Tammy Baikie - Selling LipService

I have been repackaged. My cellophane surface is so slick that not even the rain clings to it. But the package contents lie. This is not what I am. The gaudy veneer of bright words that declaim and cajole are not mine they are yours. I am the perishable rawness beneath.

You materialised with my first LipService patch. Clammy gel sucked at the skin of my upper arm, and I had to swallow hard against the rancid oil in my throat. The neurologist overseeing the hospital ward of eighteen-year-olds newly come of haemorrhage was watching me with the squinting intensity of an eye to a keyhole. He had personally applied the transdermal patch to my upper arm, while nurses went around to the other patients. Had my revulsion betrayed me? Tinnitus echoed like a siren through the empty halls of my mind. Did he know?

I remembered him as being among the group of doctors that a week or two earlier had huddled around the glow of the light boxes near the door. As they pointed and gesticulated at the brain scans, a grotesque shadow pantomime unfolded on the adjoining wall. I lay with my eyes half-closed, blinkering my mind to all but the progress of an ant across my arm and the parallel passage of bergamot that it induced across my palate. But my skin was crawling with more than six tarsal claws. I opened my eyes to see the medicine men staring at me. They had been looking into my head and seen something. Something that merited monitoring.

Now, the doctor revealed nothing. He asked how I felt, and for the first time since waking in the hospital weeks earlier, a fully formed utterance tumbled out of my throat: Bathed in Pristine radiance. It was my voice but I had to turn over the strange auditory artefacts in my mind several times before admitting that they really came from me. They were not the words I had strained to reach on the high shelves of my cranium. Someone had rushed in while I groped, filled my basket with items and pushed me through the linguistic turnstile. I was left staring bewildered at the shiny word packages. That person was You.

That very first LipService patch was programmed for the Pristine bodywash brand. My response to the doctors question was copywritten to reference the tagline: Remain bathed in radiance, long after you leave the tub. Of course, I knew that greetings serve to identify a brand to interlocutors and provide a context for a speakers LipService drift. I knew that, just as girls bodies bleed on reaching maturity, the brain must also bleed to come of age and that after my haemorrhage I would need to consume LipService to produce language written and spoken like all adults. But I never really accepted that another would speak for me. Or that your tackiness would adhere to me, too.

In the months before the bloodbath in my brain, I was sure I could regain language after coming of haemorrh-age and refuse LipService as long as I retained my particular deviancy the ability to draw up flavours through my skin. My first conscious thought on waking in a hospital bed was raw with fear that I had been flayed, in one stroke, of language and of my taste-budding skin. I roiled in the sheets, desperately trying to stir up the sediment of their aroma. At first there was nothing; my skin felt thick with tongue fur. But eventually I chilled out to the ricotta sluggishness of the bed linen. I still held the savour of myself behind pursed lips.

Was that what the doctor had been looking for, too? But instead of the perversity his eye had watered for, he had gazed on the banality of another newly bled. He had almost turned away from me when he remembered himself and said, Congratulations on completing neural pruning. Welcome to LipService, patting me distractedly on the shoulder before moving off to check on the other patients.

When the doctor and nurses had gone, some of the girls in the beds on the opposite side of the room from me started chatting. The newly styled LipServants emerged from aphasia like women from beneath large bonnet hairdryers, cooing and clucking at each other in delight. Fragments of a variety of LipService brand languages floated across to me.

wake up to the kiss of Prince coffee

cool mint

cant wait to give her the antibacterial treatment

so swept up in aromance

a string of pearly whites is the best accessory

The shy plump one on my right looked hopefully at me and was even drawing in breath to speak, but I turned on my side with my back to her. I didnt feel up to giddily pretending that You and I are the same. I wouldnt just click with You like plug and socket.

I liked them less knowing I was one of them just as stroke-stricken, equally lost for words. We were as kinbled as our brain MRIs suggested, pinned up on the wall of the ward. Each one with an almost identical inkblot lesion a black mark against our names and the naming of all things. I was supposed to feel bound by blood to those who shared my coming of haemorrh-age day and ward. But they were all waterslide happy to be carried along on your slippery sales pitches. And I couldnt be. Besides, with the variety of LipService patches tag-lining our tongues, we were differentiated into products: the Prince coffee girl, the Soundbites toothpaste girl, the HailChef home appliances girl And crossing the aisle in our supermarket world is an act of treachery.

I was discharged a week later. The following months were filled with corrosive jollity many exclamations of Hows our new LipService mouthpiece? Your responses were never what I had hoped for and I perpetually found myself gaping, a wound. This was just the opening that the distant aunt, family friend or neighbour was looking for to say, What, LipService got your tongue? and then chortle as if this drollery werent as tired as a face in a mirror wiped of make-up.

And these were only the preliminaries to the word wake the school graduation ceremony held once everyone in the class had bled. Its an all-night vigil for the demise of narcissistic talk and the stirring of the communal, copywritten tongue. As instructed in the invitations, my classmates and I arrived without wearing the transdermal patches wed needed since our haemorrhages. We stood in the school hall, a row of mutes dressed in white the blank pages of a sheaf. The teachers filed past, shaking each individuals hand and penning a LipService wish on our clothing. Next came the parents, who did the same.

Receive the script, said the principal, placing a wafer with the word copywritten on our tongues. The wafer melted away but the letters left a stain that lasted more than a week. For all its superficiality, the brand chatter programmed into the LipService patch indelibly marks both body and mind.

There was a cheer from the audience as the hall was plunged momentarily into darkness, before the glow of black lights came on at exactly the same moment as the sound of a loud jingle. Our white clothes phosphoresced blue-opal. Then our line dissolved as friends and family advanced and neat ceremonial script gave way to frenzied scrawlings. Marker pens snagged and puckered skin, disembodied hands of the dancing crowd reached, wrote and withdrew. I had no LipService patch, no words to protest. Arms raised defensively presented another surface for phrases that ran into each other, knocking themselves insensate, and in the rush to find a footing on the body, meaning slipped and was trampled. Letters piled up, a writ of passage into branded language.