Specsavers. Look around, its all eyes, a feast for the peepers, look and look again, shiny reflections advertising the very notion of clear sight. It’s what they are known for, the glamour of well dressed eyes. But what of ears? The website tucks ears in a small corner, in plain type. Blink with your relatively precious eyes and you’d miss it. For a small fee, it turns out, Specsavers remove “compacted wax”.
“No wax, no fee” it says.
They must be doing this for love then.
I am here for ears. I am hardcore. I am being led around the back. These are evidently unglamorous repairs and the assistant, like a fearful guide in the Amazon rainforest, leaves me just short of my destination.
“It’s through there.” I turn to thank him, he is already gone.
The paint is pale green, so close to a calm jade, but really it’s like white stricken by melancholy. The young technician (I don’t know if he’s a doctor) offers an outstretched hand. His hand says hello but his face says sorry. It turns out he knows what is ahead for us both.
“Let’s have a look” he says, wedging a plastic funnel into my ear and strapping on cyberpunk headgear with binoculars and a light, “yes, it’s all softened up nicely, shouldn’t be too difficult to get that out…”
It is difficult to get that out.
It takes an hour and ten minutes to get that out, during which time my head is subjected to various low level assaults and investigations. The sound of wax being sucked out of the ear has the intensely warm crackle of a needle dropped on vinyl that’s too loud, combined with the feeling of having the lining of your head pinched like a balloon from the inside. Sometimes he reaches for tweezers, and this feels like he’s picking the nose of my brain and I’m hearing the screams of the bogeys in real time.
(Apparently I have very thin passageways with tricky twists and turns. It’s a fact that sound travels at 343 metres per second. But to get to my brain, it has to do the equivalent of the 110 metre hurdles through the maze at Hampton Court, which I reckon knocks the speed down a bit.)
Exasperated sighs, which are now getting louder as my ear gradually clears, add to the cocktail of sonic assault. About halfway through the operation he starts to speak of a “break”, not the kind where you stretch your legs, more of a gap year, for him possibly a career change.
Afterwards, slamming the tools down on his desk with a kind of joyful and final wheeze, he says “That was a tough ear”.
The toughest ear, in my long and varied career, I have had to clear.
Like the deck of a ship after a fishing expedition, the haul lies on a sheet of kitchen roll. Two black clumps of stuff, dark and shiny. They remind me of sad photos of seabirds pulled from an oil spill.
“Of course” he goes on “hospitals have more powerful equipment and so it’s easier, but it can be dangerous. In retail we just don’t have the suction.”
I pay him cash, it’s like no one knows he is here and transactions can’t be linked to the store outside, in all its glowing loveliness. It’s off the record, cash in hand. We shake hands and I wander off, it seems somehow not enough to leave like this, not after the intensity of our shared experience. There’s probably someone right after me, it’s just a job for him I think wistfully as I stagger out, slightly dizzy from the change in pressure, hearing the world anew through a room full of spectacles.
Brother Face 