Woken from a dead sleep by an ongoing, piercing shriek.
I leapt out of bed, dragging on my dressing gown and slippers in dismay and stumbling downstairs. I found Simon in the kitchen fiddling with the fire alarm on the ceiling. As part of our recent renovations, the new building code meant we had to put smoke detectors into every room, even though all the work was on the outside. Go figure. And for some reason, they had all been set off and were blaring shrilly.
Simon tried everything to make them stop but we had no idea how so he quickly searched online. “Find the one that is flashing a red light” apparently. We looked everywhere but couldn’t find one so in the end we went to every room in the house and unscrewed the alarm from the ceiling, which stopped them alarming one by one. In the end there was one still going that we eventually found in the sunroom: it was the culprit, flashing and squealing away. No sign of a fire anywhere. Simon unscrewed it and blissful silence reigned, apart from a ringing in my ears, which is still going unabated twenty minutes later.
I’m so angry. I’ve read an huge number of articles on the importance of protecting your hearing as you get older. This loud tinnitus I’ve got now means permanent damage has been done, just for a false alarm. I’m livid and want to blame someone, but who? Should the builders who installed them have told us how to turn them off? Certainly they were way louder than they needed to be, so clearly a flawed design. False alarms are inevitable, they shouldn’t be permitted to cause permanent damage to health. Can we blame the council and their stupid regulations? In any event, we’ve decided never to replace them. I’d rather take the risk of going up in flames than go through that again. Fuck the nanny state.
….
Woken the following morning by a shrill ringing in my ears, but this time it’s just me. I’ve always had tinnitus but it was the gentle sound of masses of distant cicadas. I can’t think what it sounds like now except that it’s loud and unpleasant. I suppose if it’s permanent I’ll have plenty of time to work out what it reminds me of. I’m still really angry but now also frightened.