Sometimes I don’t look people in the eyes when I talk to them. Instead, I look past them, to the side, over there. I gesticulate and I glance and I project my voice as though I’m addressing a whole audience of ghosts in their periphery. I would love to say that I’m not scared of making eye contact, that it’s just a habit. But I think that if I look into a stranger’s eyes, bullseye into their pupils, I might be reminded that through the black hole awaits a little bit of magic or god or spite keeping every one of us alive. Do you know that vertigo feeling? Because I don’t know if I want to confront that emptiness so casually. The impossible consciousness that inflates our bodies. It’s too interesting, too vulnerable. And really, I would rather only look deeply into the eyes of people I trust. One day we can look at each other safely, waiting until the magic or the god or the spite crawls out of the eye-hole, slips off the waterline, projects its own voice and tells us what the fuck is going on. I am still not sure how we are alive — how I’m writing this — how I have these eyes to look with.

But because I need to do a lot of interviews for the book in the coming months, and seeing as I’m going to be meeting more people than usual at events, (seeing also as I’ve had a few months downtime, sick-time, looking only at screens and bedroom ceilings), I read a media training book on the advice of my publicist and eye contact is what it dared me to do. For what it’s worth, it also advised anybody being interviewed to make their point up front. You have to say your conclusion before you illustrate it, and then repeat your conclusion again at the end. As a writer, I’m used to gently building up to my endings for drama and justification. I don’t want to spoil the surprise. The media training book was worth it for that advice — to learn that journalists don’t have the time to be told stories. You simply need to look into their big open eyes with your big open eyes and feed them good quotes like you are throwing popcorn into their mouth, piece by ruffled piece. The eye contact just means you can be trusted to throw the popcorn where it’s supposed to go. Can’t speak over their shoulders because ghosts have no appetite.

So then I read this book in preparation of being human and found I didn’t have anyone to practice with. There was only really the ice cream man doing his last rounds through the streets of Liverpool. Greensleeves bleating its polyphonic funeral march, seeing in the end of summer. But I did it. I looked right at the ice cream man. I saw him and he saw me. It wasn’t an interview, or maybe only in the sense that having a conversation with anyone is a kind of interview. We spoke through the window cut out the side of his perfect, singing van and I walked away from my confident interaction thinking we’re all alive and it’s mostly fine. I opened my Solero and thought, The god behind his eyes has probably seen a million children also being fine. Or more than fine. I wondered how he made a living in the winter, and realised I should have interviewed him back. Realised more broadly that media training should be taught in schools so we all know what to do with ourselves when those selves come together. I closed the front door, sat down with ice cream in hand, got brain freeze, felt the opposite of fine, and then the toothache I’d been denying all summer quaked inside my mouth.

Round 2: eye contact with the receptionist in the dentist’s office was harder to maintain. She was just as nice as the ice cream man. She talked me through all the different ways I could qualify for free dental procedures, and that thing happened where, because we were speaking in the same accent and she was being so helpful, I felt instantly related even though nobody in my family is blonde. It was harder to focus on her eyes because I didn’t want to be there. I think I must be scared of more than I let on, even to myself. I hadn’t been to the dentist in 5 years. I had lost my electric toothbrush after moving house three times in the space of a year. I tried flossing once when I was a teenager and when the silk tape came back bloody, I thought, well, I’m never doing that again. Life is hard enough. Happy to pay for Soleros and screwballs and 99ers twirled in bright blue sherbet but I will not look the piper in the eyes. Consequences are none of my business. I hate it here.

While I waited for my name to be called, I sat on a deep-buttoned leather couch pushed into a bay-window-trapezium that wouldn’t quite accommodate it. That was the other thing. I couldn’t have a serious conversation with the dentist’s receptionist in the room we were in. Both my doctor and my dentist are in barely renovated family homes on residential streets; both look like the previous occupants only moved out a month ago, and it’s like seeing the bad neck line on someone’s mismatched foundation. Every room in the dentist’s is just slightly too empty, the wallpaper is textured and abrasive, staircase narrow and steep, and there are framed photos everywhere to compensate for the building’s new chill. In theory, I would think that having my dentist in a semi-detached house would put me at ease, like giving birth at home. Familiar, accessible, whatever. But it’s another ghost. Another haunting as the economy caves in on itself, and buildings that should be for families are accumulated by businesses instead.

The wait went on. Most of the frames on the walls were for huge mouthy stock photos of women’s lips, bright red lipstick. Smiling under studio lighting, teeth so white they almost looked blue. And just so big, so looming and singular, these mad smiles like propaganda or hypnosis. Forensic decoration, a clown world. Eventually, another girl came in for an appointment. She was with her dad or her granddad. Between the four of us, we were acting out a waiting room scene and she was the star of the show because she was crying. The receptionist had softly reprimanded her for missing an appointment earlier in the year and not paying the fine. She had to pay it today before she was seen. It didn’t seem like the receptionist wanted to read her script, but she wasn’t the one directing. The new girl on set explained that she nearly missed today’s appointment as well because her cat had just been ran over. But I’m here anyway, she said, livid. Everyone was quiet. She continued to openly cry. I imagined her lying right back in the dentist’s chair with those continuous tears rolling across both of her cheeks and down into her ears, hot-wet, the way that sometimes happens when things are especially bad.

When one more patient arrived and the living room was full, the receptionist sent me upstairs to an identical fake waiting room, complete with a duplicate large framed smile. I looked through those cheap grey blinds that are always in semi-public buildings like this. There was another photo up here, this time of Penelope Cruz. Sort of cinematic, sort of stretched out and posed like a Vogue tableaux; she didn’t even have her mouth open, and it’s not like Penelope Cruz had been to get her teeth done in L18. I once heard that celebrities swap their own teeth out for hand-crafted ceramic substitutes that cost upwards of six thousand dollars per tooth. I heard they have to eat things very gently, lest a six thousand dollar tooth smashes. Liquid diets, porridge, other slop. And if a tooth smashes, their special tooth ceramicist has to get to work on another six thousand dollar replacement. Right size, right shape, right colour. They might keep a record of their work, celebrity teeth samples like paint shades in a catalogue. The celebrity dental ceramicist probably wanted to be a normal ceramicist but nobody bought their designs, and so, this was their only option: waiting for celebrities’ teeth to break.

When it finally happened to me, the appointment did not last nearly as long as the wait. And for all this talk of eye contact, I never saw the colour of the dentist’s eyes. It was too fast a pitstop while he changed my body parts. He looked around the toothache-vicinity, told me a previous filling had come away and that he could see a new hole. One hand in my mouth, he asked me what I did. Critic. He asked what qualified me to be a critic while he punched a needle in my gums and I told him I was very judgemental. That isn’t even true, not really. The media training book probably said something about not giving false answers for laughs, but I only read the first half so I imagine there are plenty more consequences to come for me in life.

I couldn’t catch the dentist’s gaze so that we could really get into this high stakes interview. He shape-shifted into the faces of various silent assistants while we all did our dance inside the shape-shifting house off Allerton Road. I couldn’t look at any of them so I looked up at the ceiling instead where, behind the bright disc of the dentist’s light, hung a flatscreen TV mounted directly overhead. It was showing what I can only describe as live-action desktop wallpapers. A sunset, a desert, a tribe of elephants, a coiled jade green snake. I told the dentist I thought the screen on the ceiling was a good idea. Sour anaesthetic had dripped across the left half of my tongue and I did not expect to speak so clearly. From somewhere behind me, he said the TV was there to calm people down. Screensaver trance. I tried. I looked into the eyes of the jade green snake while the man in charge made terrible chainsaw noises in my mouth. But I didn’t feel calm, not about the noises or the vibrations or the future or the continued ordeal of my own mortality. I couldn’t look at him or the snake, and I braced, and I just let myself close my fucking eyes.