PopCo (14 page)

‘We always hoped you would come and stay,’ my grandfather says in a happy/sad way, and I sense grown-up politics that I don’t understand. Is there a connection between the arguments my father and grandfather have been having and the fact that I have never been here? Almost certainly; although I don’t know why. It’s not as if I was involved in their disagreement.

‘Do you still wear the necklace?’ he asks me, after I have taken the door sign from him and put it on the bed.

‘Yes, of course,’ I say, pulling it out on its thin silver chain to show him.
Of course
I still wear it: he told me never to take it off.

‘Good,’ he says. Then: ‘We’re going to have fun, you know.’

‘I know,’ I say. And then, once he has left the room, I cry, thinking of my abandoned ship, and all the bowls of porridge I made.

There is a five-columned matrix on the desk in front of me. This is what is says:

Everyone else has roughly the same thing in front of them, as this matrix is what we have been making all afternoon, with a facilitator called Ned. Most of the columns have been created by us all just shouting ideas out as they have come to us, but now we have been left on our own to finish compiling the random word columns individually. Ned is young, together and certainly
not
a fuckwit like poor Warren, who was almost crying by the end of the morning session. With Ned, we are ‘recapping’ the process of compiling matrices, most of us having done it before, and adding this new thing: the random words column, which is pretty new to most of us.

The notion of randomness is a big part of any kind of lateral/creative thinking. It’s all connected to that idea that you can’t really trust your brain, that any ideas you have on your own may well turn out to be simply bad ideas or just ones that aren’t at all original. Just as routine kills creative thought, so too apparently does, well, thought itself. Our brains are just not wired up to be original on their own. But with this thing called ‘Random Juxtaposition’ (an idea of Edward de Bono’s, of course), well, you can have many good ideas.

My random words aren’t entirely random, however. When you use a dictionary to search for random words, you end up with things like
fritillary
and
droshky
, which don’t really work in this context. So what I’ve been doing instead is picking a random
page
of the dictionary and then finding a product-matrix type word on that page. It may be cheating but now my notebook has ideas crawling over it like cockroaches. It’s uncanny.

What you do with a matrix is as follows: you write the columns out, as I have done, and then you take one thing from each column until you have made an entirely new thing. For example, you could have a small ball that is connected with mastery and is perceived as special. So this could be a brand where each ball is unique, perhaps with its own signature pattern or design (like Cabbage Patch Dolls, which each came with a unique ‘Adoption Certificate’). Using mastery, you would be able to learn tricks with the ball, and perhaps take part in regional or ‘street’ competitions. If we add a word from the random column we could take, for example, ‘complex’ and make this product complicated and challenging to learn. This would fit in with children’s desire to be special, to learn special (secret?) skills and ‘be the best’. This product would also have
collecting/trading appeal because of the uniqueness of each ball. Perhaps kids could be encouraged to buy the whole set of a particular theme (sea, space, monsters, etc.). You wouldn’t know which type of ball you were getting when you bought it and then you might want to swap. To further encourage kids to buy more than one ball, there would also be multi-ball tricks that could be learnt.

Or what about a ‘Snake Board’: a skateboard that is ‘real’, connected with animals and the words ‘silly’ and ‘serpent’? This would be a product for 9- to 12-year-old boys and would be sold in the form of a ‘create-your-own’ kit. The ‘real’ factor would be the wood and wheels and so on, which the kid can put together in various ways. Each Snake Board kit can take on the shape and character of different types of snake. There’d be the Python, the Adder and so on. The ‘silly’ factor could be achieved by having things like ‘wobbly wheels’, ‘crazy eyes’ and ‘killer tongues’ as features that could be added to the board. Perhaps the boards could also shoot ‘venom’ when you stamp on a foot pedal?

What about a building set that shows emotion, is connected to the environment and the word ‘cute’? This would be something like Meccano (a product that makes all toy creatives, engineers and architects go a bit misty-eyed due to the fact that everyone learned to build things with it and it isn’t made any more). However, when you build things with it, it becomes ‘happy’ or ‘sad’, depending on certain factors. A wall without windows would be ‘sad’, perhaps? Or the building material would become sad about things that are bad for the environment? I’m not sure this is feasible – it’s a bit too AI – and sounds altogether too educational. Still, a building set with ‘cute’ features would work – definitely for girls. I add the random word ‘elves’ and spend the next fifteen minutes working out a product with which girls could build miniature elf dwellings, shops, and, in theory, whole towns, which they would then put in their gardens. Like bird tables – but for magical creatures! At the point when I catch myself thinking,
How would you know if the
magical creatures had visited or not?
I give this up and start doodling instead.

My brain actually, physically hurts. I can’t switch off, though. My doodle – several cubes and a large spiral – makes me suddenly think of a way you could make Go three-dimensional. And now I have a mysterious board game that is big, clever and complex. This
matrix has embedded itself in my brain. How would you play three-dimensional Go? You would still place stones on the intersections but to surround a stone you would need to control not just the four intersections around it on the plane but the six that you would find in the three-dimensional equivalent. My doodle breaks down and I am not even sure that six points would connect each intersection. My head really is fucked now.

To my right, Dan is writing away furiously like he is in the most important exam he has ever sat. Esther, on my left, is looking dreamily out of the window.

‘So,’ says Ned. ‘How many product ideas have each of you managed to create?’ He looks around the room at people and they start calling out figures, which he writes down on the whiteboard. Grace has got four, Richard has got seven. I learn a few more names as he goes around the room. The big tattooed bloke is called Frank, Ben’s fawn-haired companion is Chloë and the girl with pink pigtails is called Mitzi. I am able to match the name Hiro (which Mac called out on Saturday night) with a skinny Japanese guy with short black hair. They all have six ideas each.

‘Seventeen,’ says Dan when Ned’s glance falls on him. Bloody hell. I offer my four ideas, and Esther slightly apologetically offers two.

‘So, in this classroom, in the space of one afternoon, we have created exactly two hundred and one ideas. Pretty good going, don’t you think?’ Ned smiles. ‘Of course, the important thing about matrices is the creative use of columns and parameters. I’m seeing you again on Wednesday, so perhaps between now and then you could think about what other parameters we could use. And I’d like you to develop one of your ideas into a full proposal, please.’

There is a lot of scraping-chair noise as we all get up to leave.

My new home is much quieter than my old flat. Trucks don’t go past all the time, and people don’t shout at each other underneath the windows. I don’t have to go to school as it is almost the summer holidays and there’s no point enrolling somewhere for just two weeks before everything breaks up. So I am free. My grandmother is working in her study all the time and my grandfather is researching a new series of his Mind Mangle columns at the University Library. So I spend my days exploring the village. I am alone most of the time, which is OK. At least I am not shipwrecked any more.

I have started working on my necklace. When I say ‘working on it’, I mean that I am working on deciphering the strange letters that are engraved in it. 2.14488156Ex48. What does that mean? And what about the little swirly shape? I haven’t got very far but I think that this necklace holds the secret of why my father went away, and why my grandfather has been acting strangely recently. He was always such a cuddly, sweet-shop kind of person before. Now he looks like there is a ghost following him around all the time that no one else can see. In order to work on the necklace I have to be very secretive. In the middle of the night I have to do stealth-walking to get downstairs to see if I can look up the symbols in any of the books (or, indeed, find evidence of what the whole thing is about). Stealth-walking is a special skill I made up. To do it, you have to wear thick socks, and you have to place your weight down on your feet very slowly and carefully so as not to make a sound. You have to imagine each foot almost melting into the floor;
heel, ball
and
toes
slowly, like that. When walking down the stairs, you have to keep to the outside edges, because the middle bits creak.

One night I got caught! I was in the sitting room, about to open a book, when I heard a bed-spring noise from upstairs and then the sound of a door opening. I considered hiding but knew that wouldn’t work. What if whoever it was checked my room before coming downstairs? They would know I was hiding and would then also know I was up to something. No. Something else. I could feel different parts of my brain clicking around like the dials on a safe, struggling for the right combination. By the time my grandmother came into the room I was already walking around with a glassy stare, almost bumping into things.

‘Oh, Alice,’ she said, leading me gently back up the stairs.

‘Have a good sleep-walk?’ my grandfather asked me over breakfast.

I feigned ignorance.

By the time the real summer holidays start, my grandfather is spending more time at home. He has cheered up, too. He shows me card tricks and leg-spin bowling and substitution ciphers. Now that it is summer, the village even has its very own gang of kids, which I am supposed to want to join. This gang consists of two quite stuck-up rugby-playing brothers, James and Vaughan; a girl called Rachel
who has her own pony; and a girl with pierced ears called Tracey. Tracey seems like some sort of outcast, though. Apparently, they all go to private boarding-schools and she doesn’t. As I haven’t started my new school yet, I am an unknown quantity. I am suspicious of them all and, much though I would dearly love to ride Rachel’s pony, I initially choose to hang around with Tracey instead. I teach her the substitution cipher and send her secret messages which she can unfortunately never decipher – even though she is a whole year older than me. I have a plan whereby, using stealth, we will take territory from the others; particularly some strategic points on the playing field by the stream where they hang around playing kissing games. Tracey doesn’t want to. She wants to teach me about make-up and pop music. I begin to suspect that she would probably enjoy kissing games. I quickly defect and join Rachel instead. During the course of the summer Tracey joins the boys (we think she may have held hands with James) and we wage war against them, relentlessly, until term starts again. I am sometimes allowed to ride Rachel’s sister’s horse, Pippin, if she is away. Riding is scary but fun and you have to watch out not to get beheaded by low branches.

My grandfather plays cricket for the village team. The other players say he will carry on playing until he literally just dies at the crease, which I don’t like the sound of very much, although it makes them all laugh. On Sundays they sometimes travel in their rusty old van to away fixtures in various nearby villages, and I am allowed to go too, supposedly to help with the teas. I hate helping with the teas, though. Tracey’s nan is in charge and she always smells like sour fruit. There are always wasps, and they always get in the jam, which makes me feel funny. Anyway, I would much rather be playing cricket than fiddling around with jam, and I do have my own bat and pads now (which I got for my birthday in July). But however long I stand there hopefully, knocking a ball around on my own, they never ask me to play. Even when they are a man down I am not allowed on the team. It’s not fair. They say I am too young but Colin Clarke plays if they are really short, and he’s ten as well. I think it’s because I am a girl.

One day I hear my grandfather talking to the captain about me.

‘Come on, Mike,’ he’s saying. ‘Give her a game.’

Mike’s frowning. ‘Where would she get changed?’

‘She doesn’t need to get changed. I never use the changing rooms.’

He’s right. Like most of the team, he turns up for matches in his old cricket jumper and trousers, and goes home like that too. Only Bob the accountant ever uses the changing rooms and that’s because he also plays squash.

‘Yeah, but we’d have to provide facilities anyway. There’s a law.’

‘So we’ll
make
her a changing room. I’ll bring a tent! There. Solved.’

‘What’ll we say to the bowlers on the other team? They’ll feel like they have to go easy on her and it’ll be unfair. They won’t want to bowl to a, you know, a
kid
.’

‘They bowl all right to Colin, though.’

Mike shrugs. ‘Well, he’s playing for the Under-11s now. He can handle himself all right.’

‘So can Alice. She’s a decent little spin bowler, you know. Come on Mike, stick her in at number eleven just once. It would make her summer.’