Deaf Sentence Read Online Free PDF

it’s not my field.
    I was at a party a few years ago, not as noisy as the one last night, but bad enough, and I overheard a man enthusing about a book he was reading called Being Deaf . It sounded like just the book for me, a self-help manual I presumed, but I didn’t like to barge into the conversation demanding the bibliographical details. The man was talking to a girl who was looking admiringly into his eyes and nodding eager agreement, and he left the party early (with the girl) before I had an opportunity to speak to him. So the next day I went to Waterstone’s to try and get the book. ‘What was the author’s name?’ the assistant asked. ‘I think it was Grace,’ I said. It turned out to be Crace, Jim Crace, and the book was a novel called Being Dead.
    Often only the context allows me to distinguish between ‘deaf’ and ‘death’ or ‘dead’, and sometimes the words seem interchangeable. Deafness is a kind of pre-death, a drawn-out introduction to the long silence into which we will all eventually lapse. ‘ To every man upon this earth, / Deaf cometh soon or late ,’ Macaulay might have written. But not Dylan Thomas, ‘ After the first deaf, there is no other .’ There are lots of others, stages of auricular decay, like a long staircase leading down into the grave.
    Down among the deaf men, down among the deaf men,
Down, down, down, down;
Down among the deaf men let him lie!

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    2 nd November . An odd thing happened this morning. I was sitting over the remains of my breakfast, in my dressing gown, reading the newspaper. It’s one of the few perks of retirement I really enjoy, the leisurely breakfast, the unhurried perusal of the Guardian over a third cup of tea . . . After that the day tends to drag rather. Fred was bustling in and out of the kitchen, fully dressed, getting ready to go out. She had an early manicure appointment before going to the shop. I had taken in that information because I was wearing my hearing aid. I really prefer not to at breakfast because it amplifies the noise of eating cornflakes and toast inside my head with an effect like dinosaurs crunching bones in Surroundsound, but I bear it, if we get up at the same time, for the sake of matrimonial harmony. Fred was making out a list of things for me to buy at the supermarket when the telephone rang. ‘Answer that, would you, darling?’ she said. She frequently addresses me as ‘darling’, though not necessarily with affection. In fact I don’t know anyone who can utter that term of endearment with so many different tones of hostile implication, including impatience, disapproval, pity, irony, incredulity, despair and boredom.This, though, was a faintly ingratiating ‘darling’.
    ‘You know it’s for you,’ I sighed, folding the newspaper and getting reluctantly to my feet. I was in the middle of a rather interesting if depressing article about the ageing populations of the developed world, who combine increased life expectancy due to advances in medicine with a diminishing capacity to enjoy it because of physical and mental deterioration. ‘Nobody phones me at this hour of the day,’ I said.Very few people phone me at any hour, actually, since I retired.
    ‘If it’s Jakki, tell her I’m busy. And remind her I’ll be late because I’m getting my nails done,’ Fred said, frowning over her list. Jakki is Fred’s business partner and one of the many things about her that irritate me is her propensity to make unnecessary phone calls. Another is the way she spells her name.
    I lifted the wall-mounted phone off its cradle and put it to my ear, immediately producing a howl of feedback. I always forget that ordinary phones produce that effect if you’re wearing a hearing aid, or else I forget I’m wearing a hearing aid when I pick up an ordinary phone. Which was the case this morning? I forget. I prised the earpiece out of my right ear and dropped it in my haste, exclaiming ‘Fuck!’ as it hit the