by Tammy Baikie
Selling LipService
Selling LipService
Tammy Baikie
First published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2017
10 Orange Street
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South Africa
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© Tammy Baikie, 2017
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d-PDF ISBN 978-1-4314-2480-1
ePUB ISBN 978-1-4314-2481-8
mobi file ISBN 978-1-4314-2482-5
Cover design by publicide
Job no. 002957
See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za
‘Chris Moulin, of Leeds University, asked 92 volunteers to write out “door” 30 times in 60 seconds. At the International Conference on Memory in Sydney last week he reported that 68 percent of volunteers showed symptoms of jamais vu, such as beginning to doubt that “door” was a real word. Dr Moulin believes that a similar brain fatigue underlies a phenomenon observed in some schizophrenia patients: that a familiar person has been replaced by an impostor. Dr Moulin suggests they could be suffering from chronic jamais vu.’
TIMESONLINE, 24 JULY 2006
‘Man’s achievements rest upon the use of symbols … we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.’
ALFRED KORZYBSKI
Contents
Coming of haemorrh-age
Chapter 1
Before the haemorrhage
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
LipServant
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Acknowledgements
Coming of haemorrh-age
1
I have been repackaged. My cellophane surface is so slick that not even the rain clings to it. But the package contents lie. This is not what I am. The gaudy veneer of bright words that declaim and cajole are not mine – they are yours. I am the perishable rawness beneath.
You materialised with my first LipService patch. Clammy gel sucked at the skin of my upper arm, and I had to swallow hard against the rancid oil in my throat. The neurologist overseeing the hospital ward of eighteen-year-olds newly come of haemorrhage was watching me with the squinting intensity of an eye to a keyhole. He had personally applied the transdermal patch to my upper arm, while nurses went around to the other patients. Had my revulsion betrayed me? Tinnitus echoed like a siren through the empty halls of my mind. Did he know?
I remembered him as being among the group of doctors that a week or two earlier had huddled around the glow of the light boxes near the door. As they pointed and gesticulated at the brain scans, a grotesque shadow pantomime unfolded on the adjoining wall. I lay with my eyes half-closed, blinkering my mind to all but the progress of an ant across my arm and the parallel passage of bergamot that it induced across my palate. But my skin was crawling with more than six tarsal claws. I opened my eyes to see the medicine men staring at me. They had been looking into my head and seen something. Something that merited monitoring.
Now, the doctor revealed nothing. He asked how I felt, and for the first time since waking in the hospital weeks earlier, a fully formed utterance tumbled out of my throat: ‘Bathed in Pristine radiance.’ It was my voice but I had to turn over the strange auditory artefacts in my mind several times before admitting that they really came from me. They were not the words I had strained to reach on the high shelves of my cranium. Someone had rushed in while I groped, filled my basket with items and pushed me through the linguistic turnstile. I was left staring bewildered at the shiny word packages. That person was You.
That very first LipService patch was programmed for the Pristine bodywash brand. My response to the doctor’s question was copywritten to reference the tagline: ‘Remain bathed in radiance, long after you leave the tub.’ Of course, I knew that greetings serve to identify a brand to interlocutors and provide a context for a speaker’s LipService drift. I knew that, just as girls’ bodies bleed on reaching maturity, the brain must also bleed to come of age and that after my haemorrhage I would need to consume LipService to produce language – written and spoken – like all adults. But I never really accepted that another would speak for me. Or that your tackiness would adhere to me, too.
In the months before the bloodbath in my brain, I was sure I could regain language after coming of haemorrh-age and refuse LipService as long as I retained my particular deviancy – the ability to draw up flavours through my skin. My first conscious thought on waking in a hospital bed was raw with fear that I had been flayed, in one stroke, of language and of my taste-budding skin. I roiled in the sheets, desperately trying to stir up the sediment of their aroma. At first there was nothing; my skin felt thick with tongue fur. But eventually I chilled out to the ricotta sluggishness of the bed linen. I still held the savour of myself behind pursed lips.
Was that what the doctor had been looking for, too? But instead of the perversity his eye had watered for, he had gazed on the banality of another newly bled. He had almost turned away from me when he remembered himself and said, ‘Congratulations on completing neural pruning. Welcome to LipService,’ patting me distractedly on the shoulder before moving off to check on the other patients.
When the doctor and nurses had gone, some of the girls in the beds on the opposite side of the room from me started chatting. The newly styled LipServants emerged from aphasia like women from beneath large bonnet hairdryers, cooing and clucking at each other in delight. Fragments of a variety of LipService brand languages floated across to me.
… wake up to the kiss of Prince coffee …
… cool mint …
… can’t wait to give her the antibacterial treatment …
… so swept up in aroma’nce …
… a string of pearly whites is the best accessory…
The shy plump one on my right looked hopefully at me and was even drawing in breath to speak, but I turned on my side with my back to her. I didn’t feel up to giddily pretending that You and I are the same. I wouldn’t just click with You like plug and socket.
I liked them less knowing I was one of them – just as stroke-stricken, equally lost for words. We were as kinbled as our brain MRIs suggested, pinned up on the wall of the ward. Each one with an almost identical inkblot lesion – a black mark against our names and the naming of all things. I was supposed to feel bound by blood to those who shared my coming of haemorrh-age day and ward. But they were all waterslide happy to be carried along on your slippery sales pitches. And I couldn’t be. Besides, with the variety of LipService patches tag-lining our tongues, we were differentiated into products: the Prince coffee girl, the Soundbites toothpaste girl, the HailChef home appliances girl … And crossing the aisle in our supermarket world is an act of treachery.
I was discharged a week later. The following months were filled with corrosive jollity – many exclamations of ‘How’s our new LipService mouthpiece?’ Your responses were never what I had hoped for and I perpetually found myself gaping, a wound. This was just the opening that the distant aunt, family friend or neighbour was looking for to say, ‘What, LipService got your tongue?’ and then chortle as if this drollery weren’t as tired as a face in a mirror wiped of make-up.
And these were only the prel
iminaries to the ‘word wake’ – the school graduation ceremony held once everyone in the class had bled. It’s an all-night vigil for the demise of narcissistic talk and the stirring of the communal, copywritten tongue. As instructed in the invitations, my classmates and I arrived without wearing the transdermal patches we’d needed since our haemorrhages. We stood in the school hall, a row of mutes dressed in white – the blank pages of a sheaf. The teachers filed past, shaking each individual’s hand and penning a LipService wish on our clothing. Next came the parents, who did the same.
‘Receive the script,’ said the principal, placing a wafer with the word ‘copywritten’ on our tongues. The wafer melted away but the letters left a stain that lasted more than a week. For all its superficiality, the brand chatter programmed into the LipService patch indelibly marks both body and mind.
There was a cheer from the audience as the hall was plunged momentarily into darkness, before the glow of black lights came on at exactly the same moment as the sound of a loud jingle. Our white clothes phosphoresced blue-opal. Then our line dissolved as friends and family advanced and neat ceremonial script gave way to frenzied scrawlings. Marker pens snagged and puckered skin, disembodied hands of the dancing crowd reached, wrote and withdrew. I had no LipService patch, no words to protest. Arms raised defensively presented another surface for phrases that ran into each other, knocking themselves insensate, and in the rush to find a footing on the body, meaning slipped and was trampled. Letters piled up, a writ of passage into branded language.
At midnight, the lights were switched back on and the music stopped. Dazzled by the brightness, I glanced down at my dress – white no more. We were pushed forward again. ‘You have received the script. Now speak your part,’ intoned the principal as she approached the line of new LipServants that had reformed. She ceremonially handed each of us a LipService patch.
Disoriented, we were herded off to the photographer to have our pictures taken with a stuffed parrot perched on a shoulder. One of its glass eyes was chipped and this gave it a duplicitous expression. It was supposed to represent Polly, the LipService mascot, which appears on the cover of LipService catalogues in the form of a tattooed bird and logo on a naked shoulder. Whenever I look at the photo of me taken that night, it strikes me that the scribbling covering my clothes and body is a double exposure – a second competing image. The startled girl beneath is dematerialising, to leave only the tatty parrot and its lines.
At dawn I lay in the bath, the hot water needling hide scrubbed raw but still not entirely clean. Traces of marker pen appeared like meat stamps on the tenderised loin.
These memories are as abrasive as my fingernail scraping over the backing of the LipService patch – that cheerfully printed polyester scab on my shoulder. By goading that circle of skin back to sensation, perhaps I could reawaken the dead spot in my brain. It’s the moribund places that You insinuate yourself into.
I wish I could tell You how much I loathe You. For a long time, I contemplated curses so pustular You would break out in boils at the sound of them. Only they’ll never be heard. All LipService products block obscenity. And to whom would I address my rage anyway? I’m left looking on helplessly at the endless treachery of the impostor wearing my skin.
Then it came to me that I could interrogate You. You wouldn’t answer directly but I already know all your answers, because You are perfect conformity. Beneath the dome of my skull, where my inner voice is now forever trapped, my word is still law. Here, I can put You in the dock.
I try to picture You bowed and crumpled but I can’t see your features. No amount of swivelling of the mind’s inner periscope brings You into focus. You remain a blur of peripheral vision. ‘Show me your face,’ I hiss. The words have barely rumbled loose and already I know the answer – you are a boardwalk billboard painted with strong men flexing their muscles. Where the bodybuilders’ heads are, there are holes for people like me to stick our faces through. Your face is mine. But I don’t want to be a caricature, nor do I want to be stuck in the shadows behind the board, where lost shoes lie after falling from the feet of children craning to hook their chins into the cutout.
‘Don’t like what you see, my pet?’
You’re speaking Love Bites pet food. Since that’s my current patch, it’s natural for You to speak that brand, even in my head, but ‘my pet’? It’s the Love Bites expression that makes me feel like I’ve bitten into an ice cube every time it comes out of my mouth. I’m supposed to be in control of your words. Where did that come from?
‘Stop trying to convince me that You and I are one and the same. I know what You are. You are nothing but the programmed response to a combination of drugs and electrical stimulus activated by nanotechnology.’
‘Just an involuntary twitch of a tail, eh? Aren’t I so much more?’
‘Fine. You’re the leash that the corporates have tightened around my throat.’
‘Oh mee-ow. LipService speech is created by copywriters to declaw breeds like you.’
‘I refuse to be one of those creatures that sit and beg for your scraps.’
‘You have clearly failed to appreciate the catechism. LipService is not scraps, it provides a wholesome mental balance and contains all the positive sentiments scientifically proven to keep you living a healthier, fuller life. The well-socialised animal is happier and less prone to illness.’
‘I’m not one of your carbon copycats, I’m not …’
‘And yet you’re speaking Love Bites LipService. In your own head. Did you forget which of us was which?’
That’s not how this was supposed to go. Panic feels like being vacuum packed. But You continue talking:
‘Or did it just seem natural, like the nutritious ingredients in Love Bites? One bite and you’re smitten, eh? Common expression is social grooming. But you’re not a pally cat. Oh no, you think you’ve got it all licked – a special feeline. But this cat’s got your tongue.’
I’m hyperventilating. I scramble for a shopping bag and breathe into it. That wasn’t just me imagining You. No, You are the copywriter’s familiar who stalks my every thought.
I rip off the Love Bites patch and stamp on it. It oozes bile from the drug reservoir like a crushed earwig.
Before the haemorrhage
2
Her long fingernails were painted with miniature logos, perfect in every detail. Their length meant that Mrs Mondaine handled everything, including our marked tests, with a funny tweezing action. It reminded me of Mother plucking her eyebrows – from the frowny grip, through ouchy rip, to the let slip. The pincers released my results onto my desk and I saw four brand hero stickers attached to the top. Four! I felt breakfast-cereal-cartoon perky.
I was ten and I was probably wearing my favourite T-shirt, which said ‘Little Madams’ just above the small brass cones at nipple height with tassels sprouting from them. I was always wearing that. Hanging upside down from the playground jungle gym, I would swish-swish them like la femme Frisson Froufrou from the ad, who dangled from a trapeze and whose bustier tassels flicked as she swung. I was going to be spotlit beautiful like her and like Mother, who is a sales manager for the lingerie brand. By learning the right figure-hugging LipService, I was going to follow her into the embrace of the Frisson Froufrou brand family. Or maybe even be a copywriter. Then I would write the grown-ups’ clever LipService words that wiggle up into your bum like my Butt’fly G-string (a gift from Mother) and stick there so you can’t forget them. But Mother said we weren’t an ebrandgelical family. Then she looked hard at Dad. Still, with four brand hero stickers, I thought they’d let me.
The brand awareness lesson that day was on quality. Mrs Mondaine passed fabric samples around the class: ‘If it feels as good as silk, cashmere or linen to the touch and looks as good, well then it must be as good.’ I raised my hand. I imagined myself as Stainley, the Cryowash stain detective, who uncovered the dirt that everyone else had overlooked.
‘Mrs Mondaine, you can taste the difference
between the real silk and Selkie.’
Mrs Mondaine had the face of an inflatable doll. Her eyes narrowed so that the heavy mascara on her lashes formed puckers around the dark orifices in her head. I thought there must be some LipService drift I had forgotten, and continued: ‘I mean, the taste you get when you touch something, which makes it easier to tell what it is – you know, metal is like salad dressing – and Selkie is …’
‘I don’t understand your value-added contribution, Frith,’ she said.
The other kids were staring at me. My confidence curled at the edges, brand hero stickers that no longer adhered properly. It felt like looking down into the emptiness of Mother’s bra cups when I first snuck into her cupboard to try on her things. I thought that everybody could taste things through their skin, that they all picked at the walnuts in lace. Wasn’t that as ordinary as haemorrhages, health rewards and brand awareness lessons?
‘The core sensory competency of the skin is not taste, Frith. Did you put the samples in your mouth?’
‘No, Mrs Mondaine. I felt them and tasted them through my skin.’
‘That is false advertising. Make a full retraction.’
‘But Mrs Mondaine …’
Mrs Mondaine took me to the principal’s office. She said nothing as we walked, but the sound of her heels on the corridor made the same noise as coins fed into slot machines. Every step made my head spin symbols – lace, walnut, Frisson Froufrou – but they were all unlucky combinations.