Staring At The Light (21 page)

William put the hand across his mouth, moved his fingers and felt his jaw. He leaned against the door frame and looked at
what he could see. Everything as normal, nothing disturbed, as if they had never been there. All the paintings still in place.
The mark of an emerging bruise on his own skin.

The phone rang into the heavy silence and William looked at it as if it were alien. He listened to the message and heard the
receiver replaced after the bleep. Slowly he flexed the fingers of his right hand, then cupped it in his left to control the
tremor. Poor hand, mottled in colour, intact, the same as ever. It was a playground trick to compress the knuckle like that
and make the victim scream. The body was shy of injury to the hand. A circle of purple toothmarks rose in the fleshy part
between thumb and forefinger.

A series of possible and logical actions paraded themselves in the forefront of his mind without prompting him to any movement.
He felt sick with a corrosive shame; paralysed by the conviction that he had invited the intrusion, played with this fire
and solicited the burning. It made him responsible; he felt like a girl, guilty after the rape because she had been the first
to smile and get into his car. This is your fault, William. Then, panic, mollified in part by the
presence of bruises without blood; a mental check of the last tetanus jab; all immunizations in place as they always were.
No bite more poisonous than a human bite.

To test the workings of his right hand, he pressed out 1471 on the phone, using three fingers and thumb.
You were called today at
… The number was Isabella’s. She did this sometimes, never speaking or leaving a message, and he never knew if he was supposed
to have known and phoned her back, whether she was lonely, whether she simply wanted a few seconds of his pre-recorded voice
to prove he was still alive and earning money. He would have liked, for a moment, a touch of her unsympathetic certainty;
he could ask her for help.

But he did not want
help
: he wanted redemption. He was too ashamed for help to be appropriate. Seeking help from Isabella, showing her the pathetic
bruise to his face and the non-existent damage to his hand, which had made him scream like a baby, would only be tantamount
to inviting contempt, while seeking help from Sarah would involve facing the briskness and wisdom of her sympathy along with
an offer of strong drink. He decided on strong drink alone.
He
had got himself into this;
he
would get himself out.

William went to his kitchen and made tea with elaborate care. One Earl Grey tea-bag, indecision about whether to have lemon
or milk, until he remembered there was no milk, the sharp scent of the tea a restorative. A sip of that, a slug of brandy
into a
glass, sipped and then gulped, which made him cough. Then he collected the bundle of notes from the desk and went backstage.
He felt like a reviled actor, slinking into the wings.

The room that comforted in its mess. The reminder of the good old days of dentures and National Health practice; dangerous
anaesthetics for children; no time for mere technique. Dentures and moulds on surfaces, looking as if they waited for a mouth.
No-one had come down here: he would have been able to tell by the disturbance of the white dust. He went back for the second
glass of brandy and collected the bottle. He got ice from the fridge, noticed evidence of Tina’s current passion for lemons,
added a slice. The first drink had gone straight to his head. Somewhere in here was the first impression he had ever made
of Cannon’s teeth. He began to search feverishly, faster and faster, increasing the mess and the sense of hopelessness as
he went, and all the time the bruises on the back of his hand faded indiscriminately until only the most prominent, left by
the top canines, remained. He stopped the frantic searching; there would be nothing to compare but, all the same, he could
swear that those teeth and the teeth that had made the impression would be almost identical.

There was no telephone here, deliberately, a decision made on grounds of economy, and a state of affairs preserved because
he liked it. He wiped a surface clean with his sleeve, blew at the dust, and separated the notes into two piles. They were
heavy; he found himself panting, with a vague inclination to
cry, which, once recognized, made him cross. Oh, for heaven’s sake, William, what happened after all? Nothing. A shock, easily
treated with sugared tea, more brandy.

He made himself concentrate on the notes. They would be out of order; it might take hours to sort them and there would be
patients arriving tomorrow. The thought of that made him tremble; the mere idea of ever again facing a patient without reading
the notes first made him nauseous. That was what he had done with the girl-child who inhabited his dreams along with her brother;
the one from whom he was sure he had removed the wrong teeth. He looked at the names on the first three folders: none of them
meant anything. Without their notes they were strangers, although, if he looked at the chart, memory stirred in the way it
might for a fingerprint expert recognizing a familiar set of whorls. The impression left by a bite was similarly unique. He
almost wanted the bruises to reappear, to evidence their own origins. It had been a nip; the man had not wanted to
eat
his hand any more than he had wanted to eat from it.

William thought of another version of the same scene: the man’s teeth snapping shut on his hand, not with the nip of a puppy
but the bite of a Rottweiler, jaws locked, teeth grinding on sinew, remaining like that until prised apart or the hand torn
away. The notes were not hopelessly muddled, and it might have been himself who had muddled them more by carrying them downstairs
and dropping a few of the folders on the way – no way to treat
treasured things, how could he be so clumsy? The mere touch of the folders reassured him, but what might have been taken out?
From cursory examination it seemed that nothing was missing from the first few he examined. Gradually he relaxed and slowed
down. He isolated the Ms; they were all together, like a family. Ah, Mrs Macdonald, he remembered her from her chart, a lady
with fine yellow teeth like a horse and a kindred liking for sugar lumps. Mr Murray, a faceless memory with a highly successful
bridge between molar and premolar of which William had been proud. Miss Motcomb, a child of the fluoride age, free of dental
caries. He looked for the single folder on Andrew Mitchum, Sarah’s emergency treatment, and could not find it. This was faintly
disturbing, but since he doubted that patient would ever return he put second thoughts into the realm of non-being, calmer
now. Sister Dominic’s were gone, with the notation of Cannon’s introduction to the sisters.
Cannon’s friends
, he had written on the front, with a reminder to keep them all together. That did not matter either: he would remember Dominic’s
filling. What mattered was that there would be notes for tomorrow’s patients: Tina would be able to find them before anyone
arrived. The relief was profound. He sorted through until he found the folder that related to Cannon, filed under that name
in the Cs without fuss. The name Smith was added in brackets; there was no address other than the prison, and Cannon’s prisoner
number was all that appeared. William sat back, sipped the brandy and read, slowly and
thoughtfully, the coded record of what he had done with Cannon and in which order over nine months. A good job, was what –
but, then, the raw material had been so much better than he could have hoped. Diseased teeth, but strong and recoverable;
not a suggestion of degenerating bone or receding gums; an extraordinary case of underlying health.

He remembered Cannon trembling in the chair. Remembered the man downstairs, with his shudder of revulsion, the aggression,
the bravado, which were surely the symptoms of fear. He looked again at the notes and felt satisfaction. A
good job
; he was
good
at this; in fact, he was
excellent
. He drummed his fingers on the dusty surface; the pain had gone.

Now, if these two were twins, there was every chance that the mouths would be similar, but professional instinct was telling
William that
this
man would not have the same underlying strength. There was a lividity about him that suggested otherwise; blood pressure,
lines to the face that suggested familiarity with chronic pain. And Cannon, virtually under orders and removed from prison
for the purpose of mending his teeth, had had nothing to lose and something to gain from a glimpse of the outside world. Cannon
had been curious; Cannon had been allowed to explore; Cannon had sat happily in
this
room. And Cannon had a capacity to trust: he
wanted
to believe and he
wanted
renewed teeth, he had said, because it would so delight his wife. Lord, he’d forgotten that Cannon had a wife. There was
nothing about the state of his clothes to suggest it.

Would this man have the same to lose or gain, and did he have an ounce of faith? William doubted it. Would he stand a dozen
or more long afternoons devoted to crowns and veneers? Would he submit quietly to the needle or the offer of Diconal oblivion?
William doubted that, too. Would he be able to accept that some of his treatment would be experimental, at least a case of
trial and error, and not everything would work first time? Probably not. William would not be able to treat this man in the
same way as his brother, but all he knew at this point was that he desperately wanted to try. He craved the challenge of finding
the
best
methods and achieving the
best
results, making a real difference to the man’s appearance and attitudes, lifting a lifetime’s curse by reversing a now rare
condition, the way he had with Cannon, and against that desire the blow to the face and the pain to the hand became, if not
forgotten, at least irrelevant.

He moved, restless, slightly drunk and becoming more so; he had consumed little food that day, and it was getting dark. He
found the darkness a relief. He picked up one of the moulds on the table, counted the teeth. Twenty-eight in this particular
head. What if he were simply to remove the disfiguring teeth and create a denture? The creature would endure this better,
perhaps; the result would still change his appearance dramatically. William had a fondness for dentures. His National Health
practice had featured them strongly, for reasons of budget rather than of fashion, and, ah, Isabella had been right to tread
on his principles and insist he migrate to private practice,
for the chance to do better, without restrictions …
she had been right
, without knowing why: dentures slipped, they broke; the mouth changed around them, for all that they served well. There had
been dentures brought back for repair that looked as if they had been run over by a train; he remembered the dentures that
had been chewed by a mimicking child, dentures chewed by a dog with similar ideas. Suddenly he began to giggle, holding his
sides at the thought of a dog running away with a set of teeth, giving them to a bitch by way of courtship –
Here, have these; my master clearly thinks they’re delicious
.

William told himself he was probably losing his mind and the loss would not make a difference. He laughed until tears rolled
down his cheeks and he felt exhausted and sober. He rolled back towards the kitchen in search of more drink, dabbed at his
face with a paper towel. It took some time to adjust to dentures: would the man be patient with something short of pain? Then
he rolled into his surgery and sat on the patients’ chair. Looked suspiciously to his left, expecting the man to be there,
a substantial ghost, standing where he had seen him, with tears in his eyes, provoked by the denial of the existence of a
brother.

Only a man then, not a savage beast. Only a man, like himself. And William wished, far and above everything else, for the
chance to deal with those teeth, and then write it down for the world to know what
he
had done, and what could be learned from twins.

*

Write it down. Make a list of everything you want. Then look at the list and work out which of those things is less important.
Specify at those things until you realize they are not very important at all and can, therefore, be removed from the list.
Thus, make the list smaller. Sarah crossed out the word ‘garden’.

She sat by the fire with another set of estate agents’ particulars, saved as a treat, like a favourite book, to be consumed
or dismissed at leisure. This is the stuff of which dreams are made.
I tell you, Sarah, you are never satisfied. If you ever get to heaven you’ll say your wings are damp and the harp is out of
tune
. Pauline’s voice, not accusing, but puzzled about the nature of restlessness.

She had to think about houses. She had to retreat into this kind of dreaming because if she did not she would think about
Cannon and Julie all day and all night. And when they were safe, she would have no life left. She had to think about new homes
because it was the best antidote to nagging doubt, and the vision of Julie Smith with her inscrutable face and slightly swollen
belly. Concentrate.

The next flat, when she found it, would be minimalist in style, unlike this one, an overcrowded tribute to the acquisitive
habits of recent years. There was this passion for mismatched chairs, which was a particular nuisance: they crept in and out
of corners, always making room for another one with a kind of courtesy. There was an additional sofa, purchased purely for
the colour of its sun-faded cover, sitting ill at ease with the custom-built, like a poor relation.
There was a dining-room table, which dominated its own room, acquired for the splendour of its legs but redundant because
she had lost the knack of entertaining. The next flat would have none of those things; these items would have to be found
suitable homes, like well-behaved orphans. She was going to have bare wooden floors and walls full of paintings; only the
paintings were lifelong friends.

There had been a psychiatrist lover in here once or twice, who considered that her collection of paintings showed signs of
paranoid kleptomania and subversive tendency. There’s no
theme
to them, he repeated; they say
nothing
about you at all; they have nothing in common with each other or with you. Definitely like friends, then. It had seemed to
disturb him; it didn’t disturb her. It was not a
collection
. It would seem odder by far to have things distinguished by uniformity, a series of landscapes, for instance, or a series
of interiors or abstracts, instead of a jumble nudging each other for space in their diverse frames. The psychiatrist did
not seem to notice that there were more portraits than anything else; he might have analysed something sinister in that. Are
you lonely, Sarah? Do you have need of inanimate, undemanding company? Do you seek solace in the form of these expressive
faces on the wall? Do you
talk
to them?