The first thing I heard was a worrying thunk thunk thunk, and then a muted ‘ow’. My son had tumbled down the last few steps into a friend’s garden and microseconds later came an ear-splitting yell. I scooped him into my arms and prodded his body to make sure all of it was acceptably solid. An initial scout around the vital parts reassured me that nothing had been crushed or mangled, save for an oozing indentation on his lip, now filling up with blood like the bilge well of a 19th-century whaling ship.
I brought him inside where he deposited a lasagne’s worth of snotty gore on to my shoulder. I placed my hands either side of his face to inspect his lip. It looked a little swollen, but, thankfully, nothing else was damaged aside from his confidence in vertical navigation.
The welt stopped bleeding within a few minutes and he tentatively resumed playing. It was only when we gave him something to eat that the tears resumed and we noticed that his front left tooth was now a fraction of an inch longer than its partner, ridged with a tiny eyebrow of bruising at the gum. Which is how he, his mum and I found ourselves sitting in a dentist’s waiting room the following morning, dreading what came next.
We knew none of the dentists near us were taking new patients, a perfectly reasonable situation for the capital city of the world’s sixth richest nation – how many of us, after all, even have teeth? – so, since moving to Walthamstow, we’ve been commuting to our old dentist in Stoke Newington. We rang around, hoping emergency appointments nearby would be forthcoming. One two miles away said they could try to squeeze us in, but the wait ‘could be… long’. I inferred this meant less ‘you should bring a book’ and more ‘write one, from start to finish, on the life and times of Lyndon B Johnson’.
Luckily, one place had just had an emergency cancellation – the idea of what could lead someone to cancel an emergency dental appointment troubles me still – and soon we were shuttling the boy into a white room where a kindly dentist told us the tooth would probably come out ‘by itself’ and we were to promote this by encouraging him to wobble it every once in a while.
We were momentarily crestfallen, thinking of our son’s cherubic little face, marred by a piratical smile, but she reminded us most children lose one or both front teeth by the time they’re six, a rite of passage for any class of humans addicted to throwing themselves about the place like a stuntman’s apprentice. He was to be placed on a soft food diet for the next week, before a further exam to determine if the healing had been good enough to prevent extraction.
My son was delighted, not just by the attention, or the Spider-Man sticker he received for his troubles, but because ‘soft food diet’ rules out all his most-hated healthy foods. He bounded out of the dentist toward the ice-cream shop we’d promised him for good behaviour. He did so, brandishing a deep, satisfied smile that we hope to continue looking at for as long as we can.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
