Chapter 1 — Dentists Have Already Killed Me Once

There are many respectable ways to face pain. I chose to lie on my bed with one hand clamped over my jaw and consider extracting my own tooth with pliers.

I hadn't got as far as putting them in my mouth. The handles were slippery in my palm, and every time I opened wide enough to inspect the tooth, the throbbing became a sharp, personal objection.

‘Oswald.’ Emma stood in the doorway, watching the hand I was trying to lower beside the mattress. ‘Put those down.’

‘I was only looking at them,’ I said. Moving my lips hurt. I tried keeping them still and discovered that this made me sound considerably less innocent.

‘With your mouth open?’ she asked, coming towards the bed.

‘Scientific curiosity,’ I said. ‘I wanted to see what we had before making any decisions.’

Emma held out her hand. Silver had begun to show in her dark hair, but nothing about her suggested she was growing too old to deal with me. I surrendered the pliers before she decided to demonstrate.

‘Shoes. We leave in five minutes,’ she said, setting the pliers on the dresser.

I pressed my tongue against the tooth. Pain shot through my jaw, and I waited for it to subside before trying a different approach. ‘It might get better on its own.’

‘You said that yesterday.’ She bent to retrieve one of my trainers from beneath the bed. ‘Has it?’

‘I've been trying not to rush it,’ I said. ‘Recovery takes time.’

‘And now you're going to let a dentist look at it,’ she said, setting both shoes by my feet.

I stayed where I was. The pliers had been a terrible idea, but at least I would have been the one holding them. In a dentist's chair, somebody else decided what happened next.

‘I'm not going,’ I said.

Emma looked at my swollen cheek, then at the shoes. ‘You can put them on here or downstairs. Your choice.’

‘That isn't much of a—’

She slipped an arm behind my knees and the other beneath my back, and lifted me off the mattress. I grabbed her shoulder before she could straighten.

I was tall for my age. I'd been exercising regularly for months, and I had begun to take a certain pride in the results. Apparently, none of them applied to being carried out of my bedroom by a woman in her fifties. ‘Put me down,’ I said, ducking as she took me through the doorway.

She stopped on the landing but kept hold of me. ‘Will you walk to the car?’

‘Under protest.’

‘Accepted,’ she said, lowering me onto the landing. I fetched my shoes. When I came downstairs, she was waiting with my coat, and the pliers had disappeared.

Our house stood outside London, behind a stretch of drive that gave me plenty of time to reconsider my agreement. Emma opened the passenger door before I could finish reconsidering. I got in.

The house, the drive and a quantity of money managed by people in offices belonged to me. My parents, Ken and Mary Mercer, had died when I was small, leaving an inheritance large enough to make other adults very careful about what they said in front of me.

Emma had never had that difficulty. She had worked for the family since my grandfather's time, helped raise my father and stayed to raise me. After my parents died, she became my guardian. Whatever changed around her, there still had to be breakfast, clean clothes and somebody to notice when I was pretending not to be ill.

For a while, I had distrusted her. Old memories had left me with opinions about money and the people it attracted, and I had watched for signs that she wanted something from me.

What I actually saw was a woman accounting for every pound and arguing with a solicitor over a lunch charged to the estate. She refused presents she thought too expensive. She also sat with me on nights when I couldn't bear to be alone, without asking questions I didn't know how to answer. Eventually, I stopped watching for a trick.

‘Seat belt,’ Emma reminded me, waiting with the key in the ignition.

I pulled it across my chest and settled my cheek against the cool window. We drove between hedges and brick houses while I concentrated on breathing through my nose. The car warmed up. My jaw kept aching.

‘You really are frightened,’ Emma said after a while. Her voice had lost its briskness.

‘I thought the pliers made that fairly clear.’

‘They made several things clear,’ she said. ‘Is it the injection?’

I rubbed a damp patch from the glass with my sleeve. ‘Mostly.’

‘We'll tell Mr Granger. You can ask him to explain what he's doing.’

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

‘That won't necessarily improve it,’ I muttered.

She glanced across at me, then returned her attention to the road. ‘Oswald, he isn't going to kill you.’

‘The last one did,’ I said. ‘Not in this body, obviously.’

‘You've never died in a dentist's chair,’ she said. ‘And I wish you wouldn't talk as though you're expecting to.’

Emma took a breath through her nose. I recognised it as the point at which she decided that pursuing the conversation would get her nowhere. I wished I could tell her she was right about the chair.

The first time I grew up in Britain, I'd spent most of my school years finding reasons to fight. If somebody insulted me, I fought him. If he hadn't, there was always the possibility that he meant to. My family eventually suggested the army with an enthusiasm that made their opinion of my other prospects quite clear.

For once, their solution worked. Training gave me something to do with all that energy. There were rules I could understand, people who were better than me and no shortage of opportunities to discover how much better. I learned to take a correction without trying to punch the person giving it. Later, I learned to wait, judge a situation and choose what to do.

I trained hard, represented my unit in competitions and won enough awards to give my family something else to talk about. After leaving the service, I joined the police. I kept competing, too. I liked having something to improve at, even when improvement involved being thrown onto a mat.

Then I got a toothache. Before the appointment, I'd joked with a colleague about stories in which people died and woke up in another world. A dentist's chair, I told him, would be a ridiculous place to start one.

I remembered the injection. The light above me. Someone calling out, suddenly much louder than before. After that, there was a gap. When I woke, I was nine years old, in England, and people were calling me Oswald Mercer.

Remembering the rest while trapped in a car on the way to another dentist seemed particularly unhelpful. I pulled my cheek from the window and sat up.

‘What is it?’ Emma asked.

‘Nothing. Just remembering something.’

‘Try remembering your manners,’ she said. ‘The Grangers are very nice people.’

I managed a small smile. Nearly two years ago, even that would have been difficult. I had frightened myself often enough during those first months; Emma had stayed through them. Now she was taking me to get my tooth treated, and I was making it as hard as possible.

‘I'll try,’ I said. She reached across and squeezed my knee before changing gear.

GRANGER DENTAL SURGERY was written on the sign outside the practice. I read it twice while Emma locked the car. Granger. The name was familiar in a way I couldn't place. I tried following the memory, but my tooth gave another throb and scattered it.

‘Coming?’ Emma asked from the path.

‘Just admiring the sign,’ I said, and followed her inside. The waiting room smelled of disinfectant and mint. There were magazines on a low table and a photograph of a smiling couple in white coats on the wall. I sat with my hands tucked under my thighs to stop myself touching my cheek. A few minutes later, the man from the photograph came through the door.

‘Emma. Good to see you,’ he said, then turned to me. ‘You must be Oswald. Come through, and we'll have a look.’

I followed him to the chair. Up close, the instruments beside it were considerably less reassuring than their tidy arrangement suggested.

‘He's nervous about the injection,’ Emma said as I sat down.

‘I gathered,’ Mr Granger replied. He moved the tray away a little and adjusted the lamp. ‘Let's find out what's troubling you first.’

I lay back and opened my mouth. For the next few minutes, I had nothing to do except stare at the light and try not to grip the arms of the chair too hard.

‘A cavity,’ he said at last, drawing back. ‘I'll numb the area, clean it and put in a filling.’

I pushed myself halfway upright. ‘Is the injection absolutely necessary?’

‘It will make the treatment much more comfortable,’ he said. ‘What worries you about it?’

The truthful answer was likely to get me sent to a different sort of doctor. ‘I don't like not knowing what's going to happen,’ I said instead.

Mr Granger rested his hands in his lap. ‘I'll explain as we go. If you need me to stop, raise your left hand. Shall we try that?’

I looked at Emma. She had pulled her chair close enough that I could see her without turning my head.

‘I'll stay while he gets you settled,’ she said.

I eased myself back beneath the lamp. The injection hurt. I kept my attention on the fingers of my left hand, spread against the chair, and waited for the light above me to disappear.

It stayed where it was. So did Emma.

‘All right?’ Mr Granger asked.

I gave a cautious nod. As the numbness spread, I slowly loosened my grip. By the time he started on the tooth, I could hear the instruments without thinking quite so hard about the last room where I'd heard them.

A woman in a white coat came in partway through the treatment. Mr Granger introduced her as his wife, and she drew up a chair while they spoke about my tooth. By then I had stopped needing to check that Emma was still there. When Emma asked whether she could leave me for a few minutes to run an errand, I nodded.

Mrs Granger stayed beside the chair after she left. ‘You're doing very well,’ she said, as her husband reached for the next instrument.

I attempted to thank her. With half my mouth numb and the other half occupied, the result was a noise that explained why most patients kept their opinions to themselves.

‘Nearly finished,’ Mr Granger assured me, and I took the hint.

Emma was back by the time I climbed out of the chair. I followed her to reception, testing my lip with my tongue. The tooth had finally stopped demanding my attention. I was beginning to appreciate the silence when a voice came from the corridor.

‘Mum, where did you put the Encyclopaedia Britannica? I've looked in the study.’

A girl about my age appeared with two books pressed against her chest. She had bushy brown hair and slightly prominent front teeth. Seeing us, she stopped beside the reception desk and shifted the books into the crook of one arm.

The name on the sign came back to me.

‘Hermione, this is Oswald Mercer,’ Mrs Granger said. ‘He's just had a filling. Oswald, our daughter.’

Hermione Granger. I knew that name. It belonged with fragments of internet clips and conversations I'd half listened to in my old life: a clever girl, a school, magic.

I stared at her long enough for curiosity to turn into a small frown. Whatever those memories meant, she was standing right in front of me, waiting for me to say something. I could at least manage that.

‘Oswald,’ I said, offering my hand. My numb lip made a mess of it. ‘Nice to meet you.’

‘Hermione,’ she replied, balancing her books against the desk so she could shake it. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Perfectly. My face has simply resigned,’ I said, trying for a smile.

She gave a startled laugh and quickly pressed her lips together. ‘Sorry.’

‘That's all right. I wasn't using that half anyway.’

Emma touched my shoulder. ‘Come along. Let the Grangers get back to work.’

I stepped aside as Mrs Granger reached for the next appointment card. Hermione picked up her books again, and I caught myself checking her name against the one in my memory, as if it might change when I stopped looking.

‘Goodbye, Oswald,’ she said.

‘Bye,’ I managed, and followed Emma outside. She headed for the car while I turned to look once more at the name above the surgery door.

Hermione Granger was real. For the first time all morning, I wanted to get home for a reason that had nothing to do with my tooth.