Dex has a brace. That thing they do, squeezing rubber into the child’s open mouth. Child bites. Impression made. And the next time you go, there on the side table is a spooky plaster replica of your son’s teeth, hewn straight from his skull and adorned with a wire-and-plastic gizmo, a foul medieval device to rid the mouth of evil humours. And strict instructions. Keep it in all the time, even for meals. You’ll get used to it.
Or not. Three years of negotiations with a young French orthodontally evangelistic hardnut in Hoxton who specialises in slow head-shaking, long drawn-out sighing, and perfect teeth. Dex was never going to wear it all the time. Never at school, and not at the weekends, and certainly not for meals. Which leaves the sleeping bit. So Monsieur downgraded his plans, rebranding the brace as a retainer. And every six months we trundle down to Tabernacle Street and Monsieur sighs a bit, and measures the overbite, and the parole board declares that his teeth aren’t yet quite ready to release into mainstream society. The corrective measures are For His Own Good.
Today was check-up day. We cycled in under the bright, early spring light, the first ones in. Monsieur declared that the overbite was down to two millimetres, the target gap. Dex punched the air. Monsieur advised that Dexter should continue to wear the retainer to prevent the overbite from widening again.
‘For how long?’
‘Well, he can continue to wear it like that, and eventually perhaps just every other night, and then he might be down to two nights a week.’
‘Yes but until when? How many months?’
‘Really there’s no reason to stop it. If he wants to be sure that his bottom front teeth don’t cross over, he should continue to wear it.’
‘Could we have a time-frame, please?’
‘I mean, gradually he can bring it down to two nights a week, but when he stops there’s always the danger of his teeth returning to where they were.’
‘Until when?’
‘Well his teeth will continue to grow. It will always be a danger.’
‘Are you saying he should wear this thing for the rest of his life?’
‘Yes, ideally.’
I think it’s fair to say that Monsieur had a somewhat different outlook on the issue of dental alignment than me. And indeed Dexter. My son and I caught each other’s eye and in that moment we knew we were released from the spell of the crazed orthodontiste. The scenario he was describing wasn’t about to find itself adjacent to any reality Dex and I were likely to experience in our lifetimes. The words tumbling out of his flawless pearl-lined mouth melted away. Night Fever was playing on the radio. A motorbike purred past. We stepped back out into London, squinting at the sun as we unlocked our bikes.
‘Coffee?’
‘But I’m already missing English.’
‘I know. But we need to celebrate.’
We found a coffee stand at Old Street roundabout, under the Banksy. They made a sweet decaf with ice for Dex and a thick latte for me. And we had croissants. We pushed our bikes, sipping quietly. We stopped at a little park to dunk the croissants, leaning our bikes against the tennis court fence. A blackbird came and sat in a little tree right above us and began to sing.
‘Before you were born, in 1997, I hired a ladder. I went to Julia’s next door and climbed up the big ash tree at the end of her garden. I fixed a microphone up there and ran a long cable all the way back to the office.’
‘I bet you put it through the cat flap.’
‘I probably did. There was a blackbird that sat in that tree in those days. He used to sing really loudly, and he had a special song.’ I whistled the song. ‘I set my computer to record from 5 till 7 every morning for a month and then eventually I wrote a tune for my band based on his song.’
The blackbird above us had flown off. I pulled out my phone and found the track. We stood, sipping and dunking, not going to school, listening. The blackbird came back and joined us.
Bog Bean, the Flat Back Four, 1998
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