LAST Thursday evening around 11.30, my wife casually presented me with an open palm. I stared at it and was immediately overwhelmed by a wave of panic. In the centre of her hand there appeared to be a small white nut, half an almond, perhaps, although I knew that was wishful thinking.
“That’s not a nut, is it?” I asked.
“I don’t eat nuts,” slurred my wife, revealing an astonishing black hole in the front of her gleaming white teeth.
I looked back at my wife’s palm and then back up at her gap-tooth smile.
“What do you think? Do you notice it?” asked my wife with a slight yet attractive whistle.
I shook my head: “Not when you speak,” I said, “only when you smile broadly.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, apparently on the brink of exploding.
“Actually, you look like a barmaid from the Admiral Benbow,” I said, and then cowered from the ensuing eruption.
Given the circumstances, it was reasonably contained.
My wife had been working for many months on a solo exhibition which opened the following evening. Not only would she have to be there, but she would have to be photographed and interviewed by newspapers. On top of that, she was also donating a painting to the Ninewells Cancer Campaign and Lady Fiona Fraser would be there to accept it on behalf of the charity.
As my wife peered at herself in a mirror and tried to push her crown back into place, I could see the exhibition opening with me sent as a Tootsie substitute, dressed as my wife and trying to look a foot shorter and six stone lighter. The cross-dressing ceramic artist Grayson Perry sprang to mind. I could Google him, I thought, and maybe get some tips.
I was getting enthusiastic about this, but it wasn’t the time for plans. At that moment, we needed some general panic and a lot more hand-wringing.
Apparently, the root of this particular toothy problem goes back 16 years to an organic banana chip that my wife didn’t want to eat in the first place. A friend had forced it on her, even although she had said they had a habit of breaking people’s teeth.
She was repeating this when one of her top front teeth broke in half under the pressure of the organic banana chip.
The crown that replaced the broken tooth behaved itself until about a month ago, when it decided one Saturday evening to nurture an abscess that made my wife look like half a giant chipmunk. Fortunately, when I told her this, she couldn’t reply with quite the force she would have wished. In fact, she was too busy rolling around in agony, an image I just couldn’t convey to the bloke on the line from NHS 24.
Eventually, I got through to a dental nurse who gave my wife some advice about ibuprofen and drinking soup through a straw.
“A straw,” my wife mumbled, holding the chipmunk half of her face, “a banana, mashed up,” she continued, staring off into deep space.
I took the phone from her, but the dental nurse had gone.
Baffled and growing more distraught by the second, I phoned NHS 24 again, explained the situation and said we had been fobbed off. This is probably what you might call a charmless offensive. It certainly didn’t endear me to the woman on the other end, who tried her best to assure me that the word “fobbed” wasn’t in their vocabulary.
“Well, I’ve never felt so fobbed off and my wife definitely looks fobbed off to me,” I said, “or at least one half of her does. The other half of her face looks like a giant chipmunk and there’s also a fair amount of agony going on that we’d like to fob off. Any suggestions?”
The woman opened a new case number or report or file and told us to wait for a dental nurse to call us back. Half an hour later, in desperation, I called a private dentist and got an emergency appointment within the hour.
On the way into the dentist’s surgery, my wife was mumbling something about mashed-up banana chips.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “you can have all the banana chips you can eat once we’ve got this abscess sorted out.”
At that point, I thought my wife was going to be sick, but then I had forgotten about that organic banana chip.
The subsequent double helping of amoxycillin obviously lulled my wife into a false sense of security – until, of course, the crown popped out and fell into her hand just 18 hours before she was due to make a memorable, much-photographed public appearance.
Years ago, I once glued a rogue crown back into place myself, but the result was a mild form of septicaemia.
“Might be worth it, though,” said my wife as she peered again into the mirror, “although I can’t see how it would hold.”
I had to go into another room because my wife just looked so weirdly comical.
“Why don’t I make a false tooth for you?” I announced, walking back into the kitchen with a big piece of white foamboard.
“Who would know?” I continued, holding the board up to my teeth although, to be honest, speaking personally, I’d need a sort of pale-yellow ochre foamboard to pull it off.
“It’s all right,” said my wife with some resignation, “I’ll just go like this; I’ll take my lucky white heather and pegs.”
“How much lucky white heather have you got?” I asked, grinning broadly into the mirror behind my wife after sticking a piece of blackened paper on to one of my front teeth. I saw my wife’s eyes lock on to it, but there was no response.
Fortunately, our local dentist rose to the challenge the following forenoon and my wife went to her exhibition dentally intact. Exactly 24 hours after the crown popped out, my wife showed me the palm of her hand again with a similar-looking white nut nestled in the middle of it.
“Souvenir?” she whistled. “Unlucky white heather?”