What Becomes (15 page)

She repeats herself more quietly, ‘I don't know how they stand it.'

And he covers her hand with his and draws her round to him, against him. There is a tremor in her arms and back, but he holds her tight enough to quiet it and lets her press the unharmed part of her face against his chest and hovers his fingers over the harmed but does not touch it, because he understands it is there and that is enough.

‘They stand it fine.'

And he brushes the warm of her hair, cradles her head and then winds both arms around her, stills her: the shape of his coat, he imagines, bringing more than a dash of romance to the scene. They will be admired, a little focus of attention for the street. And everyone who sees them will be sure – this is what it looks like. This is exactly what it looks like. Marriage.

STORY OF MY LIFE

In this story, I'm like you.

Roughly and on average, I am the same: the same as you.

The same is good. The same is that for which we're meant. It's comforting and gently ties us, makes us unified and neat and it tells us the most pleasant kinds of story, the ones that say how beautifully we fit, the ones that summon up their own attention, make us look.

I understand this.

I understand a lot – very often – almost all the time – most especially the stories. They are an exercise of will: within them whatever I think, I can wish it to be. They are the worlds that obey me, kinder and finer worlds: in many of them, for example, I'd have no teeth.

Because I believe I'd do better with a beak. So why not have one? That shouldn't be impossible. I feel a beak could make me happy, quite extraordinarily content: sporting something dapper and useful in that line – handy for cracking walnuts, nipping fingers, tweezing seeds. Not that I've ever fancied eating seeds, but one can't predict the path of appetite.

And beaks come in different sizes: that's a plus, along with the range of designs. The toucan would be good for parties, shouting, grievous bodily harm. Ibis: mainly funerals and plumbing. Sparrow: best for online dating and eating crisps. The options, while not infinite, are extensive. In a reasonable world my personality would give rise to my true beak, would nurture it, my proper fit – parrot, hummingbird, bullfinch, albatross – and through it I'd express myself, be jauntily apparent, fulfilled, really start going somewhere with my whole appearance – somewhere free from teeth – somewhere other than the dentist.

Story of my life – maybe – going to the dentist.

Because my teeth, they've always been ambitious, problematic, expansive. I never have had enough room for all of them and so out they've come: milk teeth, adult teeth, wisdom teeth: handfuls of them over the years, practically a whole piano's worth. Of course, when I was a kid they still gave you gas for extractions – general, potentially fatal, anaesthetic gas administered, in my case, by an elderly man with unhygienically hairy ears who would bend in at me, eerily grinning, and exclaim – every single time – ‘Good Lord, dearie, they're some size, those teeth,' while he flourished that black rubber mask and then cupped me under it, trapped my mouth in one hard, chilly pounce: ‘Breathe deeply, dearie. Count backwards from ten.'

I'd shut my eyes and picture his tufted, werewolf earlobes and count until I'd reached as far as seven or so before I'd see these angles of tilting grey that folded in towards a centre point, bolted and sleeked at the backs of my eyes and then rolled me down and away to the dark.

Now, as it happens, I'm not good with chemicals. No choice here – I am made the way I'm made. Sensitive.

In the chair they'd give me nitrous oxide and it put me out nicely enough. I'd swim deep through a cartoony, bendy blank while the dentist did his work – the tugging, the twists – then I'd float straight back up and just bob at the surface like a tiny shore-leave sailor: changeable and land-sick and absolutely smashed.

My first experience of the freedom within incapacity. That swoop and rock and thunder of delight. It's always best to meet your pleasures before you can tell what they mean.

As I came round some nurse would be attending with her kidney dish and towels: a bit broody perhaps, protective – the motherly type but not a mother and therefore idealistic, if not ridiculous, about kids. She would, shall we say, not entirely expect the violence of my post-operative dismay: my tiny swinging fists and my confusion, my not unjustifiable sense of loss.

I have no idea what I shouted on these occasions – a small person turning expansive, losing it, throwing it, swarming clear out into beautiful rage. I'll pretend, while I tell you the story, that I know.

I'll say I produced – at great speed and with feeling – ‘You get away from me! I'll have you! I'll set the Clangers on you. And Bagpuss! Taking my teeth out . . . no one ever takes
me
out – except to the dentist – to take out more teeth. I need my teeth for the Tooth Fairy – I'm only five, for Chrissake – that's my one source of income, right there. How else can I save up to run away from here? I could go on the stage – be a sideshow – my manager would want me absolutely as I am –
the Shark Tooth Girl: the more you pull, the more she grows: ivory from head to toes
. I'd be laughing. With all of my teeth, I'd be laughing.'

This is untrue, but diagnostic – it helps to make me plain.

Because I wouldn't ever want to hide from you.

The surprise of my own blood, that's true – thick and live and oddly tasty – I never did get used to that, my inside being outside – on my face, my hands. Even today, if I take a tumble, suffer a lapse, my blood can halt and then amaze me. It's almost hypnotic – seeing myself run. And persons of my type, we run so easily: birds' hearts thumping in us and broad veins full of shocks.

Back from the surgery, next came the hangover – naturally, naturally, naturally – but as I was a child it would be kind, more a mild type of fog than a headache. Beyond it I'd be given soldiers with boiled eggs, gentle food for an affronted mouth and a sudden hunger – oh, such a lively hunger – and a quiet mother comfort to meet it with a little spoon. Then a bath and an early night pelting with lurid dreams of thieves and tunnels and running for my life, right through my life and out the other side and into nowhere: the coppery taste of absence, liquid heat.

Once I was older, I decided I had no more time to waste – people to do and things to be – and avoiding the dental issue became attractive. I brushed regularly, kept my head down, ate everything wholemeal for added wear, but it did no good: my teeth are forceful. They insist.

So when I'm twenty-four, twenty-five, I'm back in the surgery – new dentist – and the first of my wisdom teeth is leaving. Local anaesthetic this time, much more practical and safe, and I haven't enjoyed the injections, but I'm hoping they'll do the trick – mostly my eye's gone a little blurry, but that's nothing to fret about – and here comes the dentist – big man, meaty forearms, substantial grip – and it's plain that he'll check now, tap about to see if I'm numb and therefore happy – except he doesn't. He does not.

And I should pause here briefly, because it lets the story breathe and even possibly give a wink. I step back to let you step forward and see what's next. This way you'll stay with us. With me.

Which is the point.

You staying with me is the point.

And, no, the dentist doesn't check, he is incurious and generally impatient, goes at it fiercely with the pliers and no preamble and here comes a clatter, a turning yank, and then tooth – I am looking at my tooth without me, grinning redly in the light – and I am puzzled because of this feeling, this building feeling which I cannot quite identify – it is large, huge, and therefore moving rather slowly, takes a full
count backwards from tennineeight
to arrive and then I know, then I am wholly, supernaturally aware, I am certain in my soul that I'm in pain. This is hitherto unguessed-at pain – pain of the sort I have tried to anticipate and forestall with insulating activities and assistance. Numb is best – I always aim for numb, for numb of any type – but pain has found me anyway. Worse than imagination, here it is.

To be fair, the dentist was upset – looking down at me and saying, ‘Oh, dear,' a number of times before offering a seat in his office and an explanation involving wrongly positioned nerves – it was technically my fault for having provided them. His secretary gave me a comforting and yet excruciating cup of tea.

I walked home – it wasn't far – dizzy and racing with adrenalin. They put it in the anaesthetic, presumably to give it extra zip. Which is to say that you go to the dentist – somebody worrying – and he then injects you with terror – pure fear – you feel it rush your arms, cup its lips hard over that bird inside your chest.

And it is possibly, conceivably, odd that this is so familiar, so really exactly the simple jolt of many mornings and you draw near to your house and wonder, as usual, if so much anxiety should not have a basis in fact. Perhaps a leak under your floorboards has caused rot, perhaps you're ill – genuinely threatened by what, as soon as they knew you weren't suing, your dentist and his secretary called
a head injury
– this making you feel very noble for not complaining, but nevertheless, in many ways it sounds dire. And if you really want to fret, then perhaps you shouldn't lend that guy your money – your guy, your money, but shouldn't they still be apart? You like them both but they should surely be apart? And what if he isn't exclusively your guy, you've had that unease, felt that whisper, about him before – and it's screaming today. And what if your life is, in some degree, wrong or maladjusted when hauling a live tooth raw from the bone leaves you and your state no worse than an average night, a convivial night, a pace or two along your path of joy.

Sensitivity, you see? It causes thoughts.

When I reached the flat, I let myself in and sat on the sofa, hands holding each other to dampen their shake and keep out the sense of having gone astray: twenty-five and no real profession, no prudent strategy, not much of a relationship.

And too many teeth.

But you try to keep cheery, don't you? And you have time. At twenty-five you've bags of it.

Thirty-five, that's a touch more unnerving – wake up with thirty-five and you'll find that it nags, expects things you don't have: kitchen extensions and dinner parties,
DIY
, the ability to send out Christmas cards signed
With love from both of us. With love from all of us.

Instead I'm house-sitting for friends.

And this section of the story is here for you to like and to let your liking spread to me. Frailty and failure, they're charismatic, they have a kind of nakedness that charms.

So.

Minding the house is company for me.

Well, it
isn't
company – the owners are obviously away, hence my minding – and they've left their cats. And this is domesticity without effort: Brazilian cleaning lady, leather cushions, large numbers of superfluous and troubling ornaments.

This isn't like me owning cats, me living alone with cats, me growing six-inch fingernails and giggling through the letter box when the pizza-delivery man comes, peering out at him and smelling of cats – that's not how it is.

There are these other people who are not me and they are the ones who have the cats and I am treating their animals politely but with an emotional distance, no dependency and no indications of despair. There should be no suggestion that these friends are sorry for me, that the husband is more sorry than the wife and that they have argued about my trustworthiness in their absence and their possessions and have doubted the supervisory skills of a Portuguese-speaking obsessive-compulsive who polishes their every surface twice a week: tables, glasses, apples, doorknobs, the skin between the end of the air and the beginning of my wine. I will not tell you they left behind them a plethora of mildly hysterical notes, or that their act of charity has been overshadowed by a sense of filth, oncoming sadness.

It is only important to mention that I was, on this particular house-sitting evening, chipper and at ease. I had fed both of the creatures and I was going out – out on a date – a variation on a theme of what could be a date. We had reached a transitional stage, the gentleman and I – which is to say, I had reached it and wondered if he had too – and I have to make the best of what I may get, so I was dressed presentably and poised to be charming and, had it not been for the stitches in my mouth, I would have been perfectly on form.

More dentistry – surgical dentistry, but with mouthwash and antibiotics and painkillers – big ones.

I like them big.

So I'm all right.

I'm stylish.

And I slip into the restaurant – once I've found it – with what I consider to be grace and it's an agreeable establishment. Italian. So I can have pasta – which is soft.

And here's my date – my approaching a date – and he's looking terrific.

He's looking great. Like a new man.

Truly amazing.

He's looking practically as if he's someone else.

Yes.

Yes, he is.

He is someone else.

I am waving at someone else. The man I am meeting is sitting behind him and to the left and not waving. No one, to be accurate,
is
waving apart from me and I would love to stop waving, but have been distracted by the expression on my almost-date's face.

He is experiencing emotions which will not help me.

But I can still save the evening. I'm a fighter. I calmly and quietly explain the particular story which is presently myself: the drugs I am currently taking – prescribed drugs – the residual levels of discomfort, the trouble I have enunciating – and perhaps he might like to tell me about
his
week and I can listen.