PopCo (15 page)

But my grandfather is wrong. My summer has already been made by overhearing this conversation. He thinks I am good enough to play! My chance to join the team never actually comes though, due to my grandfather mysteriously deciding to resign from it.

‘We’ll play cricket our own way,’ he says. ‘In the garden.’

*

Mac is there for the meditation class. He speaks to a few people (but not me), and then settles down at the back to join in. I can’t believe that it was only two days ago that meeting him seemed like such a big deal. Now he’s around all the time, and my ‘secret’ – that I had that conversation with him when I first arrived here – has lost power as quickly as an engine with no fuel. We are gathered on the sunken lawn in front of the main building, under a very old, gnarly tree. Our meditation tutor is a softly-spoken woman with long brown hair tied in two long bunches. I have never meditated before but, now that I am having a go, I find that it is somehow like drugs, this feeling of shrinking back into yourself. It’s not as hard as I would have thought. All you do is shut your eyes and concentrate on something, and you almost don’t realise you have been doing it until you stop, open your eyes and the world suddenly
seems sharper, yet more distant. I thought meditating involved clearing your head of all thoughts but the woman says it’s OK to keep your thoughts in a back cupboard in your mind while you bring one thing to the foreground and focus on that. She says meditation is like tidying up before you sit down, as opposed to sitting down in a mess. She also says it’s good for when you get that brain-overload feeling, which I definitely do have. When it’s all over I feel lighter, and also very tired. I walk slowly back to my room and, without fully intending to, I immediately fall asleep on the bed.

An hour later, or possibly two. I have probably missed dinner. What time is it? I feel disorientated, sleepy. Am I still myself? I think so. I force myself out of bed, splash water on my face in the bathroom and then use some of it to smooth down my hair, as I sense the beginnings of frizz. But this is more habit than anything. Do I care if my hair is frizzy? Not particularly. I walk slowly back to bed and get in. The sheets are still warm, and the pillow still has the small indentation from where my head was resting a few minutes ago. It’s not that I’m sleepy any more, actually, far from it. I simply feel bread-warm and comfortable in here, with my legs drawn up, as if someone has been singing me magic, calming lullabies. At the moment I feel like the kind of person to whom no one would ever send notes in code. I feel like someone with no work to do. To complete the effect, I reach over to the bedside table and pick up my bottle of valerian. A few drops and then a bit more semi-meditation, concentrating on a crack in the ceiling. I am overdosing on relaxation. This is great. More valerian; now I could do with some chamomile. I really could do with some chamomile tea, some miso soup (that craving never completely went away) and possibly some dope. Where is Esther? Will the chefs have heard of miso soup? Can I answer these questions? I drop off again while wondering if I can even be bothered to masturbate.

Eight o’clock. I really have missed dinner now. The valerian has slightly rag-dolled my body but not so much that I can’t get up and smoke a cigarette. I pull on my skirt, a shirt and a cardigan and my plimsolls. I have attached my door key to a piece of ribbon and I slip this around my neck. Hair in a ponytail? No. Two thick plaits. Great.
Time to leave the room, Alice
. Can’t go back to bed again. Can I? No. I vaguely recall that I was planning to do some
work this evening but I need soup, tea, anything. I am hungry and I need to walk around. When the air hits my face outside, it is like an unexpected kiss.

Over in the West Wing, Dan is buried in a book about lateral thinking.

‘Hi,’ I say to him.

He looks at me with gleaming eyes. ‘This is so … oh, God. What happened to you?’

‘Huh?’

‘You look wasted.’

‘No, no. I’m fine. Meditation-overload. It’ll be all right.’

‘Oh. We were looking for you at dinner.’

So I did miss it. ‘I had to go to bed really urgently. Any sign of Esther?’

‘In the kitchen, possibly? It’s at the end of the hall.’

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘What time will you be up until?’

‘One-ish.’

‘Cup of tea later, then?’

‘Yeah, cool. Will you require my notes for the purpose of copying?’

‘What? Oh, yeah, maybe.’

‘You’re such a skiver, Butler.’

It’s not that, really. I just know I will be able to do this work quickly, when the deadline is looming in a more threatening way than it is now. But I say nothing and walk down the corridor towards the kitchen. I can smell toast, and steam. The door is closed but I push it open anyway, for some reason expecting Esther to be sitting in there on her own, making toast. Instead, I find Ben, Chloë and Hiro talking in an intense kind of way. It’s one of those situations where, as soon as I walk in, they all stop talking and look at me, all with raised eyebrows. Oh God.

‘Sorry,’ I say automatically. ‘Looking for someone.’

Actually, they don’t all have raised eyebrows, nor are they all looking at me. Ben keeps his gaze down on the table, his brown eyes lost behind his glasses. Does he not notice that I am here? Is he not going to give me one of his unreadable expressions? No, not now, obviously. Strange. It was only this afternoon that we were talking about jumping out of an imaginary balloon together, which gave me a nice, fizzy feeling, I must admit. As quickly as I can, I close the door behind me and start walking back down the
corridor. I briefly knock at Esther’s door, but there is no reply. I walk slowly down the steps to the stone passage below. The air is fresh and damp with the smell of grass. What is my mission now? Shall I abandon the hunt for Esther? She is a difficult person to find, so much so that I have been wondering if she can shape-shift, or even whether she turns into a bat after dark and simply roosts somewhere. Perhaps I will go and find out if the dining room is still open, or see if there is anything to cook in the East Wing kitchen. Maybe I will even do some work, now, since that’s what everyone else seems to be doing.

As I turn out of the West Wing I become aware of footsteps breaking into the quiet behind me; fast footsteps, as if someone’s running to catch up with me. Instinctively, I look behind me but there’s no one there. I hesitate for a moment but the footsteps have gone. Perhaps they were some echo from the past, or simply belonged to someone going the other way. I wander through the arch and then across the grass to the big oak door leading back into the main building.

There are indeed chefs still in the dining room. Could they even be 24-hour chefs? Anything’s possible when PopCo is in charge. I slightly apologetically ask if it would be possible for me to have something to eat, and then present them with a list of my unusual requests.

‘Miso soup,’ repeats one of the chefs. ‘Chamomile tea.
Pain au
chocolat
. Scrambled eggs on wholemeal toast.’ He grins. ‘I think we can manage that. Got the munchies, have we?’

‘Er, sort of. I missed dinner,’ I say.

‘No problem. You know we are here all night?’

PopCo really do think of everything.

‘Do I have to eat it here?’ I ask. ‘Or …’

‘You want take-away? Yep. We can do take-away.’ He shouts the order through to someone else and I go to one of the small tables to sit and wait. I wish I had something to read.

Back in my room, I pick a ‘young adult’ title from the bookshelves and then pull the foil off the plates and start to eat. The miso soup has come in a big flask and my craving is satisfied after two cups of it. The scrambled eggs have grated parmesan and basil leaves sprinkled on the top. I eat them all, with the wholemeal toast,
reading the beginnings of this novel, which is about a lonely girl and her horse. The girl is lonely because her family has moved to a remote house on a moor in Scotland and she has no friends. Every day she has to get up at five to groom her horse and then walk two miles to the bus stop to be taken to school. When she is there she is too sleepy to make friends with anyone and gets behind with her work. At the weekends she pretty much just gets into dangerous scrapes with her horse. The first time she tries to ride him over unfamiliar moorland they get lost in a storm; the next time they get stuck in a bog. On their third time out, she meets a wild boy riding his own horse. They look at each other and then, without speaking, ride faster and faster into the wind, challenging each other, competing in an uncertain event. He doesn’t stop to tell her his name but simply disappears over a hill, shouting something like, ‘Tomorrow …’. But tomorrow he isn’t there. She then starts looking for him, trying to find him again so she can at least ask his name.

The tea is finished and I am smoking. This is actually quite a gripping book. Will she find the boy? Who is he? I could finish reading this right now but that feels greedy, somehow, and faintly absurd. What time is it? Nine, ten? Maybe I’ll have another go at finding Esther. Or maybe I should just stay here and read after all, with cigarettes and more valerian. There is also, of course, the possibility that I could do some work, now I am reaching my peak time for alertness and enthusiasm, not that I feel particularly alert, or enthusiastic. A blast of wind hits the window and there is a curious whistling noise outside. Is there a storm coming in? Maybe I will go for a wander now rather than later. Even if I don’t find Esther I can have a cup of tea with Dan. Then there’ll be loads of time to come back and actually get on with something. I brush my teeth and put some lip-balm on my lips before I leave, pulling my cardigan around me against the wind. As I cross into the stone walkway on the West Wing I again imagine I can hear footsteps, just like before. I am so distracted by the sound that I almost walk straight into Ben, who appears to be walking in the opposite direction to me, towards the East Wing. It has started to rain.

‘So this is where you are,’ he says, his deep-well voice soft and uncertain.

What my eyes do now must require the activity of about a billion
neurones.
You were looking for me?
they say. And, then, subtly,
Come with me, then, through this arch. I dare you
. His eyes say something almost question-markish back, but he does; he walks with me through the arch. We walk, slowly, in the rain, around the outside of the main building towards the steps leading down to the sunken lawn. We must seem like old drunks; Ben is so close to me that we are swaying and bumping together as we walk. At some point I put my finger to my lips and make a
Shhh
noise but I don’t have to. Neither of us is going to say anything. In this almost-gone light Ben looks like a solemn ghost; his wet black hair and rain-spattered glasses giving the impression that when alive this ghost was a South European intellectual, perhaps sometime between the wars. My heart is a tap-dancing speed-freak, despite my evening of downers, and my legs suddenly feel crazy, like they could be a tail. For a second I am a mermaid. Could I have been thrown out of the storm to tempt him? Did he come out of the storm for me? Again, I think back to the moment we shared earlier on during the Balloon Game. For once in my life, I am pleased I played the Balloon Game.

Did I intend to lead him to the gazebo? Perhaps. But neither of us can wait that long. As soon as we are in the forest and well out of sight of the main house, we take a sharp left, look around to finally check we are alone, and then, as intensely and as hard as we can, we kiss. We kiss as if neither of us had names, addresses, To Do lists, phone numbers, friends, enemies or anything else in our lives at all. Ben’s arms are surprisingly strong as he presses me against a tree. ‘Don’t speak,’ I whisper, and he doesn’t speak, not once, as he pulls up my skirt, takes a condom out of his pocket, and then begins to unbutton his trousers.

Back in my room I take off my wet clothes and put on the white PopCo dressing gown. Delicious, delicious. I will not wash tonight. I sit on my bed and it all seems quiet, perhaps too quiet. There is less rain now, and no sounds from anyone along the corridor. Should I have stayed with Ben? Should we have talked afterwards; swapped details of our childhoods and our jobs and our ex-partners and our unsavoury habits? No. This is right. This is how I wanted it. And, of course, I won’t talk about this, or tell anyone what happened, especially not a woman.
You didn’t speak
at all? You did it against a tree? Well,
he’ll
think you’re easy, won’t
he? You’ve got to make them run, Alice. You can’t let them have
you so easily
. Of course, he didn’t ‘have me’; we had each other. But you try explaining that to a woman who thinks that all men are out for one thing and won’t respect you if you ‘give’ it to them. I wonder what Esther would say? Probably not that, at least. But I still won’t tell her.

It must be past eleven now. I get up off the bed and sit down at my desk.
Teenage girls
. I write this on a piece of paper and then look at the words suspiciously. Are we supposed to be diving straight into this problem or practising lateral thinking and matrices first? What would happen if someone came up with the definitive teenage girls’ product tonight? Would we all simply go home tomorrow?

I’ve only been sitting there for three or four minutes when there’s a soft knock at the door. For a moment I think,
Ben
, but when I open it it’s Dan, carrying two mugs of tea and smiling almost naughtily.

‘This is like some boarding-school story,’ he says, walking into the room. Then: ‘Oh – you’re not dressed.’

‘Just had a bath,’ I lie, taking a mug of tea from him. ‘Where did you get these?’

‘Made them in the kitchen.’

‘Great. Thanks. So … Do I need to get dressed or can you handle me in a dressing gown?’

He grins. ‘I’ll control myself, Butler.’

‘Good.’ I start rolling a cigarette. ‘So how’s stuff?’

‘Really cool. I am so into all these lateral-thinking ideas. And the matrices … I haven’t really thought about things this way before. I am definitely going to crack this teenage girl problem. I mean, how hard can it be?’ His eyes are sparkling orbs of enthusiasm.