by Nina Stibbe
I went to the front door, looked out, and then locked it and left the key in. It was ridiculous, I told myself again. I knew what to do. It wasn’t rocket science. I took Priti through to the surgery. I switched on the water to the spittoon, flicked the light on, put the bib around her neck and washed my hands.
‘Rinse out,’ I said.
There was an abscess above the upper right two. Taking a Mitchell’s Trimmer, I lanced the abscess and stroked the gum downwards until it drained. I made up a warm saline wash and Priti rinsed while I wrote a prescription, copying exactly the duplicate of the last one JP had written.
‘Remind me, what’s your full name?’ I said.
‘Pritiben Mistry.’
‘Get this made up,’ I said. ‘Take the tablets according to the instructions, keep rinsing gently with warm salty water, and come and see me tomorrow, in the flat, after surgery hours.’
JP was quiet and embarrassed the next day. At the usual coffee break time he made an excuse and left the building. I celebrated this outcome with a hot chocolate using the practice milk and helped myself to one of his cigarettes.
Priti duly called the following evening.
She felt much better, she said, and was very grateful to me for treating her. Although I avoided looking too closely at her face, she definitely seemed improved.
‘I’m sorry… about the plant,’ she said, meaning the cactus that she’d ripped.
‘Oh, no,’ I said, ‘don’t worry, people always take it out on the plants.’
Priti looked puzzled.
‘Do they?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, occasionally.’
We chatted about life. She talked about her two jobs and I told her about my one job. We met again at Jazzercise a couple of weeks later and afterwards she came up for a cup of tea and I told her all about Andy and she told me about her boyfriend, Dhann, who was a Punjabi and whom her uncle thought ‘flashy’. She also told me that her family had left Uganda when she was young, but she could still remember their old home.
‘It was nothing like Leicester,’ she said.
They’d had a small field behind the house, in which they’d kept a few farm animals. The sheep had been so agile and clever they’d been able to clamber up into small trees and help themselves to fruit. It sounded magical to me but Priti said they were just a nuisance. She could remember her parents working all day in a shop and it being hot, and having a nasty school uniform. She was sometimes homesick even now. I said I knew how she felt.
For the next week or so JP sang ‘Bright Eyes’. I too sang it, though unwittingly, and therefore Tammy sang it as well. Mrs Skidmore, the cleaner, sang it and because we all sang and hummed it constantly, the patients picked it up and they whistled, sang and hummed it. ‘Bright Eyes’ was no longer anything to do with Watership Down, nor Art Garfunkel. It was a musical reminder for my having treated a patient, and forged an NHS medical prescription.
‘What’s that song we all keep humming?’ said Tammy, humming it.
‘“Bright Eyes”,’ said JP. ‘Smashing song.’
This reminded Tammy of the book. And she told me how much she liked seeing what books people were reading because it gave her ideas.
‘What do you like reading?’ I asked, realizing I’d only ever seen her with a book on Consultative Selling and magazines about weddings and houses.
‘Oh, I’ll read anything,’ Tammy told me. ‘Romance, whodunnits, thrillers, biographies, memoirs, you name it… but not poetry.’
She’d particularly noticed the book I’d been reading when I’d come for my interview.
‘It made me think how lovely you must be,’ she said, ‘and to be truthful, that’s partly why I really wanted you to get the job.’
‘Oh, really, what was it?’ I said, pretending not to remember.
‘That one about the rabbits.’
I can’t tell you how long my mother and I spent selecting a suitable book for me to be seen with at my interview. A book reveals more about you–as a person and a colleague–than anything else, barring what you actually say and your qualifications and experience. That was what my mother thought. She suggested I take a book which combined scientific curiosity, adventure and literary merit, something like Moby-Dick.
‘Not that,’ I said. ‘I don’t want any whale talk.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘I couldn’t finish it.’
‘You didn’t finish Moby-Dick?’ said my mother, scandalized.
‘You know I didn’t,’ I said. ‘It made me feel sick–all the sperm oil and beheaded whales.’
My mother tutted. She used Moby-Dick as a measure of people.
‘How about Jaws by Peter Benchley then?’ she said. ‘It’s basically Moby-Dick for the less able reader–it has the teeth connection, and not quite so much harpooning.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘perfect.’ And we scoured the house unsuccessfully for Mr Holt’s copy, which as it turned out had come from the library.
We went through the bookshelves. We rejected Black Beauty by Anna Sewell because it seemed childish, Edna O’Brien in case it made the dentist angry, Wodehouse in case they thought me prone to pranking. We almost chose a Jane Austen but my mother worried that they might think me overqualified for the job. I wondered briefly if I might take the book I was actually reading at the time–The Millstone by M. Drabble–but my mother said, ‘Are you mad?’
In the end I settled for Watership Down because of its natural-history elements, wide-ranging appeal, and because I wouldn’t mind some rabbit talk, having read it twice and seen the film.
Now I hated it. I hated JP, and I asked my mother if I should hand in my notice. She repeated her view that ‘staying can sometimes make all the difference’.
I became wilfully less conscientious, though. Not with the patients, or the instruments, of course–I didn’t go crazy and risk anyone’s life. But I watered the cactuses and African violets with tap water and splashed it around a bit haphazardly. I was less careful about the staircarpet–JP had asked us expressly not to tread on the nosing–and I was very sloppy with the appointments book. If a patient asked to make an appointment in advance for their next six-monthly check-up, I’d say, ‘No need, just give us a ring nearer the time.’ And if they asked, ‘Do you send reminders?’ I’d say, ‘Yes.’ Even though we definitely didn’t–because of the cost of postage. And when it came to making tea and coffee, I made half-tea-half-coffee, and I didn’t warm the milk as I was supposed to. I used the coffee spoon in the sugar, and soon there were brown clumps in the bowl–and I really couldn’t have cared less.
I occasionally set the smoke alarms off with my cigarette lighter, especially if I suspected JP was resting under his sunlamp, in his trunks, so as to inconvenience him. And I’d chuckle to myself hearing him stumble around, trying to get his trousers on quickly in case there was a fire.
13. Sex
I decided I was going to have sex with Andy (and had the Durex ready), but I realized it couldn’t be in my family home. Especially with an unreliable bedroom door that might swing open at any time, the paper-thin walls, and Danny wandering around looking for someone to play with. But it wasn’t just those things, it was the atmosphere, too.
My family home just wasn’t conducive to sex–not to me anyway. It was to my sister and my brother who had it there frequently over the years, I gather, and my mother, etc. But I was sensitive. So many things made it impossible for me to have sex; if the other person was laughing, annoyed, acting sexy, or watching telly, or wasn’t freshly washed, or if we were standing up, or on a bus, or in a bus shelter, or in a dark street, or on a bridge, or in a phone box, and definitely not in a car. I know that will make me seem fussy but there was a whole list of things I couldn’t do, and though my reasoning seemed sound, I appreciate now that these abstinences made me an odd teenager.
I rarely drank alcohol, in case my face and neck went blotchy, or I lost control and said things I’d regret the next day or h
ad sex with someone who hated me. I was happy to have smooch/ kissing sessions but I’d never yet allowed anyone to touch my breasts or vagina (Christ), the reason being that I didn’t want anyone who’d want to touch them to touch them. I rarely put my tiny cleavage on show because if/when people looked at it, I wanted to hit them. I never used to bring anyone back to my house in case my mother was naked or tried to talk to them or to lend them a book or tell them her favourite names–while naked. And so on. I never ate in cafés in case I burst into tears. I never left the tap running while brushing my teeth because it seemed such a waste of water–and that was before people even cared about water. I never let any of my friends babysit baby Danny for my mother in case she changed her mind at the last minute and didn’t go out and just sat there chatting to them.
Because of all the above, if I was to have a sexual relationship with Andy, he’d have to come to my flat for it and, since he’d been living with my mother, he didn’t seem keen. He’d come in for a cup of tea, telly, chat and cuddle, but then he’d suddenly have to leave. He might be babysitting Danny (see above) or cooking a pie, or just wanting to get back for an early night. So I had to address the subject head on, and I did so one evening at my flat.
‘I can’t have sex with you at my mother’s house,’ I said.
‘Can you have sex with me here?’ he asked.
That led to a most lovely, exciting hour of love–though not quite sex–and then him suddenly wondering if we might go out for dinner and me declining abruptly and, instead of explaining my complicated feelings about eating out, I said I needed some time alone to work on my dental journal.
In my imagined life, we’d have rushed out joyfully to a bistro and picked at each other’s plates, laughing, and looked at each other full in the face while chewing confidently, and I’d have been wearing his shirt, and I’d have stopped laughing after a while and told him about JP refusing to see Priti–in a straightforward manner, angry but mature–and he’d have been outraged and impressed that I’d taken action.
Instead, he went home and I remembered a girl friend from the past, whom I’d considered a numbskull, once telling me in all seriousness, ‘Your problem is you think too much.’ And so, in response to that long-ago thing, I wrote a long, clever article for Woman’s Own called ‘Do You Think Too Much?’ which concluded that conscientiousness was nothing to be ashamed of and thinking things through, philosophizing, pondering, considering–call it what you will–was a good thing, as long as it didn’t turn into procrastination and stop you living a full life.
Around that time, my mother received a written warning from Mrs Danube, principal of Curious Minds nursery. It was mostly concerning her lateness.
You are frequently late to collect your child and this is inconvenient and against the rules of Curious Minds, she wrote. It was true, and quite polite under the circumstances. My mother was never on time; once she’d been so late that Mrs Danube had taken Danny with her to Oadby because Mr Danube needed her home, and she’d had no alternative. My mother had said that in a different narrative it would have been kidnap. The letter went on to say that Danny often arrived at school without required items from home and she gave examples of things that had recently been requested but were still absent: A photograph of his family, 10p towards the materials for his lentil rumba shaker, a change of clothing, an overall or apron, some slip-on gym shoes.
My mother was blasé about it. Mrs Danube was in the wrong job, she said.
‘She should be a prison guard or a swimming-pool attendant.’
I wasn’t, though (blasé). I didn’t like to displease Mrs Danube and it wasn’t just my fear of authority, it was my worry that Danny might get it in the neck if she was rubbed up the wrong way. Anyway, I redoubled my efforts to do things right on my Danny days.
And so it was most alarming when, just days after that, it looked as though I might be delayed at the surgery and therefore late for Danny. It was the day that JP was going to fit himself with a new upper denture (a key item from the Masonic Improvements list) and first had to extract his two front teeth. For anyone not dentally aware, dentures can be fitted immediately afterwards to replace extracted teeth (this technique, called immediate restoration, is very popular for people not wanting to go around with missing teeth while their gums heal). The procedure, in JP’s case, should have been quick and easy, the teeth in question being single-rooted incisors, old and slightly loosened. However, he managed to bungle it by snapping one of the teeth off at the gum line. He then couldn’t extract the root because his allergy to the local anaesthetic had caused a mild but incapacitating reaction, leaving him unable to grip the instruments.
‘You might have to call Bill Turner to get this root out for me,’ JP said, and I looked at the clock. It was almost time for me to leave to get Danny. I stared at JP, who was leaning on the treatment tray examining his shaking hands. He tried to pick up the vanity mirror to look at the mess in his mouth but it only slipped through his fingers.
‘It’s no good, nurse, you’re going to have to call Bill.’
In the time it would take for Bill to arrive, I could sprint up to Curious Minds, return with Danny on my back and put him in the waiting room with a copy of Playhour and Robin. ‘OK,’ I said.
I picked up the receiver and dialled. Bill’s nurse Rhona answered and said Bill had gone home. I began to dial Bill’s home number but hung up. We hadn’t got time. I was against the clock. I’d seen JP extract roots many times. Incisors were straightforward–all you needed was a tight grip and a steady hand.
‘Sit down,’ I said.
He understood–it made sense to him too–and he sat. I washed my hands, selected a clean pair of straight-beaked anteriors from the pile on the draining board, and held them up for his approval.
‘Yes,’ he nodded.
He sat back in the chair, opened his mouth wide, and curled his lip. I approached but he suddenly sat up.
‘Get a really tight grip on it, won’t you, nurse.’
I pushed him gently back.
‘I know.’
Holding his temples between my thumb and fingers, I was surprised at the slimness of his skull and the slipperiness of his hair. The heel of my hand pressed his brow. I located the root–more by feel than by sight. JP’s clumsy digging around at the gum line had made it bleed quite heavily. I pushed the beaks up around it and, pushing some more, gripped it, relaxed and let the forceps slide down the root–just to get the feel of it. I needed to get a hold further up to avoid breaking any more off. I jammed the beaks up quite hard and JP grunted.
‘That’s it,’ he seemed to say.
I pushed up further and then gripped, hard. My thumb joint hurt. I rotated one way, then the other and kept that up for a while before increasing the force until I felt the bindings break and then there it was, the root, perfect, pinky-yellow in the beaks. And JP sat up.
If the police had burst in and arrested me at that moment for quackery, I’d have pleaded temporary insanity, and my lawyer would put it to the court that I’d had no choice. That, just like the women in Woman’s Own and Titbits who’d pulled communication cords, jumped off trains, run along train tracks, abandoned cars, set off fire alarms and made hoax calls to the emergency services, etc., there’d been no other course of action available to me. Not because of maternal instinct, involuntary familial love, or a sense of duty, but because of the cuntish look on Mrs Danube’s face when I or any other guardian or mother arrived a minute or two late for pick-up.
JP examined the root.
‘It’s all there,’ I said, with pride.
He continued looking at it. And then, shielding his mouth with his hand, said, ‘Yeah, I must’ve loosened it.’
I hadn’t given it another thought until I saw JP again the Monday after. He was in bright and early even though his first patient wasn’t due until nine-fifteen.
‘How’s the new denture bedding in?’ I asked.
‘Nurse, I need to talk to you about that,
’ he said, with some stress, I thought.
‘Oh, is everything OK?’
‘The thing is, I never should have let you do it.’
‘Do what?’
‘Extract my tooth. It was unprofessional and irresponsible and just plain wrong.’
‘OK. Sorry.’
‘Look, I’m not blaming you for what happened, but I have to impress upon you just how seriously wrong it was.’
‘OK.’
‘Had I not been suffering some kind of allergic reaction I never should have allowed it.’
I was a bit surprised by this, to be honest. It was his tooth, after all, and he was a dentist. It was up to him what he did with his teeth, wasn’t it?
‘Is the denture bedding in OK?’ I asked again.
‘Yes, thank you, it’s fine.’
‘May I have a look?’
‘I don’t think that would be wise.’
I felt a little peeved. I had taken the tooth out and, whether or not it was wrong ethics-wise, I had every right to see how it was healing.
‘I’d like to see how it’s healing,’ I persisted.
‘Oh, all right then, quickly, but then we must never speak of it again. And never tell a soul.’
Andy called in late one day with a drop-off and came up after surgery for tea and telly. He had a bath–even living at my mother’s house, baths were a luxury–and stayed in so long I honestly wondered if he’d drowned. He hadn’t but he had gone woozy. I told him about Priti’s abscess. I’d tried not to because the last thing I wanted was to discuss JP’s awfulness when I was planning to have sex, when sex was already fraught with off-putting possibilities, but I couldn’t wait.
‘She was obviously in agony,’ I said, ‘and I confronted JP with her, and he just waltzed off to play golf with Bill.’
‘What a cunt,’ said Andy.
‘I treated her myself,’ I said.
And Andy looked shocked. ‘What?’
‘I couldn’t see what else to do,’ I said. ‘She was in no state to go trailing around town, begging for treatment.’