Rachel's Holiday

by Marian Keyes

  All fascinating stuff that had me nodding and ‘hmmm’ing. If I wore glasses I would have taken them off and swung them knowledgeably by the arm. Until out of the blue it occurred to me that I hadn’t been to the dentist for about fifteen years.

  More, probably.

  About nine seconds after that I got a twinge in one of my back teeth.

  By bedtime I was demented with pain.

  ‘Ache’ came nowhere near describing the metallic, hot, electric sparks of screaming torment that shot up into my skull and down into my jaw. It was horrible.

  I kept leaping up to grab my jar of dihydracodeine and cram my head full of precious, soothing painkillers. Then stumbling back in confusion as I realized there weren’t any to take. That all those gorgeous little removers of pain were sitting in the top drawer of my dressing-table in New York. Always assuming that it was still my dressing-table, that Brigit hadn’t brought in a new flatmate and thrown my stuff out on the street.

  That was far too unpleasant to contemplate. Luckily my toothache was so phenomenally awful that I couldn’t think about anything else for long, anyway.

  I tried to bear the pain. I managed a good five minutes before I shouted ‘Has anyone got any painkillers?’ to the dining-room at large.

  It took me a moment to figure out why everyone guffawed with laughter.

  I went, almost on my knees, to Celine, who was the nurse on duty that night.

  ‘I’ve got a terrible pain in my tooth,’ I whimpered, my hand cradling my jaw. ‘Can I have something for the pain?

  ‘Some heroin would do nicely,’ I added.

  ‘No.’

  I was stunned.

  ‘I didn’t mean it about the heroin.’

  ‘I know. But you still can’t have any drugs.’

  ‘They’re not drugs, they’re just things to kill pain, you know that!’

  ‘Listen to yourself.’

  I was bewildered. ‘But it hurts.’

  ‘Learn to live with it.’

  ‘But… but this is barbaric.’

  ‘You could say that life is barbaric, Rachel. Regard this as an opportunity to coexist with pain.’

  ‘Oh God…’ I spluttered, ‘I’m not in group now.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. When you leave here you won’t be in group anymore and you’ll still have pain in your life. And you’ll find out that it won’t kill you.’

  ‘Of course it won’t kill me, but it hurts.’

  She shrugged. ‘Being alive hurts, but you don’t use painkillers for that.

  ‘Oh no, I forgot,’ she added. ‘You always have, haven’t you?’

  The pain was so bad that I thought I was going mad. I couldn’t sleep with it and for the first time in my life, I cried with pain. Physical pain, that is.

  In the middle of the night, Chaquie could take no more of me tossing around and scratching my pillow in frantic torment and she marched me downstairs to the nurses’ station.

  ‘Do something with her,’ she said, loudly. ‘She’s in agony and she’s keeping me awake. And I’ve Dermot coming tomorrow to be my Involved Significant Other. I’m finding it hard enough to sleep.’

  Celine reluctantly gave me two paracetamol, which didn’t even make a dent in the pain and said ‘You’d better go to the dentist in the morning.’

  The fear was nearly as great as the pain.

  ‘I don’t want to go to the dentist,’ I stammered.

  ‘I bet you don’t.’ She smirked. ‘Were you at the lecture earlier this evening?’

  ‘No,’ I said, sourly. ‘I decided to skip it and went for a few pints down in the village instead.’

  She widened her eyes. She wasn’t pleased.

  ‘Of course I was at it! Where else would I be?’

  ‘Why don’t you regard going to the dentist as the first grown-up thing you’ve ever done,’ she suggested. ‘The first frightening thing you’ve ever managed to do without drugs.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I muttered under my breath.

  Even though one of the nurses, Margot, went with me, I was the envy of the inmates.

  ‘Will you try to ESCAPE?’ Don wanted to know.

  ‘Of course,’ I mumbled, my hand to my swollen cheek.

  ‘They’ll set the leopards looking for you,’ Mike reminded me.

  ‘Yes, but if she hides in the river they’ll lose the scent,’ Barry pointed out.

  Davy sidled up to me and discreetly asked me to put a both-ways on the two-thirty at Sandown Park.

  And on the three o’clock.

  And on the three-thirty.

  And on the four o’clock.

  ‘I don’t know if I’ll be near a bookie’s,’ I explained, feeling guilty. Anyway, I wouldn’t have known what to do, I’d never been in a bookie’s in my life.

  ‘Will you be handcuffing me?’ I asked Margot, as we got into the car.

  She just threw me a disdainful look and I cringed. Humourless hoor.

  To my alarm, as soon as the car left the grounds, I started to shake. The real world was strange and scary and I felt I’d been away for a very long time. That annoyed me. I hadn’t been at the Cloisters for even two weeks and already I was institutionalized.

  We went to the nearest town, to Dentist O’Dowd, the dentist the Cloisters used whenever an inmate’s teeth started playing up. Which, according to Margot, happened all the time.

  On the walk from the car to the surgery, I felt that everyone in the entire town was looking at me. As if I was a maximum-security prisoner who’d been released for the morning to attend his father’s funeral. I felt different, alien. They’d know, simply by looking at me, where I’d just come from.

  I clocked a couple of youths standing on a corner. I bet they sell drugs, I thought, adrenalin starting up in my veins as I wondered how I could lose Margot.

  No chance.

  She frogmarched me along to the dentist, where, from the air of contained excitement, I gathered I was expected. The fourteen-year-old receptionist couldn’t take her fascinated little eyes off me. I could see what she was thinking. I was a weirdo, a misfit, someone from life’s margins. Bitterly, I supposed she’d been elbowing the nurses all morning, saying ‘What’ll she be like, the drug addict?’

  I felt deeply misunderstood. She was passing judgement on me because I was at the Cloisters, but she’d got it all wrong, I wasn’t one of them.

  As she sniggered none-too-discreetly, she got me to fill out a form.

  ‘And the bill will be sent to the, er, CLOISTERS?’ she asked with pretend discretion. All the people in the waiting-room jerked awake with sudden interest.

  ‘Yes,’ I mumbled. Although I felt like saying, ‘Could you make that a bit louder. I don’t think the people in Waterford quite heard it.’

  I felt old and jaded, annoyed by the idealism of the young receptionist. She probably thought that she’d never, ever, in a million years end up in the Cloisters and that I was really thick to let it happen to me. But I’d been like her once. Young and stupid. I’d thought I was invulnerable to life’s tragedies. I’d thought I was too smart to let anything bad happen to me.

  I took my seat and settled in for a long wait. It might have been several lifetimes since I’d been to the dentist, but I knew the routine.

  Margot and I sat in silence reading torn copies of the Catholic Messenger, the only available reading material. I tried to cheer myself up by reading the ‘Intentions offered’ page, where people pray for whatever bad thing they’re experiencing to pass.

  To know that other people were miserable always helped.

  Now and then another spasm of toothache took hold and I would press my tormented face into my hand, keen softly and yearn for drugs.

  Whenever I looked up, all the eyes in the place were fastened onto me.

  Of course, as soon as the receptionist said ‘Dentist O’Dowd will see you now,’ the pain went away. That always happened to me. I created a big song and dance about pains, injuries etc. But the minute I g
ot to the doctor all symptoms disappeared, leaving everyone thinking I had Munchausen’s Syndrome.

  I slunk into the surgery. The smell alone was enough to make me feel faint with fear.

  Luckily Dentist O’Dowd was a plump jolly man who was all smiles, instead of the Doctor Death figure I’d imagined.

  ‘Clamber up there, good girl,’ he urged, ‘and let’s have a look.’

  I clambered. He looked.

  While he banged around in my mouth with a spiky little metal thing and a mirror, he began a conversation that was supposed to put me at my ease.

  ‘So you’re from the Cloisters?’ he asked.

  ‘Aaarr,’ I tried to nod.

  ‘Alcohol?’

  ‘Go.’ I tried to indicate a negative with wriggles of my eyebrows. ‘Grugs.’

  ‘Oh, drugs, is it?’ I was relieved he didn’t sound disapproving.

  ‘I often wonder how you know you’re an alcoholic,’ he said.

  I tried to say ‘Well, no point in asking me,’ but it came out sounding ‘Ell, oh oi i akn ee.’

  ‘Obviously, if you end up in the Cloisters, then you know you’re an alcoholic, that tooth is on its last legs.’

  I tried to sit up in alarm, but he didn’t notice my distress.

  ‘It’s not as if I drink every day,’ he said. ‘If we do a root canal we might be able to save it. And no time like the present.’

  A root canal! Oh no! I didn’t know what a root canal was but from the way other people carried on when they had to have one, I was led to believe that it was something to fear.

  ‘Not every day, as such,’ he carried on. ‘Most evenings, though, ha ha.’

  I nodded miserably.

  ‘But never when I need a steady hand with the drill the next day. Ha ha.’

  I looked longingly at the door.

  ‘But once I start I can’t stop, do you know what I mean?’

  I nodded fearfully. Best to agree with him.

  Please don’t hurt me.

  ‘And at some stage in the evening, I find I can’t get drunk anymore. D’you know what I mean?’

  He didn’t need any confirmation from me.

  ‘And the depression afterwards. Sure, don’t talk to me.’ He was passionate. ‘I often wish I was dead.’

  He had stopped his banging and scraping, but left the mirror and the spiky thing in my open mouth. He rested his hand against my face, in thoughtful mode. He was a man settling in for a long conversation.

  ‘I’ve actually thought about suicide after a hard night,’ he confided. I felt saliva slowly make its way down my chin, but was afraid I’d seem unsympathetic if I wiped it. ‘Dentists are the profession with the highest rate of suicide, would you believe?’

  With wriggles of my eyebrows and flashes of my eyes I tried to convey compassion.

  ‘Sure, it’s a lonely kind of an oul’ life, looking at the inside of people’s mouths, day-in-day-out.’ The saliva had turned into a veritable niagara. ‘Day-in-day-feckin’-out.’

  He affected a whiny voice, ‘ “My tooth hurts, can you fix it, I’ve a pain in my tooth, do something about it.” That’s all I hear, teeth, teeth, teeth!’

  Yikes, a looper.

  ‘I went to a couple of AA meetings, just to see, you know.’ He looked appealingly at me. I looked appealingly back.

  Please let me go.

  ‘But it wasn’t for me,’ he explained. ‘Like I said, I don’t drink every day. And never in the mornings. Except when the shakes are very bad, of course.’

  ‘Aaar,’ I said encouragingly.

  Talk to your captor, build a relationship, try to get him on your side.

  ‘My wife has threatened to leave if I don’t lay off the sauce,’ he went on. ‘But, if I did that, I feel there’d be nothing left for me, that my life would be over. I might as well be dead. D’you know what I mean?’

  Then he seemed to come to.

  And he regretted unburdening himself, sorry that he had weakened himself in my eyes.

  He quickly sought to redress the balance.

  ‘Now I’m just going to give you a little injection, but you’d know all about them, wouldn’t you?’ he chortled nastily. ‘I love getting you drug addicts here, most people are terrified of needles! Ha, ha, ha.

  ‘Here, do you want to do it yourself? Ha, ha, ha.

  ‘Did you bring your tourniquet? Ha, ha, ha.

  ‘At least you won’t have to share your needle with anyone else, ahahahahaha!’

  I sweated with dreadful fear because he was wrong, I was terrified of needles. And terrified of the horrors that lay ahead.

  My whole body went rigid as he lifted up my lip and pricked the sharp point of the needle into the tender skin of my gum. As the cold liquid flooded into my flesh my hair stood on end in revulsion. The pain from the needle puncture intensified the longer he held it in my gum. I thought it would never end.

  I’ll wait five more seconds, I willed. But if he hasn’t finished by then, I’ll have to make him.

  Just as the pain reaching screaming point, he stopped.

  But by then I had realized I was too much of a coward to have any more dental interference in my mouth, that I’d rather take my chances with the toothache.

  However, just as I was about to push past him and run out, a gorgeous tingly numbness crept through my lip and one side of my face, radiating outwards with soothing fingers.

  I had a rush of elation. I loved that feeling. Relaxing back into the chair, I savoured it. What a wonderful thing novocaine was. I only wished it could be applied to my entire body. And my emotions.

  The rush didn’t last long, though. I couldn’t help remembering all kinds of awful stories I’d been told about dentists. How Fidelma Higgins went into hospital to have her four wisdom teeth taken out under general anaesthetic. Not only did they not take out the four offending teeth, but they removed her perfectly healthy spleen instead. Or once, when Claire had to have an extraction, the roots of the tooth were so strong she swore the dentist had the sole of his shoe resting on her chest before he got good enough leverage to wrest it out. And of course, every dentist phobic’s favourite – the scene from Marathon Man. I hadn’t even seen Marathon Man, but it didn’t matter. I’d heard enough about it to feel sick to the stomach at my vulnerability to excruciating pain at the hands and drill of this very scary man.

  ‘Right, that mouth should be frozen by now.’ Dentist O’Dowd interrupted the horror film playing in my head. ‘We might as well get going.’

  ‘Wh… what exactly is a root canal?’ I’d rather know what was happening to me.

  ‘We take the inside of the tooth out. Nerve, tissue, lock, stock and barrel!’ he said cheerily. And with that he started drilling with the gusto of a man putting up shelves.

  Knowing what he was about to do made my shoulders clench to my temples with horror. It would hurt something ferocious. And there would be a hole right through to my brain, I thought with a pit-of-my-stomach kick of queasiness.

  A short time later the nerves in all my other teeth began singing and jumping. I forced myself to wait until I couldn’t bear it any longer – about four seconds – before waving my hand to flag him down.

  ‘All my other teeth are hurting now,’ I managed to mumble.

  ‘Already?’ he asked. ‘It’s amazing how fast you drug addicts metabolize painkillers.’

  ‘Do they?’ I was surprised.

  ‘You do.’

  He gave me another injection. Which hurt more than the first one, the tender skin already bruised and broken. Then he revved up his drill as if it was a chainsaw and off he went again.

  It took hours.

  Twice I had to ask him to stop because the pain was so awful. But twice I squared my shoulders, looked him in the eye and said ‘I’m OK now, carry on.’

  When I finally stumbled back into the waiting-room to Margot, my mouth felt as if it had been run over by a truck, but the toothache had gone and I was triumphant.

  I had done it
, I had survived and I thought I was great.

  ‘I wonder why my teeth flared up now?’ I mumbled thoughtfully on the drive back.

  Margot looked at me carefully. ‘I’m sure it’s no coincidence,’ she said.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ I said in surprise.

  ‘Think about it,’ she said. ‘I believe you had a bit of a breakthrough in group yesterday…’

  Had I?

  ‘… but your body is trying to divert you from facing your emotional pain by giving you physical pain instead. Physical pain, being, of course, far easier to deal with.’

  ‘Are you saying I’m putting this on?’ I demanded hotly. ‘You go back and just ask that dentist and he’ll tell you…’

  ‘I’m not saying you’re faking it.’

  ‘But then wha…?’

  ‘I’m saying that your desire to avoid looking at yourself and your past is so powerful that your body is colluding with you by giving you something else to worry about.’

  For the love of Jayzis.

  ‘I’m sick of so much being read into everything,’ I said viciously. ‘I had a toothache, that’s all, no big banana.’

  ‘You were the one who questioned the timing in the first place,’ Margot reminded me mildly.

  We drove the rest of the way in silence.

  On our return to the Cloisters I was greeted as if I’d been away for several years. Nearly everyone jumped up from their lunch, although Eamonn and Angela weren’t among their number, and shouted things like ‘She’s BACK’ and ‘Nice one, Rachel, we’ve missed you.’

  In honour of my mutilated mouth, Clarence absolved me from my team pot-washing duties. Which felt as wonderful as the time we were all sent home from school because the pipes had burst. But even not having to scrub pots didn’t compare with the rush I got when Chris threw his arms around me.

  ‘Welcome home,’ he croaked. ‘We’d given you up for dead.’

  A little warm bubble of happiness went ‘pop!’ in my stomach. He must have forgiven me for rolling my eyes at his advice yesterday.