by Tammy Baikie
‘I don’t want my creases ironed out!’
It’s as if a horrid man in a trench coat has just flashed her. I look away from her distaste but she quickly wipes her face of expression.
‘Oh but you do,’ You interrupt in house-proud tones, ‘you want clothes that are meadow-fresh wearable hugs.’
It seems that You have become more insistently loud-mouthed lately, and it’s harder to hear myself think. Sometimes I stray into your goods diction and find my thoughts boxed up in product puffery for ease of delivery. I have to unlearn the limp of LipService. I wonder whether Mother has her version of You – the materialist voice of more – whose bedroom purr promises life as a lingerie shoot. Or perhaps she has believed for a long time that You are her.
Her voice is tired as she says, ‘At the time it was part of the sensual hanky-panky of Frisson Froufrou that sold me on the brand, but it’s a dreadful body-con.’
For a moment, she actually feels like my mother rather than an exotic dancer who burst out of a giant cake sent to the wrong address and then stayed. She chose FF because she could gorge on satin and silk, lace and ribbons. That could be me. Maybe Mother was like me. The difference is just time – time spent with You. Are You slowly forcing me into the servant’s quarters with responsibility for little more than manual labour, the moving of limbs?
The memory of the Demoiselles de FF dressing-up game comes back to me through a Vaseline-smeared lens. Yes, it was an exercise in building brand affiliation, but it was also a gluttony of sesame, alfalfa and walnuts that she wanted to share with me. I feel my fabric soften towards Mother, as You say with no hint of irony, ‘Home is tender-loving wear – washed with Mollycuddle.’
‘The doctor says the corporate wringing and scrubbing has worn away your sensitivity. Will you show me the food stains you still hand treat?’ I ask.
I thought she would refuse, make it clear that she rejects the ‘body-con’ of tastures completely.
She stands very still for a while before saying, ‘I’m only revealing this wardrobe malfunction once.’
I wonder whether the revolt of Frisson Froufrou You feels to Mother like a digit desperately scrabbling in the throat for the gag reflex. I think about telling her that the copywriter and doctor were finger-licking over my tastures so she knows she doesn’t have to try and purge them. What’s good enough for the omnipatchpotents, Mother will surely admit is good enough for her. But then I would also have to tell her how I turned up my nose at their frozen carrots and potato sticks.
Working quickly, she collects a couple of items from the laundry basket and lays them on the kitchen counter. Then she begins to collect items from the fridge and pantry and place them next to the different textiles. But instead of sesame suggestively encircled by a satin camisole, she has a jar of quince jelly, and the alfalfa sprouts that should be married to the chiffon negligée have been cuckolded by a sweet lap cheong sausage.
‘But Mother, these aren’t the fresh aromas that impregnate fabric fibres.’
‘Don’t you think I could find a pair of edible underwear blindfolded?’ She gathers up the laundry and drops it back in the basket.
Stupid, stupid to question her tastures. It’s just that I’m surprised – I thought this would at last be something on which we are in perfect agreement, like satin and sesame. Trying to think of a way to get her to drop her brandface again, I stare at the packet of bulgar wheat, the dandelion greens and tamarind pulp – the strange pantry fellows of the quince jelly and lap cheong sausage. Mother is always looking for new flavours.
Even when I was young, a chef prepared dinner in our kitchen three nights a week. On his off nights, Mother insisted the family dine out at experimental restaurants and roll kohlrabi, dukkah, hyssop and blachan introspectively around the drums of our mouths. Conversation was kept to a minimum. And all of this was made possible by Mother’s income and affiliation to Frisson Froufrou. She may not have done it intentionally but she trained my palate. I hadn’t thought about it before but without her, I probably wouldn’t be able to lickname my tastures. I owed her that as well.
‘Is your shrinking experience a relief?’
‘We aren’t all proud of our kinky tastes, dear.’
She won’t admit it, even to herself, but I bet the tasteless world seems like a nightclub visited by day – where all the intensity is lost, and everything feels drained and tacky.
You avert your eyes at any sign of my touch-taste hook-ups – they aren’t standardised applications compatible with everyone’s operating system. Even if a doctor and a copywriter think tastures are great R&D material, it doesn’t mean that they’ve entered your coding – the commonsumer consciousness. Besides, Wordini and Bromide don’t even agree on what my tastures are good for.
Doctors and copywriters are different parts of the same machinery; their sprockets, blades and gears spin at different rates. The danger is in trying to reach between them. Expect to be mangled. Now that my own fear is no longer a plastic bag over my head, the condensation from my failing breath blurring my perspective, I understand Dr Bromide’s sudden exit on Wordini’s arrival. Those separate sets of wheels and belts need to be kept a crankshaft’s distance apart. If something flies loose at the copywriting end and lodges in the medical mechanism, the whole engine could seize. I enjoy thinking about that for a while.
After spending years trying to hide the tastures that are like a sixth finger, there’s no point any more. Maybe it’s time to find out what they can really do. I’ve been thinking about Mother saying she could taste out something ‘blindfolded’. Isn’t that what Dr Bromide and Wordini got me to do with their desk cubicle? My taste-touch hookups mean that my neural pathways are already unorthodox, so what if I could use those connections to start reorganising more of my brain? It would be my own experiment in neuroplasticity. Perhaps I could palpate my way to misdirecting the doctors’ wiretaps. By exercising my tactile dexterity, I imagine I might also be able to press my fingers around your throat and make You choke on tastures. And there’s the hope too faint to be heard – of words.
I start with what I know and what will earn your approving nod. Otherwise, You’ll upset the shopping cart, scattering my thoughts in a violent tamper tantrum. Brand awareness lessons ensure every budding consumer knows the science behind the marketing hook ‘more people prefer the taste of our product’ – the blind taste test. Only, what is there that’s unbranded? The best I can do is tap water, filtered tap water and a bottled spring water – Wholly Water. I plan everything with scientific rigour. All three are refrigerated in the branded containers and marked at their base with a small round numbered sticker. I keep shifting them around in the fridge to help me forget which was which. I don’t know if it’s You or me, but one of us is trying to keep track, so it takes over a week. You are determined that the Wholly Water – the only commercial brand – be the preferred choice. Preference isn’t the point for me, only my ability to discriminate. Which of us is the con artist and which the mark in this shell game?
Seated in front of the bottles, I put on gloves so the aspic tang of the PET bottles doesn’t leach into the water. I sense your head bobbing at my shoulder, a fly in my glass. The first gulp settles cool and slightly chalky in the well of my mouth. Must be the filtered tap. In between splashes of water I eat slices of green apple as a palate cleanser. The next bottle slops droplets that I imagine stood pooled in a granite font.
You scoff, ‘Granite? Just say what you mean: Wholly Water – rich in trace elements because health is mineral wealth.’
That means the last one should be the unfiltered tap water. There is almost no taste, and its absence is like becoming aware of my own breathing in deep quiet. I check the bottoms of the bottles. I have all three right.
A week later, I repeat the experiment, this time with two more bottled water brands. Your allegiance is now to CellSpring, the market leader. More brands, more bang for You, I reason, but You’re getting finger-drummingly impatient with my interest in taste.
‘Didn’t you learn anything in brand awareness? The classic Popsy versus Folk cola wars? Who cares that most prefer the taste of Popsy if they still go out and buy Folk? Consumers buy brands, not products. Preference in flavour isn’t the same as buying intention.’
I start the tasting but I’m muddling through murky waters. Mother stopped by earlier and the air is still hammam-humid with her new floral fragrance, Witchery. The contents of all the test bottles seem to have been funnelled through the perfume’s moonflower trumpets. The harder I try to push my tongue past the perfume slick on the surface, the more the water osmoses into tastures – the throat-snagging cheese of the synthetic carpet under my bare feet, the camel’s milk of my polyester T-shirt. They seem more real, more present than the water. I only get one out of the five and go around in a fury, throwing open all three windows in my flat.
As I do, You say in your scold-you-so voice, ‘I tell you, Popsy and Folk,’ before quoting from the research: ‘Most consumers can’t tell one similar product from another in a blind taste test. But their confidence in their powers to loyally dis-in-criminate between brands increases, the smaller the actual discrepancies in the products’ chemical formulations. Drinking cola is a psychological brand experience not an objective one. And you think your little water game is different? Municipal water is still a brand.’
I got it right the first time. I just have to control the conditions better.
A final attempt. It’s late and I think I’m getting flu. My throat is a dank highway underpass beneath the increasing congestion. I manage three out of five but at least one was a lucky guess. That’s it. I’m done. No more putting things into my mouth – I have other ways of taste testing. Taste is a fly-by-bite sense – as volatile as the chemicals that produce it. No wonder the marketers rely on sensory subterfuge if half their test cohort is likely to be wearing too much cologne or has spent the last hour chewing mega-minty gum. In my gingerbread house of tastures, it doesn’t matter whether my nose is blocked or my tongue burned, the walls are always spicy-sweet. Sometimes an urgent texture is a fist pungenting through the horizon of food tastes. Like cat fur – it’s artichoke but there are no artichokes like it.
You’ve reminded me that sight is the sense that sells, the subliminal marketing sense. It’s the optic nerve pulsing to the colourful packaging that insists two barely distinguishable cola drinks taste either like Popsy or Folk. Seeing is believing. Tasting or touching, not so much. That’s why tummy tamers, booty lifters and thigh slimmers fly out of stores: sleek looks are more real than the crushing reality of squeezed flesh and compressed organs.
‘If you ever listened, this wouldn’t be such a surprise. Beverages with an identical sucrose content but more red dye are considered to taste sweeter. There’s even research into packaging colours perceived to enhance the coldness of beers …’
Before You can get further into your profit-or-off-it speech, I make sure that You come unstuck. I’ve had enough of You. For now anyway. The patch thuds dully into the bin. I also shed my shoddings, stepping out on insect tarsi to taste with my toes like a fly. With one foot slaking the hot stuffiness of shoes and socks on the bitter tea of a melamine drawer, the other masticating the carpet cheese, I tie a blindfold around my eyes and reach for the porky savour of the doorframe. Because I’m unable to see, the flavours of things must create depth in the dimensions of sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. I imagine I’m in a wire fu harness, poised with the tastes as cables anchoring me to the material world. Pushing off from the lip of the drawer, I arc through the air like a slow-mo stream of Ceylon from the spout of a teapot. I slam into my bed, catching my shin on the frame.
For a few moments, I just lie face down, clutching my leg. The blindfold stays on. When I get up, I move more slowly in my sightlessness, allowing finger and foot to act as a forked snake tongue flicking at surfaces and objects, conversing with the lunchbox architecture of my bedsit.
What I need next is terrain for a new à la carte-ography. I visit the hospital park on my day off and walk barefoot. Standing like a pipette, my soles draw up yeasty beer from the lawn, but the grass monoculture is so far-reaching there are no new tastes to mark my progress. I lose track of where I am in the woozy beeriness. Staggering blindly across the vast lawns, I bump into one of the metal signboards in front of a branded flowerbed. It catches my shin just where it was healing from my run-in with the bed. Opening my eyes, I see the plastic blooms of antihistamine pusher daisies with their yellow pill centre surrounded by petals shaped like sniffle-free, peachy noses. The park is too big; I needed a smaller space.
Now, whenever I can do without You, without your words – on weekends and days off – I chew through the designer furniture stores with their wood veneers, Perspex, steel and microsuede. The stock and display mazes are always changing. The routine is: Survey shop floor from the door. Close eyes and part finger lips. A steady pace is important for digestion. Rushing risks collisions with other shoppers. It also doesn’t fit with the dark glasses and telescoping white cane taken from one of the Lost Property boxes, which keep the shop assistants at bay. Green matcha, rye and camel’s milk help me stay within the lines of the shop-floor sketch as seen from the door and not walk into things. A titbit of cockle is just a corner of the molluscular leather couch. I let the papaya of the cork dining room chairs melt into me. But it’s a little side table with a floral pattern of bone inlaid in resin that I can’t let go of. Fingers hiccough over the slight irregularities in the table’s surface, so that avocado slips into fresh coriander as I try to devour it too quickly. I want to buy the side table but it costs three month’s wages. If I could come home and press my cheek into those buttery oils and herbed astringency, it wouldn’t matter if I was actually eating baked beans from tins. I want it, want it. I need it, until I realise it needs me.
Like all things, it needs me to polish it and dust it, to walk carefully around it, to insure it, to worry when a visitor places a coffee cup on it, to feel ashamed of making it stand on that dreadful carpet and of having brought it into circumstances unbefitting its magnificence. One thing will probably lead to another – another object of desire. Together they’ll conspire for more nights of baked beans. Soon I’ll be twisting and tripping through a harem of recumbent chattels. I feel the weight of all these things and my duty to them, and I don’t even own them yet.
I remember when I was very young and Mother came home with a crystal-encrusted Frisson Froufrou bra that cost most of her salary. Dad was furious. Now it’s me that has You on my tongue and stores in my eyes – even when they’re closed. Am I mutating into Mother? Despite temporarily cutting the vocal cords that bind us, your influence is like mould spores – I inhale it everywhere, constantly. Do I have to give up breathing to be rid of You?
10
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. Pie
ces 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.