I nod. The thought of being able to hear a passing lorry.

Dr Laws does smile then, not wolfishly, but it is a smile. Anyway, I think you’ll be pleased to know that the myringoplasty has been extremely successful. A fine bit of knifework, if I say so myself. Mr Player, you have two stout, impregnable eardrums, impervious to water.’

I swallow, shift in my chair. ‘Right.’

‘You can go home and throw away your ear plugs.’

‘Right.’

‘And then I suggest you get to a beach and go swimming. I warn you, though, it’ll be bastard freezing.’

To my embarrassment I burst into tears and Dr Laws hands me a box of tissues.

I slam the door of the removal van, leaving Hercules and Achilles to slug it out during the journey, and climb into the cab. Ian signs, ‘Ready?’ I look at the house for the last time. I nod and we pull away. Automatically I feel for my worrystone, feel the jagged edges of the broken pieces in my pocket.

Travelling the familiar roads down to Thurlestone I think of Sonja. She stayed away for the two days it took me to contact a solicitor, pack my belongings and arrange my leaving. Where did she stay? With the Blind Man, no doubt. I’ve decided to give her the house. My solicitor is baffled by this because, he says, it is Sonja who is the adulterer. I hadn’t thought of it that way, that she is a hussy, a Jezebel, as Ian would say. That I am a cuckold. Because it doesn’t feel that way. I tried to explain to the solicitor that it doesn’t, really, have anything to do with the Blind Man. That I was as much to blame because I became someone else. I was no longer the man Sonja married. I knew the solicitor was exasperated by my refusal to allocate blame.

Blame. Who is to blame for all this? Who is culpable? Just how far back should I go to lay my charges? To Dr Price, who couldn’t teach me logic? To Moira, who put her hand on my cock and shocked me into wakefulness of a sort? To the surgeons at Tommy’s who tried to mend my ears and instead left them destroyed? Or perhaps even to Mrs Bennet, who sat on a wall and made me feel safer than I was ever going to be? The most likely suspect for culpability is Dai Davies. The father who never came. But what, in the end, did he do that I’m not doing? He left his wife and I’m leaving mine.

The blame, of course, lies with the men who laid their own charges in the car park on Gloucester Road. I know it wasn’t Sonja who made me heartless, nor was it my mother or my father. It was those faceless strangers who made my heart break into the two bloody halves I worried about as I lay in my childhood bed, hugging Tub.