I climb the stairs to my bedroom, the room I came back to from the hospital. An unknown, unloved room, with a bespoke seven-foot bed in the corner. I sit on the window-seat and look out over the sea. By the moon’s light I can see the snow on the hills, can see that it’s settled on the beach, covering sand. I reach for my worrystone.

What am I going to do?

* * *

My father never came. I stayed at the school, learning about pitch and stress, labial, velar and fricative production of sound, about reading the non-verbal indicators of others. I stayed at the school and grew, each year an inch taller until I was six feet seven and a giant among boys. I had physiotherapy to strengthen my legs and to ease the skin on my hand, arm and back. Learned to hold a pen and write quickly and legibly, learned about language, about discourse, grammar and lexis, for the deaf must know all about what they cannot hear so they may guess correctly. I learned new words, tried to say them, tried to write them, use them. (I didn’t know then that I would one day marry a woman for whom the word ‘rapture’ would bring to mind an arching portico, the word ‘miasma’ the sound of sorrow. Perhaps it was a good thing, that ignorance?) And all the time while I was doing these things I waited and I watched for my father.

When I first came out of the hospital and came here to this bedroom, I slept for days. My mother and I had our strange, empty Christmas and then I fell asleep again. When I woke up there was the letter by my bed, a handwritten letter from my mother. I’d asked her to tell me about my father and she did. I lay in my bed and read the letter again and again. (There was so much I didn’t understand — and how could I? I hadn’t loved anyone the way my mother loved my father. I hope I never do.) I read it once more. Like my mother said, I didn’t want to read about how she dressed, what she wore — I wanted to know about the Father. I was fourteen and I was lonely; I wanted my father, or rather I wanted the person I imagined he might be, to walk in and make me forget, make me whole. But as I lay there in that bed, having woken from a long sleep, I realised that he didn’t exist, that the saviour I’d had in my mind didn’t exist. Instead there was this strange, untidy, vain man. A man who had left me because my mother’s blood had prepared its weapons. I didn’t understand it - why had he left my mother? Because she worked too hard? Because she didn’t look nice? Was that all? My mother kept saying that they’d had fun - so why did he go? Because of me? Because I wasn’t special? I lay for hours, the letter in my hand, trying to comprehend naïveté, charm and vanity. If the man I’d been waiting for didn’t exist and if the woman my father married didn’t really exist either, then what was I?