. The ring of dried blood around the base reminded him acutely of the sensation of it popping from his gum. It was a pain-shaped bloodstain. With his tongue Sam probed the hole the tooth had left behind in his gum. It was identically pain-shaped. He switched off his bedside lamp and slid the tooth under his pillow.

Some hours later he was awoken briefly by his parents coming to bed. His mother looked in on him. Only semiconscious, he was dimly aware of her tucking in the blankets and smoothing his pillow. He rolled over and went back to sleep.

In the middle of the night he woke up feeling stiff with cold. His bedroom window was wide open to the dark of night, and a breath of wind lifted the curtain. The faint crescent of moon offered a little light but no comfort. The breeze brought on its wings a strange odour, familiar yet difficult to identify. It was a composite of smells, among which was that of gra.s.s after rain. Yet it hadn't been raining.

Something was wrong. Sam sat upright in bed.

Someone was in the room.

His skin turned inside out like a glove. He blinked at the web of darkness. His white shirt, ready for school next morning, was draped over the back of a hard chair. It floated in the gloom. He stared hard at the shirt. A figure was crouched in shadow behind the chair. The shocking stillness of the room wanted to blister and peel back like a layer of skin.

'I know you're there. I can see you.'

The figure stiffened slightly.

Sam was afraid, but deep within his fear he felt curiously composed. Still his voice quavered. 'It's no use hiding. I know you're behind the chair.'

The figure expelled a brief sigh. Sam couldn't distinguish anything behind the draped shirt. Burglar, he thought. It's a burglar. The intruder made a decision to come out of hiding. Slowly straightening its back, it stepped from behind the chair. The curtain lifted at the window. Somewhere far off in the night a dog-fox barked, three times. All Sam could discern was the black shadow of what he took to be a small man. The shadow approached the foot of the bed.

The voice came out in a cracked whisper. 'Can you see me? Can you?'

Through the window a broken fingernail of moon was visible. It barely illumined the intruder's face, but what Sam could see he didn't like. Two dark eyes, shiny like the green-black carapace of a beetle, flashed at him. The eyes were set deep, each in a squint counterpoised to the other, lurking under a matted shock of black hair. Tangled elf-locks framed high cheek bones and a swarthy complexion. The word 'half-caste' came to mind. Sam had heard the term employed by adults but used with an ugliness of meaning beyond the word itself. Now that the figure had come closer, Sam identified the burglar as the source of the smell he'd recognized on waking. It was not streaming through the window at all. It was the smell of the intruder, and in addition to the scent of gra.s.s after rain was the odour of horse's sweat, and birds.h.i.t, and camomile. The intruder Sam was unable to tell if it was male or female suddenly c.o.c.ked its head to one side and smiled. A row of teeth glimmered in the faint moonbeams, a mouthful of blue light. The teeth were perfect, but, unless he was mistaken, they were sharpened to fine dagger points. At full height the intruder stood little more than four feet tall, or at any rate, just a couple of inches taller than Sam. It was difficult to see what the creature was wearing in the dark, but he could identify mustard-and-green striped leggings and heavy, industrial-style boots.

'Yes. I can see you.'

'That's bad. Real bad.'

Sam nodded a silent yes. He didn't know why it was bad, but he knew it was better to agree.

The intruder was squinting hard at Sam, as if puzzling what to do next. 'And you can hear me. Obviously obviously obviously. Bad.' The sharpened teeth gleamed electric-blue again in the moonlight. There was a tiny crackle as the figure placed a finger on the bed-post. Sam felt the crackle ride to the nape of his neck and fan his hair. The intruder was discharging static.

Sam suddenly had an idea who the figure was. 'You've come for the tooth, haven't you?' He was dismayed by the Tooth Fairy's appearance. If he did have an image of a Tooth Fairy in his head before that night, it was of a fragile lady three inches tall, lace-winged, with an acorn-cup for a hat. Not a thug in heavy boots. 'You want the tooth, don't you?'

'Shhh! Don't wake the house! How come you were able to see me? How did you spot me? Don't answer. Wait.' The Tooth Fairy held up a beautifully manicured hand, five ivory fingers outstretched, a thin silver ring on each. 'How many fingers do you see?'

'Five.'