‘Tasture.’ That’s what skin tastes should be called. I had stopped crying, and the new word rustled around the alfalfa of Mother’s rich satin nightie and stirred again when sesame chiffon brushed my face. It wasn’t a word I planned on ever telling anyone, and, besides, no one would be making words any more. So what did it matter that I’d used Poppy’s word-making technique?
I got out of the dressing-up box and found a pair of scissors. There might not be any paper any more, except in the repository, but I was going to make a book – a secret book. I cut Mother’s old lingerie into rectangles and stitched the pieces together along one side. I would write stories on the pages, about the pages.
4
I spent afternoons at the end of the school day at the book repository waiting for Dad to finish work. Almost no one went there except the vacuum-sealed vans carrying volumes that had been hidden in walls and floors, buried in containers of rice, sewn into furniture upholstery or taped to the owner’s body. It had been decades since the doctors discovered the deadly library mould and ordered the sequestration of all printed literature, but still the vans kept arriving with confiscated tomes. I couldn’t understand why people still sicked to death because of those things, when everyone knows books bring the wheezing, blue-veined end of breath. I only ever visited the exhibits in the reception area, staring at the stifled volumes set in blocks of resin and sealed in display cases together with magnified slides of microbes and photos of patients in the respiratory wards. I stared through glass and time at the dusty galaxies of green-black spores on the open pages, trying to read the words so different from any brand of LipService. Every day I stared and felt the air sucked out of the present.
Dad found me one afternoon, trying not to breathe and fog the glass. ‘Ah, it’s an airtight case,’ he said with that wry expression he had when he used LipService in ways that felt like putting a shoe on the wrong foot. ‘We glazed over books, then eyes glazed over. Would you to like to see more?’
‘More books? Won’t they make me sick?’
‘No, no, we’ll put you in a nice dust jacket.’
Then, for the first time, he took me in the lift down to the hermetic underground vaults. He showed me how to put on the hooded plastic suit and mask, which rustled up runny egg yolks in my mouth, and we stepped into the airlock. On the other side of the door was a former underground grain silo. I stood peering under the crinoline that covered society’s nether regions. Books lined the walls of the floodlit well, which was hooped with tiers of balconies rising eighty metres up. Freestanding shelves conferred in the centre of the shaft, casting deep shadows as they leaned into each other on their ladders. At the opposite end of the silo from the airlock door, a tunnel led to a succession of four more identical silos. Imagining the billions of letters spun into words, spun into sentences, felt like an enormous centrifugal force: I didn’t think I’d be able to make my way to the middle of such a vast swirl of minutiae.
‘How many are there?’ I whispered, staring up.
‘Books? About eleven and a half million.’
‘Why do we keep them if they’re poisonous?’
‘Copywriters used to come. Not so much any more.’
‘But all the books are digitised, we don’t need these.’
‘You keep referencing the case in reception.’
My thoughts teetered on the edge of a bluff. He continued, ‘Come, let me explain the science of authority control.’
On the second-tier balcony, Dad pulled out a slim picture book entitled The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen. ‘Read this, I’ll be back in a while.’ His footsteps on the steel stairs up to the higher decks sounded like the metallic shutout of gates barring storefronts at night. I didn’t want to be left alone. I was afraid of the books. The colours slapped me down; there was no commercial clowning. I was sure this was the place of no escape – not even for microbes. I opened the book with clumsy gloved fingers. The pages sprayed like the hair of a trampolinist.
The paper was different from the glossily coated and laminated kinds that you sometimes still find in packaging. It looked breathing, like skin. There was no smudge of mould on any of the pages. I wanted to touch one, to know it at the base of my tongue, but I thought of the exhibit above me and its photos of the sick, who I was sure had green cobwebs in their lungs.
I found myself starey, facing the pictures of the emperor and the weavers. I couldn’t understand why they looked wrong. It wasn’t the funny clothes or that the pictures were neither cartoons nor photos. There was something about it, like the too-tight smile some grown-ups cracked at kids.
When Dad returned, he asked if I recognised the story. I said no, because I hadn’t ever heard of the Hans Christian Andersen corporation or its brands. He had that sad face I remembered from when Mother trade-dressed the tree in our yard in Frisson Froufrou.
‘Hans Christian Andersen is the copywriter, Frith. So what is the brand?’
I didn’t know. ‘Weavers,’ I said and felt stupid.
‘Are you sure there is one?’
No brand. It was even more unimaginable than the upside-down, back-to-front world of the Freaker Sneakers advergame that lets your avatar walk on the ceiling. I didn’t believe anything was possible without brands – even the wildest fantasy.
After a long pause, Dad said, ‘What if this book were indexed together with CEO Sindy’s Selkie Suit?’
Almost every second night, Mother used to read to me about how Selkie was invented. The paper book was the same story as the BMG textile corporation’s brand narrative, except for the ending. Instead of the textile technologists teaching CEO Sindy and the management board about fabric quality so that Selkie is no longer invisible to them, the emperor is laughed at as he parades naked through the street. That wasn’t branding the bright side. The harder I tried to understand the differences, the more I was reminded of the day with Mrs Mondaine and the headmaster.
Squirming in the biohazard suit made it twist and tighten around me. Sweat made the plastic cling, and egg yolks oozed slimily down my throat. I towed my attention back to my father, trying to listen, trying to hear sense.
‘In authority control, multiple writers, here Andersen and his sources, are reduced with controlled vocabulary into a single catalogue access point, the authorised file ‘CEO Sindy’s Selkie Suit, BMG corp. copyright’, which is the only version licensed for electronic publication.’
Some of the LipService words he was using were difficult to understand. So I tried to explain it to myself out loud.
‘Other people never get to read the stories as they are down here.’
‘No.’
I remembered a word from brand awareness: proprietorship. I don’t know if I understood even then that what the narrative lacked was a corporate context. For me, the story whirled away like water down the drain because there was no branded identity plugging its centre. How could I grasp it if I didn’t know which entity held it as property, had owned and trademarked it? While the underground silo and the book didn’t fit with our consumerism, I recognised exclusivity when I saw it. Mother had made sure of that. Only the very few can have the magical things that transform you.