The Whistle Only the Waveform Could Hear

The cupboard

I work inside a cupboard. That is not a metaphor about the industry, although it could be. It is a genuine built-in cupboard in the spare room of my flat in Melville, doors off, shelves out, and the whole inside lined with foam I bought in Booysens and glued up myself on a Sunday in 2019. There is a duvet nailed to the back wall, a second duvet folded over the rail above my head, and a third one I throw over the doorway when the neighbour's gardener starts the blower. The duvets are the actual acoustics. The foam is decoration. Any voice-over artist who tells you otherwise has never had to explain to a client why their forty-second radio spot for a bakkie promotion has a faint hadeda in the background.

I am thirty-nine. I have been doing this for eleven years. Radio ads, e-learning modules, corporate videos where a man in a boardroom says the word "synergies" and I have to say it after him with more warmth. My mouth is my income. Everything I own, the car, the medical aid, the small amount that goes into a retirement annuity I try not to look at, came out of this cupboard and out of my face.

You would think that makes a person careful with their teeth. It did not.

What Thabiso said

Thabiso engineers a lot of the corporate work I do. He is one of those people who is calm in a way that makes you calmer, and he has never once in six years made me feel stupid for asking him to roll back and let me redo a line I alone could hear a problem in. We were doing a compliance module, forty-five minutes of a script about reporting procedures, the kind of job that pays properly and takes your soul out through your ears.

Halfway through he pressed the talkback and said, sort of gently, "Hey. Are you okay? There's a thing on your esses."

I said what thing.

He said, "It's like a whistle. It's small. It's fine, I can catch most of it. But it's there and it wasn't there in March."

Then he sent me the file so I could see it. And that is the part that broke me, honestly, more than the sentence did. Because on the screen there was a little spike, a bright vertical hair sitting up above the rest of the waveform every single time I said a word with an S in it. Systems. Sanctions. Suspicious. The script was full of them. It looked like a heartbeat monitor with something wrong with it.

I said I would fix it. I did not know what I meant.

The tooth I had stopped seeing

When I was fifteen I climbed out of the swimming pool at my cousin's place in Kempton Park, in the shallow end, on those moulded steps that stick out of the wall like a ladder for people who are already tired. My foot slipped on the algae and I went down chin-first onto the top step. There was a moment of not much, and then blood, and then my cousin screaming, and then a small hard thing on my tongue that I understood immediately was a piece of me.

They patched it. It was 2002, there was no money, and the patch was the cheap kind you get when the goal is "she must not look like she was in a fight" rather than "this must last her life". It was a slightly different white to the rest of the tooth. In photographs from my twenties I can see it if I look, a faint seam at the corner of my left front tooth like a badly repaired plate.

And here is the thing I want to be accurate about. I made peace with it. Genuinely. Somewhere around twenty-four I stopped doing the closed-mouth smile and just smiled. I did not hate it. It was mine. When people talk about tooth stuff they always assume the story is that you were ashamed for twenty years and then bravely fixed it, and that is not my story. I had forgotten about it. For at least a decade it was simply the shape of my face.

What happened was that the patch failed. Not dramatically. It did not fall out. A corner of it just wore down and separated a fraction of a millimetre from the tooth underneath, and that fraction created an edge, and air moving over that edge at speed made a sound. Physics. Nothing to do with me at all.

Listening back

I already had a bad habit before this. Every voice artist has one recording of themselves they cannot stop picking at. I listen back to my own sibilance the way other people check whether they locked the car. I have a de-esser on my chain and I have always used it, and I have always known, in a hidden place, that I use it more heavily than most people need to.

After Thabiso's message it stopped being a habit and became a job I did instead of sleeping. I would finish a session at seven and then sit until eleven pulling my own esses apart at 8 kHz, soloing them, slowing them down. It is the most unpleasant listening in the world, your own voice with everything except the hiss removed. You sound like a snake with a grudge.

And of course I heard it everywhere. In the greeting on my voicemail. In myself saying "sorry" to a man at the Spar. My mother, who has never listened to a single thing I have recorded in her life, said "you sound funny" on a phone call and I nearly drove into a wall.

That was the spiral. Two, maybe three weeks of it. I turned down a small job because the copy had the word "seamless" in it four times and I could not face it. That is the moment I look back at with the most embarrassment. Not the tooth. The turning down of eight thousand rand because of a letter of the alphabet.

Practising in the car

There is a stretch of the M1 between the Killarney offramp and Corlett Drive where I do most of my thinking, because you are not moving anyway. I had a script open on my phone in the cradle, a thing for a medical device company, and I was reading it aloud in the traffic with my mouth doing this new careful shape, trying to feed the air past the edge instead of over it. Sixty-six seconds of copy. The word "systems" three times.

I caught myself in the rearview mirror, doing this small ugly grimace to get a clean S, and I thought: you are thirty-nine years old and you are teaching yourself a lisp in a jam.

That is when I actually admitted the shape of the problem. It was not vanity. That was the strangest part to get my head around. If it had been vanity I would have known what to do with it, I have twenty years of practice at telling myself vanity does not matter. But nobody could see this. Nobody at a braai was ever going to look at my mouth and think anything. It was invisible to every human being alive except a man with monitors in a studio in Fairland and a piece of software that draws pictures of air.

Sandton, in the morning

So I went. I got a name off a colleague, the kind of recommendation where someone says "she was fine, she didn't push me into anything", which is the highest praise anyone in Johannesburg gives about a dentist. It was a Dentist in Sandton, off Rivonia Road, near enough that I could do it before an eleven o'clock session.

I want to be honest about how boring it was. Parking, lift, a form on a clipboard, a woman at reception who asked about my medical aid and then told me plainly what part of it my plan would not cover. Then a chair, and a look, and a fairly short conversation in which I explained the whistle and felt insane, and the reaction was not delight or sympathy but something closer to a shrug. Right. That corner. Yes.

It took two visits. In between them I went back into the cupboard and worked, because rent.

The odd thing, and this is what I actually wanted to write down, is what it did to my head to be there. My whole life the reason to fix a chipped front tooth is how it looks. That is the assumed reason. Everyone in the waiting room, I assumed, was there for that. So when I sat down and said "I need this edge gone because it makes a noise at eight thousand hertz", I felt like I was bringing a work order to a Cosmetic Dentist instead of a confession. There was no confession in it. It was closer to taking a car in because something rattles at 120.

And underneath that, a thing I did not expect at all. A little bit of fifteen-year-old me came up out of the floor while I was sitting there with the light on my face. The smell in those rooms does not change in twenty-five years. I had this sudden clear memory of my mother in the corner of the room in 2002 asking what the cheaper option was, and doing that face adults do when they are working out money in front of a child, and me being fifteen and understanding exactly what the face meant and saying it was fine, it was fine, I did not mind. I had genuinely never connected that to anything. It sat there for twenty-four years being nothing.

I did not cry about it. I want to be clear. I just noticed it, the way you notice a stone in your shoe after you have already taken the shoe off.

After

The first session back, Thabiso did not say anything for the first ten minutes. Then he pressed the talkback and said, "Ja, it's gone." That was the whole ceremony. I have not had a moment in my life that I built up more and that delivered less. It was perfect.

I went back once in November for the check, and the Sandton dentist asked what I did for a living, and I said I talk for money, and she said "that explains the questions", and that was that.

I still de-ess. I will always de-ess. The habit outlived the reason for the habit, which is true of most habits. But I am not soloing my own hiss at eleven at night anymore, and I took the medical device job and said "systems" three times without doing anything with my face.

The tooth looks slightly different now. Not better exactly. Even. It is the first cosmetic change I have ever made to myself where the word cosmetic is a lie. The reason had nothing to do with my face. My face was collateral.

Sometimes I think about that step. Not with any drama. Just that a moulded concrete step in a swimming pool in Kempton Park, with algae on it, reached forward across twenty-four years and put a spike in a waveform on a screen in Fairland. That is the part I cannot get over. Everything is connected to everything, and none of it is connected in the way you would expect. I chipped my tooth on the way out of a pool and it eventually cost me eight thousand rand of work and a fortnight of sanity, and the flaw was never once a problem for the thing everybody assumed it would be a problem for.

I still cannot go near a public pool without looking at the steps. But that is not shame. That is just knowing where the algae is.