Sound by Bella Bathurst

Author:Bella Bathurst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2018-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

8

Silence

FOR ALL THE TIME I’ve been writing I’ve kept notes in a series of small paper-bound books. They aren’t diaries, they’re just jottings about whatever it is I’m working on at the moment: thoughts or questions, bits of research, ideas, phone numbers. Most of the articles and all of the books I’ve written over the past two decades appear in some form or another, interspersed with more immediate to-do stuff. Because it’s mostly just a record of work it’s not exactly personal but if a subject engages me then it always makes it into the books. Each one is the same type – black, plain-lined. Some are sea-stained, some open to spatters of flapjack crumbs, and in all of them the handwriting varies all the way from meticulous to loopy. Every few pages my pen wanders off to the motion of a train or the spine cracks to a website address whose relevance I’ve long since forgotten. Writing longhand is an old-fashioned method of retaining information but the books are useful and I like them. Somehow or another they’ve become as much a record of my working life as the final printed results.

By 2004 I’d been losing my hearing for six years. I know by then I’d begun to observe the particular quirks of deafness – the difference in the effect of various instruments or the way it was perceived. So if I go back to the relevant books, I’m sure I’ll find some kind of written evidence.

Instead, in all of them, there is nothing. Not a note, not a conversation, not a cry. Total silence. According to me, I never went deaf. I did plenty of research, I recorded more and more information, I worked harder and harder and faster and faster, but not one single word of it had anything to do with the thing often uppermost in my mind.

I flick through the books from 1998 onwards and then I stick them back on the shelf. I know exactly why there’s nothing there.

By 2003, the fight-or-flight desire to party fast had begun to transmute into something slower and deeper. I fought the deafness – and myself – for as long as I could. Then I just got sad, and all the other nightmares came to stay. Audiologically speaking, life had settled into a rhythm. I used the digital hearing aids all the time, I got them serviced once in a while, and I got on with life. Or rather, I – and my hearing – continued down. Down with my demons. If I’d been able to get any kind of a sense of balance I might have been able to see that life was not the wuthering drama I’d written myself into. But I’d found a condition – or a condition had found me – which seemed perfectly customised to my vulnerabilities. Like everyone else, I didn’t want to be lonely or isolated or ridiculous or stupid or unprofessional or irrelevant. But as far as I was concerned deafness made me all of those things, and worse.

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