How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran

How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran

Author:Caitlin Moran [Moran, Caitlin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781448118519
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2014-07-02T23:00:00+00:00


FOURTEEN

Still, life in Wolverhampton now is not without its excitements. On Thursday, we take Lupin to the dentist, where he has five teeth removed.

Here, perhaps, is the reason he has been crying so much. It’s not that his nature veers instinctively toward the melancholic, and pensive, after all – it’s just that his teeth are riddled with rot. The dentist has to gas him and take out five of them, in an hour-long, brutal, surgical punch in the face.

‘They’re only your milk teeth, son!’ Dadda says, cheerfully, as we drive him home in the van – lying flat out in the back, head on Krissi’s lap. ‘Your starter teeth! Now you’re getting your Man Teeth through! Soon you’ll be biting through bricks – like Jaws!’

Lupin is holding the bag of sweets he’s been given, as a treat. We have no other reward system available to us. He’s been paid for his teeth in Black Jacks, Refreshers and Fruit Salads. And he’s paid for his Black Jacks, Fruit Salads and Refreshers in teeth. In a way, it’s a perfect circular dental system for children.

‘When I was a kid, we all had rotten teeth!’ Dadda says over his shoulder, gleefully. ‘All of us! Every uncle! Your Uncle Jim had one that came through black. Came through. Black. We called it “The Demon Tooth”. Your Fat Nanna had false teeth by the time she was twenty-eight! She used to say she lost a tooth for each child.’

‘It looks like Lupin has, too,’ Krissi says, coldly – looking around the van full of siblings.

None of us can stop staring at Lupin. He’s still groggy – drunk – and when he opens his mouth, it looks like a fifth of his face is missing. Red, wet gaps in his head. He doesn’t have a mouth any more – just a hole.

Krissi silently puts his finger on Lupin’s cheek, pointing something out to me: they’ve split his lip, too, while he was under. His teeth and his lips. All they’ve left is a pulpy mess – with a single incisor left, on the right, like a Martello tower, sitting on an empty shoreline of blood. Poor Lupin.

When we get home, Mum has made the house ultra-tidy – in the way that it usually only is if visitors are coming. Today’s honoured guest is Lupin’s pulped mouth. He’s given the best bit of the sofa – with the most functioning springs in it – and the best blanket over his knees, and, when he comes round fully from the anaesthetic, in order to cheer himself, he gets us all to do increasingly humiliating things in exchange for sweets from his bag.

Krissi has to pretend to be an orang-utan that’s trapped under the armchair. I have to say that I fancy a series of esca-latingly mortifying people – starting with Mr Bennett, the caretaker from Take Hart, and ending with The Glove from Yellow Submarine – until I start crying, and Mum has to come in, and chide everyone for letting it get out of hand.



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