Walking between the beds, nurse continued the catechism: ‘Flatlining transdermals is contraindicated. Deliberately depleting LipService to the point of brand blackout is a punishable offence. Repatching in after brand blackout is likely to induce…’ a jolt – that’s what I call it. It’s the price for watching when You turn your back to exit.
I wish I were able to put off applying a new patch and slide through a whole day off work without You. I could inhabit my body and mind, not having to share accommodations with You or worry about the impropriety of wandering naked through my interiors. I could sense on my bare skin the air that gives me a flash of nectar nipped from the base of a honeysuckle flower. And You couldn’t ruin it with your antiseptic odour of disapproval.
But today I need You. In a few hours I meet Mother at the jetty for Archipelago Arcades – I asked her a week ago to come with me, just hours after I’d left the coffee shop. There, two people ahead of me in the queue was a girl aflutter with labels that were a dozen perfectly placed bets on cool. Even her sunglasses had a jewelled Solar Flair tag that dangled off one arm. As she turned from the counter with her latte, she ran her fingers voluptuously across its top, continuing to talk to her companion. I heard her say ‘Formica’s oyster-licking greediness.’ I turned to her to retort, ‘No it’s not, it’s far more like tanniny black tea.’ But I stopped short, all the air sucked out of me. For a moment, there was zero gravity in my head and cogitations floated disconnectedly by. Then I inhaled, things dropped back into place, and I ran after her.
Her LipService brand – I had to know what she was patched into. It was a touch-taste hookup, wasn’t it? Did things have tasture for her, too? No, it had to have been copywritten. Her tone made it sound like a product benefit. She wasn’t far up the street, and, as I came up behind her, I saw the transdermal on the nape of her neck below the studied carelessness of a messy updo. The logo was Eternal Flame.
I tear open the foil pocket of a new LipService patch. The jagged opening cuts across the Pac-Man-ish head of the Spruce oral-hygiene gum mascot whose jaws are always working, consuming. It’s bargain-bin LipService with last season’s expressions – the worst thing for Archipelago Arcades. I don’t have the money to get anything better now; I’ve put everything aside for Eternal Flame. I was counting on the Dermaluxe patch lasting through today. Removing the backing from the adhesive, I brace for the Spruce transdermal’s contact with skin and the rancid oil slick to wash up on my tongue’s shores. Then I wait for your return.
I know your approach by a prickling on the scalp, that feeling of being watched. Every sense is trained on the presence over my shoulder. Then the jolt hits, like walking into a door. The disorientation makes me angry. An imbecile rage that wants to beat at the object that put itself in my way. There’s an incessant chatting, chiding coming from a person I can’t locate. I want her to be quiet. I can’t think. The voice is in my ear. I flail about, hoping to drive her away, and yell, ‘Shut up, shut the fuck up!’ but instead hear ‘Don’t let your tongue wag if it makes others gag’.
You’re back, all tarted up in your Spruce gum finery. The sudden spike in drug- and electro-stimulation makes You babble. Fragments of Spruce LipService explode like a grotesque bubble of gum, sticking to my eyebrows and hair: ‘Are you a breath of fresh air? Goodbye halitosis neuroses! Don’t chew the fat, chew to be thin.’
I’m contorting Mother’s leather purse that I always use to earth me when the LipService current strikes. The suede has a tasture that I keep returning to. I release my grip and allow my fingers to masticate the seaweedy hide. Mother inherited it from a great aunt and doesn’t know I’ve taken it. She hardly ever uses it and I always hoped she would let me have it. But Mother wants me to covet things of Selkie and Hyde. She wants me to be You.
Mother’s bosom holds silicone hopes; they’re only natural. When I asked her to come with me to buy an Eternal Flame patch – a gilt-edged LipService brand – what had sagged swelled once again. At last, her daughter was demonstrating the right buyological urges. Of course, she would be delighted to help me find myself with a premium brand – even if it wasn’t Frisson Froufrou. Remember, darling, the key to coming into your own is owning. For me to now arrive speaking Spruce – a corner-store LipService brand with all the cachet of stale chocolate bars – smacks of insincerity, of subvertising. Yes, I am a shift worker but I should know that an aspirational consumer always trades up. When will I learn that success is nothing if not its trappings?
I am a bad daughter. Even my sweet moments are portents of a downer, a sugar crash. The year I changed schools, Mother was on track to claim her Frisson Froufrou loyalty and service incentive. She was just two years away from augmentation status, when an employee’s fleshly form is remade to embody the Frisson Froufrou ideal of firm perkyfection. My defamation of Selkie and the fact that I was moved from the BMG corporation school meant the recapitalisation of her assets was delayed five years.
I can still see Mother standing stripped to the waist in front of the bathroom mirror. Sobbing, she wrenched loose long strips of transparent packaging tape and attempted to truss her bust into shape. The device with the electronic notification had slipped off the vanity onto the floor. I picked it up and read, ‘Since you have decided to entrust your child’s education to an institution other than the BMG school, we must believe that you no longer embrace the BMG values unreservedly. Such doubts can only affect your ability to act as a brand ambassador…’ There was no need to continue. I had done this to her. Will she now suspect me of a more intentional subversion by speaking Spruce when going to buy an Eternal Flame patch?
At least twice a week, I run my finger down the grimy pages of the LipService consumer staples catalogue at the grocery store checkout. Each time, I hold onto my breath and hopes, then tap at a different brand. No words are needed. Cashiers can’t be sure whether a customer is in brand blackout or not. Especially as people, like me, who buy consumer staples patches often don’t receive a supply of LipService from their employer or much more than a minimum wage. When the money is gone, so is their voice.
In the three years that I’ve been buying language, I have seldom used the same brand of LipService twice. Somewhere among the rat poison, tinned meat, deodorant and batteries, I keep searching for the version of You that’s as gauzy as a muslin teabag and will allow me to seep through. But across all the iterations of You, from the toothpaste smiler to tinfoil tout, I’ve only ever known You as the kind of woman who would dye her own hair, a coupon collector and buyer of single-ply toilet paper. We are the charity-store set. You will admit as readily as I that it’s worth getting that free Prince LipService patch with every tenth purchase of Prince coffee. Just in case.
To Mother, this is an abject assembly-line existence that terminates in landfill. She’s convinced that the Frisson Froufrou life is different – that it’s coddled in frothy pink tissue paper scented with geranium. Not that her tissue shroud will protect her from the potato peels and car tyres when she enters the ground. But for a while I trusted in her disdain: it was enough to make the banality of necessity brands seem promising to me. After all, Mother’s sentiments are not hers alone but carefully manufactured within a consumer community. All I need is for a copywriter equally contemptuous of the clucking, battery-farmed masses to make a careless slip in the linguistic coding. The words themselves won’t be mine but I’ll feel the charge of static electricity from rubbing up against them, as I used to when reading in the repository. When I finally say something that sings in me, I will write it on walls, on clothes and on kitchen appliances to remind myself that what I hear in my head is real language, an authentic expression and not just a hallucination.