Part 5 (1/2)

'Just keep at it,' Clive coaxed helpfully.

The pond had been infilled to half its original size and the surrounding land bulldozed to make way for a football pitch. The Heads-Looked-At Boys sat on the newly created mud-bank of the reduced pond with an inarticulated sense of grievance. A yellow JCB digger with caterpillar tracks lodged in the damp clay at a prodigious angle, like a casualty of war, along with a dumper truck, both abandoned for the Sat.u.r.day afternoon.

A few small perch and tench floated on the sc.u.mmy surface of the water. There had been the usual speculation about the whereabouts of the pike. It was conceded that he'd still got plenty of water to swim in and that there was still time to catch him. But favourite trees had been felled, bushes had been uprooted and a sheltered, hidden bank had been collapsed into the pond. For Terry, a keen footballer struggling against some loss of balance since losing his two toes, the change to the landscape was regrettable but inevitable; footballing opportunities would open up, and in one sense the infill of the pond was a blow against the ravening pike. To Sam and Clive, however, who felt that things would never be the same again, it was an unforgivable violation.

It had been two years since the appalling Morris incident, when Terry was sent away to the east coast, and when Sam had his arm sliced by broken gla.s.s. Sam still bore the scar. When he'd returned home that day, bleeding profusely, he'd been rushed to the hospital for teta.n.u.s inoculations and deep interrogation. Everything about the Tooth Fairy had come blubbering incomprehensibly out of him, the entire history, all the early encounters and the violent grapple resulting in the slashed arm. Connie had been shocked and had discussed with doctors within earshot of Sam the need for him to 'have his head looked at'.

Connie was genuinely worried, and after three months when Sam had persisted with his monstrous stories, Connie dragged him to the local GP, who in turn arranged for Sam to see a specialist. Oddly, during this period Sam lost sight of the Tooth Fairy, except for one occasion, his birthday, when it suddenly appeared, naked, sitting on the corner of his bed, warning darkly against his saying any more to anyone.

'You start telling shrinks about us and we're in deeper s.h.i.+t than we already were are. It won't help.' The Tooth Fairy exuded a sweet, unpleasant, mushroom-like odour. Sam couldn't take his eyes from the creature's erect c.o.c.k. Straining from the swart bush of black curls, it was unpleasantly white and marbled with prominent veins. Sam was mesmerized into wanting to touch it and yet simultaneously repulsed by the terrifying organ.

The Tooth Fairy suddenly noticed the focus of Sam's attention, and it made him swagger. Dragging a hand through his dark locks, he tilted his head to one side and narrowed his eyes. 'Wanna touch it?'

'No.'

The Tooth Fairy ran a moist, raspberry-coloured tongue across his lips, smiling provocatively. 'Go on. You know you want to.'

Sam's eyes locked again on the marbled c.o.c.k. In stark contrast to the white stalk of the p.e.n.i.s, the head was damsonand-blackcurrant, almost splitting at the skin, ready to puncture.

'Want to kiss it?'

'No.'

'Just a lick. One sweet lick.'

'No.'

'Go on. Make it pop.'

'No.'

'Don't know what it's for, do you?' The Tooth Fairy sneered. 's.h.i.+t-scared of it, aren't you?'

Sam looked into the Tooth Fairy's eyes. For a few moments they held each other's unblinking gaze. At last the Tooth Fairy sighed, and Sam felt a critical moment had pa.s.sed. The Tooth Fairy folded his arms, and the monstrous erection began to subside. 'Listen while I tell you why I'm here. It's about the shrink. Find a way out, or things will take a dive. I'm warning you.'

'You cut my arm.'

'For which I'm deeply sorry. Things got out of hand, and you had no right to be in that place. But those shrinks are going to put a mark on you much worse than that little scratch on your arm. Believe me. I haven't lied to you yet.'

Leaving out the erotic element of the encounter, Sam reported this conversation verbatim to the specialist, an imposing but hearty Caledonian with b.u.t.ter-coloured hair and nicotine-stained fingertips. The Tooth Fairy chose that moment to make a brief appearance at the psychiatrist's window, shaking his head in dismay, an event Sam had considered it wiser to leave out of his report.

Sam stared glumly into the pond. 'How long did you say this takes?'

Terry sat to his right, his right cheek muscle twitching slightly as diligently he worked away. Clive sat on his left, eyes closed, a distant expression of studied concentration moulding his features. 'As long as it takes,' said Clive.

Terry had returned from his six weeks on the east coast looking strangely diminished and with a faint burr lodged in his accent. Some profound change had taken place in the boy, which Sam and Clive could detect but not identify. Often in moments of laughter Terry would seem to 'catch' himself and would be overtaken by a strange, self-conscious fluttering of the eyelashes, after which his eyebrows would knit fiercely, as if he were persecuted by a brief but intense migraine. These flas.h.i.+ng visits of pet.i.t mal would cause his pals to look away in embarra.s.sment; though they sensed their origins, both the cause and the condition were off-limits for discussion, even for boys who would normally ruthlessly attack any weakness in the scramble for advantage known as growing up. No one ever told Clive and Sam that what happened to Terry's parents was a taboo subject. They understood that the matter was not open for debate in the same way in which you understand your friend's eyes are not for gouging nor his belly for disembowelling.

The arrangement for Terry to stay with his Aunt Dot and cousin Linda was put on an apparently permanent basis, though the other two boys never questioned Terry about this either. Meanwhile Terry had brought back from the east coast a new harvest of nightmares. The old bad dreams had been replaced by new ones, and the new ones were bad enough to precipitate his own crisis. Night after night he awoke screaming, inconsolable, terrified, until he too was taken to his local GP, who bounced him in turn into the consulting room of a specialist. Terry too was having his head looked at, and it was a matter of considerable joy to the two boys to find out that their heads were being looked at by the very same Aran-sweatered, nicotine-sallowed psychiatrist, Skelton.

And then Clive too had to have his head looked at, but for different reasons and by a different specialist. Clive's abilities as a 'gifted child' proved to be more and more disruptive in the cla.s.sroom. Teachers did not take kindly either to being corrected or to having their arguments amplified. Clive was examined, tested, interviewed and tested again. His reward for demonstrating exceptional intelligence was to be taken away from his dearest friends and placed in a special school, run, it was said, by more specialists. It was Clive who had come up with the new group name. Both Terry's Aunt Dot and Sam's mother had separately advised them, in lowered tones, not to mention to anyone about seeing specialists. Clive, however, made it a badge of honour. 'We've all had our heads looked at. We're the Heads-Looked-At Boys.'

And they were.

'Goons! They're all freaks and goons!' Clive had protested after his first week at the Epstein Foundation for Gifted Children. He was truly appalled. If this was what it meant to be gifted, he understood instantly that there was neither honour nor pride in it. 'Freaks and goons! They've all got gla.s.ses and sorry, Sam, not like yours, I mean thick gla.s.s like at the bottom of a pop bottle and some of 'em even have brown lenses in their gla.s.ses and long fingers, I've noticed they've all got fingers probably nine inches long. Then there's this kid called Frank, who's ten years old with a beard, honest.'

This bearded Frank had told Clive about w.a.n.king, and Clive had immediately pa.s.sed on the information to the other Heads-Looked-At Boys, a gift from the school of gifted children.

'Mine's starting to feel a bit sore,' Sam complained.

'And mine,' said Terry. His right cheek muscle continued to flex, as if attached by some mysterious ligament to the c.o.c.k he was busily stroking. Clive, meanwhile, continued to pump at his own c.o.c.k while mentally engaged in some esoteric form of astral travel.

'And it's gone a purplish-reddish colour.'

'Mine's more pinkish-brownish.'

Without missing a stroke, Clive opened his eyes and said, 'Frank says if you keep at it long enough, then this white s.p.u.n.k squirts three feet in the air, and it absolutely kills you and-'

'If it kills you, what's the point?' Terry asked, reasonably.

'Not kills you, that is, it doesn't kill you, but it kills you in a way that feels incredible, Frank says.'

'I'm not sure about this Frank. He sounds like a-'

Sam's words were cut off when they heard a rustle in the gra.s.s behind them. 'What are you doing?' said a girl's voice. The three boys toppled forward, squirming on the ground at the pond's edge, stuffing themselves back in their trousers, clutching at their midriffs.

It was Lanky Linda, or rather Moody Linda; less lanky now that, approaching fourteen, she was filling out her height but increasingly disposed towards moodiness. Terry kept up a running report on her moods for the other two, plus a steady commentary on her bra size, underwear and sanitary towels.

Linda had become a teenager. It was a word which all the adults around seemed, when uttering it, to underline. There was a frisson, exasperation and a note of distaste in the word. A teenager. Something clearly happened to you when you became a teenager. You carried this word like a hump on your back; it was a mark of infamy. 'Now that she's a teenager . . .' they would say, as if what they really meant was 'Now that she's a vampire . . .' or 'Now that she's a werewolf . . .'

And the white gloves had been discarded in favour of miniskirts, and patent-leather shoes, and American-tan tights, and belts with huge buckles; and her sleek, black hair was styled in a Jean Shrimpton cut that had literally made her father weep. There were also reports from Terry of boyfriends, potential or otherwise, hovering in the background. Names were named, and the thought of Linda necking with these people left the boys uncertain whether to giggle or puke. And now here Linda was, her face made up to an astonis.h.i.+ng wax finish, her eyelids painted marine-blue, her lips a peelable, cherry-pink gloss, demanding to know what they were doing, the query put in a way which answers itself, the tone betraying that the poser of the question can see the answer perfectly well, and would rather not, but feels compelled to say something, anything to mask an evident surprise. Linda's dog t.i.tch, a whippet-cross, stood with its head on one side, as if it too was looking for sensible answers to reasonable questions.

'Having a pee,' Clive said quickly, scrambling to his feet.

'Having a pee sitting down?' For one horrible moment it seemed that Linda was going to insist on debating the point. Sam got up and affected to be fascinated by the high-pressure valve on one of the wheels of the dumper truck. Clive and Terry turned away, cheeks flaming. Mercifully, Linda changed the subject by addressing Terry. 'Dad says he wants you to come and wheelbarrow some sand.'

Terry's Uncle Charlie was building an extension to their house, chiefly to give Terry a room of his own since he currently shared with Linda's two younger brothers. 'I'll be along in a minute.' He couldn't look his cousin in the eye.

Linda surveyed the ploughed field and the partially infilled pond. 'Shame,' she said. 'Shame they did this.' Then she turned and walked back the way she came.

The boys were silent for a minute or two. Clive sn.i.g.g.e.red. Sam, fiddling with the valve on the dumper wheel, snorted too. Then came a mighty blast of pressurized air from the valve as it opened, spraying a fan of white foam at Sam's face. The other two boys shouted and cheered at the sudden release of pressure. Clive picked up a rock and tossed it at the cab window of the JCB, webbing the thick gla.s.s. Terry found an old newspaper in the cab. He stuffed it under the driver's seat, took a box of matches from his pocket and ignited the paper.

'Let's help Terry move that sand,' said Clive.

They sprinted home.