Pardon ... ?

I must warn you, I have never been normal. Nothing about me is average, typical, common or ordinary.

Fatty. Yawn. Rent-a-blimp. Ho-hum. Lard-ass. Too American. Jumbo. Habari. (Swahili humour for my African readers.) Eric, the world famous size. Goon Show — I like that. Tank, tab, tonnage, blob. Snore. More chins than a Chinese telephone directory. Milligan again, a favourite, though personally I prefer prodigious. It gives one a truer sense of grandeur than merely fat. After all, I am a fat man's fatty. Super-normal. The Incredible Bulk.

Now for the eyes.

Four-eyes. Groan. Pew. A bit literary. Helen Keller. Hardly, though I have been cursed with two framed marbles on the bridge of my nose since the age of four, the weight of which has left permanent dents in my proboscis and dragged my ears an inch further forward than they should be. Short-sighted? With glasses I become short-sighted. Without them I see the world as Monet painted it, which, for the most part, is no bad thing.

And the hooter? That isn't normal either. Beaky. Sigh. Not so much a nose, more a ski-jump. Hmm. It's Roman, roamin' all over your face. Yawn. But in this case size is a correlate of function. I can pick an unwashed body across a four-lane highway, sense an approaching storm from the smell of the seagulls and spot halitosis in nose-breathers. Evolutionary refinements akin to an anteater.

But you get the picture. I've had this banter all my life and I'm immune to it. It can't touch me any more. The antibodies to abuse course through my veins. Size, eyes, nose. Size, eyes, nose. Size, eyes, nose. Size, eyes, nose.

And now my hearing.

'It isn't normal,' Dr Wrangler said, leaning back in his reclining leather chair and eyeing me with something of a sympathetic sneer as I squirmed in the inadequacy of my flimsy plastic one. 'It seems okay to you because it's all you've ever known, but if you could swap it with a normal person you'd be amazed at the difference.'

Thanks Doc.

As he spoke he gestured to a little sheet of graph paper covered with dips and troughs that had been disgorged by a machine behind his desk. The dips and troughs corresponded to my reaction to various electronic squeals, beeps and belches that came through a set of headphones. Maybe a normal person would have hummed along to the tune, but to me it sounded like a two-year-old on a Hammond organ.

'Your hearing is like ... like a radio that isn't quite tuned to the right station,' he patronised, no doubt assuming that because I wasn't a private patient I was probably thick. 'The signal still gets through, but it's often a bit distorted.'

'So, are you saying that commercial radio really isn't bad at all, it's just my hearing that makes it sound like crap?'

Patronise that, fish-face.

'No, no, no, Mr Dombey, you misunderstand me. What I'm saying is that if you don't have your radio tuned properly, you're not going to get a very good reception, yes? Your hearing is like a badly tuned radio. You just don't get a very good reception compared to normal people.'

Aaaarrrggghhh, that phrase again!

'Do you have a big knob, Doctor?' I asked.

'Pardon?'

'A big knob? You know. To tune me in. Like a normal person.'

'Ah, well Mr Dombey, it's not quite that simple ...'

'I suppose what I'm asking Doctor, is canpooh fuckshit?'

'I'm sorry?'

'Canpooh fuckshit?'

He chuckled nervously and squeaked his chair upright. 'I'm sorry, I still didn't catch that.'

'I said CAN YOU FIX IT?'

'Oh, your hearing? Well now, some of my colleagues might demur but my own feeling is that this problem is the product of recessive genes. Either parent suffer with it?'

'I don't know, they're both dead.' You can't get more recessive than that.

'Pity, pity. They might have been able to throw some light on familial genotypes in relation to the ...' He wittered on for some time, completely avoiding my question and leaving me wondering just who had the hearing problem. Nevertheless I pressed home my enquiry with my usual ruthless intensity.

'Excuse me, Doctor, but all I want to know is damn many pling dee-dum?'

He stopped in mid-witter, gave another nervous chuckle and inclined his head in my direction. 'Pardon?'

'Can anything be done?'

'Ah, now that's debatable. There is some, though not marked, hearing impairment that may or may not increase in years to come. Such a decline might occur in the space of two or three or ten or twenty years. Or not at all. We'll just have to keep an eye on that ...'

(He didn't know.)

'... and as for the tinnitus, there is a possibility that the amplitude and frequency of the intra-cranial sonancies may undergo a volumetric increment, but there's a similar and roughly equal possibility of no such variance occurring ...'

(He really didn't know.)

'... But you could do with losing a little weight.'

'I'm sorry, Doctor,' I said, 'but I fail to see the relationship between my personal volumetric displacement and a propensity to intra-cranial sonants, surds or even sibilance. Indeed, to any debilitation of the auditory response system whatsoever.'

(I could have been a doctor, but my handwriting's too neat.)

He looked at me vaguely as though I'd interrupted his train of thought, went to speak, glanced down at the form in front of him, picked up his pen and gave no other indication whatsoever that I'd spoken at all. I was starting to wonder if my voice was going too.

'Occupation?'

I cleared my throat. 'Zumbooruk salesman.'

He ticked a box and turned the page.

The reason I was sitting on that flimsy plastic chair in that cadaverous khaki office tucked away in a forgotten byway of the Donnington Public Hospital went back to a ringing that had started in my ears some fifteen months before. It began quite suddenly as I was slouched over a book in the public library. (They, too, are cursed with flimsy plastic furniture.) My head crackled briefly — like Wrangler's radio tuning itself to a new frequency — and the ringing began.

At first I put it down to my unnatural position and the awkward seating, then to my reading material, so after a few minutes I stretched and went for a walk around the open stack.

One is a little inhibited from smacking oneself about the head with cupped hands or attempting violent neck-twisting manoeuvres in the fiction section, (authors G—M), but these things I tried when I returned home to Barchester Towers. To no avail. The ringing continued, and does so to this day.

By ringing I don't mean the frenetic tintinnabulation of some hunchback in a carillon. It's far more electronic. In fact, I liken it to Pid's printer. My brother has a vast amount of expensive computer equipment, the sole purpose of which is to impress visitors to his vastly tacky office on the fourteenth floor of Bleke House. (The fourteenth floor, incidentally, is really the thirteenth. In the age of nuclear fission, microchips and intra-cranial sonancies there is still room for soothsayers, necromancers and the superstitious.) When the printer runs out of paper it imitates a child; that is, it makes a continuous high-pitched noise until it receives attention. Just such a noise, of similar pitch but mercifully lower volume, now inhabits my cranium.

I was prepared to explain all this to the offhand oaf behind the desk, but he seemed more interested in ticking off boxes on the back of his form.

'Have you ever had dysuria, dyspepsia, cholic, cholera, dropsy, arthritis, bronchitis, colitis, dermatitis, enteritis, gastritis, hepatitis, fistula, macula, dracula, anthrax, rhinderpest, budapest, haemorrhoids, rhomboids, heart trouble, fart trouble, scabies, rabies, babies, diphtheria or death?'

'No.'

It had taken over a year even to get to his office. One of the many clever devices incorporated into the public health system is the self-reducing waiting list. To see a busy specialist like Wrangler you must book a year in advance. This is because he has a flourishing and extensive practice down the road where he charges vast sums of money for seeing private patients. Patients like the Minister of Health. One morning a week he goes slumming at the public hospital to see people with real diseases, where, naturally, there's a waiting list the size of a planet. In between the time of making an appointment and getting seen by a specialist, many poor souls simply don't last the distance, so, to save the good doctor's time, everybody is double-booked on the basis that only fifty percent will live long enough to make it.

'Are you exposed to any loud noises at work?'

'Isn't that a rather moot question?' I asked.

'How so?'

'Well it's relative, isn't it? A moderate to middling sound to one such as I might prove deafening to a normal person. One that I would regard as loud would probably liquefy your brain cells.'

'Mr Dombey, you are not deaf. Your graph shows some ... er ... abnormality in tonal distribution, but I repeat, you are not deaf!'

'Pardon?'

He began turning a rather disturbing shade of purple and was about to reply when the phone rang. He went to speak in the gap but it rang again, one of those piercingly incisive electronic chirrups.

'Excuse me,' he mouthed and swung round to answer it since the phone was conveniently bolted to the wall a metre behind the desk. The hospital obviously knew who they were dealing with; anything of value was firmly screwed down and even the pens were on chains. Wrangler, of course, used his Mont Blanc.

One can always tell when a doctor has a private practice. Apart from a propensity to dress like a merchant banker and flash around a gold-nibbed fountain pen, he handles public patients as though he's left his rubber gloves behind and his temporary surgery shows a total absence of normal human clutter. No photos of the wife and kids, no diaries, doodles or dog-eared periodicals with titles like Diarrhoea Digest and Sputum and Gland. No spent paper-clips, frilly curtains, reference books, charts of the human body or nasty plastic giveaways from pharmaceutical companies. Just a desk, a swivel chair, a pristine blotter, a box of files and an elderly intercom, also firmly screwed down.

While he talked in a voice so low I began to believe his diagnosis, I leaned forward to try and read the notes he'd been making. Useless. Medicine is one of the few professions where you fail your final exams if anyone can read your answers. The best I could manage was a word that looked like 'smartarse'.

l twiddled my thumbs, looked out the window — which opened on to a minute courtyard and a stunning view of a badly painted wall — then caught sight of the two grey wires running up the front of the desk into the intercom.

I looked at the intercom more closely. It was a monster, positively antediluvian, probably invented before anyone discovered that you could get better sound quality from two tin cans and a piece of string. It was an old slave/master type, with master Wrangler controlling everything while his aptly named slave had to put up with whatever volume and tone the good doctor chose. I reached into my duffel bag, found my pocket knife and neatly snipped one of the wires.

Wrangler turned back from his phone call and resumed scribbling on my card. No wonder his blotter was spotless, I thought.

'Now where were we? No loud noises in the workplace. That correct? Good. We'll keep an eye out for any deterioration Mr Dombey, so I'd like to see you in six months' time.'

'What? Six months?' I said. 'My God, you should have warned me. It took me nine months to get in here so I should have booked that ages ago.'

The purple made a faint resurgence. 'One doesn't have to be exact in these matters, Mr Dombey.'

'I hope your hearing-measurement-thingy doesn't take that attitude.'

Heliotrope. The man was a positive chameleon.

'Just make an appointment with the nurse on the way out,' he said, making a few more notes and underlining the word that looked like 'smartarse'.

I returned to the brimming, silent waiting room and managed to beat a severe-looking woman to a place in the queue in front of the receptionist's desk. The frazzled nurse was dealing with new appointments and double-bookings while staving off requests from an increasingly intrusive intercom.

'What was that?' it was booming, despite her attempts to muffle it. 'Say that again, I can hardly hear you Melissa ... Pardon ...? Look don't play around darling, my bloody wife's popping in shortly and I don't want the old harridan suspecting us ...'

I took the card for my next appointment and brushed past the severe-looking woman, who approached the counter at a measured pace and announced in a voice tinged with iron, 'Tell my husband the harridan is here.'