When Sonja was at work I lay in the gloom of winter days and imagined I could hear sounds — doors closing, radiators groaning, pages turning. Of course I couldn’t. Even when they pulled the packed gauze from my ears in two weeks’ time, I’d hear nothing. Only when the electrodes were buried in my head and the implants slipped under my skin would it be possible for me to hear. I thought about how once again I’d stopped talking and I did try to make conversation with Sonja but what did I have to say? My thoughts were constantly reflected back to me, back to my hearing. After a few days I touched the scars. The stitches were rough, scabbed, and the feel threw me across years, to Tommy’s.

For a week I lay in the living room, the skin on my skull closing as the tissue from my neck nestled deep in my ear canal, protected by antiseptic gauze. I read, I ate and slept. When I was awake I thought I could hear and I wondered what Sonja was doing. Was she still seeing the Blind Man? She had opportunity enough.

The last summer when I was Merboy I sat one early morning on the garden wall and watched my mother, her cheeks flushed, the armpits of her cotton dress stained, climb awkwardly backwards out of the car, pushing at bowls and suitcases. She brushed back her short black hair, damp with sweat. ‘Come on, John. Get in and then we can get going.’

I swished at pebbles with a long blade of grass, jaw aching as I chewed a sour quince apple. ‘Don’t want to go.’

‘Frankly, you don’t have a choice.’ My mother shaded her eyes against the glare of the July sun. ‘You’ve done nothing to help me, you haven’t carried one bloody box or bag out here. I’ve done it all, and now we’re ready to move, so let’s move, buddy.’

‘Don’t want to.’

‘I don’t care. Get in.’

I scowled and sat in the passenger seat. My mother put a washing-up bowl of flasks and sandwiches and boxes on my lap. I swivelled in the seat and tried to jam it on the back seat but it was already crammed with things.

‘You’ll have to hold that on your lap,’ my mother said, starting the engine.

‘What? All the way there?’

‘Yes. All the way there.’

A tantrum began to build in me as the car wound out of Noss Mayo and we headed into Plymouth to catch a ferry to Roskoff, my mother constantly stabbing at the choke button. Fury built inside me when I thought of spending four weeks — four weeks! — of the summer away from the river and beaches. I wanted to break something, run and scream, but there wasn’t enough room in the car to do anything except scowl.

It took the old Morris Minor four days to get down to Ispes, south of Bordeaux. Three days of setting up the tent every evening, rummaging in the boot for clothes and packets of dried soup. My mother had bought a second-hand two-room tent and it took the two of us hours to unfold the heavy canvas and sort out the poles. The tent always looked lop-sided, ungainly. It was an embarrassment — like a third-world shanty. Its sides were never taut and the guy ropes sagged so when it rained, as it did on the third night, water first seeped then flooded in. It was night when we arrived at the campsite in Ispes and a fine drizzle had set in. I got out of the car and sat on a log while my mother pulled at the heavy, wet tarpaulin in the dark. I think she must have realised that I was beyond childish tantrums or unreasonable behaviour because she came and sat on the log next to me and lit a cigarette.