‘Right.’

She smiled and patted the bed. I stood up and gingerly lay down next to her. We lay on our backs, staring at the ceiling, as I stroked her hand, and if there are qualities to silence (and I believe there are and I should know), the quality of that silence was precious. After a while I looked at Ellen and she was asleep. I kissed her cheek and rolled gently off the bed, leaving her behind.

Today Ian, my mother and I went back to the ENT clinic at Derriford so the electrodes could be tuned in. I was taken into a small, dim room, where an unfamiliar doctor was waiting for me, keying words into a computer. My hands wouldn’t stop sweating and I had damp patches on my jeans where I kept rubbing them dry. He looked up, smiled distractedly and waved for me to sit down, then told me to expect hisses and screeching sounds. He told me to expect sounds. The doctor turned various knobs on a console and my head filled with noise. As I wondered at the beauty of a hiss, it faded, to be replaced by well-known silence. Still the doctor adjusted frequencies and the hiss reappeared, followed by feedback. Then silence. He looked up from his machine, his face lit by a blue glow and he said, ‘Can you hear me?’

And I looked at him, unable for a moment to speak. Then

I said, ‘Yes,’ and I stood up and hugged the man; I think I hugged him so hard he thought he was going to break. When it was done, when he’d identified the best frequencies and refined the sounds I heard, I walked back out to the waiting area and there was Ian. I sauntered over, hands in pocket, trying not to smile.

Ian stood up, his face grave as ever. ‘Well?’

A door slammed behind me and I heard my mother call, ‘John?’ The first time since I was thirteen that I’d heard my mother’s voice, and I turned round to face her.

The day my mother’s deck is finished — a plain, Shaker-style affair of clean lines and simple, straightforward angles — Ian and I scrub ourselves clean, dress in red and white shirts and bully my mother, who is merely squiffy rather than plastered, into coming with us to the hotel in the village. The three of us walk down the lane, my mother between Ian and me, a munchkin among giants. The hotel bar is heaving, hot with thundery air, cigarette smoke floating in fields. The screen at the end of the bar is huge and Ian and I stand at the back, lifting my mother to perch on a window-ledge so she can see over the crowd.

In 1966, when I was eight years old, my mother and I watched England beat Germany on a small, black-and-white television in a flat in Earl’s Court. They thought it was all over then and it turned out that it was because we haven’t beaten them since. Thirty-four years later Alan Shearer stoops in front of a goal line and heads the ball into the net. The crowd in the bar leaps up and roars its approval as the floor shudders. People wave scarves, jump up and down, hug each other. Even my mother is on her feet, clapping and yelling. Passing drivers hoot their horns and the singing begins. For first time in thirty-four years I’m listening to the sounds of celebration again.