THE REMARKABLE CASE

There’s an old H.G. Wells story called ‘The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes’. In it, a man sees halfway around the world while the rest of him remains, evidently in Harlow Technical College.

Davidson wanders around as though in a trance, walking into equipment, colleagues, and benches, but somehow still seeing a beach, a schooner, the Pacific and the shoreline of a tropical paradise.

This, I have decided,  is my new technique for surviving the dental hygienist.

“Just relax,” she muttered, clearly frustrated as I screwed up my face again. She angled some sort of dreadful metal hook into my mouth and started scraping it across my teeth. I shuddered, squeamishly, and made balls with my fists. My toes curled up inside my shoes too.

Davidson’s Eyes. I stared up at the plasma lamp attached to the ceiling and let it drift out of focus. Plasma swirled into a ball of pale yellow light against the plasterboard ceiling, then gradually started to swim against the blue tiles. My eyes felt the warmth as my eyelids closed, a strong, sweet sense of summer flooding over me, growing and turning with every cascade of the ocean beyond.

The sun was hot between the palms. I let my gaze drift out beyond the white sand and out to sea. A hazy volcano, perhaps an island over the horizon, puffed lazy smoke into the sky. A sailboat, brilliant with white sails and red flags, carved a triangle of white through the turquoise waves. Closer, those same waves rippled gently onto the beach, where a single set of glistening footprints trailed along the water’s edge.

I relaxed into the sun lounger. To the right of me, another, empty, and there between us, was a small wicker table with a glass of something fizzy, popping and bubbling in the sparkling sunshine. A straw wobbled as the bubbles pushed it up. I could smell lemons.

There were lizards too. They scuttled around, looking implacably at me with their tiny black eyes. One flicked a tongue as though tasting the air, and then scuttled along the mottled bark of the nearest palm tree. Another raised its scaly head, like a dinosaur against the ocean.

And above it all, the hot sun burned through the sky, blinking through the deep green leaves of the palms as they waved in the breeze, dappling the ground with moving shadows of light and dark, light and dark. I closed my eyes and sank slowly backwards with a smile, all to myself.

“Right,” she said, “That’ll be that. I recommend using those type of brushes I told you about, and change the head of that toothbrush every three months, won’t you...

And try to relax.”

Before long I was on my way, back to the car, the grey sky, and the day job. And I’m not sure I felt a thing.

Perhaps ‘The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes’ is a hint - you can disconnect yourself from you sometimes if you want to, be somewhere else, maybe even be someone else for a while, and you can come back to reality feeling all the richer for it.

But then, anyone who’s ever read a book knows that story, don’t they?