The Twins Speak a Language That Answers Back

Twins inventing a private language is common enough to have a name — cryptophasia — and ours did it early and thoroughly, a babble of invented words and shared grammar that excluded the rest of us entirely. We thought it was delightful. The paediatrician thought it was normal. We recorded snatches of it for the baby book and laughed at being locked out of our own children's conversations.

The monitor is how it stopped being delightful.

We keep a monitor in the twins' room — audio and video, the modern kind. And going back through a night's recording once, idly, looking for the source of some small-hours crying, I heard the language being used at night, after they should have been asleep, in the dark. Both twins, awake, murmuring their private words back and forth. Fine, if unsettling for two-year-olds at 3 a.m. But there was a third voice.

An adult voice. Low, male, patient, speaking the same language — their private, invented, mutually-exclusive language, the one only the two of them are supposed to know — in fluent, easy turns, as though answering them, as though conversing, from the far side of the room. The empty side. The video showed the twins in their cots, awake, looking toward the corner, taking turns to speak and then falling quiet, listening, the way you fall quiet when someone is replying. And on the audio, filling those quiets, the adult voice, murmuring back in the children's own impossible words, from a corner the camera showed to be empty.

I have listened to that recording more times than has been good for me. It is not one of us; my husband and I sound nothing like it and were, both, asleep down the hall, and the timestamp proves it. It is not a neighbour bleeding through; the language is theirs, unshared, uninvented by anyone else on earth. It is an adult, fluent in a tongue that two toddlers made up between themselves and taught to no one, sitting in the dark corner of their room at three in the morning, having a gentle conversation with them, and the twins, in the footage, are not afraid. They are comfortable. They are chatting to someone they clearly know, in the private words that are supposed to belong only to the three of them — and I realise, writing that, that I have started saying three.

We moved them to our room. The language faded as they grew, the way cryptophasia does, replaced by ordinary English and ordinary arguments, and they remember none of it — not the words, not the nights, not, when I have gently, terribly asked, anyone who used to talk to them in the dark. The recording is still on the old monitor's card, which I cannot bring myself to erase and cannot bring myself to play for anyone, because I don't want to watch their faces when they hear the third voice answer, fluent and fond, in a language only my children were ever supposed to know.