PopCo (48 page)

‘Hello,’ I say to the elderly woman behind the desk. ‘One adult, please.’

‘Are you a resident of Totnes?’

‘No,’ I say, looking down at a pile of leaflets advertising some of the exhibits. I glance at the picture on the front of one of them, showing that this museum used to be a merchant’s house. Inside, there is information about current exhibits. There’s a Victorian apothecary display, a historical costume display and – what’s this? – the Charles Babbage Room? This is too weird. Why would they have a Charles Babbage room here? He worked in London, I know that. It was from London that he waged his relentless campaign to ban organ grinders and street musicians. I shake my head the way you do when you are trying to shake dreams and illusions away, and look again.
Charles Babbage Room
, it still says.

‘That’s
£
1.60,’ the woman says.

I get out the change. ‘I’m interested in the Charles Babbage Room,’ I say.

‘Oh yes,’ she says. ‘It’s the room at the top of the house. History of computing. Very popular. It’s those stairs there that you want.’

The wooden stairs creak as I walk up them. Are there any other people in the whole museum? It doesn’t sound like it. I pass one floor, then another, going, I think, forwards in time the higher I climb. There are nooks and crannies and I can see rooms with sloping floors, a sign to the apothecary display and various snatches of period costumes. When I reach the top floor, I am actually awed and almost frightened by the silence and stillness here. There’s a sign.
Charles Babbage Room
. I go in. And there, in the corner of the room, is Babbage himself, sitting at the desk.

‘Oh my God,’ I yelp, springing back.

If he looks up at me I will die on the spot. I will die. I look back. Nothing happens. I look again. It’s a life-size model, posed at the
desk like a waxwork. Who would do that? This is one of the scariest things I have ever seen. He’s so … real. I’m sure his plastic eyes follow me as I walk around the room, looking at pictures of models of the Difference Engine and plans for the Analytical Engine (the real ones are in museums in London). I discover that Babbage was born here and has had a road on a local industrial estate named after him. I look at displays about the history of computing; a frieze about Babbage’s life. In a glass display case, there are little ZX Spectrums and a BBC Microcomputer that look almost as old as the Difference Engine.

On the far wall there is a portrait of Ada Lovelace. I go and look at it.
Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron
, a caption says. A printed sheet tells me things I already know: her mother didn’t want her daughter tainted by poetry the way her father had been, so had her schooled in mathematics and science instead. In 1843, Ada married the Earl of Lovelace. When she translated an Italian summary of Babbage’s plans for the new Analytical Engine, Babbage suggested she add her own notes. These notes turned out to be three times the length of the original article. Ada and Charles continued to correspond. Ada wrote an article that was published in 1843. In it, she predicted that the Analytical Machine could be used to compose complex music, to produce graphics, and for both artistic and scientific endeavours. Her predictions turned out to be correct. She was my grandmother’s heroine.

No one is coming, Alice. Relax
. Can I do the decode here? Is anyone else going to come and look at Babbage? I suppose I will hear the creaking steps if anyone does come. I work out that I will have at least a minute-and-a-half’s warning of anyone coming up here, and slip down on the floor under the picture of Ada Lovelace, my legs crossed on the hard wooden floorboards, my bag by my side, ready to abort this mission if need be.

Don’t
. That’s the first word. OK. I flick to page 343 of the book. The 9th word is either ‘go’ or ‘to’, depending on whether my correspondent has counted a hyphenated construction (self-educated) as one word or two.
Don’t to
. Well, that doesn’t make sense.
Don’t go
…Bloody hell. Who has sent me this? The next two numbers are similar: 363, 97 and 363, 98. Two words together. I flip to page 363 and count words. Word 97 is ‘fight’ and word 98 is ‘back’.
Fight
back
.

I sit there counting words for the next ten or so minutes until I have the following:
Don’t go fight back struggle against corporate
enemy meet in your room to night at eight it’s a war
. Bloody hell. Refusing for a moment to actually digest the meaning of this, I suddenly think of Francis Stevenson, and the mystery text he used to code his treasure map. I remember my grandfather explaining that you always have to think about what sort of books would contain the right words to create a particular kind of message. I look at the language of this one. Fight, enemy, corporate, war, struggle. You wouldn’t find any of those words in the horse book I sent. I smile at the broken-up nature of the word ‘tonight’, written as two words in the message. You wouldn’t think so, but sometimes it’s hard to find a simple word like
tonight
in even a long text.
Woman on the Edge of Time
is written in the past tense, which means that you would only find a present-tense word like ‘tonight’ in a piece of speech.

But maybe none of this matters right now. I read the message again, inserting my own punctuation.
Don’t go. Fight back. Struggle
against corporate enemy. Meet in your room tonight at eight. It’s
a war
. Who is this from? What is going on? And then it hits me. I didn’t think the enemy existed. Then I realised it was me. Then I decided to desert. Now – is this possible? – I am about to find out that there is another side. I suppose there has to be, if there is an enemy. My mind is running the tape of the last couple of weeks again, like a password-descrambler checking every letter in every space to see what fits. I can almost hear the click, click, click as faces, coincidences, events fall into place. And, suddenly, I think I can make a pretty good guess about who will be coming to my room tonight. It’s like playing Cluedo, really.

There’s a sound, like marbles falling onto concrete, and the patch of sunlight in the room suddenly disappears as if it was a rug that someone had simply pulled away and rolled up. It’s funny how dark it is in here now that the sunlight has gone. I shiver. It’s cold, suddenly, too. Babbage’s eyes still seem to follow me as I get up and go to the window. Hailstones as big as gobstoppers are falling from the sky. I stand in the chilly, dark silence in here and watch as people outside duck into shops and doorways or open their just-in-case umbrellas. One man runs down the suddenly deserted pavement with a supermarket carrier bag over his head. A smell of wet leaves comes through the window.

Change the world
. Has my mother been time travelling again? Has she violated some cosmic law to send me this book with this new message? Do I believe in coincidence? Do I believe in synchronicity?
Stop it, Alice
. Hail beats against the window and outside, people are still huddled in doorways, looking at the sky. I remember thinking I had encountered a huge coincidence once, when looking up a word in a dictionary. Usually, it takes me ages to find the right page but once, just once, I picked up the dictionary and opened it to the correct page immediately.
Amazing
, I thought. Then I worked out that, since I have been using dictionaries all my life, the probability is that this would have to happen at some point. There’s what, a thousand pages in a dictionary? When you open it, there’s therefore a 1/1000 chance you will open it on the page that contains the word you are looking for. These odds are greatly reduced by the fact that people don’t open dictionaries randomly: they aim to open it as close to the word they want as possible. If you are searching for a word beginning with ‘C’, you don’t open the dictionary at the end, you open it fairly close to the beginning, where you guess the ‘C’ section might be. It is likely then that you will hit the correct page more than once in a lifetime, especially if you use a dictionary a lot (although it could, of course, happen the first time you ever use one).

Probability – remember – also proves that, if you get twenty-three people in the same room, you will have a 50 per cent chance of finding that two of them share the same birthday. Probability is a funny thing, something that humans don’t intuitively understand. We declare as coincidence events which aren’t actually that unlikely, mathematically. It’s like the story of Marilyn vos Savant and the Monty Hall Problem.
Of course
you have a greater chance of winning the car if you swap doors. There was a two in three chance you made the wrong choice in the first place, so you should definitely swap. But, when Marilyn vos Savant said this, even Erdös was convinced she must be wrong. But she wasn’t. She got hate mail from male mathematicians saying she was wrong, but she wasn’t.

So, you’ve picked one of three doors. You’ve been shown a goat. Do you change doors? You’ve chosen a life that seemed to make sense. But there are two other options. One is, perhaps, a goat. One is a mystery. Do you open the mystery door? Do you abandon the game and (metaphorically) embrace the goat? What’s wrong
with goats anyway? I’d actually rather have a goat than a car. I already have a car, but I do not own a lawnmower.

Or perhaps there are two boxes, A and B. Box A contains
£
1000. Box B is either empty or contains a million pounds …

I pick up my bag from the floor.

‘What would you have made of Newcomb’s Paradox?’ I whisper to Charles Babbage. ‘What would you have chosen?’

I smile, then turn and walk towards the door.

‘
Choose
Box B
,’ says a deep male voice.

Babbage? I turn around but the dummy is still and lifeless. My heart is a fish trying to escape from a hook as I run, clattering, all the way downstairs.

‘Goodness me,’ says the woman at the desk as I fly past her.

‘Sorry,’ I call back. ‘I’m late …’

Out in the street, the hailstones have stopped falling and people are wandering about again, their shoes and trainers and boots scuffing up dirty bits of sleet, little puddles forming between cobblestones. I look at the town clock and see that it is half-past twelve. I cross the road and walk back up to the funny little parade of shops on what I now see is called the Butterwalk. One is a health-food shop and I duck into it and buy a huge bottle of Echinacea tincture on PopCo expenses. It’s quite crowded inside and I end up standing in the queue for ages next to a noticeboard covered with business cards.
Personal
Journeys, Yoga for Health,
Reiki
, The Individual and the Spirit,
Reflexology, Colour-therapy, Psychic Healing, Chanting Workshop,
Jungian Therapy, Psychodynamic Counselling, Hypnotherapy,
Hypnobirthing
, Womb Chanting,
Qigong
, Crystal Healing
… Each card has a mobile phone number on it and for a second I am reminded of prostitutes’ cards in London call boxes. Eventually I get to the front of the queue and pay for my Echinacea.

I go next door, into a funny little department store. It smells of leather, a smell which follows me through into a small womenswear department, all floaty scarves, incense and ‘handmade’ Indian tops. Then I walk into the footwear department and up the stairs. At the front of the first floor (and this is the reason I came in here at all, because I saw it in the window) is a large rocking horse, with traditional toys displayed all around it. I touch its mane, thinking about how much I wanted a rocking horse when I was about five. I’m not convinced about the rest of this shop but up here it’s nice. There
are wooden toys, building blocks, sharing toys, caring toys. There are wooden train sets and farmyard animals and fairy costumes. There are no big brand names, no guns, no electronics, just simple, well-made toys. I touch the silky outsides of juggling balls. I look at glass marbles, pick-up-sticks and rainy-day cricket sets. I see something that partly inspired the bead/necklace idea I will never develop, something you see in a lot of department stores: little pick-and-mix beads and strings so you can spell out your name on a necklace or a bracelet. I smile. Yes: this is nice.

I walk around to another display. Oh no. Something I recognise. A cardboard stand with smudgy, child’s-finger-painting-style images of two children. One is a yellow smudge with brown plaits and a red hat. The other is a pale green smudge with yellow-smudge hair sticking out at all angles.
Milly and Bo
, a sign says. But I already know Milly and Bo. On the shelves by the cardboard stand are various Milly and Bo products: a fire-fighter’s uniform for Milly. A nurse’s outfit for Bo. A Milly and Bo doll’s house which has solar panels, a composter and encourages equal gender roles. Although there is no sign anywhere and no familiar sailboat logo, Milly and Bo is a brand made by PopCo.

I feel sick. But why? What’s wrong with the fact that PopCo makes and sells nice politically correct toys? What’s wrong with this little department store selling this range alongside small, non-corporate brands? Well … What’s wrong is that PopCo haven’t got their logo here anywhere. This is yet more mirror-branding. This means that parents can buy these products without ever realising that they are lining the pockets of the third richest toy corporation in the world. What’s wrong is that everyone in the industry knows that PopCo ripped this idea off from a small co-operative toy company based in Scotland called Daisy, who couldn’t match PopCo’s distribution or afford to sue. What’s wrong is that PopCo really don’t care what they make as long at it sells. I rip open the plastic package containing one of the male nurse uniforms and check the label.
Made in China
, it says. Did someone lose a limb so that middle-class children could experiment with gender roles? How nice that in this country we are on to messing around with gender roles while in so many foreign-owned factories it’s still impossible to form a union and get fair pay, whether you are a man, woman or child.

Children who make footballs in factories, or stitch trainers and sweatbands and purses for us … they won’t ever play with toys like these. They will make them but never play with them. I reach into the packet I have just opened and feel for a seam. Once I have located it, I rip it all the way down. Then I leave the packet open. There. That’s one unit PopCo won’t be making a profit on.