The Fishwhacker Swindle?

I went to the dentist on Saturday for the first time in two years. “Why have you left it for two years?” asked Ali as he rammed cold jagged vibrating steel between my jaws. As if he gives a monkey’s: my self-neglect means there’s more for him to fix, and therefore more for him to spend on fripperies like that midlife crisis toy parked outside the surgery.

It’s a private facility and upstairs from a heart clinic, which is handy in the event of somebody suffering a cardiac arrest in the chair, or more likely when the receptionist gives him the bill afterwards. As a familiar if infrequent customer I’m entitled to a freebie with Monica four times a year. Monica is a buxom wench who wears some heady scent that would stir a man’s blood even if she was 70, elephantine and had a face like a yak, which she isn’t and doesn’t. She’s not a prostitute, by the way, as far as I know, but rather a dental hygienist, and on Saturday I emerged from her tender ministrations with all the relevant parts satisfyingly polished.

The session with the dentist was not as much fun. It got off to a bad start. I tried wrong-footing him by saying loudly and sheepishly as I sat down, “I know, I know, I should -” but he’d clearly rehearsed his lecture and wasn’t going to be denied. Phoebe, his nurse, who has a voice indistinguishable from one of his drills, chipped in with little acerbic bon mots. It was like being back at school and I was about to pull my trousers down and bend over for the inevitable when I got a grip on myself and remembered that I was the customer and they were my paid helpers. Curtly, I asked Ali to get the fuck on with it.*

So we moved on to X-rays, Ali gabbing away as dentists do about every bloody thing on God’s earth and engaging in playful flirtation with Phoebe, even going so far as to whack her bottom with my dental records at one point. I quite like Ali, really, and he’s a good dentist, but they’re all cut from the same cloth. He went out to get the X-rays and Phoebe tried to engage me in a conversation about football, without success as I know nothing about the game and care less. Ali came back in, shaking his head slightly and with the tip of his tongue squeezed into a thin white strip between his perfect front teeth.

“Oh my God,” he crowed in the grating cod-Indian voice he likes to put on for what he tragically believes is the amusement of his patients and staff. He’s second-generation British Asian and normally has a Kensington accent that could cut glass. “Wery bad, wery bad, Mr Eater.”

It turned out I needed three fillings and there was a wisdom tooth that was likely to impact some time soon. I felt sick and angry. I brush twice a day, floss more or less daily – well, three times a week anyway – and don’t really eat sweets. I kicked the fags five years ago so my gums should be in good shape (and to be fair, they were according to him). But if all that effort yields such slim pickings, what’s the point? He could do the two worst fillings now, and it would take about an hour.

“Don’t worry,” said Ali, mercifully back in his soothing normal voice, “we have a new entertainment system for you to use while I’m working.” And so they did. It was a pair of spectacles onto which was projected a DVD film. I had a choice of films and TV shows. There wasn’t much that appealed, and what I did like, I’d seen before, but in the end I picked an episode of Jam, the brilliant Channel Four programme from five or six years ago by the legendary satirist Chris Morris. It’s a nightmarish sketch series, comedy in only the broadest sense of the word and probably the most twisted thing that has ever appeared on television.

And the horror began. The footage playing on the glasses was also showing on a small screen visible to Ali and Phoebe, and what bothered me was that they were chortling away from the start. I find Jam hilarious but I’m unnerved when other people do, especially people with a responsible job taking care of my dental well-being. After the unutterable pain of the anaesthetic injections I focused on the programme, assuming the worst was over and that all I’d feel was a little gentle pressure. One of the milder sketches came on, involving a young man who goes for acupuncture with a terrifying woman who treats her clients by driving ten-inch nails through their arms and legs and pinning them to boards. (As she says, “The treatment’s very successful… I’ve never had a patient come back.”)

In an eerie instance of coincidence:

WHACK went the nail into the man’s hand -

CRRRRRRZZZZZZTTTT went the drill bit into my jaw, prying forth rotten tooth contents –

HEEHEEHAAAOHGODTHATSGROSSHEEEAAAAGHH went Phoebe -

STOPSTOPICANTTAKEANYMOREFORTHELOVEOFGOD went I. Or, more accurately, LLLLLLLG.

Fifty minutes later I staggered out of the building and ran to my car, a wad of bloodied swab crammed against my mouth. The journey home was quick, no doubt helped by the lightening of my wallet that had occurred, though the new metal in my mouth would have counterbalanced this somewhat.

Ali should be arrested forthwith, his assistants with him, and the police must dig up the foundations of that building because there are bodies buried under it, I swear to Christ. Dentists are evil and must be abolished. Children should be genetically tampered with so that they don’t grow teeth.




*Actually, what I said was, “I’m really sorry and I’ll take better care of my teeth in future,” but I’m not going to admit that to the likes of you. I maintain this blog so that I can present myself as something I’m not: a heroic figure.