‘It might be the secret brandshake of a professional rather than a consumer tribe, but EmPath still enforces an identity,’ I interrupt.
‘I know.’
He sits up again and shakes the pins and needles out of an arm.
‘But that’s what I was saying. About pain. Pain is the first sensation to return for burn victims. You can’t be la femme Frisson Froufrou or… Prince coffee royalty or… a doctor. Not with real pain. Then you can only be yourself. I’m good at what I do. Because I understand that.’ His head is lifted on its long neck now and with the light behind the wispy haze of blonde curls, his head is like a thistle on a stalk.
‘But you’d be even better if you didn’t have to speak EmPath?’
It’s a few days since Stillwell and I spoke unbranded LipService. There’s been an accident, and the bus I ride to work is taking a different route to its usual one. It turns onto the motorway and passes a large Frisson Froufrou billboard. Leopard crawling over what appears to be bearskin, the underwear model looks out at us with that startled-deer expression. She’s partially obscured by an outburst of graffiti: ‘Where to hide when your hide is a patch of lies?’ It’s one of my authorgraphs. The row seated next to the window turns to gape at the sign.
‘What brand is that?’ asks the woman next to me.
I shrug and bite my cheek to stop myself grinning. How did he get up there to write it? It must’ve required ropes and harnesses and daring. I wonder if there are more. While I’m tucking my armnotes away, he’s been writing them large.
15
It’s launch night for The Hayrick pop-up restaurant. I don’t know what to expect or even what to hope for. I’ve had my head stuck in the cloudy glass of my cubicle. In a vague unarticulated way, I suppose I imagined I was creating savoury textures for Stillwell alone. But I’m not. As Wordini said, ‘This is the beta phase for the tasture tablewear. If you can serve up the tastemakers on an indoctrinplate, we can cut ourselves a nice share of wallet.’ And what if I hit the buyers’ spree spot? Do I want that? And what if I don’t? Which is worse?
The diners wear blindfolds, my French chain-mail beards and big bibs. A set of my spoons hangs from long cords around their necks so they can’t lose them. In the lift down to an abandoned underground station, the attendants put on their thermal imaging goggles. They lead the influencers and opinion feeders to their tables to take up their suppersitions. Above ground in a small recording room, Wordini watches the red-green-blue human heat signatures from the infrared camera. I sit next to him.
Even though I know that the diners can’t see them, the stalk-eyed attendants carrying in the entrée work on my nerves like the horrid high-pitched shrilling of a dog whistle. I know I can’t say anything to Wordini because this was his pragmatist’s solution to serving people food in complete darkness. They’re just wrong as part of my tasture opera. But I don’t have time to ponder why. Already the spoons with the knobbly lips have skidded off in hot pursuit of mushrooms stuffed with The Hayrick escargot.
‘Ah, it’s epiphanised eating – a fork-tender, molecular deconstruction of songbird hearts infused in joie de garlic butter,’ bellows a large celebrity chef. Just because the banquothers can’t see each other, they all seem convinced that no one can hear normally either.
‘That’s a load of meat-factory pink slurry,’ shouts back a retail-chain buyer directly opposite him. ‘Can’t you savourise the sousvide aubergine with a hint of tarragon and longing?’
‘And what about these?’ says a woman, clinking her beard. Surprisingly, everyone appears to hear the slight tinging perfectly. ‘They bring out the full eruptive demeanour of the victuals, n’est-ce pas?’
‘There’s a definite umami about the whole brazen enigma,’ agrees the chef.
‘I prefer the nipple-grazing lip of this spoon as it rises from the unmade bed of fennel,’ says someone else.
In self-congratulation, Wordini slaps my back and gleefully crows, ‘They’re swallowing it like foie gras geese with the gavage funnel down their throats. No pseudy will ever admit to having lost the pot in a dining experience.’
‘You make them sound as oblivious as the character in CEO Sindy’s Selkie Suit,’ I say miserably, although I suspect that this is really more like The Emperor’s New Clothes and I am the weaver who has spun the invisible robes.
‘What a droll little banalogy,’ he laughs.
‘So are we going to explain tasture to them, the way the textile technologists do for CEO Sindy and the management board at the end of the story?’
‘What in mirth for? Then they would have something they could bespittle with their sharp tongues,’ he replies.
‘If this is what you had in mind all along, what did you need me for?’
‘My dear dupe, I could never have come up with a hoodwink as genuinely shamboozling as all this. The spoons, the beards, the darkness – no amount of my weasel words could achieve it.’
I turn back to the screen and the naked heat of the bodies. There are bits of food caught in the beards now, morsels and sauces dripped all over the table linen. Although they’ve learned to adjust the volume of their voices, they’ve also quickly adapted to the leeway blindness gives them to scratch itches and fully aerate a mouthful while talking. It’s all so very ugly. I look at the carpet between my feet because I can’t bear seeing this crookery of tasture, knowing that I scammed it into being.
At the end of the meal, the tastemakers are brought back up to the surface. They spend a few minutes in a dimmed room, removing their blindfolds and bibs and cleaning themselves up as their eyes adjust to the light. Together with The Hayrick execs, Wordini and I wait to receive their impressions over coffee.
Since getting unbranded LipService, I’ve spoken only to Wordini, some of the staff in his office and Stillwell. With branded patches, no one says the wrong thing – or the right thing. I feel self-conscious and more than self-conscious – afraid to speak.
The opinion feeders start arriving in the reception area. I manage to stay out of the hobmobbing by making my coffee with the slow deliberateness of someone modelling a ship in a bottle. When I can’t delay any longer, I turn from the table and am instantly cornered by the celebrity chef. ‘So you’re the little saucier who cooked up this amuse touche?’ He taps my forehead with one of my spoons still hanging from the cord around his neck.
‘Uh… yes.’
‘You must know,’ he says conspiratorially, ‘that my métier is really the ambrosialisation of harpoon-caught lexicon served drizzled with gastrosexual promise. Half of dining is menu descriptions.’ He winks.
He looks at me, anticipating some response, only I have none. So he forages on. ‘Of course, with your sensory palate cleansers, flavours sigh to a liquid-smoke climax.’
My gratitude flashes flambé blue. I think he understands something of what I was trying to do. ‘Thank you, I’m so glad you feel that way.’
Encouraged, the chef continues. ‘So you’ll give me a toothsome soupçon of your recipe?’
Behind him Wordini is violently gesturing for me to zip it. I’d like to enjoy the irony of the copywriter trying to enact a mute point like a silent, but earlier he’d threatened me: ‘If you break the ruse, those will be your infamous last words.’