by Nina Stibbe
Another time, early on, I’d straightened a man’s shirt and tie after a gruelling extraction, brushed his hair out of his face with my hand, and wiped the dots of blood from the corners of his mouth. I fell slightly in love with him, even though I knew that was probably wrong of me.
Surgery etiquette was soon second nature to me. I knew, for instance, never to laugh at someone’s teeth, especially when they removed them. Never to heave or gasp, even at the worst, most rotten stumps. Never to underestimate how important a person’s teeth were. I quickly overtook JP and Tammy in this regard even though I was by far their junior.
Also, life in the flat became a bit nicer and I was less lonely now that I had Andy popping in from time to time with his laundry. And Tammy, who’d been given a book on optimizing her fertility, was now enjoying researching ovulation and conception and wedding venues and a much calmer presence. Meanwhile my mother’s novel was coming along in leaps and bounds–a whole episode of her life, involving a beagle and Princess Margaret, had come back to her in vivid detail and was now being cleverly incorporated into the middle section. Allegorically.
Just then, though, Bill Turner, JP’s dentist pal from up the road, put a spanner in the works. Due to unusual plaque build-up he had started coming in every few weeks to have his teeth cleaned with JP’s ultrasonic scaler. I liked Bill. He’d been evacuated to the Midlands as a teenager after narrowly escaping a bomb in the East End, and had been fostered by a well-to-do couple who introduced him to oranges and got him into medical school even though he was a cockney. I didn’t know how to explain his caked-up teeth. I imagined he literally didn’t bother flossing, and stuffed himself on candy prawns and Toffos all night, watching telly–his wife Jossy being the sort to demand a telly in the bedroom, and Bill the sort to fall asleep without cleaning his teeth, which was one of the dangers of tellies in bedrooms.
During these visits Bill talked freely about his life, telling us about his home-grown asparagus, his golf clubs, his three high-achieving sons, but most alluringly of all, his Freemasonry activities: the fine white gloves, ceremonial goings-on and handshakes, as well as the mutually beneficial, tit-for-tat arrangements involving golf and speeding tickets, admittance to theatres and nuclear bunkers, and so on. JP was bewitched.
‘Freemasonry sounds marvellous, Bill,’ he might typically say as he chipped away at the horribly caked-up teeth. ‘Do you think you can get me in?’
‘Sure, I’m happy to nominate you to the lodge,’ Bill might say, rinsing out, ‘but you’ll need to clean your act up a bit first.’
‘What do you mean?’ said JP.
Bill spelled out what he needed to do. First and foremost, JP needed to look the part, the surgery and building needed a facelift too, and then there was his philanthropy profile to improve.
‘Philanthropy?’ said JP. ‘Don’t tell me I have to adopt a Biafran.’
‘No, just some charitable work, something visible, along the lines of my garden parties for the Retired Airman’s Fund,’ said Bill.
‘You could sponsor St Pippin’s Home for Pets,’ I suggested, but was ignored.
‘Or do what Jacobs up the road has done,’ said Bill.
‘What?’ asked Tammy, scribbling into a notebook.
‘He’s had a nuclear bunker put in his back garden. That did the trick all right.’
Tammy asked some awkward questions.
‘I still don’t see what’s in it for JP,’ she said.
‘Look,’ said Bill, ‘imagine that, right now, JP is a fine, healthy cactus, but that after joining the Freemasons he’ll flower, metaphorically speaking, in the eyes of everyone around and he’ll have people queueing up to help him, if he needs help for anything whatsoever.’
However much I liked Bill, the consequences of his Freemasonry talk were profound and inconvenient. JP took on a decorating firm, two miserable old men who were around for weeks on end, burning off old paint, then scraping, sanding, priming, undercoating, and painting the whole ground floor, as slowly as possible. Sending up dust and fumes and smells. The patients were impressed though. I noticed how much they admired the works being done. Every single one of them mentioned it, and JP loved it.
‘I’d do it myself, but I haven’t the time,’ he’d say.
New things kept arriving–surgical instruments, a top-of-the-range Flexi 400S surgery light–and ornamental rustic barrels containing laurel bushes appeared either side of the front door. Mr Skidmore put in three On-Guard battery smoke alarms, and, worst of all, two orange three-drawer filing cabinets to replace the rusty old khaki ones, which meant re-filing every single dental card. Also, because the new drawer mechanisms were fiercer than the old ones, Tammy said we must practise opening and closing the drawers as silently as possible so that we could be continually filing all day, in between jobs–even while patients were having elaborate or sensitive treatments–without causing a disturbance. Tammy was an expert at this kind of thing and demonstrated her technique–a sort of pull outward but at the same time pushing slightly, to stop the dragging vibration. And when closing (this being the real problem, noise-wise), resisting the roll on the final inch toward closure, which produced a jolting clack.
‘Don’t let the drawer take control–imagine it’s a frisky horse and the drawer handle is your bridle.’ She wasn’t a rider.
Tammy invented a game. She’d hide around the corner and try to hear me opening and closing a drawer. I used to just stand there and she’d call out, ‘Well done, I didn’t hear a thing.’
It was the cost of everything, though, that worried Tammy the most–she’d got her wedding and honeymoon cruise to think of, and after settling well at home she suddenly started to come in more, to ‘drum up business’. JP had already been in the habit of vaguely mentioning possible treatments but now, under Tammy’s watchful eye, he was making patients fully aware of ‘all the options’ for dental restorations including expensive, private procedures–e.g. gold crowns instead of fillings, white fillings instead of silver, and bridges instead of dentures. Tammy was then quite forcefully encouraging them in a follow-up move in the waiting room, and if cost was ever the barrier to having the fancier treatment she might say, ‘Think how much you spend on your hair in a year,’ and if it was a man, ‘Think how much your wife spends on her hair every year.’ And quite soon JP was doing more than just silver fillings, plastic dentures and cleaning.
Things progressed slowly with Andy Nicolello and me. I mean, we had cups of tea while his laundry went through, and he’d shout at newsreaders on the television and criticize JP’s dental impressions, and call him ‘Plasticine Joe’ and ‘Farah-man’, referring to his slightly too-small hopsack trousers.
Sometimes we might dash up to the Old Horse for the duration of the mixed-coloureds cycle but Andy wouldn’t risk leaving the tumble dryer unattended because in his head all those crackling synthetic fibres would be overheating and tiny bits of fluff catching fire, and so forth. He was as wary of electricity as people in the olden days who’d had buckets of sand on standby in case of flames leaping out of sockets, and switched off their fridges at bedtime and risked their luncheon meat going off and the milk turning sour, just for the peace of mind.
The romance was beginning, I could feel it. On our walks up and down between the wash and the dry, we’d link arms, and I’d make sure we were walking along in step–right leg, left leg, right leg–and if not I’d do a little skip to correct it and he’d sometimes pull me in closer. It was slow. Slow but sure.
If I had any complaints about Andy it was his professional pride. He’d been taught to manufacture dentures by Mr Burridge–whose name in the industry was ‘Mr Softee’ because of his marvellously comfortable dentures–and Mr Burridge himself had apparently conceded that Andy had surpassed him in this respect and was the best apprentice they’d ever had.
It was because of this that I boasted about having filled a tooth for JP. I laughed about how the drill had almost flown out of my hand. In truth, JP had done
the important drilling himself, but because of the difficult angle (upper right seven) and limited visibility, he’d had to call upon me to pack the amalgam into the cavity and, the following day, to smooth it off with a burr attached to the drill. And it served me right that Andy had a tooth that needed a tidy-up and refill and now assumed I’d be willing and able to do it for him and that, before I could object, he had trotted down to the surgery, switched on the treatment island, and sat down waiting.
‘It’s a recent filling,’ he said. ‘You need only remove the old amalgam, tidy up the cavity and refill it.’
I picked at the filling with a probe, needling it into the hairline join. Andy jumped.
‘You’re going to have to use the hand-piece,’ he said, and using the vanity mirror pointed. ‘Drill in there, and there, around the old filling, in short bursts.’
I drilled as instructed for a moment and stopped to give him a break and then started up again. It was an unexpectedly lovely encounter. Him making the most adorable, involuntary little sounds–choky little coughs and swallows, and saying, ‘’S’cuse me’ all the time–clutching the napkin at his neck to catch the blue-black gravelly liquid that ran down his neck and pooled in the hollows of his collar bones, there being no nurse to aspirate. Eventually the filling jumped out and he spat it into his hand. The cavity was like a clean but jagged cave. I picked at the dentine looking for caries and then lined it with Dropsin, partly because it was good practice to put a barrier between the tooth and the filling, but mostly because it meant detaining Andy in the chair a few moments more. Reclining, eyes closed, black eyelashes resting on his lightly scarred cheek; trusting, friendly, relaxed, like a resting horse, and then alert again as I mixed the amalgam.
‘I’ll fill it now,’ I said, and he opened his mouth wide. I packed the amalgam into the cavity and tamped it down. His facial expression when I said, ‘Bite down now please, gently,’ and his biting down so tentatively on the still-malleable amalgam, almost made me cry.
Did it honestly matter that we’d been raised and shaped by eccentric mothers?
Mine: drunk, divorcee, nudist, amphetamine addict, nymphomaniac, shoplifter, would-be novelist, poet, playwright.
His: teetotal, anti-Establishment, rabbit-trapper, alleged suicide-pact participant, television-forbidder, misery guts.
Did it make us incompatible in the eyes of the world? Plus, what did it matter what people thought?
‘Does it feel OK?’ I asked.
‘I think it’s fine,’ he said, chewing gently.
‘Let me check it’s not high…’ I said. ‘Open, and bite again.’
And honestly I just wanted to watch him gently bite and open and bite and open and not let him up, but to climb into his lap and kiss all over his face, especially around the upper-left area where he was probably a bit sore. It was all magical and divine.
Back in the flat after I’d tidied the surgery, Andy told me he’d doubted I’d handle the drill quite so well.
‘It’s a powerful instrument,’ he said, impressed.
I reminded him that I was a medal-holder in javelin and had won a dart-throwing competition the summer before and my winning throw had measured over twenty metres. He wanted to know what that was in feet and inches and, when I told him, whistled. Everything sounds bigger in feet. And then he wanted to know the weight of the dart and then the rules of the thing (Could you run up? What was the position of the non-throwing arm?) until I wished I hadn’t brought it up. My mother had warned me about this–that men like to explore things, to understand them on their terms. If you tell a man you’ve mined a diamond, they might ask when, how, what tools? Did you wear the regulation hard hat? And what carat? How much is it worth? But they might not think to ask to see the diamond.
I related the whole thing to my sister on the phone later.
‘I did a filling for him and it felt wonderful,’ I said. She told me quite angrily that what I’d done was illegal and that my weird feelings afterwards were psychological and closely related to a dangerous mental condition called Shendyn’s Syndrome where people deliberately injure other people, so they can kiss them better.
‘I’d never injure Andy,’ I protested.
‘That’s what they all say,’ she said. ‘So you are going out with him then?’
‘No, not really,’ I said. ‘But I like him.’
Because of Andy’s manners and gentleness, I entertained the possibility that he might be gay or asexual. Men were beginning to be so then–often the nicest ones. I examined the evidence. He liked freshly laundered clothing. He never minded me having a bowl of show fruit–in spite of his left-wing politics. In fact, he sometimes chopped up apples and oranges to make us a mini fruit salad. And he once experimented with a slice of lemon in his tea. He didn’t try to rub against me, and never once got his penis out, which won’t sound particularly gay, asexual or kind but, back then, the exposed penis, though often upsetting, was strangely intended as a compliment.
The idea of Andy being gay or asexual gave me the confidence to throw myself at him–thinking, if it turned out he was gay, he’d explain it to me and then we’d be able to continue our relationship as really good friends, like Tarzan and Cheetah or Alison Langdon and her Filipino manservant, Anacleto. And if not, we’d kiss and make love. And so, one night, after we’d watched an erotic episode of Dallas, when I’d asked him how it felt to suddenly be able to watch TV, and he said it was nice but nothing on TV beat watching spiders weave their webs, which he’d done for hours on end in various corners of his home over the years, and he began to describe spiders methodically picking up and weaving threads, I leaned in, cupped his face in my hands and said, ‘Can we kiss?’
It was a real question which required an answer, so I waited and the answer was a most lovely slow smile and then the feel of his lips on mine and the gentle warmth of his nasally exhaled breath. None of the frantic head-circling that was all the rage back then. It was very nice and not wet or fast or uncomfortable.
‘I threw myself at you,’ I said.
‘Good,’ he replied.
And that was the start of it all.
8. The Good Life
The subject of contraception occupied me for a while. I wondered if the pill would suit me. I mean, my mother couldn’t have it due to vascular peculiarities, nor my sister because of her acne rosacea and fearfulness. Added to which I’d read copious Woman’s Own correspondence on the topic and knew it to be a minefield. I might lose or gain weight or–another possibility much discussed by Jo and the team–I might feel despondent or depressed and have a drop in libido.
But if not the pill, what? Durex? I couldn’t see Andy in a Durex–it seemed wrong for him and embarrassing. The Dutch cap was inappropriate for me on emotional grounds. I’d seen my mother’s pinky-beige thing sitting behind the taps on the bathroom sink in the mornings after she’d had sexual intercourse with a vet or a doctor or a man of some kind, and had had to locate her cervix beforehand, and its high failure rate was why she’d had so many babies, miscarriages and abortions, and therefore misery.
I phoned Melody in Luton and Dunstable and she returned my call on the faulty phone and we had a long conversation about my situation, it being her favourite subject. Melody’s main aim in life was to have sex without it making her sad or pregnant, and she was happy to advise me. Firstly, she wouldn’t dream of taking hormones to fool her body into thinking it was pregnant just so a man could ejaculate inside her with no repercussions. Secondly, neither did she want the worry and risk of the withdrawal method, which was very popular back then, and thirdly, she didn’t trust any other contraception not to fail or cause mental and/or physical anguish.
‘Have you ever wondered why there isn’t a male pill, Lizzie?’ she said. ‘Have you ever asked yourself that?’
I hadn’t, but I said, ‘God, I know.’
However, Melody had devised and perfected (and had shared widely) a method of arranging her inner thighs so that they squashed into
a makeshift vagina, and according to her, no one in a hurry could tell the difference.
‘Its weakness is that it’s slightly disappointing for women who actually enjoy being penetrated,’ she said, ‘but not many are too bothered about that bit.’
‘No,’ I said.
After the phone call, I tried to imagine presenting a thigh-vagina to Andy. I thought it probably inappropriate in our case because Andy wouldn’t be in a hurry, we wouldn’t be in a car, and I felt I liked him too much to trick him. And in any case, I reminded myself, our mutual weirdness would reflect for ever like two mirrors, and I shouldn’t even go out with him, let alone go on the pill or the cap, or present a bogus vagina. For both our sakes.
Over the weeks I began to piece together Andy’s life. I tried to put the rumours out of my mind: that he lived in a bus, that his brother faked their parents’ suicide (to inherit a bus?), that they lived on roadkill and beechnuts, that they forcibly tattooed people to initiate them into a bird-worshipping cult, that his brother was really his father. His parents had gassed themselves, drowned themselves off Loxton Locks, taken cyanide tablets left over from their spying days, been pushed over the edge after having a letter published in the Leicester Mercury which contained a disastrous grammatical error.
I let myself believe only what I heard from Andy himself and, though he wasn’t a chatterer, snippets slipped out. Mr Nicolello had been a brainy dropout who’d met Andy’s mother, a fellow brainy dropout, at university–both of them anti-capitalists who refused to be shackled to the banks or utility companies–and they’d bought a piece of wayside above a village and endeavoured to be self-sufficient, like Tom and Barbara from The Good Life but not as funny or charming. They managed to generate electricity somehow and though they’d had lighting, the power was gone by night-time and they insulated a tiny refrigerator with a beanbag and relied upon candles and home-made entertainment, such as reading and singing after dark. They had died ‘close together’ after Mr Nicolello had been diagnosed with an enlarged heart and then the country had voted in the referendum to remain in the EEC and the pair had literally lost the will to live.