I hated spots, so I did. An enormous zit always seemed to erupt on the end of my nose just in time for the Westy Disco on a Saturday night. Sharon Burgess would have been too sensitive to my feelings to have ever drawn attention to such things, but I feared my big red nose could be seen throbbing in the dark, like the disco lights that flashed in time with ‘Shang-a-Lang’. So I applied Clearasil lotion to my pitted face every day, in spite of the typical taunts I knew this would draw from my big brother. I even tried to burn off my spots with Brut. I already of course had some personal experience of the proven fiery effects of aftershave on sensitive skin, and so I splashed it all over my spots. It hurt, but it didn’t work. It just made the spots grow larger.
I wanted to look good for my first sweetheart: I needed to retain her affections under possible threat. The disturbing revelations of the wee millie at my jumble-sale fiasco were still ringing in my ears: ‘She’s only going out with you because she fancies your big brother, ya know.’
I repeated these words in my head many times thereafter. Even when I tried to forget them, they wouldn’t go away. It was like putting ABBA’s Greatest Hits on repeat on the stereogram in the sitting room and not being able to get ‘I Do, I Do, I Do …’ out of your head for the rest of the day.
I never mentioned any of this to Sharon Burgess, because I believed she was innocent until proven guilty. It would have been very out of character for the lovely Sharon Burgess to be going out with a wee lad just to get close to his big brother. She was too perfect to do anything like that. Her deep brown eyes were too bright and honest to be clouded by any such deceit. Her skin was soft and beautiful, and she never had any spots. Sharon Burgess was like a Miss World, but younger, in parallels and without a tiara. Our family watched Miss World on TV every year. It was real family viewing. My mother admired the evening gowns, and my father enjoyed the swimsuits. My brothers and I were also more than susceptible to the charms of this beauty contest, and we enjoyed picking our favourite ones every year, like in the Eurovision Song Contest. One year, however, we were sent to bed early for fighting, after my big brother accused me of staring at Miss Argentina’s diddies.
To bring up the damaging gossip I had heard about my own personal Miss Upper Shankill and my big brother carried the risk of accusing my sweetheart of an unproven crime. People in Belfast got accused of things they hadn’t done all the time, so I was determined not to make the same mistake myself. It would have been as bad as suggesting that Sarah Jane Smith only assisted the Doctor in the TARDIS because she fancied the Master. This was just as unthinkable, and to suggest such a thing would just have made Sharon chuck me. I did, however, closely observe any interactions she had with my big brother – but I couldn’t detect any signs of adoration. I even secretly looked up the problem page of Irene Maxwell’s Jackie one week before I delivered it, to see if there were any letters from a girl called Sharon in Belfast who fancied her boyfriend’s big brother. I also consoled myself with the thought that my big brother wasn’t interested in my girlfriend anyway, because she was too young for him and he preferred girls who did gymnastics.
To look handsome enough for Sharon Burgess necessitated well-pressed parallels, polished platforms and feathered hair from His n’ Hers beside the graveyard where Sharon’s own mother did the feathering. But I knew I could only ever be superficially handsome without perfect skin like David Cassidy and perfect teeth like Donny Osmond. So I began a war on acne. Although I spent many hours on the battlefield in front of the bathroom mirror, I never seemed to win a strategic victory. I tried squeezing the most persistent spots, but that just made them bigger and then I would get shouted at by my mother for splatting zit pus on the bathroom mirror. Pinching the most stubborn spot was like trying to push an already torn newspaper through a customer’s letterbox: it just made things worse. I found myself facing defeat on a daily basis.
Then, as if the acne wasn’t bad enough, I began to notice that my teeth were growing in a very strange manner. I noticed this change over the course of a few months, during my daily inspection of my face in the mirror, when I would be searching hopefully but in vain for signs of new hard hairs on my upper lip. I would also scan my skin for newly erupted or potentially threatening spot sites. At first, it was barely noticeable, with my upper canines growing down like those of a normal human, but after a while I observed that they kept growing further and further downwards. To my horror, I realised that I was developing fangs! It was ghoulish – I was beginning to look like Dracula. At Halloween I didn’t have to buy plastic fangs in a Lucky Bag any more, because my real teeth were becoming monstrous enough. I was turning into the only good livin’ vampire in history. How could this be happening? My mother was next to notice this dental deformity, and I knew it was becoming obvious when my big brother began referring to me as ‘Fang’. I knew a visit to the dreaded dentist was inevitable.
The dentist’s surgery was in a big old three-storey house overlooking Woodvale Park, where they even vandalised the bushes. When I sat in the dentist’s chair, I could see the tops of tall trees that had ‘Tony Loves Sharon – True’ carved into their boughs with the penknife I had won at the fairground in Millisle. Whenever I was trapped in that chair to have a hateful filling done, I would try to think of pleasant things to distract me from the pain. So, as the dentist drilled, I would look out of the window across the park and imagine Agnetha up a tree, singing ‘Fernando’.
On the day my mother took me along to have my fangs checked, I sat in that same chair, dreading a diagnosis that would necessitate a cold sharp steel injection into the roof of my mouth. Fortunately, on this occasion, this was not to be the case. ‘Your son requires orthodontic treatment as a matter of urgency, Mrs Macaulay,’ said the dentist. ‘I will arrange an appointment for him to see Mrs Osborne immediately.’
Within two weeks, I had my first visit to the orthodontist to arrange for a brace to be fitted, so that my vampire mouth could be pulled into shape. Mrs Osborne’s orthodontic surgery was located in one wing of her huge house up the Malone Road, where all the wealthy people lived. On my first appointment there, I was amazed to discover how the real rich people lived.
Before this, the biggest house I had ever been in was a four-bedroom detached house up the Antrim Road with a double garage and an avocado bidet. That had been impressive – but I had never been inside anything quite like this before. There were rooms everywhere, and the walls were covered with dark polished wood instead of woodchip wallpaper. There was wood on the floor as well, instead of shag pile. There were no fluorescent light tubes in the kitchen. It was much more old-fashioned than our house, more like the Rowings’ place, but bigger and richer. They hadn’t knocked down the walls between the toilet and the bathroom, neither had they removed any chimney breasts to make more room and put in an electric fire. There were no lava lamps or brown suede pouffes, even though I was certain they could have afforded dozens of them. They had very old-looking wooden furniture that you couldn’t get on hire purchase in Gillespie & Wilson on the Shankill, and they had old chiming grandfather clocks and silver candlesticks you couldn’t buy in the Club Book.
All of this made me a little nervous. When we arrived at Mrs Osborne’s front door, I noticed it had stained-glass windows like in a church. We were welcomed by a friendly receptionist, and there was a woman with a mop bucket, washing all the floors. ‘Your granny used to clean for people in big houses up here, y’know, son,’ my mother explained.
Being surrounded by such opulence, I expected Mrs Osborne to have a bun in her hair, and I assumed she would put us down with lots of ‘ings’, but when we met her she wasn’t like that at all. Yes, she did talk like a lady on Radio Ulster, but she was very warm and friendly. I was wearing my BRA uniform, and I wondered if that was what made her so nice to me, but she seemed to be so genuine that she might even fix my fangs if she found out I was a paperboy with dirty hands from up the Shankill.
My mother accompanied me to Mrs Osborne’s palace that day, and, because we were on the Malone Road, she spoke to the orthodontist in her Gloria Hunniford telephone voice. She attempted most of her ‘ings’ in such locations, even though she knew my father would have disapproved. ‘Are you go-ing to be eat-ing some cucumber sandwiches on the lawn in the gard-ing ?!’ Daddy would mock, when he suspected she was getting above her station. ‘No son of mine will ever try to be something he’s not!’ he would say to me at the slightest hint of an emergent middle-class BRA accent.
The first visit to my orthodontist was all very pleasant and going very well.
‘Yes, the boy will need a brace on his upper teeth for about twelve months,’ advised a very professional Mrs Osborne.
‘Will he have to wear the brace while he is eat-ing?’ enquired my mother politely.
‘No, he can take it out during meals. We will take an imprint of his teeth at the next appointment, but he will have to have two teeth extracted first,’ she continued in a matter-of-fact manner.
Silence.
‘Does he have to have some teeth tak-ing out?’ asked my mother, with an unmistakable look of concern on her face.
‘Yes, my dear. These two here,’ replied Mrs Osborne pointing with her sharp steel instrument at my two condemned teeth.
Another pause.
I knew what my mother was thinking. I immediately deduced the source of her concern and her next question simply confirmed my conclusion.
‘But our Tony has a bad heart, so he does, and Mr Pantridge at the Royal says that if he ever has to get a tooth out, he needs to go into hospital in case, well, just in case,’ she said, while making the strange expression with her eyebrows she sometimes used to indicate to other adults that I wasn’t supposed to be hearing something.
‘Will he be all right?’
‘This little chap will be just fine,’ replied Mrs Osborne, clearly untroubled by the life-threatening situation she was forcing me into. I had never heard someone who wasn’t English use the word ‘chap’ before. They always talked about ‘chaps’ in The Two Ronnies on BBC 1.
‘I will arrange for the extraction to be carried out at the School of Dentistry in the Royal,’ added Mrs Osborne.
I was in shock. I had lots of questions in my head. Was it a life-threatening operation? What are the average survival rates for boys with bad hearts getting teeth out?
I found I wanted to ask the question they always asked Dr McCoy in the sickbay in Star Trek in such dire circumstances: ‘What are my chances, Bones?’
But here I was in a big house up the Malone Road under the authority of a posh lady who you just could never question, and so I didn’t dare articulate my inquiries out loud. I quietly accepted my fate. My mother looked worried, but did not question either. It wasn’t fair. Just when I had begun to accept that I had a future with a fully beating heart, now everything was up in the air again – and all for the sake of having teeth more like an Osmond than a vampire.
On the day of the operation, I was very nervous. When we arrived at the Royal, and I got my first whiff of disinfectant at the front door, I was more worried than the day of my Eleven Plus or the night I had to do a violin solo at the school concert. I spent what I knew could very well be my final hour sitting in the waiting area, reading an old copy of Look-in I found among a pile of well-thumbed Woman’s Owns. I tried to read an article about why Alvin Stardust always wore a black leather glove on one hand, but I couldn’t really concentrate.
As the nurse ushered me into the operating room, I was aware my days could be numbered. I said a prayer and did a deal with God: as I had asked Jesus into my heart on the bin at the caravan and been good livin’ for years now, I in return asked if He would look after me and keep me out of Heaven for another wee while yet. But before I could finish the Lord’s Prayer, they had knocked me out with gas.
Five minutes later, when I awoke, I was alive but minus two teeth. I was very drowsy and a little confused, and was sick once again over my Harrington jacket, but at least my bad heart was still going. I started to cry like a wee boy, and it was all very embarrassing as my mammy comforted me, but at least I had survived. I thought I had been knocked out for hours. It was like when the Russians put a drug in James Bond’s drink and made him have hallucinations, before torturing him for secrets about big atom bombs. The whole day my mother had pretended it was all very routine, but now she also looked very relieved indeed. I would live to deliver the papers another day. And if I was very lucky and splashed on just enough Brut, I might still experience endless snogs with Sharon Burgess at the Westy Disco.
Now that the two teeth beside my incisors had been removed and it became clear that my bad heart was continuing to beat, I was able to return to Mrs Osborne, so that the process of bringing the rebellious fangs under control could be continued. I thought the trauma was over, but there was more pain and humiliation to come. Mrs Osborne took an imprint of my upper teeth with horrible putty that tasted like mud with toothpaste, and then she made a brace of plastic and wire especially for my mouth. I had looked forward to getting my brace, because it made you look grown-up, but as soon as I inserted it in my mouth for the first time I discovered an unforeseen problem – I couldn’t speak properly! A brace gave you a speech impediment. Every ‘s’ sound became a ‘ssch’.
‘How am I sschupposed to sschpeak with thissch thing in?’ I complained to my mother.
‘You’ll just have to put up or shut up, love!’ Mammy replied. ‘You don’t want to end up looking like Christopher Lee when you grow up. You’ll never get no girls nor nathin’ if you end up lookin’ like a vampire.’
I practised hard to enunciate my words properly, but in the end I had to accept that I would never be able to pronounce an ‘s’ normally while wearing my brace. And so I had great difficulty with all the most important words in life, such as ‘SSchowaddywaddy’, ‘sschex’, ‘Protesschtantsschs’ and ‘Catholicssch’.
This new handicap caused great upset in many different areas of my life. At home, my wee brother had great fun, repeatedly asking me the name of the spaceship in Star Trek. After my third attempt at ‘SSchtarsschip Enterprissch’, I realised he was doing it on purpose.
At school, after our first performance of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, I overheard our female Huck mimicking me to wee Thomas O’Hara. ‘Hi Tom SSchawyer!’ she said, before bursting into laughter. It was interesting that she never did this in front of me. Huck obviously didn’t have the balls.
This was all very embarrassing, but when it started to affect my profession it was clearly becoming a much more serious problem. When collecting the paper money on a Friday night, for instance, I had great difficulty in communicating to Mrs Charlton with the Scottish accent who lived in No. 102 that she owed me £1.66. ‘I dinnae ken what yer saying, love,’ she repeated after several vain attempts on my part to communicate the detail of her weekly papers bill. In the end, I had to write it down. It all seemed so inconvenient, and yet I knew that I would have to persist though pain and embarrassment, otherwise I would grow up to look like the undead.
Sharon Burgess of course didn’t have to get a brace. Her teeth were perfect. They were white and straight and lovely, like Marie Osmond’s. My sweetheart’s pure teeth just made me want to kiss even more. Big Ruby at the caravan had taught me how to kiss properly in the sand dunes. It was a different type of kiss to any I had ever experienced before – nothing like the sort of kiss you would get from your granny at Christmas or from your Auntie Doris who was a lovely singer in Lambeg. No, this was real kissing. Big Ruby had said it was called a French kiss. I couldn’t for the life of me understand the connection, because Big Ruby was from the Newtownards Road and had never even been to France. But she was very generous nonetheless, taking the chewing gum out of her mouth especially so as to show me how to use my tongue. She also told me that if you ran your fingers through the girl’s hair when you kissed her, it meant you really loved her in your heart. My first real kiss with Big Ruby was pleasant enough, although it was slightly ruined when a cheeky breeze off the Irish Sea blew some sand in my mouth.
But I didn’t fancy Big Ruby, so kissing her wasn’t the real thing. It was a bit like learning how to score a goal in a football match on your big brother’s Subbuteo set on the living-room floor, instead of scoring a real goal for Man United in the FA Cup Final at Wembley. My first real kiss had been with Sharon Burgess at the Westy Disco. I had persuaded my DJ dad to put on a slow song at just the right moment, after I had got Sharon up on the dance floor to do the Bump with me. As my father carefully faded the music into Donny Osmond, Sharon stayed up on the dance floor with me to slow dance to ‘Puppy Love’. My bad heart fluttered a little as she put her arms around me and we danced. I ran my fingers through her hair, so I did.
As Sharon closed her eyes and held me tight around the waist that first time, I hoped that she was thinking of me and not Donny. But these days, after the disturbing revelations of the jumble sale, my greatest fear was that it was actually my big brother she longed to embrace on the dance floor of the Westy Disco.