By Jo Morey
Suspense novels invariably play on the reader’s senses. The dreadful blackness of night. The metallic taste of blood. The pungent scent of fear. It all heightens the tension. So, when I set about writing my debut novel –– a literary suspense set in the Belizean jungle –– I knew how important it would be to play with all these modes of perception.
In Lime Juice Money my protagonist, a middle-aged Chef, Laelia Wylde finds herself trapped in a coercive relationship five thousand miles from home in the country’s southern jungle. It’s a lush setting ripe for exploration with all its colors, scents, and tastes. The camouflage of the fer-de-lance winding its way through the undergrowth. The smell of rotting verdant leaves. The flavors of the water vine and mangoes straight from the tree. I lost myself in describing the uniqueness of this shaken paradise. But one sense fascinated me above all the others: Sound. Or rather, lack of sound.
I’ve been losing my hearing since I was thirty years old. I’m now forty-five and I’ve spent the past fifteen years adjusting to this loss and wearing hearing aids, but also learning to live with the added noises in my head –– the endless tinnitus that came on one morning and has never gone away since. Tinnitus is often associated with hearing impairment and in my case, the audiologist was unable to tell me what came first, or why it started. No-one really knows. I wanted to explore the distortion of this sense through fiction.
Lime Juice Money started as an image in my mind: a woman in the jungle who was lonely, but not alone. She was far from home and afraid; the peace she thought she’d found shattered somehow. I wanted to explore how the relationship with her partner could unravel quite so dramatically, and to such devastating ends. I was interested to examine a controlling dynamic with all its power plays and gaslighting.
Once I’d started drafting the novel, I gave Laelia a similar hearing impairment to that which I have myself. I wanted to heighten her fears even further by weaving in the sense of disorientation and isolation that comes with such an affliction. Above the endless thrum of cicadas and the barks of the howler monkeys, the tension in the novel was immediately raised another octave.
When hearing is impaired, the brain must work harder to decode and understand, especially in noisy environments. You begin to question everything and come to doubt yourself.
It’s a devastating fact that deaf women are twice as likely to suffer domestic violence than hearing women. The University of Rochester has found that reports of physical and sexual abuse are nearly twenty times greater in deaf compared to hearing people. Dependency in this type of relationship becomes almost inevitable; the non-hearing person relying on their hearing partner to help them make sense of the world, to translate what others are saying in social situations and crowded rooms.
All of this is ripe territory for gaslighting. The power dynamic shifts. The opportunity for abuse heightens. The rules of the game change. A partner playing tricks on the other, pretending not to hear them and misrepresenting what people have said or disputing what they have previously been told or understood to be true; not to mention the potential for cutting off their communication dead by switching off their hearing aid chargers.
While Laelia fights against the tinnitus in her head, she mishears things her partner Aidrian says, and the gunshots she hears at night seem to be getting louder and closer, but maybe it’s just her ears playing tricks on her again. As she says herself, “It’s impossible to hear nothing when you’re listening for silence”.
Conveying hearing loss on the page was something I played with at length; how to accurately represent the sense of bewilderment and misunderstanding deafness creates. In the end, I chose to leave blank gaps at the ends of certain pieces of dialogue to communicate the misheard syllables and sometimes, whole words. At other moments, Laelia needs others to repeat what they are saying to her, and often she misses what’s been said.
Memory loss is closely associated with hearing loss and is a key theme in Lime Juice Money –– the unreliability of memory, its fragility and reimagining. There are two different timelines in the novel, Laelia’s and her father Ellis’s who was a botanist studying the orchids in the jungle in the 1980s. This allowed scope for playing further with memory, particularly how Laelia and her sister remember situations from the past so differently and how events are so easily erased, or edited, or forgotten. Laelia stitches more recent recollections back together incorrectly in her mind. As she uncovers dark secrets and pieces together fragmented memories, she must decide who to trust and how to try to protect her newfound paradise.
The dedication in my book is “For anyone who feels unheard and for everyone who cares to listen” because those who can’t hear have trouble feeling heard.
Fiction is a fertile environment in which to explore this sensory loss and to try to convey the resulting detachment to others. Family members and close friends who have read Lime Juice Money have told me how surprised they were to understand just how much my hearing loss must be impacting me in a way they had never really considered. The beauty of fiction is this unparalleled ability to bring a reader into a different world, to enable them to view it through a different lens, or in this case, to experience it –– just for a while –– through hearing aids in all its cacophony.
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