I mime the ritual of stripping, doubling over and dispatching.
‘I have a headache, sweetheart.’ She extends the transdermal like a lace handkerchief.
Why does she always have to be in character? I should’ve known how she’d play it, from her romantically sheer peasant blouse and the rosebud bustier underneath it. In frustration, I tear the Frisson Froufrou patch from between her clavicles. There’s an awful gagging noise as if I’ve wrenched out her voice box, and she backs into the bathroom, locking the door. I sit on the couch and try to arrange and revise the questions written on uncooked fettuccine (The Hayrick’s, of course) that I prepared at the office. But my rage at being trapped in the role of bare-chested barbarian in her grope opera makes it hard for me to read.
Mother emerges from the bathroom.
‘Well darling, are you happy now you’ve ripped my bodice?’
Her cheeks are lashed with a tear-jerk of just enough accusatory streaks to require comforting but not to make her eyes look puffy. This riles me so much I forget my thwartification and notice that she has at least applied the unbranded patch. But why is she still speaking Frisson Froufrou? Hasn’t she realised that the stays have been loosened and she can say anything? I feed her my first piece of fettuccine anyway: I know you only had me as a mouthpiece for taste-touch hookups. I see the folies Froufrou drop from her like needles from a Christmas tree, leaving her barked and bare. Without a pause, I hand her the next piece: I want to know when you changed your mind and why.
‘I thought you understood by now that you can’t escape the fish nets.’
I bang my fist on the coffee table, making the fettuccine pieces jump as if in hot water.
‘I’m tired of doing the tanga with you over this,’ she says. ‘Frisson Froufrou is all the intimates that I need.’ She picks off the patch like a scab and hands it to me.
The unrepentant lingerie lush. Either she can’t or won’t swear off the brand speak, and I hate her for it. My free hand sweeps the remaining pasta onto the floor and my heel grinds its gist into nothing. I head for the front door, leaving the roast birds. She deserves them. Let her quail behind the FF feather boa constrictor. I’m washing my mouth of the word ‘mother’. I won’t talk of or to her. Her taste won’t touch me again.
Back in my flat, I don’t even want to apply the barely expressed unbranded patch. Instead I rub my entire body in a cyclist’s embrocation and let the cauterising capsaicin act as the white noise of tasture.
‘Did the unbranded transdermal have a remedial effect?’ asks Stillwell at our next meeting. The cables from the wand strapped to my head for the weekly download slap at my face as I shake my head.
‘Do you still have it quarantined?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’d like systemic exposure to the unadulterated transdermal, if… if, of course, you waive claims to it…’
Since I realised that my mum fatale is permanently made up, a figment of plasticised emotions, I hadn’t even considered giving the patch to anyone else. But I like the possibilities of this idea.
‘What if we emanciprated a second patch? So there’s one for me, one for you. Then we can talk.’
He rests a hand on my shoulder and at last I feel it – not just the coupling of two senses but two sensibilities riding tandem. So we smile and smile at each other.
Stillwell has brought the second unbranded patch to my flat. I’ve let him use the bathroom so he can be alone behind a closed door, watching himself in the mirror shape long-unspoken words like bits of bubblegum. Crouching in the kitchenette, I’ve taken the one that she wore. I’ve never patched into a transdermal that has divulged someone else before. It’s contraindicated. I turn my head away from recalling her spoiled tasture and lick the adhesive onto my upper arm without looking at it. The patch’s oily mouthfeel carries a backwash of scanties speech and indelicate terms for delicates. For the first time in many weeks, I’m afraid You have returned with a stinging snap of a bra strap. There’s a horrid sound of savaged fabric and then I realise it’s me – me wailing.
‘Frith, Frith,’ says Stillwell. His stilling hands are holding my temples. The Frisson Froufrou predations are over. On twisted rankles, I limp around my head but there’s no sign of menace.
‘I’m OK.’
We sit back to back on the rug. It’s comforting and he’s still muddled by hearing his thoughts unrefracted, so it’s easier if I’m not looking at him. He starts by trying to explain his gift of artificial skin.
‘So it’s not just that the dermal template tricks the cells into healing. It tricks them into regeneration rather than scar formation. But it also eventually dissolves. It’s a…’ His excitement outruns his shuffling words. ‘It’s a histological copywriter. It directs the expression of dermal tissue. And that’s not all. Did you, did you know? After the graft has taken, pain is the first sensation to return. Then touch. Cold. And finally warmth. Think… think of what it says about us… in, in evolutionary terms.’
‘Oh, evolution-devilution,’ I swipe. ‘Pain first? Sounds like a doctor’s order of infliction.’
He doesn’t respond but his back becomes a hard boulder.
‘You aren’t like Bromide. Why would you want to be in the medical professions?’
‘My parents are in the medical professions,’ he says too quickly. He’s quiet for a while but fidgets about, playing dodgem cars with my back.
‘Actually, they were worried… about the necessary med-side manner. Because of my disability. I had chronic vocal tic disorder.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It started when I was about eight. With the Snuggle-Ups digital pet slogan. I’d burst out with it. Burst out in a high-pitched voice. I didn’t want to. But it came out. Had to come out. Pent-up, pent-up words shook loose. Bit like now.’
For the first time, I consider that giving up EmPath also meant giving up his wordulous fluency.
‘In an aneurysm preparedness class, I yelped “Stoked on strokes!” I was almost expelled. Lucky. Just lucky I had been recently diagnosed and that I was in the EmPath community. If my family had been with one of the corporates, it would’ve been the profane asylum for me. If the tics are coprolalic. That’s what happens.’
I feel his body release the ticcing bomb and relax. He speaks more easily.
‘The tics quietened down before I came of haemorrh-age. When I ruptured, they disappeared completely. Because they were always taglines or sonic logos, I knew. I knew the… the oafishness of transdermal language programming long before anyone else my age. And the urge to tic – it’s not so different from compulsive consumerism. But no one can hold out against the consumptive tic forever. Everyone capitalates to it in the end. Everyone.’
His back is heavy against mine as if the spine has crumbled. He turns and rolls onto his side on the carpet and I can’t tell if his eyes are even open. I’m about to tell him that I haven’t capitalated but then remember that I’m still wearing the day’s business bedeckings dictated by the season froufrou.
‘You shouldn’t think medicine was just a default choice,’ he continues. ‘I spent a lot of time in consulting rooms. In habit reversal training. In biofeedback machines. I know what doctors are like. But look at you. You with your cross-modal interaction. And look at Mrs Waxwing who has palinopsia. Yesterday she saw a persistent afterimage. The Nice Slice emblem from the hoarding over the restaurant. It’s across from the bus stop. For an hour after catching the bus, the pizza sainted anyone she spoke to. “A thin-crust halo”, she called it. And there’s the fourteen-year-old Holbein boy. His hearing is impaired but he has auditory hallucinations of jingles – especially the symptoms jingle. Sung by an eerie children’s choir. These are the human conditions that people my days. You remind me that biology rejects grafted brand identities.’