All I want for Christmas.
It was a terrifying sensation. I felt around with my tongue. There was a huge gap where my front tooth should have been, and a hard object was tumbling around in my mouth. There was I, sitting at a table outside a posh restaurant with my husband, Fernando, my small son, Andy, and the Spanish friends we were staying with, eating fresh prawns on a summer evening in Spain. Everything was calm and peaceful until it happened.
I got up suddenly and, without opening my mouth, I half stumbled through the restaurant to the toilets. What a relief when I picked the false crown off my tongue and inserted it back in its socket! But, how long would it last? I made my way back to our table.
“What’s the matter?” asked Fernando worriedly, his dark eyes surveying me for a clue.
“Nothing,” said I, muttering nonchalantly.
I refused, with gestures and shakes of the head, to eat anything else, pretending I was no longer hungry.
Ten minutes later, I felt the tooth wobbling and my heart sank. What should I do? I got up again and went around a corner, pushed the crown in again and reappeared. This excessively odd behaviour had everybody puzzled, and there was no more pretending.
“One of my false crowns has come loose,” I admitted, rather embarrassed.
My friend, Rafaela, her two daughters, and my husband did not know how to react. Should they be compassionate or amused? I was beginning to see the funny side of it but I could not laugh for fear that the tooth would shoot out of my mouth and land in the middle of some dish of food, or worse still on somebody’s lap.
I remembered vividly the day, years before, when I went to the dentist and asked him if he could straighten out my front teeth, which overlapped. At the age of twenty, this defect was hideously conspicuous, or at least I thought it was. It was the cause of infinite embarrassment, making me put my hand in front of my mouth whenever I laughed. The dentist felt generous and was obviously not too pressed for time as he immediately agreed. He got hold of my teeth with some sort of instrument like pliers and snapped them off. What a horror! When I reached up with my tongue and felt nothing but a wide gap, I could have screamed.
“What has he done to me?” I thought in fright.
I imagined myself as a ghastly, ugly, old hag. The correct procedure might have been to explain what he was going to do, in order to prepare me psychologically. However, he evidently did not consider this necessary. He was smiling happily at the result of the treacherous action which had dashed into microscopic pieces all my hopes of finding a boyfriend, getting married or living happily ever after.
While I was living my own personal nightmare, the dentist proceeded to file down and perforate, finally sticking two false crowns into the stubs of my own teeth. When I looked in the mirror he handed me, I was pleasantly surprised. I really looked better.
“These are temporary crowns,” he added. “Come back again and I’ll get you some permanent ones.”
The fact of the matter is that I never went back. It was a question of having to go back to university, then go abroad, then work, then get married – things that happen and occupy your time, pushing other matters, like getting some permanent crowns, into the back of your mind. However, that day the matter came forth with a terrible thrust and I relived the awful sensation of that hideous gap.
My husband and friends took pity on me, decided to pay the bill and go back to the flat. It was time for bed, so there was nothing to be done that night. I put on my nightie and went to the bathroom. I should have realised that cleaning my teeth in that situation was a highly dangerous operation. However, routine is routine and I opened my mouth to put the toothbrush in. That was a bad decision as my tooth fell out, rattled around the washbasin like a ball on a roulette, and finally came to rest. This time my reaction was quick. I had not put the plug in the washbasin and the tap was on. I rapidly put my finger into the hole to stop the tooth disappearing. Imagine if I lost the tooth! I would have to go on living goodness knows how long with nothing in the gap. I tried to pull the tooth up but I realised that I could not reach it with my other hand, and it could slip down the plughole. At that moment, an attack of total panic overcame me. Without moving the finger which was stopping the tooth from being engulfed by the drainage system, I shouted with all my might.
“Help! Help!”.
Everybody came running to see what disaster had struck. With great presence of mind, my husband plucked the tooth out with my eyebrow tweezers, and gave it back to me, shaking his head as if I were making a fuss about nothing. He was totally unaware of the great psychological trauma I was suffering. I went to bed in silence, placing my rebellious tooth on the bedside table with great care, to be sure to find it easily in the morning.
The next morning, we got out the telephone directory and rang a dentist. No answer. We rang another – answering machine – dentist on holiday. Another – no appointments until September. As you can imagine, my state of mind was again developing from calm preoccupation to nervous panic. Was there no dentist in Cordoba in August? At last, we got an answer and made an appointment for the same day. We arrived there early, I with my mouth tight shut, and my tooth carefully wrapped in a hankie in my bag. The dentist did not waste any time with pleasantries. He just took the tooth, smeared it with white paste and stuck it back in its place. It took him about half a minute and cost me thirty pounds, which seemed a lot at the time.
Maybe I clean my teeth with excessive vehemence, but the next time it happened I was also in the bathroom. This time the tooth had obviously learned from experience and disappeared rattling down the plughole to unfathomable darkness. However, I did not let myself be seized by hysterical panic. Besides, I was alone, so it was no use screaming. The nervous fright quickened my wits. Where had the tooth gone? I unscrewed the pipe under the washbasin and peered into the blackness. There was a bend at the end. Where did it lead? Had the tooth got stuck there? It could not progress along the horizontal bit on its own unless I turned the water on. Where did that pipe lead to? I found a suspicious-looking metal lid in the floor, ran for a big screwdriver and unscrewed it. Below floor level, a series of pipes ended in a big hole. I traced each pipe-hole back, one to the bath, one to the bidet, and one to the recently value-increased washbasin.
“Now”, I thought, “if I turn the tap on, the water will send the tooth shooting out of the hole and may make it disappear down the main pipe into total oblivion.”
I rushed back to the kitchen, scanned the larder and returned with a sieve, which I carefully fitted over the big hole. I was on all fours staring down the hole, and planning my next move when my husband arrived.
“Don’t touch the tap!” I barked when he looked in to see what was going on. After explaining the situation, I asked him to turn on the tap slowly while I put my hand over the end of the pipe. Seconds later, I felt the water and something hard in my hand. “That’s it – turn it off!” I cried.
At last, I had my precious tooth again. An enormous sense of relief invaded me and I just sat there on the floor. My husband left me, with the remark that he had saved my tooth for the second time, as if I had not done anything at all.
The next day I went to the dentist once again, but this time it was different. My dentist explained that being a temporary crown it had a very short pin. In time, the root had worn down so, even though he stuck it back on, it would not last for long. He suggested getting implants.
Finally, Father Christmas brought me my two front teeth, as natural-looking as my own, and mercifully unmoveable for ever and ever amen.