Before he gave me this message he held out his hand for my pad of paper, just as the eye specialist had. I frowned, confused. He had his own paper. I looked at my mother and she smiled her twisted smile and nodded. I gave him the pad and then he gave me the message. I looked at it, puzzled. I waved my hands at my pad, itching to answer. Harry took the message back very gently from me and underlined the words Tell me. I looked again at my mother but her face was impassive. My arms flapped, beat the mattress. I already liked Harry - why was he teasing me? I wanted to cry as he began to write.

John, you have forgotten something which is fine because you’ve had a very rough time of it. You have had a terrible time so no one blames you for forgetting this one thing. It’s kind of like magic. We know you can’t hear. But, John —you can SPEAK

I read the message and looked at my mother, my mouth slack. Again she nodded. I could speak? It’s difficult to understand how it is that you forget that you know spoken language, that you can speak although you can’t hear. But I had forgotten. I had, after all, forgotten that I could write. I had also forgotten that I could speak; I had almost forgotten how to speak.

So — what do you like doing best? Tell me.

It felt as if the whole world was waiting as I lay there staring at the men surfing Big Wednesday. Many times I felt the word in my mouth, like a bolus of food, and then swallowed it. It lodged behind my teeth and I forced it back and swallowed it, a hard word at the beginning but the ending slipped down my throat. My lips were made of lead, my tongue of sponge. I had to spit it out, the world was waiting. I spoke, apparently soundlessly. I looked at my mother and for the second time in five months she smiled.

Can you say that again, John?

‘Swimming.’

* * *

Apparently the heart is a ‘hollow pear-shaped muscular organ placed between the lungs in the middle of the chest that pumps blood through the body, supplying cells with oxygen and nutrients’. So they say. ‘The apex pulses with every beat and this is what you feel when you hold your hand to your heart.’ Perhaps others do. I’m no longer sure what I feel. ‘The adult heart is approximately the size of a fist. In an average adult it is about five inches long and three and a half inches across at its broadest point.’ This is not the size of my fist but it may well be the size of my heart. It seems hardly adequate to shoulder the burdens it has been given during my life. Certainly not adequate for Shylock’s purposes, since the average adult heart weighs less than a pound.