Free The Tooth Fairy by Graham Joyce Page B

low whisper.
    Five breathless, heart-stopped, insect-crawled minutes passed before Sam exploded from his bolt-hole, snorting dust, scattering poles and tearing off his shirt.
    ‘Close,’ said Terry, emerging from the pile, face streaked with pitch.
    ‘Too close,’ said Clive, escaping from a crate. Sam was still twisting and clawing at his bare back. ‘At least they didn’t see us.’
    The next day they returned to the scene of their almost-crime to pour scorn on the gymkhana. They had to pass the Sunday school on their way. Mr Phillips was just emerging from the gate, looking rather pleased with himself. ‘Hello! Haven’t seen you chaps in a good while!’ The boys’ answer was to smirk and to avoid eye-contact as they passed. Each of them sensed Mr Phillips watching their necks a good way up the road.
    It was a dry, blustery day, and the early-morning rain had not discouraged the fifty or sixty pony-riders who’d spread their horse-boxes and towing vehicles around the gymkhana ring like pioneers of the Western prairie. Some kind of game was in progress, involving the pennanted sticks Sam had seen, from his hiding place, dumped on the pavilion floor.
    Most of the pony-riders were either younger than the boys or in their early teens. Terry thought it was hilarious to go from cluster to cluster of the girl riders asking for a fictitious Abigail.
    ‘Excuse me, have you seen Abigail?’ Very polite.
    ‘No,’ they would reply, already looking suspicious, twitching their reins. ‘Abigail who?’
    ‘Well, if you see Abigail, could you tell her not, under any circumstances, to use the toilets over there?’
    ‘STAND!’ they would bark at their nervous ponies. ‘Stand! Why?’
    ‘It’s just that there are some boys going round looking through the holes in the wood when people are using the toilets. I think she ought to know – I mean, it’s not very nice is it? – so I’d be grateful if you’d tell her. Thanks very much.’
    The girls would flick a glance at the toilets and then look back at Terry as he walked away, and he would sense – rather, he would
know
– that the girls would be calculating when they last used the toilets or when they would next need to. Although the novelty of this exercise quickly wore off for Sam and Clive, Terry could have cheerfully continued the game all afternoon.
    They bought lemonade from the refreshments counter inside the pavilion. ‘You’ve got a broken window,’ Clive observed to the lady engaged in serving.
    ‘Vandals,’ she said, opening the till.
    ‘I wish I could get ’em,’ said a red-faced man with a cloth cap and green Wellington boots. Purple veins in his cheeks seemed set to explode. ‘I’d make ’em into pulp.’
    ‘It’s so senseless,’ Clive pointed out, accepting his change.
    ‘They must be sick,’ Sam added.
    They slurped their lemonade and watched the competitors without interest. The commentator’s disembodied voice requested a big hand for Lucinda on Shandy. Terry left them to go to the toilet. While pissing he glanced up and saw an eye looking at him through a knot-hole. The eye disappeared, to be replaced by another one.
    When he came out two girls in jodhpurs, holding theirriding hats in their hands, were giggling at him. ‘Fucking perverts,’ he growled.
    He found the other two standing near a practice jump, hoping to see someone fall off. Ponies cantered up in regular order to leap the bales of straw. Terry was about to tell them about the giggling girls when he heard pounding hooves accelerating behind them. ‘Out of the way!’ a rider screamed. The boys scattered as a horse twice the size of most of the ponies galloped between them and cleared the practice jump by at least three feet. The rider reined in the horse, turned it in a circle and walked it back towards them.
    It was a girl. She wore cream-coloured jodhpurs and a tweed hacking jacket. Her long, dark hair was stuffed into a net under her peaked riding hat. Her cheeks