Selling LipService

by Tammy Baikie

  15

  It’s launch night for The Hayrick pop-up restaurant. I don’t know what to expect or even what to hope for. I’ve had my head stuck in the cloudy glass of my cubicle. In a vague unarticulated way, I suppose I imagined I was creating savoury textures for Stillwell alone. But I’m not. As Wordini said, ‘This is the beta phase for the tasture tablewear. If you can serve up the tastemakers on an indoctrinplate, we can cut ourselves a nice share of wallet.’ And what if I hit the buyers’ spree spot? Do I want that? And what if I don’t? Which is worse?

  The diners wear blindfolds, my French chain-mail beards and big bibs. A set of my spoons hangs from long cords around their necks so they can’t lose them. In the lift down to an abandoned underground station, the attendants put on their thermal imaging goggles. They lead the influencers and opinion feeders to their tables to take up their suppersitions. Above ground in a small recording room, Wordini watches the red-green-blue human heat signatures from the infrared camera. I sit next to him.

  Even though I know that the diners can’t see them, the stalk-eyed attendants carrying in the entrée work on my nerves like the horrid high-pitched shrilling of a dog whistle. I know I can’t say anything to Wordini because this was his pragmatist’s solution to serving people food in complete darkness. They’re just wrong as part of my tasture opera. But I don’t have time to ponder why. Already the spoons with the knobbly lips have skidded off in hot pursuit of mushrooms stuffed with The Hayrick escargot.

  ‘Ah, it’s epiphanised eating – a fork-tender, molecular deconstruction of songbird hearts infused in joie de garlic butter,’ bellows a large celebrity chef. Just because the banquothers can’t see each other, they all seem convinced that no one can hear normally either.

  ‘That’s a load of meat-factory pink slurry,’ shouts back a retail-chain buyer directly opposite him. ‘Can’t you savourise the sousvide aubergine with a hint of tarragon and longing?’

  ‘And what about these?’ says a woman, clinking her beard. Surprisingly, everyone appears to hear the slight tinging perfectly. ‘They bring out the full eruptive demeanour of the victuals, n’est-ce pas?’

  ‘There’s a definite umami about the whole brazen enigma,’ agrees the chef.

  ‘I prefer the nipple-grazing lip of this spoon as it rises from the unmade bed of fennel,’ says someone else.

  In self-congratulation, Wordini slaps my back and gleefully crows, ‘They’re swallowing it like foie gras geese with the gavage funnel down their throats. No pseudy will ever admit to having lost the pot in a dining experience.’

  ‘You make them sound as oblivious as the character in CEO Sindy’s Selkie Suit,’ I say miserably, although I suspect that this is really more like The Emperor’s New Clothes and I am the weaver who has spun the invisible robes.

  ‘What a droll little banalogy,’ he laughs.

  ‘So are we going to explain tasture to them, the way the textile technologists do for CEO Sindy and the management board at the end of the story?’

  ‘What in mirth for? Then they would have something they could bespittle with their sharp tongues,’ he replies.

  ‘If this is what you had in mind all along, what did you need me for?’

  ‘My dear dupe, I could never have come up with a hoodwink as genuinely shamboozling as all this. The spoons, the beards, the darkness – no amount of my weasel words could achieve it.’

  I turn back to the screen and the naked heat of the bodies. There are bits of food caught in the beards now, morsels and sauces dripped all over the table linen. Although they’ve learned to adjust the volume of their voices, they’ve also quickly adapted to the leeway blindness gives them to scratch itches and fully aerate a mouthful while talking. It’s all so very ugly. I look at the carpet between my feet because I can’t bear seeing this crookery of tasture, knowing that I scammed it into being.

  At the end of the meal, the tastemakers are brought back up to the surface. They spend a few minutes in a dimmed room, removing their blindfolds and bibs and cleaning themselves up as their eyes adjust to the light. Together with The Hayrick execs, Wordini and I wait to receive their impressions over coffee.

  Since getting unbranded LipService, I’ve spoken only to Wordini, some of the staff in his office and Stillwell. With branded patches, no one says the wrong thing – or the right thing. I feel self-conscious and more than self-conscious – afraid to speak.

  The opinion feeders start arriving in the reception area. I manage to stay out of the hobmobbing by making my coffee with the slow deliberateness of someone modelling a ship in a bottle. When I can’t delay any longer, I turn from the table and am instantly cornered by the celebrity chef. ‘So you’re the little saucier who cooked up this amuse touche?’ He taps my forehead with one of my spoons still hanging from the cord around his neck.

  ‘Uh … yes.’

  ‘You must know,’ he says conspiratorially, ‘that my métier is really the ambrosialisation of harpoon-caught lexicon served drizzled with gastrosexual promise. Half of dining is menu descriptions.’ He winks.

  He looks at me, anticipating some response, only I have none. So he forages on. ‘Of course, with your sensory palate cleansers, flavours sigh to a liquid-smoke climax.’

  My gratitude flashes flambé blue. I think he understands something of what I was trying to do. ‘Thank you, I’m so glad you feel that way.’

  Encouraged, the chef continues. ‘So you’ll give me a toothsome soupçon of your recipe?’

  Behind him Wordini is violently gesturing for me to zip it. I’d like to enjoy the irony of the copywriter trying to enact a mute point like a silent, but earlier he’d threatened me: ‘If you break the ruse, those will be your infamous last words.’

  While I can’t tell the chef anything, I want to show him my appreciation. I rest my hand on his shoulder and am about to say how sorry I am that I can’t help, when he recoils under my touch. With a noise like a balloon animal being twisted into shape, he withdraws, disappearing behind a conversing group of The Hayrick executives and retail buyers.

  In the shock of the moment, I find myself wondering about Stillwell. Would he have known that some people react like this to touch? Probably. He seems to have a better grip on the LipService mindset than I do. I attempt to scale its glossy heights but like a spider trying to escape a bath, I always slip back.

  Wordini is laughing hard. It takes him a while to recover enough to speak. ‘Pseudies can’t ordeal with uncomplicated sensory input,’ he explains. ‘It’s like serving them plain, unsalted rice. If the grains haven’t been cajoled, poached in brand bouillon and given symbolic fluffings, they would rather starve than eat them.’ He starts laughing again. ‘You didn’t actually think being a foodie had anything to do with sensual experience?’

  Wordini calls me into his office. ‘My trend patrol brings us good sidings from the front lines.’ He hands me photographs showing people wearing my beards and spoons as they walk through shopping malls, receive pedicures and draw money from ATMs. The pop-up restaurant closed two weeks ago, and a limited edition of The Hayrick hampers with the spoons and beards is available at selected stores.

  ‘But … none of them are eating,’ I say slowly, trying to train my confused ideas over this trellis of the obvious.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it a coo-coup – everyone cooing all cuckoo over your product coup? Now try and say that fast!’ he says, guffawing at his own wit.

  The beards are starting to take on a life of their own. The trend patrol’s pictures show that, while some women continue to wear them as a sort of high-fashion yashmak, others drape them like triangular kerchiefs over their heads. Both sexes attach them to belts as suggestive loincloths over jeans, with the mouth hole rather obscenely positioned at crotch height.

  While I’m looking at the pictures, I have to keep reminding myself that I made the beards. They are my creation. But I can tell myself that as often as I like, it’s not true. A realisation comes like that sense of falling that wakes you with
a start. It’s as if a LipService of objects is at work. Some monstrous genetic modification occurs as my ideas reseed from me in distant soil. How could something that comes from me sprout strong and alien – true products of the consumerist dirt? I suspect your involvement; I suspect a side effect of the implants. My suspicion roves, it beats at the air but finds no perch to rest on.

  After seeing my bespoiled beards, I left a message for Wordini before quitting the office, saying that I wasn’t well and wouldn’t be coming into work today. I just want to pick up my pieces. But now Wordini is yelling down the phone at me.

  ‘If you want your every boo-hoo pandered to, you should’ve survendored yourself to Dr Bromide. So unless you’re having a rupture, I own your fat farce and you’d better get over here.’

  In my unpatched state, all I can do is make a small groan of assent.

  When I arrive at the office, it becomes apparent that Wordini’s snooper troopers aren’t the only ones who’ve been watching the beards’ depurposing into status symbols. A number of corporate clients have contacted Wordini saying they also want what he refers to as ‘spoondoggles or some such parapheregalia’. I sit in my cubicle and think about starting all over again, knowing that no one – neither the corporations nor their customers – gives a discount coupon about what tasture really is. I can’t bear to watch what I feel being commercially abominmated again. My forehead sinks into the sour rye crust of the desk. The only way is to fake it. It won’t matter anyway. I’ve learnt from the pseudies – everyone just wants a slice of crispy half-bakery.

  I develop a pitch for scent diffusers that release blasts of newly mowed grass in a DIY chain. My first choice was freshly sawn wood, but Wordini’s research indicates employees were considered ‘more fix-it fit’ when planted in a meadow of a grassy olfactor. For Nice Slice pizza, I design a scratch and sniff takeaway menu. That’s when Wordini comes to me, waving the mock-up and announcing his presence with a zephyr of anchovies and cheese.

  ‘Where are the fingerfoods? I gave you Nice Slice so that you could induce a Pavlovian product response,’ he snaps.

  ‘But this triggers salivatory pooling much faster than the drool-down effect of the beards. I’ve read papers from the database about the olfactory bulb’s location within the limbic system and direct access to the amygdala and hippocampus, which makes for more powerfully conditioned associations with mood and memory than other senses.’

  He looks at me with narrowed eyes and I’m suddenly so nervous that, without even touching it, I taste the tension in the high thread-count of his suit as a metallic note. The release of pressure is sudden as he turns to leave my cubicle, saying, ‘Botch your step and I’ll have you scotched.’

  The projects keep coming. My elevator concept for the Arcadian Group of hotels adds real vibrandcy to the chain’s signature experience. Even Wordini gave cred so. By selecting a floor, guests also engage an ambience. For the suite level, projections on the elevators’ walls make patrons feel as if they are travelling between the canopy and floor of a rainforest. Instead of music there are surround effects of dripping water, calling birds and the shrill of the katydid.

  I feel the warm hug of smug as I produce these forged experiences. At the launches, unveilings and openings, I’ve even learned to make appropriately ambogus statements such as, ‘Yes, the rainforest ambience enhances a form of psychological levitation, of leaving behind the surly-burly world beyond the hotel doors.’ I tell myself I’m fooling everyone, that I can huff and puff and blow them all away. But the workdays just never end and my eyes are soon shackled in black rings. ‘It’s a form of psychological levitation,’ I repeat at product parties. And I’m too heavy to rise to anything else.

  Everything – my words, my ideas – seem to come out of a price gun, the same little sticky labels. Today, the sell has run dry. I’m coming up blank on the Skidoo retail concept. I have nothing. Just nothing. They sell ski equipment. I watch the promotional videos. All I can think is that things would be better if I were on skis.

  At lunch I go to a Skidoo outlet. I buy skis. I stand on a plastic slope. The gliding is nice but I still don’t feel it. Maybe it should be cold. It’s the only thing I can come up with. Make the whole store very cold – wintery.

  ‘That’s not a sham dunk! It’s so bleedious, I’m surprised I haven’t haemorrhaged,’ Wordini says in disgust. Failure, failure. I’ve failed even in fakery. I think of Lost Property – a box with my name on it. It’s empty. I’m empty and dead. To fill me up, Wordini prescribes a malling – I must ‘regain purchase on materialism’, he says. He expects certain ‘spend-swift ways’ of his staff. That means ‘presenting proof of investments with an appropriately high cost-to-status ratio’ in the form of receipts.

  At the shopping arcades, I get comimmersed in dresses and scarves. I drape, swathe and cloak myself in cotton, linen, satin, silk, neoprene and grosgrain. Automatically my mind gets into the weave of catchpraises – wear the kindest cut of all, putting the neo in preening. I devour so much yoghurt, ricotta, sesame, cool mint, beeswax and drippings that I feel a bit sick. Still, I must stimulate the wardlobe of my brain. Keep going, I tell myself, clutching at handbags, grand bags, tanned bags – because life holds more with a designer bag. I know I’m spinning too fast and am losing words’ worth, but if I can’t brandstorm, fire off a stun-pun, they’ll take away my language. I even go back to Skidoo and buy a downy parka, snow boots and earmuffs. But the hot stuffiness of trying them on stifles any other ideas.

  I stand outside the door of the flat with my shopping bags, keys in hand, but I don’t want to go in. Since being pro-opted by Wordini, my flat has closed in on me. Gangs of goods wield their sharp edges in the shadowy alleyways between boxes of material indulgence that I’ve never unpacked. All these things wait for me. They lurk. I lurch. They throw themselves at me. Sharp heels and kicking toes of bitchy stilettos. It’s as if they know I’m foundering in their ostentnarration. Reaching for the light switch, I’m pelted by a collection of Fabergé eggs. I beat a retreat to my bed, where I have to fend off the advances of the greedy guava-walnut-melba ensemble that reclines there. I’m grateful to sleep.

  The alarm goes off in the half light. My mind tears loose from my body in shock and my limbs can’t find their way home. An arm connects with something hard, and one of the skis falls like a guillotine on my head. The rabble of revolutionary un-a-wares cheers. My head hurts and my vision jumps like the picture on a bad TV screen.

  Through the blur, I notice a movement at the front door. From the hood of the Skidoo parka that hangs on the hook there, I see a face emerge. My face. But it’s elaborately made up – as if I were Mother. She that’s me approaches the bed with an awful painted smile. All my great and goods rattle with excitement. In her hand she holds my spoon – the one with the mouth-filling bulb – and a beard. She moves towards me with swaying hips, the snake in the gross sales. And I know – I know without a doubt she’s come to wedge the silver spoon in my mouth and tie it in place with the beard.

  ‘Mild concussion as the result of minor head trauma,’ says Stillwell to me in the hospital. Although I’ve seen him weekly at the office for the MindSweeper downloads, we haven’t been able to meet for an unbranded speakeasy for months. ‘You’ve been certified invalid for two weeks – although you’ll be discharged tomorrow. You’ll need to remain recumbent. I’ll increase on-site neural monitoring.’ I dip my chin into a nod and feel a stab in my head. Any relief at escaping the office is sold down the shiver by the fact that I’ll be deworded for all that time. My stock will be downgraded.

  Stillwell arrives to check in on me at home. He looks shocked at how my flat has come under pretsiege by status goods and carefully picks his way through the tortuous terrain of pricey, pretty things. While taking data readings and doing the neural checks, he seems more withdrawn than usual. I miss the little touches. When he’s done, I get out the two unbranded patches left over from last time.

  ‘What’s, what’s all thi
s … stuff?’ he blurts out as soon as he’s patched in, waving a hand around the room.

  ‘Investments with an appropriately high cost-to-status ratio,’ I say.

  ‘I thought you didn’t care about … about things.’ It’s an accusation.

  ‘Spend-swift is a corporate responsibility of all copywriters.’

  ‘So? You don’t have to keep it. Sell it, sell it all,’ he says.

  I hesitate and his face takes on an expression of disnay – a hardening against me.

  ‘But I need it to get into the products’ spin so that I can transprose the buyological urge.’

  ‘They’re, they’re …’ I can see his thoughts engaged in a furious stock count of words. ‘They’re contumour goods, understand? Contumour goods!’

  He starts fiddling with the edge of his patch as if he’s going to tear it off and walk away. Instead he looks at me and says, ‘You know, you’re talking like him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Wordini. You’re talking like him – even when you don’t have to. The armnotes were never like that. Are you still even making those?’

  I haven’t written an eloquention for weeks. I’ve been too busy writing commercenery rhymes. I look at my hands even though hanging my head hurts.

  16

  The noosey parka is keeping to itself. I stare at it hanging on the door. I squint and look atrance. But it remains unanimated – a legless back turned to me as it hides its face and perhaps a gallows-knot in its sleeve. But she that’s me doesn’t appear.

  The censuring ski has done me a kindness. It’s given me time to think about how I got from working on the beards to where I am now – from an empty flat to one beset and bethinged, and from Stillwell’s expression when I wrote the armnotes to his face when he saw my advertising hoardings. There must’ve been a moment when I made a You-turn, chose to peddle indulgence and commodeify my life. Only there wasn’t. I didn’t surrender to You, and I haven’t become mirage-me with the awful painted smile. Have I? All I wanted was unbranded language, but somehow that single desire mutated through rapid sell division into a legion of splurge urges. One desire in life is never enough for the conspicuous consumer. On every street corner, products are out soliciting with a wink and a smile.