As I brushed what’s left of the 32 teeth that God endowed me with a good while back, I felt and somehow heard within the echo chamber of the skull a cracking and a crumbling and I sensed rubble on my tongue and spat it into the basin where I studied it then looked into the mirror.
And just like that, in half a nano-second, I was standing on a muddy rugby pitch in eastern France in 1981.
For this game I was hungover. Friends were visiting and we had kept going till the sort of hour I cannot manage today.
But they had come along to watch the match and I was keen to impress. The weather was cold and grey, the pitch a quagmire.
The standard of rugby at ASPTT was not high, which suited me. I played flanker despite lacking several of the assets that a flanker finds useful, such as courage and speed.
But I liked my team-mates, and the celebrations after every match regardless of the score, and I enjoyed being the only foreigner on the team, le rosbif.
My opposite number in this match was a feisty blond-haired lad, remarkably pale of skin, close to albino, who resented being tackled and writhed like an eel to avoid being brought down. As he came away from a ruck with the ball I put a tackle on him and he swung his elbow and it caught me in the teeth and within that echo chamber of the skull I felt and heard a front tooth snap.
When the whistle blew I was on my hands and knees in the mud dazedly looking for half a tooth in the vague hope that it could be preserved and glued back on. I didn’t find it.
I can’t remember the result of the game of course. But I can remember with exquisite precision the sensation of the injury and after the match not minding the comments that the broken tooth attracted, not minding, either, the raffish piratical look that the broken tooth afforded, perhaps because I’m far from being raffish or piratical by nature.
My classes in the week that followed all wanted to know how the tooth had been broken. I told them variations on the truth.
One young woman, a prize student, stayed behind after class to say her father was a dentist and would fix my tooth. I said I couldn’t pay.
I lived from hand to mouth back then, had not a penny saved. At 23, if things go wrong, you have the faith in time and strength to put them right.
She said her dad would do the job for nothing. I asked her why; she just repeated that he would.
The following week I visited his surgery after hours. Her father was expecting me but didn’t smile. It was as if I’d made unfair demands on him.
When I lay back and opened wide his first reaction was to tut. I smoked too much, he said. I drank too much red wine. Both were ruinous for teeth, he said. And health.
You’re vulnerable in a dental chair. By definition you are passive. You’re on your back, in the position of surrender, and gagged by dental tools. I didn’t try to speak.
As he worked to rebuild the broken tooth he told me how superior French cars were to British cars, French food to British food, French everything to British everything. I lay back and took it.
When he had done, I thanked him and looked in the mirror. I couldn’t tell the tooth proper from the repair. I said as much.
He said he had stained it to match the squalor of my mouth in general.
And now, this week, that 45-year-old repair that I have lugged around the world has crumbled and I am back to how I was on that French rugby pitch in 1981.
My smile is raffish and piratical. And I’m uncertain whether to bother to have it fixed.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
