Selling LipService

by Tammy Baikie

  After breaking for lunch, the procurator calls a new witness.

  There’s a sound like a body bag being moved. Mother appears wearing a red-trimmed, transparent pink raincoat over a knee-length black shift dress. Red manicured nails hold the edge of the hood over her head as if a sudden sousing gust might blow it back. Mother knows how to make an entrance. The bare skin of her arms simpers through the rose-coloured PVC. She sits in the witness chair behind my right shoulder. I refuse to turn and look at her.

  The bailiff orderly swears her in: ‘Do you swear on the power of speech invested in the transdermal and pains of a second cerebral haemorrhage to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Madame,’ says the procurator, who hasn’t been nearly so gracious in addressing previous witnesses, ‘you are the defendant’s mater familias, correct?’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispers in her most tragic voice.

  ‘Perhaps you could provide a dictum about the lapsus linguae inflicted on you?’

  ‘Oh sir, I’m afraid you’re going for the absolute opaques and leaving it all to the imagination.’ I don’t need to look to know she’s producing a full ingénue’s blushfulness.

  ‘The unbranded LipService in flagrante delicto,’ explains the procurator.

  Mum fatale has told them about how I tried to get her to use unprogrammed LipService.

  ‘Oh, yes. There’s no merrywidow with her, it’s all boxer nastiness. My daughter is ill fitting and rides up my back because of it. It was chest-bindingly cruel to force that unbranded pastie onto me. I would never go commando, I always wear my Frisson Froufrou. But do you think I sagged a bit? No.’

  The procurator is standing just in front of me, bordelloed over. I don’t think he understood a word but he’s rushing over to her. My neck snaps round to follow him and for the first time I look at Mother sitting in the witness chair with the procurator on his knees to her right, clasping her hand. On her left the judge crouches, clutching her other hand. The light from the dome above illuminates the rose raincoat and Mother is transfigured into the madonna of the sunset corona. She’s a woman on fire, and through the glow I swear I see she-me standing behind Mother, arms over head, holding the lighter aloft. Mother is the brand made flesh, Frisson Froufrou incarnate. The men of law are weak-kneed before her.

  Petula stamps her foot but it makes no sound in its hushed-up hose. ‘Objectio, objectio!’ The judge hurls the reflex hammer at her but it glances off her bunched shoulder pad. I start laughing. It’s an ugly sound, but I can’t stop.

  When order is finally restored and the adorers have regained their feet, the procurator says, ‘The testimonium of this charming gentlewoman is lux in tenebris, a great illuminator. For what does it reveal?’ He pauses uncertainly.

  I see them all waiting on the gallery’s hard wooden benches, waiting to understand and participate in the court’s catharsis. For once they aren’t all looking at me, and I search the rows for Stillwell, but he’s not there.

  ‘What does it not reveal!’ he declares triumphantly.

  With that court is adjourned for the weekend.

  20

  In my cell, I lie on my bed, digesting the yoghurty tasture of the sheets. It’s proof of life when I’m starting to feel unreal. Language in the Ether Jar sublimates into gas, increasing the empty spaces between atoms of meaning. I am that void, the unspoken, the rapidly dispersing significance of these speech particles.

  Words fail me. They do me no justice. Not because I am innocent, but because they can’t give offense – least of all mine. What does the procurator or Judge Mannix or Petula Ormod or Dr Bromide think my patch prose was like? What does the unspeakable mean to those who have never heard it – like the mob eager to lynchpin it on me? Do they even know what it is? In LipService there is rhyme but no reason.

  There is someone who could tell everyone what LitService was really like, who knows what it’s like to face a dead wall of language. And when I return to the Ether Jar on Monday, he is called to testify. I can tell from the crease in his trousers that he has returned to the fold.

  ‘Copywriter,’ says the procurator, ‘you are the provisor of panem et circenses to the plebeius …’

  ‘Bread and circuses!’ interrupts Wordini. ‘Who writes your Arguendo? That is just too ah-cute.’

  ‘Arguendo is an imperium in imperio,’ mumbles Brimlad. ‘Now, forthwith to the quaestio: What confeasible interest could you have in this offender?’ He waves towards me.

  ‘Commercial, of course. The good doctor and I reached our mutually agreeable firms on merchandising. Manus manum lavat and all that. Isn’t that what you lawyawners say – one hand washes the other?’

  The audience starts applauding, Wordini takes a bow, and the procurator rams the witness chair into the back of his knees so that he falls back into his seat.

  ‘Could we continue?’ asks Procurator Brimlad. ‘Is it not a non sequitur to employ a persona non grata in essential surfaces such as copywriting?’

  ‘Perhaps to the sparrow-minded,’ says Wordini, looking directly at the procurator. ‘But the best way to mortar a maverbrick into place is to turn oddity into commodity. Which is why my medicronies and I are launching Censory LipService – a patch that brings your speech to your senses …’

  Wordini’s announcement whooshes through the gallery that had been wilting under all the hot air.

  ‘Copywriter, copywriter …’ insists the procurator, hoping to switch Wordini’s raillery back onto his track, but he rattles on, overfreighted.

  ‘Imagine dining out on your brand slogan. You can – but can you guess how it will taste? This is the real lip-smacking nature of the desplendent’s perversity and now you can safely relish the deviant neural paths that brought her here.’

  The audience bends to his windy language.

  ‘Our Censory LipService lets you savour word flavours.’

  ‘Contemptus!’ bellows the judge. ‘The court is not a forum for mercators to vender their vendibles. You will adhere to the question or be held in contemptus.’

  Wordini is undeterred. ‘Free sample patches sponsored by The Hayrick at the exit.’ The judge responds with the knee-jerk action of the reflex hammer. An orderly reaches under each of the copywriter’s armpits, and together they haul him away, still inveigling, ‘With Censory LipService, you’ll truly chew over your words, as never before!’

  The crowd are shifty in their seats, furtively turning to the exit, where another pair of large orderlies has stepped forward to block the doors. As Wordini is dragged past me, he succeeds in bringing the digits of one hand to his mouth and kissing them in a gesture that is part ironic magnifique – perhaps, at all that has brought me to this point – and part finger-licking. It’s what I also saw Dr Bromide do.

  ‘Your Honour, Surgeon Legal, I haven’t cross-interrogoed the witness,’ complains Petula Ormod.

  ‘Objectio overwrought,’ says the judge and waves her back to her seat.

  Wordini’s triumphant finger-kissing opens up a fault in me, and I half stand, my wrists still bound to the wheelchair’s arms and start running at him. Beneath the carapace of the chair, I hear the wind between my handlebar horns. The movement is its own impetus. Until I harrow into Wordini’s back. And the possessed whistling dies out.

  When the orderlies come for me again the next day, they also restrain my ankles to the footrests’ struts. ‘Any further attempts at perverting the course of justice and it’s sedation for you,’ says the hairy one who had been escorting Wordini out when I charged at him.

  Wordini’s advertorial outburst still seems to be ringing in people’s ears, leaving them deaf to new sounds. Petula sits listlessly swiping a device screen while she rubs a foot with the other hand. Again and again, Judge Mannix a-hems, everyone sits up blinking, but he fails to call the court to order. When the session finally begins, Procurator Brimlad summons Stillwell to the stand.

  It’s wrenching trying to s
ee his face, but he stays turned away as he walks to the witness chair. The collar of his white coat is turned up against the cold, or everything else. I feel how he is buttoned up and I’m afraid – I don’t know whether for him or me. Pivoting in my chair, I glimpse the orderly, who rocks on the balls of his feet and raises a finger. I sit quietly to hear what Stillwell will say. Can’t let them banish me into the n-ether now.

  ‘You were the facile princeps of the posse forensis that investigated the medico-tempering of LipService patches?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The onus probandi – the burden of proof – was on this posse. And what evidence did you discover? Did veritate triumpho?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your posse revelared that the programma was sorcered from the index librorum prohibitorum.’

  ‘Yes.’

  At last, the procurator has a witness ameekable to his questioning – someone who seems to have no interest in upstaging or downcasting him. ‘And quod erat demonstrandum the defendant’s crimen?’ Before Stillwell can answer, the procurator realises his mistake in asking something that demands more than a monosyllable. ‘Allow me to refaze,’ he says, his hand dramatically raised. ‘Did you uncover prima facie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is this your res ipsa loquitur?

  The ‘yes’ reply is softer this time, more just the sibilance of a sigh.

  ‘Declamatio, please,’ insists the procurator.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I present ad curiam Exhibit A.’

  I’m in pains to see what he’s talking about, but the strain is unnecessary. Procurator Brimlad moves around the room, proffering the object on a platter like wedding cake. A woman in the gallery screams and tries to clamber back over the rows above hers. Most in the crowd are confused. At first all I can see is a transparent yellowish plastic block. Then, as he moves round the arc of the gallery, I see it. Eda-Lyn is set in resin like the book in the repository’s display case. Not just cast out, but cast in. Untouchable.

  All my head hollows fill with weep water. Dead brackish pools no squid ink will stir. No black words from the page to murk the LipService. No way to raise a sleeve to a brine-brindled face. No, no, no. Noisy squalls that wash the sandbars of my face away. She that’s more me cups her hands below my jaw to collect the run off. Her face is so terrifyingly close I can see how it’s drawn on with makeup. Now, as she moulds her features with all that has leaked out of me and is lost, cheeks, chin and forehead all become more defined, more real. Already she has the scar in her eyebrow. Do I still have mine? It itches where the bare skin between the hairs should be. Soon I’ll be the immaterial one. She’s leaving me unsavoury, to taste of nothing.

  I don’t see or hear the orderly approach. Did the judge shout, call for silence? Only the bore of the needle pries into flesh and consciousness. It opens a tunnel into mind and matter that collapses on itself.

  ‘The defendant is sedated, your Honour.’

  I don’t sleep at night. Stillwell knew where the book was hidden. No one else. Stillwell, the head of the forensic investigation. Stillwell my friend. I feel the hum come on all electric. The pound of blood and beating sashimi fist.

  Orderly rubber soles squeak against the new polish of morning, scuffling me into the chair and dullness. Benzo days. I sit in court unminded. What I remember is madness mongering. Mrs Mondaine, my teacher of long ago, was called and arrived accompanied by a class of children dressed for a brand-mascot parade. One had a live LipService Polly Parrot. It mimicked everything being said

  ‘Sentencing today, so no benzo,’ says the orderly. ‘The Surgeon Legal wants you of sound mind.’ He thinks that’s funny. In the Ether Jar, my wheelchair is turned for the first time to face the judge’s operating table rather than the gallery.

  Judge Mannix begins reading, ‘As ruled ab initio, the defendant has been found guilty by the processus per inquisitionem on the counts of breaking and entering into EmPath Industries’ property, the misappropriation of materia medica and tampering therewith, joined with the charge of compelled self-defamation pursuant to the consumption of said contaminated materia by members of the Copywriters’ Association.’

  He takes a deep breath before continuing. ‘This incursus on our modus vivendi cannot be tolerated. Of courts, culpae poenae par esto – the punishment must fit the crime. In proclamaring her sentence every time she speaks, the felon shall maledictio herself and it shall memento her ignominia and be horribile dictu for all to hear. This sentence was written curtsy of the Copywriters’ Association and shall be read by their representatus.’

  Now that I face the judge, I have to twist against the restraints to see that it’s Wordini who rises from his seat in the front row of the gallery and reads my sentence: ‘I pay for Lip Disservice; I hang my tongue in shame.’

  He lets a black tongue droop out of his mouth so that the crowd recedes from it like a hairline.

  Once Wordini is seated again, the judge announces, ‘The felon convictus will now intact her sentence.’

  An orderly applies a patch to my neck and releases the restraints on my hands and feet before pulling me to my feet. A second stands by. They wait as I hunch over the jolt.

  ‘Now, let us hear the vox veritas. Speak!’ orders Judge Mannix.

  I don’t want to. I won’t. The orderly thumps me on the back as if I were choking and the words fall out like half-chewed meat: ‘I pay for Lip Disservice; I hang my tongue in shame.’

  The crowd mocks and caterwauls. Are those even words they’re hurling? The knives are out again. Used transdermals pelt down. The hissing and booing drowns out the judge, who is reading the rest of the sentence regardless. There’s a brownish smudge on the adhesive side of the patch that’s landed at my foot. Meaning won’t stick any more.

  21

  In that cell, after the trial, I lost all whyfor. There was no reason in being. My pieces no longer fitted; they had grown apart. Once I woke in my cot to my screamed sentence – ‘I pay for Lip Disservice; I hang my tongue in shame.’ In my nightmare, I was shouting something else, but those words were the only ones possible out loud. As I lay there, something took shape in the dark umbrage I felt towards all patched expression – the word morth, my first shadow word. It’s undefined. It bites the lip instead of serving it. It means nothing to anyone but me. I created its sound and its sense. It’s entirely mine. No more second-hand language for me. Slowly, slowly, I’m adding to the shadow words – perguiling my vocabulary. Eventually, when I ramble, it won’t be on the treacherous lie of the land.

  It’s weeks, maybe a month later that a copywriter with the page name Verbociter comes to speak to me. She says that, among a certain ‘coterie of copyrati’, my LitService has ‘revived interest in leveraging book resources for brand differentiation’. As a result, a liberarian is once again needed at the repository to meet this demand.

  I listen to how her ugly club-footed words make her stump speeches. Of course, she says, there’s ‘no rewriting the wrong’: I am still condemned to my sentence. She has, however, discovered that the terms of my conviction make provision for a parole d’honneur spoken by a suitable corporate champion and has lobbied her association to apply. All the ‘dread tape’ has been taken care of. She just needs to scan my fingerprints as consent.

  I think of that other contract in Dr Bromide’s office and I try to read the document on her device. She lets me but my mind is as small a lurk-hole as my cell, and neither can accommodate legal furniture. Besides, just the thought of getting out and returning to the book repository fills that tiny space like a carp in a goldfish bowl. I let her print me.

  For the first time in almost a year, I’m not wearing hospital pyjamas. My fingers only want to know the ricotta whey of my shirt. When I’m released from the linen cuffs, I can’t stop ploughing the guava furrows of my corduroys. The door to my cell opens and I walk out. Just like that. I keep looking over my shoulder, looking for orderlies, lawyers, doctors, copywriters, she that’s me.
There’s no one. I leave virtually unheeded.

  I notice the change in LipService. Bromide’s tasture technology has reached the market. Now it’s easy to see, across a room, a street or office, which tout has shifted ever so slightly off-message. The bad taste it leaves in their mouth is hard to hide. They pull their faces into the ugliness of a used handkerchief. The doctor has made sure that no one can look sprilow while off brand. I see it in the way people try to shoot words like ping-pong balls between the teeth without letting them touch sides. At corner stores, the chewing gum stands have signs saying, ‘No stock. On order.’ People chew against the bitter dictates of taste. I try not to step in the pale blobs of ZapperMint, AniseIce and CinnaMax on the pavement.

  I’m glad to get back to my flat. The crepulet palpitations of hard sell LipService on the streets and on the bus deliver me bruised and sweating onto my doorstep. Inside, I find all the Fabergé nest eggs and the piled-high attempts to regain purchase on materialism, under Wordini’s instruction. I almost go straight back out again. I just want all of that gone. I need to know my walls – what to line up against, like in my cell. The boxes stack up and are tracked down the stairs to the kerb. Slowly as the flat empties, I sense my boundaries.

  In the kitchen, the fridge has been switched off and cleared out but stinks. Neither here nor anywhere else in the bedsit has my life been unpacked in a great rummagery. There was no frantic search; they knew where to look: the broom cupboard door hangs defeated. Pieces of the broken robotic vacuum cleaner where I hid Eda-Lyn lie on the floor. Of course, my share of the stolen unbranded patches is also gone from the bedroom curtain hem. Not that I expect to ever speak the shadow words out loud.

  Sitting on the counter drinking water from a glass – a real, menthol-chill glass, not a paper cup – I notice the Nice Slice pizza clock has stopped. I take it off the wall and pry the back open. In the compartment where the batteries should go are three unbranded patches. On each one a word is written in black marker: sorry, sorry, sorry.