Even as a boy, Max was morbidly sensitive to certain noises that most people either enjoyed or, at any rate, were not bothered by – blackbirds singing, for example, or kettles boiling. As he grew older, the aversions – which could come on suddenly - increased. Sometimes this created real problems, as when a much anticipated holiday in Portugal was spoiled. The tones and timbre of Portuguese speech were, Max discovered, as repellent to him as the cawing of crows is to many people. A lively Lisbon restaurant was, for him, like a corvid roosting site.
A more serious episode occurred in his late twenties, six months after he’d moved in with Jenny, a promising young cellist who had joined the prestigious Walthamstow String Quartet. One afternoon, she started to practice the slow movement of a Brahms Cello Sonata. For Max, the sound of the instrument – which he had always loved – was suddenly as unbearable as that of the proverbial nail scratching on a blackboard. After a week, unable to suffer the sound, Max moved out.
Breaking with Jenny was made the more painful by her refusal to believe his reason for leaving. She was adamant that Max was either bored with her or had found someone else.
‘You really are a horrible man, Max. You can’t even tell me the truth!’, were her parting words when he left her apartment, suitcase in hand.
A still more serious development took place three years later. It began when Max was having lunch with a colleague. Asked about his plans for the weekend, Max began to reply, but quickly stopped, horrified by the sound of his own voice. He tried to finish the sentence, but his words sounded to him like the noises made by a complete beginner on the bagpipes.
When the problem persisted, Max wondered what he could do. Stop speaking? Grin and bear the sound of his voice? Over the next few weeks, he tried a combination of these options. But a mixture of his taciturnity and the pained expression on his face when he occasionally spoke soon alienated colleagues and friends alike.
There was, he decided, only one alternative: to find a way of speaking that he could tolerate. With this in mind, he took a month’s holiday on a remote Scottish island. There, he listened through his ear phones to a wide variety of languages, accents, and intonations. He tried, for example, speaking with an Italian accent in a mellifluous tone, and Australian English in a gravelly bass one. None of these were an improvement on his normal voice.
Inspiration finally came when, one stormy evening, Max watched Gone with the Wind on Amazon Prime. After listening closely to the dialogue, he formed the hope that, by speaking in an exaggerated American ‘deep south’ accent, and in a squeaky falsetto, he could live with his own voice. After watching the film another twenty times and practising the accent and pitch for several hours a day, Max’s hope was realised. This was a sound he would be happy to produce and hear.
Two days after returning from the Scottish island, Max was dining in a restaurant close to his flat. While waiting for his food to arrive, Jenny entered the restaurant, saw Max and, after some hesitation, came over to his table.
‘Max, it’s been a long time no see. Good to see you again. How are you?’
Max looked up, smiled and replied in his newly acquired shrill, high pitched, squeaky drawl:
‘I do declare, Miss Jenny, that it’s mighty fine to see you again too’.
Jenny looked at him, more in sadness than in anger.
‘You really are a horrible man, Max, aren’t you?’.
