For the first time since the surgery, I’m not thinking about the eyes in the back of my head or Dr Bromide giving me notice of eviction from my own body. There’s the ticklish excitement of a hamster up my sleeve. Its cheeks are stuffed with hoarded words.
I peel off the patch’s backing and smack it onto my upper arm. Out of habit, I find myself holding my breath against You and the rancid grease that clings to palate and arm. But although it’s oily, the awful putty note is gone. You are gone. I take a moment and then start whispering to myself – things unspoken for years, such as the word ‘dwell’ from Dad’s echo of Ovid. It’s a word with a soft dell at its centre that I sink into like a beanbag chair. And ‘relishes rare rhetoric’ from the riddle I gave Oona to read. And ‘tasture’.
‘So that’s what you call it.’ I look up to see that Wordini is standing over me. ‘Not a bad lexicallure. We might hook them with that.’ Please, no, he can’t take my pet word and let it be teased into endless yapping. He notices my expression and says with a surprising lack of enthusiasm, ‘You’re now in the world of the lingua banker. If your coinage is not out there earning interest, you risk losing currency and ultimately your rights to unbranded LipService. It’s a highly competitive business. Let me show you to your word station.’
Walking between the hazy screens is like flying through cloud; occasionally a break appears in the whiteness and I’m introduced to another junior copywriter. They all look at me with the same disdain as the tray bearer.
When we reach the cubicle that is intended for me, Wordini says, ‘I’ve transferred an advance on your wages. Use it so you aren’t always hung by your threads.’
The copywriter’s ebrulliance isn’t what it was at our previous meetings. It’s as if I’m suddenly noticing the gloss of a too-hot iron on his fabric – the inevitable consequence of that implacable crease in his trousers. Of course, Wordini would never actually wear anything with a shabby sheen. But I see his smoothness differently now, as if he knows what it is to be pressed so that the fibres of his being melt.
So I speak openly: ‘Dr Bromide is making a patch that will induce branded tastures. I don’t know what I can do here to make that redundant.’ I’m caught yack-jawed by my own directness – because I still half expect You to intervene and because the last person I heard talk without any brand bingo was Oona.
‘I’m aware of Bromide’s activities,’ he says with a barely suppressed heartwheel of his former animation. ‘Even if the doctor can chemjure forth skingestions, who says anyone’s buying? They weren’t with unbranded LipService.’
He looks at me, enjoying the impact he’s made. ‘Given the choice, focus groups preferred a whip-sharp quip to the old ad-lib. They liked being able to twinpoint members of their own social tribe.’ He pauses and then continues: ‘Anyway, getting people to want what is much like a sixth finger requires psychosell – managing the entire experience cycle by tapping the power of association and memory at all touchpoints. That’s what you’re going to do – give meaning to taste-tactile pairings.’
I’m resigned to enjoying my work. Despite trying to doghouse the sentiment, it won’t sit and stay. Wordini pitched tasturising marketing to The Hayrick, makers of gourmet condiments. They approved the proposal, so my desk has been pantrified with pots of mesquite and stout ale mustard, black cherry and anise jam, radish greens pesto, honeyed chestnut spread and more. Now, I have to find a way to make The Hayrick gourmandisers feed on a fondling that’s more than in the mouth – a touch that sets the products apart.
I can’t make anyone else experience tastures as I do, but I can create an association between non-food tactility and a flavour. Wordini thinks it’s enough of a noveltease to experience strange strokings while eating. And I can write tasting notes, copy that binds taste and touch in the mind.
By fashioning sleeves of leather, woven straw and wool to slip over the handles of spoons and forks, I want to take advantage of that moment when the hand and mouth are connected by the implement so that the taste of The Hayrick’s brandied nectarines is Siamese twinned with the stroke of satin. I weigh the spoons’ balance and heft, adding a bulb below the bowl that hangs ponderous like honey and feels like a lollipop in the mouth. One spoon has a calabash-shaped ladle with a small opening over its gourd so that sipping from it is flutteringly slurpy; another has nodules along its lip – like studs along an ear. Fashioning the spoons from modelling clay, my fingers pull up slips of peppery watercress. Each spoon raises a megaphone to the lips for sweet, salty, bitter, sour or umami. I have planned that a specific spoon will be packaged with certain products, plus an insert describing tricks of taste and buffet-play.
The problem is that most of The Hayrick’s products aren’t really the kind tucked into with cutlery. So I’ve moved on from spoons to facial hair in my attempts to recreate tasture. They’re fake beards with elastic ear loops to hold them in place and a notch for the nose to remain uncovered, as well as a large hole for the mouth. I called them beards because, aside from covering the same area as face fuzz, one of the first was made of shearling. Actually, the woolly side is worn in, so that it automatically starts muzzle-nuzzling when the wearer’s jaws are in action. The Italian beard is made of lace because for me the walnut openwork is a colander for the flavours of pasta, basil, artichokes and tomato. There’s also a delicate chain-mail French beard that hams up nouvelle cuisine and traditional cassoulet. Wordini calls them the feedbags but I think that’s unfair.
At the end of each working day, I have to moult language and leave my exoskeleton of words behind in my cubicle. The guard at the building entrance has received instructions to scan me for expression – the transdermal’s signature – before allowing me to leave. What he doesn’t know about is my authorgraph – the writing on my inner thigh that I add to with each bathroom visit during the day. When I get home I trace the letters onto cling wrap. I trip over their humps and tails, unable to form sensetences. My pen staggers blindly forward until I look back over its path to see meaning reassemble around recognisable words. I insert the film between the pages of my book. Words overlaying words.
In those first few days after starting at Wordini’s office, I mainly just write lists of words. I don’t want to scrub them off in the shower, though I keep reminding myself that they won’t be lost – their imprint is on the sheets in the book. As the weeks go by, the expectation that some meddler will snatch away the unbranded LipService loosens itself from me with every washing-off of marker ink. The lists turn into lines, impressions, tastures. Sometimes I come home with both thighs authorgraphed and words clamber-clamouring up my left arm. Sometimes there’s just a single phrase.
Stillwell arrives once a week at the close of business with his case of gear. I assume the doctor has arranged this so that I can be interviewed and my words compared with the chatter relayed by the spyware in my head. But since the session at the hospital when he put the MindSweeper system into operation, we haven’t talked much. He looks at me over his laptop. His remarkably long neck bows like the top spike of a Christmas tree under the excessive weight of a ponderous ornament. Is this still about the artificial skin? How can anyone who is so sensitive work in the medical professions? If he isn’t interested in spreading dominfear of body scientists into us carcasses, why does he do it?
‘Dr Bromide has instructed that I administer a course of intramuscular cyanocobalamin injections. I’ll need access to the deltoid,’ he says.
I pull my sleeve up over my shoulder and only remember too late that the skin of my arm is covered in my personal correspondence. His hand has already closed around my wrist; there’s no point in retracting now. He reads my expressions and I try to read his. Do the wordings on my arm (which are actually the end of what starts on my thighs) make me more knowable than I find him to be?