Do you know of an NHS dentist around here? asked the girl who’d I’d been drawing in Costa Coffee in Newton.
I told her I didn’t. She had an Irish brogue – very subtle. She told me she was from Dublin but gave no reason as to why she was in that small Welsh town.
I had to have a tooth out, and I need to see a dentist for my wisdom teeth and some are rotten, she continued, almost to herself. I haven’t been to a dentist for years. Do you see an NHS dentist? Oh, yours is private is he? Is it very expensive?
She’d moved tables since I’d drawn her. Now she was sitting quite close to ours. She’d been consuming (eating rather than drinking) a large frothy drink with what looked like crumbled biscuits on top. I’d watched as she’d got up to get a spoon. Her hair was a mass of tangles and piled high on top like I sometimes wear it. She seemed edgy, a little high-wired. I could sense him tensing a little. I wanted to help but couldn’t.
I like your hair, she said, it’s like that actress on Desperate Housewives, she wears it like that sometimes.
I wished her the best of luck with finding a dentist.
A young man walked ahead of me along the main street this morning. I say walked. He didn’t, he lurched and zig-zagged. Spidery-thin, he kept falling towards the town houses to his right sometimes being lost to my view completely. Is it sadness that makes them drink so heavily, or a need to fit in? Turning down Thespian Street, I went home the other way. On one of the doorsteps either by intent or mistake, someone had left a bouquet of apricot roses. They were still in their cellophane.
