Targeted by Patience Mackarness
The Talking Pictures channel has extra long ad breaks, so in between Poldark (70s bodice-ripper nostalgia, copious sex) and Maigret (60s detective nostalgia, zero sex, minimal blood) there’s an ad for no-frills cremations starting at £1,095, followed by an appeal to remember neglected donkeys in my will, followed by an invitation to buy a set of commemorative D-Day coins (First coin absolutely free!!). Then two late-middle-aged women start discussing incontinence pants with rueful humour, Woman #1 saying she can’t go to a rock gig because she’s scared of wetting herself, Woman #2 recommending disposable pants (£3.79 for a pack of six) that will make her free.
I’d like some of that, I’d like to forget stress incontinence, forget I’m old, forget everything but the music, but to be honest I didn’t do the forgetting-myself thing well even when I was 16, and watched on TV a crowd of dancing, flinging-themselves-about young people in in tight flares and short dresses, each one thin and gorgeous, chanting Ev’ry day – In ev’ry way – You’re OK – with Us, then spent my allowance on Us deodorant with the rounded top I hadn’t yet realised was shaped like a penis head, or stared at a sanitary towel ad in Jackie magazine, between the Problem Page and a pull-out poster of David Cassidy in pink satin that was destined for my bedroom wall.
In the ad, a group of hikers are resting by a mountain lake, all of them thin and gorgeous, with the caption Confidence is knowing nothing can possibly go wrong, and it’s not clear which of the girls is wearing a sanitary towel, but that’s kind of the point, one girl’s legs in cutoff jeans are clear-honey smooth, she probably uses Immac cream (page 41), though the ad doesn’t mention that Immac stinks and turns your leg hairs into little rubbery maggots, and yes, the mountain hiker-boy with the guitar and long hair probably wants to **** the girl with cutoff jeans (I don’t say fuck at this stage, any more than the agony aunts in Jackie do), but sex isn’t the point here, the point is money, I’ll spend it to neutralise shame, erase the fear of a hot overflow, a red stain soaking through denim or, worse, through the white dress I asked for after watching the Cadburys Flake ad, the one where a thin gorgeous girl sits in a wildflower meadow full of scarlet poppies, sliding the Flake into her mouth in a way that even I realise is suggestive.
And now, the black-and-white square’s flashing top right to signal the end of the ad break, and here’s Woman #1 at a glam rock concert, the porky late-middle-aged bandmembers gyrating, the music lusty and ebullient, and thanks to the pee pants that Woman #2 recommended (actually pretty good value at £3.79 for six), they’re both stamping and singing-along like there’s no old age and no tomorrow.
Patience Mackarness lives and writes in Brittany. Her work has appeared in JMWW, Lost Balloon, Fiction Kitchen Berlin, Citron Review, and elsewhere.
www.patiencemackarness.wordpress.com
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