I remember the first word I sold was ‘ox parade’ (from paradox) for when a grown-up’s LipService drift seemed to say one thing but you were pretty sure they meant another. Poppy, who smelled of condensed milk, bought it, which was surprising because she was really quiet. I wrote the words and their definitions on old LipService patch backings, folded them up and put them in a jar. The customer stuck a hand in and pulled one out. Faith insisted that we charge a minimal one-off subscription per user over and above the original buyer.
‘Who cares about that?’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t it be lexicool if the other kids used my words? And besides, how would we ever keep track of who was allowed to use which words?’
‘That’s the genius of the haemorrhage and LipService, isn’t it? Built-in control. I’ll just have to work on an accounting system.’
I didn’t know how her head, which was mine, could ever possibly hold all those columns and double entries. But I needed her approval.
I hadn’t been sure if Poppy liked her word, until I overheard her best friend whisper to her in a corridor, ‘Ms Marshal put on a real ox parade in there over contrabrand. What was she trying to say?’
‘Oh, who knows? The bull really had her by its horns,’ Poppy replied and they both tittered.
They were using my word! I had my gloves on but I was doused in the shiver and prickle of ginger ale, my skin goosed in mimicry of the bubbles. There were more buyers every day after that – in fact I had a hard time thinking up enough words for all the kids that crowded around my table at lunch wanting to dip into the ‘gun jar’ (jargon). Some of the words were duds but I thought quite a few were really great, like ‘lexity perp’ (from perplexity) for an adult whose LipService was complete gibberish, ‘showman pros’ (from promotions) for kids who were already so into their chosen brand they made the rest of us look like flip-floppers and ‘get tarred’ (from targeted) referring to the kids who just couldn’t wrap their heads around brand awareness.
I even stopped missing the skin tastes. I could go almost a whole day without thinking about them until it came to the Turkish delight hour. With Wardsback, each of my words echoed off all those other tongues. I was no longer a singularity; I was we, the multiplicity. I felt large, bigger than the other kids. And I was doing big things. There was quality control – not just of the words themselves but also listening out to make sure no one was using them incorrectly or unrightfully. To help with that we had ‘fire nutties’ (notifiers) who rather enjoyed watching others get burned. They were paid to eavesdrop on schoolyard conversations. Based on their intelligence, the ‘wrist rotors’ (terrorists) could be sent in to twist arms and punish offenders.
I know I should’ve thought more about all that. Somehow it just grew out of Faith’s subscription programme, the way in winter you forget to cut your toenails until one spring day you find you have hideous claws that rake anyone who stands too close. I tell myself I didn’t actively set it all up. I don’t remember recruiting. But I came up with the names. Is naming something the same as assuming responsibility for it?
I was not myself any more. My image had come unstuck – a promotional cardboard cutout was walking around instead of me. In the corridors, I would pass younger girls wearing tights with dresses and long opera gloves. They did their hair like me, plaiting the forelock and tucking it behind an ear. At lunch, they only ate what I ate. Once, I noticed one of them mimicking the way I carried my schoolbag and my nervous habit of nibbling the uninhabited fingertip of my glove. It was a hall of mirrors – everywhere I saw myself, disembodied. Even Faith had stopped lecturing me. ‘These are the rewards of a strong brand,’ she said between cooing sweet numbers over the day’s takings.
Did I enjoy it? I keep asking myself. I want to say no, but that’s probably a lie. I was the Wardsback girl and everyone knew the Wardsback girl. I was greater than the sum of my many refractions. When the others came to buy words, there was the way they looked at me. And the way they spoke my words. A clandestine tone like the hiss of a graffiti can. I didn’t see that I was in a market bubble.
The wrist rotors got carried away with a kid called Ansgar and dislocated his finger. Somehow in my memory he seems connected to Poppy – like a cousin or a brother’s friend. But I think that’s just the vanity of guilt, the need for what came next to be a personal punishment and not just inevitable market forces. Poppy started selling words. Hers were cheaper. There was no secondary-user subscription and no enforcers, although she would’ve probably gotten there, too. What was hardest for me was that her words were good – like ‘frenvy’ for when a friend gets an iconic product that you desperately want, and the fact that they have it and you don’t makes it hard for you to continue liking them.
Not all of the Wardsback customers disappeared straight away. But another one or two kids started peddling words not long after Poppy. Soon profits crashed and my social stock fell. The opera gloves and tights of the Wardsback ebrandgelists vanished from the school hallways. I looked around for direction but, as the Wardsback star faded, I lost my bearings. I had rewired my night sky as advertising hoardings.
Faith said we would cut the competition down with our wrist rotors. I would need to start working on a series of tarnish words referring to speakers of other brands. They would see that only the business with a viable retention strategy survives. Ours was the superior brand. Only I didn’t feel very superior. My words didn’t seem better than Poppy’s. I was groping. Brands were slippery things – Selkie could become silk and my game of words a corporate crackdown. I missed the palpable pawing reality of my skin tastes, where things pressed up close and declared from my throat what they were. The order for the sear and smear campaign never went out.
There were so many new words and so many kids using them that the teachers realised what was going on. An assembly was called and the headmistress announced, ‘Almost all of you without exception have been involved in the trafficking and proliferation of contrabranded language, which undermines the efforts of this institution to prepare you for life post-haemorrhage and brand-self integration, in particular. The faculty is forced to implement corrective measures. A two-week gag order will be implemented, with immediate effect. After that, a new batch of personality and brand matchmaking tests will be conducted.’
As we filed out of the hall, a doctor and nurse were waiting at the door to administer vocal-inhibiting injections.
This was exactly the kind of thing Faith was supposed to warn me about before I started Wardsback. She was supposed to keep me out of trouble. Instead I had caused all this. Teachers often threatened us with gag orders but I’d never heard of it actually happening – and to the whole school. How had we gotten it so wrong?
Faith was sullen. ‘We didn’t. We did everything exactly the way they do it. That’s what they didn’t like. If you’d done what I told you and sent out the wrist rotors, we could’ve regulated the market and controlled use. You just couldn’t handle the business behind branding.’
In fact, I wasn’t sure I liked Faith any more. I told her to leave me alone. We were no longer friends, and I wasn’t introducing her as my imaginary brand buddy at school. I never spoke to Faith again. But I was wrong to think that Faith would just go away. Faith has come back, only now instead of me speaking for her, she speaks for me. You are Faith.
Ripping off opera gloves, kicking off tights, flinging off my dress, I climbed into the dressing-up box and cried for a long time. I cried for a whole school of kids who walked through hallways making only sad herd sounds – snufflings, scratchings, huffings. And I cried for myself because no matter how hard I tried to be good, I seemed to be bad. Now I had no voice and no choice. But the words were still there, small pale insects scuttling about. And just like Poppy and her clever words, it just popped into my head.