Filthy

Cough syrup, it’s a curse. Temptation may incline your heart towards it, I realize that: the warmth you know it lights, the way it lingers, that nursery type of numbness it lays down: but the stuff is appalling and does you no good. If you’re stuck in a certain mindset, the not-drinking-much-these-days mindset, then every brand of cough mixture becomes suddenly, tragically effortless to buy and guzzle down. You want it and then you want more of it and each purchase is a joy, because cough mixture isn’t a drink and if you’re not drinking a drink, then you can’t be drinking.

   But don’t presume that you’ll escape unscathed — these aren’t the kind of liquids that will love you. In fact, many have been emasculated in an untrusting attempt to prevent misuse. Nevertheless, they will all of them give you a five a.m. headache that makes you quite certain you hanged yourself overnight, or that you should have. I am soaking with filthy syrup, although it’s not nearly as filthy as I know myself to be.

   And that’s what I need to save me: filth.

   Please, God, grant me filth.

   I hadn’t felt like the bar that evening. I’d stayed in with a couple of milkshakes and my unlicensed radio — otherwise, he wouldn’t have found me, I might have been anywhere. Instead, I’m fixed in my own hall, waiting while he studies me, until he’s searched out whatever he wants, or compared me to memory, or made sure I’ll become one. I lean close until I can taste him in my breath, but I don’t touch, because I am being reserved now, still adjusting, and because I am saving him for later. Then I get my jacket and lead him out to the company van.

   Robert’s voice is small and dry as he directs me and I drive towards the end of the estuary, to the nice suburbs and then beyond to a little sea town surrounded by caravan parks and stripped grain fields, dark potato rows, almost ready to be torn away.

   “This is it.”

   It’s dark when I pull up outside a dull gleam of whitewash. Sunk into this are a black door and black-framed window in which stands an animated model of a dentist waving an oversized toothbrush, up and down, across a set of frighteningly painted teeth. The teeth are large enough to stand level with this chest, crouched like a giant mollusk of some kind, clearly capable of biting him in half. Behind the waving is a background of faded posters about sporting gum shields and prosthetics and the evils of sweetened drinks for under-fives.

   “Good god.” I examine the dentist’s glasses and wooden — in combination with the white coat and the blankly coated eyes, they strongly suggest a quite different past involving electrical torture and South American uniforms.

    Robert unlocks the black door and I follow him up a narrow slight of stairs packed with the smell of heated calcium, mouthwash and disinfectant and panicked sweat.

 

  “Do people like that? It doesn’t put them off?”

   “Everyone’s scared of dentists — after him, I seem quite friendly. And I tell the very little nippers that if they don’t behave, then clockwork dentist will come and get them, in the night. So. Here we are.” He gently dunts his fist beside an unwilling Yale and then we slip in past the brass plate that proclaims Robert Gardener to be a BDS and an MSc. This seems unlikely, although I’m sure it’s true.

   The surgery is small and very bright. A glass partition defends the receptionist’s desk and alcove, with its predictable picture postcards, bad seaside calendar and merrily orthodontic cartoons. Branching off a central hallway are four doors marked WAITING ROOM, TOILET, X-RAY and MR. GARDENER, respectively. The other, intriguingly blank, doors conceal, as Robert shows me, a cramped tea-making nest equipped with a cracked sink and a wooden chair, bearing an unemptied ashtray and many, rather dull shelves of supplies.

   “Back in a moment.” He briefly squeezes my arm and then pads away while I consider this last cupboard. If Robert is the man I take him for, then it may be that somewhere here, in appropriately devious seclusion, there is at least one alcoholic bottle, tucked up and asleep. I feel that I should be capable of sniffing it out and pouring it awake.

   I begin the search.

   lignocaine, hydrochloride, dexamethasone

   I know a man whose work is in these words: in chemicals and how the body lets them touch it.

   potassium nitrate, articaine hydrochloride, epinephrine

   I love a man whose work is in

   No.

   That’s what I wanted to say, that’s the word I never think of, in case I’m listening.

   polyhexanide, propylene glycol

   A slip of the mind, that’s what it was. I’m just overreacting because I’ve missed him and now he’s here again. No need for words that I’ll regret.

   And it’s his booze we’re after, remember?

   As if anyone could forget.

   Unruly stacks of boxes full of other, smaller boxes. No drinker’s logic in any arrangement that I can see: no trace of subterfuge and hidden tracks, only jars and tiny, svelte containers of strictly dental purpose, everything honest and above board.

   ziconium oxide, zinc oxide, epinephrine bitartrate, formaldehyde

   But there will be a lie here somewhere: a flagon of disinfectant that isn’t, gloves that are not gloves, needles that are not needles, wadding that gives up a chuckle, a cluck of frightened liquid when you shake it.

   Yes.

   A package of absurdly heavy cotton wadding and, under the top layer, a sheen of glass, the virgin seal around a cap with the scrawly, red signature — Paddy. I should have known: it’s the lovable-ugly orphan of Irish whiskies, the one with the big ears that scuffles in the dust at playtimes over by the fence. It’s forty per cent proof, though: who needs a mother and father when you’re that.

   “I see. You’ve found me out.” Robert, as quiet as his breath, sets himself behind me, catches my elbows before I can turn, and then rests his chin on the crown of my head. “But that’s for later. This first.”

   And gently he explains his substances, rocking until I rock with him, his voice low in his chest, flaring in with his heart to my spine. “These are the anesthetics, so I don’t hurt anyone. This is a kind you put into the bone — it’s very good for awkward cases, for people who can’t help feeling too much pain. And this

covers wounds and helps to heal them. And this makes everything clean. And this is for preparation, so that I can build a bond. And these are what I build with, how I put things right. I have anything I might want for anything. I can be good at what I do, you know? I have been good. Once I’ve done you can eat and speak and bite and drink and kiss as if you’d never had a problem. People have thanked me. I used to get letters.”

   “That’s great.”

   “It was great. It was really great.”

   Then Robert lets me move, step out of reach and round to find him, face him.

   “Oh.”

   At first it is almost hard to understand that he is naked. Tension putting a fast, shallow rise in his chest and smoothing the skin against his ribs, a fresh bruise large on his hip, the older grazes on both knees, bare feet: I have to take him in piecemeal, because he is so much. Shadows and splinters, that’s all I could remember, but here he is whole, the full, pale ache of him. A tick of Hooksexups in one wrist and so he raises his hand to smoothes across his forehead and I follow the motion up until I’m halted by his eyes. He swallows and his blush begins, rimming his ears. Silly, blushing now.

   We are both very near to sober — he may even be completely sober. And being without clothes is one thing — is a fine thing — but being without clothes and without drinking and about to do what we have to be about to do — that’s completely another thing and one that we’ve never attempted. Like this, I don’t know if I can stand how beautiful he is — the rush of that and need and hormones and nothing to smooth it out, nothing to keep me held so I can focus.

   I don’t want to fall over and I think I might.

   Then he gives me that little glance, that small, specific glance you both recognize: the mix of shame and pride and resignation: the way men always have of saying they know you’re going to look at their prick next, give it some time.

   We’ve met before, of course — Robert’s prick and I — but not like this. We’ve never been formally introduced.

   And there’s no room in this for saying anything — not to tell him that he’s lovely, that all of him is lovely and couldn’t be anything else and not to tell him that I disapprove absolutely of circumcision, but love that he is circumcised, because it lets me be selfish, lets me like to have him always so deeply, clearly stripped for my benefit. Even when he isn’t hard he looks closer to it, more ready.

   But now he is hard, quite ready enough.

   “Robert Gardener.”

   He stays as quiet as I do and walks out of the storeroom, waits for me in the hall.

   “No. Don’t do that. Not at the moment.” Robert gathers my hands together in his before I can reach him. Then, concentrating on his fingers, frowning down, he methodically removes my jacket, my blouse, my bra.

   He doesn’t pause. “What we do at the moment is this. And this.”

   I hold his head as he bows it and then kisses, suckles the way a son would, then teases, bites, because he is a man and, either way, draws out my heart from me like a thorn. I’m hauled out beyond myself, beneath myself, outside myself, inside his mouth.

   I love his tongue. No other word will do it. I love his tongue.

   And the sweet scalp underneath his hair and the drive of his breath, the fierce push of his cheek and the howl, our howl, the one we make out of our skin.

   Which is very well, but it isn’t filth.

   What I was after was filth.

   You’d think I could summon something up.

   But no.

   Not fucking on the padded bench in his waiting room, or on the hallway floor — that’s a blood-colored haze, I can’t bring it into focus. I can’t even grab at thumping each other down and into the cold vinyl grip of his chair — quite naturally his chair — you’re going out with a dentist, you’ll have to want to fuck him in his chair, at least talk about doing it — first place you would think of. Although we didn’t go there first.

   No, we started in the hall, began with unbearable gentleness, with his mouth finding my breasts.

   I talked the whole time, babbled, couldn’t help it. “My wee man, my good man, my good lamb, that’s…that’s my man…that’s shhh, you’re my man, it’s fine, it’s all fine, you’re my man, it’s fine.”

   Which also isn’t filth — it’s the way you nail yourself to someone else without even thinking: forever and ever, amen.
 n°

Excerpted from the novel Paradise, © 2005 by A.L. Kennedy

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