Mia Gallagheron falling in love with the Polish language
First things first. I love it. I love the sound of it, deeper than English, lighter than Russian, the way it slides through the Luas, the lazy, throat-caught rhythm of it. The unending shezhs and zhezhs, how they creep up behind you, caress your ears. I like the look of it, too, on shopfronts, in newspapers and, of course, on the pickle jars in the special section at the supermarket. All those crazy consonants rubbing up against each other in bulky 1980s fonts. Exclamation marks in weird places that make me wonder what the joke is. And I really enjoy the taste of it in my mouth when I try out what little of it I know, the way you have to pout when you swear, roll your tongue, lift the tip and kiss the words out. Kuuuuurrrr-wa.
I think the first time I heard it was in some art-house film. Kieslowski, I'm guessing. But I don't remember getting a visceral sound or feel from it then. Funny, the difference between letting something just brush your ears and really hearing it. Spool forward a few years to Berlin, in 1997, and a dance course run by a terrifying African determined to get us stiff Europeans to loosen up. There were 10 students, including three Poles and two Irish. Somehow the five of us ended up bonding: drinking, dancing, staying out late. But as we spoke English, again I don't remember feeling the sound of their language, apart from their names. Janusz. Grzegorz. Agnieszka.
No, I'd say the first time I heard it proper was a year after Berlin, in a decaying stately home at the foot of Knocknaree, in Co Sligo. I'd been engaged by an experimental theatre company to live and work with a Polish group for a month. The Poles brought vodka, lovers and their children: three tiny blondes who trashed all the adults at the nightly poker, shy Marisia, just beginning to negotiate an awkward adolescence, and gorgeous, generous 15-year-old Pawel. ("Young Pawel", because another Pawel, a cellist, was there, too.) Young Pawel became my buddy. We shared Beavis and Butthead jokes, and in his flawless English he taught me basic Polish. Thank you. I'm hungry. I have a fork. It was the other Pawel who taught me to swear.
It took me a few days to settle. I remember lying upstairs in the dead of night, feeling cold and a bit miserable as, down in the kitchen, the Poles knocked back vodka, told jokes and laughed at the kids, their voices singing up through the mouldy walls and into my skull. Yep, that's when I first really heard it.
Someone once told me there's a word for it, when someone's voice gets stuck in your head. Cathexis, he told me. I Googled "cathexis", but, sadly, I don't think it's the right word. Still, named or not, the thing definitely exists. That feeling of having someone else's sound inside you, of somehow carrying around their reverberation. Somewhere else I read that the word "personality" might come from the Greek for voice. Per sona - through sound.
I like that - that even in our image-laden culture, where we're always taking our first bite with our eyes, it's still sound, the voice, that hooks you in. Of course, I've known for ages that the reason I've got such a crush on Derren Brown, the magician, or why I start to question my sexual orientation any time Mariella Frostrup appears on Newsnight Review, has an awful lot to do with how they sound. Derren's chilled-white-wine clarity, Mariella's honeyed gravel. Yum. More, please. Closer to home, my seven-year-old nephew Eoin has one of the most beautiful voices I have heard. Musical, rich and somehow calming. I could sit beside him and listen for hours.
Even closer, I think the moment I fell for my husband was when he told me his mother was from Belfast. His mixed-up accent made sense as, for the first time, I really heard him. Northern voices, like their Scottish cousins, have always made me go weak at the knees.
It's this sense of needing associations that makes me reluctant to suggest my fascination with Poles and Polish is all down to physics and chemistry - sound waves resonating through bone, triggering neurotransmitters to flood my brain with happy chemicals.
My grandmother was German, and I've known for years there was "some connection" with Poland. Cue marching-band music, goose steps and invasion jokes. Then, this year, my dad told me the connection was a bit more specific: my grandmother's mum was born in Poznan. Of course, back then Poznan was Posen and part of the German empire, but, apparently, a lot of Germans had Polish names and vice versa. So who knows? Maybe that's why I don't mind so much when the kids next door switch on their techno every evening. My husband rants about proper music and asks how they can listen to one beat all the time - and, Jesus, this is the country that produced Chopin - but I just sit back and listen. It's not as if we never made a racket at their age. Besides, who knows how long they're going to stay? They are a young, free, floating population. In six months their landlord could have sold his house, and then we mightn't have Polish neighbours any more. While I can, I'd like to enjoy the sound of their lilting, sibilant and, yes, sometimes raucous conversation rising over the techno beat and filtering through the thin wall between us. Na zdravie.
• Mia Gallagher's Hellfire: A Novel is published by Penguin, £12.99