PopCo (46 page)

One day, about a week before term starts, we are in town as usual, pretending to be older than we are, on drugs, in the middle of interesting crises and so on – our usual fantasies of adult life. We are on a mission to buy new lipsticks: they have to be exactly the right shade of pale pink. We
have
to have them. Really, we live for this sort of thing. We occasionally see people I used to know from Groveswood in town. For example, Emma is now a junior assistant in Miss Selfridge, and Lucy works in the bank. We think they are really stupid, and we laugh at their hair and clothes and jobs. We would never fall into the establishment rat-race rut of working in something as pathetic as a bank or a mainstream clothes shop. They spend all day doing what they are told, with their back-
combed pony-tails and their red lipstick and blusher, and we talk about how ridiculous they look. Only someone who had sold their soul to Thatcher/Hitler/Reagan would seriously want to look like a cheap doll in red (of all things) lipstick and black skirts and tights. And they all wear high heels. Every mission that Rachel and I go on is about not being this. Our lipstick, our jeans, our hair – these things, so carefully put together, say that we don’t like what everyone else likes. Or, at least, we don’t like what the plebs in this town like. In London, or Paris, maybe somewhere like that, maybe we’d fit in.

So we are on this mission for our pink lipstick. Outside Boots, the animal-liberation stand is there as usual. We approach it, smoking cigarettes.

‘I want to join that,’ Rachel says to me. It’s not a surprise. She loves animals and always has. She wants to be a vet. She’s wanted to be a vet since she was about ten.

‘I do, too,’ I say. ‘But I’m scared.’

We giggle. ‘I am too,’ Rachel says. ‘But I don’t know why.’

‘I think they might tell us off for smoking,’ I say.

‘Yeah. And wearing make-up,’ Rachel says.

‘Do you think it’s true, what they say they do to the animals?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Rachel. ‘It must be a bit exaggerated.’

‘Yeah. It would be too horrible otherwise.’

‘No one would let them get away with it.’

‘No. Exactly.’

‘But I do agree with them, though.’

‘Yeah, me too.’

So, having added that to our identities, we swish into Boots in our jeans and we buy our lipsticks. We laugh at the tragic pictures of models on the make-up displays, and we giggle at laxatives and Durex. We don’t think any more about the animal-rights stand, and the people outside in the rain. We don’t make any particular connection between our lives and theirs. We don’t consider not coming to Boots any more. After all, no one else stocks our favourite lipstick! But mostly, we expect that while we are being young and doing this, someone else will care, and someone else will sign the petitions and we can simply tell all our friends (the ones we are bound to make) that we support animal liberation. We don’t really think that the stands, or the people in the rain, will ever just go away.

*
*
*

College is everything we thought it would be. There are rockabillies and psychobillies and girls who dress like punks and boys who dress like 50s American movie stars. These people, however, look at us as though we are children. We need to raise our game but we don’t know how. We look OK. We like the right music – although there’s no easy way of getting this across. We sit in our favourite cafe and dream of the day when we will have been coming here for enough years so that we can send funny postcards from abroad and they will be displayed on the wall. We plot ways of being invited to the other kids’ parties and invent ways of getting into the pubs where they all go. We think about how to obtain some cannabis and where/when we could learn to smoke it like they all do. We long for the day when one of the skinny boys in black will speak to us.

More than anything, we wish there were more things for us to buy, and easier ways of finding out what we should buy. We trawl charity shops and fancy-dress shops but we still don’t quite know the secret of being as trendy as the other people at college. We could be saying so much more with our style. Rachel, who started doing Biology, Chemistry and Physics, swaps so she is doing Biology, English and French. This won’t get her into university to study to become a vet, but all the interesting people are in the arts groups, not the sciences. I am doing Sociology, English and French. A lot of the most interesting people are in my group for sociology. On the day the Gulf War starts, we have a discussion about the end of the world. Then we organise a sit-in protest.

‘We thought you two were just really aloof,’ a girl called Harriet says to me and Rachel during the sit-in. We are all telling secrets and making friends and flirting. Harriet is a couple of years older than us and has only recently come back to college after something thrilling like a nervous breakdown or a period of drug-rehabilitation.

‘We thought you just didn’t like us,’ Rachel says, honestly.

And then we can’t stop talking.

We have just become friends with Harriet! After the sit-in, she invites us to our first party. We ring up our parents/grandparents and tell them that the sit-in is going to go on all night, and because of our political beliefs, we really feel we have to stay on. When my grandfather says he is proud of me for standing up for what I believe
in, I feel a little bit sick. But then I reason that all the people at the party are all the people from the sit-in so it’s almost like an extension of the same thing. It’s not a complete lie.

When Rachel tells her parents, they say, ‘Just stay with Alice, she’s sensible.’

The party is in a squat in a huge mansion off Mill Road. This is simply the most amazing place we have ever been to. They have it all connected up so there is a second-hand or stolen telephone in each room, all networked so that, say, the girl who lives upstairs can call the sitting room downstairs and ask for a spliff to be brought up to her. All the people who live here ride bicycles, many of them stolen. They are living the same kind of anti-establishment life we have seen in films and magazines!

This turns out not to be a dancing/eating sort of party. Instead, everyone sits around in the big, dusty living room or in the dirty, cramped kitchen, passing round spliffs and talking about politics or music or protest marches they have been on. Rachel and I don’t have to go home until the morning and so we definitely won’t. We drink cider and vodka and smoke our first spliffs. Our eye makeup smudges and our breath goes sour. Our stomachs rumble. We haven’t eaten since lunchtime. A student called Toby starts talking to me, while his friend, a musician called Gary, talks to Rachel. We both lose our virginity that night, on opposite sides of the same room, each while we think the other is asleep. Voodoo Ray is playing on an old, half-broken stereo when it’s my turn.

Over the next few months, the various accessories and props from our discarded identities pile up in corners of our bedrooms like we are both holding never-ending jumble sales. Broken Walkmans, watches that aren’t cool any more (‘cool’ is the new word for anything good), copies of French existentialist novels that we bought one Saturday from the bookshop to go with our French cigarettes, dinky notebooks half-filled with poetry and lists of what we thought was ‘in’ or ‘out’ at the time, Zippo lighters (branded matches from interesting clubs are better, we decide), silk scarves, berets, menthol cigarette papers, perfumes, deodorants, lipsticks, black nail varnish, indie albums (we like house now) and posters for demonstrations from when we used to hang around at the squat. Even my tarnished old necklace is under there somewhere, and my now battered copy of
Woman on the Edge of Time
.

How much life can the two of us fit in to the smallest space? We squeeze our few experiences like oranges, telling our new friends how wasted we always are, and how much sex we are always having. I say I was fucked up by my dad abandoning me, and Rachel turns her boarding-school into a reform school for the purpose of anecdotes and discussions. We claim to have seen cutting-edge TV programmes that last aired when we were both ten, and despite Rachel being at boarding-school and me not having a TV. We even lie to each other. ‘Yeah, I tried a bit of coke once,’ Rachel says. ‘Someone brought some into school.’ ‘Yeah, me too. Same,’ I say. As if anyone would ever have brought coke to school. Suddenly, trying things for the first time (coke, acid, speed) can’t even be that because doing something for the first time is too uncool. We don’t even admit to ourselves that we are the inexperienced sixteen-year-olds we are. We hitch rides home after the last bus has gone. We read ‘feminist’ novels about prostitutes being raped and we think they are profound. We even find them titillating, which we have no problem admitting to each other. We still think we might die if Saddam launches a nuclear missile at us. We fall in with another group, at another squat, and Toby becomes Mike and Gary becomes Dave. Dave already has a girlfriend with a kid on the way but Rachel doesn’t care. She is younger, prettier, poutier. And anyway, we are grown-ups now, doing grown-up things, like in the books we read. There will be casualties, of course there will. But that’s not our problem.

But summer changes everything, as summer always does. Did I think I would ever get away with this? Did I think I would ever manage to be cool and liked and myself, all at once? How stupid of me. It’s over – bang, bang, bang, bang – all of a sudden, just like that. Bang! My first-year exam results are pitiful and Rachel fails altogether. Bang! Rachel is pregnant and can’t tell her parents. Bang! Her mother is diagnosed with breast cancer. Bang! My grandmother goes into hospital, having suffered the first of the many strokes she will have. My life is like a firework display that has just finished; with cold, greasy hot-dog wrappers and charred remains of fun lying everywhere. I have hardly spoken to my grandparents for months. Now I find I simply have to be at home. I have to be the right sort of granddaughter for my grandfather. I want to work
with him again like when I was a kid, before these pretty, meaningless lights exploded around me. But even this is tarnished. Of course, I still have to sneak around with Rachel, trying to organise an abortion, trying to convince doctors that she really cannot tell her parents.

By the time it is all over, my bedroom is tidy again, my necklace is back on, and my hair dye is growing out. Life doesn’t seem quite so frivolous any more. Rachel starts her A levels again, back to her science subjects, and I pull my socks up for my second year. When I leave for university the following year, I take a recipe for root-vegetable stew, my gaffer-tape glasses and lots of books connected to the Voynich Manuscript. I send my grandparents long letters every week, written in fountain pen, on nice paper. I look at the other first years, smoking their first joints, agonising over their first sexual experiences and trying to come up with a ‘logo’ for every society they invent and I know that I have already had enough of all this.

*

My remedies arrive on Thursday morning, in a little brown padded envelope. This cheers me up a bit. I love getting remedies through the post. Little brown bottles with tiny white tablets inside, each labelled with the Latin name and potency of the remedy inside. I take a Kali-C, one of the 200s, and then get back into bed. I haven’t slept well at all, and the remedy knocks me out, too. I pretty much sleep through breakfast.

Eleven o’clock. I sit up in bed, switch on the TV and then immediately switch it back off again. I go to the bathroom and wash my face. I walk back into the bedroom and look at my storyboards from yesterday. What a load of shit. For the first time in ages, I think back to my own teenage years. I think about how we all built ourselves up like AIs or online avatars, as if identity was something you could put together only if you bought the right bits first. However, when I was a teenager you at least got to do the thinking yourself. You at least had to be inventive about where you got the bits and how you put them together. Teenage girls haven’t changed that much, but now there is so much more for them to buy. Now there are people only too willing to stick a bunch of them in a focus
group and say, ‘Now, girls. Tell us what exactly you want a lipstick to
do
.’ I suddenly think back to the question of the moon. If I was a scientist and I had worked out how to brand the moon, how to shine logos on it so that everyone in the world could see them (100 per cent coverage, well, except blind people), would I sell my idea? Would I sell the moon for a million or more? No. I absolutely would not.

I think about all the marketing books I have read, and all the little tricks that we learn in our industry and I suddenly realise that Esther is right. It is all dishonest. We are twenty-first-century con artists. Marketing, after all, is what you do to sell people things they don’t need. If people needed, say, a T-shirt with a logo on it, no one would have to market the idea to them. Marketing, advertising … What started off being, ‘Hey, we make this! Do you want it?’ turned into, ‘If you buy this, you might get laid more,’ and then mutated into, ‘If you don’t buy this, you’ll be uncool, no one will like you, everyone will laugh at you and you may as well kill yourself now. I’m telling you this because I am your friend and you have to trust me.’ Marketing is what gives value to things that do not have any actual intrinsic value. We put eyes on a bit of plastic, but it is marketing that actually brings the piece of plastic to life. It is marketing that means we can sell a 10p bit of cloth for
£
12.99. We spy on kids and find out that they like playing with socks, so we sell them socks. I don’t want to do this any more. I really, really don’t want to do this any more.

I burn the storyboards in the bath.

‘You’re looking a bit better,’ Ben says when he comes later, with dinner.

‘Thanks,’ I say, smiling a watery smile.

‘We’re going on an excursion tomorrow,’ he says, just as we finish eating.

I put my tray down on the table. ‘An excursion? Where?’

‘Totnes. You should come if you feel better. We can have lunch. We’re all getting things for sailing … Deck shoes, funny hats. All that stuff.’