Recession. Depression. What does it matter? I lost my girlfriend in July. I lost my job in September. And I lost an ear last Wednesday. My best ear, the left one. So I have to turn my head when people are talking to me. And I can’t write proper sentences any more.
That was then, but it couldn’t stay that way. I finally went to see Peter, who I was at school with. He’s my doctor. I mean, I went to see him as my doctor, not because we were at school together. He looked in my ear and said it was full of wax, and prescribed me some ear drops. If they didn’t work it might mean surgery. When I asked him what that involved, he said they would probably take the side of my skull off, sort out the ear and stitch it back together again. I couldn’t tell if he was joking.
If you would like to read the rest of this story, please check out Lovers' Lies, the Arachne Press anthology in which it, and many other sexy and lovable stories from the League archives, appears.
Eardrops never work. How can you lie on your side for hours without doing anything? I went back a week later, and Peter had another idea. He has recently become interested in psychosomatics, which I always thought was imagining you are ill when you aren’t, but it’s also about sorting out physical problems by psychological means.
Peter happened to have been invited to a reception in a smart bar in town that a sculptor friend had organised to launch a new project of his. I should come along too. He would let me find out what it was about when I arrived, as the surprise might help. What it seemed to be about when we got there was drinking sparkling wine and eating nibbles and chatting. I could do the first two quite well, but I couldn’t hear anything with so many people talking at once. It was only when the host, Brett, stood up on a little stage and called for order that I could actually hear. He said that his new project was to sculpt ears, and he had been round the bar selecting a representative range. He hoped that the people whose names he read out would agree to model for him. It was at this point that Peter thought that my hearing would return, he told me afterwards. He knew that I didn’t like putting myself forward and being noticed, and the fear of being selected
might act as a curative.
Brett didn’t select me, and my hearing didn’t come back, but it might have done if I had been. Apparently the models had to remove all their clothing, even though they were only modelling their ears. Brett said he needed a sense of the whole person to be able to give the ears their proper character. That would have shocked me.
Then I got an e-mail from Julie, my ex, saying that she never wanted to see me again (I don’t know why she bothered; she’d said it to me the last time we went out) and couldn’t imagine why she agreed to go out with me for so long (five months in fact, and I was the one who said we weren’t ready for sex) and telling me to look at her new photo on Facebook. She said a lot more, many of the words with asterisks in, but they were untrue. I shouldn’t have gone into Facebook. She still had that wavy blonde hair and bright eyes, but she was cuddling Travis, the creep who was always hanging around us in the pub.
Peter phoned me to say that if I wouldn’t take commonsense measures like using eardrops there was little more that he could do for me (he had explained at the reception that the surgery idea was a joke).
Nothing much happened for months. Even my dreams became boring. I have always looked forward to dreaming; however bad the day has been you know you may find yourself in the middle of a really exciting story. Now I was always in a room full of people who were obviously having a good time and making witty remarks, and I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Sometimes I was even outside the house in the cold, looking in through the window.
During the days I looked for work if I had the energy. I came home from another job interview, for a cleaner’s job in a bookmaker’s. They told me I was over-qualified. There was a recorded message on the phone from Peter. “One last chance, mate. Brett’s exhibition opens at the Crystal Gallery on Tuesday. I’ll see you there.” I hadn’t expected to hear from him again after I had let him down, but he does still owe me £10 from our last term at school, and I think he feels guilty.
The Crystal Gallery is amazing. The outside is all glass, lit up silvery from the eaves at night. But inside the foyer it’s dark – you can’t see out at all – just dimly lit from the ceiling. The exhibition was up a few stairs, through double doors, where everything was clear and light again. Beside the entrance to the exhibition was a huge bronze tongue hung on the wall, sticking out at you, with “Please touch me” below it. I’d thought this was an ears exhibition, but I touched it anyway, and then stroked it gently with both hands. Inside, the walls were covered with ears, life size and at head height, all of them firmly attached to the partitions along the gallery walls. There were untreated oak ones, skin coloured clay ones, bright stainless steel ones, a retro Bakelite one, a balsa wood one painted bright green, a small glass one, a huge cauliflower ear carved in chalk next to a tiny seashell ear in copper; even a natural hollow pumice
stone pretending to be an ear.
I recognised a lot of the people who had been at the reception, wearing the same clothes – or similar clothes – designer jeans and silk shirts, and most of them were licking ears like mad. Little bowls with lemon juice in them had been placed beside each ear, and you wiped the ear with juice before and after licking it – well, I didn’t lick any myself. One woman was trying to get her partner to kiss his own ear. He was cool, tall and dark-haired, and he wouldn’t. He went quiet and cold, and wouldn’t kiss his own ear. It was in gunmetal and beautifully made; one of the best, I think. There was one other person who stood well away from the ears, looking as if she was afraid of being held and forced to lick one if she came too close. She was wearing woollen tights, a grey and pink checked skirt and grey top, and I thought I might introduce myself later.
But on my second time round I noticed something I had missed, an unfilled hole where there should have been an ear, like the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. At the same moment I realised that Peter hadn’t arrived, but it didn’t matter as I was having such a good time, and thinking of him gave me a plan.
The empty hole was obviously intended for an ear, so I went around the back of the partition and put my left ear through the hole. It was odd, because of course I couldn’t see what was happening in the room. But I didn’t feel any licks, and after a few minutes it was starting to get silly. Just as I was deciding to give up I felt something warm and fleshlike enter my ear and start to probe around. I could sense the wax melting and the tongue, if that’s what it was, coming deeper and deeper, as if it was about to enter my mouth and meet my tongue. Then it was gone, and I could hear all the people chattering. I stood undecided, hoping that maybe the tongue would come back for more. It didn’t, and finally I pulled my ear out of the hole and went back in front of the partition to find out who had cured my deafness.
It was awful. Everyone was standing in a semicircle staring at the earhole, and as I came out they started clapping and cheering, some of them laughing.
‘Never been an installation before?’ quipped the not-so-cool man who wouldn’t even lick his own ear.
‘Who was it?’ I asked. It was meant to sound grateful and passionate but it came out like a blurt.
‘That’s for you to find out’, a voice from the back said.
I went to the toilet to prepare a plan. Whoever it was must be a kind person, and fancy me. I would start with the woman I fancied most and then the next, and so on until I found the right one.
I had spotted a gorgeous woman with tight jeans and an inch of dark skin between them and her revealing top.
‘May I see your tongue, please?’
‘Of course,’ she said, but what she stuck out was disappointingly short. It couldn’t be her.
The second one, a tall blonde, had a longer tongue, but it was fat and inflexible. It couldn’t have crept round all of my aural crevices.
As I went round I realised that there is a lot that you can miss by just looking at people’s faces and figures. If tongue-showing was made compulsory there would be a lot fewer unhappy marriages, I’m sure.
They were a room full of good-lookers, so I wasn’t despondent when I reached number eight. But when I asked her to open up she blushed, and said, ‘Have you met my husband, Peter?’ And there he was, just behind her.
‘Hello, Peter,’ I said, ‘I thought you weren’t coming.’
‘Not doing too well, are you?’ he said.
‘I can hear again, and I’ll find her soon.’
‘Why do you think it was a woman?’
I was flabbergasted. ‘You wouldn’t!?’
‘I didn’t, but why wouldn’t I?’
‘Would you like to see my tongue?’
It was the loser man. He must have overheard our conversation.
‘No, loser, and your teeth aren’t straight,’ I heard myself saying. He looked shocked, and all of his group started laughing.
That made me even more determined. People were starting to leave, so I hurried around, ignoring the girl in the woollen tights. Most of the tongues weren’t right, and the owners of the few possibles denied responsibility when I asked them directly.
In the end I was left with the shy girl. She was looking at the ear of an old man in pink and red painted porcelain. I leaned over her shoulder and asked quietly, ‘Can I see your tongue, please?’
‘Not in public.’
She turned round and said, ‘Can you bend down a little, I want to whisper something?’ She was that short. I did as she asked and her perfect tongue entered my right ear and started a tour around it.
‘I haven’t been deaf in that one,’ I whispered.
‘What are you doing after this?’ she asked.
‘I was about to ask you the same thing. But it can’t have been you – you were too shy even to lick the sculpted ears.’
‘I’ll tell you on the way.’
We went down to the street and started walking, and I told her how she had cured my deafness.
‘I was desperate to lick the others’, she said, ‘but I couldn’t reach. That’s why I was standing in the middle of the room. But I had to have yours, so I went round the whole building till I found a man to lend me a stool. And then everything was just fine. The rest is silence. No that’s not right, is it?’
We both laughed, although I didn’t quite know why.
© Bartle Sawbridge, 2008.
For Your Ears Only by Bartle Sawbridge was read by Stephen Butterton at the Liars’ League Lost & Found event on Tuesday 9 December 2008.
Bartle Sawbridge has written one (so far unpublished) novel and a number of short stories, and has read his work on BBC Radio 4. He lives with his family in South East London. Bartle Sawbridge is his real name, honest.
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