* * *

Oh, well spotted, pumpkin.’

It was Harry who introduced me to the language of language. It was unfortunate that he did this when the only thing I knew was the language of pain, yet some things broke through that barrier. He taught me about phonology — accent, stress, pitch, speed, intonation, register — the sound of language. Which was laughable, really: he might as well have talked about the unicorns of language, or the language of unicorns. But because I was a post-lingual patient he said it would help and perhaps it did - how could I tell?

At special school the teachers taught me about grammar, about the features and functions of language, about tenses and sentences, collectives and agreements. Merboy would have hated it, would have balked at it, but Special watched with his mad, moving eyes and learned because it was the only escape route from his silent world. Those teachers also taught me about graphology, about the signs of language; the conventions of writing. With my hawk-like eyes I soon learned to lip-read and to watch distant flying fingers, moving lips, and translate their movement to meaning.

The summer I prepared to go to King’s College, my mother tried at last to teach me aspects of philosophy as she had promised to do all those years before. She sat on the deck with me and read with me, questioned me, tried to enable me to understand the lexis and the discourse of language. ‘Language,’ she signed, one dazzling afternoon as gulls and rooks fought over the remains of fishermen’s bait on the beach, ‘has two primary functions — communication and memory.’ She talked and signed and scrawled words on a pad of paper: etymology, morphology, context, semantics. She segued from lexis to discourse and on to coherence, cohesion, text and subtext. I squinted, shaded my eyes and nodded, over and over. I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. She was, after all, a prodigy, a woman who had mastered these concepts at seventeen and had never tripped over them again. My mother drew swirling web diagrams, the words ‘semantics’, ‘portmanteaux’, ‘idiom’ floating across the page, and I thought of the thought of university. I think it was late that afternoon, when the ice-cream vans had left and the golfers had altered their cards before they reached the clubhouse, that I first thought of becoming a carpenter.

Later still, Ian and I developed our own language of hands and faces, notes and symbols, unintelligible to others. Ian also took it upon himself to teach me those words found at the outposts of our language — flimflam, rodomontade, gudgeon, smutch, homeostasis. But it was with Sonja that language became something other than my mother had described to me because for Sonja a word often meant something other than it meant for others. For Sonja the word didn’t change -it was its sensory equivalent that slithered around her linguistic map. We also shared the non-verbal indicators my teachers at school had mentioned but I don’t think our indicators were what they had in mind.