teeth

I set off just after 10:30, my main task for the day, the dentist.

My mother blessed me with rotten teeth, soft teeth. All my life she’s had a denture and very private about it too. As a child I’d ask to see that denture but she’d never take it out and give me a look.

From my eastern suburbs eyrie to the dentist in Sandringham is 40 kilometres. I’ve pedalled down to my have my teeth drilled, filled, rooted canalled, extracted, scoured and polished more times than I remember. For three and a half years I caught the train down from Bendigo. Never late.

Today I’m doubling up with a visit to Ikea for a mattress. Hard to carry home on a bicycle, though I’m sure many Asians would manage. So I drive the Jazz, and for the first time I’m late.

My dentist has beautiful eyes, lashes made for batting, cat-green irises. She’s a Pole from Krakow, the rest of her as brutal as her eyes are enticing. The thick accent makes her questions hard to decipher; I could be agreeing to anything here. I have a disintegrating tooth—lower left five. It’s not on its own. LL6, LRs 4, 6 and 7 are gone, replaced with a plate, a partial denture.

Marzena bought the practice from Peter who became a personal friend after emptying my bank account for 27 years. The bastard retired on the proceeds to travel overseas, then devote his life to a nice house and garden in Sandringham and charity dentistry in the Third World.

Marzena has replaced what seemed perfectly adequate dental furniture to me. The basin and spitter are new, the chair too. I climb aboard: my head hangs over the back of the headrest, my back straddles the articulation amidships. The chair inclines till I’m almost upside down and Marzena goes in for the kill.

She twiddles the little auger into a root canal right down to the nerve endings. She squirts some vile concoction into the cavity. She tuts and ahs and leaves me in no doubt that my teeth are a trial to her. She wrenches my head this way and that for traction, wedging it occasionally against a hefty right breast as she packs in the amalgam.

I can’t decide if she’s an Eastern bloc charlatan or remarkably efficient: the job is soon done. “Rinse,” she orders, but only some dark green stain rings the bottom of the plastic beaker. I look at her forlornly. “Ah, you would like water.” She presses a hidden switch and water flows into the beaker. I rinse.  

“Expensive root treatment or have it out,” she says. I indicate out. An appointment is made to extract the tooth two months hence and fill another. A new cavity is made in my dwindling bank account.

The Ikea visit is efficiently executed too. Late in the afternoon I fall asleep on the new mattress in my new loft bed. I wake with the vile liquid seeping from LL5. The taste hangs around for 24 hours despite toothpaste, olives, garlic.

    

Rock on.