Less Than Perfect Read Online Free PDF Page B

whatever conversation or social event was happening. I felt deeply grateful for this.
    Josh’s speech challenged me and I often struggled to understand him. His voice was nasal and his consonants were clearer than his vowels, particularly the consonants you say with your lips, like ‘m’ and ‘b’. Invariably, he would lose the last sound in a word, as it was harder for him to hear that far. Though he practised and practised saying my name, it never sounded right.
    I discovered that he wasn’t deaf to music, as I had originally assumed. He could hear patterns, a beat, but not the pitch. I played CDs for him and he followed the lyrics by reading my lips, oblivious that my singing voice was just as off-key as his. He liked rap, Jay-Z and some Backstreet Boys, anything that had a strong rhythm. We had impromptu discos in my room, shimmying against each other before we ended up kissing on the bed.
    Sometimes, I watched his soccer games on the weekends, standing on the sidelines, often in soft rain that wasn’t heavy enough for the match to be called off. Josh was beautiful to watch, fluid as he ran after the ball, elegant when he extended his leg to kick it down the line or cross it towards the goal. I yelled encouragements that he couldn’t hear. He was one of the better players on the team, the only problem being that he couldn’t hear the whistle and often continued for a few seconds after play had stopped, smiling sheepishly when Liam or one of the others waved him down. When this happened, it brought a lump to my throat. I could see supporters of the other team, people who didn’t know him, conferring, shooting curious glances at the young man with the dark hair and eyes, wondering what was wrong with him.
    â€˜He’s deaf,’ I wanted to explain. ‘He can’t hear. That’s all. In every other way he’s perfect.’
    Josh worked as a plasterer for a small building company. His boss, Phil, picked him up in the morning and dropped him home in the late afternoon, either to his parents’ house in Clonmegan or to my room in Belfast. Rather conveniently, most of their work was in the Belfast area. Once onsite, Phil took all the instructions and did all the talking to the client. He then communicated to Josh what needed to be done. He knew how to sign; his brother was profoundly deaf. Phil often commented to me how good Josh was at his job, how he could make the ugliest wall smooth, how his corners and finish were beautiful to behold. Though this praise for my boyfriend made me proud, it didn’t surprise me. Josh was good with his hands in every way. He instinctively knew how to fix things, taking them apart and fitting them back together again. He was artistic and could sketch quite proficiently. And – something I wouldn’t admit to Phil in a million years – Josh’s hands knew how to caress and sweep the length of my body, how to bring me to a point where I hardly knew what I was saying or thinking, where he began or I ended.
    Seeing Phil, a burly man with huge hands and bulbous fingers, signing so adeptly with Josh gave me the impetus to improve my own signing skills. As my relationship with Josh became deeper and more involved, so did our need to communicate on a more complex level. I asked him to teach me sign language and practised my skills by watching the RTE
News for the Deaf
, which was on after the main six o’clock bulletin. In a relatively short space of time I became quite good at sign language, with theadded benefit, thanks to the news, of being very up to date on current affairs.
    Occasionally Josh and I had arguments. Not shouting matches, like other couples; our conflict was expressed with angry gestures, furious glares and slammed doors. More often than not, the arguments spiralled from frustration: a failure in comprehension, having to repeat what we were trying to convey again and again, until one of us would throw up