Deaf Sentence

by David Lodge

  All the theatres and big cinemas closed down in the course of the day but the Curzon Soho was open and I passed a couple of hours agreeably there watching an Argentine film, Bonbon el Perro, an engaging art-house comedy set in Patagonia, perfect escapist entertainment for the occasion, and subtitled to boot. I found an Italian trattoria in Dean Street defiantly open for business where I had a decent early supper, and walked back up Tottenham Court Road and along the Euston Road to King’s Cross, where a skeleton mainline service had resumed. I was leg-weary but curiously content. It had been a kind of unexpected holiday, a reprieve from the tedious duty of visiting Dad, but most of all I had enjoyed the unaccustomed urban quiet. Paradoxically, being deaf doesn’t make quietness any less attractive, but rather the reverse. Aural experience is made up of quiet, sounds and noise. Quiet is neutral, the stand-by state. Sounds are meaningful, they carry information or they give aesthetic pleasure. Noise is meaningless and ugly. Being deaf converts so much sound into noise that you would rather have quiet - hence the pleasure of walking those traffic-free streets. Terror had temporarily pedestrianised the whole of central London.

  Later, as the full horror of the bombings was reported - the terrific force of explosions in the packed, tunnel-trapped rush-hour trains, the darkness, the smoke, the screams, the panic, the severed limbs - my reaction seemed in retrospect frivolous and self-indulgent. For some months, like many others, I avoided using the Tube in London, taking expensive cabs instead; but after a while, again like many others, I returned to it. Irrational, really: the more time that passes without serious incident, the more likely it is that there will be another one, since the underlying causes, Islamist fanaticism, alienated British Muslims, the provocations of Palestine/Israel, Iraq, etc., remain. How can the Tube system ever be made secure? The suicide bomber will always get through. So you place your trust in the enormous odds against being in the wrong carriage of the wrong train at the wrong time. I read recently about a victim of the bomb on the Piccadilly Line train on the 7 th of July, who happened to be reading her own account, just published in a magazine, of how she had been raped and nearly murdered in July 2002, exactly three years earlier, when Germaine Lindsay, aka Abdullah Shaheed Jamal, blew himself to bits in the same carriage and scarred her for life. What are the odds against that happening, I wonder?

  I am late getting to Lime Avenue, but it doesn’t matter because Dad has forgotten I am coming. I have to bang the door-knocker for about five minutes before he opens it, keeping the door on the chain. He stares at me through the gap.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve come to see you, Dad. We arranged it last Sunday, on the phone.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he says quickly, trying to conceal his memory lapse. He shuts the door to remove the chain and opens it wide. ‘Well, come in, then,’ he says tetchily, as if I have been keeping him waiting. He looks more like a down-and-out than ever, his dirt-encrusted tubular tweed trousers drooping on one side where a button securing his braces has come off, and he hasn’t shaved. He leads me into the living room. There is an ominous heap of papers on the open flap of the bureau. ‘I’ve been looking for those savings certificates, but I can’t seem to find them.’

  ‘Well, I’m not surprised,’ I say. ‘Why don’t you use that filing system I gave you?’ More than a year ago I gave him a cardboard box file with divided compartments labelled ‘Bills’, ‘Bank’, ‘Savings Certificates’, etc., but it stands unused on the floor in a corner of the room, empty apart from a few fliers offering discounts on double glazing and garden furniture.

  ‘I couldn’t get on with it,’ he says, closing the flap of the bureau and sending a small avalanche of papers sliding into its interior, his preferred filing system. ‘Will you have a cup of coffee?’

  ‘I’ll make it myself.’

  ‘Yes, make it yourself, I don’t know how much to put in.’ He means how much of his instant coffee, an economy brand called ‘Instant Coffee’, best taken black with a little sugar. He follows me into the kitchen, which is in a dispiriting state of dirt and disorder. ‘Will you have a cup?’ I ask, searching for one that isn’t cracked or chipped or covered in grease.

  ‘No thanks, coffee goes right through me.’

  ‘The usual place for lunch?’

  He looks worried. ‘Well I’ve got a bit of cold scrag of lamb left from the weekend, but it’s not enough for two.’

  ‘No, do you want to go to Sainsbury’s for lunch?’ I say, raising my voice. His face lights up with relief, and he bares his false teeth in a smile. ‘Yeah, that would be nice.’

  ‘Well, go and have a shave and get changed.’ While he is upstairs I put on a very dirty floral apron that is hanging behind the door, and a pair of yellow rubber gloves, and try to clean up the kitchen a bit, beginning with a stack of soiled dishes on the draining board which I realise belatedly have already been washed up, but not so that you would notice.Then I tackle the work surfaces with a scrubbing brush and some cleaning fluid I find under the sink. I notice a new burn mark next to the stove. I don’t hear Dad coming down the stairs.

  ‘Have you seen my brown suede shoes, dear?’ he says from the kitchen doorway, behind my back. I turn round, startled by this mode of address, and see his expression change from enquiry to surprise and then disappointment. He is shaven and fully dressed apart from his feet, which are in thick woollen socks. ‘I thought you were Norma,’ he says. ‘In that apron. And the gloves.’

  ‘Sorry, Dad,’ I say. ‘I didn’t mean to . . .’

  ‘You haven’t seen her, have you?’

  ‘Mum?’ He nods. ‘Mum’s dead, Dad,’ I say gently. ‘She died thirteen years ago.’

  ‘Did she? Yes, of course she did. Course she did . . . But I hear her, you know, moving about upstairs when I’m down here. I hear the floorboards creaking. And when I’m upstairs I hear her in the kitchen, washing up.’ He doesn’t appear to regard these experiences as unusual or disturbing - on the contrary, they seem to have relieved his loneliness. I am moved as well as worried by his account.

  We take a minicab down to Sainsbury’s. We both have fish and chips with peas in the cafeteria, and when he has finished his pudding, apple pie and ice cream, and seems to be in a good mood, I float the idea of his moving into a residential care home somewhere near us. Immediately the corners of his mouth turn down and he shakes his head emphatically. ‘No, son. Thanks, but no thanks.’

  I take out of my pocket a brochure for the most attractive-looking of the homes I have contacted in the last week or so and show it to him, pointing out the pictures of bright, well-furnished bed-sitting rooms with en suite bathrooms, the comfortable lounge, and the dining room with separate tables. ‘You have your main meals cooked for you, but there’s a little hotplate and kettle in the room so you can make your own breakfast and snacks.’

  ‘How much is all that going to cost?’

  ‘Never mind that now,’ I say. ‘You could afford it, and if necessary, I’ll make up the difference.’

  He looks at the brochure as if trying and failing to imagine himself inhabiting the place it pictured. ‘No, son, it wouldn’t suit me. I like my own home. I know where everything is . . .’

  ‘You don’t, Dad,’ I say, rather unkindly. ‘You don’t know where your savings certificates are, or your suede shoes. You can’t find anything when you need it.’

  ‘That’s because I’ve got such a lot of gear. What would I do with all my things in a poky little place like that?’ He prods a picture of a bed-sitting room in the brochure.

  ‘Well, you’d have to get rid of most of them, obviously.’

  ‘You mean - chuck ’em away?’ he says indignantly.

  ‘Sell them, give them to charity, whatever you like. You could take a few bits of furniture that you’re attached to.’

  ‘Oh, thanks very much!’

  I pause for a moment, thinking that I am handling the conversation badly, getting drawn into trivial side issues and antagonising the old ma
n at the same time. ‘I’m worried about you, Dad,’ I say. ‘You might have an accident one day.’

  ‘What kind of accident?’ he demands.

  ‘You’ve had some accidents in the kitchen lately, haven’t you? Things burning, I mean.’ His sulky silence is a confession of guilt. ‘You’re not as fit as you used to be.You might fall down the stairs.’

  ‘How did you know about that?’ he says.

  I pounce: ‘You mean you have fallen down the stairs? When?’

  He looks away shiftily. ‘The other day. It was dark. I thought I was at the bottom, but there was one more step.’

  ‘That’s because you won’t keep the light on in the hall,’ I say. ‘It’s a false economy.’

  ‘I didn’t hurt myself, just a bit of a bruise on my hip.’

  ‘You could’ve hurt yourself badly. Suppose you’d broken your hip - you wouldn’t have been able to get to the phone.’

  ‘Are you trying to frighten me?’ he whimpers. ‘It’s as bad as watching Casualty, listening to you.’ He has an aversion to hospital soaps. I remember him saying once,‘The people who watch Casualty must want their flesh crept.’

  ‘I’m only trying to be realistic, Dad,’ I say. ‘You’re getting to the point where you can’t look after yourself safely any more. Now’s the time to move into sheltered accommodation, before it’s too late. All I ask is that you have a look at this place, when you come up to stay with us at Christmas.’

  He shook his head again. ‘Well, I’ll look, son, to please you. But I’m not moving anywhere. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself up north.’

  ‘It’s not that far north, Dad.’

  ‘It’s all the same to me. I can’t understand people in your shops when they speak to me. I don’t know the bus routes. I wouldn’t be able to go to Greenwich in the summer and watch the big ships on the river at high tide. And she wouldn’t come there.’ He pushes the brochure across the tabletop towards me. I don’t need to ask whom he meant by ‘she’.

  ‘All right, Dad,’ I say with a sigh. ‘We’ll drop the subject for now. But think about it.’

  When we get up to leave a middle-aged woman at a nearby table smiles at me sympathetically, and as we pass she says, ‘They can be very stubborn at that age, can’t they?’ I notice people at other tables looking at us with interest and amusement, and realise that Dad and I have been talking at the tops of our voices. Leaving the cafeteria feels like walking off a stage.

  30th November. I had my first lip-reading class today. The experience evoked dim memories of my first day at primary school, which I joined halfway through the school year because of illness: there was the same sense of being a new boy, uncertain and self-conscious, in a group that was already bonded and familiar with the routine. As Bethany Brooks had intimated in advance, most of the participants, about fifteen of them in all, have been coming regularly for years. They are mostly women, middle-aged or elderly. Bethany herself, known as ‘Beth’, is a buxom, motherly lady of about fifty, I would say, with fluffy white hair, and a round, rosy-cheeked face, who looks like a farmer’s wife in a child’s reading book. She introduced me to the group as ‘Desmond’, and they all smiled and nodded. Everyone is addressed by their first names. ‘Desmond is a retired teacher,’ she said. That was how I had described myself in our correspondence, not wishing to pull rank as a Professor of Linguistics. It was a wise move.

  We sit on stacking chairs in an arc around Beth, who faces us with a whiteboard at her side, and the apparatus of a portable loop system (the wire runs along the floor under the chairs and one has to be careful not to trip over it). All the participants - it seems somehow incongruous to call them students - wear hearing aids of various kinds, and some are very deaf indeed. When I tried the loop facility on mine I found it was much too loud, and managed perfectly well without it. Beth’s basic teaching method is to say something silently in lip-speech and if members of the class look puzzled, she writes the problematical words on the whiteboard. Then she repeats the statement with voice. Her own speech is extremely clear but with one or two slightly distorted vowel-sounds that one associates with the profoundly deaf. She told me in the tea break that she lost her hearing completely at the age of nine as the result of a virus infection. She also told me that thirty per cent of English is not lip-readable, a statistic which makes it all the more remarkable how well people like herself cope with their disability, but removed any illusions about lip-reading being a magic bullet for my condition.

  It was not only the sense of being a new boy that reminded me of primary school. Beth evidently tries to make the class interesting by enhancing the participants’ general knowledge and testing their wits, as well as improving their lip-reading skills. So she tells us little stories or relates interesting facts about some subject, which she presumably finds in newspapers or magazines or encyclopaedias, alternating lip-speech with voiced speech, sentence by sentence, and then sets us related exercises in a quiz format, which we have to complete in pairs, lip-speaking to each other. This week she began with a brief history of the origin of Thanksgiving Day in America, which was celebrated last week. Her own lip-speaking, as one would expect, is relatively easy to read. She forms the words with lips, teeth and tongue carefully and deliberately, but not artificially, and if you don’t get the sentence the first time, you have a second or third chance, because she repeats it three times to different segments of the arc of students. I have to admit that I learned some things about the Mayflower pilgrims that I hadn’t known before, or had forgotten, for instance that there were only 102 of them, and that forty-six died in the first winter, which wasn’t entirely surprising since they landed on the north-east coast of America on December 26th, 1620. I just stopped myself from putting up my hand and asking why they hadn’t started their colony in the summer, reflecting that Beth might be irritated at having her demonstration of lip-speaking interrupted by an irrelevant question, or embarrassed by not knowing the answer. In the first year the local Indians helped the Pilgrims with growing crops and hunting and ninety-one of them attended the harvest feast of 1621, which was the origin of the modern Thanksgiving. I didn’t know, or I had forgotten, about the friendly Indians. Later Beth handed round a typewritten quiz about the Pilgrim Fathers, which we had to complete in pairs, collaborating in lip-speech with the person we were sitting next to. In which century was the firstThanksgiving Day? In which year did the Pilgrim Fathers go to America? Where did they sail from? What was the name of their ship? And so on. I was paired with a nice but rather timid middle-aged lady called Marjorie who was quite content to let me suggest all the answers and confined herself to nodding agreement and writing them down on the form. Still, she seemed to be able to read my lips. Then Beth went round the circle asking individuals to tell the group in lip-speech the answers they had come up with. Some are better at it than others. Some, perhaps out of shyness, barely move their lips at all. But there was no difficulty in lip-reading them since you could guess what they were going to say. The same was true of a game we played, a kind of simplified ‘Twenty Questions’. Each person was given a card with the name of something round on it, say, an orange, and a list of questions to ask other people about their round objects: Is it big? Is it small? Is it soft? Is it heavy? Can I touch it? Can I eat it? etc. I created some consternation by asking a question not on the list, Is it manufactured? There was much hilarity when the resulting puzzlement was cleared up. The atmosphere of the class is very good-humoured and supportive. There is a lot of laughter, of a totally innocent kind. At the beginning of another little talk Beth wrote on the board, ‘An Enormous P -’, and nobody sniggered or even smiled.The subject turned out to be a giant pumpkin which someone had grown on their allotment.After the talk Beth handed out pictures of it taken from a magazine which we passed round from hand to hand. The analogy with the infants’ class seemed complete when each of us had to think of a nursery rhyme and recite it in lip-speech to the group. I started ‘Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross
/ To see a fine lady upon a fine horse,’ and then my mind went blank and I couldn’t remember how it went on. More hilarity, as they competed to remind me: ‘With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes / She shall have music wherever she goes.’ Of course! What a dunce I was. There were two things which were interesting about this exercise: one that the poetic rhythm helped to make people’s lip-speaking more decipherable, and secondly that even if you failed with the opening lines you would recognise the rhyme sooner or later, because it was familiar. The first point is not much use in ordinary conversation, and the second merely illustrates a general rule that the more predictable a message is, the easier it will be to receive it in an incomplete form.

  Fred quizzed me eagerly about the class when she got home that evening. I made her laugh with my description of the proceedings, especially my failure with the nursery rhyme, but she looked disappointed when I said I thought the exercises were of limited usefulness because they were loaded in favour of the addressee. ‘You are going on with it, though?’ she said. ‘Oh, I’ll carry on for a while,’ I said. ‘I’ll give it a chance.’ ‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’s the spirit, darling.’ The fact is that in a curious way I quite enjoyed being back in the infants’ class.

  1st December. Today was the day Alex had appointed for her ‘punishment’. I became increasingly nervous as the hour of three o’clock approached. I was alone in the house, and paced restlessly from room to room, glancing at the clocks in each of them. I had decided that the best response to her bizarre proposal was to ignore it, but now that seemed like a mistake. She had asked me to reply only if I wanted to change the day, so she might easily have interpreted my silence as agreement. I imagined her preparing the flat, closing the blinds in the living room, setting up the red table lamp in the corner, then stripping her lower limbs and bending over the table with her face resting on a cushion, waiting for my ring on the entryphone - no, I revised the scenario, she wouldn’t bend over the table until she had heard my ring and admitted me to the building, but she would be naked from the waist down, ready to take up her position at the table at once. So now she might be pacing anxiously like me, but half-naked, or sitting on the sofa with her bare knees together, like the adolescent nude in the Munch picture, waiting, wondering if I would come. Perhaps she would go to the window, prise the louvres of the blind apart, and peer down to see if I was coming along the towpath. How long would she wait after the hour of three before she realised I wasn’t coming, and got fully dressed again? How foolish would she feel? How angry? What would she do next?