Free The Tooth Fairy by Graham Joyce

‘Shame they did this.’ Then she turned and walked back the way she came.
    The boys were silent for a minute or two. Clive sniggered. 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 atthe cab window of the JCB, webbing the thick glass. 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.

In the Saddle
     
    After the eleven-plus they transferred their attentions from the football-club changing rooms to the gymkhana pavilion. Over the past two years they’d poked out the football club’s windows on a regular basis, gouged holes in the door, committed the offence of breaking and entering in order to scribble on the nude pin-ups tacked to the walls and wrecked the internal plumbing of the showers.
    Perhaps it was the eleven-plus itself that provoked this change in policy. Sam and Terry had sat the exam side by side. ‘If you pass, you go to Thomas Aquinas Grammar School,’ Terry reasoned, ‘which has a shit football team. Fail, and you go to Redstone Secondary, which cleaned up the A, B and C leagues last season.’
    Sam found a question which asked them to
Describe a recent holiday you have taken with your family
. Before setting out to answer it, he looked over at his friend. Terry had laid down his pen and his eyelashes fluttered furiously. Sam passed, Terry failed. Clive, having breezed the eleven-plus exam when he was only seven, had no need to sit it again. He was to stay on at the Epstein Foundation.
    ‘With the geeks and the freaks,’ he said staring grimly into the pond. They sat with their backs to the football pitch. The football club kept in readiness a net on a long pole for hooking the ball out of the water.
    ‘So that’s it then,’ Terry said. ‘I’m thick, so I go to Redstone. You’re bright, so you go to Epstein, and Sam’s—’
    ‘Mediocre,’ said Clive, ‘so he goes to grammar school.’
    ‘Fuck off, Epstein egg-head,’ said Sam.
    ‘You fuck off.’
    ‘You fuck off.’
    ‘Let’s leave the football buildings,’ Terry broke into the gay banter, ‘and give the gymkhana pavilion some hammer instead.’
    ‘Why?’
    Terry rubbed his chin judiciously. Now that it was settled he was going to Redstone Secondary, he was aware that one or two of the senior boys played for Redstone Football Club, and that one day he might too. ‘Football is for ordinary folk. Gymkhana is for the snotty bastards. We play football.’
    ‘I don’t play fucking football,’ Clive objected. ‘You two play fucking football, but I don’t.’
    ‘No,’ Terry agreed. ‘You play three-dimensional chess while composing music along with boys from another planet. Fucking egg-head.’
    ‘Fuck off.’
    ‘You fuck off.’
    ‘You fuck off’
    ‘Fair enough,’ said Sam. ‘We move on to gymkhana.’
    ‘So your reasons are proto-political,’ said Clive.
    ‘Fuck off.’
    ‘You fuck off.’
    ‘You’re out-voted,’ said Terry. ‘It’s decided.’
    ‘Who said this is a democracy? It isn’t. Heard of intelocracy?’
    ‘?’
    ‘Government by the brains,’ Clive continued. ‘I get three votes. Sam gets two votes. Terry, with his school for turnip-toppers, gets one vote.’
    ‘Have you heard of punch-in-the-mouth-ocracy?’
    ‘Fuck off.’
    ‘You fuck off.’
    ‘You fuck off.’
    But power in this group, true power, rested in the hands of the one who had the stamina to say, ‘Fuck off’ more times and more vigorously than the next man. Clive, who didn’t give a hoot whether they wrecked the football rooms or the gymkhana pavilion, surrendered early to the new political order.
    The sun made