Selling LipService

by Tammy Baikie

  I had never been to see Principal Launder before. Mrs Mondaine left me in a small room with a table and two chairs. It was the barest room I had ever been in. No windows, no posters or pictures, no mobiles or collections of brand figurines. That made me more frightened than I already was. There was nothing to distract me from the horrible scrabble to understand. I picked at a scab on my knee until it bled. I stroked at the corduroy of my pinafore but its furry guava only reminded me of what I’d said before Mrs Mondaine pulled me from my desk. I twisted at a button on my cardigan until the thread broke and I had to put it in my pocket.

  Then I heard it – Mrs Mondaine’s casino clack. There was another sound, too, a soft flip of notes shuffled – the big money. I froze. But the door didn’t open. There were voices out in the corridor, Mrs Mondaine and Principal Launder. I got up from the chair and stood still, barely breathing. Slowly, I edged towards the door and pressed myself to the wood whose sour rye trickled into my ear and down my throat.

  I yanked my mind loose from the taste and texture of the door and concentrated on the voice, which whined like the TV test pattern.

  ‘What if there is a fault with the metrics on the cohort’s perception of the quality experience? It could damage the credibility of the brand promise with a knock-on-effect for reputation management.’

  ‘Mrs Mondaine,’ Principal Launder said, ‘you are mistaking an anomaly for actionable market intelligence.’

  ‘Even if we don’t send a risk report to the corporation, we must surely submit her for biomedical recall?’

  ‘An unnecessary escalation. We can correct any behavioural flaws through peer reconditioning. You will discuss this incident with the rest of the cohort using the psychological cues I’ve copywritten for you, and social pressure will correct the cognitive dissonance.’

  Then there was the sound of feet moving, and I threw myself across the room to reach the chair and table. If the principal saw my dive for the desk, he didn’t show it. Leaning forward, he put on a pair of spectacles and said, ‘Ah, you must be Frith’s friend, Faith.’ When he spoke his voice was smoothy perfect like it had been airbrushed. I didn’t know anyone called Faith but nodded, unsure whether it was a game or whether he honestly thought I was someone else. Either way, it felt safer than being me.

  ‘So you would know about her tasting things she touches?’ Another nod. Being Faith made things much easier. Next, he asked whether Frith could hear colours. I must have looked surprised, so he changed the question to whether sounds had colours. And what about tastes, did they have textures? No. Well then, I had to agree that tasting through skin, as Frith said she did, seemed made up. All her other senses functioned alone. I understood now. To admit to being Frith or that Frith really could taste things she touched made me a liar. What could I say when he asked if I would help to convince Frith to stop pretending? Didn’t I see that her game of make-believe was not very credible, and it was dangerous – she must be made to realise that it was false advertising and defamation of Selkie. My ‘yes’ was more like the little sssss when opening almost-flat cola. He wanted to know whether I thought she would continue with such slander. The bones in my neck made gristle grindings against the shaking of my head.

  I didn’t like being Frith any more. I wished I were Faith. Principal Launder trusted her to be a good consumer.

  I was allowed to go. It was lunchtime. Outside the windowless room, colour had drained from the world. Bleached litter trapped in tree branches on the playing fields flapped like prayer rags.

  I kept picking apart my talk with the principal, trying to understand his magic tricks – how with his talk of Frith and Faith, he had performed the famous sawing-a-girl-in-half illusion. I realised that he meant for me to overhear his discussion with Mrs Mondaine. The top-hat words that things disappeared into were all part of the abracadabra. He was probably a burned-out copywriter – most headmasters are. And, of course, what I didn’t understand at the time was that my two halves would never fit back together.

  In the canteen, there were hardly any kids still in the queue to collect the sponsored lunch hampers. I was walking away from the refrigerated shelves when one of the girls from my class came up to me and dropped a used handkerchief into my Big Chief Beef Bolognese. ‘Wouldn’t you rather eat this?’ she said, before walking away. There was the sound of sniggers.

  The handkerchief joke was repeated and then I started receiving little fabric dolls with anatomical details crudely drawn in marker pen and a plastic speech bubble stuck to the mouth saying things like ‘lick me’. Some time later, one of the teachers found me choking on a dirty sock that a group of older kids had shoved into my mouth.

  My visit to the principal was never mentioned at home, although my mother as the brand-affiliated parent must have been notified. She was as consoling as my talking Gabby doll. Tug at the cord in her back and Mother would say the sweetest things to distract me from the questions she couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. ‘Need a little lift, darling? Shoulders back, chest out – it’s an instant push-up.’ But I knew that the incident frayed at the fibres of my mother’s hopes for me, because although she still spoke the words, tugging her LipService cord now elicited warbling that lacked conviction. The ballad of la femme Frisson Froufrou played like a stretched tape now that she had failed to socialise me in the ways and words of the brand.

  Mother is a believer. Her brand loyalty is a neon example at BMG Textile and Clothing Corporation. Nothing but Frisson Froufrou crosses her heart, crotch or lips – even when off work she only uses FF patches.

  She spent years cultivating her image, only to find I had sprouted in ways incompatible with the BMG corporate and social culture. I had issued from her like a black bush of armpit hair above her beribboned corsetry. She’d always have to keep her arms stiffly clamped to her sides, hiding that shaggy shame.

  Everybody knows it’s the parents’ role to pass on by word of mouth the values and LipService of their corporate tribe. Then when the child comes of haemorrh-age and the blood knot is broken, the transition to the family brand and patched speech comes as naturally as swiping a credit card.

  She wouldn’t willingly have taken me out of the BMG-sponsored school but she was informed that my ‘poor fit with the corporate identity’ was undermining brand integrity in the classroom, and the administration could not accept responsibility for my safety. Dad wasn’t employed by a corporation and, without a second brand affiliation in the family, the only alternative was the ‘no-name’ school. I sighed into anonymity. No focused brand identification courses, no corporate mascots at sports events and little prospect of internships or admission to the corporate universities. I would certainly never be a copywriter.

  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 t
he 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.

  I remember the first word I sold was ‘ox parade’ (from paradox) for when a grown-up’s LipService drift seemed to say one thing but you were pretty sure they meant another. Poppy, who smelled of condensed milk, bought it, which was surprising because she was really quiet. I wrote the words and their definitions on old LipService patch backings, folded them up and put them in a jar. The customer stuck a hand in and pulled one out. Faith insisted that we charge a minimal one-off subscription per user over and above the original buyer.

  ‘Who cares about that?’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t it be lexicool if the other kids used my words? And besides, how would we ever keep track of who was allowed to use which words?’

  ‘That’s the genius of the haemorrhage and LipService, isn’t it? Built-in control. I’ll just have to work on an accounting system.’

  I didn’t know how her head, which was mine, could ever possibly hold all those columns and double entries. But I needed her approval.

  I hadn’t been sure if Poppy liked her word, until I overheard her best friend whisper to her in a corridor, ‘Ms Marshal put on a real ox parade in there over contrabrand. What was she trying to say?’

  ‘Oh, who knows? The bull really had her by its horns,’ Poppy replied and they both tittered.

  They were using my word! I had my gloves on but I was doused in the shiver and prickle of ginger ale, my skin goosed in mimicry of the bubbles. There were more buyers every day after that – in fact I had a hard time thinking up enough words for all the kids that crowded around my table at lunch wanting to dip into the ‘gun jar’ (jargon). Some of the words were duds but I thought quite a few were really great, like ‘lexity perp’ (from perplexity) for an adult whose LipService was complete gibberish, ‘showman pros’ (from promotions) for kids who were already so into their chosen brand they made the rest of us look like flip-floppers and ‘ge
t tarred’ (from targeted) referring to the kids who just couldn’t wrap their heads around brand awareness.

  I even stopped missing the skin tastes. I could go almost a whole day without thinking about them until it came to the Turkish delight hour. With Wardsback, each of my words echoed off all those other tongues. I was no longer a singularity; I was we, the multiplicity. I felt large, bigger than the other kids. And I was doing big things. There was quality control – not just of the words themselves but also listening out to make sure no one was using them incorrectly or unrightfully. To help with that we had ‘fire nutties’ (notifiers) who rather enjoyed watching others get burned. They were paid to eavesdrop on schoolyard conversations. Based on their intelligence, the ‘wrist rotors’ (terrorists) could be sent in to twist arms and punish offenders.

  I know I should’ve thought more about all that. Somehow it just grew out of Faith’s subscription programme, the way in winter you forget to cut your toenails until one spring day you find you have hideous claws that rake anyone who stands too close. I tell myself I didn’t actively set it all up. I don’t remember recruiting. But I came up with the names. Is naming something the same as assuming responsibility for it?

  I was not myself any more. My image had come unstuck – a promotional cardboard cutout was walking around instead of me. In the corridors, I would pass younger girls wearing tights with dresses and long opera gloves. They did their hair like me, plaiting the forelock and tucking it behind an ear. At lunch, they only ate what I ate. Once, I noticed one of them mimicking the way I carried my schoolbag and my nervous habit of nibbling the uninhabited fingertip of my glove. It was a hall of mirrors – everywhere I saw myself, disembodied. Even Faith had stopped lecturing me. ‘These are the rewards of a strong brand,’ she said between cooing sweet numbers over the day’s takings.

  Did I enjoy it? I keep asking myself. I want to say no, but that’s probably a lie. I was the Wardsback girl and everyone knew the Wardsback girl. I was greater than the sum of my many refractions. When the others came to buy words, there was the way they looked at me. And the way they spoke my words. A clandestine tone like the hiss of a graffiti can. I didn’t see that I was in a market bubble.