by Darren Horton

Created on: November 23, 2010   Last Updated: April 23, 2011

Dentally Handicapped

I was next up.  My leg began to shake in a sudden outbreak of nervous energy - ‘Leakage’ - my wife calls it.  To take my mind off it I picked up a woman’s magazine and found an article entitled ‘How to examine your breasts’ which I read.  A man peered over my shoulder and I quickly flicked the page.  The next article read, ‘Are you psychic?’   The next read ‘My husband likes to wear my panties, is this normal?’ followed by ‘Out-of-body experience changed my life’.  I placed the woman’s comic back on the table, wondering at the differences between the sexes and the strange things women are interested in. 

A pretty nurse with a clipboard entered the waiting-room, smiled at everybody and nobody inparticular, and said, “Mr Kettle?”

I hate being called Kettle.  I hate it.  I know that’s how it’s spelt but its pronounced K’tell.   I explained this to her and then to the dentist, and then to another dental assistant, and when I was left alone in the room I could hear them giggling amongst themselves.  I don’t think the dentist was taking my fillings seriously, because the first injection didn’t kick in at all and he had to inject me again, and then part of my tooth apparently ‘shattered’ and he said he’d have to remove it, so I had to endure another jab.  It felt like I had the mumps again. 

As I was walking down the stairs to pay for the session of voluntary torture, a pair of yesterday’s pants fell out of the bottom of my jeans. The pants were kicked into the waiting room, which was now full, and everybody saw them and sniggered.  Even the pretty nurse saw.  She tried to hold back her mirth as she read out my bill, “that’s one hundred and fifty eight pounds please, Mr Kettle,” and then she ran into the back room and didn’t come out for five minutes.  I picked my pants up and stood waiting with everybody staring at me.

I finally staggered from the dentists, a broken man.  I wondered if the Elephant-man had a face as big as mine and just as I was looking in a shop-front window to decide, I noticed a brown paper-bag on fire in the doorway, so like the good citizen I am, I began to stamp it out.

For some reason, a group of kids were laughing at me from behind a parked car but they weren’t

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