by Tammy Baikie
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 f
ingers 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.
11
Clothes, toiletries, packets of vegetable seed, lentils and my book from Dad. I put it all in a bag and then take it all out again. The order feels wrong or the uncertainty about going to live with the silents is behaving like referred pain. Should I rather put the book at the bottom of the bag or in a separate pocket? I’m not going anywhere without it, but what if they want to take it away from me? The lentils and seeds are gifts anyway; Oona said they would be appreciated. And they can cut up my clothes and share out my toiletries, I don’t care. Just not the book. I rest my hands on Eda-Lyn and press my fingers in circles over her skin to reassure her, as the woman Gudrun did to me.
Since joining the mutes, I haven’t had You sneak through the cat flap in my head for a week now. That’s the longest I’ve been free of your visitations since I came of haemorrh-age. Now that your crowding presence is gone, my thoughts are skittish and agoraphobic. But the quiet is already padding the walls. I have joined Poppy in patch-making, where the buds of my fingers taste different fabrics. It’s also one of the only jobs in the community that has a residual attachment to language. I enjoy subvertising the logos – with a nip and a tuck turning Prince coffee into Price coffee. Most of the clothes come from landfill. I asked Mother about it once, and she said it was to ‘preserve brand integrity’. Donating unworn Frisson Froufrou lingerie to charity stores or organisations damages its upscale image, so instead new bras and knickers are defaced and dumped if unsold.
Oona checks in on me at least once a day. She revises what she calls ‘hand words’ with me. Of course, they aren’t words at all; they can’t do what words do – fracture the light of meaning through a crystal lattice to reveal its component colours. They are restricted to the dull grind of manual labour – mimic an action, signify an action. There are only about 70 of them and I already know them. Palms together making a pillow for the head means ‘sleep, asleep, go to sleep, sleeping’, the fingertips of one hand pressed together and held up to the mouth signals ‘food, eat, hungry’. They are the high wall around an abstinent life.
For those who must go as far as to speak, a flat hand at the side of the mouth indicates that a teller – one of the unbled – should be called. This starts a game of charades with the kids guessing at the meaning. The success rate isn’t good.
Mainly, it’s the younger ones, whose haemorrhages are recent, that ask for a teller. The older silents hardly ever use this last retort. Maybe they’re tired of the indignity of playing the fool, or maybe they don’t have anything they really want to say any more. Is it possible to no longer want to trace out the topography of language? I can’t imagine that. As much as I despised LipService, with its trompe-l’oeil ceiling of airbrushed angelic aspirations, I feel the flatness of my scratchings in the dirt here.
The thread running through my patch-making day is the possibility of adding to the hand words. I think of it as my gift to the mutes – a word in repayment for the generosity of these people’s touch. Like the head of a tick still attached to my skin even after the body has been pulled off, the itch of your mouthparts says that this is no kindness – I want more hand words. I don’t listen.
When everyone gathers for dinner in the parking garage, announcements are made. A mute will stand and perform a few hand words. The scrape of the tin drum that is my seat against the concrete floor turns a glitter of gazes on to me. I point to myself to indicate ‘I’; next comes my new hand word – I rub my left patchwork sleeve between the opposite thumb and forefinger to represent ‘feel’. Heads swivel: there are no hand words for sensation or emotion, which is strange for a culture that prizes touch. It’s what makes the sign seem so necessary to me. I finish with the left hand over my heart for gratitude, thanks and respect. Gudrun rises and slowly turns her back to me, and to the table, before sitting down again on her metal drum, facing the exit. The true silents clustered around her follow suit. And eventually so does everyone else at the table. Poppy is one of the last to rise. She looks at me as if I were the monkey who won’t release the word candies and so can’t get its closed fist out of the narrow neck of the jar. She makes one furtive sign, ‘school’. Normally, the sign would mean the community’s school on the property but I’m sure she means the one we attended, where we created new words. Then she also scold-shoulders me. I’m left standing. She thinks I’m refusing to learn.
Oona comes and leads me out of the parking garage.
‘You’ve been given a warning. No one is allowed to make new hand signs.’
I make a mute point of shrugging and facial confusion. There’s no hand sign for ‘why’ either.
‘It’s got to do with the talking labels and brands.’ She says the last word as if sliding a hand into a dark burrow in the ground. ‘And the way they make feelings and wanting go bad. Some things must be shown by our actions not our words.’
I nod. She leaves me sitting watching the cabbages grow obediently in the last of the day’s light.
I stick to the hand signs, but knowing that I can’t add to them is starting to make me resent them almost as much as the patch. Oona still makes me practise the signs. I think she’s worried. Only I can’t tell about what. Whether I’ve accepted that I can’t invent new ones? Whether I’m adjusting or have already been too damaged by the ‘talking label’?
One day, instead of asking for the next hand word, Oona says, ‘Did you know Avery?’
I can’t think who she’s talking about so give a slow half shake of the head.
‘Avery was my best friend. I knew his touch on my back without seeing him. Poppy went to find him when he didn’t come back from the hospital. We’re not supposed to look for the ones that don’t come back. But Avery was like me. He was born here and he told me he was coming back. He promised to bring me sweets. Poppy says he’s dead.’
The carton that Poppy collected. That was Avery. For a moment, I feel like a gravedigger who is caught lifting coffin lids. But she can’t know. Lost Property can’t be explained in mute point, can it?
‘In the box that Poppy brought back were sweets. I know they were sweets because the packet said: “Pop mothballs in, and forget the gnawing worries.” Poppy won’t let us have them. But I want to eat those sweets and remember Avery.’
Oona’s words remind me of the cause of death on Avery’s box: ‘Fatal haemolytic anaemia due to naphthalene/dichlorobenzene poisoning resulting from ingestion of mothballs.’ I had thought it was suicide but Avery was poisoned with words.
‘What?’ says Oona.
It’s impossible to share ideas with people here, but they notice the most infinitesimal muscular twitch of emotion. I ape putting something in my mouth and then keel over cartoonishly. The shame of explaining a death with such buffoonery is horrible.
‘The sweets killed him?’
I try again, following the eating gesture with a waggling finger to show that mothballs aren’t food, but she thinks I’m forbidding her sweets. Only when I pretend to take a bite out of the end of a candle does she understand.
‘So why does the packet use those words?’
With effort, I pull my shoulders back from the defeatism of shrugging. I don’t know how to explain the metaphorical mid-air twisting of words that land catlike on another level of meaning.
I remember how Dad died writing an echo, burnt by the flame of language. Avery died, a clothes moth drawn to the wordless darkness in a dumb fog of naphthalene. Poor Avery in fool’s mothley. His end is as nonsensical as Dad’s.
Oona reads my face and says, ‘You’ll find a way to explain it.’
The next day, while I’m cutting and sewing, cutting and sewing, my mind, too, is stuck on a loop until I imagine my hands as Dad’s and guess the meaning of my own mute point – the cutting and rebinding of the stories between Eda-Lyn’s skin. The book. With the book I can show Oona the shifty character of words.
There’s a riddle that Dad and I loved, which is perfect. And Oona already knows about guessing games – she has to solve the silents’ body-twisters all the time. The thing about riddles is that they’re like a weather vane – it’s not the compass point, which the arrow indicates, but its opposite that is the answer. And this one’s easy enough, if you know about books. I can already hear it in my head:
Musty moth made a meal of words.
More’s the marvel that in the murk,
While munching worm’s mouth does work,
It robs the writer of his riddle
And relishes rare rhetoric,
Yet retires still unrefined in matters politic.
For Dad and me, the solution (bookworm or booklouse) was itself a metaphor that hatches out of the original riddle as a LipService larva and eats all the books and everyone’s speech, only leaving us droppings. For all the words it has consumed and all the words it makes us spout – because more is never enough – they’re still just the waste of our thoughts. So am I better off now without the worm and entirely without words? Avery has made me uncertain. What if the mutes’ silence is a great unlearning? With every generation, more of them will come of haemorrh-age only to eat mothballs and stick their fingers in electric sockets when forced to step out into the consumerist world. Perhaps the doctors and copywriters are counting on that, together with untreated second haemorrhages and disease.