Byron Easy by Jude Cook Read Free Book Online Page A

my father’s, failed to grow straight and strong and is now resigned to its agonising curvature under my shoulders. I used to spend hours coveting the supple, pooltable-flat backs of men on beaches, wondering just where their vertebrae had got to. How easy, I thought, must it be for them to sit erect on buses and bar-stools. How their girlfriends must love to pull tarty nails over that expanse of non-deformed flesh. How pleasurable for them to bend over from the waist and not feel that dangerous whip of pain from coccyx to cerebellum. But at my age—at this altitude; this great distance from childhood, from the maelstrom of adolescence—one puts up with such deformities. At my age you get the body you deserve. Or the body you paid for (the latter never being an option).
    Which would bring our writer onto teeth. My lower-deck is dangerously overcrowded, like a teetering rush-hour bus crammed to capacity. This state of affairs is more than vaguely connected with my childhood dentist’s vast talent for incompetence. I can still remember the doomsday visits there as a teenager with my half-sister, Sarah—across Hamfords green and undulating Payne’s Park (how apt a name). Even then, at six years old, she had that defiant look in her champagne eyes that made her a fabulous squabbling partner. After the hour-long fight over who would go first, we would arrive at the scrotum-tightening suburban address. Together we would tremble up the shovelly, crunchy gravel to a door bearing a plaque the bastard had screwed there to ensure he inflicted agony on only the very highest class of toothache sufferer: DR DEMJANJUK—DENTAL SURGEON. NO WORKMEN’S BOOTS OR SOILED SHOES PLEASE . Well, that disqualified two-thirds of the town’s population straight away. And you’re just talking about the women: the puffa-jacketed, gum-chomping, scarily confident spreads who did men’s jobs on the labyrinthine industrial estates. How he ever got any work I’ll never know. He had the same unassailable conviction in his own purpose as does a serial killer. And then there was his suspiciously Eastern European name: Dr Demjanjuk. Was he the distant cousin of one of Ceaus̩escu’s blood-drunk henchmen? Or the son of an exiled Nazi? One almost expected to see the arrows of an SS ensign peeking from under his fumey white gown as he greeted us at the gates of his torture den; lime-green mask dangling beneath his smile. From a tender age, his jaunty manner didn’t fool me for a moment. He was always a little too pleased to see me shaking there, engulfed by the springy sofa in the converted downstairs parlour of his house. Years later I discovered that other tooth-surgeons had practices with computers, clinic-style waiting rooms and fragrant nurses in fantasy costumes. But, with Dr Demjanjuk, one was never sure anyone else knew he was involved in this, this dental lark—as if he’d cobbled together all the necessary drills and equipment, nailed his stupid sign in front of his gravel path, stuffed some initials after his name and settled down to a day-job of fulfilling sadism after night-shifts in an abattoir. For years afterwards I would check the latest tabloid exposure of some House of Dismemberment or other to see if it wasn’t his impenetrably netted sash windows in the innocuous photograph.
    Anyway, he systematically failed in his task of draining my lower field. Once, after eight extractions in a single morning, I messily spat a mouthful of alarmingly black blood into his bidet or sink or whatever makeshift apparatus he’d stolen for such a purpose, only for Commandant Demjanjuk to grin: ‘Would you normally do that at home?’ To which my strangled, pipe-voiced reply was: ‘I never have teeth taken out at home.’ Now that—that really put a smile on his face.
    So it came to pass that I have two rogue incisors in the basement: one pointing out to catch my lower lip and one leaning in at a ridiculous angle that has snagged on my tongue for