I'm in too deep

10:22:2004
There's no getting out of it, In too deep, no doubt about it...

Except to come clean eventually. I am referring (via some '80s pop lyrics) to the web of lies I've had to spin for the benefit of ---y, who has lost a couple of teeth recently. Basically it's the Tooth Fairy. A bit of harmless fun? Not if you have a kid whose thirst for knowledge can never be slaked- especially when you have to compound one lie on top of another to make an increasingly unstable tower of bollocks.

Let me back up a bit. I don't know where she learned about the tooth fairy. Probably at school, along with the word 'Fuck'. Anyway, the fucking tooth fairy is all right in her book seeing as it's her main source of income. Teeth 1 and 2 went OK apart from the fact that she lost one of them before she managed to get it under her pillow. Still, we made up some bullshit story like 'Maybe the tooth fairy needed it before bedtime and took it away. You'll still get your pound, stop fretting'. So that's 2 teeth and 2 quid accounted for.

Then she lost a front incisor. A big deal. This time she put it in a rather natty miniture pillow containing a pocket just big enough for a coin specially designed for the tooth-coin exchange to go to plan without the tooth or the coin getting lost. The only problem was we forgot to do the exchange that night and were confronted by a confused and slightly upset ---y in the morning who wanted to know why the fairies had forsaken her.

That was really the point where we should have come clean and told her that the whole tooth fairy thing was a bunch of crap. When you think about it, the Tooth Fairy is usually the very first myth to get debunked; Santa Claus takes a good while longer. At least it did when I was young. For me the debunked myth order went: Tooth Fairy, Santa, God, Success Through Hard Work. Anyway, it being first thing in the morning we weren't up to it so while ----i stalled her I sneaked a pound coin out of my trousers which were on the floor and stuck it under my own pillow. Then I pretended to discover it, much to ---y's joy.

Then of course I had to explain why the Tooth Faries had put her coin under my pillow and not her own. I started with the lie that they must have got lost but she countered that they had found her pillow the last two teeth she had lost. So I told her that it being summer, the regular tooth fairies must be on holiday and some incompetent Temp was covering for them. She looked sceptical, so I embellished it with the explanation that the Temp probably hadn't realised that the tooth was inside the mini-pillow-with-a-pocket thing. This satisfied her and I made a mental note not to forget the next tooth she lost.

She lost the other front incisor this week and once again used the mini-pillow for the exchange. Then to make sure that the Fairies didn't cock it up again, she made me write a note saying 'Tooth is in here' with an arrow to put under the pillow as well. As I was writing the note (with, I might add, an uncooperative biro that would scribble but not write) it struck me what a bizarre series of lies and follow-up lies had led me here: struggling to write a note to ensure that if the incompetent Temp Fairy came back, the bloody thing would be able to find the tooth.

Only 14 teeth left to go. Well, 46 if you count the other kids.

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