For the first time in almost a year, I’m not wearing hospital pyjamas. My fingers only want to know the ricotta whey of my shirt. When I’m released from the linen cuffs, I can’t stop ploughing the guava furrows of my corduroys. The door to my cell opens and I walk out. Just like that. I keep looking over my shoulder, looking for orderlies, lawyers, doctors, copywriters, she that’s me. There’s no one. I leave virtually unheeded.
I notice the change in LipService. Bromide’s tasture technology has reached the market. Now it’s easy to see, across a room, a street or office, which tout has shifted ever so slightly off-message. The bad taste it leaves in their mouth is hard to hide. They pull their faces into the ugliness of a used handkerchief. The doctor has made sure that no one can look sprilow while off brand. I see it in the way people try to shoot words like ping-pong balls between the teeth without letting them touch sides. At corner stores, the chewing gum stands have signs saying, ‘No stock. On order.’ People chew against the bitter dictates of taste. I try not to step in the pale blobs of ZapperMint, AniseIce and CinnaMax on the pavement.
I’m glad to get back to my flat. The crepulet palpitations of hard sell LipService on the streets and on the bus deliver me bruised and sweating onto my doorstep. Inside, I find all the Fabergé nest eggs and the piled-high attempts to regain purchase on materialism, under Wordini’s instruction. I almost go straight back out again. I just want all of that gone. I need to know my walls – what to line up against, like in my cell. The boxes stack up and are tracked down the stairs to the kerb. Slowly as the flat empties, I sense my boundaries.
In the kitchen, the fridge has been switched off and cleared out but stinks. Neither here nor anywhere else in the bedsit has my life been unpacked in a great rummagery. There was no frantic search; they knew where to look: the broom cupboard door hangs defeated. Pieces of the broken robotic vacuum cleaner where I hid Eda-Lyn lie on the floor. Of course, my share of the stolen unbranded patches is also gone from the bedroom curtain hem. Not that I expect to ever speak the shadow words out loud.
Sitting on the counter drinking water from a glass – a real, menthol-chill glass, not a paper cup – I notice the Nice Slice pizza clock has stopped. I take it off the wall and pry the back open. In the compartment where the batteries should go are three unbranded patches. On each one a word is written in black marker: sorry, sorry, sorry.
At the repository, below the dirt again at last, I stand in the familiar ring of unspoken words, looking at the balconied shelves circling the silo walls. The air smells quiet. I sit. From down here, I try to imagine wrapping my mind around the many-storied bigness of it. I would be pulled far and wide, stretched tauter than Eda-Lyn to contain all those tales. I get up and go looking for her remains. Copies of all the books that got under her skin are laid out in state on the floor. I arrange and rearrange them but I can’t find her flavour profile beneath my fingers. She is flat and dead, a skeleton.
The buzzer sounds in the silo. I exit the airlock to attend to the burrower. It’s Verbociter. As soon as I appear she says, ‘I want the one where “Echo still repeats the last words spoken.”’
So I turn around and go back into the silo. All I have to do is pick up the Ovid from within that outline of a body drawn in copy on the floor. But I can’t. Even though no one is allowed to remove books from the reading room, I know what Verbociter is taking away from me.
As part of our echo studies, Dad showed me a paper on how people are able to judge the distance of a sound’s source. It’s all about amplitude modulation and the way reverberations dampen the loud and softs. The more objects the sound waves crash against on their travels, the more echoes eddy around. In an anechoic chamber it’s impossible to tell how remote a noise is. That’s exactly what will happen to the story of Echo. Her voice won’t carry true when it strikes up against a whole brand portfolio of products. No one will hear the dusty slap of Ovid’s Roman sandals coming from far away.
The chorteen is already suited up, masked and waiting when I return. She snatches the book from my hand and rustles her biohazard plastic off to the reading room. When I go back into the silo, there’s a movement behind a distant shelf and I feel the presence of she that’s not me like an old wound in wet weather.
I wear headphones whenever I leave the flat. It looks as if I’m listening to jingles, but I just don’t want to hear Verbociter’s LipServiced version of Ovid’s story. I try to keep words between my ears and the edges of a page. I don’t speak; I don’t listen. If I could I would shut my eyes, too, so no capitals on hoardings, signs and windows can pierce my thick skull with their interrobangs. And I wouldn’t have to see everyone’s lips curled borchardly back against the offensive language of my tastures.
More copywriters come to the repository, far more than I ever remember when Dad was here. They wink and tell me they want ‘the one with the fellow who prefers not to’ or ‘to con-verse with the creature who has no toes’. Some even insist on rifling the stacks themselves. I keep watch because I can’t turn my back.
On the days when I can’t stand it, I imagine having a child – someone to break my silence and skeepen the shadow words. But I soon meaker again, remembering Mother, and why she had me, and all the hepnot past that followed. I will not repeat that. Neither will I think of Stillwell and how he would tell me a language that isn’t shared isn’t a language at all. But what have I ever gained from sharing? So instead I finock mentally through my glossary and glinker at each erpish teetle.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the Jacana Literary Foundation for being brave enough to publish a novel about breaking through entrenched forms of expression and to my editor Jenefer Shute, whose delicate touch belies a laser-like acuity in separating the good from the bad.
While writing this novel as part of the MA in Creative Writing at the University of the Witwatersrand, I was very fortunate to have the support of Karen Lazar and Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, as well as the infinitely perceptive Gerrit Olivier. They patiently turned my words over every which way and offered sound and sane comment. The input of my fellow travellers Jessica Liebenberg, Dennis Dvornak and Billy Rivers was also invaluable. Thanks also go to my parents for their supernatural faith in me. Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to my intrepid readers Danièlle Crouse, Vicky Jacob-Ebbinghaus and above all, my husband James.
Copyright
First published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2017
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© Tammy Baikie, 2017
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d-PDF ISBN 978-1-4314-2480-1
ePUB ISBN 978-1-4314-2481-8
mobi file ISBN 978-1-4314-2482-5
Cover design by publicide
Job no. 002957
See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za