PopCo (36 page)

Waiting for Miss Hind turns out to be a complicated affair. We realise that if we are still here in the changing rooms, dressed, when the others come back, we will definitely be called lesbians. You simply can’t watch other girls change and shower unless you are doing those things yourself. So we end up doing a strange tour of the very edge of the school boundaries until we end up at the top of the Rural Studies department where the goats are kept. Apparently, when you get to the third year you have to learn to milk the goats. Yuck! And you have to dissect things in biology. Emma and I have already talked about going on strike when this happens. Striking is a very fashionable thing to talk about at school at the moment, perhaps because of the miners. Emma brings it up all the time.

We manage to time it so that we get back to the changing rooms two minutes after school has ended. This has to be quick, because my bus is waiting in the car park already, and Roxy’s father will be here soon as well. Miss Hind is there on her own, sorting through a box of hockey balls.

‘Excuse me, Miss,’ I say.

She turns around. ‘Yes?’

‘I came to collect my necklace.’

‘I’m sure you did. I see there are three of you here. Is this necessary? Are you too much of a baby to come and see me on your own?’

I want to shout at her. I want to say that she is violent and unstable and has already pinned one of my classmates against a wall today. I would be mad to see her on my own. Instead, I just say, ‘Can I have my necklace, please?’

She sighs and gets the cardboard box. ‘I was going to confiscate this over the weekend but I can’t be bothered really. Here you go.’

She throws it at me but I am too slow to catch it. It falls to the floor, almost in slow motion. My poor necklace! I let out a yelp as I bend down to pick it up.

‘What do you say, then?’ says Miss Hind while I am trying to rub stagnant water off the necklace. She says it in the kind of voice people use to prompt you to say thank you.

‘What?’ I say back.

‘What do you say?’ A bit more stern – but she actually wants me to thank her.

I look at her with hatred in my eyes, then I look back at my friends. ‘Shall we go home, now?’ I say to them. I am not thanking this woman. No way. I am not the bravest person in the world but I will not be intimidated by this. I don’t care how hellish she makes my life at this school. If I have to, I will run away to Russia, perhaps with Alex. Without saying anything else, the three of us walk out of the changing rooms.

I spend most of the weekend in my room. School now seems to be one long complicated knot of things that I can’t tell my grandparents about. I certainly can’t explain about the necklace, not that I have to now, since I actually got it back. But everything at school – all the painful inadequacy I feel – comes from the fact that I am not normal. I am not normal because I live in this village, with my grandparents, in a house with no TV. I imagine living where Emma does, on the estate just in front of the school building, with normal furniture and oven chips and parents and catalogue clothes. This would be heaven. I could invite Emma over for tea, then. I could dream about Alex coming around one day and not laughing at me. (He may have no parents but I bet he has a TV and normal books in his house.) So now I have actually wished my grandparents and
everything I love away, all because of what people at school think.

If your friends threw themselves off a cliff, would you do it too?
Well, no. If they threw themselves off a cliff, I wouldn’t have to worry about what they think any more, so that’s a stupid question. I can’t deal with this. My grandparents are both too caught up in their work to take me into town. I will not have a pleated skirt by Monday. I will not have lip-gloss. I have to do something about this. But what? Will my friends like me for another week without these things? I have a plan to ask my grandparents if I can have dinner money instead of a packed lunch, so I can buy chocolate at the van at lunchtime like my friends do. Perhaps I can save some of the change for lip-gloss? So next week I will have to feel guilty because of that, too. What am I turning into?

My mother’s diary turns out to have been written in the 1960s, when she was a teenager. Her life then seems a million miles away from my life now, however. She went to the girls’ grammar school and was obsessed with her violin. Every entry in her diary mentions how much practice she has done that day, as well as whether she has any spots! I wish I was at the grammar school. Why did no one tell me that everything was going to be like this? I thought my mother’s diary would be the secret way into her mind but there isn’t that much in it apart from the notes to do with her violin practice, or homework. I feel guilty about this as well (guilt is my new best friend), but I feel almost cheated by the diary. I have searched it for secret messages or code, but there is nothing. On the plus side, however, some of the novels in the box are very interesting. Some of them even have dirty bits! I have decided to get to know my mother by reading these books instead. Although I am not cold, I snuggle up in bed with these books all day on Sunday and try not to think about going back to school. I wish I could contract a terminal disease so I don’t have to go to that place tomorrow. My stomach ache starts at about six o’clock on Sunday evening and I can’t listen to anything my grandparents say at all.

*

Ben and I wake up at dinner time. He gets out of bed with messed-up hair and walks through to the bathroom. I can hear him peeing and then the taps running.

‘What do you want for dinner?’ he asks me when he comes back.

‘You don’t have to …’ I say.

He smiles. ‘Shut up. Just give me your order.’

‘Oh. Well, just bring me whatever you’re having.’

‘Do you mind if I eat here too?’

‘Of course not.’ I yawn. ‘Bloody hell. I didn’t think it was possible to sleep as much as I have over the last couple of days.’

‘You need rest,’ Ben says, walking to the door. ‘Oh. There’s something here.’ He bends down and picks up a white envelope. ‘There’s nothing written on the front. Do you want me to ….?’

‘No,’ I say quickly, holding out my hand. ‘That’s OK.’

He passes it to me. ‘All right. Well, I’ll see you in a bit.’

‘Yeah.’

Is this the longer message from my unknown correspondent? I tear open the flap and pull out the contents of the envelope. It’s definitely not the longer message. There is just one thing in here: a white business card with a mobile phone number on it. There is a message in blue ink on the back.
Alice
, it says.
Forgive my jealousy
.
If you ever change your mind …??? Oh, well. Here’s the
number again anyway. G
.

My heart is beating fast. Shit. What if Ben had seen this? It’s not just that this is a secret note from another man; this is evidence that I have had/will have some sort of romantic entanglement with one of the PopCo Board. This isn’t just ludicrous, it’s deeply, deeply lame and uncool. Of course, I don’t care about being cool most of the time but this is the one issue on which I think cool has it right. Creatives are creatives and bosses are bosses. That’s it. You can’t mix the two groups. Also, though, I think about the way Georges stood here in his suit looking down at me. I think about Doctor Death and his Vicodin. Then I think about Ben. Suddenly, it’s not just sex with him. With a strange sense of déjà vu, and without thinking any more about this, I get out of bed, find my lighter and burn the business card.

‘What’s that smell?’ Ben says, when he comes back.

‘What smell?’ I say.

‘Oh, nothing.’ Ben puts down the two trays he is carrying.

‘So what have we got?’ I ask.

‘We have got … Um … Sticky onion tarts; braised red cabbage with apple and red wine sauce; and potato, parsley and celeriac
mash. There was beans and chips but I thought I’d get the posh stuff. For pudding we have lemon cake with mint leaves. One of the chefs said they call it
Let Them Eat Cake
cake. Some kind of Marie Antoinette thing. I think they’re a bit bored down there. I brought you some green gunpowder tea as well. I’ve had a real thing about gunpowder tea lately.’

‘I love green tea,’ I say. Ben passes me my tray. ‘This looks amazing. Is it all ….’

‘What, vegan? Yep.’

‘Cool.’

‘Shall we have the radio on?’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘It’s just up there, on the windowsill.’

Ben gets up. ‘What station?’

‘Um … Well, it’s not late enough for Radio 3 to be any good. I don’t know. Maybe 4? You choose.’

Ben fiddles with the dial, switching reception from FM to SW. It crackles and hums a lot and then, suddenly, an intense bass noise kicks in, with ethereal flute sounds. The two melodies, high and low, twist around each other like alien tentacles.

‘Cool,’ Ben says. ‘They’re on.’

‘Who’s “they”? What’s this?’

‘Zion Radio.’

‘Pirate?’

‘Yeah, sort of. As much as anything is on short wave.’

‘Zion as in
Neuromancer?
’

‘Yeah. These two postgrad students in Poland run it. They play math rock, experimental jazz, classical, drum and bass and … oh, here you go.’

A woman’s voice fades up over the track.

‘She’s speaking Polish,’ I say.

‘Wait,’ says Ben.

She stops speaking and then starts again, this time in English. A new track starts softly in the background. It is one of Bach’s fugues – something my grandmother used to play all the time. But there’s something else coming in and out of it, another track; very faint drums. The woman keeps speaking, the English words softened by her accent. I recognise that she is reading something, and I quickly realise that it’s Gibson, but I’m not sure which one. Then I hear the word
Wintermute
and smile.

‘She’s reading
Neuromancer
,’ I say, bemused.

‘Yeah. They do this most nights. They don’t read a whole book, or even the same one, they just broadcast music and excerpts of whatever they choose to read that night. It’s brilliant.’

‘I love this,’ I say. It’s an odd experience, sitting down to eat while a Polish woman reads William Gibson on short-wave radio, but odd in a very, very good way. ‘Oh yum,’ I say, trying some of the mash. ‘This is amazing.’

‘Those chefs are pretty good.’

We are silent for a while, listening to the radio and savouring our food.

‘Ben?’ I say eventually.

‘What?’

‘Thanks for looking after me.’

He smiles back at me. ‘Any time,’ he says. He finishes his onion tart. ‘Do you really like this?’ he asks.

‘What?’

He gestures at the radio. ‘The Gibson stuff?’

‘God yes. Especially done like this. I wrote my thesis on cyberpunk at university.’

‘As part of what degree?’

‘English.’

‘I thought you’d done maths or something like that.’

I smile. ‘You’re not the only one. Violet thought so, too. I had a mathematical grandmother, which is how I know the few bits of maths I do.’

‘Had?’

‘She died. Just after I finished university.’

I tell him briefly about how I lived with my grandparents when I was a child and what a good job they did of bringing me up, even if I didn’t always appreciate it. I tell him about my mother dying and my father disappearing. Even the short version takes almost an hour, during which time it gets dark outside, the bird finally stops singing and Ben smokes a cigarette out of the window while I enjoy the passive smoke. We drink gunpowder tea.

‘So your father just went?’

‘Yeah.’

‘With no explanation?’

‘No.’ I don’t tell Ben about the necklace and all that stuff. There
are lots of reasons not to tell him but at the moment the main one seems to be that I want him to be intrigued and fascinated with me, not with my past. If that’s not possible, then the programme can terminate. I will not put an artificially infinite loop into this relationship. The algorithm is already wonky but is at least looping at the correct point. I will not make him want me because of intrigue/money.

‘That’s horrible,’ Ben says, about my father.

‘Yeah.’ I want to change the subject. ‘What did you do at university?’

‘Philosophy and Theology.’

I hadn’t expected this. ‘Wow.’

‘Yeah. Doesn’t make you very obviously employable. It was interesting, though.’

‘So how did you end up in the videogames division of PopCo?’

‘That’s a pretty long story.’

Ben starts clearing the trays away. He pours more gunpowder tea for both of us and passes me my cup. I smell the smoky, green tea aroma. I hadn’t had gunpowder tea for ages before tonight. It’s amazing.

‘Too long?’

‘Probably. But the bare bones are that I needed money fast, for various reasons. I’ve always coded, ever since I got my first BBC Microcomputer in the 80s. I used to create Othello games for fun, and little text adventures. Obviously, as a kid, I got heavily into science fiction and fantasy. I was a right little geek. I started wondering about other worlds, and other forms of consciousness. I ran these crazy astronomy programmes on my computer and persuaded my parents to buy me a telescope. It’s …’ He laughs. ‘It’s a long story, like I said. I basically became obsessed with making contact with other worlds. Then, when I hit about fifteen, or so, I suddenly started thinking about things in a different way. What would it mean if there were other worlds? Could computers ever develop consciousness? How do you define life? When it came to choosing A levels, I decided to go for Religious Studies, Philosophy and Psychology. I left science behind. There was also this girl …’

‘Isn’t there always?’ I say, feeling an unfamiliar discomfort. Jealousy? What was this girl like? Did he reject her or she him? Does he still dream about her?

‘At university I became interested in thinkers like Deleuze, Baudrillard, Virilio. I think I may have done the same as you – left the scientific stuff behind and then picked it up again as part of an arts degree.’

‘Yeah. That’s exactly what I did.’ For a moment it all comes back to me; how quickly it happened. One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been re-routed into more ‘normal’ girls’ activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes. ‘How did you do it?’ I ask him. ‘What sorts of things were you interested in?’