Holding back the years
Jeremy Clarke
I’m beginning to decompose even before I’m dead. My eyesight’s going, my hair’s falling out, I’ve got galloping gum disease, my legs are covered in eczema and I’ve found a small hard lump on one of my testicles. To stop the rot, I got on the phone and made appointments. Last week I had three appointments — optician, dentist and doctor — on the same day.
The optician pushed me down into a black leather restraining chair. Then she ordered me to lean forward and put my face in a harness. Then she turned out the lights, straddled a stool and homed in on my eyeballs with a range of bizarre medical and scientific instruments. It was incredibly sexy. Given the choice between a full body massage and a detailed eye examination, I think I’d take the latter. The upshot of the examination was my walking out of the opticians wearing contact lenses for the first time. I’d let things go for so long that I’d forgotten what it was like to see properly. I stood outside the optician’s and looked about me, astonished by the beauty and clarity of the world.
Next stop the dentist. So far I’ve spent £900 in four visits getting the gum disease under control and doing up the gnashers. I’ve lain underneath my dentist with my mouth open for about four hours altogether. But now, with my new contact lenses, it was as if I was seeing her and her assistant’s faces for the first time. Today they were renovating another filling. Where possible, I’m having the mercury amalgam replaced. My dentist insists that there is no scientific evidence that mercury fillings are bad for the health, but I suspect otherwise.
When I was 21, my mouth already full of mercury amalgam, I went to a pop festival at Stonehenge that coincided with the summer solstice. Just before sunrise, I was dancing in a field to a band called Planet Gong when this chap, previously unknown to me, offered me a tab of LSD, which I accepted and immediately swallowed. He then asked me whether I would like to pop along to the stones to watch the sunrise. He had a holdall with him, and when we arrived at the old monument he surprised me by disappearing behind a trilithon and emerging dressed in a magnificent white druid’s robe.
When the rim of the sun appeared above the horizon, he and about 20 other druids held hands and danced in a circle. So I’m standing in the centre of Stonehenge at the summer solstice, coming up on acid, encircled by dancing druids and watching a huge sun come boiling up behind the Heel Stone. Now if Stonehenge was the King’s Cross station of a network of ley lines, as they say it is, I was on the right wavelength to have picked up anything unusual, any power or energy surges, for example. And I did notice something. Suddenly, I was overwhelmingly conscious of the fillings in my teeth. I felt as if I had a mouthful of tin foil through which a tiny current of electricity was being passed. The feeling was overwhelming and unpleasant. And since that moment, I’ve been conscious of having in my mouth a substance that is not only unnatural but also anti-natural. The dentist is politely sceptical, but more than happy to indulge my LSD-induced delusions at £160 a filling.
Half an hour after slipping off the dentist’s chair, I was on a hard couch with my trousers down and a duty doctor searching diligently for an alleged testicular lump. He cupped my testicles in his fingers and probed with his thumbs. With my new contact lenses I looked down and saw my testicles more clearly and in more detail than I had done for very long time. Surveying further afield, the eczema on my legs was redder and scalier than I’d realised.
As if playing a Christmas game for swingers, the doctor and I took it in turns to probe, but neither of us could find the lump. He said that if it was as I’d described it — small, hard, mobile, pea-sized — it was more than likely a harmless piece of calcification and I therefore need no longer worry about it.
Finally, I had my hair cut. I slumped in the barber’s chair and studied my face in the mirror. The left side of my face sagged still from the anaesthetic, and I was dribbling. My hair, I noticed, was greyer than I’d realised. I might have stopped the rot temporarily. I wasn’t going to die of testicular cancer. Nor were my teeth about to drop out. And I could see. But from now on it was going to be a holding action. Up bounced the barber. ‘And what can we do for sir this afternoon?’ ‘Lethal injection, please, Ronald,’ I said.
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