It took a long time for me to decide to tip the photos out of the envelope and look at them. I’d never seen a picture of him before and I knew him immediately. He was tall and he was handsome. He did stare at the camera and not at my mother. I eased myself out of bed and limped to the mirror over the wash-basin in the corner. I looked at my father’s picture and then at my own reflection. My face was gaunt, the scars on my jaw livid; my hair cropped unevenly. My father had left me because he thought I might be damaged, blind or crippled. Well, now I was — deaf and damaged and limping. But — and this is what made me howl with rage — he didn’t meet Merboy. The Father never met brown, slippery, dangerous Merboy. And if he came now he would think he had always been right.

I sit on the window-seat in my bedroom looking out over the beach, my mouth moving as I sing my song just as I did that morning my mother forgot it was Christmas, thinking of the boy who looked in the mirror and lost something for ever. Ts that all there is?’ But the odd thing is I’ve never stopped waiting for the Father, waiting for him to appear in the corner of my hawk-like eyes. Even though I know that he isn’t who I’d thought he was, I still wait and watch. Forty-one years I’ve been waiting.

I go to the virulently orange, unfinished bathroom and draw a deep, boiling-hot bath — my mother, careless with her money, has left the water on. I slip the plugs into my ears — an action I perform without thought: in nearly thirty years I’ve never once forgotten — and sip the whisky, sluicing the water over my body. I think of Ellen, who showers every early evening, ‘washing the day away’, she calls it. I raise and lower my knees, making waves, hoping to wash away years.

There were two things I excelled at in school: football and woodwork. If we’d played basketball then, I’d have been on to a winner. What must it have been like for spectators? To watch a team of deaf children playing football — eyes flitting, fingers flying, grunting unheard by each other as they ran, hearts pumping. The woodwork classes were an oasis of calm in the middle of the week, on Wednesday afternoons, in the sweet-smelling, sunlit room off the art room. The smell came from the 3-in-l oil and the shavings of fresh pine. I loved to stand by the bench, looking out at the garden, a whetstone encased in a maple box clamped in front of me, sharpening chisels. Loved the feel of oil on the whetstone, the rhythm of the blade gliding over oil and stone, angled just so beneath my fingers, becoming sharp. I would plane pieces of wood to right-angled perfection, running my thumb along the edge until it was without flaw. The feel of a tenon slipping snug into a mortise to complete a joint calmed me, and the sight of the nubs of dove joints sitting proud, needing only planing, was deeply satisfying. Mr Tompkins, the woodwork teacher, would stop by my bench and touch my elbow, smiling in a way that made me know I was special, although he never called me that. No one at school called me Special and maybe that’s why I forgot to feel it.