Staring At The Light

by Fyfield, Frances

  There was the man with the legs like pillars and his back turned, his arms folded and his head dipped in enquiry, nodding in deference towards the drill equipment, hoisted safely out of reach on the gantry, and then, as William watched, sitting awkwardly in the dental chair, still with his arms folded, his eyes fixed on the light. Adjusting himself for comfort, finding none, slipping on the seat. The features of the man suddenly made sense. Without thinking, William approached, flicked the switch for the overhead light marked Siemens and put his foot on the pedal to recline the chair. He moved round to Tina’s side and turned on the aspirator. Slugggh, the head of the thing sucking at nothing, slugghh. Where there had been silence, there was racket. The man lay, his eyes blinded by the light, his lips in a rictus smile, his limbs stiff with terror. All he did was remove his hands from his armpits and put them over his ears, as if aping the monkey who hears no evil. He made a small sound, a hiss; then the prominent red lips, which had been parted, were clamped shut, forming a wide, red line splitting the jowls of his face. William stood over him. There was no time for fear; he was simply very angry.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ he said. He moved the drill gantry so that it hung between them, in front of the man’s eyes. ‘If I drilled your teeth without water coolant,’ he said conversationally, ‘I could make them white hot. What the hell do you want?’

  The man did not speak. William’s anger became tremulous. ‘What do you want?’ he repeated, moving closer. And then, in a voice that sounded petulant to his own ears, ‘Why did you hit me?’

  The eyes opened wide and stared at the light, blinked and remained fixed. A large hand shot from the torso and grabbed William by the balls through his trousers. The hand gripped; William gave a sharp yelp. The grip lessened, but remained. He looked down at the brown paw clutching his groin and grabbed at the wrist. The bone felt like the indestructible iron of the railings outside. The man blinked again and, for the first time, diverted his glance to William’s face, twisted his grip, then relaxed it. Then he smiled. ‘This is just to make sure’, he said softly, ‘that we don’t hurt one another.’

  They remained like that, William and he, staring at each other, William with watering eyes, mesmerized by brown teeth. Then the hand dropped away. The relief was enormous. As if in response to some command not actually made, William pressed the foot pedal bringing the chair upright. Almost a normal chair. The man sighed, pushed the offending hand into the pocket of his trousers and flourished from it William’s card. ‘You gave me this,’ he said. The voice was extremely soft. ‘You insisted,’ he added, as if that were more than sufficient to justify forced entry and trespass. The argument seemed completely compelling. William felt at a loss – again, that strange sense that the visitor was here as of right, his presence inevitable, even familiar, and that it was he who was owed an apology. He found it difficult to take his eyes from the flash of the brown teeth, almost urged to touch them. He could do so much for these teeth; he could redeem a thousand wrongs by treating these teeth. The man got off the chair and began to prowl, his hands locked behind his back in a mute promise of no further intimidation. William could do nothing but continue to stare at him, scarcely aware of the third man, who made slight paper-shuffling noises from behind.

  ‘How did you get in?’ William asked stupidly. It was irrelevant how they had got in: the only fact that mattered was their presence – the man’s presence. The other, somehow, counted for nothing. There was no reply. The man seemed totally absorbed in his own curiosity. He paused in his perambulations, looked at the battery of equipment on the dentist’s side of the chair, equipment more cumbersome than that on the nursing side. A deep shudder shook his frame; his body trembled with profound revulsion. It reminded William of a dog shaking water from its coat.

  ‘So, Mr Dentist,’ said the soft voice, ‘you think you could do something about my fangs? I’ve got as far as your door how many times? Five? Six? Never made it inside until now. And I didn’t need your card. Some little boy of a lawyer told me all about you. If you treat the crap inside prison, like he said, you ain’t too proud to treat me.’ He retracted his upper lip, let the top teeth pin down the lower lip, the better to expose them. It was an almost comical snarl, like a child competing with another in pulling faces.

  That’s what you might have done as a child; made people laugh at you.

  There was a photocopier in the other room by the reception desk. William heard the sound of its operation and, for a moment, his sensation of panic returned with a different focus. The records. They were inefficiently banked on computer; he was not particularly computer-literate and it was still those pieces of paper that mattered. Without records, he would be lost. The practice would be lost. So would his academic career.

  He closed his eyes to blank out the thought. Concentrated on his own voice. ‘Yes. I could do something about your teeth. Veneers … crowns, all sort of things …’ He faltered. ‘Yes, I could do wonders with those teeth. I’ve got all the relevant experience.’

  ‘Would it hurt?’

  William shook his head, without sufficient conviction. ‘Totally painfree dentistry is a modern myth,’ he said earnestly. ‘No pain as such, or never for long. The analgesics are highly effective, although people vary in response. But it would be …’ he struggled for the right euphemism ‘… uncomfortable, at times.’

  ‘I need fillings, too. I don’t want metal in my mouth. Poisonous.’

  ‘Amalgam isn’t poisonous. You don’t have to have it. Resin for the cavities.’

  ‘But you could cause exquisite pain,’ the man stated, emphasizing the word, gesturing to the drill. ‘You could disfigure me.’ The pause was poignant, as if both recognized that disfigurement of the man was already achieved.

  ‘Your brother had no pain.’

  ‘You’re quite wrong about that. I have no brother. I don’t know why you think so.’

  William turned his head and, for one horrified moment, thought he saw tears in the other man’s eyes. ‘There’s always the potential for pain,’ William said. ‘I’ve devoted my life to avoiding it.’

  ‘Where do you keep the stuff? I’d need to know you had plenty.’

  William opened a drawer. ‘Plenty for daily purposes. I keep the minimum, order what I need. You could be sedated.’

  ‘No. I need to know what’s happening.’

  It was a surreal conversation, he thought. He felt as if he were being interviewed, his premises viewed not from the point of examining his credentials but with some other agenda in mind. The man continued to pull faces, looking clownish, as if the working of his jaws and eyebrows were essential to the process of thought.

  ‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘Let me ask you something, Mr Dentist, before I make an appointment. A test, if you don’t mind. What, in your life, do you hold dearest? Or, should I say, whom?’

  The question was oddly shocking. The photocopier made its familiar noise. William tried to remember the order in which he stored the dental records, what they said, apart from the charts of teeth. They were stored in sequence, the most recent patients to the front, the bulkier records to the back of each alphabetical index. What privacy was being invaded? No layperson could read a dental chart. He remembered how he recalled names and addresses with a note of who had referred the patient to him, so that he could remember to ask after a patient’s referring friend and thus make it seem as if he remembered who they were. Part of the personal touch he had to rehearse. What did he hold dearest, or whom? At the moment, his records. The man waited for an answer. It tripped, stutteringly, off William’s tongue. ‘The pursuit of perfection. Professional pride. Technique.’ He held out his hands in front of himself, making a plea for the records. His hands were shaking. ‘And these, I suppose.’

  The man nodded. ‘You’ll give me an afternoon this week, perhaps. Before Christmas. We’ll fix it. I don’t want anyone else here, do you understand? I don’t want anyone watching me.’

  ‘There are rules—’ William
began.

  ‘And rules,’ the man murmured.

  He was moving towards the door, William following. He saw, to his relief, that the records were neatly reassembled, sitting on the reception desk. A briefcase stood by the door. What the other man had copied, he had no idea. It was what he was leaving behind that mattered. Suddenly everything was polite. Their method of entry was a mystery.

  The man stopped and stared at Cannon’s drawing of William’s hands. He stared for a long time. Then he turned and held out his own. It seemed necessary to reciprocate, like civilized beings at the end of a normal, mutually beneficial meeting. The man wrapped William’s knuckle in both of his own and crushed it. Then he lifted the hand to his own mouth and bit it. William could feel the movement of bone, jarring pain, felt as if the hand would crumble into sharp splinters. This time he screamed long and loud. The hand was released. The scream echoed into the empty hallway, continued as the door closed.

  William put the hand across his mouth, moved his fingers and felt his jaw. He leaned against the door frame and looked at what he could see. Everything as normal, nothing disturbed, as if they had never been there. All the paintings still in place. The mark of an emerging bruise on his own skin.

  9

  The phone rang into the heavy silence and William looked at it as if it were alien. He listened to the message and heard the receiver replaced after the bleep. Slowly he flexed the fingers of his right hand, then cupped it in his left to control the tremor. Poor hand, mottled in colour, intact, the same as ever. It was a playground trick to compress the knuckle like that and make the victim scream. The body was shy of injury to the hand. A circle of purple toothmarks rose in the fleshy part between thumb and forefinger.

  A series of possible and logical actions paraded themselves in the forefront of his mind without prompting him to any movement. He felt sick with a corrosive shame; paralysed by the conviction that he had invited the intrusion, played with this fire and solicited the burning. It made him responsible; he felt like a girl, guilty after the rape because she had been the first to smile and get into his car. This is your fault, William. Then, panic, mollified in part by the presence of bruises without blood; a mental check of the last tetanus jab; all immunizations in place as they always were. No bite more poisonous than a human bite.

  To test the workings of his right hand, he pressed out 1471 on the phone, using three fingers and thumb. You were called today at … The number was Isabella’s. She did this sometimes, never speaking or leaving a message, and he never knew if he was supposed to have known and phoned her back, whether she was lonely, whether she simply wanted a few seconds of his pre-recorded voice to prove he was still alive and earning money. He would have liked, for a moment, a touch of her unsympathetic certainty; he could ask her for help.

  But he did not want help: he wanted redemption. He was too ashamed for help to be appropriate. Seeking help from Isabella, showing her the pathetic bruise to his face and the non-existent damage to his hand, which had made him scream like a baby, would only be tantamount to inviting contempt, while seeking help from Sarah would involve facing the briskness and wisdom of her sympathy along with an offer of strong drink. He decided on strong drink alone. He had got himself into this; he would get himself out.

  William went to his kitchen and made tea with elaborate care. One Earl Grey tea-bag, indecision about whether to have lemon or milk, until he remembered there was no milk, the sharp scent of the tea a restorative. A sip of that, a slug of brandy into a glass, sipped and then gulped, which made him cough. Then he collected the bundle of notes from the desk and went backstage. He felt like a reviled actor, slinking into the wings.

  The room that comforted in its mess. The reminder of the good old days of dentures and National Health practice; dangerous anaesthetics for children; no time for mere technique. Dentures and moulds on surfaces, looking as if they waited for a mouth. No-one had come down here: he would have been able to tell by the disturbance of the white dust. He went back for the second glass of brandy and collected the bottle. He got ice from the fridge, noticed evidence of Tina’s current passion for lemons, added a slice. The first drink had gone straight to his head. Somewhere in here was the first impression he had ever made of Cannon’s teeth. He began to search feverishly, faster and faster, increasing the mess and the sense of hopelessness as he went, and all the time the bruises on the back of his hand faded indiscriminately until only the most prominent, left by the top canines, remained. He stopped the frantic searching; there would be nothing to compare but, all the same, he could swear that those teeth and the teeth that had made the impression would be almost identical.

  There was no telephone here, deliberately, a decision made on grounds of economy, and a state of affairs preserved because he liked it. He wiped a surface clean with his sleeve, blew at the dust, and separated the notes into two piles. They were heavy; he found himself panting, with a vague inclination to cry, which, once recognized, made him cross. Oh, for heaven’s sake, William, what happened after all? Nothing. A shock, easily treated with sugared tea, more brandy.

  He made himself concentrate on the notes. They would be out of order; it might take hours to sort them and there would be patients arriving tomorrow. The thought of that made him tremble; the mere idea of ever again facing a patient without reading the notes first made him nauseous. That was what he had done with the girl-child who inhabited his dreams along with her brother; the one from whom he was sure he had removed the wrong teeth. He looked at the names on the first three folders: none of them meant anything. Without their notes they were strangers, although, if he looked at the chart, memory stirred in the way it might for a fingerprint expert recognizing a familiar set of whorls. The impression left by a bite was similarly unique. He almost wanted the bruises to reappear, to evidence their own origins. It had been a nip; the man had not wanted to eat his hand any more than he had wanted to eat from it.

  William thought of another version of the same scene: the man’s teeth snapping shut on his hand, not with the nip of a puppy but the bite of a Rottweiler, jaws locked, teeth grinding on sinew, remaining like that until prised apart or the hand torn away. The notes were not hopelessly muddled, and it might have been himself who had muddled them more by carrying them downstairs and dropping a few of the folders on the way – no way to treat treasured things, how could he be so clumsy? The mere touch of the folders reassured him, but what might have been taken out? From cursory examination it seemed that nothing was missing from the first few he examined. Gradually he relaxed and slowed down. He isolated the Ms; they were all together, like a family. Ah, Mrs Macdonald, he remembered her from her chart, a lady with fine yellow teeth like a horse and a kindred liking for sugar lumps. Mr Murray, a faceless memory with a highly successful bridge between molar and premolar of which William had been proud. Miss Motcomb, a child of the fluoride age, free of dental caries. He looked for the single folder on Andrew Mitchum, Sarah’s emergency treatment, and could not find it. This was faintly disturbing, but since he doubted that patient would ever return he put second thoughts into the realm of non-being, calmer now. Sister Dominic’s were gone, with the notation of Cannon’s introduction to the sisters. Cannon’s friends, he had written on the front, with a reminder to keep them all together. That did not matter either: he would remember Dominic’s filling. What mattered was that there would be notes for tomorrow’s patients: Tina would be able to find them before anyone arrived. The relief was profound. He sorted through until he found the folder that related to Cannon, filed under that name in the Cs without fuss. The name Smith was added in brackets; there was no address other than the prison, and Cannon’s prisoner number was all that appeared. William sat back, sipped the brandy and read, slowly and thoughtfully, the coded record of what he had done with Cannon and in which order over nine months. A good job, was what – but, then, the raw material had been so much better than he could have hoped. Diseased teeth, but strong and recoverable; not a suggestion
of degenerating bone or receding gums; an extraordinary case of underlying health.

  He remembered Cannon trembling in the chair. Remembered the man downstairs, with his shudder of revulsion, the aggression, the bravado, which were surely the symptoms of fear. He looked again at the notes and felt satisfaction. A good job; he was good at this; in fact, he was excellent. He drummed his fingers on the dusty surface; the pain had gone.

  Now, if these two were twins, there was every chance that the mouths would be similar, but professional instinct was telling William that this man would not have the same underlying strength. There was a lividity about him that suggested otherwise; blood pressure, lines to the face that suggested familiarity with chronic pain. And Cannon, virtually under orders and removed from prison for the purpose of mending his teeth, had had nothing to lose and something to gain from a glimpse of the outside world. Cannon had been curious; Cannon had been allowed to explore; Cannon had sat happily in this room. And Cannon had a capacity to trust: he wanted to believe and he wanted renewed teeth, he had said, because it would so delight his wife. Lord, he’d forgotten that Cannon had a wife. There was nothing about the state of his clothes to suggest it.

  Would this man have the same to lose or gain, and did he have an ounce of faith? William doubted it. Would he stand a dozen or more long afternoons devoted to crowns and veneers? Would he submit quietly to the needle or the offer of Diconal oblivion? William doubted that, too. Would he be able to accept that some of his treatment would be experimental, at least a case of trial and error, and not everything would work first time? Probably not. William would not be able to treat this man in the same way as his brother, but all he knew at this point was that he desperately wanted to try. He craved the challenge of finding the best methods and achieving the best results, making a real difference to the man’s appearance and attitudes, lifting a lifetime’s curse by reversing a now rare condition, the way he had with Cannon, and against that desire the blow to the face and the pain to the hand became, if not forgotten, at least irrelevant.