The Girl with Two Tongues

When your milk teeth fall out it isn’t terribly traumatic. It doesn’t hurt, or rather, it isn’t painful enough to cry about. But there’s something about the space left behind, the strangely soft, jellified absence. The salty metallic tang, like sucking pennies. There’s something about it, the strangeness of it, that beckons the tongue back, again and again. The intimacy of such a wound, inside the mouth, unseen but constantly felt, is what makes it so bothersome. So quietly disquieting. And this is what Lena felt when her second tongue began to grow.

At first it was just a swelling, tender but not sore. Then it was a lump. An ulcer, she told herself. Where’s the Bonjella. Couldn’t stop running her tongue over it. Soon the lump was bigger and disquiet turned to distress, disgust. She couldn’t find the Bonjella but if she had it wouldn’t have helped. Soon it was impossible to ignore, but she tried her best. No doctors’ waiting room, no NHS direct, no agony aunts. It would go away, eventually. It was just a swollen gland. But soon enough it began to move of its own accord, and Lena knew, as she had done all along, perhaps, in the back of her mind, what it was.

The new tongue was very pink, red almost. She hadn’t noticed until now just how pale, how grey, her old one had become. It was more sensitive, too. Her teeth felt sharper and her soup tasted hotter, saltier, of flavours whose existence she felt she’d never known. Gradually she realised that the new tongue liked different tastes to the old one. The latter liked sardines, beans, Marmite on toast, cups of tea; the former preferred sweet pastries, chocolates, coffee, cheese - things she hasn’t previously cared for. The two tongues filled up her whole mouth, it seemed; but soon she grew accustomed. It stopped feeling foreign, like a stranger’s kiss. It didn’t impede her speech either. Not as such. It was just that it didn’t sound the same as the first tongue. It made different sounds altogether; Rs were guttural and the vowels were all alien and the endings were silent. It was, it seemed, a different language entirely, although the tongue itself appeared to be a beginner, trying out the words for the first time like a new-born baby. People began to talk about her, the girl with two tongues. A freak, an oddity. They wanted to take her to doctors, to scientists. They wanted to understand what the new tongue was trying to say.

So Lena ran away. She ran far away, to another land across the sea. Maybe, she thought, there would be people there like her, people with two tongues, one eye, three arms. This, sadly, was not to be the case. But something much stranger happened. The people of this new land could understand the words her second tongue spoke, for it was their language too. They spoke to her and she could reply; soon her second tongue spoke as fluently as the first. Lena stopped fearing her new tongue and began to cherish it. But for every new thing cherished is an old thing resented. This was indeed the case with her first tongue, for she now realised how spiteful it had been, how it had hurt others, how it whispered strange utterings at night. And when she finally went back to her old country, her old tongue, grown lazy from years of silent languidness, became uncooperative. It forgot the words she wanted; it said words she hadn’t meant at all. Everything it touched tasted bland and grey. Besides, all of her old friends had forgotten her. So she returned to the new country, and when she got there, she took a pair of kitchen scissors, and she cut her old tongue right out of her mouth. It bled and it bled, her mouth was full of blood like gulps of gazpacho, her clothes stained vermillion and garnet and crimson. The blood dried into her carpet and under her fingernails. It congealed in her socks. But after a few hours the bleeding stopped and she threw the old tongue into the dustbin and Googled ‘how to get bloodstains out’ and left her old life behind.