My Daughter Counted How Many Times I Said "What" on the Way to Gran's House

Eleven

It was a Sunday in March, on the R21 heading to my mother-in-law's place in Kempton Park, and my daughter Mia had a little notebook open on her knees. She is eight. She keeps notebooks the way other children keep stickers, and on that drive I assumed she was writing down number plates or drawing the clouds.

When we pulled into Gran's driveway she leaned forward between the seats and said, quite seriously, "Pa, that was eleven."

I asked her eleven what.

"Eleven times you said what," she said. "And Ma only talked to you four times."

My wife, Anel, laughed, and then she stopped laughing, because she looked at me and saw that I was not laughing either. I sat in the car with the engine ticking while they went inside, and I did the sum Mia had already done for me. Four sentences. Eleven requests to repeat them. I had not even noticed I was doing it.

Friday Nights at the Same Pub

I have played drums in a covers band since I was twenty five. We are not famous and we never will be. We play the same pub in Benoni most Friday nights, a wedding in Brakpan now and then, the odd fortieth birthday in somebody's garage with fairy lights strung across the rafters. We do Springbok Nude Girls, Johnny Clegg, a bit of Fleetwood Mac for the aunties, and a Bon Jovi song we all pretend to hate and secretly love.

For nineteen years I sat about a metre and a half from a crash cymbal and a guitar amp that our lead guitarist, Wikus, keeps turned up to a number he will not admit to. On the way home my ears would ring like a kettle left on the stove. I used to think of that ringing as proof of a good night. If my ears were singing at one in the morning, we had played well.

Our bassist, Sipho, had started wearing in-ear monitors about three years before Mia's notebook. I gave him grief about it every single week. I called them his hearing aids. I asked if he wanted a blanket and a cup of rooibos as well. Sipho, who is a patient man and a high school maths teacher during the week, just smiled and told me I would come around. I said drummers feel the music, we do not need it piped into our heads. I was very sure of myself.

The Booth in Boksburg

Anel made the appointment because she knew I would not. A small audiology practice in Boksburg, between a pharmacy and a shop that sells school uniforms. The woman who tested me was younger than my youngest cousin and extremely kind, which somehow made it worse.

I sat in a padded booth with headphones on and pressed a button every time I heard a beep. Some beeps were obvious. Some I was sure I heard and was not sure at all. Some, I realised later, I never heard, because the silence just went on and I kept waiting.

Afterwards she turned her screen toward me and showed me a line that dipped down, sharply, in one particular region, like a pothole in an otherwise decent road. She explained that it was a pattern she sees often in people exposed to loud sound over many years. She said the word "permanent" very gently, as if it might break.

What I remember most is that she asked what I did, and when I said I was a drummer, she did not look surprised. She just nodded, like I had confirmed something she had already guessed from the shape of the line.

I drove home without the radio on. I wanted to hear the car. I wanted to hear the indicator clicking. I caught myself listening to everything as if it was about to be taken away.

Admitting It to Sipho

The next Friday I got to the pub early and found Sipho coiling cables by the stage. I told him about Mia's notebook and the booth and the pothole on the screen. He did not make a joke, even though he had earned about three years' worth of them. He just sat on the edge of the stage and said, "Okay. So now we look after what you have left."

He explained how his setup worked, how he heard a mix of the band at a level he chose, and how the sound in the room stopped mattering so much because he was not trying to fight it any more. He said the strangest part for him at first was not the sound but the quiet. You hear your own breathing. You hear your fingers on the strings.

That week I sat up late on the couch with my laptop, scrolling through pages of in-ear monitors for sale and feeling completely out of my depth. Drivers, impedance, isolation, fit. I did not understand half of it. I sent screenshots to Sipho at eleven at night and he answered every one of them, slowly, with the same patience I imagine he uses on teenagers who cannot do fractions.

In the end I chose something modest. I was not trying to become a different musician. I was trying to stay the same one for longer.

Playing Inside a Fishbowl

The first rehearsal was awful. I will not pretend otherwise.

We practise in Wikus's garage in Northmead, and the moment I pushed the tips into my ears and the room went quiet, I felt like I was underwater. The kit sounded thin and far away, and I could not feel the kick drum in my chest the way I was used to. I sped up on every song. Wikus kept turning around and frowning at me. I took them out after forty minutes, sweating, and said they were not for me.

Sipho did not argue. He just asked me to try again the next week, and to turn my own kick up in the mix, and to leave one ear slightly looser for a few rehearsals until I adjusted. He said it took him about a month before he stopped missing the noise.

It took me closer to six weeks. Somewhere in there I started to notice things I had never heard in nineteen years. Wikus's little slide before the second chorus of "Scatterlings of Africa." The way our singer, Chantelle, breathes in just before a high note. My own hi-hat, which turns out to be sloppier than I thought and has been for a very long time. That last one was humbling.

What I Heard at Home

The real change was not on stage. It was in the house.

About three months after I switched, the ringing on the drive home stopped. Not overnight, and not completely every time, but the kettle in my head went quiet more often than not. On Saturday mornings I was not shouting across the kitchen. Anel noticed before I did. She said I had stopped turning the television up to a level that made the dog leave the room.

The damage the audiologist showed me is still there. Nothing I bought was ever going to undo it, and I want to be honest about that, because I wish someone had been honest with me at twenty five. What the change did was stop the line on her screen from getting worse. When I went back for a follow up test a year later, it had not moved. She smiled at me this time, and I nearly cried in a booth in Boksburg, which is not something I expected to write down.

The Notebook, Again

These days, when younger players come through the pub and set up next to us, I hear myself saying the things Sipho said to me. One kid, a drummer from a band in Springs, asked me after their set why I had "earphones" in. I told him the truth, that I waited far too long, that I spent nearly two decades thinking ringing ears were a badge, and that my daughter had to count my mistakes in a notebook before I took any of it seriously.

He laughed, and then he did not laugh, the same way Anel had in the car. A few weeks later he messaged me asking which IEMs I would suggest for someone starting out, and I sent him the same kind of slow, patient answer Sipho had once sent me.

Last month we drove to Kempton Park again for Gran's birthday. Mia, who is nine now, had her notebook open on her lap. Halfway up the R21 I asked her what she was writing.

"Nothing," she said. "I stopped counting. You only said it twice."

Twice is still twice. But I heard her the first time when she said it, and I did not have to ask her to repeat a single word.