In the first year of my applied linguistics course in Paris, I took a unit of articulatory phonetics. My father had passed his love of language on to me. He was a serious man; solemn, really. He was almost forty when I was born and I don’t remember him without grey hair. He was a speech therapist by profession, and after he took his early retirement at fifty-three, he did a PhD in Middle English literature, examining Chaucer’s use of alliteration. He used to read me extracts from The Canterbury Tales, explaining the differences in pronunciation between fourteenth-century English and ours, and examining the debates around the causes of the Great Vowel Shift. No one in the family really understood our shared passion, but it was a thing we’d had for years.
When I moved to Paris to study, we kept our conversations up through letters. My father knew how to use email, but for our correspondence he preferred ‘the dead tree variety’, as he liked to say. His letters were typed on thick cream paper on an electric typewriter he’d had since the eighties, and they were striped with white corrector fluid. He addressed them to Ma fille chérie and signed them Papa, which I found corny but somewhat sweet all the same.
One letter arrived about a week after he turned sixty and I turned twenty-one. I’d phoned him on the morning of his birthday and we’d had a disjointed conversation with me bellowing in a phone booth over the noise of a jackhammer on a line with a two-second delay. He must have written his letter that evening after a couple of glasses of the Scotch whisky he drank rarely, but always just a little too much of.
You know, sweetheart, he wrote, your mother was very beautiful when I met her, but I had my doubts even back then that we’d have enough to share. Despite my best efforts over the years, she’s never let herself be wooed by the beauty of words. We talk, and our conversations are never dull, but the words aren’t what I need to hear. That’s why I’m glad I’ve got you, sweetheart. With you I can share the words that matter.
It should have made me happy, this love letter from a father to his favourite child, but all I saw in his words were decades of quiet despondency and they made me want to cry. I put the letter away in a suitcase on top of my wardrobe between the jumpers I’d brought with me for when winter came.
* * *
In the first week of my course, I learned all the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet and used them to write secret notes to my French boyfriend during lectures. I was meticulous in my accuracy, even inserting the symbol for glottal stops, which made my boyfriend laugh and got us thrown out one day from a Discourse and Pragmatics tute.
It was the names of the different categories of sounds we loved the most—glottal, uvular, velar, sibilant fricative. I had my favourites—the bilabials, [m] [b] [p]—made with both lips brought together, like preparing for a kiss. I loved the words they made. Bubble gum in English, and in French, barbe à papa. Daddy’s beard—their term for fairy floss.
My boyfriend favoured [f] and [v]—the labiodentals. He talked of the ‘savage sensuality’ of the name. ‘Labiodental, labiodental,’ he liked to whisper in my ear when he used it as a code for going down on me. And the words these sounds produced seem to validate his theory. Fauve—wild beast in French—and in English fever, fervent and forever.
We consumed words in the Métro, pressing our heads together behind second-hand paperbacks bought from the bouquinistes up on the banks of the Seine. Nabokov was in fashion and we read Lolita several times. Silently we mouthed the opening lines, leaning in close, watching each other’s tongues. The three syllables of her name tripping down our palates and tapping against our teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. My dad had told me that Nabokov was wrong about the phonetics of the name; that the English [t] was not a true dental. But the line gave us so much pleasure that I never told my boyfriend.
* * *
It’s the last Friday in May and I’ve just arrived home from a Semantics exam when I get the phone call from my Uncle Doug. He pays for my plane ticket and I land at Melbourne airport less than fifty hours later.
They’d told me that my dad was in a critical condition after the stroke, but when I see him in intensive care, I know they’ve just been keeping him alive so I can say goodbye. The doctor explains that there’s been a massive bleed on the left side of his brain. Massive—that’s always the word they use. Like the French word masse—sledgehammer. That’s how I see it in my mind’s eye. Like a sledgehammer taken to his delicate brain. I understand enough about neurology to know that, if he does survive, his language centres will almost certainly be affected. I picture him in a nursing home, struggling with his one good arm to point to a symbol on a board to tell the nurse that he needs to shit. I can see myself staring into his lopsided face, still able to look out but not able to let the world see in. And all those words trapped within his brain, bashing around like flies in a jam jar, exhausting themselves in the effort to escape.
After my mum has spent her time with him, she goes off to finalise details with the doctor and I’m alone with Dad. I close the curtain around us and pull the padded vinyl chair up close to the head of the bed. His face is stiller than any face I’ve ever seen. I watch it for maybe a minute, waiting for a change in colour, a twitch, any final sign of recognition that I am here with him. I wonder how long it takes after the last heartbeat for the final neuron to fire. Are there still sounds echoing in the vacant space once all the thoughts are done? If I whisper in his ear now, what will he hear? Will my words still have meaning once he’s no longer there to understand them?
I watch my father’s body lying silent just after the machines are turned off; the family crowding round as if there might be one last word to hear. And then the muted conversation, the whispered platitudes, filling the room like bathroom steam, thin in the air, but clouding over mirrors, hiding the naked truth. Like the words they use, that even my mother uses—passed away, passed on, departed. I walk away from the ward and phone my boyfriend back in Paris. I don’t cry, just tell him of my frustration. How, although I know I should be comforting my mother, all I really want to do is to confront her, to stop her from using those cowardly words; too soft and comforting with their whispered [p], like a bedtime kiss on the forehead. I want to confront her with a word that sounds as hard as it needs to be—dead—bookended by a pair of [d]—a final sound, the tip of the tongue lifting up against the back of the teeth, cutting off the airflow. The English example our phonetics teacher had given the class was dad.
When we arrive home from the hospital, I claim jetlag and lock myself in my old bedroom at the end of the hall. I lie down on the bed and look up at the fluorescent stars on the ceiling, left over from my childhood. I wait for the sorrow to come, for the love I feel for my father to ferment into grief. The sky outside darkens and the stars begin to glow as my eyes lose focus and start to ache. I hear doors open and close as people leave, and the sound of dishes being done is all that is left. When the house finally falls silent, I allow my eyes to close and my mind to quieten down. For the briefest moment I think the footsteps approaching down the hall belong to my father, coming to say goodbye. I hold my breath as the door opens slightly and silently, and the yellow hall light flows in over the ceiling and extinguishes the stars. I close my eyes but through my eyelashes I can see my mother in her dressing-gown with a plate of warmed-up food. As I watch her back away and close the door behind her, the stars reappear and the tears finally come, hot and continuous, rolling one by one into my ears and overflowing into my hair.
Later, when I wake, the hall light is off and the stars have run out of glow. My tears have evaporated and I can feel the tracks of salt across my temples. I get up and walk quietly down the hall to my parents’ bedroom. My mother is asleep on her side of the bed, her breathing soft and regular. I slide under the blanket next to her. She stirs and draws herself close into my back and lays her arm across my side. I shiver with the intimacy of our positions.
Lying in the quiet warmth, I repeat a phrase silently in my head. My dad is dead. My dad is dead. I decide I need to hear the words pronounced, to accept the fact of them and give them voice. Already the words my father spoke are losing their shape. I can’t be sure his voice is truly stored away. If I heard it, I would know it, but to re-create its sounds from memory is beyond what I can do.
Lying there in my mother’s grasp, I take a breath, but the weight of her arm keeps it shallow. My dad is dead, I try to say, but the air leaks limply from my mouth. I open my lips and move my tongue, but not a word comes out. I think of trying others—words with different sounds, other movements of the tongue and lips—sad, lost, loved, gone, forever. But they too refuse to form. The words I spoke about my father and those I need to speak are lodged in my lungs, bound up within the tarry residue of grief. I take no pleasure in their meaning, their feeling on my tongue, the shape of them on my lips. In the silence of my mother’s room, all these words are nothing more than sounds.