‘John, do you remember when you were, urn, a young boy and they tried to make you some eardrums?’

I blink and swallow because the question conjures up the picture of a pale, thin boy on a hospital bed, crying for days as the infected tissue itself wept, oozing pus out of his ear canals. I nod, unable to speak.

‘Well, that was a long time ago and things have changed, methods have changed. The surgery has improved beyond measure. I looked at your file while I was waiting for you, and I think you should consider having cochlear implants. Before we do that we’d have to attempt myringoplasty again. It’s essentially the same idea - making you new eardrums from the soft tissue of your neck. And then when that’s healed, we’ll try the implants.’ He must see the fear in my eyes. ‘John, I wouldn’t recommend this unless I believed it would work. I’ve known you, what, fifteen years? I know what scares you. It’s something of a miracle that you have survived at all.’ He sighs and shakes his head a little. ‘But the thing is, John, the thing is, I know you’re remembering the last time — when it went wrong.’ His eyes scan my face and I nod again. ‘When they operated on you then, your body was young, it was badly damaged, you were fighting Lord knows how many infections. I’m not saying they shouldn’t have done it, but…’ He arches his eyebrows slightly. ‘Anyway, what’s done is done. You’re now a forty-year-old man, and a rather imposing one at that. Your scar tissue healed decades ago. You’re fitter now than you have ever been. You’re a big man, John, a strong man. It will be different this time. Hand on heart.’

‘Will I hear again?’ My hands are gripping the arms of the chair, fingers deeply denting the padded leather.

Dr Laws pulls a sheet from the folder that details my sad aural history and holds it out so that we can both see it. It’s a graph I’ve looked at many times, mapping the sounds I can hear. On one side is the graph showing what I hear when I wear the headphones over my ears and the lines for both left and right are flat, following the horizontal axis. Nothing. I hear nothing. Next to it is another graph, the same as the first, mapping what I hear when the sounds are transmitted through my skull, bypassing my pointless, drumless ears. Dr Laws taps the lines with a pen. ‘Look, you can hear about thirty with your left and thirty-five with your right. The residual hearing left after the German measles damaged you when you were a foetus’ Jesus Christ, I think, I was under attack before I was even born. I look back at his ascetic, careworn face. ‘There is a possibility — a possibility — that if these operations, the myringoplasty and the implants, are a success you will be able to use the aural faculties you possess. You may hear this much.’ And he taps the graph with the pen. ‘Not only that, you would stop getting these infections.’