You are petering out. The ballpoint rolls on but the ink is stuttering into a Morse code of dots and dashes. This morning as I stepped into the shower, I glimpsed the LipService patch on my shoulder in the mirror. The Dermaluxe paint logo has paled so that the stylised paintbrush looks like the handprint of a prehistoric hunter on a cave wall. That means You don’t have much time left. My cells have almost completely metabolised You. I rush into the spaces You are receding from. My lungs rustle with the wind of prohibited words and I start to think I am on the brink of saying something – speaking the unspeakable. Then it’s lost. And no sound comes out at all except for a clicking at the back of my throat like the phone being put down.
The Dermaluxe patch slurps at my skin as I peel it off. It’s a sound that always summons the memory of the nurse with a face the texture of roughened polystyrene. Every third day at the hospital, she used to stand in the middle of the ward. ‘Strip, double over, dispatch,’ she would say in an alarm-clock voice, and everyone submissively removed their LipService patch, folded it in half and dropped it in the medical waste container she carried to each bed. I always wanted to gloat at the thought of You stripped, doubled over and finally dispatched. But it was a tartrazine pleasure, a yellow deception. I only had to look at the nurse for my swagger to crumple into a cringe. She was nothing but an intricate plumbing system that gushed LipService. The words passed through her with no resistance. Open the tap and she gurgled away. Is this what becomes of us?
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.
Each patch I’ve applied has been an act of faith in language’s ability to escape the copywriters’ grip. With Dermaluxe paint, I imagined unmoored LipService drift about walls tart to the touch. With Love Bites cat food, I promised myself verbal slippage on the savoury nap of fur coats. Even Spruce was chosen with a hopeless fancy that its tackiness might hide real flavour and texture. So far You have proved unrelenting in pushing product benefits and lifestyle enhancement. Nothing You say deviates from the great corporate project. But the girl with the Eternal Flame patch made me think I was wrong not to have tried the elite brands. Maybe I had misunderstood Mother’s distaste for cheap LipService. Perhaps she was right; privilege is better.
I stand waiting for Mother on the jetty looking out at the islands that form Archipelago Arcades. With the image of the girl from the coffee shop in mind, I have tried to dress appropriately but I know I lack the insouciance and labels. Being able to pay the high price that premium LipService commands isn’t enough; you also have to be the right fit with the brand. The exclusivity of Eternal Flame must be guarded. That’s why I need Mother. She’s bought their skin serums and eye repair treatment. And what she wears are not merely clothes but regalia, part of a complex courtly code of luxury materialism. Without Mother, I have little hope of getting an Eternal Flame transdermal.
We take a gondola to Beauty Island. It’s the only place, aside from the brand’s invitation-only events, where you can buy Eternal Flame. The store is a summerhouse fronted by a conservatory that juts onto the lake and is filled with specimens of the plants used in the cellular bioenergetics of skin renewal. Jets of mist periodically dew the orchids, and the stirred air sets the crystal chandeliers to tinkling against the percussive drip-drip of water.
The saleswoman who approaches to greet us is the girl from the coffee shop. Her name badge says Lucretia. With the charm of a bank manager keeping a running mental tally, she assesses the peekaboo lace of Mother’s camisole that is a porthole into the plunge of her décolleté and the Frisson Froufrou patch placed like an amulet between her clavicles. Extending a hand to Mother, she says, ‘Welcome to the flush of youth. Welcome to the glow of Eternal Flame.’
Her skin has the polished luminousness of rose quartz with the light behind it. I wonder what it would taste like to rest my fingertips on her cheek. She’s leading Mother to a divan and I’m being left behind. I have to keep my attention from brushing up against every surface.
They are about to sit when suddenly she turns to look at me. Mother must have just told her that I will be the one using the Eternal Flame LipService. A spasm of distaste, as if stepping on a piece of chewing gum in her designer heels, crosses her face.
She recovers quickly to ask, ‘Champagne?’
I smile, shake my head and move towards a particularly curious-looking flower with a throat sac like a marabou stork. Mother told me in the gondola that if I sincerely want this patch and am not just set on humiliating her, I am not to open my frumpy Spruce mouth.
So far Lucretia has said nothing with the surreal quality of ‘oyster-licking greediness’. That’s OK, she probably doesn’t want anyone to know about that, and nor do I.
Right now she is saying, ‘You must understand that our reputation rests on fighting free radicals, maintaining firmness and erasing irregularities.’ The muscles in her jaw thrash below the immaculate surface of her skin.
‘Yes, Frisson Froufrou also aims to give women support …’
‘Certain women. Eternal Fame is clinically proven to synthesise covetousness. The concentrated effects produced by extract of mass longing are what make our serums so rejuvenating. We cannot allow any impurities in the formula.’
‘Ah, the cups must always be half full for most,’ says Mother, settling her shoulders back against the divan. Her camisole shifts to reveal a distinctive salmon broderie anglaise bustier strap with candle cutouts. It was the limited edition Frisson Froufrou and Eternal Flame co-branded vintage-style bullet bra. Only ten were made. I don’t know how Mother got hold of one. The twin points of her chest prod at Lucretia, whose cheeks show pricks of red.
Mother continues, ‘But a brand must hug a customer base’s curves, coax them into shape, teach them to defy gravity. You want them in your training bras from a young age.’
Lucretia smooths her skirt over her knees and rises sharply from her wicker chair opposite the divan to clear the champagne glasses. When she returns, she holds an origami orchid that contains within its marabou throat a LipService patch.
On the gondola, I let Mother’s social climbing, her coy stratagem, slip into our watery wake, because all I can think of is that she did it for me. I hug her. I don’t say anything, so that You can’t ruin the lullaby of custard in my throat while pressed to Mother’s cheek. Mother just smiles.
I force myself to wait the mandatory three days until the Spruce hygiene gum patch is low but not flatlined. Strip, double over and dispatch. You slip off my skin. The Eternal Flame patch is powder-puff pink and is embossed with an orchid blossom lying in front of a lit candle. The only printing is the gold lettering ‘Eternal Flame’, and below, in a smaller typeface, ‘The glow that never leaves your cheeks’. It’s so lovely I can almost understand the appeal of wearing it prominently like an ornament. But it’s not just an ornament, it’s an insignia of social rank, a statement of identity, and I don’t belong. I apply it above my hip. And reach for a marker pen.
I fixate on the words ‘Formica’s oyster-licking greediness’ and put the pen to my left inner arm, preparing to inscribe my skin with its truth. The letters lurch along and I gaze at ‘Formula’s moisture-locking ingredients’. I don’t understand. How did this happen? Flicking mentally back and forth between the two phrases, I realise that they have the same auditory silhouette.
I must have filled in the outline.
You are laughing.