Cathy Hopkins - [Mates, Dates 07] Read Online Free Page A

up some soothing visualisations of my own. Things
that made me happy to think about. The perfume counters in Selfridges. Rails of
fab clothes in Morgan. The lingerie department in Fenwicks. Snogging Brad Pitt.
Oh, I’m being shallow, I suddenly thought. Clothes, underwear, snogging. No, I
can do better than that. I can do deep visualisations or else the girls would
have been right yesterday, all I think about is my appearance, boys and
clothes. No, I’ll try again. I
will
think deep meaningful things. I
imagined myself going on a protest march to save the environment. Hhmm, I
wondered, what does one wear for a demonstration? Green or brown? Something
that looks like you’re serious about the cause, but casually alluring as well
in case there’s a hot eco-warrior boy there. Oh
no
. I was back to
clothes and boys. I tried again. Think uplifting thoughts, uplifting,
deep
thoughts, I told myself. Something to distract from the fact that my jaw has
locked and my neck muscles have gone into spasm. No. The visualisation stuff
wasn’t working. All I could see now was Steve Martin with his drill in his
hand, an evil look in his eye and he was coming closer. I was never very good
at getting the right visualisation for the right moment, I’m not like Izzie,
she’s so into all that New Age hocus pocus and it seems to work for her.
    I opened my eyes to
see if Mr Saltman had finished. No. He was still nose to nose with me, only
with a mask over his nose and mouth. And glasses over his eyes. He looked like
a giant insect hovering in my face and suddenly I had the urge to laugh as the
words to Steve Martin’s song from the film rang through my brain, ‘to beee a
dena-tist…’ Gulp. Arghh, I thought as I struggled to swallow.
    ‘Ow,’ I cried as Mr
Saltman pulled my mouth to the left. Real person down here, I thought, skin may
be elastic, but it’s not
that
stretchy. Sadly he didn’t seem to be
picking up on my thoughts and continued to yank my bottom lip as though it was
made out of plasticine.
    ‘So Nesta, have you
been flossing regularly?’ he asked.
    ‘Urg, argle oof,’ I
attempted to say. I mean how ridiculous? Asking people questions when they’re
lying on their backs with their mouths full of fingers, metal things and cotton
wool. I think it may be one way that dentists make their jobs enjoyable. When
they get bored or something, they wait until someone is in their chair with
their mouth full of dentisty type stuff, then they ask them questions and
secretly laugh as they watch their patients struggling to answer.
    I nodded, then tried
to swallow again. Not long to go now, surely? Two more minutes. One, two,
three, four…
    Finally Mr Saltman
stood back. ‘OK, you can rinse now,’ he said as he pressed a button on the side
of the chair causing it to suddenly jerk up from horizontal to vertical and so
throwing me forward. That’s the other way that dentists get their laughs, I
decided. Playing around with their chairs. Most of them have some way of
lowering you down or pushing you back up. I wonder if they have ejector buttons
for really difficult patients or nasty kids who bite them. They can just press
a secret button and the patient flies out of the chair and back into reception.
I know I’d have one fitted if I were a dentist. But then, I’m not going to be a
dentist. I’m going to be an actress, which is one of the reasons I do actually
turn up regularly for this torture. It’s v. important to have good teeth. Which
reminds me, I ought to be going over my audition piece for
West Side Story
.
I’d decided to do Maria’s song, ‘There’s a Place For Us’. Pah, I thought, I
could have been doing that as a distraction. It would have been a great
visualisation, imagining that I’d got the lead part and I was there, on stage,
singing my heart out as everyone looked on in admiration.
    As I rinsed with the
disgusting bright pink liquid in the plastic cup on the stand next to the
chair, Mr Saltman went to look