Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

It would have been better, though, if it had happened the other way round, if I had remembered and he had forgotten.

As for Dad’s changeling idea, I have to say that he wasn’t altogether wrong. The look that he saw on my face, the construction he put on my words, neither of these expressed actual rejection on my part, but there’s no doubt I was leaving his world. I was being changed away from him, and I could no longer be expected to carry the weight of his hopes. For Dad the fantasy aspect of parenthood collapsed early. It became clear before I reached school age that my life would be no sort of extension of his, and he went into an angry mourning.

Usually parents have the feeling that their children are stolen from them when they’re bigger, almost grown. The current word that has something of the flavour of ‘changeling’ is ‘adolescent’. It carries that sense of malign substitution. Nowadays children are abducted not by fairies but by their peers. Only a poor copy of what was taken is left behind.

I was already a poor copy. Dad forfeited his due as a father — the knife box brought home from carpentry class, the girl-friend brought to dinner who would look at him slyly and tell him she could see where I got my looks. The thing which happens between fathers and sons happened early in our case. He never stopped being the father who threw a red ball to me from his æroplane — whatever the reasons he had for that — but I soon stopped having anything in common with the son who had caught it.

Brute fact

As for Mum and the dentist’s, what happened was that she went to have two teeth out. She read an article in a magazine while she was waiting to be seen. She had always been more of a magazine person than a book person, even away from waiting rooms. Over time magazines had rewarded her with household tips, recipes, sensible opinions and even the idea for keeping and breeding budgies — that fulfilling pursuit, that life-saver. Now the world of magazines punished her with something it normally kept at arm’s length, brute fact, not to be bargained with. Not to be cooked, cleaned, common-sensed or hobbied away.

Mum was going to have two wisdom teeth taken out — only the upper ones, which isn’t normally traumatic. It’s pretty much in and out. The dentist was only going to use a local anæsthetic. It’s the bottom ones that give the grief. Mum was half-way through reading the article when her name was called. At that moment her whole world was going smash. She didn’t even think of cancelling the appointment. It was something people just didn’t do in those days. She would keep her appointment with the anæsthetic needle and the extraction pliers, but as she stood up to go through into the surgery she slipped the magazine into her handbag. She was only stealing a second-hand magazine that no one else was likely to want anyway, but this was by her standards a steep descent into lawlessness. The abandonment of morals showed that she was in shock. She held the handbag tightly against her, despite the dentist’s cajoling, all the way through the raid on her mouth.

The dentist injected her in the gums, each side, and also in the palate. When he does that it feels as if someone has stuffed a shoe in your mouth. He tells you that you’ll feel as if you’re unable to swallow, although if you try you’ll find you can.

He tested the inside of her mouth with a probe, to make sure that the anæsthetic had taken hold, while she held the magazine against her heart.

I don’t think dentists enjoy inflicting pain any more than any other health professionals. I quite enjoy my own sessions in the chair. I find the dentist’s working position comforting, leaning over me from behind, so that I can sometimes rest my head against his chest. I enjoy the warmth transmitted through his smock to the crown of my head. There’s a soft connection there, where the bodies touch, as well as a harsher one where the scientific illusion makes its investigations, usually with something sharp, into the ‘I-am-the-body’ illusion.

The anæsthetic deadens pain, but it has no power to muffle the disconcerting sounds of extraction, which are transmitted sharply along the bone to the ears so close by. The groans of the gums are silent, but the teeth creak and crack under the pressure of the pliers in the moments before they give way. The sounds they make are very much like iceberg calvings, frozen sunderings. Cracks echo from an arctic distance as the dentist consolidates his grip on the condemned tooth and starts to pull, yanking its roots from bone.

Mum’s dentist was a competent one, and he didn’t take long to perform the extractions. He asked her if she wanted to see the teeth he had removed, but she didn’t hear him. She was already pulling the dog-eared magazine from her bag. He showed her the teeth anyway, with a touch of professional pride, explaining that one of them had been infected and would have given her grief before too long. Between his pliers the crown of the tooth was mush. She barely glanced at it. Her eyes strayed only for a moment towards those shattered trophies before they returned to the pages in her hand.

The dentist asked Mum to open her mouth, and when she obeyed him he popped in a little cotton-wool bolster on each side, to absorb the blood. Her mouth was still numbed, and she found it hard to close her mouth round the cotton wool. Then she wandered into the waiting room again. She sat there, as if she was still waiting for her appointment, until she had read the article to the end. Her legs had received no anæsthetic, but she didn’t trust them yet to carry her home. Normally she was the one who did the pouncing in waiting rooms, with sad or happy stories, bed rest or budgies, but now she had been pounced on herself.

Horribly perfect

The article she read was about a special hospital where they sent sick children, children whose joints swelled and then locked, whose first symptom was a pain that kept coming back at the same time of day. As the article described them, they were children exactly like me. They didn’t have rheumatic fever. What they had was systemic juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, known as Still’s Disease after George Frederick Still (1868–1941), the professor of pædiatrics who first described it.

She read the article again and again, trying to find something in it that didn’t fit my case. The fit was horribly perfect, the symptoms identical. The only discrepancy was the diagnosis. The only thing that didn’t fit was what the doctors had told us. Lightning had struck twice in exactly the same place — in my joints. The first strike had been destructive enough, but this second strike was worse. It seemed to blast with a sort of irony.

Mum rolled the magazine up without looking around and put it in her bag. She was smoother in the business of stealing now. She was hardened. She passed her hands over her face, and braced herself against the chair to stand up.

Only on the way home did unnatural calm give way to hysteria in its other form. Granny was sitting in the kitchen with a cup of coffee when her daughter came flying in, her swollen mouth stuffed with blood-soaked swabs, hardly able to speak, making sounds that were more like howling than anything else.

Mum should have remembered who she was dealing with. It was a point of principle for Granny not to be taken by surprise. She said, ‘Laura, dear, whatever’s the matter? You look like a molested guinea-pig.’ Mum spat the swabs out into the sink, making fastidious Granny wince, and she tried to explain, though the anæsthetic did her articulation no favours. She was trying to master a new language.

‘I can’t understand a word you’re saying,’ said Granny impatiently. ‘Calm down and then start from the beginning.’ Instead Mum thrust the magazine at her, stabbing at the fatal article with her finger.