ROGER'S BIRTHDAY TREAT

A loving wife wants to give her aging husband a very special birthday present...

Roger was beginning to get tired of birthdays. The rest of his almost global (or so it seemed to him) family had drained his always frugal resources by celebrating what, to him, seemed an unnecessary number of birthdays. There was Annie (four), Brenda (six) together with Desmond (six) and Strawberry (also six, and what a daft name for a child anyway.) And that was just for starters. The list went on to number almost twenty.

And now it was his birthday.

“Happy birthday, darling,” beamed Doreen (his wonderful wife, and only he could possibly know how wonderful she was.)

“Another year closer to the grim reaper,” he muttered, pulling his silky boxers on.

“You are an old misery-guts,” she grinned at him, “you’ve got years ahead of you! Now come on! Get dressed because I’ve got a treat for you after breakfast.”

“What treat?” he demanded, not liking surprises when he didn’t know what they were going to be.

She sidled up to him knowingly. “I’ve seen you when we’re watching Strictly,” she said, “when those lithe young dancers start grinning and flashing their perfect teeth! All white and even and never a blemish! So today we’re going somewhere special. It’s my special birthday treat for you.”

“What it it?” he asked. “I’m not so good with surprises,” he added, knowing that she was perfectly aware of that.

“You’ll love it,” she smiled, and kissed him on the cheek.

“Are you taking me to a recording of Strictly?” he asked, hopefully. Now that would be a birthday treat, close as anything to some of those glitzy half naked dancers!

“You’ll see,” she said, “now finish getting dressed, come and have a bite of breakfast, and we’ll be off!”

“What was that you said about dancers and their teeth?” he asked as they climbed into the car. She was the driver. It was the way it had always been, and he didn’t mind one jot.

“The way you look at them,” she replied, “and say things like look at those white teeth … how do they do it … mine can never be as white as that...”

“I didn’t know it was so obvious,” he sniffed, and didn’t like to mention that it wasn’t normally the teeth that attracted his attention but the delicious long legs of the female dancers in the almost-nothing outfits. But, he guessed, the smiles and the teeth behind them did help.

She drove down the road smiling to herself.

It only took around ten minutes and she pulled into a small car-park and switched off.

“We’re about on time,” she said, “come on … hurry up!”

“But this is the dentist’s!” he almost shouted, “and you know how I am with dentists! I never go anywhere near them unless I have to!”

“But it’s my birthday present to you,” she grinned, “remember … white teeth...”

“I don’t like dentists, not since I was a boy in short trousers,” he protested, but she led him by the arm and with no time left to protest without making a fuss he found himself in the dentist’s waiting room. It smelt of the dentist. He already began deciding that birthday presents at his age were a very bad idea indeed. The very ambience of dentist waiting rooms went back down the ages in his mind, back and back and back to when he’d been nine and needed a tooth extracting.

“Damned places,” he muttered.

It was barely daylight, and here he was in Hell!

“This is horrible,” he muttered to Doreen. “I want to go home!”

“Now come on, Roger, you’re not a child any more though you do look like a little boy who’s about to get six of the best on his bottom for eating sugary sweets!”

“I don’t eat sugary sweets,” he snarled, and the receptionist called his name.

“I’ll wait for you, darling,” whispered Doreen, and like a prisoner being led to the scaffold he just about managed to put one foot in front of another as he followed the white-uniformed receptionist into the surgery.

It would have been better had the dentist been a charming little man, but it wasn’t. This dentist, to start with, was female and that’s where her charms ended. She was a large lady: a very large lady with a few straggling wisps of hair on her chin, and the nurse by her side was bigger and hairier.

“I want to go home,” mewled Roger.

“Nice white teeth,” boomed the dentist, “that’s what she’s ordered and that’s what you’ll get! The whitest set of canines this side of Hollywood, and with molars to match!”

“I’m not...” He was going to say he wasn’t bothered, but it seemed churlish and ungrateful on his birthday, so he dried up. “I’m not good with dentists,” he said lamely so as to put all the blame for his attitude on himself. He didn’t like offending women, not even grossly huge ones like this dentist.

“A childhood experience was it?” asked the woman, and added, “if it helps you can call me Rosemary. Ribald Rosie they call me in the ring...”

It was more than a childhood experience, it was a life-long experience, he thought, remembering the time when he’d passed out after having a molar filled when he’d been in his twenties and swallowed far too many aspirins for his own good in order to combat the excruciating agonies prompted by a slightly bad tooth.

“In the ring?” he stammered.

“The wrestling ring, on the circuit. I’m Ribald Rosie and I don’t half knock ‘em about!”

“Oh dear...” he sighed.

“We’ll have them all out in a moment!” chuckled Rosemary.

“What?” squeaked Roger, “out? I’m not here to have anything out of anywhere!”

Rosemary pushed her nose as close to his face as was decent, and then closer.

“Didn’t she explain?” she asked, her breath smelling of waiting room. “Your wife, is it? She said you want beautiful white teeth like those sported by Anton Du Beke, and I told her the only way that can be achieved is by starting again, so start again we shall!”

“Starting again?” he blabbered.

“Exactly. Out with the bad old yellow ones and in with some nice new lustrous plastic ones, all shiny white and elegant, and never a moment’s pain from them ever again!”

“I haven’t got any pain!”

“What about this one here?” asked Ribald Rosie, somehow managing to tap one of his front teeth with what looked, to Roger, like a slightly smaller relative to the sledgehammer. It twinged slightly, and he screwed his face up momentarily.

“See,” she said, “it on its way out. Now let me see. Your wife, the lovely lady who’s treating you to this magnificent birthday present said that you don’t react well to anaesthetics. But that’s of small consequence. It’s just as easy without, and there are two of us ladies here to hold you down if we have to.”

He shook his head really violently, but Rosemary didn’t seem to notice.

“Open wide,” she instructed him. “I’ll be as quick as I can. It’s much easier when I’m quick. Like lightning, you know.”

There was no way he was going to open wide. No way at all. This nightmare was going to end right now. He didn’t want white teeth! He was perfectly happy with the off-white assortment that he had.

But somehow that large nurse got his mouth open.

And the nightmare began.

It seemed like an age passed. An age in which he suffered the most phenomenal pain ever suffered by mortal man. His jaw, his gums, even his tongue, they all raged against the intrusion that was being forced on them as a huge and slightly hirsute lady dentist clamped his mouth open and lunged at him with an assortment of instruments designed by sadistic man for the cruellest of all tortures.

Within moments there was blood everywhere even though surplus was being pumped into a sink and allowed to gurgle out of sight down the plughole. And still the torment went on, the frenzied Rosemary, arms flailing and cheerful as a manic hyena, yanked and pulled and twisted and tugged until every last tooth in his mouth lay in an enamelled dish and he felt that the best option for him, right now, might be to die.

“That’s it!” smiled the dentist from Hell, “I’ll see you when it’s all nicely healed and then won’t we have fun fitting a nice new set of specially ordered teeth ready to blind the ladies as you flash your smile at them!

“Happy birthday!”

The nurse, also, no doubt, from Hell, carried him out, blood-stained and weeping, and set him next to Doreen who looked at him in absolute horror.

“I only wanted them polishing for you!” she whispered, “only polishing and whitening, that’s what I told her...”

© Peter Rogerson 07.12.43