A tale with plenty of bite

Oh well, I think, here we go again. I’ve been here so many times before. Let’s hope everything works out this time. Let’s hope for the happy ending that, so far, has eluded me.

I look at the woman. She seems to be intelligent, clean, respectable. She has a sense of humour, which is nice. She has dark hair and bright eyes. She’s healthy. She’s in her late thirties, I would guess, although that doesn’t feel particularly important right now. She smiles and moves closer to me. I think she’s The One. But, then again, she might not be. So many have disappointed me.

Why? Because they’ve been rough. Because they’ve been uncaring. Because they’ve been after my money. Because they’ve been cheap hustlers.

But Katherine is different. That’s not her real name. Somebody I know and trust told me I’d like her. And I do. I’ve been frank about what I want. I’ve been exacting. I’ve told her my exact specifications. I want her to take the utmost care. I want her to work slowly. I’m interested in precision. I actually said, “I want somebody who thinks of themselves as an artist. Do you think of yourself as an artist?” I knew it was very important to be clear. That’s been my problem in the past. I haven’t been clear enough.

“What I’m looking for”, I said, “is attention to detail.”

That was five minutes ago. Now I’m lying down. Now I’m opening my mouth. Katherine inserts her fingers into my mouth. She takes a tiny mirror and looks at it from the inside. She taps and scrapes at every one of my teeth. She wants to know the history of every one of my teeth. She gets me to sit up and bite on a piece of X-ray film. She X-rays my mouth. Then I get up and walk towards her computer.

We look at the picture of my teeth. Katherine interprets the picture. She’s excellent. She can tell me that I’ve had lots of bad dentists, a few average ones, and one good dentist. She points out the places where the good dentist has worked. That was Tom. He was very precise. And very expensive, too. “That’s good work,” says Katherine. “And that’s good work.” We look, for a moment, at a picture of a crowned molar. It fits perfectly. The work cost me about £750. It was horribly complicated. Fifteen years on, it’s as good as new.

The rest of the picture tells a different story. It tells the story of the man who didn’t want to give me a painkilling injection, so when he hit a nerve I jerked sideways, his drill splitting my lip; the man who filled my teeth with a crumbly substance; the man who re-filled my teeth but left gaps underneath the filling; the man who tried to replace the old amalgam fillings with early plastic ones; the man who replaced the early plastic fillings with amalgam; the speed-merchant who could have me in and out in 17 minutes, having removed and replaced a filling. The emergency crowns that didn’t, and don’t, fit properly. The one magical filling created by Tom, who somehow made a condemned, razor-sharp shell of a tooth whole again. But I’ve moved; Tom is miles away. And for what I want – a “complete restoration” – I couldn’t afford him.

. . .

My teeth have been unlucky. Arriving in my mouth during the 1960s, around the time of the Summer of Love, they’ve had several disadvantages. They came at a time of affluence and liberal sweet-eating. Ten years earlier, sweets would have been scarce; 10 years later, my teeth would have been protected by the fluoride in the water. Also, I went to boarding school, where teeth-cleaning was unsupervised, except by towel-flicking prefects. I had many different dentists, who undid and re-did each other’s work.

Katherine and I survey the damage. I need several fillings redone. I need three crowns replaced. There is something suspicious underneath one of the crowns that will need to be investigated. Decay has crept in. What I need, I say, is to have every tooth filled or crowned. I also want the gaps between my teeth to be perfect. No snags. No floss-traps or toothpick graveyards. I need filing and scraping; possibly even whitening.

But I’ve made a start. I’ve been flossing every day. At first, it was carnage. But my gums have got tougher. Now my gums are fine. Now there’s no blood at all.

“You have good gums,” says Katherine.

So, I say, can you do it?

“Yes,” she says. At this exact moment I look into her eyes. I decide that she’s The One. She does not look like a cheap hustler. She does not look like she’ll be rough. She looks caring. She looks capable. If I shake her hand now, I’ll be spending a lot of time in this narrow, bright room. I’ll be here 15 times over the course of a year. I’ll give her thousands of pounds.

Let’s go for it, I say, and stick out my hand.

Susie Boyt is away