A place where I'll post up some thoughts and ideas - especially on literature in education, children's literature in general, poetry, reading, writing, teaching and thoughts on current affairs.
Thursday 6 September 2018
The Filling
I went to the dentist and he said that
I needed a filling, a huge filling, massive,
really, really big. I said OK and he gave
me an injection and while we waited for
it to take effect he said what music would
I like on, you can have classical, pop, jazz,
whatever you like and I said, jazz please
and he said that he was writing a novel,
it’s about this Jewish kid who was
adopted by the Pope and I could feel the
injection spreading through my jaw like a
finger in my gum and there was Miles Davis
doing ‘So What’ on the speaker and that gave
me such a good feeling of sitting in my old friend
Dave’s room and Dave saying that this is the
greatest record ever made, and me thinking
how does Dave know that, how can he be so
certain and to think - hah! - it wasn’t all that long
after it came out and in a way, Dave was right
and he was - what? - only sixteen at the time,
fancy being 16 and listening to that album, and
knowing that it was great and the dentist said
Spielberg was on to the story and was making a
movie about it but Spielberg was basing it on a
history book he’d got hold of not his novel and I said
how I wrote a book about a kid who spends the
night in a museum long before the ‘Night in the
Museum’ movie came out and he said that the
filling was going to be enormous, huge, massive,
and he got cracking and I closed my eyes and
concentrated on flattening my back out in
the chair and breathing and he said to the
assistant, ‘Wedge’, and I wondered what that
could be, and then I heard the drill - such a
high pitch - and he said to the assistant,
‘Come over here, take a look at this,’ and she
went around to his side, and looked in and I
could hear her take in a sudden breath, and
he said, I’ve never seen that before, and she
said, ‘Neither have I,’ and I said, ‘What?’ though
really it was just a kind of questioning grunt
because I had the suction thing in on one side
that was hauling all my spit out and somewhere
in there was the thing he called the wedge, and
he said, ‘Well, I think I can see your brain.’ And I
said, ‘What colour?’ but I think he thought I said,
‘Fuck off’ because he said, ‘No. I mean really.’ So
I tried to ask him, ‘What was he going to do about
it?’ And because I couldn’t say it properly, I did
a kind of shrug meaning, what to do? And I meant
it quite urgently because I didn’t really want my
brain exposed like that, I don’t know much about brains
but I was pretty sure that a brain shouldn’t just be
hanging out in the middle of a dentist’s surgery. But
I think he took the shrug as a kind of Jewish shrug,
meaning, ‘hey, so! It’s no big deal, there are worse
things in life than a bit of brain being on show.’
So, he said, ‘Too right, I like the attitude. Do you
mind if I take a picture of it?’ And I did a gesture
meaning, ‘You go ahead,’ and he got that gesture
OK and put his phone right next to my mouth and
he said, ‘Got it, thanks. I won’t put it up on social
media or anything,’ and I gave him a thumbs up
because actually I was quite grateful that people
would not be tweeting pictures of my tooth with
this - like - tunnel leading up to my brain because
next thing I’d be on a station somewhere
and someone would come up to me and say,
‘Sheesh, saw your brain on Facebook, man,’
and he showed the pic to the assistant and she
said, ‘That’s good,’ and in a way I felt kinda
flattered that she thought my brain looked good
but then I thought O maybe she just means that
her boss has taken a good picture and - hey -
who knows, there might be some whole thing
about her having to say that his photos were
good because of whether she got a bonus or not
and he said, that he needed to ‘pack’ the hole
now and because it led up to my brain, it might
start affecting how I thought with that part of
the brain, and I said, ‘what part of the brain
is it?’ And he said, ‘It’s the part of the brain
that deals with chickens.’ And I said, ‘Will it mean
that I won’t be able to see or hear chickens, is it that?’
And he said that he wasn’t sure because people
react in different ways to having packing put in
right close to the brain. And I said but you said that
you had never seen anything like this before, it
sounds like you have seen a few people with this
tunnel up to the chicken-part of the brain and he said,
who’s the dentist here? And I pointed to him. I very
carefully pointed at him with one finger so that he
was in no doubt that I thought that he was the
dentist here. And I think he took that pretty well.