Deaf Sentence (22 page)

I feel a bit better for having got that out of my system. Fred is a true Christmas devotee and gets annoyed if I moan about it. Of course it has a genuine religious significance for her, but it’s also good for business, so now she embraces it with both arms. Then she likes bringing the family, or families, together, and the fact that we invariably get on each other’s nerves after a few hours doesn’t seem to bother her, or rather it does bother her but she has a knack of deleting the unpleasantness from her memory well before the next Christmas comes round.

 

 

 

7
^th
December.
I couldn’t get away from Christmas even at the lip-reading class. This afternoon Beth handed out questions on a piece of paper which we had to ask each other and answer without voice:
Have you started your Christmas shopping? Do you get up early on Christmas morning? Do you visit family and friends at Christmas? What present would you like to receive this Christmas? Do you have a turkey for Christmas dinner?
etc. Then she read without voice a magazine article about the biggest Christmas pudding in the world, and handed round pictures of this gross and repulsive object. In the tea break Marjorie reminded us that we should put our names down on a list if we wanted to join the Christmas lunch party at the end of term. She left the list on a table and I carefully avoided going anywhere near it.

Fortunately it wasn’t all Christmas. We had an exercise in small groups involving homophenes - the deafie’s equivalent to homophones, words which look alike on the lips but have a different meaning, like
mark
,
park
and
bark
, or
white
,
right
and
quite
,
rewire
and
require
. We had to make up sentences using one of these words and lip-speak them to the group. I made up a sentence using all the words in two sets, ‘
Quite right, the white room requires rewiring
,’ which of course nobody could lip-read, and there was much protesting laughter when they gave up and I said it with voice. I was justly punished for showing off in this fashion by the next exercise, a quiz, to be completed in pairs, called Animal Crackers, which was a list of words with letters missing which themselves spelled out the name of an animal. Thus the solution to
Ball - - - ing
was
Ballbearing
,
Bl - - t - -
was
Blotter
, and
Pu- i - -
was
pumice
. It reminded me of puzzles in the comics which I read as a very young child, but I found the exercise surprisingly difficult, while Gladys, the elderly lady I was paired with, was an absolute wizard at it, and guessed nearly all of them before I did. She told me she is eighty-six.

It is too early to tell how far these classes will improve my ability to use lip-reading in real conversations, and I doubt whether it could ever help me much in situations where there is a low level of redundancy and predictability in the flow of information. Nevertheless I find the class a soothing and refreshing interlude in the week, a welcome suspension of the troubled introspection for which retirement gives so much scope, and a distraction from the anxieties of my personal life at the moment. Above all, it is wonderfully relaxing to be in a social environment where you don’t have to feel in the least foolish or worried or apologetic about being deaf.

 

 

 

8
^th
December
. I met Alex today as arranged, at Pam’s Pantry, a café near the main campus of our second university, the former Poly. There used to be a second-hand bookshop next door, in which I browsed occasionally before the Internet made it redundant. The café is a stripped-pine and home-made carrot cake type of place, busy in the lunch hour, but quiet in mid-afternoon, and it doesn’t have any piped music. I haven’t been there for a long time and didn’t recognise the bored-looking young woman behind the counter. I arrived early, got myself a cup of tea, and sat down at the back of the room with a view of the door. There weren’t many other customers: a couple holding hands and a whispered conversation, and a few solitary young people who looked like students reading text messages on their phones or listening to their iPods.When Alex came in she did not look round or catch my eye, but went straight to the counter and ordered a coffee - a latte, I deduced from the server’s movements at the coffee machine.This took some little time, during which Alex kept her back turned to me. She was dressed in black as usual, a shiny black quilted nylon coat over black trousers and boots, with a long red knitted scarf wound round her neck, trapping her pale blonde hair. Then, with the cup and saucer in one hand, and a capacious handbag in the other, she went through an elaborate mime of looking around, hesitating about where to sit, then catching sight of me, and giving a surprised smile of recognition before coming over to say, in a loud voice, ‘Hi! May I join you?’ The other occupants of the café, who had taken no notice of either of us till this moment, looked up. I realised she was teasing me by this unnecessary and in fact counterproductive pretence that we had met by chance. She unwound her scarf, shrugged off her coat and sat down opposite me. She took my folding umbrella out of her bag and laid it on the seat of an unoccupied chair beside our table. ‘Don’t pick it up now,’ she said, in a lower voice, as I made a move to do so. ‘When we’re through, I’ll go out first and leave it there. You stay for a few minutes and then just casually pick it up when you leave.’

‘You’ve been reading too many spy stories,’ I said.

She smiled in acknowledgement of the source of this bit of business, and stirred her latte. ‘Have you forgiven me, Desmond? For the library book and all?’

‘It’s not for me to forgive,’ I said. ‘It’s for the Librarian.’

‘You want me to go and confess to the Librarian? Then they’ll banish me from the Library! Probably from the University. Probably from the country! I’ll be forcibly repatriated, like an asylum seeker caught shoplifting.’ There was a mischievous gleam in her bright blue eyes.

‘What is it you want from me, Alex?’ I said. I was tiring of this badinage.

‘Right now, it’s a suicide note.’

I asked what she meant. She said there had been a psychology research experiment years ago, in America, mixing up genuine suicide notes with what were called ‘pseudicide’ notes composed by friends and family of the research team, and asking a class of graduate students to distinguish the genuine ones from the fakes.‘They scored a surprisingly high success rate. It turned out to be a useful way of identifying the stylistic features of real suicide notes. I want to repeat the same experiment, so I’m asking everybody I know, which isn’t an awful lot of people here in England.’

‘You want me to write a suicide note -’

‘Yeah, make it as realistic as you can.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ I said.

‘Why not?’

I hesitated. I recalled as she spoke that there was a murder case some years ago in which a man had tricked his wife into writing a suicide note and then killed her. I could hardly cite this as a reason for refusing to cooperate, and I didn’t seriously suspect her of any murderous intention, but I was sure it would be extremely unwise to put such a potentially compromising document into her irresponsible hands. I quickly invented another reason to decline: ‘For the same reason I wouldn’t use that website where you enter all your personal details and a computer program calculates the day you will die.’

She looked taken aback. ‘You mean, you’re afraid it might come true?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Have you been tempted to commit suicide, then? Why?’ She had dropped the tone of badinage. Her blue eyes were intently focused on me, waiting for my answer.

‘I’m gradually losing my hearing,’ I said.‘There’s no cure. Eventually I’ll be stone deaf. It’s very depressing.’

‘Gee, yeah, I can imagine but . . .’

‘But what?’

‘I never came across a case where somebody killed themselves because of deafness,’ she said.

‘Beethoven came near,’ I said.

‘But he didn’t.’

‘No. He still had all that marvellous music inside him which he wanted to get down on paper. I don’t have any marvellous music inside me. I don’t have any marvellous anything.’ I was almost persuaded by my own story, moved by the pathos of my imagined plight. Alex anyway was convinced.

‘Hey,’ she said, putting her hand over mine on the table. ‘Sure you do.’ Her fingers were cool and soft, like Dad’s. I was startled, but did not remove my hand. She wore a sapphire ring on her middle finger which seemed to reflect her eyes. ‘You have a lot of knowledge, Desmond, which you can share with people like me,’ she said, in a lighter tone, withdrawing her hand.

We talked for a while about my past research - or rather I talked. She was charming and receptive, and I have to admit that I enjoyed her company, forgetting the embarrassment and worry she had caused me in the past few weeks. I bought her another cup of coffee and myself another tea, with two portions of carrot cake. But when I glanced at my watch and said I had to be going she reverted to the mood of her entrance, and said with a conspiratorial smirk, ‘I’ll leave first. Don’t forget your umbrella,’ reviving the memory of her email prescribing her ‘punishment’, and its sequel. Neither of us had mentioned that episode, and it was as if by not registering my disapproval I had acquired some virtual complicity in it. I smiled feebly and stayed obediently in my seat as she gathered up her bag and her scarf and did up her coat. ‘Thanks for the coffee and cake,’ she said. ‘And if you change your mind about the suicide note -’

‘I won’t,’ I said.

‘Well . . . I’ll be in touch.’

About what, I wondered. I had come to the café with the intention of bringing our relationship to an end once and for all, and failed again. I watched her make her way between the tables to the door, and to my dismay she paused briefly to greet a young man sitting on his own with a laptop open on the table, who looked up as she passed. Absorbed in our conversation, I hadn’t noticed him come into the café. After Alex had gone out he glanced across at me, and I stared him down. I wondered if he had been observing us, and whether he had entered the café in time to see Alex cover my hand with hers.

Tonight, after writing up our meeting, I began idly drafting a pseudicide note - not with any intention of offering it to Alex, but as a stylistic exercise. It was addressed to Fred of course, but just deciding on the form of address was difficult. Fred or Winifred? Dearest or Darling? In the end I decided on Dearest Winifred, the intimacy of the epithet balancing the formality of the full first name, which seemed more appropriate to the occasion than ‘Fred’. Imagining what had brought me to the point of preferring extinction to the continuation of consciousness was easier, for I had already thought of it in conversation with Alex: a drastic acceleration of hearing loss, leading to almost total deafness. Everything I suffered now - frustration, humiliation, isolation - multiplied exponentially. Barely able to hear
anything
. At cross purposes in every conversational exchange. In the home a silent, withdrawn, unresponsive companion at the best of times; a surly, self-pitying misery at the worst. A damper on every party, a dud at every dinner table. A grandfather unable to communicate with his growing grandchildren, in the presence of whose blank looks and idiotic misunderstandings they must strive to stifle their giggles. It’s not a life worth living, I would tell Winifred -
My deafness is a drag on you and the rest of the family, and an inescapable, irremediable grief to me. So I’m going to put an end to it. Please don’t feel bad about it, my darling, it’s not your fault, and you mustn’t blame yourself; no one could have been more kind and understanding. But everyone’s patience has its limits, and I have reached mine.
But as I drafted the note its insincerity showed in every word, even in punctuation marks (did anyone ever use a semi-colon in a suicide note?). I don’t really believe Fred would show such saintly forbearance as it implied, nor would I expect her to. And depressing as the state I had conjured up for myself might be, it wouldn’t be utterly unbearable. There would still be some pleasures left, and no pain. I could have written a convincing note based on the premise of a painful terminal illness, but just thinking of it stirred up distressing memories of Maisie. I abandoned the exercise.

Perhaps it’s true that nobody ever committed suicide on account of deafness. Beethoven came pretty close, but, as Alex said, he didn’t. You could say that the Heiligenstadt Testament was
instead
of a suicide note, designed to be found after he died by natural causes, but having just the same motives as a suicide note: to reveal the depth of his despair to his family and friends, to explain why he seemed outwardly such a grouchy unsociable bastard, and make them feel bad for not realising how wretched he had been. Maybe that’s why I started writing this journal; maybe that’s what it is, a testament. The Rectory Road Testament.