“It's okay, there's an ambulance on the way”.

This is the first thing the kid hears me say when he comes to.

I'm crouched over him in blue boots that suddenly look ridiculous on the floor of an ice cream parlor, of all places, asking him if he's alright, when he's clearly not.

Fat, dark gulps of blood leap from his face and hit the floor, syrup-thick and just too much for everything to truly be okay, but that's just what you say to boys who are on the floor bleeding.

A badly-dyed blonde in a cheap black dress falls to her knees beside me. She scoops him sitting into her arms as store staff rush over with wads of tissue.

She's not supposed to move him, but it's too late, so I tell her to press hard on his wounds to stem the bleeding.

I've done this before.

She slaps the tissue to the red gape under his eyebrow and starts dry heaving.

She clearly hasn't.

That's when the giant security guard who I screamed at to call an ambulance soberly taps me on the shoulder. He opens his too-big bear hand in front of my face. In it is a long, shiny tooth – the whole tooth, root to tip.

“That's his tooth”, the guard says, simply, sadly. I'm hit with a wall of gloom – shit, not his front tooth. Not when he sells that face for a living.

He’d showed off an advertisement emblazoned with his pouting mouth just minutes before in a store window. I was surly and unimpressed and whining at him for keeping me waiting. He was riding around on a white bike and laughing at my annoyance. A child who knows he can't be slapped.

Now I can't remember ever being anything but worried. One emotion wipes away all the others. Damage puts you at ground zero, you start over, and everything you ever knew about this person is erased.

With his sharp white incisor pressed in my palm I kneel back down to ask the kid if he's okay again. He's talking now, almost coherently, so I know he at least doesn't have a major head injury. Three police officers have swarmed in and are asking him what his name is, how old he is, what year it is, what day it is. The last one he doesn't know.

“That doesn't mean anything!” I yell. “He never knows what day it is!”

The police quickly find out what happened. Some thug in a singlet just walked up and accused him of messing with his cousin. The guy had a look on his face like he’d seen something pretty, something enticing, but ill-aligned, and because it didn’t fit, it needed to be knocked off centre. It had to be hit.

“I don't even know you”, was all the kid said before the guy slammed him so hard in the jaw he flew face first into the cold, glass case holding 40 flavours. The crack that rung out when he hit the wall was so loud I was sure he'd fractured his skull.

The police are holding onto the kid now, he's safe, and it's then I remember then that you can keep a tooth viable by dropping it in milk. It's been out of his head for maybe a minute, it can be saved. I need a glass of milk, and we're in an ice cream parlor. Oh God is merciful when he's struck his babies down.

I turn to the girl behind the counter and yell for a glass of milk. “Milk ain't going to help

him, honey!” she says, incredulous. I howl back in her face, “GET ME A GLASS OF FUCKING MILK, YOU DUMB FUCKING BITCH!”

She doesn't move. Stands there staring at me, half-smiling. False politeness heightened by what to her is a harmless fuss.

I lower my voice to pleading and say, “Please, it's for the tooth”. The girl suddenly understands and nods violently like a bad extra overacting in a movie. She's back in seconds with a giant milkshake cup and I drop the tooth in. White sinking in white, it vanishes, which makes me nervous. Later in the ambulance, I can't help but check that it's still at the bottom of it's cloudy plastic well.

And when they load him in the ambulance the kid is drunk and falsely jovial, his pill is kicking in, he can't feel a thing yet, so he busies himself chanting Libertines lyrics and talking with the paramedic taping up his cuts about the cultural validity of musicals.

I sit up the front with the cup holding the kid's tooth in my lap and the ambulance driver asks me if the kid is my boyfriend. When I say no, he tells me I look amazing.

I yell to the kid: “Jesus Christ, you're bleeding in the back and the ambulance driver is hitting on me!”

He laughs widely with his slick, bloody mouth.

When we roll the kid into St.Vincents, the ambulance driver leans over the kid and writes my number on his blood stained bed sheet. "Fucking hell," the kid says. "Someone get me a pen and paper". The paramedics run and fetch him a red pen and crumpled scrap as quickly as if he'd asked for oxygen and stand back watching him scrawl, more than a little amused, or maybe charmed.

Ten minutes in a red and white van and everybody already loves him.

Loaded into a wheelchair, he scrawls an incoherent poem. It’s as surreal as the situation he’s in. Reading it back, he throws it on the floor in disgust but later, I take it home and tape it to my wall. On the corner, where it's torn, there is a faint red-brown fingerprint.

I take photos with my camera phone while we're waiting for a doctor. He wants pictures of his ruin. The next day, they both humour and frighten him.

I wheel the kid into the consultation room and demand a dentist. The doctor calls one. I look down at the kid's blood-matted mess of blonde hair and splattered white shirt and think..."This is so Kurt and Courtney," he says, beating me to it. "I want some bananas!" he hollers, quoting The People Versus Larry Flynt. I laugh at the ridiculousness of pop culture shared in the halls of an emergency ward. We're constructed from external references, even in the immediacy of injury. "Bananas!" he cries again. "I'll get you

some bananas, Larry," I say, "But let's get the fucking tooth back in your head first".

The actress texts me while the kid's mouth is being patched up.

She writes: I’m at a lame perfume launch party and I’m thinking I’ll go home with this bronzed Brazilian model. Opinion?

It takes me a while to respond. I don’t know if I want her there or not, if this is my turf now, or still hers.

I write: The kid is in hospital. St Vincents.

She writes: I’m on my way.

She's there in minutes.

She always travels at witch-like speed, as if she was already halfway to wherever you are by some sorcery that folds her into bends of time and catapults her head first into any petty promise of drama.

The doors fly open and there she is. Glances at a junkie chewing bubblegum or maybe his own cheek. Nope, not who she’s here for. Keeps walking. Spots me and with a measured tilt of her chin signals hello. Acts as if she’s arrived at a press conference.

It’s one in the morning and she’s wearing amber aviator sunglasses, obscene blue eyeballs spilling over the rims, a tad too wide with lusty excitement.

I’m sorry she’s there the second I see her.

“He’s with the doctor,” I say, so we sit in her car outside, smoking a joint.

I've been freezing in my scrappy yellow cardigan and checkered blue dress and in the warm car seat I stop long enough to look down at my hands and see they're covered in blood. It's the first time I lose my cool. A stifled sob rises through my body, a sound wave declining in it's upward thrust until it's just a quiet, tearless whimper.

I spit on my hands and rub out the still-wet smears that have sunk into the life lines in my palms. Out damn spot - out, out.

I think for a moment - my future is mapped out in these thin, red roads desperately wiped clean. I don't know if I've been blessed or cursed, but something has become irreparable. The kid and I, we’re bound together. Or maybe that’s what I want to be true.

The actress asks to come inside. I tell her to wait. I hope she’ll just vanish.

I fan my eyes, I look in the mirror, I put my lipstick back on, and I go back inside.

The kid is lying in the consultation room, staring at the ceiling with each holey-soled foot pointing at the white walls on either side of his small body, and I feel bad for having left him alone for even a minute. His bloody tooth is crookedly back in place, for now. The blood staining his jeans in red-blue streaks is thick and round as paint.

He asks for his girlfriend, I give him his phone. The hospital is as silent as a library without a single page turning. I hear her crying in mono through the small speaker.

She won’t come. She has to work.

"Why did that guy hit me?" he asks when he hangs up, and for a split second he looks so hurt that I try and think of something witty to say to barrel through the weight of muted distress in the room. He's sitting right on top of it, smothering it, not letting it show. A line from a movie springs perfectly to mind. "Maybe he just wanted to destroy something beautiful," I say and smile one of those small, apologetic smiles you see on relatives in cancer wards. "You know Fight Club?" he answers with an odd, sad inflection in his laugh - nothing can fix this, he's not-saying, and I know that. Of course I do, Mr Durden, I say, of course.

The actress thrusts herself through the door uninvited, her hips thrown off balance from their deliberate vixen swing by moderate panic. She thought she might miss the show.

In hospital lights I scan her with distaste – faux vintage jeans, baby blue and buttoned, skin tight and waist-high. A white satin shirt tucked in and blooming over her monstrous 50s bosom. Marilyn Monroe’s Eurotrash understudy with a mile of fake white hair.

The kid flinches a second, considers a performance, drops the idea of an act before an act is mustered, then loudly thanks her for coming.

His vulnerability opens further, he lays easier, wider, on the bed.

A doctor wearing a retainer across his top row of teeth comes in to stitch the angry plum-coloured slash under the kid's brow. He uses a 12-gague needle and pushes anesthetic into the open flesh. The steel slides into the clotted mouth, splayed and fat like a small afterbirth.

This is going to hurt.

I tell him he can, so the kid squeezes my hand so hard it's bruised in the morning.  I look at the dirt under his fingernails as my own turn white.

The actress suppresses a jerk of rage when she sees me touch his hand. She clutches one of his feet in retaliation.

The look she gives me across the bed is the equivalent of blowing a raspberry while trying not to cry. School yard hair-pulling.

He can only belong to one of us.

The black wire being strung through the kid’s face tugs and shudders as it goes. It looks something like the vicious pecking of a baby bird.

The actress says, “Cool”.

The kid reminds the doctor he doesn't normally look like this.

In eight stitches to his eye and chin, he's finally sewn shut with a thin trickle of blood left trailing down his neck.

When he's as clean as he will be, a police officer comes in and takes photos. An undercover cop who happened to be on the scene wrestled with the guy and dragged him literally by the hair to the cop shop, we're told. He’d already been charged with assault-occasioning-grievous-bodily-harm. His mum bailed him out.

The cop's flash goes off one, two, three, four times. The kid woozily sits up at attention and turns from side to side. He knows his best angles, even now.

The paramedics come in to look at his resurrected tooth and guffaw. The attention comes with the opposite of the usual pay off. He gets an ice pack, prescriptions, painkillers, antibiotics, an x-ray. The stitches come out in five days. The tooth will need some expert dentistry, but everything is as alright as it can be.

“Give him morphine. He’s resistant to pain medication,” I tell the doctor.

“I don’t think he’s in any pain,” the doctor laughs.

“That’s idiotic -” I start.

The kid tries to shush me. To no avail.

 “He had a tooth knocked out of his head. He needs morphine. Nothing else will work and he’ll just end up here tomorrow!”

I speak quickly. I’m needy. It’s a horrible noise.

But he gets a prescription. In fact he gets two.

The actress and I wait outside while the kid closes the deal.

With the slam of the emergency room door something jolts inside her and erupts.

She throws a barely lit smoked cigarette at the floor.

“The whole time I knew him,” she says, spitting, “I waited for something like this to happen so I could be there when he was helpless. And you were there. You!”

The things she says out loud, my god.

“It just happened,” is all I say, but I’m feeling the beginning of something like smug.

The kid walks out looking taller than before and wraps an arm around both of us, pulling our heads into his chest. Nestled in his wings, the actress glances at me and I glance at her. There’s not enough space for both of us, but, for now, we work in tandem.

We load him in the car, feed him a joint. Pull up in front of the girlfriend’s house.

“This is one of those times you wish you could rewind your life ten minutes before this happened”, the kid says. But you can't. Let time take us forward instead. What follows this will be the closest we're offered to erasure.

“Does your face hurt?” I ask.

“No,” he says quietly, distantly, “I just need to sleep”.

“I can’t go in there. She hates me,” the actress snaps. She means the girlfriend.

“I’ll go,” I offer, maybe too eagerly, and deliver him to his bedroom.

The sleepy, grieving girlfriend rises from the chaos of bed sheets, her own face pale and crumpled.

She rubs her wig of black hair out of her black eyes to look at him. With a hand outstretched towards his injuries, her face crunches into a complete and utter frown. Her shoulders fall, and she collects him in her arms.

She says, “Thank you so much for looking after him”.

I think, thank you for not being there.

As I turn to leave he stops me, and over her shoulder he says, “See, we’re friends now”.

I know this already.

Image by Dr Starbuck
licensed by Creative Commons