“Use-Wish...”
“Remember you’re Lucillite. Identify. That’s all I want you to do. Identify. Now—get rolled up. Like a spring. Fine. Tight with Use-Wish. I really think we’ve got something here, Richard. O.K. Now let it come.”
“Sex-thing, it is, by God...”
“Great. Great.”
“No, you’re dead right, Gordon. I’m really with you on this. Christ, but Use-Wish—it’s brilliant. But brilliant. A sort of Product-soul—that’s how you read?”
“That’s how I read. Right. So be Lucillite. Come on, give OUT, Lucillite.”
“I’m granules. I’m a lonely lover made of granules...”
“Great. Come on, come on, come on...”
“I’m in a box. Imprisoned in a box.”
“Yes.”
“But there are women all round me. And they say, what is this? What does this do?”
“Women?”
“Washwives.”
“Great.”
“And I tell them: I don’t do anything. I want to be used is used up—turned into foam and sluiced away.”
“Guilt eradication.”
“And I shout out: Darlings, feel my granules. They are for you...”
“Spermatozoa image! Marvellous.”
“Open my box...”
“Pandora complex!”
“Fly fixation, actually.”
“Oh, this is four-star, Richard. Bloody four-star. Christ, wait until I tell them at D-F.”
“Wait a minute, though. I’m still Lucillite. Still the Product. And I know what I want these women to do. I want to be delved into. Grabbed. Emasculated. De-granuled. The final orgasm of being de-organed!”
The climactic six words were delivered by a man suddenly wide-eyed and holding aloft a fan of tensed fingers.
D-F’s Area Promotion Director released pent-up breath. “My God,” he said softly. “Mantis motivation!”
The other watched him, alert but silent.
“You see what this means, Richard!”
TEAK’s DCBV nodded. He blew gently upon the nail of his left thumb.
“An ad-clens revolution. A turn round of the whole concept. Everything up to now has been slanted on women wanting to please men. But do they?”
“Exactly. Do they? We’ve been hammering away for years on this whiteness thing. And why? Because Motivational Research said whiteness represented lost virginity.”
“Every washday the woman got her hymen back so she could offer it again to her mate. Sure, sure. You remember the Vurj campaign, Richard? Always a shot of washwife handing the Vurj pack to man in white hubbyshirt.”
“God! How off-beam can one get? Listen, this is how I see it, Gordon. Copulation equals children equals drudgegrudge.
Right?”
“Right.”
“What colour drudgegrudge? White. Because of millions spent on washimage, right? Now, then. White equals the Product. Lucillite equals white equals copulation, equals drudgegrudge.”
“A multidirectional equation...”
“Sure. Now you see where everybody’s been going wrong, Gordon. They’ve tried to make the Product a love-object.”
“Instead of...”
“Exactly. A hate-focus. Or castration substitute, if you like.”
“The implications are pretty terrific, Richard.”
“Policywise, my God, yes! Dynamite.”
“Maybe we should have had Antony in on this.”
“He’s getting cameras set up. In any case, we’ll have to stick to format until D-F and TEAK can conferencize.”
“I suppose so.”
“Pity.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Gordon...”
“Yes?”
“You realize we haven’t any consumer-participation laid on yet?”
“God, I’d forgotten. No use waiting for Persimmon. Look, what about getting Hughie to organize this. He’s done CP organizing before.”
The adman went into the interior of the campaign cruiser. He called back: “Which mobile is Hughie on?”
“Number two.”
“Roger.”
The prodman heard a murmur of conversation in the talkout stall.
When he returned, the adman said that Hughie would brief his Lucy-team and issue them with extra giftbait.
The first women recruited by the Lucies arrived shortly after twelve o’clock. They were from the Council estate off Burton Lane. A party of three from Windsor Close had linked with the Simpson Road and Abdication Avenue contingents. They were closely followed by a straggling dozen from Edward Crescent. Some had brought sandwiches and flasks of tea. Almost all wore their best clothes and more than their usual amount of make-up. Several of the younger ones had packed swimsuits in their shopping bags, but none admitted having done so.
The campaign cruiser was easily enough identified. It carried the word LUCILLITE in letters two feet high along each side. There rose from the roof on supporting brackets the representation of an attractive female clutching a packet of Lucillite and gazing up, like a saint contemplating her own halo, at a thinks-balloon inscribed “For Stains that Defy—Saponify!”
The cruiser was parked on a half-acre of uncultivated land that lay between the river and the northern end of Jubilee Park Crescent. The area was low lying and its liability to be flooded each spring gave it a grey and streaky appearance; what grass grew there was short, sparse and wirelike.
On this impoverished terrain had been set a broad, white-painted platform surmounted by an arch of trellis over which two drumfuls of “Bowermaster” plastic vine had been unwound. At each side of the platform was an imitation medieval fair booth. That on the left bore a notice in Gothic type: Ye Towns-people’s fouled cloutes taken here. The notice on the right-hand booth read: Collect ye fayre and sweete cloutes here.
An outsize washing-machine occupied the centre of the platform.
By one o’clock, more than thirty women had collected around the great caravan. Two Lucies emerged from their rest-room amidships and began to check names and describe in simple terms what was going to happen. More detailed directions, they said, would be given by the gentlemen from The Company and The Film People.
The crowd grew to fifty or more. Instinctive segregation was beginning to be noticeable. The more animated elements, those from the Burton Lane estate, kept close to the cruiser, ready to profit from neighbourhood solidarity should anything be offered from its doors on a first-come-first-served principle.