by Nina Stibbe
It came to a head when I inadvertently used a blue ink biro to write a name (Mrs Lydia Marshall–Insp.) in the appointment book and Tammy asked me, tearfully, what I was planning to do if Mrs Lydia Marshall rang up to cancel.
‘You won’t be able to erase the name,’ she said.
‘Well,’ I replied, ‘then I’ll resign.’
But this didn’t go on for long. Tammy apologized for her mood swings. ‘I’m sorry I’m being so snippy,’ she said. ‘It’s the upheaval of trying to settle into this new life with JP–it’s affecting my mental balance.’
I sympathized. We’d read the same article about how moving house was upsetting–like jet lag, only worse–and that even the driest hair could go greasy overnight and vice versa. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘my mother used to suffer with her moods.’
Moods notwithstanding, I preferred it when Tammy was in the surgery. There were certain jobs I disliked–wiping the cactuses down, waking JP from his naps, cleaning his spectacles and, worst of all, I hated break times with him–talking to him and feeding him his cigarettes–all of which I had to do when I was in sole charge. One break time when it had been just the two of us and I was feeding him a Hamlet while we had our coffee, he returned to the subject of his son’s vasectomy.
‘I know you must be thinking, “It’s Junior’s life,” and up to him whether or not he procreates,’ he said, ‘but it has hit me hard, nurse. I don’t think you could possibly understand.’
‘Do you think it’s because you want a grandchild?’ I said.
‘A grandchild, yes, of course, but it’s more complicated than that, nurse. It’s the sudden realization that my line–my bloodline–will die out.’
He sucked the Hamlet like an orphaned calf on a bottle and almost had it out of my fingers.
‘Your quest for immortality has been thwarted,’ I said, having recently read that this was essentially what drove the species forward.
‘Yes, that’s about it.’ When he spoke, I could see the blue veins on the underside of his tongue as he rolled it–like a ham horn on a plate of mixed hors d’oeuvres–and exhaled through it.
‘If you know that, why can’t you just have another baby yourself?’ I asked. ‘With Tammy.’
‘Tammy hates children–surely you’ve noticed?’
‘Other people’s, yes,’ I said, ‘but she might like her own.’
‘She’s a bit long in the tooth for all that, anyway.’
‘My mother is the same age and she had a baby recently,’ I said. ‘Or you could go for a test-tube one, like Louise Brown.’
‘Hmm?’ he said, puffing away. ‘Thank you, nurse.’
He took a few more puffs and left me in the staffroom holding the panatella. I heard him trot upstairs humming Bach’s ‘Air on the G String’ or, as my mother would want me to point out, not Bach’s–as such–but Wilhelm’s arrangement of the second movement in the Orchestral Suite Number 3.
I was tempted to take a puff on the little cigar myself–it was most pleasant-smelling–but the end was the usual soggy mess. I stubbed it out, lit myself an ordinary cigarette and gazed out of the window, and I was just imagining a test-tube baby when I heard the door go and the call, ‘Mercurial!’ It was Andy Nicolello. I cantered downstairs as fast as I could.
‘Hello,’ I said, ‘you’re early.’
‘I’ve got Mrs Woodward’s partial upper.’
Before we could have our usual daily smile Mrs Woodward herself stumbled in. Tammy then came marching in too and announced for all to hear that she’d come back to work because she was sick and tired of throwing toys for the cat and answering the door to gypsies. Andy passed me the dental delivery and left. I watched through the window as he strode to the company moped, pulled on his helmet, flipped the visor down and disappeared into the traffic on Station Road.
Mrs Woodward had brought a leaflet for JP, which she’d obviously got from her vicar husband, entitled Finding Acceptance through God, and as soon as she had slumped into the chair, she handed it to him. He stared at it for a moment, and put it aside without making any comment.
‘Right, let’s try this new denture, shall we,’ he said, and he angled it into her mouth.
I always felt it slightly intrusive watching a patient as they explored the altered landscape of their mouth after the fitting of a new denture, crown or filling. Rootling around with their tongue, concerned, blinking, assessing, nervous. It seemed so personal, so intimate, like watching someone eating a yoghurt.
Mrs Woodward’s new denture fitted like a glove and she declared the breakage of the old one a blessing in disguise. ‘I hadn’t known a denture could feel this comfortable,’ she said, sounding just like an advert, and with a new confidence she leaned forward, took up the leaflet and waved it in JP’s direction. ‘If ever you feel you’d like to talk things through, my husband would be more than happy—’
JP waved it aside, snatched Mrs Woodward’s chin and pushed her back into the chair. ‘That won’t be necessary, Mrs Wood. I’d like you to be the first to know,’ he said, ‘my partner and I have decided to try for a baby of our own.’
Mrs Woodward’s mouth fell open and her eyes strained to look at Tammy who stood up too quickly, steadied herself on the desk and sat back down again.
‘Now, close your mouth, please.’
I didn’t see Tammy for a while after the announcement of the baby; she had a few days at home ‘taking cactus cuttings’. But when she returned all seemed well.
‘So, you’re trying for a baby,’ I said.
‘Yah, absolutely,’ said Tammy. ‘JP’s got me on a fertility programme–I can’t eat seeds or legumes or liver sausage, I can’t go near caged birds, sheep, or people with diseases –’ she listed them on her fingers–‘and I have to put my feet up.’
‘Are you partial to liver sausage?’ I asked.
‘Are you kidding?’ she shrieked. ‘The only reason we went to the Ardèche last year was for the andouillette.’
‘Bad luck,’ I said.
‘Good news though, JP’s agreed we should get married.’
‘Well, congratulations! Let me know if there’s anything I can do,’ I said, as if there’d been a death in the family.
5. The Hoover Aristocrat
I had long telephone conversations with Melody who had access to a pay phone in the nurses’ home at Luton and Dunstable that never asked for any money after the first coin. She loved Luton, she told me, especially the nightlife, and said the men there were streets ahead of Leicester men sexually–but though I loved to hear this, I never asked for details. She was particularly looking for a Virgo because they were good with money and people but avoiding a Libra because they were greedy and bad with people. I also spoke to my mother on the phone regularly because she was frivolous in that regard and would ring up to ask whether I’d borrowed her copy of Roget’s Thesaurus, because Jack needed it for his essays, etc. I often took these calls in the surgery because the flex was so long and the chair so comfortable. I made the miraculous discovery that if someone rang me I could answer on the upstairs extension, hang up, run downstairs, pick up the receiver in the surgery and they’d still be there on the line.
These calls became important to me because I had surprisingly few visitors to the flat in the early days–my sister never seemed to fancy the two-bus journey–and no invitations out except from Tammy, and even they’d dried up once she was on the fertility programme. And whatever my mother might say about never admitting it, I was lonely. Adulthood had come upon me like the creeping darkness of night and I felt lost. As a child I’d have wandered about until I found someone to play with, whether their parents liked it or not, or a building site to run around, or an injured bird to nurse back to health, and that would have been me happy.
I wished I could go for a dog walk, because I was lonely not only for people but for dogs, and the sight of horses and cows, the early spring hedgerows alive with young sparrows and buds and new green leaves. Now all I saw were
the khaki limbs and hairy, dust-covered leaves of Tammy’s violets and cactuses, and the occasional, window-bound geranium or fake rose–whose petals folded back like the ears of an angry mule–and all I had to look forward to were potted daisies on dark steps and sunless streets, with velvety middles that were threadbare like old cushions. And the occasional sweet William, whose foliage would slowly rot in the water of the cut-glass vase.
And now all I had to do was trail around the shops looking at money-wasting, time-wasting, life-wasting rubbish, or issue vague invitations to busy people who only wanted to get drunk somehow, somewhere.
I offered the use of the Hoover Aristocrat to my sister. She thanked me but declined, claiming to enjoy going to the launderette where, apparently, fellow nurses and trainee doctors played ‘Who Am I?’ and ‘20 Questions’ while their washes went through, and then helped each other with the folding. It was a student ritual I wouldn’t understand.
Even my mother–who seemed like a frequent visitor–was actually most interested in the quiet solitude of my empty flat while I was downstairs, and used it to work on her novel in peace before collecting baby Danny from Curious Minds.
Andy Nicolello called at the surgery most afternoons to deliver or collect dental items, riding an old-fashioned moped with a huge box on the back featuring Mercurial’s winged-feet emblem, and L-plates. One day I looked up to smile ‘hello/goodbye’ and to my astonishment he blew me a kiss. I caught it in my hands and then, realizing how silly it was, had to turn away, shy. It was as though he had dragged me into a silent movie with him. And then he was gone and the door clanged me back to my senses.
Tammy had noticed and though she smiled, she told me later that JP would hate it if I started going out with him. ‘Oh, my gosh, please do not start dating Andy from Mercurial,’ was how she put it. ‘He really isn’t suitable.’
She told me Andy was a radical. He’d protested outside the Swan Hotel because the BDA hadn’t invited the technicians to the annual winter dinner dance. ‘The dentists and their wives arrived in their finery and there he was, with a placard.’
‘Oh.’
‘And JP literally can’t stand him.’
‘Hmm, I think it’s mutual,’ I said. ‘I mean, Andy probably feels the same.’
‘I know what mutual means, thank you,’ said Tammy, which surprised me.
That blown kiss plus JP’s theoretical disapproval plus general boredom/loneliness plus hormones urging me to procreate plus my athlete’s foot had turned me into an idiot and soon I was brushing my hair and applying lipgloss after tea break in preparation for the thirty-second encounter I might have with Andy Nicolello. And, if there was no collection or delivery, or old Mr Burridge called instead, I’d be devastated and would will his old ailment to flare up and prevent him from making the next one.
‘How’s your phlebitis, Mr Burridge?’ I’d ask, as if reminding him of it might bring it on. And finally one afternoon, when Andy appeared for a late pick-up, I found myself boasting of my plan to paint some shelves in the flat.
‘Cherry red,’ I said.
‘What, you live upstairs, here?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘On your own?’
‘Yes. Come up and have a look.’
Andy very much liked my vision for the flat (French bistro). He liked everything–television, bathroom, views–but most of all he liked the Hoover Aristocrat and he squatted beside it as if it were a vintage car or a poorly alien we’d found in the cellar. And even though it was far, far too soon, I heard myself say, ‘Bring a load of laundry over any time,’ and he laughed.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t.’
But after we’d had a cup of coffee and just before he left, he asked if I were serious about the laundry.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘deadly.’
I could never go out with Andy, I reminded myself, as through the window I watched him straddle the Mercurial moped and zoom off into the traffic. I couldn’t care less what Tammy thought, or JP, but however handsome, likeable and normal he seemed nowadays, I could only befriend him privately. I couldn’t go out with him publicly. I needed someone normal and so did he–God, he really did. I would never do. I’d never cope.
I must impress upon you that Andy was from the most famously eccentric family in the whole of the county if not the Midlands. I mean, there were probably worse families, but his was known about; celebrated, even. The worst of the rumours held it that his parents had entered into a suicide pact involving gas or cyanide and that one of them had tried to swerve it at the last moment only to die slowly and in agony. The two of us going out would be like when two really flamboyant people get together, or two extremely shy people, two clowns, two punks, two long-distance runners, two jailbirds, two space freaks, two artists–all the people around nudging each other and saying, ‘Pity the children,’ and that kind of thing. And apart from that, I couldn’t see what we had in common.
I tried to picture us side by side, walking to the Princess Charlotte or the Arts Café, where the tables were in the shape of artists’ palettes and the chipped mugs all had star signs and the customers were arty and unusual, but still all I could imagine was people shaking their heads and grimacing. I wondered if we might become close enough for me to put Abe from Abraham’s Motors on to him, who was apparently becoming a dab hand at shame-counselling and dragging people out of the shadows of family madness, via positive chit-chat.
As luck would have it, Andy Nicolello’s first laundry visit coincided with an impromptu visit from my mother and Abe. A mixed-coloureds load had just finished and he’d held his shirts up to the window, impressed, like a woman in an advert, and was hanging them over the rack when they appeared. I made the introductions. Abe, this is Andy; Andy, this is my mother; Mum, this is Andy; Andy, this is Abe.
There was high excitement because Abe’s porcelain-bonded jacket crown (upper left two) had pinged out that morning while he’d been flossing. I must say, I admired Abe for flossing so thoroughly, when most men seemed to think it unnecessary.
The problem, and the reason they’d come to me, was that Abe’s dentist, Dr Chandra, was based at the Government Dental College of Bangalore and Abe had no plans to go there in the foreseeable future.
‘I wonder,’ my mother said, ‘do you think you might have a go at sticking it back in, rather than him having to fly all the way to Bangalore, or go on bended knee to some hideous old dentist?’
‘If the crown and post are still intact, it’s just a case of mixing a bit of cement,’ I said.
And after some coffee, we wandered down to the surgery, switched the lights on and got Abe comfy in the chair. I turned the crown over in my hands. It was in perfect condition, as was the tooth post. I passed it to Andy who picked about inside the crown with a probe to remove the old cement. I mixed some new and gently, exaggeratedly carefully, stuck it back in. I held it in place for two full minutes and stared around the room, just the way JP did. I mentioned the weather and studied the skin around Abe’s handsome eyes. I checked the bite with articulating paper and all was well. Abe took this in his stride. My mother seemed proud.
‘Isn’t she wonderful, Abe?’ she said.
‘Yes, she is,’ he agreed.
Back upstairs, Andy adjusted his laundry on the rack while I made more coffee.
‘How long until you qualify?’ Abe asked, inspecting his smile in the mirror. ‘Maybe I will finally leave Dr Chandra.’
‘Oh, no, I’ll never qualify–I’m just a dental assistant,’ I said. ‘I will only ever assist.’
‘Lizzie’s the type to paddle along with the tide for years and then suddenly win a dog-photography competition or something,’ my mother chipped in.
‘Oh, you’re a photographer?’ said Abe.
‘No,’ I replied, ‘she just means I’m not qualified at anything.’
My mother chose this moment to heap praise on my younger brother, Jack, who had been offered a place at the University College London and w
ouldn’t have to paddle along waiting for a dog-photography competition.
‘UCL,’ she emphasized, ‘where they display the preserved head of Jeremy Bentham in a special box,’ as if this made the place even more prestigious. ‘Jeremy Bentham the philosopher.’
‘How’s your training going?’ I asked Abe.
‘It’s going very well, thank you,’ he said, in a most considered manner.
‘He’s a marvel,’ said my mother. ‘He’s cured my shoplifting.’
My cheeks flushed, I turned in panic to Andy to indicate that she was talking in jest, but he was nodding.
‘That’s good news,’ he said, ‘well done.’
And so I didn’t have to apologize or try to pass it off as a joke. I was able to say how pleased I was too.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘God almighty, we’ve had some scrapes.’
And we had. Not a month previously we’d been in Woolco and an assistant had followed us out of the store, calling, ‘Excuse me, madam, excuse me.’ And we’d both run full pelt into the car park with shopping bags containing two bottles of stolen Scotch and a block of Red Leicester cheese. When the assistant caught up with us at the exit it turned out my mother had left her cheque book in the store.
‘Whew,’ he said, ‘I thought I’d never catch you.’
We had thanked him and laughed and said something about being in a hurry to get home.