The ghost of Merboy stalks the attic, his wet, salty feet leaving prints on the boards, leading me to a decision, as the surfers fly through Big Wednesday and the Blind Man sits in my coffee and wheat house. My mother is watching over Ellen’s dying. Ian is packing up for the day, nursing a split lip, wondering what his deaf friend is thinking. His deaf friend is thinking it’s time to start answering the questions.

One early spring morning this year when Sonja and I were sitting on the deck over breakfast, wrapped in thick Norwegian sweaters, pretending it was warm, Sonja touched my arm and pointed to an article in the obituary pages. Dusty Springfield had died the day before. There was a black-and-white picture of her, with her blonde, towering hair and thick mascara, standing uneasily in a sleeveless dress in front of a television audience, looking hunted. I read the obit and realised how unhappy she had been and it made me sad. I wish she had known that all my life I had replayed the loop of her voice asking how she could be sure, whenever I thought of my mother dancing on a supreme summer’s night in 1966.

I’m not my mother’s son for nothing: I build a fire in the library in moments and it catches and flickers as I carry my mother’s journals through from the kitchen. Lying down on the rug where I fell asleep with the fragments of my boy’s voice rolling in my mouth, I begin to read my mother’s life at last.

A cochlear implant involves implanting ten to fourteen electrodes in the cochlea. It is an operation performed when the eardrums and ossicles have been damaged beyond repair. The implant leaves the patient with a limited range of frequencies: one hundred thousand frequencies are reduced to fourteen and so the sound, while purer, is disjointed. The human ear must corrupt sound in order for the brain to interpret Mozart’s Requiem or Pan-pipes echoing around the Andes because the ratio of decibels to KHz is that which is found not in nature but in science. The titanium implant, a steel button, is buried behind the ear in the skull bone and the bone eventually smothers it. It is possible to remove the sensitive tip, like a press stud, and then the patient may swim. Assuming that the myringoplasty has been successful. Assuming that the patient has the desire. Assuming that the patient has the courage.

Once I had left my mother to go to college, where I took Sonja’s warm hand in mine, I slipped away from her. My mother receded and became yet another ghost. I never knew why this happened. I didn’t love her less. Now I know that it happened because she launched me and let me go. As I lie in front of the fire, my hand loosening in the heat, I read the letter Harry wrote to my mother that Christmas, the letter that came with the compact — ‘you have given up your life for John’. So she did. I roll over on to my unfeeling back and remember the days, the months, the year my mother spent in Tommy’s watching my scars heal, willing me to live, willing me to care again. Eventually I cared. ‘You stayed … that’s why John will survive.’ And so I have, against all the odds. I turn back to the journals.