A DAD'S LIFE:I HAD to lie to the elder this morning. She was heading to the dentist, not for the first time – we're not that delinquent – but for the first bit of an invasive procedure.
Two teeth have decided they don’t like the look of this world and so have buried their heads under their neighbours’. As a result, they’re getting the big pull.
“Will it hurt, Dad?”
“Not at all.” There’s big fat lie number one. “He will be gentle with you.”
The dentist is a friend and she knows him, so I work the personal angle. I don’t point out that, no matter how well we’re acquainted, he will still have to open her face and remove objects from her jawbone.
“But how does he do it? Won’t he have to pull hard? And what about the needle? I’ve never had an injection before.” So many questions, so many lies.
“He does it like he’s picking strawberries out of cream, it’ll be that easy. And the needle is so smooth you don’t know it’s done till you start to dribble down your chin.”
The problem with having a dentist as a buddy is you hear the stories. Not the horror stories – he wouldn't bother with what appear to be flesh- ripping gorefests to us. No, you hear about the distractions, about how root canal becomes so mundane he could be daydreaming about O'Gara's confidence levels while you're in a mind melt, oral scaffolding giving you the Alienface.
But I let him muck around with my mouth, so I presume he’ll take care of the mini-me too.
This trust is hard won. I am long in the tooth before my time, the result of a Wham bar 1980s diet and agricultural dental practitioners. In the beginning, a nice man on Wellington Road used to maintain my mouth, but all that came to an end when I was packed off to boarding school.
Pain kicked in on the first night. I had waved off the parents, puffed up the chest, eyeballed a couple of lairy third years knowing there was a hiding in the offing at some stage but unwilling to show fear, and begun to get to grips with the new surroundings. It was obvious boarding school embraced the notion of a pecking order and I wanted in as high up the food chain as possible.
Why hadn’t my mother brought me to the dentist before slinging me down to the bog? Why, instead of staking my claim in the classroom on day one, was I sat in the infirmary, clinging onto my swollen jaw and whatever abscess had taken hold, begging the matron to let me go home.
No way. This boy was packed back into maths and instructed to depart “up the town” with a 5th year prefect after the final bell at 3.30pm. Pain fugued the first classes I ever sat through in that school until, hours later, I found myself on a scratchy, slippy recliner, staring into the face of a man with a drill who oozed the sense that he’d rather be elsewhere. You and me both, mate. All I can picture is lank black locks and a shower of dandruff.
He poked around for a while, coming up for air and a sniff. “Well, the one at the back has to go anyway. But if you’re still hurting in a couple of days it means it’s the one beside it that’s giving the trouble. Come back to me then if you have to.”
So started the fabled dental wrestling match that many of us went through. The attachment, following anaesthesia with a wide-bore prong, of garden-shed pliers followed by the inelegant mount of a tired, bored man in striped shirt and shiny slacks. Then the pull, another pull, a twist, a grunt and a yank. The proud proffering of the offending molar and a shove of dry blue tissue into the gob to staunch the spurt. This man was a true professional.
Fortunately, the pain abated that night; he had gotten the right one. But the experience coloured a triumvirate: school itself, my forgetful old pair, and blackguard dentists. It was a long time before I climbed into the chair again and when I did I paid the price once more for that neglect.
So I lied to the elder and when she arrived home, hangdog and tired, she said it had hurt. I told her I had lied a little, but knew it wouldn’t be too bad. Lots of things hurt a bit, but usually they’re not too bad.