A trip to the dentist, for the first time since the late eighties. It is a small, well-airconditioned office in Newtown with the usual complement of unisex trash magazines. I am so unenthusiastic that I arrive on the dot of ten thirty and only have time for a brief perusal of the latest round of baby-buying and love ratting. I am peering into Angelina Jolie's pout to try and see her teeth when my name is called.

My dentist introduces herself as Yippella Espino. I'll be your dentist for today, she says. She is a small, dark neat Phillipina with her own row of pearly teeth peeking out from between a pair of plummy lips. She buzzes my chair down several centimetres and I can feel my pallid head emerging into the pool of light under the lamp like a sickly bean stalk. I am invited to open my mouth . When's the last time you went to the dentist? she asks me. My eyes skitter around the room, bouncing off stainless steel implements and into shadowless corners. A couple of years ago, I say. She peers into my yellow, unlovely grimace and we both know I am lying.

She puts a pair of black goggles on me and reclines my chair. She has a little mirrored piece of metal on the end of a stick and insists on showing me my cavities while I squint into the light. She and her assistant put on masks (spawning paranoid speculation that they are protecting themselves from my halitosis) and she stands over me with a metallic instrument in each hand, systematically rummaging through my mouth like a well-bred cannibal wielding a knife and fork over her victim. 31/5, occlusal and labial. 24/1, occlusal. 18/2, occlusal and labial. She is listing the teeth that need fillings, and the list goes on and on.

After that they clean them. I close my eyes and soon I hear a buzzing, whining, grinding noise. It takes some time to realise that this is the sound of something scraping on my teeth. Periodically she stops and pokes about with her knife and fork, making an enamelled little clink like a spoon falling into a sink. Then she continues. I lie back slavering while my tongue is sucked up into the spit-remover and then released with a slap and a small explosion of spray. Suck, grind, slap. Suck grind slap. I stagger home through the early weekday streets of Newtown feeling both shell-shocked and relieved.

They say that eyes are the windows of the soul, but if you think that. think again. The window to the soul is actually the mouth. Every cigarette, every meal, every blow job and kiss and cocktail and breath leaves its residue there, building up layers of sediment that contain the history of a life. Eyes know how to conceal their secrets, but the warm damp cavity of the mouth reveals everything to those who know how to look.