The Story

by Victoria Hislop

  I’d shut my eyes and picture his tufted, werewolf earlobes and count until I’d reached as far as seven or so before I’d see these angles of tilting grey that folded in towards a centre point, bolted and sleeked at the backs of my eyes and then rolled me down and away to the dark.

  Now, as it happens, I’m not good with chemicals. No choice here – I am made the way I’m made. Sensitive.

  In the chair they’d give me nitrous oxide and it put me out nicely enough. I’d swim deep through a cartoony, bendy blank while the dentist did his work – the tugging, the twists – then I’d float straight back up and just bob at the surface like a tiny shore-leave sailor: changeable and land-sick and absolutely smashed.

  My first experience of the freedom within incapacity.

  That swoop and rock and thunder of delight. It’s always best to meet your pleasures before you can tell what they mean.

  As I came round some nurse would be attending with her kidney dish and towels: a bit broody perhaps, protective – the motherly type but not a mother and therefore idealistic, if not ridiculous, about kids. She would, shall we say, not entirely expect the violence of my post-operative dismay: my tiny swinging fists and my confusion, my not unjustifiable sense of loss.

  I have no idea what I shouted on these occasions – a small person turning expansive, losing it, throwing it, swarming clear out into beautiful rage. I’ll pretend, while I tell you the story, that I know.

  I’ll say I produced – at great speed and with feeling – ‘You get away from me! I’ll have you! I’ll set the Clangers on you. And Bagpuss! Taking my teeth out… no one ever takes me out – except to the dentist – to take out more teeth. I need my teeth for the Tooth Fairy – I’m only five, for Chrissake – that’s my one source of income, right there. How else can I save up to run away from here? I could go on the stage – be a sideshow – my manager would want me absolutely as I am – the Shark Tooth Girl: the more you pull, the more she grows: ivory from head to toes. I’d be laughing. With all of my teeth, I’d be laughing.’

  This is untrue, but diagnostic – it helps to make me plain.

  Because I wouldn’t ever want to hide from you.

  The surprise of my own blood, that’s true – thick and live and oddly tasty – I never did get used to that, my inside being outside – on my face, my hands. Even today, if I take a tumble, suffer a lapse, my blood can halt and then amaze me. It’s almost hypnotic – seeing myself run. And persons of my type, we run so easily: birds’ hearts thumping in us and broad veins full of shocks.

  Back from the surgery, next came the hangover – naturally, naturally, naturally – but as I was a child it would be kind, more a mild type of fog than a headache. Beyond it I’d be given soldiers with boiled eggs, gentle food for an affronted mouth and a sudden hunger – oh, such a lively hunger – and a quiet mother comfort to meet it with a little spoon. Then a bath and an early night pelting with lurid dreams of thieves and tunnels and running for my life, right through my life and out the other side and into nowhere: the coppery taste of absence, liquid heat.

  Once I was older, I decided I had no more time to waste – people to do and things to be – and avoiding the dental issue became attractive. I brushed regularly, kept my head down, ate everything wholemeal for added wear, but it did no good: my teeth are forceful. They insist.

  So when I’m twenty-four, twenty-five, I’m back in the surgery – new dentist – and the first of my wisdom teeth is leaving. Local anaesthetic this time, much more practical and safe, and I haven’t enjoyed the injections, but I’m hoping they’ll do the trick – mostly my eye’s gone a little blurry, but that’s nothing to fret about – and here comes the dentist – big man, meaty forearms, substantial grip – and it’s plain that he’ll check now, tap about to see if I’m numb and therefore happy – except he doesn’t. He does not.

  And I should pause here briefly, because it lets the story breathe and even possibly give a wink. I step back to let you step forward and see what’s next. This way you’ll stay with us. With me.

  Which is the point.

  You staying with me is the point.

  And, no, the dentist doesn’t check, he is incurious and generally impatient, goes at it fiercely with the pliers and no preamble and here comes a clatter, a turning yank, and then tooth – I am looking at my tooth without me, grinning redly in the light – and I am puzzled because of this feeling, this building feeling which I cannot quite identify – it is large, huge, and therefore moving rather slowly, takes a full count backwards from tennineeight to arrive and then I know, then I am wholly, supernaturally aware, I am certain in my soul that I’m in pain. This is hitherto unguessed-at pain – pain of the sort I have tried to anticipate and forestall with insulating activities and assistance. Numb is best – I always aim for numb, for numb of any type – but pain has found me anyway. Worse than imagination, here it is.

  To be fair, the dentist was upset – looking down at me and saying, ‘Oh, dear,’ a number of times before offering a seat in his office and an explanation involving wrongly positioned nerves – it was technically my fault for having provided them. His secretary gave me a comforting and yet excruciating cup of tea.

  I walked home – it wasn’t far – dizzy and racing with adrenalin. They put it in the anaesthetic, presumably to give it extra zip. Which is to say that you go to the dentist – somebody worrying – and he then injects you with terror – pure fear – you feel it rush your arms, cup its lips hard over that bird inside your chest.

  And it is possibly, conceivably, odd that this is so familiar, so really exactly the simple jolt of many mornings and you draw near to your house and wonder, as usual, if so much anxiety should not have a basis in fact. Perhaps a leak under your floorboards has caused rot, perhaps you’re ill – genuinely threatened by what, as soon as they knew you weren’t suing, your dentist and his secretary called a head injury – this making you feel very noble for not complaining, but nevertheless, in many ways it sounds dire. And if you really want to fret, then perhaps you shouldn’t lend that guy your money – your guy, your money, but shouldn’t they still be apart? You like them both but they should surely be apart? And what if he isn’t exclusively your guy, you’ve had that unease, felt that whisper, about him before – and it’s screaming today. And what if your life is, in some degree, wrong or maladjusted when hauling a live tooth raw from the bone leaves you and your state no worse than an average night, a convivial night, a pace or two along your path of joy.

  Sensitivity you see? It causes thoughts.

  When I reached the flat, I let myself in and sat on the sofa, hands holding each other to dampen their shake and keep out the sense of having gone astray: twenty-five and no real profession, no prudent strategy not much of a relationship.

  And too many teeth.

  But you try to keep cheery, don’t you? And you have time. At twenty-five you’ve bags of it.

  Thirty-five, that’s a touch more unnerving – wake up with thirty-five and you’ll find that it nags, expects things you don’t have: kitchen extensions and dinner parties, DIY, the ability to send out Christmas cards signed With love from both of us. With love from all of us.

  Instead I’m house-sitting for friends.

  And this section of the story is here, for you to like and to let your liking spread to me. Frailty and failure, they’re charismatic, they have a kind of nakedness that charms.

  So.

  Minding the house is company for me.

  Well, it isn’t company – the owners are obviously away, hence my minding – and they’ve left their cats. And this is domesticity without effort: Brazilian cleaning lady, leather cushions, large numbers of superfluous and troubling ornaments.

  This isn’t like me owning cats, me living alone with cats, me growing six-inch fingernails and giggling through the letter box when the pizza-delivery man comes, peering out at him and smelling of cats – that’s not how it is.

  There are these other people who a
re not me and they are the ones who have the cats and I am treating their animals politely but with an emotional distance, no dependency and no indications of despair. There should be no suggestion that these friends are sorry for me, that the husband is more sorry than the wife and that they have argued about my trustworthiness in their absence and their possessions and have doubted the supervisory skills of a Portuguese-speaking obsessive-compulsive who polishes their every surface twice a week: tables, glasses, apples, doorknobs, the skin between the end of the air and the beginning of my wine. I will not tell you they left behind them a plethora of mildly hysterical notes, or that their act of charity has been overshadowed by a sense of filth, oncoming sadness.

  It is only important to mention that I was, on this particular house-sitting evening, chipper and at ease. I had fed both of the creatures and I was going out – out on a date – a variation on a theme of what could be a date. We had reached a transitional stage, the gentleman and I – which is to say, I had reached it and wondered if he had too – and I have to make the best of what I may get, so I was dressed presentably and poised to be charming and, had it not been for the stitches in my mouth, I would have been perfectly on form.

  More dentistry – surgical dentistry but with mouthwash and antibiotics and painkillers – big ones.

  I like them big.

  So I’m all right.

  I’m stylish.

  And I slip into the restaurant – once I’ve found it – with what I consider to be grace and it’s an agreeable establishment. Italian. So I can have pasta – which is soft.

  And here’s my date – my approaching a date – and he’s looking terrific.

  He’s looking great. Like a new man.

  Truly amazing.

  He’s looking practically as if he’s someone else.

  Yes.

  Yes, he is.

  He is someone else.

  I am waving at someone else. The man I am meeting is sitting behind him and to the left and not waving. No one, to be accurate, is waving apart from me and I would love to stop waving, but have been distracted by the expression on my almost-date’s face.

  He is experiencing emotions which will not help me.

  But I can still save the evening. I’m a fighter. I calmly and quietly explain the particular story which is presently myself: the drugs I am currently taking – prescribed drugs – the residual levels of discomfort, the trouble I have enunciating – and perhaps he might like to tell me about his week and I can listen.

  People like it when you listen.

  They have stories, too.

  But he doesn’t give me anything to hear.

  And so I talk about my roots – that story – a little bit angry, because he should have been better than he is, should have been a comfort. My roots are 23 millimetres long, which is not unimpressive, is almost an inch. I tell him about my root canals. I summarise the activities involved in an apesectomy – the gum slicing, tissue peeling, the jaw drilling, the noise.

  This is not romantic, because I no longer wish to be, not any more. I am watching a space just above his head and to the right where another part of my future is closing, folding into nowhere, tasting coppery and hot.

  Could be worse, though: could be forty-five, when everything tilts and greys and comes to point behind your eyes and you have not run away, you have waited for the world to come towards you, given it chance after chance. And, besides this, you find it difficult to name what else you have done, or who is yours. After so many years you are aware of certain alterations, additions, the ones that would make you like everyone else, that would join you, tie you gently, allow you to fit.

  But they don’t make a story – they’re only a list.

  More dental adventure, that’ll keep us right – another practice, another extraction, another tale to tell and that remaining wisdom tooth: it’s shy, it lacks direction, the time has come to cut it out.

  Cheery dentist, in this instance, talkative, ‘This is an extremely straightforward operation. It is, of course, oral surgery but you’ll be fully anaesthetised.’ Which is frankly the least I would hope – and dialogue, that’s always a boon – a voice beyond my own, someone in whom I can believe.

  He puts his needle in, ‘There we are…’ and the numbness goes up to my eye. Again. Faulty wiring. So my mouth is now more painful than it was and I’m also half blind. ‘Well, I’ll just deal with that, then – there you go.’

  Oh, that’s better, that is good. Thass gread.

  And this is my speaking voice, my out-loud voice, the one for everyone but you. So it’s in italics – that way you’ll know.

  Thass bedder. Thass suffithiently aneasssetithed. You may protheed.

  When we’re in private – like now – and I say this, to no one but you, then italics are unnecessary.

  We can be normal and alone.

  ‘No, I think you need more than that.’

  And this is where the dentist gives me more anaesthetic and I notice his hands smell a little like cornflakes – his gloves, they have this cornflaky scent – which is a detail that makes him seem credible and not simply a nightmare.

  ‘Perhaps a touch more there.’

  Whad? No, no thass a bid mush.

  ‘And some more.’

  Shurly nod?

  ‘And more than that. Splendid.’

  I can’d feed by arms.

  ‘Of course, the effects of the anaesthetic will usually pass after three or four hours. But working so close to a nerve, as we will, in very unusual patients the numbness will pass in three or four…’

  It would be tiresome to pause here.

  So we won’t.

  ‘…months and in some extraordinary cases, you will be like that…

  ‘…for the rest of your life.’

  Unf?

  ‘Here we go then.’

  It’s not that I don’t appreciate the chance to feel nothing at all – but this isn’t that – this is horror combined with paralysis – only very minutely exaggerated paralysis. I can’t see to hit him, I can’t fight him off and he’s digging and drilling, drilling and digging and the extraction takes forty-five minutes.

  Honestly.

  That’s how long it takes – no exaggeration.

  There’s blood in his hair.

  It’s mine.

  Finally, I’m released, it’s over, the stitches have been stitched, and I ran out of the surgery.

  Well, I pay the bill and I run out of the surgery.

  Well, I pay the bill and ask them to call me a cab and I run out of the surgery.

  Well, I can’t really run, but I leave the surgery as best I can and I wait for the cab in what happens to be a colourful urban area, one where relaxed gentlemen stroll the boulevards of an afternoon and possibly sing. Perhaps there may be vomit on a lapel here and there. Perhaps there may be vomit and no lapel. And I’m standing – just about – and I can hear a relaxed gentleman coming along behind me.

  He says something approaching, ‘Hhaaaaa.’ Which is not much of a story but is true and I know what he means because I can speak alcoholic. I have learned.

  He reaches me and he says what might be expected – ‘Scuse me cunyou spare twenny pence furra cuppa tea?’ And I turn to him with my bleeding mouth and my lazy eye and my dodgy arm and my swollen tongue and I say, ‘I don no. Havin a biddofa bad day mysel.’

  So he gave me twenty pence.

  And a slightly used sweet.

  And a kiss.

  It’s best, if you can, to close up every story with a kiss. If you can.

  Story of my life – maybe – going to the dentist.

  The story that kept you here with me and that was true. In its essentials it was never anything other than true.

  True as going to sleep tonight with the idea of blood beneath my tongue and meeting the old dreams of robbery and tunnels, the ones where I run straight through and beyond myself and on. And sometimes I wake up sore and wanting to set out nice fingers of bread and ru
nny egg and avoiding the issue is always attractive, but I am tired of speaking languages that no one understands and I have only these words and no others and this makes my stories weak, impossible – impossible as the Christmas cards – with love from all of us – the night hugs and pyjamas, the tantrums and the lost shoes and the hoarding of eccentric objects: figurines, sea glass, washers: which are the kind of details that should not be discussed. They are impossible as hiding the so many ways that my insides leak out, show in my hands, my face.

  Impossible as telling you a story of a new arrival – a small person, turning expansive – someone growing and beautiful, but not perfect, the story of their first trip to the dentist, their first real fear I’d want to drive away. My duty would be to ensure that we would conquer, because every pain is survivable, although it may leave us different, more densely ourselves. The child and I, we would be unafraid and we’d have stories and every one of them would. Start with

  In this story you are not like me.

  All of my life I’ll take care we are never the same.

  The Man Across the River

  Polly Samson

  Polly Samson (b. 1962) is a British author, journalist and songwriter. As well as contributing stories to many anthologies, Samson has published two collections of short stories, Lying in Bed, and Perfect Lives, and a novel, Out of the Picture. She has also co-written lyrics with her husband David Gilmore for his band Pink Floyd.

  ‘Fear grips me from behind, with a knife to my throat. Fear wears a dark cloak. He mourns, the loss of his wife. He’s on drugs…’