Today will be mild and sunny, the temperature a pleasant twenty-four degrees with the possibility of light showers towards the afternoon.
This is some relief to Nora, the new mother, left high and dry with the baby of her unrest, husband gone AWOL. And the news must be true, isn’t it, because the sun rises, and sets and rises. Every day at sparrow’s the milk and orange juice are delivered as always by the boys from Clover, the trucks noisy as ever; and the dustbin boys and native girls are still coming to work without any trouble. So it seems that ordinary black people know which side their bread’s buttered on.
Or at any rate, like the rest of ordinary people, they’re caught by the short and curlies.
And then, after the referendum, the country is a new republic. So okay, it squeaks home by only fifty-two per cent, but narrow margin or not, you can’t deny the vote’s a majority. Which means it’s time to go it alone.
Toothless cavity
A few more weeks pass, and Nora is over the worst of it with the baby. No more crisis, somehow. She doesn’t know what it is. Maybe they’re just used to each other. Even their bad habits. The skinny thing gains, though it’s ounce by ounce, and it remains distressing to see her little body naked. Half starved, she looks; an awful rebuke to a mother.
And what with being so busy with the child, and going off to work, constantly reproducing her labour in order to live, Nora herself doesn’t want to eat. It’s like a reciprocal scientific law: as the baby picks up, the mother loses. Nora becomes nauseous, and the child less fretful.
Slowly, the infant fleshes out, her angles more padded, though there’s never a baby’s chub-cheeked bum, and the mother, well, she’s not yet skin and bone, but sure there’s not much for a husband to hold on to, were he home, and should this have been his desire. Though he might well not have wanted to, for such a body would have him running the gauntlet: the collarbones stick out, stark as a wooden coat hanger to beat him about the empty head.
Then, without warning, the mother feels fragments of grit in her mouth as she bites into her (single) slice of (dry) toast.
She spits and checks. It’s tooth. Hey. Would you believe it! When she goes over to the mirror, the glass confirms the feeling of her tongue. Cracked back molar.
Which is the beginning of the end.
By mid-morning, more than half of this tooth is broken off at the gum, and other teeth have begun to chip in thick, bizarre flakes, like scales. Yet others foliate around the silvery, mercuric fillings, which is but a precursor to the inevitable breaks.
Nora is very poorly, and deals with her baby daughter only as well as she’s able. It’s one of those situations where generous amounts of Woodward’s Celebrated Gripe Water are useful, administered by the capful, straight down the gaping throat. Gooi sommer net. Amazingly, the child does not hurl it up. She sleeps.
After this, it’s all Nora can manage to find something for her own pain. A swig comes in handy. And another. Though it’s only gripe water, and some paregoric, which is really for bad stomach, but it’s an opium tincture so it might help. Then one by one she crushes Disprins in a teaspoon, adds a few drops of clove oil and applies the burning paste to her gums, wadded over with strips of soggy cotton wool saturated in TCP. She tries every trick she knows, desperate to find an amalgam against her pain. She sniffs self-consciously, aware of . . . that strange smell. A dispensary. Herbal and hospital, the door of death, or healing.
Barely able to speak, her words thick and slurred like those of a common drunkard, she telephones the dentist and fixes an urgent appointment. Which unfortunately is Tuesday 8am, soonest, about two and some days away. Then she swallows a paper of Grandpa headache powder and tries to pass out past the pummelling and pulverising in her jaw.
She makes it through the rest of Saturday. On to Sunday. Monday first thing she calls the office to book off sick.
The rotten, metallic taste in her, the chafed tongue with nowhere to hide. Inside what ought to be her mouth, although she cannot stomach a close look, there opens a red cave of bloodied ice and bone as if some brute monster has been feeding on flesh. Her jaws snap to in horror. Trapped, she can feel how her inflamed red tongue lies in its pool like some flab of raw animal fat.
When Tuesday finally comes around, Nora takes the baby to the neighbour downstairs, as she always does on workdays, and the woman minds it along with her own two for a small sum. Then she walks down to the circle on Queen Mary and catches the City bus, holding a handkerchief discreetly to her mouth as she pays the fare, but removing it immediately afterwards in order to appear dignified as she faces the other passengers while trying to find a seat.
Every gear shift shudders in her head. The sheer lawn hanky may seem refined, but Nora needs it to disguise the swelling and take the bloodied spittle. And to conceal the smell of fouled blood which has begun to suffuse her person.
She has seen black women who come to town in quite smart clothes, but with slipped, vigilante doeks wrapped around their lower jaws and tied at the back of the head. Protecting their mouths from wind and germs, she’s surmised, since they have ‘the toothache’.
Today, nursing her mouth on the bus, for once she would like to be so regardless of self, so without self-consciousness, that she could claim in public the comfort of evident warmth against her ache, shamelessly revealing her distress. Though the fact of having to weigh up the idea shows her how impossible this would be. Even when she’s in agony, she agonises. She is much too mindful to forget herself; all she can think is that she’d really look a sight.
Then, thank heavens, without having to wait she is in the chair at Eagle Building, her stinking, odious suffering handed over to Dr van Toren.
Flinching, though faintly, evident only in a superficial flicker about the nostrils, the dentist leans in to consider what is left. Finds horrifying caries. Spalling. Corroded enamel perforated to pulp; parts fragile to powdery. Several teeth: dentine evident; molars – the grinding stones – themselves ground down to nothing, even disintegrated. Septic roots.
What is this? he frowns, suspecting. Then turns away from the patient to the steriliser in order to grimace to the eyebrows. It can be only prolonged vitamin and mineral deficiency; calcium, he thinks, over the frame of his glasses, the cloth mask. What else to explain this extreme oral pathology?
Nothing that will comfort this poor woman; a slight, elegant young lady wearing imitation pearls. She is in a worn, mint green pastel twinset and fawn pencil skirt, her slim, stockinged legs extended past his bent waist, feet enclosed, he has noticed, in classic two-tone pumps, scuffs polished out, but rather down at heel. Still, yes, most lovely; an effort to appear chic.
He pulls his mask down and in an engaging, broken English, repetition with variation allowing him pause to place the words he needs, he finds this not good, no, and for this he is sorry. Not before is he having seen such a terrible thing. Now please, he requests with an upturned palm, To rinse. Twice, he indicates, raising two fingers like a scout’s honour. And while she does, he scoots crabwise to the counter on his stool, and with his back turned, pens notes into a folder.
With each sip from the glass of pink liquid – discreetly sloosh, and spit – Nora avoids following the debris that swirls down the porcelain cavity.
Then Dr van Toren swivels around to face her, capping the pen. And for me, he continues, I must say to you. What also I am seeing here today, you (another beautiful, sophisticated gesture), this is a lovely lady. But, however, she is too thin. And I am asking why. This is my big question. What can be the reason? So if you would please to tell me: What is it, the food you are eating?
And then there is very little to say.
And so there is Nora, in her early twenties. And despite having been careful, she has a runty baby, a half-day clerical job (plus typing at home, addressing envelopes for various companies), a part-time husband, and not a tooth in her head. Single,