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.