I clocked a couple of youths standing on a corner. I bet they sell drugs, I thought, adrenalin starting up in my veins as I wondered how I could lose Margot.
No chance.
She frogmarched me along to the dentist, where, from the air of contained excitement, I gathered I was expected. The fourteen-year-old receptionist couldn’t take her fascinated little eyes off me. I could see what she was thinking. I was a weirdo, a misfit, someone from life’s margins. Bitterly, I supposed she’d been elbowing the nurses all morning, saying ‘What’ll she be like, the drug addict?’
I felt deeply misunderstood. She was passing judgement on me because I was at the Cloisters, but she’d got it all wrong, I wasn’t one of them.
As she sniggered none-too-discreetly, she got me to fill out a form.
‘And the bill will be sent to the, er, CLOISTERS?’ she asked with pretend discretion. All the people in the waiting-room jerked awake with sudden interest.
‘Yes,’ I mumbled. Although I felt like saying, ‘Could you make that a bit louder. I don’t think the people in Waterford quite heard it.’
I felt old and jaded, annoyed by the idealism of the young receptionist. She probably thought that she’d never, ever, in a million years end up in the Cloisters and that I was really thick to let it happen to me. But I’d been like her once. Young and stupid. I’d thought I was invulnerable to life’s tragedies. I’d thought I was too smart to let anything bad happen to me.
I took my seat and settled in for a long wait. It might have been several lifetimes since I’d been to the dentist, but I knew the routine.
Margot and I sat in silence reading torn copies of the Catholic Messenger, the only available reading material. I tried to cheer myself up by reading the ‘Intentions offered’ page, where people pray for whatever bad thing they’re experiencing to pass.
To know that other people were miserable always helped.
Now and then another spasm of toothache took hold and I would press my tormented face into my hand, keen softly and yearn for drugs.
Whenever I looked up, all the eyes in the place were fastened onto me.
Of course, as soon as the receptionist said ‘Dentist O’Dowd will see you now,’ the pain went away. That always happened to me. I created a big song and dance about pains, injuries etc. But the minute I got to the doctor all symptoms disappeared, leaving everyone thinking I had Munchausen’s Syndrome.
I slunk into the surgery. The smell alone was enough to make me feel faint with fear.
Luckily Dentist O’Dowd was a plump jolly man who was all smiles, instead of the Doctor Death figure I’d imagined.
‘Clamber up there, good girl,’ he urged, ‘and let’s have a look.’
I clambered. He looked.
While he banged around in my mouth with a spiky little metal thing and a mirror, he began a conversation that was supposed to put me at my ease.
‘So you’re from the Cloisters?’ he asked.
‘Aaarr,’ I tried to nod.
‘Alcohol?’
‘Go.’ I tried to indicate a negative with wriggles of my eyebrows. ‘Grugs.’
‘Oh, drugs, is it?’ I was relieved he didn’t sound disapproving.
‘I often wonder how you know you’re an alcoholic,’ he said.
I tried to say ‘Well, no point in asking me,’ but it came out sounding ‘Ell, oh oi i akn ee.’
‘Obviously, if you end up in the Cloisters, then you know you’re an alcoholic, that tooth is on its last legs.’
I tried to sit up in alarm, but he didn’t notice my distress.
‘It’s not as if I drink every day,’ he said. ‘If we do a root canal we might be able to save it. And no time like the present.’
A root canal! Oh no! I didn’t know what a root canal was but from the way other people carried on when they had to have one, I was led to believe that it was something to fear.
‘Not every day, as such,’ he carried on. ‘Most evenings, though, ha ha.’
I nodded miserably.
‘But never when I need a steady hand with the drill the next day. Ha ha.’
I looked longingly at the door.
‘But once I start I can’t stop, do you know what I mean?’
I nodded fearfully. Best to agree with him.
Please don’t hurt me.
‘And at some stage in the evening, I find I can’t get drunk anymore. D’you know what I mean?’
He didn’t need any confirmation from me.
‘And the depression afterwards. Sure, don’t talk to me.’ He was passionate. ‘I often wish I was dead.’
He had stopped his banging and scraping, but left the mirror and the spiky thing in my open mouth. He rested his hand against my face, in thoughtful mode. He was a man settling in for a long conversation.
‘I’ve actually thought about suicide after a hard night,’ he confided. I felt saliva slowly make its way down my chin, but was afraid I’d seem unsympathetic if I wiped it. ‘Dentists are the profession with the highest rate of suicide, would you believe?’
With wriggles of my eyebrows and flashes of my eyes I tried to convey compassion.
‘Sure, it’s a lonely kind of an oul’ life, looking at the inside of people’s mouths, day-in-day-out.’ The saliva had turned into a veritable niagara. ‘Day-in-day-feckin’-out.’
He affected a whiny voice, ‘ “My tooth hurts, can you fix it, I’ve a pain in my tooth, do something about it.” That’s all I hear, teeth, teeth, teeth!’
Yikes, a looper.
‘I went to a couple of AA meetings, just to see, you know.’ He looked appealingly at me. I looked appealingly back.
Please let me go.
‘But it wasn’t for me,’ he explained. ‘Like I said, I don’t drink every day. And never in the mornings. Except when the shakes are very bad, of course.’
‘Aaar,’ I said encouragingly.
Talk to your captor, build a relationship, try to get him on your side.
‘My wife has threatened to leave if I don’t lay off the sauce,’ he went on. ‘But, if I did that, I feel there’d be nothing left for me, that my life would be over. I might as well be dead. D’you know what I mean?’
Then he seemed to come to.
And he regretted unburdening himself, sorry that he had weakened himself in my eyes.