Dublin Palms. Hugo Hamilton

I have been clenching my teeth, grinding in my sleep. He gives me a gum shield. I sleep like a boxer for a couple of weeks, but it makes no difference. Back in the chair again. He begins to single out one of the upper molars on the left. He undertakes the required root-canal treatment. It involves many repeat visits, lots of drilling, I take several days off work, I go back some weeks later and he puts in the crown.

      The buses stop right outside the surgery. Passengers upstairs get a good look at me lying back with my mouth wide open and the light shining across my face. The sight must fill them with horror. The dentist reaching into my mouth with his fingers. My hands gripping the armrests.

      I hear the dental assistant speaking to him softly in the background, handing over instruments I don’t want to see. Everything feels so enlarged. His rubber gloves make a squeaking sound against my teeth. He asks me questions he can only answer himself, all I can do is consent with a crow sound at the back of my throat.

      When he’s finished, he removes the rubber gloves and says I should have no more trouble. He flicks his head to the side and apologises for not fixing the problem sooner. He refuses to take any money. I try to pay him, but he tells me to go. He smiles and says the tooth is dead, it’s beyond pain – come back to me if you feel anything.

2

      Their school is on a street leading to the harbour. A terraced white building where the mariners used to gather for prayers with their families before they set sail. I wait outside in the car an hour early, falling asleep. In a dream, I trip over a tower of books and wake up with a snarl, not refreshed but confused, mothers and fathers standing by the gate talking in quiet voices, arranging play dates.

      They came running out, handing me their drawings. Rosie had done a man inside a space capsule. Big dish ears. He was wearing a red shirt, the sky around him was full of onion rings. That was the song they wanted to hear again and again, about the man who gets lost in space and continues travelling far above the world in a tin can. As soon as we got home it was engines on, lift-off, we had chairs called Venus and Jupiter. I tried explaining infinity to them. The man in the spacecraft keeps going away for ever and ever.

      Essie said – but he will come back.

Everyone was talking about the solar system, the Voyager space mission heading into the unknown, the drug allegories, there was a plaque erected on a wall nearby for somebody who died in a road accident – gone with Nash to the dark side of the moon.

      While Helen was teaching her class, I sat in the back room playing the astronaut, they had me sitting in the armchair with the sick bowl across my chest, making swirling sounds. The launch buttons were carefully arranged along my knees. The aerial on the portable radio fully extended. They held a pink hand mirror up to show me how crooked my nose was. A battery-operated toy kept repeating the same phrase over and over in a voice that I found disturbing, I vowed to make it disappear overnight. A malevolent gift, given to them by one of Helen’s aunts, the aunt with the bunch of keys.

      Here I was, floating above the world, two children and a talking toy.

      As soon as the yoga classes were finished, I disappeared into the empty front room with a small foldable school desk Helen got for next to nothing from the furniture auctioneer next door. The room was heavy with perfume. I had a portable typewriter that belonged to my father. Essie left me a plastic zebra for company. There I sat for two hours alone, doing nothing, staring at all the things I could not describe.

Every sentence tied me down. Words often came to me first in my mother’s language. I was faced with a choice of three versions of the same object, like a street trick where the correct word was hidden under one of three matchbox hats, lifting the wrong one, the meaning had already moved. I formed a sentence in German, then I veered down into the native basement and came up at street level with the verb in English, a rough stone with no value. My descriptions kept alluding to something larger which was not contained in the words. If I mentioned a crowd, I was equating it with a crowded train station during the war, if I mentioned a space left vacant in a bar, it was a place where you could settle down for the rest of your life and never move again. Everything was loaded with distress and joy, full of misunderstanding.