by Nina Stibbe
‘How have you cured her?’ I asked Abe.
‘I contacted her subconscious and found the reason she was shoplifting,’ he said.
‘And why was she?’
‘I can’t discuss my client.’
‘Shops have got cameras, Lizzie,’ said my mother. ‘Hidden cameras.’
This really was very good news, not least because it meant I could go shopping with her and not have to constantly check my bag, pockets or hood.
Abe tried to give me some money to thank me for cementing his crown but my mother refused on my behalf–for legal reasons–so he insisted on taking us all around the corner to the Raj Restaurant for a lunch of spicy potato pastries, which was very nice. Abe kept pretending the crown had fallen out, which was funny the first few times, but my mother died laughing every time even though she’d had hardly anything to drink. Finally, they got up to leave.
‘Remember to write this up in your journal, darling,’ she told me, ‘under G for guerrilla dentistry.’
6. The Missing Premolars
One Sunday around then, my sister came and I served her a traditional roast with all the trimmings, albeit no meat. She’d heard on the grapevine that our father was planning to spend a year in the USA, teaching at a management college in Massachusetts. His wife had announced this possibility to the parents of a friend of someone who knew my sister. So she now knew too, and though my father and his wife didn’t know that she knew, she was seriously thinking she might go with them.
This didn’t interest me much but she was keen to examine the subject.
‘I quite fancy a year in America,’ she said.
I only wanted to talk about Andy. I asked her what she recalled of the Nicolello family, and of him. I was beginning to wonder whether his good looks in adulthood might offset the weirdness of his upbringing. That kind of thing.
‘Andy Nicolello,’ I said, ‘do you remember him?’
‘Rings a bell.’
‘He was one of the Nicolellos who lived near the soap factory.’
‘The Flintstones!’ she said. ‘Oh my God, I’d forgotten about them.’
‘What about them?’ I asked.
‘Well, they were odd–didn’t they live like cavemen?’
‘They didn’t have a telly, that was all.’
‘No, it was more than that. They were bizarre.’
‘In what way?’ I pressed. ‘What did they do?’
‘Oh my God, the parents, the mum and dad,’ she said excitedly, then whispered, ‘and oh my God, Lizzie–weren’t they the suicide-pact couple?’
‘Yes, but the story is probably exaggerated. Anyway, he’s really good-looking now,’ I said, ‘and has a great job and loves telly.’
‘You’re not going out with him, are you?’
‘Not as such. Why? Do you think it’s a bad idea?’
‘Yes, I do. How old is he?’
‘Twenty-two, twenty-three.’
‘Look–you’re weird, he’s weird, together you’ll be a million times weirder. Your mutual weirdness will reflect for ever–like mirrors that face each other.’ That was the way my sister thought and spoke.
I was a bit taken aback by this, to be quite honest. Sure, I was a secret non-drinker, disliked chips, didn’t like eating in public, and didn’t follow fashion quite as closely as other girls my age–but who didn’t have a few quirks? And anyway, how did my sister become so normal that she could judge me? I changed the subject by reminding her that she was six years overdue for a dental check-up. She knew it.
‘Is Wintergreen any good?’ she asked.
‘He’s OK. Shall I book you in?’
‘I suppose so.’
I was anxious when a week or so later my sister came in to see JP. Early experiences had turned her into a dentist-hater, plus she had a fear of throwing her head back and having things put in her mouth.
‘Would you like to come through now, Miss Vogel,’ I said, upbeat but secretly on high alert. She straightened the magazines and came through, unsmiling, then slid into the chair. After I’d put the bib loosely around her neck, she drummed the armrests and looked from side to side.
JP entered. ‘Hullo, hullo,’ he boomed, looking over his specs at her dental card. I’d written Lizzie Vogel’s sister at the top.
‘So, you’re Lizzie Vogel’s sister and we’re going to take a little look at you, are we?’
Annoyed at being addressed in this manner and from behind, she twisted around in the chair.
‘Are you speaking to me?’ she said.
JP and I exchanged a look.
I’d filled out the card before she arrived and had found writing her details, which I knew so well, unexpectedly moving. I knew everything about this girl. I could mark up the tooth chart in the most exacting detail. I knew for instance that she had a tiny, slightly discoloured, distal silicate filling in her upper right two, that JP might suggest replacing.
I knew that, some years ago at aged thirteen and a half, she’d had both upper fours removed in preparation for orthodontic treatment she’d never completed.
My sister’s name is Thomasin, after Thomasin Yeobright from Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. It’s pronounced Tamsin, but she shortens it to Tina because when we were small someone struggling to recall her name landed on ‘Tina’ by accident and from then on that’s what she’s been. My mother only ever planned for it to be shortened to Tommie. Writing her birth date–which was and still is the most important day of the year, it being her birthday and the gateway to the autumn–I’d recalled the party games she loved, which were always taken seriously: picking up dried peas with a straw, hiding and seeking, pinning tails on donkeys, musical chairs, that kind of thing. She was an accomplished apple-bobber, knowing to go into the water hard, breathing out robustly, forcing the apple to the bottom of the receptacle so that she could sink both upper and lower teeth into it, and come up with it properly impaled. It’s no good mouthing at the apple, trying to get hold of it as it floats. Only a shark could achieve that, or some kind of water snake. I’d never known her beaten, and yet, here she was now–two missing teeth, an uncorrected class two occlusion and, most poignantly of all, a nervous patient.
I’d marked her card NP which was our secret code for Nervous Patient and this I pointed out to JP. He shrugged and opened his hands–he’d forgotten the meaning. So I scrawled Nervous Patient across the top. I didn’t want him assuming she’d have the same impressive pain threshold and cooperative attitude as I had–just because we were blood relatives.
‘She’s a nervous patient,’ I said, annoyed with both of them.
JP moved to the treatment table and looked down at her. ‘Is that right, Thomasin–you’re a nervous patient?’
‘She goes by Tina,’ I said. I had written Tina in brackets on the card but that was too much for JP to cope with.
‘I wouldn’t say I’m nervous–I just dislike dentists.’
‘Not all dentists,’ I laughed.
‘I hope not,’ said JP.
‘I had trouble with the previous one, and it put me off.’
‘You went to…’ He glanced at her card again. ‘Ah, Cunningham, Pope and Fisher. And who treated you there?’
‘Mr Fisher.’ As Tina said it, I braced myself.
Mr Cunningham had been our dentist during childhood and had been perfectly nice–as nice as a private dentist would ever be to a family losing its toehold and sliding bumpily down the social ladder–and we’d enjoyed his gentle rebukes and jokes about us eating too many Spangles and we liked his glamorous eyebrows. I must say he put in an inordinate amount of amalgam into our hundred or so teeth and had sold my mother all sorts of mini-brushes and mouthwash for the periodontal gum condition brought on by all her pregnancies, pills and alcohol, but he was nice.
In the mid-1970s, though, my family were among the first to be relegated when the practice took on a junior colleague. Mr Fisher was a divorcee, he wore his hair in a middle parting, and his tunic was so tigh
t you could see his buttocks clench as he leaned over. I couldn’t believe someone who looked as though he’d lick the gravy off a plate and tease a dog could be a dentist and be permitted to look so closely into another person’s body. He seemed wrong for it.
Mr Fisher had an interest in children’s dentistry, especially orthodontics, and showed an aptitude for making parents conscious of slight misalignments and crookedness in their children’s teeth.
‘Look at this overcrowding,’ he might say, or, ‘it would only take one hockey ball to smash those prominent front teeth right in.’ He didn’t worry about the long-term effect robust orthodontic treatment might have on the child’s bite, or other details. He was only after plaudits from his colleagues for bringing in such lucrative work–and was soon made a partner. Thinking about it now, perhaps he was a Libra.
Anyway, Mr Fisher joined a list of men who exploited our mother for their sexual gratification and/or material gain. That on its own wouldn’t usually provoke violence–those men were often despised by the end of it but usually got away unharmed. Mr Fisher, though, made the mistake of involving my sister’s teeth.
What did he do? Firstly, he convinced my mother that Tina would benefit greatly from orthodontic treatment to bring her upper incisors back into line after years of thumb-sucking had protuberated them.
‘How would she benefit?’ asked my mother, looking at my sister with a cocked head, and thinking as she did that her little girl was perfect with those teeth exactly as they were, resting on her plump lower lip as if she were waiting for the answers to life’s questions.
Mr Fisher insisted that the extraction of two upper teeth followed by twelve months wearing a simple appliance would catch her a better class of husband–that was how he put it. My sister quite liked being the centre of an exciting new thing–her family around her and highly attentive. I could see the attraction of it all and don’t blame her for going wholeheartedly along with it.
My mother wasn’t in a position to pay for the suggested treatment, having had one financial blow after another, and with us getting more and more expensive to keep. Perhaps she’d find a dentist to do this work on the NHS, she told Mr Fisher, but he wouldn’t hear of it. We were loyal patients, and he’d do my sister’s orthodontics on the NHS, even though the practice generally didn’t. She mustn’t worry her pretty, sexy, woozy little head about it.
Soon after that, Mr Fisher dropped in at our house on his way to a nearby riverbank for a spot of night fishing, only he never left our house and didn’t go fishing. Instead he and our mother got drunk and had sex on the carpet. He had no dignity about it and they didn’t even close the sitting-room door and our dog wandered in. For once, we children hoped very much he wouldn’t become our new man at the helm. He was a dentist with a grunty voice and a middle parting, and he wore awful tight jeans.
My sister was in the chair the following week and Mr Fisher administered a local anaesthetic via four injections; two into the roof of her mouth and two into the soft tissue under her lip. After that, he suggested that my mother and I might like to step into the waiting room, but Tina said we mustn’t go. So we remained around the chair, like the family at a deathbed, as Mr Fisher extracted two of her healthy adult teeth–and it was terrible. The extractions were straightforward enough–good, single-rooted premolars, cleanly brought out–but there was something wrong in the air. It felt as if this were a tableau to symbolize every dreadful thing we’d been through, except it wasn’t our mother being dragged about and manhandled–this time the evil had settled upon my sister and it was in her mouth with forceps, brutally assaulting her, but simultaneously smiling and clenching its buttocks. Tina and I did not take our eyes off each other, even as Mr Fisher twisted the teeth out. We didn’t even blink. She gripped our mother’s hand but looked at me. It was frightful. All the time I knew she was thinking she’d been a fool to agree to this–and I thought the same.
We drove home, the three of us in tears. My sister, changed somehow, was trembling. And my mother, knowing she’d made some awful bargain, could hardly keep the car in a straight line on the road. I suggested we call in at the Travelling Man for a cup of something–it was out of character but I felt we might otherwise die. My mother drove on, breathing through clenched teeth and occasionally saying, ‘All shall be well, all shall be well,’ which someone had taught her to say when things were not.
Soon after my sister’s gums had healed Mr Fisher got back together with his ex-wife, Anthea, and for that reason and others, our mother was less keen to have sex with him. They had an argument in our garden. It was difficult to get an appointment with him to have my sister’s appliance fitted–he was suddenly very busy. Eventually, we went to the surgery without even having an appointment because it was all beginning to seem a bit odd and my mother was feeling guilty and sick about the whole thing.
She was told by the receptionist, ‘Mr Fisher regrets that he won’t be able to fit Thomasin’s appliance until you’ve settled your account for the consultation, the surgical treatment and the manufacture of the orthodontic appliance.’
The bill was over two hundred pounds, which is thousands in today’s money and was millions in non-money terms, and every drop of blood in my mother’s head drained away and even her lips went white. She wobbled. A strong smell of pepper filled my nose and my eyes brimmed with tears.
Mr Fisher supposed that our mother would be alone in understanding what had transpired, that only she would be able to follow this saga–its offers and arrangements and reprisals–and that she would feel ashamed and disappear. He supposed her children too young, naive, innocent to appreciate the rules. But it was not so. We’d deciphered games more complex than this one, and with higher stakes.
We retired to the waiting room and sat quietly in its regency splendour. My eyes landed upon a beautiful print of Gimcrack the grey thoroughbred on Newmarket Downs, originally painted by Stubbs. Did horses look like that in Stubbs’s day? Or was he like all those cave painters, and just couldn’t do realistic horse necks?
My sister got up out of her chair.
‘Won’t be a moment,’ she said, and walked across the parquet hall to Fisher’s surgery door. She was thirteen years old, tall and strong, and had held a snake, steered a horse no one else could ride, and swallowed a wasp that had stung her throat in passing and meant she had to wait at the doctor’s in case her tubes all closed down. They didn’t. She’d beaten bigger men than Mr Fisher. We peered into the hall as she opened the surgery door and asked him for her orthodontic appliance.
‘Could you give me my brace, please?’ she said.
Mr Fisher called out to the receptionist in a slightly panicked voice, ‘Jean, could you help this patient a moment, please.’
‘Where is my appliance?’ repeated my sister. ‘You may as well give it to me.’
Mr Fisher’s colleagues now appeared in the hallway, scratching their heads. Mr Cunningham, our old dentist, approached him with his hand up to his face and spoke quietly into his knuckles, as if he were coughing.
‘No!’ said Mr Fisher. ‘Mrs Vogel must settle the account first.’
‘But you said, very clearly, that you’d treat me on the National Health,’ said Tina. ‘I heard you–we all heard you.’
‘I did not say that.’ Mr Fisher gazed around. He was a good actor, and it was almost as though he believed himself.
‘You’re a liar,’ said my sister. ‘Tell the truth or I’m going to make a huge scene.’
‘I did not offer to treat you on the NHS,’ lied Mr Fisher again.
And so Tina smacked him across the face with the back of her hand–it was a good-looking strike, which spun his face to the side and made the audience gasp. I think about that smack often–it’s nice to be able to write about it. It must have been considerably more painful than a slap. With a slap, the travelling hand, being slightly concave, collects air, which buffers the impact. A backhanded smack is more like a punch, in terms of pain.
‘Now
get me my appliance or you will be sorry,’ said Tina.
The nurse scampered around and then approached my sister, handing her the appliance which was clamped on to a plaster model of her upper jaw.
‘Thank you.’
Tina removed the appliance from the model, dropped it and crushed it beneath her foot like a cigarette end.
She looked up at Mr Fisher–as did several people. There was quite a crowd now, as patients who’d been in the waiting room had come into the hallway.
‘Men like you disgust me. You are disgusting.’ And with that she threw the plaster model at his medical light and it exploded with a flash and the room went dim.
None of us ever returned to Cunningham, Pope & Fisher, our mother never paid the bill, and my sister never got her teeth sorted. But I always hoped the gossip reached his wife, Anthea.
‘And what did Mr Fisher do to upset you?’ asked JP.
I butted in. ‘Mr Fisher didn’t do anything… she just found him a bit brusque.’
‘I’m afraid I ended up having to hit him.’
‘Oh.’ JP lifted his head to recall a fragment of gossip. ‘Aha, the famous slap. That was you, was it? We heard about that.’ And he shot a look at me, and then at Tammy.
Tina settled back in the chair now, relaxed. She’d announced herself and knew she’d get the best of treatment. JP passed over the card and called out her tooth chart to me, quite unnecessarily.
‘Your upper fours have been extracted,’ he told her, as if she might not have realized.
‘Yes,’ said Tina, ‘I know.’
7. Masonic Improvements
Things started to improve all round. I was gaining confidence in the surgery, and was now fully adept at managing the instruments and equipment. Also, I had finally learned from Tammy how to hold patients’ arms down–quite forcibly if necessary–during treatments to prevent the seizing of the hand-piece, which could actually pose a risk to JP’s life. I was good at wiping them down afterwards (the patients) and becoming quite skilful at reapplying lipstick and make-up to shaky-handed ladies if need be. Since becoming an avid magazine reader I’d collected a little bag of free make-up samples especially for this purpose and could sort them out in a trice. Once, in an early attempt, I’d been a tiny bit heavy-handed with Rimmel’s ‘Thunderclap’ eyeshadow, and a patient’s relative had phoned the surgery later to enquire about the ‘bruising around her eyes’.