Tell me, how do you compensate for the loss of trust? For the essential loss of a mother? For the loss of some of your face and all of your hearing? For the loss twice over of a father who never visited? For the loss of conversation, of music?

Tell me: how much are these things worth?

Sonja has taught me many things - how to dance, how to cook, how to laugh, how to ask people to look at me when they speak. She taught me how to look in the mirror and not flinch, how to think of my father and not drink whisky; how to plant bulbs and tend European oleander. How to make love, how to forgive people for their impatience. She has fought for me in restaurants, in bars, over dinner tables. She even took me, one sharp autumnal day, to the local football club and talked to them as I stood by the car, twisted with embarrassment, shamed almost by my eternally silent world. But they took me on and they looked at me when I asked if they would, so I could watch their lips.

I sit here, on the settee where I fell asleep when I sliced my thumb, when Sonja asked me if we could buy the deli. I stroke the thin, white line of that scar and wonder what else she has taught me. She has taught me to love her, for it seems I am unable to love myself. She tells me over and over that I should be grateful that I have a memory of sound and speech, that it means I can speak, if not hear what I’m saying. She has tried to teach me to be grateful that I can master new words, that I can look at an unknown word and have a stab at it, read its meaning in a dictionary. Try to use it in a sentence. When Ian came to me in the hospital, biting into small, zesty kumquats, I asked him what his word for the week was. ‘Homeostasis,’ he said and I practised saying it until he nodded and smiled, his cheek bulging with fruit. I wasn’t sure what it meant but I could say it.

As I have said, Sonja is an optimistic synaesthete. But I am numbered among the pessimistic deaf. I find it hard, this life of watching people, of constantly asking them to look at me when they speak so that I can read their lips. I grow old, I grow tired. This is a common disposition among the deaf: it takes so much effort to hold conversations that eventually you forget to speak, forget to watch faces, lips.

‘You’re retreating,’ Sonja tells me.

Is that really so surprising? Outside this house people grab my arm or tap me on the shoulder all the time, trying to pull my attention towards them so I can watch their lips. Drivers shout unheard insults as I step off the pavement, the television flickers, the radio chatters, records spin on turntables, CDs slip silently away and none of it is for me. People laugh and smile as I frown. Planes and saws move across wood, mallets hammer without sound, helicopters move across the sky. But this house, this room, every room, is peaceful. I open the front door, leave that unheard bedlam behind and Sonja is waiting for me, smiling, ready to fill the void. Or so it used to be. The Blind Man can hear. He can listen, have conversations unpunctuated by silence. ‘You’re retreating.’