'No,' said Alice firmly. 'Linda's the one.'

And Alice was right. Linda was the one. All compet.i.tion withered before her, and Linda was crowned Midsummer Queen. She was photographed wearing a sash and a coronet and again with George Crabb mashing his thick lips against her cheek.

'George Crabb asked her for a date,' Terry reported the following day, as they waited for the carnival parade to pa.s.s. 'Derek was not happy about that at all. Not at all!'

'Did she say yes?' Clive wanted to know.

'Christ, no. He's one ugly footballer, that George Crabb. He looks like he ran into the Main Stand chasing a ball.'

'I knew she'd win,' Alice said with a sigh. 'Men would die for someone like Linda.'

'Then there's area finals and regional finals and national finals,' Terry said. 'People said she could go all the way.'

'All the way where?'

Sam's question wasn't answered, as the first lorry appeared, moving slowly in first gear, like a ship chugging between the small crowd of people fringing either side of the main street through Redstone on its way to Coventry. It was a great day. Redstone had hosted the compet.i.tion and Redstone had provided the winner. The local girl had beaten all comers. The sky was blue, and all was fair. A dozen vehicles lumbered slowly through the street, coal trucks and lemonade lorries and haulage wagons commandeered by disorderly rabbles in fancy dress, this one with a Spanish theme, this one a science-fiction spoof, this one unguessable.

'What are they meant to be?'

'Dunno. Something.'

And the penultimate lorry, beautifully decked with satin drapes and vast bunches of gladioli, fluttering streamers and bunting a-flapping and a hundred helium-filled, sky-blue balloons, bore Linda, the summer G.o.ddess of Love enthroned, happily waving to all the folk lining the street, her coronet glinting in the sunlight, flanked by her handmaidens of second and third place, waving, all waving, waving. And, seeing her mother and father Dot and Charlie and Terry and Derek and the others, Linda got out of her throne and moved to the edge of the lorry to shriek and blow kisses and wave and accept the cheers and the whistles and the acclamation.

Sam, waving and whistling with the others, stopped suddenly, feeling his smile collapsing and his face falling and some dread part of him inside crumbling to a foul black dust. 'Don't,' he said, very faintly. 'Don't.'

'What is it?' said Alice, seeing Sam. All other eyes were turned on Linda.

Sam raised a finger close to his face, pointing it in horror at the pa.s.sing carnival float. Because he saw on the throne the Tooth Fairy, a sooty shadow lolling on the vacated gilded chair. She had resumed her female form again, but her face was a hideous mask, and she wore a crown of ivy leaves and a sash of a thousand beaded teeth, a hollow mockery of the beauty queen waving in innocence to the cheerful crowd.

'I don't see anything,' said Alice.

But even as Alice tried to make sense of Sam's behaviour, he saw the Tooth Fairy reach out a fetid hand from within its own shadow, extended to touch Linda on the shoulder, ready at any moment to infect her immaculate beauty and her moment of triumph. 'Leave her alone,' he whispered. 'Not Linda. Leave her alone.'

But the float had already pa.s.sed on, leaving Sam gazing after it in horror and Alice staring at Sam in dismay.

31.

Blim-blam Boys BLAM! Sam practically saw black printer's-block letters and an exclamation mark bent across the cloud of smoke as the bomb exploded. The noise of the explosion volleyed across the football field and seemed to die somewhere in the neighbouring woods. Grey-white smoke hung in the air for a while, like buds of cotton.

It was after six o'clock in the evening, and no one else was around. The football teams had long gone home, and it was too early for courting couples to park their cars in the lane. Impressed by the noise of Clive's weed-killer pipe bomb, the Moodies emerged from behind the bushes by the pond and strolled over to inspect the damage to the door of the football changing rooms.

Clive got there first. The bomb had left an acrid smell in the air and a dirty scorch mark on the flagstone under the door. The wooden door itself, though, had sustained no more damage than a nine-inch split in the wood just above the centre of the explosion.

'It's hardly touched it!' said Sam.

'I thought,' said Alice, 'it was going to blow the door off its hinges.'

'Here's the casing,' said Terry, kicking at a still smoking length of gutted pipe. Terry was still ambivalent about the idea of bombing the football club. The season had started, and he'd been pa.s.sed over for selection when the team coach chose his own son to play in what, everyone acknowledged, was rightfully Terry's position. The coach had counted Terry's toes in the showers at the end of the last season and had expressed doubts, never previously mentioned, about Terry's balance.

'Right,' Clive had said on hearing of this instance of appalling injustice and pretext for nepotism, 'we bomb the football club.'

'Seconded,' Sam concurred.

'Seems fair,' Alice had agreed. Terry wasn't sure about all this, but, seriously aggrieved, he went along with the others.

Clive inspected the pipe. He was slightly apologetic for the ineffectualness of the device. Most of its force seemed to have been concentrated in ripping the pipe open. 'I don't know what you expected,' he said. 'It was only a thin piece of pipe.'

'Make another, then,' said Sam.

'We'll all make one,' was Clive's answer. 'See if you can do better.'

The following afternoon they gathered in the shed behind Clive's house. Eric and Betty Rogers were accustomed to Clive and his friends locking themselves in the shed, supposedly meddling with chemistry equipment which, in reality, hadn't been touched for over a year. It was a regular Moodie venue, with a one-bar electric fire, where they could gather for a cigarette without too much risk of being disturbed. Clive showed them how to use a hacksaw to open a detonation point, how to pack the pipe and how to close the extremities. 'You have to be particularly careful here,' Clive said seriously, 'because if you hammer the ends too hard, a spark can explode the thing in your face.'

Apart from Alice, who wouldn't have anything to do with making the devices, they'd all found bits of pipe which they hacksawed into equal lengths. Clive mixed the weed-killer and sugar, and filled a separate bag for fuses. When the pipe-ends were squeezed shut in a vice they each had a bomb. Clive suggested they personalize the things. He took a pot of white paint and a small brush and painted the words DEEP MOOD on his bomb. Then he looked up at Alice.

Sam grabbed the brush and painted the words BLIMBLAM BOY on his. 'What's that?' the others wanted to know. Sam shrugged. Alice looked at his pipe. 'Yours is a bit thin,' she said. Suddenly everyone was sn.i.g.g.e.ring. 'Terry's is the thickest.'

Terry took the brush and just about squeezed the words ALICE IN THUNDERLAND on to his pipe. He looked up at Alice. She blushed.

At the onset of dusk they walked to the football field, and after checking no one was around, they crept over to the changing rooms and wedged their individual bombs under the door. Clive laid powder fuses of equal lengths along the ground.

Alice, invited to ignite the fuses, declined, so the boys lit their own simultaneously. The fuses burned sluggishly with yellow, moth-like flames. The four of them hurried across the field, took cover behind the bushes around the pond and waited. Two of the bombs detonated within a split second of each other, a double-blast which seemed to echo back from the low-lying clouds. After an interval of a few seconds the third pipe bomb made a different sound, a sharp, concentrated crack.

The Moodies giggled uncontrollably as they ran across the gra.s.s to inspect the results. This time the door had been blown off its lower hinge and the nethermost panel had been blasted away. Smoke hung around in the twilight air like ectoplasmic spirits. Clive nodded in satisfaction. He was about to say something when a car pulled up in the gateway to the field, obstructed by the closed gate itself. The four dived behind the building as the car's headlamps flicked on to full beam. The car reversed slightly and inched forward again to play the headlamps at a different angle, and then again, shining them directly at the building. The four crouched in heart-stopping silence, squeezed into the shadows, inches from the searching beam of light.

After several minutes the car reversed into the road and drove away. They emerged from hiding, sighing and shaking their cramped limbs. 'That was close,' said Clive. His face was smeared with charcoal or soot from something he'd pressed his cheek against in the dark. They all started giggling again, hysterically.

'Let's go to my place and play some records,' Alice said. Elated, they walked to Alice's, all talking simultaneously. The bombs had exalted them. They stumbled across the dark fields in an afterglow. Then Sam, bringing up the rear, stopped talking.

He saw that Terry had his left arm around Alice's shoulders. Alice was making no effort to resist. She even seemed to lean towards Terry, staggering through the long gra.s.s. Terry's hand resting on her left shoulder gleamed pale and white in the dark, like some alien thing not attached to his arm, an insect or a creature with a life of its own, maggoty, flexing occasionally and unpleasantly. They crossed barbed-wire fences and a stream to get to Alice's house, and after each obstacle Terry's arm found its way back around Alice's shoulders.

In the dark, throughout the buoyant journey, none of the others noticed Sam's silence.

A different kind of explosion was happening at Terry's house, and it was happening around Linda. Things had moved so rapidly after the triumph of the Midsummer Queen beauty compet.i.tion that Charlie and Dot were reeling. They went around in an abstracted daze, not knowing quite how to share Linda's excitement. On the one hand, they clearly appreciated what a compliment to them it was to have bred such a beautiful and personable daughter; on the other they realized that their only reward for this achievement was to have her s.n.a.t.c.hed, prematurely it seemed, away from them.

Linda was going to leave home. Linda was going to live in London.

Three weeks after the citywide compet.i.tion staged at Redstone Social Club, Linda walked away with the area trophy. And then in August she carried off the regional crown. Her photograph, having appeared in several newspapers both near and far, attracted many eyes. All kinds of 'work' seemed to come with the beauty-queen territory: snipping ribbons to open new shops; kicking off footb.a.l.l.s to commence charity games; pushing piles of pennies over the bar in pubs. Everyone wanted Linda. Linda Linda Linda. What's more, they were prepared to pay good money to get her.

The American company Chrysler had bought out Humber and were launching a new car that autumn. Linda was contracted to stand by the new saloon in a mini-skirt while press and company photographers aimed their cameras. Ironically her father, working in the paintshop at the car factory, had sprayed the very same vehicle before the a.s.sembly line began to turn them out in quant.i.ty. Charlie went with her to watch her receive all this attention. He felt self-conscious and uncomfortable in collar and tie in the executive lounge and showroom, standing with his manager and all his middle-ranking factory superiors as the cameras flashed and the male jokes ricocheted off the polished body of the gleaming new saloon. For three hours of this 'work' Linda was paid almost the equivalent of Charlie's wage packet for a month. The irony was not lost on Linda, who tried to make a gift of the entire cheque to Charlie and Dot, though they refused to accept it.

Then, a few weeks before the Moodies began their bombing campaign, Linda was invited to model some clothes in London. She was asked by the ill.u.s.trious Pippa Hamilton Modelling Agency to spend three days in the capital, accommodated in a hotel at their expense. Linda was on her way.

'It's all too fast,' Charlie complained. 'It's all happening too fast.'

'It's an opportunity, Dad!'

'Your studies are going to suffer!' Dot whined.

Linda, having completed her A-levels, was set to attend teacher-training college in Derby within a couple of weeks. 'But this job might lead to even more work. Who knows?'

'That's not real work,' countered Charlie.

'But look at the letter, Dad! For three days' work they want to pay me half what you earn in a year!'

Linda regretted saying this as soon as it was out. She hadn't meant to demean, merely to persuade, to recruit her father's support. But Charlie had no answer. He looked away, and Dot looked at Linda and Linda looked at the floor. 'Anyway, I want you and Mum to come to London with me.'

Charlie cheered up, and relented. 'No, my sweetheart. But you and your mum can go to London and have a nice time. And don't come back without a whole weight of shopping bags.'

Linda squealed with delight and ran to the telephone to let Derek in on the good news. Charlie went upstairs to his and his wife's bedroom, where he closed the door behind him. He lay down on the bed and wept for the first time in eighteen years, since the day Linda had been born.

The expedition to London was a great success. Linda met Pippa Hamilton in person, and though Dot thought the woman a gorgon, Linda was bowled over. A letter soon followed, in which Pippa raved and raved about some photographs and in which Linda was invited to place herself on the agency's books. Pippa would personally oversee her career, it said, and if the answer was yes, then Linda should waste no time in making arrangements to move to London.

'What about college?' said Derek.

'It can be put off for a year, can't it, Derek?' Dot asked.

'Yep,' Derek said glumly. Derek knew it was all over bar the shouting, and the crying, and the talk of how much she could earn for doing so little, and the cancellation of a place at teacher-training college in Derby. Linda was London-bound.

'Don't brood on it,' said the Tooth Fairy. 'I told you she'd hurt you.'

Sam lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling. It was a warm Sunday afternoon. The others would be up by the pond, smoking cigarettes, cracking thin jokes. He wanted to be there, to be close to Alice, but he couldn't bear to witness her burgeoning relationship with Terry. He felt disembowelled every time Terry's hand was allowed to stray casually across her clothes, to stroke her hair, to brush the exposed skin of her arm. So far he'd managed to conceal his feelings entirely. No one knew how he was suffering.

Except the Tooth Fairy.

'At least you know now what it's like,' she said. 'Now you know what it is to feel jealousy.'

'Jealousy?' Sam said bitterly. 'Why should you feel jealous?'

'Because you're all I have. You make me come here, and then you want someone else! I never want to come here: it's like a bad dream for me. And when you want Alice or Linda instead of me, I feel like I'm dying. I get sick inside. I choke. I sob. I bleed for you. My life ebbs away. What do you expect me to do? You're all I have here!'

Sam couldn't understand her when she railed against him like this.

She softened. 'Am I forgiven?' The Tooth Fairy's female aspect had been restored. She sat on the bed, her long fingers laid upon his thigh. She was revitalized, renewed. Those black eyes shone like a beetle's carapace again; her pale skin was dear and unblemished. Her ma.s.s of black curls seemed full of stars as, awaiting an answer, she moistened her lips with her tongue.

Suddenly it dawned on him. 'You use my teeth to heal yourself, don't you?' said Sam. 'That's how it works, isn't it? You take something of mine and it helps you.'

'Yours or someone else's. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you. There are different sides to me. It's not even something which I control. You have to understand that. The first time, the first tooth, is supposed to put an end to it. But you saw me I don't know how. You saw me, and we were both doomed.' She got up and trained his telescope on the woods. Fiddling with the focusing ring, she said, 'I've always had your interests at heart, Sam.'

'You're so f.u.c.king generous.' He was becoming bolder in his dealings with the Tooth Fairy. 'I don't know why you care.'

'This is not a one-way thing, you know. You may think I'm your nightmare, but you in turn are my nightmare. It's your moods that pull me here. So is it too much if I ask you to love me instead of Alice? Is that too much? There! Found it!'

'Found what?'

'Stop playing with your c.o.c.k and come and look.'

Sam got off the bed and dragged himself over to the telescope. He squinted through the eyepiece as the Tooth Fairy held the instrument steady. She had focused on a spot among the trees in Wistman's Woods. All Sam could see was a blur of branches and a brown shadow in the centre of the lens. 'What is it?'

'Keep looking.'

At last the trees became more defined, and the brown shadow began to a.s.sume shape, changing hue as it did so. Finally it resolved. Sam was looking at a strange, long-stemmed woodland plant with a purple trumpet-flower. It looked vaguely poisonous. Growing inside the sinister purple trumpet was a fat, erect stamen, white and tuber-like, waving slightly in the breeze.

'Very rare,' said the Tooth Fairy. 'In fact, those babes only grow where there's a corpse in the soil. To fertilize it. Honest.'

Sam looked hard at the base of the plant. It was growing out of a hollow trunk stuffed with ferns and branches. 'What sort of plant is it?'

'It's got lots of names. We call it a carrion flower.' She giggled. 'But I think I'd call it Tooley's Revenge.'

Sam pushed past her and returned to his bed. He lay down and thought of Terry's arm draped around Alice and of his hand on her shoulder.

'Don't brood,' said the Tooth Fairy. 'It hurts me when you brood.'

The bombing campaign was stepped up in the weeks leading up to Linda's departure. The football club's changing rooms were the target of two more bombs (one called PLUG and the other called SKUNK, both inexplicably). Others were detonated in various venues, such as under the railway bridge, in the gymkhana field's commentary-box and, most pointlessly of all, in a half-oildrum floated on the pond.

Sam kept a watchful eye on signs of a quickening relationship between Terry and Alice. What he saw was difficult to interpret. The hand the dread hand of his friend would occasionally scuttle around her shoulder and would rest there for as long as Alice allowed it. And at these times there was no doubting the special intimacy developing between the two. But at other times Alice would squeeze up against Sam, rest an ivory finger on his thigh, provocatively share a cigarette. It was as if she was telling him he wasn't excluded or perhaps that she had yet to make her choice. Only Clive seemed to exist outside this troublesome formula, and then even his resolve collapsed.

In trying to throw off the quirky character and geeky scent smeared on him by the Epstein Foundation, Clive took to wearing blue jeans and baseball boots, out-smoking all three of them and doing hard-case things to show how mean he was. Like embedding razor blades in the trees' branches to b.o.o.by-trap their 'den' against the kids from the estate who'd roughed up the place. Alice objected, and she and Terry privately went around afterwards taking out as many as they could find. And it was no coincidence, given Alice's deep interest in pop music, that Clive became fascinated by, and authoritative on, the subject. He exchanged discs with Alice and dropped names like Syd Barrett and Captain Beefheart, names Sam and Terry had never heard of. But when he turned up with a pipe bomb one day and was wearing a fringed leather jacket just like Alice's, Sam knew that Clive had got it just as bad, if not worse.

'Wow! Great jacket!' said Alice. 'Can I try it on?'

So Alice and Clive swapped jackets for a couple of hours. Sam knew what that meant. They had swapped skins. Clive would get Alice's scent. And ever afterwards that lunacy-inspiring glandular pipe bomb would continue to detonate just under his nose and yet just out of range.

Clive had gone over; and from that day Alice might choose to snuggle up to, or link arms with, or even nuzzle against, any one of the three of them. She called them her three 'protectors' and distributed her favours in almost equal measure. But if extra favour was to be apportioned anywhere, it went to Terry. Sam wondered, in the private, aching chambers of his heart, if Alice had shown Terry the secret of the Gossamer.

One Sat.u.r.day morning Sam thought an episode in his life was being replayed. The only difference was that Connie and Nev were out shopping when the doorbell rang and Sam answered it to two oddly familiar faces.

'Mornin'!' said one of the two men, picking up a bottle of milk from the doorstep. 'Your parents in?'

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.