him first, as if a small glacier had shattered on his head, blinding his vision and making him stagger; then the cold enveloped him as if he had fallen through a hole in the Arctic ice, and he sucked it into his lungs and held it there, unable to expel it in the form of a cry for (it seemed) minutes; then, as the ability to breathe returned, he gasped, he yelled, he blasphemed, he hopped from one foot to another, he grabbed his towel and tried in vain to swaddle himself in its folds. Someone drew back the curtain inside the room, light flooded out across the deck, and Jakki’s grinning face appeared behind the glass. He begged her to open the door and, barely preserving his modesty with the towel, stumbled over the lintel into the living room.
‘My God!’ he said. ‘That was brutal.’
Jakki said something to him. Lionel, who had exchanged his towel for a bathrobe, and had a glass in one hand, held up the bottle of malt, which had a few amber inches left at the bottom, in the other, and said something which he assumed to be the offer of a drink. ‘No thanks, I’m off the booze today,’ he said. Winifred, who was reading a book, looked up and said something. ‘I’ll go and get my hearing aid,’ he said. He went to the bedroom to insert the hearing aid, and put on a shirt and a pair of trousers while he was about it. He was pleased that Winifred had been present when he declined the whisky. He felt no need of it: already his whole body was beginning to glow and tingle with radiant warmth.
He went back into the living room. Jakki said something. Lionel said something.Winifred said something. He looked blankly at them. ‘I think my batteries must have gone,’ he said. ‘Sorry, won’t be a moment.’ He went back to the bedroom. It was odd that both batteries had once again failed at the same time - perhaps he had bought a bad batch. He inserted new batteries in the hearing instruments and returned to the living room. Winifred said something. Lionel said something. Jakki said something. He still couldn’t hear them. A terrible dread gripped him. He was deaf. Really deaf. Profoundly deaf. The trauma of the mass of cold water suddenly drenching his overheated head must have had some catastrophic effect on the hair cells, or on the part of the cortex that was connected to them, cutting off all communication. He had a mental image of some part of his brain going dark, like a chamber or tunnel where suddenly all the lights go out, for ever. He saw his concern reflected in the anxious, enquiring faces of the others. Winifred said something which he was able to lip-read: ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘I’m deaf,’ he said. ‘I mean, really deaf. I can’t hear a thing any of you are saying. It must have been the douche.’ She said something else which he could lip-read: ‘I warned you.’
It was four hours before his fears were relieved, four hours of panic and anxiety such as he hoped never to have to live through again: fiddling frantically with his hearing aid, cleaning it, trying yet more batteries, all to no avail, unable to hear the advice and comments of his wife and friends unless they wrote them down or mouthed the simplest sentences. Jakki suggested that he should go to Gladeworld’s medical centre to which he responded caustically that he didn’t think they would have an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist in residence, and Jakki said she was only trying to help. Lionel rang the main reception desk and they said that the medical centre would be open in the morning but was only staffed by a nursing sister. They thought it would be difficult to get a doctor to see Desmond on NewYear’s Day and suggested the Accident & Emergency department of the hospital in a small industrial town some twenty miles away. Winifred said, or rather wrote, that she didn’t see the point but she would drive him there if he really thought it would do any good, and did so, in stony-faced silence, and drove around the empty streets for some time till she found the hospital, and sat with him for two and a half hours in a waiting room full of people injured or made ill by drugs and drink the night before who