Demons of the Mouth

I’ve been away. Not really Away, you understand, just away. But all calm now. I guess you have to change your perspective a little. Rather than standing in the fire, just use it to toast that marshmallow. And yes, I know they’re carcinogenic. Anyway, this thankfully leaves me free to think again about the more trivial things in life. Like mouth ulcers.

Mouth ulcers are like thorny stowaways, lying in wait in the cargo hold with a bomb in their shoe, fondling your belongings as they rustle up a comforting pocket away from all that nasty bunker-cold before lighting the ignition and blowing you out the sky. Or perhaps I am overstepping a little. Ulcers are more like simple hijackers, steering you away from all that meaty food that you love, forcing you to mouth over soft, supple foods as if you had prematurely lost your teeth or receded in time to become some infant, bibbed and spitting wretched ready-chewed peas and carrots onto the moulded plastic tray locked in front of you. The horror.

There are a number of ways to get one. You can order them from Argos, because you can order everything from Argos, or you can eat something unexpectedly hot that irritates a patch of your gums like cosmetics in a rabbit’s eye. You may summon one on an adversary through incantation of course. This normally involves finding a suitably heavy stick, a piece of driftwood is ideal, and then waving it theatrically at some roadkill until you invoke the Spirit of Suffering, and from there, using said wood as a receptacle, transport the Spirit into the gums of your victims, ideally while they are asleep and their lips are rippling from the snoring like loose flaps on a marquee at a windswept beach resort for retired junkies.

From personal experience though, the best way to get a mouth ulcer is undoubtedly to smack your gums with your toothbrush. This incident has all the best hallmarks of the perfect accident. It happens, of course, by surprise. It happens while you are doing something routine and mundane, a bit like how that serial killer will get you while you have your back-turned to the door while microwaving up some popcorn that you and your girlfriend can pick idly at while watching some sordid rom-com starring an affable Englishman with the charm of neutered snake. Cheap skates. That’ll learn you for shunning Odeon. People hardly ever get killed there. Also, toothbrush-ulcers are more likely to happen locally, much like minor road accidents. Though admittedly few road accidents actually happen in your bathroom. And lastly, they always happen when you take your eye off the ball for just a second.

The bastard toothbrush, in all its existence, has only a few minutes a day to really shine. It is itching to, storing up all that energy through the night waiting for that moment when it can justify itself to its owner again, and then there it is, greeting you like a happy dog. Just like a happy dog though, you can’t face it early in the morning, you just want to get after it with the rolling pin. And unlike a happy dog, you put this weapon of bristly vice into your mouth and try and manhandle it round what is really your fundamental access-point, in a half-witted state of dreamery. For perhaps a hundred consecutive times, all goes according to plan. You avoid your own reflection bleary eyed while idly gobbing a mouthful of foaming spit into the basin. You muse as it slips toward the plug hole, pulled in by the inexorable forces of Newton, emulating the lava flow from some volcano that had been used to dispose of all the detergent that had failed the Daz doorstep challenge, and then think about whether to jump from your third-floor window and risk being crippled rather than certain death, or just go to work and carry on as before because, let’s face it, no one likes change.

But then, just that one time, the toothbrush slips. Time slows down. Your dreary malaise is lifted into a heightened state of awareness, your eyes widen to detect untoward motion under some kind of predatorial instinct that kept your cave-wife Linda safe from sabre-toothed chipmunks in the prehistoric era. And then, before you even have time to regret wrong decisions and lost opportunities, collision. A numbing pain echoes through your face, and even as the neurones arc the blinding sensation across, you realise that this is nothing compared with what you will endure over the next two weeks. You retire to your room, tonguing the embryonic wound in a self-piteous manner, and then, if you are like me, set up an ad hoc schedule, cramming your favourite foods into the next two days of meals before the young ash-mound turns into a full-blown Vesuvius.

The pattern then unfolds over the next fortnight. After the heady glut of rich and sumptuous foods which you can now readily afford since your daily food spend is about to dwindle to the low double-digits of pence when the bastard really kicks in (honestly, it’s worth getting a loan to get through the first few days of opportunity, you will have no trouble paying it back having saved in the days of food-poverty that follow), you start to feel the monster glowing inside you. You tenuously peel your lip down and gaze at it in the mirror. It does not look like the hideous tent-like lump of cling-film portrayed in the adverts. If you touch it, you find it has more the texture of under-cooked sausage, lightly pink on the inside, taunting with its moist beauty yet harbouring demonically in the same breath. Of course you appreciate this more after the forty minute bout of crying in the foetal position from the shot of pain that touching the ulcer gives you is over. It does not resemble an outgrowth, like a teenage pluke, but instead looks as if some miniscule creature like a Fraggle has taken a circular saw and gouged a small, grey crater into the back of your lip. It reminds me of the disc-shaped gouge left in ceilings when drilling in roof-lights during my days helping renovate pubs as a summer job.

Today, which happens to be midway through the ulcer-fortnight, I tried the new tack of scalding it out. At hourly intervals (and in constant risk of losing my job – they do not handcuff you to the desk as they wish to betray the image of an ‘open company’, but they are always watching, WATCHING, I tell you…), I would fetch some boiling water in a mug, and force myself to drink it, bulging my bottom lip out as it cascaded its steamy torture around the vile, craterous skin-terrorist. Actually I did well not to scream out loud. The entire gum around that area is wracked with pain now, and I may well have killed the parts of my tongue that taste salt, mauve-coloured foods, and things from Korea (my tongue is more ghettoised than 1930’s Chicago). Going on the principle that it is like an unwelcome lodger, I would try throwing its belongings out the window, but unfortunately it is a Marxist mouth ulcer and has none to speak off. So instead I am going to draft it a strongly-worded legal document and use it to paper-cut it to death. If someone could pick me up from A&E in a couple of weeks time it would be much appreciated.

Anyway, after the original grief of inheriting the mouth ulcer, you start to learn to live with it. You stop tonguing it, knowing that the throbbing agony it induces down one side of your face has lost its novelty. You tilt your head to one side as you chew, summoning the food to the ‘good side’. You do not open your mouth as wide, lest you stretch the be-ulcered section with hideous consequences. You even sleep differently, trying to place your head so that the jaw lies slack off the side of your pillow. This has two results in the morning: either you have drooled an inexplicably large volume of sputum onto your mattress, it soaking it up sponge-like so that you feel as if you have been cut adrift in the North Atlantic on a punctured hovercraft; or you roll about in a state of unconsciousness, banging your ulcer gaily off your teeth so that as you rouse to consciousness in the morning your mouth is in such severe pain that you feel as if a rodent is burrowing through it on a long and convoluted trip to the secret trapdoor in your colon that leads to Narnia. Those darn rodents miss Narnia.

Eventually, it subsides. You start tonguing it again. It mutates from a grey crater back into a burgundy gentle lump, with the barely-raised geometry of those useless painted white discs on mini-roundabouts. You note with glee that you can use both sides of your mouth. You feast again, and repay the gluttony debt. The bastard, like a flea infestation, a violent pet or a suddenly unstuck baked-beans tin previously wedged under your brake pedal as you hurtled towards the back of a traffic queue, is gone in the most welcome manner possible.

I like food. I practically live for it. Getting a mouth ulcer for me is like cutting off a marathon runner’s leg and then still forcing the marathon runner to run anyway. So why, you ask – if you have got this far, which you haven’t – don’t you take some sensible precautions? Perhaps I could set aside a more awakened time of day to indulge in tooth-brushing, like during lunch perhaps, or while performing some full-attention activity like manoeuvring a light aircraft around the Outer Hebrides? Or perhaps I should avoid traditional ‘manual’ toothbrushes altogether.

Electric toothbrushes. They seem a little like overkill to me. Like using a jack-hammer to get through pie crust, a cannon to scare pigeons off your porch roof, or using a bus to run over your piggy bank to scab enough money to buy a Twix that you don’t really want, only it breaks up the boredom of a night of watching repeats of CSI and swearing at your laptop because it will not run Channel 4 On-Demand due to some trifling error that is written in hexadecimal and requires special glasses to read, and knowledge of a manual the weight of a small asteroid which nevertheless harbours lichen that could have yielded the fruit of life, to solve.

And then, say the omnipresent boffins who have the same mentality as those who stand over your shoulder, casting a shadow onto your desk, and give you tips while you play ‘Solitaire’ (it’s called ‘Solitaire’ for a reason. Now fuck off before I thrust a second javelin through your right testicle and then you can use the javelins to bollock-ski off to casualty and possibly appear in some local news item about ‘the jovial impacts of office-rage’), “Why not use Bonjela?” I’ll tell you why. While I freely admit that is has a lovely anaesthetising effect, and that indeed I would happily bathe in it and then, even as a man, give birth afterwards free from the slightest twinge of pain, the agony that results when it wears off is excruciating. And it is tasty, and you are more likely to eat it when your normal access to food has been inhibited for so long anyway. If you are trapped in a room with a bear, you should leave it alone. You should not cover it in jelly, chuck a net over it and then taunt it with a stick because it will eventually get out and then tear its way through you that makes a dark-hatted Austrian doctor performing a live autopsy seem mild-mannered.

Anyway, brush carefully. And remember to lock all your doors. (Well you ought to learn at least one good practice from reading these pages).