The Teenager’s perfect teeth cost a fortune – so I’m showing him off

THE TEENAGER has just been freed after serving a five-year sentence with our local orthodontist. The treatment cost an arm and a leg as well as the odd kidney or two but now five long years later he has the most amazing set of gnashers ever seen on a 14-year-old Irish boy.

I’m showing him off everywhere I go. In the butchers the other day someone stopped to say hello. ‘ This is my son,’ I said, pushing him forward like an exhibit. ‘Look at his teeth. Aren’t they amazing?’

My son is of a generation who will take perfect teeth for granted. It’s just part of growing up as far as they’re concerned – a little blip on the landscape of adolescence. In my day, only the lucky ones got orthodontic treatment. I was one of the lucky ones but on discovering the opposite sex, threw my brace down the toilet, got walloped by my mother and ended up looking a bit like Janet Street Porter.

That wasn’t going to happen to My Boy. My Boy was going to have a killer smile – if it killed me, I decided when he was very young.

These days he has a tendency to lurk behind him whenever he is with me in public because obviously he wants to pretend he’s not with me, but since last week he hasn’t had a chance. I’ve been grabbing him by the arm and hissing at him to smile at complete strangers.

‘Will you stop doing that. I am NOT a performing bear,’ he informed me after I introduced him to a neighbour he’d never met before and made him smile for her. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘You are not a performing bear. But you’ve cost us a bloody fortune so I’m making sure I get my money’s worth.’

At a funeral I marched him up the aisle to meet his great aunts. ‘Show Aunty Betty, Aunty Pat and Aunty Mary your teeth.’ He obeys reluctantly to approving murmurs from the aunts. ‘Oh. My. God. He’s gorgeous,’ they declared unanimously. The teenager nudges me to one side. ‘Right. That’s it. I’ve had enough. Stop telling people about my teeth and getting me to smile at random strangers. It’s weird.’ I’d had my fun so I agree to stop much to his relief.

An hour later in a local restaurant I notice that he’s beaming from ear to ear, showing off his Colgate smile like there’s no tomorrow. I follow his gaze and see a pretty girl about his own age smiling back at him from a nearby table.

My work here is done. It was worth every penny – even the kidney.