Graham Joyce by The Tooth Fairy (epub)

Author:The Tooth Fairy (epub)
Format: epub
Published: 2023-06-24T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FIVE

The Truth Room

Meanwhile the kiss hung in the air for months, like an aerial spirit. Offered at midnight betokening a new year, with Alice’s tongue inserted between his lips at some hazy time dividing the first and the last radio-broadcast chimes of Big Ben, it neither belonged to the dying old year nor yet was it properly born into the celebratory nascence of the new. So it hung, frozen in time, over the threshold of Sam’s house, neither in nor out, unacknowledged, the unhatched kiss.

It was never spoken of. Sam certainly never mentioned it to either Terry or Clive. In any event, Terry would have waggled his eyebrows suggestively, and Clive would have curled his lip. Despite the fact that Alice and he sat together most days on the bus to school and back, discussing many things, the subject was never broached. The magical kiss was like the Brazil nuts and the “Eat Me” dates: it seemed to have no place in the world beyond its seasonal novelty.

But again it wasn’t a dream. She had kissed him. His tongue had tingled. His hand did tremble. Though the issue could grow no further, the moment could never be taken away. So Sam lived with it, this mystical halfway state of being kissed; and he developed, every time he saw Alice, the nervous habit of pushing his spectacles higher up the bridge of his nose.

The most extraordinary thing was the way in which some of the people around him seemed to suspect vaguely or to guess exactly. Connie had taken to watching him very closely since the holiday season. He might turn suddenly and catch his mother staring at him, her face etched with concern. Then one evening at Terry’s house Linda had said something to him that caused him to blush outright. Not that this was unusual. Lovely Linda’s unfolding beauty was unstoppable. She wore pink lipstick and enticing perfume even around the house; her increasingly short skirts trumpeted her dazzling, sword-slim thighs; and her full breasts, straining against the white cotton of her blouse, provoked a pang every time he saw her. Sam didn’t know how Terry could bear to live so close to her. Each time he saw Linda in a new outfit he would eventually be compelled to return home and go to his room for a frenzied bout of masturbation.

“You look different somehow.” Linda had laid a light and fragrant finger on his reddening cheek. She was wearing thigh-length patent-leather boots and a black leather miniskirt. “What have you been up to?”

“Sam always looks like he’s found a quid and lost a fiver,” chuckled Terry’s Uncle Charlie.

“That’s right,” Linda said thoughtfully, still looking hard at Sam. “You look like you found something and then lost it again.”

Sam stood up, pushing his glasses higher up the bridge of his nose. “I have to be getting back home.”

“Ask her if she’s got a friend for Terry,” said Linda. Sam turned furiously. “Joke,” she said.

But Skelton was the worst, and the most perceptive.

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