Now, whenever I can do without You, without your words – on weekends and days off – I chew through the designer furniture stores with their wood veneers, Perspex, steel and microsuede. The stock and display mazes are always changing. The routine is: Survey shop floor from the door. Close eyes and part finger lips. A steady pace is important for digestion. Rushing risks collisions with other shoppers. It also doesn’t fit with the dark glasses and telescoping white cane taken from one of the Lost Property boxes, which keep the shop assistants at bay. Green matcha, rye and camel’s milk help me stay within the lines of the shop-floor sketch as seen from the door and not walk into things. A titbit of cockle is just a corner of the molluscular leather couch. I let the papaya of the cork dining room chairs melt into me. But it’s a little side table with a floral pattern of bone inlaid in resin that I can’t let go of. Fingers hiccough over the slight irregularities in the table’s surface, so that avocado slips into fresh coriander as I try to devour it too quickly. I want to buy the side table but it costs three month’s wages. If I could come home and press my cheek into those buttery oils and herbed astringency, it wouldn’t matter if I was actually eating baked beans from tins. I want it, want it. I need it, until I realise it needs me.
Like all things, it needs me to polish it and dust it, to walk carefully around it, to insure it, to worry when a visitor places a coffee cup on it, to feel ashamed of making it stand on that dreadful carpet and of having brought it into circumstances unbefitting its magnificence. One thing will probably lead to another – another object of desire. Together they’ll conspire for more nights of baked beans. Soon I’ll be twisting and tripping through a harem of recumbent chattels. I feel the weight of all these things and my duty to them, and I don’t even own them yet.
I remember when I was very young and Mother came home with a crystal-encrusted Frisson Froufrou bra that cost most of her salary. Dad was furious. Now it’s me that has You on my tongue and stores in my eyes – even when they’re closed. Am I mutating into Mother? Despite temporarily cutting the vocal cords that bind us, your influence is like mould spores – I inhale it everywhere, constantly. Do I have to give up breathing to be rid of You?
10
The gesture of hand to mouth doubles as a sign of mute shame. But that’s not the way she’s doing it. No, this is the first half of a movement to blow a kiss. I’m fascinated by this abstract expression of defiance. The hand drops back down; the girl on the other side of the Lost Property window is staring at me. I know her. She’s Poppy who smelt of condensed milk and bought the first word I sold at school. What happened at her coming of haemorrh-age? Was she one of those whose CVA was a vex-sanguination – a prognosis so feared that everyone genuinely celebrates a comparatively small puddle of blood on the brain?
From my class, Brunfrid and Thea vex-sanguinated and couldn’t be patched. No one saw them again. I think of them sometimes when I can’t avoid skirting the vexation ward at the hospital with its barred windows and laments from the lifers. But I don’t remember it being murmured about Poppy that she had vexed. Perhaps she ruptured while I was in recovery. I still think I would’ve heard.
Poppy gazes at me the way someone looks at old childhood photos of herself – the recognition is purely intellectual; it barely keeps at bay the sense of estrangement from the figure pictured there. She’s wearing the weirdest clothes made of patches sewn together. Pieces of fabric – one with half a logo, another with the printed chicken feet of some brand mascot and a third a dignified floral – have all been tacked together by hand. Wait. I’ve seen this before, folded in the bottom of an unnamed box that came in yesterday. I’ve hardly gotten to know it. Running a hand over the patchwork, I chased a variety of tastes, skewering them on the tines of my fingers for a single multi-flavoured mouthful. There was nothing else in the carton except the string of chimes, a few mothballs, a bag of lentils and some loose change. It was one of the emptiest I’ve ever seen.
Your distaste was obvious when You said, ‘Anyone with so few possessions can’t be possessed of much consumer sense.’
But now, seeing Poppy similarly dressed in front of us sends You into foaming convulsions of rage. By just standing there Poppy has a more neurotoxic effect on You than any of my grimace-demeanours have ever achieved. I know why. Recycling old clothes refutes the need for the new and dismembers corporate identities. It’s brand assassination. On Poppy’s top, the Midas Trust bank logo has been decapitated so that only ‘das Trust’ remains and some sloppy darning makes the ‘a’ look more like an ‘i’. I notice the first starbursts of a migraine and try to focus on Poppy’s face.
I greet her in my light bulb LipService: ‘Live on the bright side with GlowWorm.’ She nods and slides the paperwork for the carton’s release beneath the window. My rubber stamp thumps at the forms but my mind is pounding away at other things. I scan for the vex symptoms that parents threaten disobrandient children with – paralysis, facial droop, spasticity, emotional incontinence, dementia… Nothing. Maybe I just haven’t spent enough time with her. The only way to delay her now is to invite her into Lost Property instead of pushing the box through the flap in the wall next to the window. No visitors are permitted in the storeroom but I welcome her in with ‘Come into the light’. Once I’ve opened the door and Poppy is inside, I realise that this hasn’t solved anything. What can I possibly say to her and what answers can I expect? She’s mute and I’m a babbling LipServant. ‘Illuminate for me what’s happened to you,’ I try desperately. My head is a hotel room that You’re trashing. Poppy smiles and takes the carton out of my hands and replaces it with a patch of fabric. By the time I manage to squint through the migraine aura to decipher the words formed by an awkwardly childish running stitch, she’s gone. It’s an address in the industrial district.
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.