The gesture of hand to mouth doubles as a sign of mute shame. But that’s not the way she’s doing it. No, this is the first half of a movement to blow a kiss. I’m fascinated by this abstract expression of defiance. The hand drops back down; the girl on the other side of the Lost Property window is staring at me. I know her. She’s Poppy who smelt of condensed milk and bought the first word I sold at school. What happened at her coming of haemorrh-age? Was she one of those whose CVA was a vex-sanguination – a prognosis so feared that everyone genuinely celebrates a comparatively small puddle of blood on the brain?
From my class, Brunfrid and Thea vex-sanguinated and couldn’t be patched. No one saw them again. I think of them sometimes when I can’t avoid skirting the vexation ward at the hospital with its barred windows and laments from the lifers. But I don’t remember it being murmured about Poppy that she had vexed. Perhaps she ruptured while I was in recovery. I still think I would’ve heard.
Poppy gazes at me the way someone looks at old childhood photos of herself – the recognition is purely intellectual; it barely keeps at bay the sense of estrangement from the figure pictured there. She’s wearing the weirdest clothes made of patches sewn together. Pieces of fabric – one with half a logo, another with the printed chicken feet of some brand mascot and a third a dignified floral – have all been tacked together by hand. Wait. I’ve seen this before, folded in the bottom of an unnamed box that came in yesterday. I’ve hardly gotten to know it. Running a hand over the patchwork, I chased a variety of tastes, skewering them on the tines of my fingers for a single multi-flavoured mouthful. There was nothing else in the carton except the string of chimes, a few mothballs, a bag of lentils and some loose change. It was one of the emptiest I’ve ever seen.
Your distaste was obvious when You said, ‘Anyone with so few possessions can’t be possessed of much consumer sense.’
But now, seeing Poppy similarly dressed in front of us sends You into foaming convulsions of rage. By just standing there Poppy has a more neurotoxic effect on You than any of my grimace-demeanours have ever achieved. I know why. Recycling old clothes refutes the need for the new and dismembers corporate identities. It’s brand assassination. On Poppy’s top, the Midas Trust bank logo has been decapitated so that only ‘das Trust’ remains and some sloppy darning makes the ‘a’ look more like an ‘i’. I notice the first starbursts of a migraine and try to focus on Poppy’s face.
I greet her in my light bulb LipService: ‘Live on the bright side with GlowWorm.’ She nods and slides the paperwork for the carton’s release beneath the window. My rubber stamp thumps at the forms but my mind is pounding away at other things. I scan for the vex symptoms that parents threaten disobrandient children with – paralysis, facial droop, spasticity, emotional incontinence, dementia … Nothing. Maybe I just haven’t spent enough time with her. The only way to delay her now is to invite her into Lost Property instead of pushing the box through the flap in the wall next to the window. No visitors are permitted in the storeroom but I welcome her in with ‘Come into the light’. Once I’ve opened the door and Poppy is inside, I realise that this hasn’t solved anything. What can I possibly say to her and what answers can I expect? She’s mute and I’m a babbling LipServant. ‘Illuminate for me what’s happened to you,’ I try desperately. My head is a hotel room that You’re trashing. Poppy smiles and takes the carton out of my hands and replaces it with a patch of fabric. By the time I manage to squint through the migraine aura to decipher the words formed by an awkwardly childish running stitch, she’s gone. It’s an address in the industrial district.
Two days later, I stand across the road from a factory at the address and read its peeling sign, ‘Trimcote & Son, Magnetic Tape Manufacturers’. It looks derelict – which feels about right for the place where I hope to amputate You, even if it means sawing off language at the same time. When I reach the iron gate at the entrance, I notice a few kids dressed in patchwork clothes playing in the rubble and ask them to ‘turn the spotlight on Poppy for me’. There is some sniggering but they show me a hole in a section of fence hidden from view of the road. The kids lead me down the side of the factory.
In between calls of ‘this way, this way’, they repeat ‘turn the spotlight on Poppy’ to each other and titter behind their urchins’ hands. I don’t understand what’s so funny about GlowWorm LipService. I keep my eyes on the ground in front of me, mainly to avoid your poutcry. The kids guide me to a couple of teens not yet come of haemorrh-age and whisper to them.
A girl steps forward. With one hand, she takes the patch with the address from me, while with the other she reaches onto my back to doodle circles with her fingers. The contact jolts through me. No one greets with touch. Brands make first impressions.
She says, ‘I am Oona. I will show you. Then you can decide.’
I have no idea what I’m supposed to decide but I nod. If it weren’t for the pain in my head, I’d think this was too easy. Are they really just going to let me walk into their tongue-chide community without testing my intentions?
Though I’m keeping my head down, You are upping the voltage, increasing the charge. ‘Uggh, her sentences are blander than no-name packaging. No promo-emotional flourish. What do you want with these people?’
I want to fade You out before You and your jingo-lingo become my permanent mood lighting. If they have a way, I have to find out about it.
Oona takes me across the main production hall that no longer has a roof. The window frames have been torn from the walls to construct low greenhouses where vegetables live sheltered lives. A man is stroking and caressing the leaves of a cabbage, as if it’s a small rabbit. In what must’ve been an upstairs office overlooking the factory floor, three women and a man are sorting through piles of old clothes, cutting them up and stitching the pieces back together again. I’m afraid of triggering the fit-inducing GlowWorm strobe with all this brand mutilation but don’t know where to look. I rest a hand over my eyes as if staring into floodlights. One of the patch-makers is Poppy.
She comes up to me and rests both hands on my shoulders, holding me at arm’s length and smiling.
‘This is the greeting without words,’ says Oona. ‘Here only the unbled speak.’
Is she telling me that they’re all vexed? How many of them are there?
‘Is everyone here a blown light bulb?’ I ask. Oona looks confused.
‘Vex-sanguinated,’ I try. But she still doesn’t seem to understand me.
‘Dull-spoken fools in motley,’ You jibe. But I remember reading, at the repository, that only the fool has a licence to transgress.
Poppy performs a pantomime, making the right side of her face droop.
‘Oh,’ says Oona. ‘No, there are only a few true silents. The rest choose not to wear the talking labels. You must choose, too. Then you can stay.’
Poppy takes my hand from my eyes and moves it to my mouth in the stifling gesture she had made at Lost Property. The soft mounds of her fingertips taste of button mushrooms. The other women and man working with her come up to me and brush their hands over my back and shoulders. I’m surprised at the earthy comfort of it, like a bowl of mushroom soup warming beneath the skin.
As we leave the patch-makers, I ask Oona, ‘How does anyone know they’re on the same wavelength?’
Again my LipService baffles her. ‘You mean how do the silents talk?’
‘Yes.’
‘They read faces. They touch. Our lives are simple. It’s harder to lie with the face and fingers.’
She wants me to understand as they do, without words. So I try, but your jab-jabbering is incessant and it’s becoming impossible to hold back the pain in my head. We cross a courtyard scullery where an industrial mixing drum has become a hand-spun washing machine, and patchy clothes flap on a line in the breeze like a series of slaps in my face. At the back of the courtyard is a staircase down into the factory’s underground car park, where the kitchens and storerooms are. Bunk beds line one wall close to a large wood fire where pots hang over the flames.
‘Candle power, literally,’ You sneer.
Here, the kettles are vocal and knives chatter on the chopping board, so the people’s silence is not as obvious as among the gardeners, who walk as soundlessly as their tomatoes grow.
Occasionally Oona stops and says to someone, ‘This is Frith. Poppy welcomes her.’
Then there are more shoulder greetings and back scratchings. I don’t know whether these are leading lights or just the people Oona is closest to. I’m still waiting to be vetted, to prove my brand aversion in some sort of anti-corporate loyalty test.
One of the outbuildings is being used as a classroom. An unbled teen instructs the younger children seated at broken pieces of concrete resting on bricks. In a corner facing the students, a middle-aged woman sits observing the lesson.
For the first time, as we stand at the window looking in, Oona offers something like an explanation, ‘It isn’t like out there, I know. We don’t need a lot of words. We only have them for a short time.’
I notice a small boy at the back of the class perform a series of grotesque grimaces and rude bottom waggling. The woman gets up from her chair, grabs the boy by the arm and drags him out of the classroom.
‘Some of the children don’t like learning words,’ Oona says, blushing.
You are spitting watts in an incandescent rage. ‘Get me away from these people. They’ve all been left on dim!’
It takes me a moment to escape your glare and focus on my question. ‘What surge protection do you have for when you start to flicker?’
‘I’m sorry. I grew up here. I know the words but not your meaning.’
‘Bleed … hospital.’ I stumble over the words in the LipService blackout.
‘Yes, we go to the hospital when we bleed. They won’t help us after that.’
I’m surprised she continues after a pause. ‘Some take longer to come back from the hospital. I think they try to live with the talking label.’
She reaches toward my patch, which peeks from below my T-shirt sleeve, but quickly withdraws as if afraid of Polly the LipService parrot’s sharp beak.
‘Almost everyone comes back eventually. We don’t know how to live with all those deceiving words,’ she says with unmistakable sadness.
Before I can green-light joining these people, I need to know whether medicorporate oversight will look the other giveaway. If free market competition allows the choice of one product over another, then amping things up to a rejection of all brands should be possible. But I’ve been wrong before – like at school when Poppy and I were selling words. What if this place is just a trick to force me to choose between the doctors and copywriters? I don’t want this to give them a reason to plug me back into their circuit boards in the lab.
‘You’re not seriously thinking of joining these agrarian-contrarians? They’re so primitive they don’t even have product differentiation. Don’t like dinner? Starve. Don’t like our savaged clothes? Go naked.’ You sound louder than usual, as if outside my head and not just inside. With the migraine pressing on me from all sides, I feel I’m flickering.
Oona’s lips are moving but she isn’t the one speaking. The top half of her head has disappeared into blackness. I try to reach out my right hand but my arm hangs taut like the cable to a great chandelier. And the pain, it’s unthinkable.
I become aware of myself as bar soap gone soggy. You were the puddle I was liquefying in, my extremities turning to mush. But I can’t feel You now. That’s how I know they must’ve taken my patch off when I blacked out. Firm fingers press around my eye sockets and mould my jaw line, pushing through the scum to my solid core. The woman from the classroom is working my skin against my bones as I lie on one of the bottom bunk beds in the underground garage. The pressure of her hands helps me recover my solidity.
For the first time, I notice that Oona is seated at the foot of the bunk. I try to sit up but the woman holds me down and her hands continue to circle my eyes, head and neck like a dog not yet satisfied with its bed.
Oona sees my movement and says, ‘I was afraid the phoney words had killed you. But Gudrun has the touch. It’s more honest than words.’
I’m not sure. It might be easier to lie with language but touch is still manipulation – even if it feels as good as this.