Teeth
(Winner of the 2005 Leicestershire Short Story Comp and to be on Radio 4 August 08)
Some say you can choose your friends and lose your family. In my experience this is not the case, not with Rodney living next door.
The first I know about Rodney moving in is when I am woken up five am one Tuesday by these loud footsteps going across the floorboards of my bedroom. I open my eyes and there he is, this six foot goofball with a rucksack on his back.
“I’m Rodney,” he says, rocking backwards on his heels. “I’ve rented the flat next to yours. Sanjay said you wouldn’t mind.”
Sanjay and I have this understanding whereby I live above his shop rent free in return for helping him unload stock every Saturday and Sunday. As far as I’m concerned, this is a cushy number and I don’t want to rock the boat whatever kind of goofball comes along.
“Fine,” I mumble, pulling the bedclothes over my head. Then I ask a question that I feel is pertinent. “But tell me, what are you doing in my bedroom at the crack of?”
“A little problem,” says Rodney. “Baked beans stacked high to God in the storeroom. Access to the annex flat is only through your bedroom. Don’t worry, Sanjay says he’ll sort it soon.”
I hear the connecting door in my bedroom being unlocked, I hear Rodney making himself at home, I hear the door reclose. I am on the point of falling back to the land of pushcarts and playzones when I feel someone sit down heavily on the side of my bed.
I open my eyes and there is Rodney.
“Hello,” he says, “I thought I’d just come in for a little chat.”
It is ten past five in the morning.
In a lot of ways Rodney is a regular guy, he has been married, divorced and has a kid, Josh, who he never sees. The most remarkable thing about him though is that he doesn’t have any teeth.
“They fell out one by one,” he tells me that first morning. “First of all I had these dreams about my teeth falling out and then it happened for real. There wasn’t even any pattern to it, top bottom left right, they could drop from anywhere. It put an awful strain on my marriage. That’s the reason we split up. That and my anger issues. Well, who wouldn’t be angry at their teeth falling out?”
Rodney has this way when he’s talking of keeping his lips closed. To look at him you wouldn’t notice right off that he doesn’t have any teeth. He looks just like a regular goofball, lanky with a bit of a paunch but apart from that a guy you would expect to have a full set of molars.
“I’ll probably see you around,” says Rodney, “what with us sharing a front entrance and all. Actually, I might pop over. We can crack a few cans. Get to know each other better.”
“We’ll see,” I say.
“Right then,” says Rodney.
“I’m going to sleep again now,” I say.
“Ok,” says Rodney.
I turn around under the covers of the bed so I am facing the wall. As I fall asleep I am aware that Rodney is still sitting there.
When I get home from work I find Rodney sitting in my armchair with his feet up on the coffee table. By the side of the chair is a six pack of lager. He unhooks one of the cans and holds it out to me.
“Not too early, is it?”
I don’t answer this but I pull back the ring-pull and take a big gulp from the can.
“And I brought some porn,” says Rodney. “I’ll put it on, shall I?”
Before I say anything Rodney puts the disc in the dvd and sets it to start.
“Look,” says Rodney. I look up and see that Rodney is holding out a photograph. I take it and sit down myself. On the tv a naked woman is playing with herself and groaning.
“That’s my son Josh,” says Rodney. “He’s four there. Isn’t he a button? You know what he said to me? He said, ‘Daddy where are your teeth?’. I mean what do you say to that? By this time he knew all about the tooth fairy and my situation was giving him nightmares. He said the tooth fairy was going to come and pull out all his teeth too. The tooth fairy is supposed to be nice, isn’t she?”
I wonder if Rodney is one of these people who over-compensates or if having no teeth is really such a big deal.
“I’m going to see a specialist tomorrow,” says Rodney. “You don’t know how many dentists I’ve been to. The problem is my gums. Apparently they reject false teeth. This specialist, he’s the man though. I have high hopes. He’s from Bolivia.”
I finish the last of the beer in my can and push myself up.
“I’m going to fix myself something to eat,” I say. “Can I get you anything?”
“I would say yes,” says Rodney, “but I’m on a liquid only diet. Not only have I lost my family, I can’t eat solid food. It’s a bummer.”
“Right,” I say and go into the kitchen.
All the following day at work I find myself thinking about Rodney and his specialist. There’s no doubt Rodney has had quite an effect on me.
When I get home I almost expect to find him sitting in my armchair knocking back a beer. He isn’t but the porn is still playing. We must have left it on continuous loop.
I sit down and watch it for a bit and then I get up and put my ear to Rodney’s door. I can’t hear anything. I nip into the kitchen and get a glass. I saw them do this once on ‘Bless This House’ when they wanted to know if the neighbours were going to appear in the local carnival as a pair of Caribbean deities.
I put the glass on the door and put my ear against it. I still don’t hear anything. I’m not sure if I have the glass the right way around.
I go and watch a bit more of the porn but I am thinking about Rodney. Well, not him exactly, I want to know about his teeth and what the specialist said. I remember the way Rodney held out that picture of his son. ‘Daddy why haven’t you got any teeth?’ his son said. Thinking back I see now that Rodney was a man balanced on a knife edge.
I wait until the cum shot and then I go down to the shop. Sanjay is serving a tiny woman with blue hair a packet of ten Benson and Hedges in a gold packet. When he has finished I ask him if he has fixed Rodney’s door.
“Come here,” he says. He leads me round the back to the storeroom. “Two hundred tins of baked beans. I can’t shift them myself, can I? In India they would be gone like billy-o but here, every day it is things from the deli counter. You will have to put up with Rodney using your entrance for a while yet.”
Then I ask the question. “So have you seen him today?”
Sanjay shakes his head. “He went out this morning. I haven’t seen him since. Is there a problem?”
I shake my head. “No, no problem. At least I don’t think so.”
Back upstairs, I find Rodney in my lounge. He is wearing only a pair of red briefs and he is pacing backwards and forwards. When he sees me he stops.
“Where’ve you been?” he says. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Tell me, have you got any boot polish?”
I try to ask Rodney about his specialist but he is like a man on a mission with this boot polish. Eventually I cave in and go and have a look in the cupboard under the kitchen sink. I strike lucky and find a tin under a box of rat poison.
“It’s brown,” I say to Rodney, not altogether hopefully.
Rodney kisses his lips together. “That’s the baby,” he says and takes the tin and begins to rub polish into his cheeks.
“So what’s going on?” I say.
While Rodney continues to rub the boot polish into his face he tells me the whole story.
He arrived at the specialist’s early. He was taken into a big white room and made to lay on a couch and open his mouth. The specialist put instrument after instrument in his mouth. Then he declared the case was hopeless. He said that that Rodney had a case of non-specific allergia.
“So I’ve come up with my own plan,” says Rodney. “Will you help me?”
Rodney is sitting there and his face now is completely covered with boot polish. All I can see clearly are these eyes. There are staring at me like that dog in Roman mythology who ate anybody who tried to go past. I am kind of mesmerized. Sometimes goofballs can get you like that; that’s why they are dangerous.
“Ok,” I say. I hesitate a bit. “Do I have to put boot polish on my face as well?”
“Yes you do,” says Rodney and he holds out the tin.
Rodney makes us wait until ten o’clock and it is completely dark and then we go out. Rodney has put on these dark clothes and he has insisted I do the same.
“Keep to the shadows,” he says, “and if you have to speak, do it in a whisper.” He puts a finger to his lips.
Half of me thinks we are on a mission to kidnap Rodney’s son and half of me doesn’t know where we are going. If it is a kidnapping then I hope I can talk Rodney out of it. After all, kidnapping is a pretty big thing even if it is your own kid who you are taking. If it is something else then I will have to cross that bridge when I come to it.
In front of me Rodney suddenly stops and I crash into his back.
“We’re here,” he says.
Here is the Leicester Museum which is pretty much a complete surprise for me.
“What are we doing here?” I say.
“Shhh,” says Rodney and he leads me past some large bins around to the back.
I am beginning to get a little worried now because museums were never part of any equation and more so when Rodney picks up a large stone and hefts it through the window.
“Put your hands together,” says Rodney, “give me a bunk up and I’ll pull you through.”
Inside the museum it is dark. Rodney pulls this little pocket torch out and flicks it on. He seems to know where he is going because we wind our way through room after room until we come to a stop in front a large glass display cabinet. This is dimly lit by a low wattage bulb in the top left corner.
The cabinet contains various aquatic creatures, an eel stuffed, a flat fish lying on a bed of what is either sea grass or household nails, the bulbous form of an anemone and then I spy at the end what we must have come for. It is the complete set of teeth from a medium sized tiger shark.
“No,” I say but it is too late. The whole front of the glass case has shattered as Rodney has thrown a metal stool against it.
The next morning I wake up to find Rodney sitting on the edge of the bed. I push myself up and shake my head. It is worse than I thought.
The lower half of Rodney’s face is horribly distended and he has blood running freely down each of his cheeks. The cause of the blood is clear. There are a number of tears in the skin and showing through these tears are the serrated edges of the shark’s teeth where they have fit imperfectly in Rodney’s mouth.
Rodney moves his jaw up and down and puts a finger up to the teeth. He is obviously quite proud.
“How did you get them to stay in?” I ask.
“Rrr rrr rrr,” says Rodney. He gets up from the bed and comes back over with a pen and paper.
‘Superglue,’ he writes. Then he writes, ‘I can’t speak very well but I’m quite pleased nevertheless. I’m going to see Josh today. Give it one more try. Will you come with me?’
It turns out that his wife and his son live in Skegness so we have to take the train. Rodney pays and sits on the seat opposite me. Whenever we go through a tunnel he turns to look at his reflection in the window.
His lips have swollen up so they are almost as big as the shark’s teeth behind them but the bleeding has stopped. Before we came out I dabbed the holes with iodine. The body is a miraculous thing and I guess that maybe they will heal. It is the son I feel sorry for. By all accounts he is ten now and not a baby anymore. Some wounds go deeper than others.
We get a taxi outside the station and I tell the driver to take us to the address that Rodney has written down. This is a council estate on the edge of town. There are bits of old cars on street corners and the grass is either completely yellow or wild and about a mile high.
Some boys stand on a street corner and a girl goes past. One of the boys whistles her and the girl rushes back and punches the boy in the face. Then someone releases a dog and that joins in the melee.
“Is this where Josh is growing up?” I say.
Rodney can’t answer but even with the shark’s teeth he looks pretty sad. In fact, he looks pretty stressed out about the whole situation.
I knock on the door he indicates and it is opened by this woman with large boobs in a boob tube. She has this way of standing that is all on one side. When she sees Rodney she points her finger at him.
“I’ve told you,” she says, “you’re bad news. We’re doing alright. We don’t need the grief. I’ve told you this. Why have you come here?”
Then a boy in shorts all arms and legs comes tumbling down the stairs and he sees Rodney. His mouth drops. Then he closes it. Then he breaks into the biggest smile I have ever seen.
I read out from the piece of paper that Rodney has given me. ‘Sandra,’ I read, ‘I don’t know how long I have before these teeth reject me. Please can I have this one day with my son. Please.’
We go down to the beach and Josh and I have a hotdog. Josh has about to hundred questions which I try to answer as best I can. We live in Leicester. We live above a newsagents. We spend our evenings watching tv. I work in a factory where crisps are made. All of this is according to Josh either cool or awesome. Even though he is ten he holds his dad’s hand. They are quite a touching sight.
I feel that perhaps Rodney isn’t such a big goofball after all and that maybe I should give him and his son some time alone together and say as much but Rodney writes quickly on his pad. ‘Stay,’ it says.
“Yeah, stay,” says Josh and we go down to the sand.
We seem to have walked a fair way up the coast and the beach here is deserted. It is not a day to take your t-shirt off so we don’t. We sit in a line on the beach. I have run out of things to say now and Rodney still can’t talk so we sit there in silence. It’s quite a nice silence though because there is the sound of the sea picking up the sand and rubbing the grains together.
After a while Rodney passes me a piece of paper. ‘The teeth are really fucking hurting. I’m going into the water. The salt will do them good. Will you look after Josh for me?’
Josh thinks it is hilarious that his dad his going for a swim. More so, when Rodney takes off all his clothes. Josh shrieks at this. “Dad you can’t go in the nuddie.” He slaps his hands down on the sand. “Dad. Not in the nuddie. Pur-leese.”
Rodney does a jig and walks down to the water. He doesn’t flinch although the water must be cold and soon he is right in, only his left, then right, then left arm visible as he strokes away.
Josh doesn’t look at me. I pick up some sand. He picks up some sand. We let it slip through our fingers.
“Those teeth,” he says. “Did they once belong to a shark?”
I nod my head. Rodney has stopped swimming out. He is now swimming parallel to the shore.
“Thought so,” says Josh. “I thought so. Mum says that dad is a loser, but you’ve seen her, haven’t you? I think you’ve got to make the most of what you’ve got. Everything has its advantages, don’t you think? You just have to learn to look at it right from the right angle.”
After about a minute Josh leaps up and claps his hands. “Ok,” he says, “I’ve got it. I’ll be Roy Scheider. You be the mayor who wants the beach to stay open for the Bank Holiday weekend.”
Josh runs down where the waves meet the sand and turns back towards me. He cups his hands over his mouth like they are a megaphone.
“EVERYBODY OUT OF THE WATER. WE’VE GOT A SHARK SITUATION. EVERYBODY OUT OF THE WATER. SHIT.”
“A SHARK IN THE WATER,” I shout into my own megaphone hands. “DON’T BE ABSURD. WE HAVEN’T HAD A SHARK IN THESE WATERS FOR NIGH ON FIFTY YEARS.”
“IT’S A SHARK I TELL YOU. NOW CLOSE THE GODDAM BEACH.”
Over Josh’s shoulders I can see Rodney’s arms working. They are like clockwork. He is a good swimmer; powerful, elegant and economical. Each stroke thrusts him through the water, water slipstreaming over his head. He looks happy there, at ease with his environment. If you’d have asked me I would have said that he could swim forever and didn’t really have a problem with his teeth. But you didn’t.