She says, ‘I am Oona. I will show you. Then you can decide.’
I have no idea what I’m supposed to decide but I nod. If it weren’t for the pain in my head, I’d think this was too easy. Are they really just going to let me walk into their tongue-chide community without testing my intentions?
Though I’m keeping my head down, You are upping the voltage, increasing the charge. ‘Uggh, her sentences are blander than no-name packaging. No promo-emotional flourish. What do you want with these people?’
I want to fade You out before You and your jingo-lingo become my permanent mood lighting. If they have a way, I have to find out about it.
Oona takes me across the main production hall that no longer has a roof. The window frames have been torn from the walls to construct low greenhouses where vegetables live sheltered lives. A man is stroking and caressing the leaves of a cabbage, as if it’s a small rabbit. In what must’ve been an upstairs office overlooking the factory floor, three women and a man are sorting through piles of old clothes, cutting them up and stitching the pieces back together again. I’m afraid of triggering the fit-inducing GlowWorm strobe with all this brand mutilation but don’t know where to look. I rest a hand over my eyes as if staring into floodlights. One of the patch-makers is Poppy.
She comes up to me and rests both hands on my shoulders, holding me at arm’s length and smiling.
‘This is the greeting without words,’ says Oona. ‘Here only the unbled speak.’
Is she telling me that they’re all vexed? How many of them are there?
‘Is everyone here a blown light bulb?’ I ask. Oona looks confused.
‘Vex-sanguinated,’ I try. But she still doesn’t seem to understand me.
‘Dull-spoken fools in motley,’ You jibe. But I remember reading, at the repository, that only the fool has a licence to transgress.
Poppy performs a pantomime, making the right side of her face droop.
‘Oh,’ says Oona. ‘No, there are only a few true silents. The rest choose not to wear the talking labels. You must choose, too. Then you can stay.’
Poppy takes my hand from my eyes and moves it to my mouth in the stifling gesture she had made at Lost Property. The soft mounds of her fingertips taste of button mushrooms. The other women and man working with her come up to me and brush their hands over my back and shoulders. I’m surprised at the earthy comfort of it, like a bowl of mushroom soup warming beneath the skin.
As we leave the patch-makers, I ask Oona, ‘How does anyone know they’re on the same wavelength?’
Again my LipService baffles her. ‘You mean how do the silents talk?’
‘Yes.’
‘They read faces. They touch. Our lives are simple. It’s harder to lie with the face and fingers.’
She wants me to understand as they do, without words. So I try, but your jab-jabbering is incessant and it’s becoming impossible to hold back the pain in my head. We cross a courtyard scullery where an industrial mixing drum has become a hand-spun washing machine, and patchy clothes flap on a line in the breeze like a series of slaps in my face. At the back of the courtyard is a staircase down into the factory’s underground car park, where the kitchens and storerooms are. Bunk beds line one wall close to a large wood fire where pots hang over the flames.
‘Candle power, literally,’ You sneer.
Here, the kettles are vocal and knives chatter on the chopping board, so the people’s silence is not as obvious as among the gardeners, who walk as soundlessly as their tomatoes grow.
Occasionally Oona stops and says to someone, ‘This is Frith. Poppy welcomes her.’
Then there are more shoulder greetings and back scratchings. I don’t know whether these are leading lights or just the people Oona is closest to. I’m still waiting to be vetted, to prove my brand aversion in some sort of anti-corporate loyalty test.
One of the outbuildings is being used as a classroom. An unbled teen instructs the younger children seated at broken pieces of concrete resting on bricks. In a corner facing the students, a middle-aged woman sits observing the lesson.
For the first time, as we stand at the window looking in, Oona offers something like an explanation, ‘It isn’t like out there, I know. We don’t need a lot of words. We only have them for a short time.’
I notice a small boy at the back of the class perform a series of grotesque grimaces and rude bottom waggling. The woman gets up from her chair, grabs the boy by the arm and drags him out of the classroom.
‘Some of the children don’t like learning words,’ Oona says, blushing.
You are spitting watts in an incandescent rage. ‘Get me away from these people. They’ve all been left on dim!’
It takes me a moment to escape your glare and focus on my question. ‘What surge protection do you have for when you start to flicker?’
‘I’m sorry. I grew up here. I know the words but not your meaning.’
‘Bleed… hospital.’ I stumble over the words in the LipService blackout.
‘Yes, we go to the hospital when we bleed. They won’t help us after that.’
I’m surprised she continues after a pause. ‘Some take longer to come back from the hospital. I think they try to live with the talking label.’
She reaches toward my patch, which peeks from below my T-shirt sleeve, but quickly withdraws as if afraid of Polly the LipService parrot’s sharp beak.
‘Almost everyone comes back eventually. We don’t know how to live with all those deceiving words,’ she says with unmistakable sadness.
Before I can green-light joining these people, I need to know whether medicorporate oversight will look the other giveaway. If free market competition allows the choice of one product over another, then amping things up to a rejection of all brands should be possible. But I’ve been wrong before – like at school when Poppy and I were selling words. What if this place is just a trick to force me to choose between the doctors and copywriters? I don’t want this to give them a reason to plug me back into their circuit boards in the lab.
‘You’re not seriously thinking of joining these agrarian-contrarians? They’re so primitive they don’t even have product differentiation. Don’t like dinner? Starve. Don’t like our savaged clothes? Go naked.’ You sound louder than usual, as if outside my head and not just inside. With the migraine pressing on me from all sides, I feel I’m flickering.
Oona’s lips are moving but she isn’t the one speaking. The top half of her head has disappeared into blackness. I try to reach out my right hand but my arm hangs taut like the cable to a great chandelier. And the pain, it’s unthinkable.
I become aware of myself as bar soap gone soggy. You were the puddle I was liquefying in, my extremities turning to mush. But I can’t feel You now. That’s how I know they must’ve taken my patch off when I blacked out. Firm fingers press around my eye sockets and mould my jaw line, pushing through the scum to my solid core. The woman from the classroom is working my skin against my bones as I lie on one of the bottom bunk beds in the underground garage. The pressure of her hands helps me recover my solidity.
For the first time, I notice that Oona is seated at the foot of the bunk. I try to sit up but the woman holds me down and her hands continue to circle my eyes, head and neck like a dog not yet satisfied with its bed.
Oona sees my movement and says, ‘I was afraid the phoney words had killed you. But Gudrun has the touch. It’s more honest than words.’
I’m not sure. It might be easier to lie with language but touch is still manipulation – even if it feels as good as this.
11
Clothes, toiletries, packets of vegetable seed, lentils and my book from Dad. I put it all in a bag and then take it all out again. The order feels wrong or the uncertainty about going to live with the silents is behaving like referred pain. Should I rather put the book at the bottom of the bag or in a separate pocket? I’m not going anywhere without it, but what if they want to take it away from me? The lentils and seeds are gifts anyway; Oona said they would be appreciated. And they can cut up my clothes and share out my toiletries, I don’t care. Just not the book. I rest my hands on Eda-Lyn and press my fingers in circles over her skin to reassure her, as the woman Gudrun did to me.