3
The dressing-up box was an old trunk full of cast-off chiffon slips, satin cami sets and babydolls Mother had put together so that I could learn to be a Frisson Froufrou lady. When I needed close and tender comfort, I would take everything off, climb in and close the lid to enjoy the whiskery ribbons and slippery fabrics tonguing alfalfa and sesame on my belly and back. But then Faith told on me to Principal Launder. When I had to leave the BMG-sponsored school, Mother stopped inviting me to play Demoiselles de FF. She probably thought it had become a pointless exercise.
I told myself I didn’t mind, because I was trying to forget the dressing-up box and ignore skin tastes. They were pretend – a game I forgot to stop playing. Like when I used to believe that the Peppy the Crayon Clown came to my fourth birthday party, instead of someone paid to put on a costume. But when did I first make them up? What was the first stroking that I invented a taste for? I couldn’t find that lost moment or imagine how I’d lost it.
Skin tastes had simply always been there, like arms and legs. When I was seven, our class went to the Animal Crackers petting zoo and I touched a snake for the first time. Between contact and liquorice there was no time. No time to think of favourite foods or fancy flavours. Even now, with my mind running, running red rover towards the fault – which had to be there – between finger and flavour, all I managed was to knock myself to pieces. I was fracturing trying to get through the impasse. Nothing made sense, and I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to switch the skin tastes off. And that I wouldn’t be able to go back to being the product of an endorsed family.
Inside my brain was a wall of TVs, each with a different grown-up – Mother, Mrs Mondaine, Peppy the Crayon Clown – competing to tell me how their brand could fix me. I put my head under my bed, willing myself to pinch my pores closed against the stinky blue-cheese synthetic carpet, and howled, ‘Not real, not real. I don’t taste anything!’ The scream was an electrical surge that blanked the screens. Only one small voice was left.
‘Oh, hardly anything is real any more. Everyone is pretending all the time – being a play-play la femme Frisson Froufrou or whatever. But you can’t just invent your own fantasy world. There are rules, silly-that’s-what-you-get-when-you-eat Chilli Fusilli.’ It sounded like me, only copywriter clever. That’s how I knew it was Faith.
Of course, Faith was make-believe, but I wanted to believe. I wanted to be sure of things, the way she was. Everyone needs a brand conscience – that’s why there are relationship management days at schools, when you introduce your imaginary brand buddy. At my new school, it was just two months away, not long after my eleventh birthday. Everyone would see how, with Faith, my pretend was really intend. I might even be able to make the early adopters programme. That’s how Mother started at Frisson Froufrou.
‘So what games are allowed?’ I asked.
Faith rolled her eyes. ‘You know, playing proper brand characters.’
It was Faith’s idea to try the black satin Lycra opera gloves that came with an old peignoir in the dressing-up box. The fingers were a little too long and they hung off my hands like skin gone wrinkly from swimming. But they did gag the skin tastes. When I first put the gloves on, the singed sesame force-fed itself down my throat. After a while I became numb to it, the way when sitting in a room with a wet dog, the nose quickly forgets how a room without a wet dog smells.
‘You must wear them all the time,’ Faith said.
‘What about eating? And bathing?’
‘For eating, too. S’pose you’ll have to take them off for washing though.’
‘But bathwater is lovely pink Turkish delight…’
‘You’re not trying hard enough, Frith. If you can’t block out the Turkish delight in the bath, then it should at least be Pasha’s Pleasure and you should hum the turban tune. Engage with Pasha’s brand story and commodeify, commodeify.’
That was Faith – constantly telling me what to do: ‘You have to live brand culture, not just act all diligent in class,’ and ‘Come on, wear their art on your sleeve, merchandise your look.’ She was always right and I was always wrong. And we always had to do what Faith wanted. She refused to come with me to the book repository. ‘Aggh, it’s so depressing – no flash and attention grab.’
But at least she was there with me the first day I wore the gloves to school. Even though it was summer, I wore tights with a dress and the long black satin cuffs that reached up to my armpits to smother the seductions of skin. I knew what everyone was thinking: What is the new girl wearing? That’s not catalogue cool – bet that’s not in any season’s collection. She’s got no idea about strategic alignment. What a surprise she ended up in a no-name school.
The glove days wore on and wore down. I was a cat with clipped whiskers, never sure of the places I could fit, bumping into things. In the evenings, I peeled off the gags and my skin screamed mouthfuls. Standing naked in the steam coming off the water in the tub, I was a satellite dish of flavours amplified. I took long gluttonous baths, soaking up sweet rose water. The gloves worked while they were on but when they came off, I seemed to be worse – with a thirsty proboscis protruding from every follicle. Faith said it was the lie of skin tastes coming out, like when junkies go cold turkey.
I wanted to show Faith that I also had core competencies – that I could talk LipService lickety-split and was copywriter clever. And, while I was having one of my very long baths, I found a way to do it. I was trying to think of Pasha’s Pleasure like Faith said I should, but my mind kept diving after playful Pobbles because Dad had given me funny poems to read in the book repository. So every now and then I had to chant to myself Pasha’s Pleasure, Pasha’s Pleasure, Pasha’s Pleasure until it got all gargoyled up into Shapa’s Sureplea. I thought that was quite funny, too. That’s what I’d call a Turkish delight that you can only eat in the bath. The silliness went ricocheting through my head and upset the neat order until it lodged in an idea. What if I made up a LipService with special secret words? Everyone knows that shared LipService is a cohesive force that engenders mutual consciousness among brand communities of haemorrh-aged. It’s catechism.
All I needed was a brand, something to sell. What did I have to sell? I couldn’t think of anything. I almost asked Faith but I wanted to have it all worked out myself before I told her.
It was obvious, really. If I was going to create a sort of secret language, why not sell the words to my classmates? That’s not so different to LipService, is it? It’s a tried-and-tested business model. I was so proud of myself. There would be words for ordinary things like teachers (shirties) or parents (rent pairs) so they wouldn’t know when we were talking about them, and words for things that just deserved to have a single expression, like ‘on an urchin quest’ (from questioner), referring to someone like my dad who never sounded convinced by their own LipService. I could call my language Wardsback because the words were roughly reversed versions of familiar ones, and they pushed back at the old meanings the way wearing a woolly jumper back to front tugs at the throat and armpits.
Faith played with her hair for a long time when I told her about the idea, and I felt like a piece of CheezPleez left in the sun – dry and curling at the edges and sweaty in the middle. She probably didn’t believe that any of my ideas could be buyonormative. But she couldn’t think of any reason to junk it and she got more and more excited about making money with absolutely no overheads.