Hands, p.12
Hands, page 12
When it finally came to the dentist’s hand prodding around in there, it was fully and immediately clear that my surreptitious pre-emptive pokes hadn’t had the effect I’d hoped: to prevent future pain by feeling that pain now, in a way I could control (pressing down was as hard as I wanted it to be). Wanted isn’t the right word, perhaps needed. I was an Olympian in training, trying to push myself beyond my limits, except I wasn’t getting better at anything the more I did it. No, I was somehow getting worse.
Eventually, the words I’d been trying to stave off were uttered: ‘We’re going to have to take it out.’ OK, it wasn’t that blunt. On the upper left side of my gums, my second from last tooth was dying. I was about 14 or 15 and a root canal hadn’t stopped the pain, which doesn’t make sense now I say it out loud but there we are, that is how I remember it working. The ginger-haired dentist (who at the time I thought was hot, but then again I was at the age where I thought everyone was hot, especially pretty much all grown men) explained that he could go back in there and have another jiggle about or, and he was so sorry, take it out.
I went into reassuring mode, if you could call it that, as if he was the one in the big white seat and not me. ‘Don’t say sorry!’ I said. ‘Don’t worry at all, I totally understand [who the fuck was talking with my mouth?], let’s just take it out. It’s easier that way, isn’t it?’ The sudden nonchalance! Was I trying to impress him, this average-looking ginger man (but ugh, a man! hot) with my lack of fucks? Nothing, I’ve learnt since, is sexier than a woman who doesn’t care if her permanent last-chance teeth get pliered from her skull forever. It’s a marvel he managed to get through the procedure at all without orgasming.
Things started going south as soon as he started. Firstly, being injected with a needle in the gums is the stuff of the Saw franchise. Nobody should have to go through that – it’s obscene and should be illegal. The gums are an abomination of human design. They’re just so gummy. Like, is it skin? Bone covered in muscle? Bone covered in skin? There’s just something irretrievably grim and unthinkable about them, which is fine given that in daily life I’ve been lucky enough not to have to think about them very much at all – they do their job more or less well in terms of keeping my teeth in my head, but Christ alive, they have the makings of a really brilliant and surprisingly as yet unseen Doctor Who monster. A person who’s gum all over? I’d rather die. Even the dentist prodding them with a begloved forefinger was bad enough, so I scrunched my eyes closed as he raised the needle and brought it into my cavernous mouth. I felt the cold needle like a sharp pinch and shivered as it slipped deeper inside; from then on I was stiff as a board. That should’ve been the worst of it, he’d said as much before he started – ‘Just a sharp pinch and then numb, you’ll hardly feel a thing’ – but of course it wasn’t. I did feel a thing, a really horrific not-in-the-agreement thing. As soon as he started to thumb-plunge the syringe’s contents into me, I felt an electric spark rip like lightning across my entire face. I was stunned.
‘All good?’ he asked.
‘No’, I explained. ‘That just electrocuted my entire fucking face actually.’
‘Ah, OK.’ He’d hit a nerve, he explained, and then hit another one by audaciously claiming that this was a good thing because now the numbing agent would work faster. I didn’t believe that for one second, but after that one second I very much did, as the left side of my face departed the land of the living and sagged like meat. I’d enjoy prodding it later, but for now, the extraction (that’s what he called it, like it was some precious jewel being plucked from the earth and not the corrupt popcorn it was).
Reader, it got worse. Within minutes the drill head had spun off its whizzy electrical buzzy thing and into my mouth, clattering against teeth I, on the left-hand side, couldn’t feel, and on the right-hand side, could. The dentist, even after Nerve-gate, remained remarkably calm and nonchalant at this occurrence, in my memory just refitting the nozzle onto the uncontrollable snake it muzzled, before going back in. Anyone who’s been to the dentist for Intensive Work will know how weird it feels to have someone drilling your teeth when they’re numb. You can feel them pulling, tugging the difficult bits, but there’s no pain. Just the sense that someone is rearranging your skull, and the drug that was supposed to put you to sleep under the goggled glare of the Frankensteinian maniac who’s kidnapped you hasn’t worked.
I should add that it was around this time in my life, when the glossy real-life mags covered Mam’s rug, that I read a story in one of said magazines about a Woman Who Had Surgery and FELT IT ALL. Once I started reading it, I was incapable of tearing my eyes away, like it was some horrific car crash I couldn’t help but want to see in all its gory detail, and it just got worse and worse. I could feel the words entering my memory like shards, every subsequent one slashing open another neural pathway. Whichever drug was meant to paralyse her worked, so she was incapable of so much as opening her eyes, but whatever was supposed to put her to sleep hadn’t, so she was alive and kicking up there while they opened her belly and started rummaging around inside. She felt everything, she said, and was (obviously!) completely traumatised by the experience. And listen, I don’t understand anaesthetics or whether they’re supposed to paralyse you or what, but I do know that that shit is not supposed to happen – period. I was always worried that this would happen to me in the dentist’s chair, that the drill would touch nerve before I’d screamed loud enough to stop him. That I’d feel the nerve exposed, screaming, to the cool, air-conditioned air.
Thankfully, I remained numb throughout. When it was finally over he stuffed a marshmallowy substance into the hole and got me to bite down on it before sending me on my merry way.
My grandma always came to the dentist with me, knowing how I was with it, and afterwards we went and sat down somewhere. I tried having a cup of tea, waiting for it to cool, but still wound up burning myself anyway. We enjoyed the ridiculousness of my numb face – Liv, who was also there, took a video of me talking out of a laughing, wonky smile, which did well on Facebook – but after a time the jocularity wore off and I realised what to me was the gravity of what I’d just done.
The dentist had explained to me that because of the way light works, and how the back of my mouth was dark, no one would be able to tell even if I laughed with my head flung backwards. Even if I was on the waltzers and my neck gave up and my head dragged back. But now the numbness was wearing off, I could feel the newly empty space, not just in a physical with-my-poking-tongue kind of way, but with over-eager tendrils of compulsive thought. I prodded and brushed the absence and felt I’d lost something huge. Tears – you guessed it – streamed and streamed where once there had been only laughter. I turned to my grandma and heaved ‘When my skeleton is found by Time Team or whatever, they’ll see there was a tooth missing and think badly of me,’ before breaking down in sobs again.
My mind was filled with my skeleton, my previously lovely skeleton – how could I not have realised how lovely it was before? How stupid of me not to, how stupid. Stupid. Apparently I didn’t care enough about it to keep it in pristine condition for future archaeologists, who I was sure would care enormously. Now they would assume me a peasant with a poor diet (Can they find cherry coke in the chemical composition of teeth? Oh God, even if they can’t now, they will be able to by then, etcetera). In many ways they’d be right, of course, about the cherry coke (Asda’s own), but at least before then they might have at least considered the possibility I was of royal lineage and worthy of a museum vitrine.
The enormity of what I’d done, egregious as murder, plagued me as we made our way home. I went straight upstairs to inspect the absence in the long mirror on the landing, where the lightbulb was bright and orange and unforgiving. Back in the days when Liv and I would go to house parties, the Apple Sourz days, we’d get Mam to take 100 pictures each and then a few together on her digital camera before we went: hands on bony hips, fringes pulled to the side, lipstick-smothered half-smiles eclipsed by extraordinarily short skirts. The landing was, for me, lowest on the pecking order of potential photoshoot spots. Best of all was the slightly gloomy hallway downstairs, in front of the porch window – enough to get some natural light, but not nearly enough to illuminate what I actually looked like, which would be unacceptable. Sometimes there’d be no good photos in the heaving stack. Mam would bear the brunt of her frustration – it was obviously her fault that we looked exactly like ourselves in the photographs.
Here, though, hooking my cheek with a finger like a doomed fish, I didn’t think I’d ever get a picture taken again. I might not ever leave the house. I’d chucked the blood-soaked marshmallowy thing into the toilet by this point, and the puckered and bloody little absence I saw made me want to vomit. I spat pink spit into the sink, and then I went back to the mirror to keep looking. I don’t know what else I expected to see; I wanted to feel the full gravity of it, for it to somehow ‘hit me’ (as though it hadn’t already). Exhausted with all the inspecting, I sauntered like an empty tracksuit downstairs and into the dining room. I slumped down at the dining table and spun the black, looping cord of the phone around my fingers. Mam finally surrendered her silence and acknowledged me – I’d no doubt been performatively huffing and sighing in her general direction – and told me it really wasn’t that big of a deal because no one would see it, and as the dentist had reassured me, as I grew older the gap would likely become smaller as my other teeth crowded in.
‘Can you see it if I laugh?’ I asked, tilting my head back and laughing with a caricature face. She tutted, her tone getting higher, incredulous, at the end. ‘When have you ever, has anyone, ever laughed like that? You can’t see it anyway you daft get, oway.’ But I didn’t follow her into the living room, just stayed there silent-crying – the kind of crying where you’ve got your head in your arms and your mouth open in a voiceless howl dripping saliva – thinking about how the only thing going for me, my fanciability, which I was still very much invested in, was suddenly gone. My head spun thick with the permanence of it, and I vowed never to drink pop or eat sweets or hard things or chocolate ever again, that this was rock bottom and the wake-up call I needed. But I did, as hastily as a diet begun on a Monday is dropped by Wednesday. Even before the painful gummy crevice was sealed shut I’d got over it, joining in with gusto a crisp-eating sesh at my friend Ellie’s house. A shard of tangy cheese Dorito lodged itself in the gum, to my horror, and I had to extract it in her downstairs toilet, which I thereafter vomited into. Even that, though, slipped into the past, and whether the damage was already done or I’d created fresh damage, I found myself back at the dentist’s a year or two later for another big procedure.
It was another of the chunky teeth, this time the second from the back on the lower right side, that was giving me grief. I’d tried to ignore it for as long as possible, not wanting to admit I’d gone back on my healthy pledge, but even biting down on soft food became an impossibility and I relented. Another root canal was needed. After the failed attempt at the first one, which had resulted in the extraction (in lieu of another crack at it), I was sceptical as hell. I asked lots and lots and lots of questions and probably delayed several other patients’ appointments, but I needed absolute reassurance that this was going to work. He obviously couldn’t give me that, he said, but he was confident that this wasn’t the same as last time and the only way would be to try. That one, the upper left bastard, was cracked and would likely buckle under another root canal treatment. This one didn’t look so bad.
By the time he’d finished, he hadn’t taken out the full root. He’d done some other dental wizardry I won’t try and remember nor explain that meant he’d gone down a few layers of strata, scooped out the minging stuff, and left a very thin layer of enamel over the frenetic nerve. It was a risk, he said, but one he was willing to take. Like a dilapidated house, he’d realised the foundations were actually still there, the bare bones as it were, and he was willing to do it up, restore it as close as possible to its former glory. He put over the top a temporary – though, he reassured me, sturdy – crown and, having taken a mould of the remaining, flattened half-tooth before doing so, invited me back to get my bespoke permanent crown fitted some time in the future.
A paradoxical character, for whom every tiny life occurrence simultaneously scars forever yet fails to create a lasting impression sufficient to change my behaviour, I took him at his word and bought a £1 packet of chorizo slices from the nearest supermarket. I headed to a nearby friend’s house with them in hand, also clutching closely the justification that I needed to eat dinner, didn’t I, and that I’d be fine if I just ate on one side. About three slices in, I failed. It turns out that it’s really difficult to only use one side of the mouth to eat – it requires a significant amount of deft tongue work and razor-sharp concentration on the physical mechanics of eating only, at the expense of the deliciously smoky taste of Spanish sausage. I must have subconsciously been unwilling to make this sacrifice – and, in any case, unable, since it’s hard to control a side of your face you can’t feel – and the teeny tooth-topper pinged off. At first, I thought it was one of those weird white gristly bits you sometimes get in chorizo – the ones that unfortunately remind you exactly what it is you’re eating – but then a throb burst through the numbness like a lamppost on a foggy night. The glue obviously hadn’t set yet, and my tooth screamed. Tail between my legs, I slunk back to the dentist’s and had another one put in. This time I ate whatever the adult equivalent of baby food is (soup, I guess) until I finally had a permanent bad boy fitted. For the first couple of weeks I re-entered a Googling-how-much-extensive-dental-work-such-as-veneers-and-bridges-costs phase.
When the first tooth had been plucked out, not too long before, I’d been horrified in my research to discover that they had to file the healthy teeth around a gap into little shark’s teeth in order to fit fake ones. I don’t know why this surprised me. Like, how else would it work? But I sank further into despair; not only could I not afford such options, but they didn’t bring my tooth back. But I did it again, pre-empting the inevitable moment this one would fall out and my crumbly feta dreams would edge closer to reality – a nerve grazing a thin layer of tooth that was surely unable to contain it.
I didn’t shell out any money, and my remaining teeth were not filed into fangs. Three or four years passed.
The wind that close to the sky was ferocious, a feral beast always just out of sight, slashing around our heads and whipping our hair into watering eyes. Stone stairs, half-crumbled paneless windows, weather-worn walls, and crenellations like teeth comprised the breathless castle’s husk, from whose impossibly high promontory others like it could be seen; ancient ships drifting between breaks in mist. It wasn’t a particularly cold day. On the contrary, we’d wound through vineyard upon vineyard bathed in golden light to get here, Tom’s expert driving manoeuvring us, then, up and around knife-edge turns – passing, ominously, the shell of a car pitched down a ditch – up and up, round and round we went, every sweep around a corner stealing our breath and widening our eyes. When we got to the top we – that is, me, my boyfriend Jovan, Tom (our friend) and Kate (also our friend and Tom’s then-girlfriend, now wife) – had a picnic of questionable service-station sandwiches, sat at a lone picnic table above the world. Below us, it was huge and verdant and endless.
Finished, we turned again, faces skyward, to the cloud-surfing castle whose every corridor, staircase and stone we desperately wanted to inhabit, with whose history we wanted to interlace, mind and body. The climb was intense – I’d feel it in my legs tomorrow – but worth it. Oh, so very worth it. A vast, rolling carpet of every green, beige and brown tumbled before us as we peered through – or rather over the edge of – half windows, low walls. We gripped hard onto scant rope handrails and pressed our palms against the cold walls out of necessity as well as, at least for me, to feed that need – curling through me like warm tendrils reaching my fingertips, the thread of human history linking us all – to connect with whoever was here before. Whoever else touched this place, and this place, and this place. The open-air ruin – though, really, there was nothing ruined about it – was surprisingly short of visitors and I felt utterly alone up there, in the best way. Tom even found a secret – or what seemed to be a secret, which was good enough for me – passageway, which we trudged down with arched backs and lowered heads. I was so scared and so excited that I’m sure the adrenaline kept me warm for some time, kept me exploring. But then as though from nowhere the wind picked up in a great heaving bellow, and just how high up we were became terrible. We were so brutally exposed, so chilled to the bone by the air up here; Kate – slight, petite – carefully lowered herself onto a step sheltered by surrounding intact walls, and couldn’t take a step further for panicked fear of being defenestrated. I continued on for a short time after, but quickly conceded. Once sat, it seemed impossible ever to get up again without being sucked through a passageway with the force of a plane door opening mid-flight, and, shocked through, we carefully – so carefully – exited the building back onto the sloping hill by which we had approached it.
