Silence
FOR ALL THE TIME I’ve been writing I’ve kept notes in a series of small paper-bound books. They aren’t diaries, they’re just jottings about whatever it is I’m working on at the moment: thoughts or questions, bits of research, ideas, phone numbers. Most of the articles and all of the books I’ve written over the past two decades appear in some form or another, interspersed with more immediate to-do stuff. Because it’s mostly just a record of work it’s not exactly personal but if a subject engages me then it always makes it into the books. Each one is the same type – black, plain-lined. Some are sea-stained, some open to spatters of flapjack crumbs, and in all of them the handwriting varies all the way from meticulous to loopy. Every few pages my pen wanders off to the motion of a train or the spine cracks to a website address whose relevance I’ve long since forgotten. Writing longhand is an old-fashioned method of retaining information but the books are useful and I like them. Somehow or another they’ve become as much a record of my working life as the final printed results.
By 2004 I’d been losing my hearing for six years. I know by then I’d begun to observe the particular quirks of deafness – the difference in the effect of various instruments or the way it was perceived. So if I go back to the relevant books, I’m sure I’ll find some kind of written evidence.
Instead, in all of them, there is nothing. Not a note, not a conversation, not a cry. Total silence. According to me, I never went deaf. I did plenty of research, I recorded more and more information, I worked harder and harder and faster and faster, but not one single word of it had anything to do with the thing often uppermost in my mind.
I flick through the books from 1998 onwards and then I stick them back on the shelf. I know exactly why there’s nothing there.
By 2003, the fight-or-flight desire to party fast had begun to transmute into something slower and deeper. I fought the deafness – and myself – for as long as I could. Then I just got sad, and all the other nightmares came to stay. Audio-logically speaking, life had settled into a rhythm. I used the digital hearing aids all the time, I got them serviced once in a while, and I got on with life. Or rather, I – and my hearing – continued down. Down with my demons. If I’d been able to get any kind of a sense of balance I might have been able to see that life was not the wuthering drama I’d written myself into. But I’d found a condition – or a condition had found me – which seemed perfectly customised to my vulnerabilities. Like everyone else, I didn’t want to be lonely or isolated or ridiculous or stupid or unprofessional or irrelevant. But as far as I was concerned deafness made me all of those things, and worse.
Somewhere underneath everything was a bigger truth. Deafness was neither good nor bad. It was completely neutral. It was just itself. What was good or bad was the way I took it, and I took it hard. Deafness acted on me like strong liquor, drawing out deeper hurts and older issues. What had begun as a kind of medical novelty spun down into a darker drive downwards, a bitter fuck-you attempt to rid me of myself.
Through most of this period I was still writing. One book in particular – The Wreckers – required a lot of interviews with people all over the country. So I’d trot off with my digital recorder to the Scilly Isles or Cromer or Lerwick and talk to ex-lifeboatmen or coastguards or Receivers of Wreck. I remember a trip to the isle of Barra in the Outer Hebrides in November or February or one of those months with too much weather and not enough light. I’d set up a few interviews beforehand but I also went round the island making connections and persuading people to talk to me. Most were reluctant. I stood in pubs buying drinks for men who already had the word ‘No’ written all over them, or hunched on dripping doorsteps watching the blinds move aside, pause, and then swing emphatically back into place. Between searches I walked the Atlantic beach while the whirling sand smacked the skin off my face. Back at the deserted B&B in the evenings I thought, I would go home, if there was anything to go home to.
In films and books and newspapers, the world pivots on moments of action – the crash, the diagnosis, the unmasking – but in real life, that’s not how it happens. Sometimes it’s not the shock of the fight that does the damage, it’s the accumulated silence in the time beforehand. Darkness works slowly.
It was the shame, that was the weight that lay over me. By then it seemed large enough to be a solid thing with a proper existence independent of me. When I woke up in the morning I could see it there at the side of my vision, and when I lay down to sleep I could feel the iron of it at the back of my breath. The shame blocked my throat. Every time I started to speak it stopped up the air. What could I say? What was there to say? And how could I convert something which seemed so much worse than words into something made out of ordinary English?
If you’d asked me at the time I would have said I was fine, absolutely fine. Really. Really fine. Honestly. Definitely. And if you’d pressed me I would have said that we’d done that topic now, so how about we move on and talk about you?
‘What do you remember of me from that time?’ I asked an old friend recently.
‘Hostility,’ he said. ‘You were scary.’
‘Scary?’ I said, shocked.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Closed off. If I asked you about how you were doing you’d just sidestep it, so our conversations felt completely one-sided. I talked about what was going on for me, but you never gave out more than just what you thought we wanted to hear. All of us could see that you were going through something, some kind of process or battle, but you’d never let us in. It sounds awful, but sometimes you were so far away it was just easier not to see you.’
The lower I got, the harder I worked. In just over a decade, I wrote six books. I taught myself photography, botany and the rudiments of marine engineering. I wrote countless articles, I sat in late-night libraries making notes for stillborn novels. I drove and I drove. I drove harder. I drove round and round the British Isles like someone chasing the laws of perpetual motion. And when I wasn’t driving or typing or cycling or walking the dog in the park, I ran. I kept on running. A moving target is harder to hit. I wrote and wrote, phoned and typed and questioned and noted. I asked questions, I kept on asking questions, I asked and asked, but I never answered any questions myself. I wrote words by the thousand. I sat in a room typing, I typed and typed, I wore out whole keyboards in the pursuit of connection. Every minute of every day I was out there pinging away like Asdic. I saw friends and family as I always did, I ate and drank and slept and woke and laughed and loved and cried and did all the things that were supposed to prove me as a fully operational human being, but all the time it felt like someone – or something – had reached into my heart and, atom by atom, was drawing it out to its death.
It sounds daft and slightly melodramatic to say this now, but I know that for seven years or more there wasn’t a single day when I didn’t think about dying, and not many minutes in those days when I wasn’t searching for the shape of it. I knew absolutely that I wasn’t going to take my own life, but I did often think longingly of more passive exits. I also made the discovery that there’s more than one way to kill yourself. There’s the active way, where you go out to seek death. You make the plans, you hoard the pills, you buy the rope. Or there’s the passive way, where you just stand there on the threshold holding the door open, hoping – dreading – that death itself will take the first step towards you. I didn’t actively want to die, but then nor did I actively want to live.
It makes me feel sad now, writing this. It was horrible. Or rather, it was frustrating being deaf, but it was horrible, really horrible, using the deafness as a judgement against myself. Why call a friend? You’re just hard work. Why keep writing? You’re just making it up. Why try and be loved? You can’t even be useful. Why live? Nobody needs you. Why die? Nobody’s there.
That shame was having an impact on other things as well. By late 1998 I’d split up with Euan. Over the next twelve years I went out with three men, though I can’t claim that any of those relationships was very healthy. That wasn’t the fault of the men concerned, it was just the inevitable consequence of my own anger and sadness. All of them were tolerant, generous and happy to adapt in whatever way it took. It was me who was convinced that hearing loss rendered me unfit for human consumption. If they asked me about the deafness, I’d be defensive. If they didn’t, I’d be annoyed. On a bad day, they’d have to repeat everything they said at least five times. On a good day I’d just be knackered. Our social life together was often weird. Pubs were out of the question and parties were tricky. Dinners round at friends could be uncomfortable and at home we couldn’t talk in the kitchen whilst doing anything kitchenish like cooking. If required to deal with two or more sounds – a phone conversation at the same time as frying something – I’d have to stop one and concentrate entirely on the other. It seemed I’d lost the capacity to multitask.
During the day I’d have the hearing aids in but at night I’d take them out and lay them on the bedside table. I’d be lying on my side just dropping off to sleep and through the thrum of his chest, I’d feel more than hear that my boyfriend had said something. Every time it would require a tiny calibration, a thought-out process over the potential of each statement. Did I sit up, put the aids back in and ask him to repeat? Or did I hope it was something requiring no acknowledgement? At night, things seemed so much starker than during the day. There were the things that could be said unspoken or there was a series of scheduled monologues conducted under the ochre glow of the street lights. ‘If I’m being honest,’ said Simon later, ‘that really shocked me. I didn’t really take in how deaf you were until I saw what it was like at night. When you took the aids out, there was nothing. You couldn’t hear anything, and if you were facing the other way or couldn’t feel me talking, then I might as well not have spoken. When I met you I knew you were deaf but the hearing aids gave the impression you were doing OK, so the difference was that much bigger.’
It was also unfortunate that things were at their worst at the moment when everyone else I knew was getting married and having children. I wanted the same thing, no question. I wanted to fall in love, have mad intemperate sex, stop having mad intemperate sex, start squabbling over door handles and savings rates, get lost, get found, say everything, say nothing. I wanted to know someone when they were scared or grieving or behaving badly. I wanted to go through crises with them, to love and fall out of love, forgive and be forgiven. I wanted to crack myself open, forgive my prejudices and run out of things to talk about in the car. I wanted the accumulated knowledge of years and days, I wanted to know someone other than myself that close. I wanted to stop being so selfish. Instead of this time-free, age-free, change-free rotation of years, I wanted the chronology of trimesters and half-term panics over childcare. I wanted to complain about being kicked from the inside, to go through the big messy adventure of kids and to take my place as part of the human succession. I wanted to be part of a family, my own family. I wanted the sort of knowledge that meant something.
But instead of knowing all that, I knew all the wrong things. I knew what Robert Louis Stevenson was doing in the summer of 1874 and how to take photographs using processes a hundred years out of date. I knew how to spoof a GPS set and the difference between flotsam, jetsam, ligan and wreck. I knew the correct procedure for dealing with Royal Fish and how to build my own bicycle. By the time I reached the other side of my thirties, I also knew the rust in my own voice when I hadn’t spoken to another human being for three days or the feeling I got when I looked at the books I’d written and saw only a waste of paper. I knew hope, rotted. And the lower I got the more the probability of connection receded, and the more it receded, the more ashamed I got, and the more ashamed I got, the more I remained alone.
For a long time it didn’t occur to me to ask for help because when you most need it, you’re least able to ask for it. Sometimes when friends discuss what’s really bothering them, they apologise: ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t go on like this, I don’t know why I’m talking about myself.’ But I did the exact same thing: talk about anything, anything at all, except the thing which is killing you.
Eventually it came down to a simple, binary choice. Change, or die. That choice didn’t appear in some single cataclysmic event: no gunshots, no ODs, no sudden technical malfunctions. There was no moment of revelation, only the advancing knowledge that death had now metastasised to fill the whole of life.
But I had no real idea of what to do or where to look for help. I was deaf and I was sad, but what was I supposed to do with that? There was nobody out there to talk to about hearing loss because hearing loss was a joke. I couldn’t confide in my friends because they were all knee deep in teething crises and plastic toys. I didn’t need pills because I wasn’t ill. And, I reasoned, there was no point in going to a therapist because I wasn’t depressed, I just kept thinking about death.
And, because I’m here now to look back on it, I must have got out. I did get out. How I did so doesn’t really matter – for everyone who doesn’t die, the journey is totally different and exactly the same – though there were certainly a few tragicomic moments. I rang the Samaritans, but they spoke so quietly I couldn’t hear them. I looked for some kind of gathering, some fantasy 12-Step group for people who weren’t actually addicted to anything. I went to an AA meeting just for the fun of it. What I wanted was a group, a structure, peers – someone who could say, yes, I know who you are, and I know what you’re coming from.
And finally, one Friday night, I turned up at the local mental health unit’s inpatient department. I sat in the waiting room while the receptionist fetched someone from upstairs. One of the senior ward nurses came down and looked at me from the other side of the room. Then she came and sat down beside me.
Um, please, I said, I’m really sorry to bother you, but can you admit me?
‘No,’ she said.
Oh, I said. OK. Can you section me?
‘No,’ she said.
Please? I said.
‘You do understand,’ she said, ‘what a Sectioning Order is, don’t you? It’s a legal document, and it’s only used with someone who presents a risk to themselves or others and who won’t consent to assessment or treatment. It needs several separate signatures, so it takes time to arrange. Which therefore means we definitely can’t use it for someone who turns up at the door at ten p.m. on a Friday night and begs to be admitted.’
OK, I said, I totally take your point, but could you section me anyway?
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But no.’
Please, I said. Not even if I act unwilling?
‘No,’ she said, and smiled regretfully. ‘Come back Monday.’