I never made any friends in my four years at the school. I was a good student, a quiet student. I made no demands of anyone except that I could go home every weekend to be with my mother. I would lie on my bed in the dorm at night and think of my younger self, the young boy who would gather people around him by simply being. I wondered what happened to him — did he disappear when my eardrums did? Did he blow apart when the bomb blew? I could picture him, remember him falling into water, climbing trees, throwing stones at gulls circling above the beach, chasing dogs, his arms outstretched, yodelling. He’d had about him an aura of danger. I knew that I’d been him but was no longer. Many nights I’d lie there crying, mourning him, and no one could hear me. That is the one privilege of the deaf - there is privacy in the dark, when we are sightless. Often I wondered if all the boys were lying there crying, wailing even, and no one knew it.

I sit up late, drinking alone on the deck, watching a distant bonfire flicker on the beach and wondering what I’m going to do. As I drink I think of Sonja, wonder what she’s doing. Is she at home? Is she with the Blind Man? Just what did she think when she saw me thundering towards them? She dragged him into the deli, protected him against me. But can I blame her? I drink my way down the bottle and my last thought, before I stagger upstairs and fall fully dressed, starfish-style, on my bed, is that I’ve left my wife.

When I wake late the next morning I’m parched and I gulp water straight from the bathroom taps, then stand - head thundering — under a cold shower, wondering how my mother can bear to feel like this every day. It’s cold on the deck, when I go out there with my coffee. The snow hasn’t melted and I can see the black smear at the end of the beach where the bonfire burned. The beach is beautiful and I’d like to walk its length, smell the ozone, taste salt, but there’s something else I have to do. I climb the stairs and open the hatch to the attic.

I pull a sheet from the tall object leaning against the rafters and it slips away from Merboy’s surfboard — made of plywood, painted pale blue, scratched where it was dragged over pebbles. There are my old rubber fins and the water-skis my mother bought Merboy that last summer — an unused extravagance because then I had my thirteenth birthday. In a suitcase I find my old clothes: the Levi’s I wore the first night I went out in London, the T-shirt Hyacinth gave me, faded to grey and ivory by too many washes, thin as paper. A bundle of reports from the school at Exeter. Tub the Ted. The tennis racquet and bowling ball my mother bought me when she forgot Christmas. Both unused, because I thought they were dangerous, because I knew I couldn’t use them alone.