It took a long time for my mind to order itself. At night, or whenever I slept, unless I was snug and safe under the effects of drugs or anaesthetic, I called out, cried, yelled incoherently. I whimpered endlessly, a whimper which was to me ungovernable. I was always scared that I would wake to the pain. The pain was crushing, it crushed harder and deeper than the falls of mortar, more than the weight of the car. My back was a lattice of quilted skin, my arm a burnished pillow of flesh borrowed from my thigh, the pearly pink of conch shells. It was the pain that scared me, because I’d forgotten how it had arrived. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t work out what I’d done to deserve it.

And then the memories began to seep back as I stared at the wall. The memory of sound hit me one grey, endless afternoon as my mother sat behind me. I remembered the sound of Toulouse the cat squawking when I trod on him, remembered carrying a bottle of lemonade. I reached up and touched the healed scar on my scalp. That afternoon I laboured as I lay on my side, trying to remember where I had been going with the bottle. I knew it was important.

It was once I began to remember, began to think, to struggle with the past, that the pain started to recede — or perhaps it simply became the norm? That it is possible to be wrenched from one state of being to another in an instant, in an intense blast of grey bland Semtex the size of a matchbox, is too much for the thirteen-year-old mind to grasp. There is no language I can use to describe the turmoil, the confusion, of those months as I healed and grew and remembered sound. This confusion left me with many questions and that was why I finally turned and looked at my mother. She didn’t smile at me, for what was there to smile about? She just held my hand whilst I cried.

The next day her present was a red spiral pad with matching pencil. She had a blue set for herself. She put the pad on the bed, on my stomach, and eventually I picked it up, turning it in my hands, puzzled. I opened it gingerly, my burned arm tight and ungiving. I picked up the pencil and stared at it, an alien object. I had spent so long thinking of sound, mourning its absence, that I had forgotten I could write. I am ambidextrous, the only trick I inherited from my father (apart from being heartless, that is, but I didn’t know that then).

My mother knew better than to write the first note. It was me who had to take the first step back into the world of communication. My fingers felt furry, far away. I took minutes to write the wobbly, arthritic phrase, Why can’t I hear?