PopCo (7 page)

‘I bet people have died in here,’ Esther says, wrinkling her nose. I don’t think she’s going to tell me what she does at Battersea. And I don’t think I should push it. I don’t quite understand how it can be a secret, though, but whatever.

‘This used to be a boarding school,’ I say. ‘So I bet all sorts of scary stuff has happened in here.’ I think about my conversation
with Mac again, and the Kid Lab noises. ‘I wonder where all the kids went,’ I say, suddenly.

‘What, from the boarding school?’

‘No. Sorry – two trains of thought. No, there were kids before, at the Sports Field. I just wondered where they all went.’

‘You seem to know a lot about this place,’ Esther says.

‘Oh, I got here a bit early.’

I’m not going to tell her about Mac, or my night-journey. So now we are both keeping secrets.

There’s a gazebo deep in the forest: old, with chipped paint on the outside and rusty hinges. We fall on it excitedly and start trying to open the door. It takes a few tries but eventually it does open, with a broken-sounding creak, and we enter it like naughty schoolkids who’ve found a secret grotto. There are crispy old leaves inside, and a platform for sitting on. The window frames are greenish with mould and all you can see through the smeared glass is the idea of trees. We sit on the platform and Esther starts rolling a joint.

‘Fuck it,’ she says.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ She sighs. ‘Why aren’t you at Georges’s speech, then?’

‘Because I’m here?’ I try.

‘No, come on. Really, why?’

‘
Really
why?’ I sigh. ‘Oh – can I tell you some other time?’

Esther shrugs. I half expect her to start questioning me – I have accidentally given her a question-mark after all – but she doesn’t. She just kicks around some of the leaves under our feet.

‘I wonder how it’s going,’ she says. ‘Georges and his
speech
.’

‘Huh?’

‘Why do they think they’re better than us?’ she asks, suddenly.

‘Who?’

‘Mac. Georges. The
Directors
. Why? They’re something here, yeah. But in, say, my local supermarket they’d be nothing. If you didn’t know who they were, you could bump them with your trolley and not have to sweat about it for two months and send all your friends e-mails saying you can’t believe who you saw in the supermarket and what you did to them … They’d just be a nobody, and so would you, and none of it would matter.’

‘Well, they sort of are nobodies. We all are, really.’

‘Not all of us. Not …’ She kicks around some more with her scuffed trainers. ‘Pop stars. Film stars. If the lead singer from say …’ She thinks for a while and then names the most successful rock band in the country. ‘If he walked in here now you wouldn’t treat him like nobody. You couldn’t.’

I would actually be more interested in the lead guitarist but I don’t want to confuse the issue. In fact, it’s odd that she’s mentioned this band, as I often have odd dreams about the lead guitarist: not wanting to fuck him or anything, more wanting to be him. I even want his hairstyle. But I won’t say any of this. ‘So …?’

‘Are you going to any festivals this year?’

‘No. I don’t like crowds.’

‘You don’t like crowds?’ She sounds pleased.

‘No.’

‘Being in them, or from above?’

‘Huh?’ I frown. ‘From above?’

‘Being in a mass … You can only really see how horrible a crowd is when you see it from above, like when they televise festivals. When you’re in the crowd, you’d be, what? A dot, a nothing, a statistic. Whose statistic? Some PR firm? An advertising agency?’ She puts on an advertising-style voice. ‘
Wouldn’t it be amazing if
we were all connected to the same mobile phone network? Wouldn’t
it be just great if we could all text message each other pictures
of ourselves watching the same band in the same crowd, at the
same time?
I don’t want to be in the fucking crowd. I’m not an insect. I don’t want to be the same as the person I am standing next to. I don’t want to be in the fucking audience anyway … I want …’ She trails off, looking vaguely through the window at the almost-forest outside.

I actually know what she means, though, which is rare. Usually when someone starts talking passionately I end up tuning out, even if I don’t mean to. I find it hard to connect. But then I’ve never liked crowds myself, and I’m not that big on advertising, either. I also don’t like doing things that thousands of other people do.

‘I want …’ she repeats.

‘You want to be in the band,’ I suggest.

She looks at me strangely. ‘Yeah. Maybe, but …’

‘What?’

‘Being in the band means that those insects give you meaning. Being in a band means that you’d be the reason for the crowd, you’d be responsible for an emerging demographic: fans of your band.
What can we sell them? Flame-grilled burgers or burgers with
gherkins? Oh? This demographic is mainly vegetarian? OK, well
let’s have a brainstorm about the packaging for that fruit drink –
I’m thinking a self-referential, knowing, playful Utopia pastiche,
kind of hippy in style – and maybe something for those flapjacks
. Meanwhile, back at Team PopCo:
Oh my God, the cool rock stars
are all wearing sweatbands this year! We have to design the Star
Girl and Ursula sweatbands this week. Get them on the website
now and I’ll get on to Manufacturing
…’

‘Does the band know this, though?’ I interrupt.

‘Of course they do. I haven’t even started on the record companies yet. Big rock bands try to be anti-establishment,’ Esther says. ‘Some of them, anyway. And then we just sell anti-establishment stuff to their fans. We watch what they wear on stage and sell it off our websites. Their record companies don’t care as long as there’s a market – they just send out briefs for artwork that say “anti-establishment” on them. These cunts don’t care if you’re anti-them, as long as you make them some money. So you’re a star in this system? You’re famous? Great. You’re making someone else loads of money. Let’s all go and have hamburgers to celebrate! It’s like a bunch of vampires sucking one corpse dry. Who wants to be a vampire or a corpse? No one. But everyone is. Everyone apart from Georges and Mac and people like them and all the fucking shareholders in the world.’

I think I have just heard the reason why Esther has skipped Georges’s speech.

‘Look, I know you don’t want to say what exactly you do,’ I say. ‘But you must work with Chi-Chi on K. I mean …’ People burn out all the time working on K. I’ve seen it happen. They get a kind of intense pop culture overload and it’s very unpleasant; worse than the measles. It almost happened to Dan, then he and Chi-Chi fell out and he was spared.

Esther laughs and it comes out almost like a squeal. ‘Shit, I’m totally ranting, aren’t I? Look, you’ll have to remember to just tell me to shut up when I start going on … Fuck. I can’t end up like a malfunctioning version of one of Chi-Chi’s evil automatons.’ She
gets up and starts staggering around the small gazebo like a robot, with her arms held out in front of her. ‘I – will – be – cool – I – will – use – my – evil – thoughts – in – a – positive – way – rebellion – is – cool …’

‘So you
don’t
work on K?’

‘I’m not actually allowed to tell anyone what I do,’ she says. ‘And I wasn’t even supposed to say that, so you’d better stop asking me.’

‘OK,’ I say, too quickly. ‘I heard nothing.’

Esther looks slightly alarmed. ‘It’s not that big a deal,’ she says. ‘But thanks. I fucking hate Georges, though, don’t you?’

‘I heard nothing.’

It’s my dad, not very long before he disappeared. We’re living in the centre of the city, about a month before the lay-offs started at the button factory. My grandfather has come over, but instead of sitting down to drink milky tea and play chess with me, he’s arguing with my father.

‘Please, Bill,’ he says.

‘Look, I told you. I
heard nothing
. It’s zipped, all right.’

He mimes pulling a zipper over his mouth. When I do this with my friends it’s a sign of absolute secrecy and trust, and we do it with big solemn eyes. But my father’s eyes are blank and cold, and his fingers look wrong making the movement. They’re too big and grown-up. His middle finger is stained yellow from smoking, and his hands shake. They always shake; more so when my grandfather is here.

‘Yes, but Bill?’ my grandfather says.

‘What?’ my father replies. I can’t remember – this memory is as brown and dusty as our old sofa – but I think my dad is coating two slices of bread with lard while the frying pan heats up. ‘What?’ he says again.

‘If they find out that I know anything I …’

‘What?’

‘Just –
please
– don’t say anything else, all right? Think of Alice, if nothing else.’

‘I am thinking of Alice,’ my father almost hisses. ‘Why do you think this is important to me? These things … This …’ He seems to search for a word he cannot find. ‘
It
… It always seems to be just a game with you. A bit of fun, an intellectual challenge, like doing the sodding crossword. And this time, when it could actually be useful to us, when it’s not just messing around but something real … You chuck it all away. You just chuck it away like it’s rubbish, and …’

‘No. You’re the one treating this like a game.’

‘Oh, come on. You talk about danger this and danger that … It’s just fantasy.’

‘No.’ My grandfather sighs. ‘But anyway, it is up to me, not you.’

‘You’ve got a house, yeah? You’ve got a sodding house and a sodding garden and you don’t have to worry about making ends meet in the real world. Look at what we’ve got. And then ask yourself why this matters to me.’

‘It’s just a stupid dream, though. It probably doesn’t exist. It’s bad enough that we are arguing over it. We are certainly not risking our lives over something that might not exist. I absolutely forbid it.’

‘You forbid it?’ My father can’t seem to believe that my grandfather is speaking to him this way.

‘Yes. I forbid you to do anything else that will put us in danger.’

‘If you just told me, then I could …
I’d
take the chance … It wouldn’t involve you.’

‘No. Now – please – that really is the end of this.’

And I’m sitting there with a book, pretending not to listen, playing with my necklace, wondering if the secret it contains relates to the secret my dad isn’t allowed to tell.
Think of Alice
. And I want to know it, this secret, so badly that I get a stomach ache that lasts for a week. I have examined this necklace but I can’t make sense of it at all. It is a silver locket with a strange combination of numbers and letters engraved inside it: 2.14488156Ex48, and a little swirling pattern.

Think of Alice. Think of Beatrice
.

Beatrice was my mother. By the time things started to go wrong between my grandfather (her father) and my father, she had been
dead for almost two years. She was the one who gave me my name, my books, my identity. She stamped it on me when I was a baby, a mark I refused to wash off. One night, during that winter when we hardly had money for the meter and he argued with my grandfather constantly, my father took my necklace. He copied out the numbers and letters, and the little swirling pattern, and then put it back around my neck when he thought I was asleep. You have to wonder about parents sometimes. You’re not asleep when they are pretending to be Father Christmas, and you’re certainly not asleep when they are stealing secret objects from you so they can copy them. How is it that they don’t realise this?

Esther and I are now staking out the entrance to the Great Hall.

‘Watch them come out, then
merge
,’ she commands.

‘Yes, sir,’ I say, messing around.

Apart from the fact that she hates Georges and I did, well, what I did, with him, Esther and I have more in common than I would have thought. She must play Go, of course, everyone does. I wonder what sort of player she is; how she forms ladders and how far ahead she thinks. I wonder if she knows the moment she’s made a losing move, as I do, even if the end of the game is still hundreds of moves away. She looks crazy, with her head poking out of this bush, but there’s no one here to see. They must all still be inside. Yes – I can hear some clapping and a whoop or two of joy (Georges makes people whoop with joy and I have to say that if he hadn’t turned me on so much I’d probably hate him too just because of that).

‘Soldier: move out,’ Esther says a few minutes later, as the first people begin to emerge through the door. The idea is that we will join the crowd and act like we were in there all along.

I can’t help smiling at the cod military terminology she uses. It’s obviously not just me and Dan, then. Does everyone end up doing this? Where do we get it from? Probably a combination of videogames, grandparents, Sunday matinees and news reports. Is this our language now – even though most of us have only ever used it in simulations? I’m not sure. Perhaps everything is a simulation, now. Anyway, this war-terminology stuff reminds me of a focus group for a board game that I observed when I first joined the company. (Observing a focus group was one of those induction
activities, along with ‘Use the Computer Safely!’ and ‘Manufacturing Techniques!’) The game was so obviously based on Hasbro’s Risk that it never went anywhere but the people playing it in the focus group didn’t seem to care.

‘Peasant revolt!’ said one of the women players, as she attacked a country occupied by more armies than she could ever defeat. I remember her being the kamikaze queen of the game, lucky with the dice.

‘Die, peasant scum,’ said the man she was attacking, in a deep, put-on war lord voice. ‘I will be ruler of the world!’ He kept missing the ashtray and flicking cigarette ash all over the table.

‘Terrorists!’ said another woman when the other three players attacked her, one after the other. ‘I have the biggest continent, I will rule the world. Those who oppose me are terrorists …’ She was thin and ghostly with a pale, academic face. There was another man, too, although I don’t remember him very well.

They banged their fists on the table as their global meltdown escalated.
Terrorism must be stamped out! Suppress the masses!
Of course, they were friends and all very drunk, playing the game after a dinner we’d laid on for them (with lots and lots of very nice wine that I was able to sample afterwards). At the time I was intrigued by their ability to iron the complexities of war into this thin sheet of banter; their playful neutralisation of horror. Now I wonder, do we all do that without even thinking about it? And do we all call our enemies ‘terrorists’, now?

We may as well be scuttling across the path under fake bushes and dustbins, we’re that obvious. ‘Look more natural,’ I hiss, but Esther is in a semi-crouch position, looking furtively to the left and the right and – I do believe – holding her hand in the shape of a gun, as if she were about to pull it from a holster low on her hip. The last people pass and walk off towards the barns.

‘All clear,’ Esther says to me.

‘Esther!’ I whisper, but she’s already made it over to the door. Of course, we’ve now completely mistimed this and she runs straight into Georges.

‘Hello, Esther,’ he says. ‘Games before dinner?’

Her hand’s still in the shape of a gun; two fingers pointing down.

‘Nice speech,’ she says.

He looks almost small in his black suit, his hair shining, looking
newly cut. I am waiting for him to look over and see me but he doesn’t. ‘Thanks,’ he says in an odd way. Then he’s gone.

‘Cunt,’ says Esther when I join her by the door.

There’s no one in the room in the barn when I get back but the smell of perfume tells me that someone has been here recently. I actually wish someone was here so I could ask them the time. It must be almost seven, and I probably should be walking over to the cafeteria for dinner but I just don’t know. I left Esther about fifteen minutes ago and then went looking for Dan. He wasn’t in the Great Hall, or up the hill, or around by the Sports Hall. I am not familiar enough with this place to know where to look for him. He was probably in his room, although I don’t know where that is.

My
Hide It!
pack is still safe under the cabinet. It feels lumpy in my fingers as I pull it off and dump the contents on the bed. Somewhere in here is a small watch face that doesn’t have a strap any more. Ah, yes: five to seven. The watch is five minutes fast, so I’ve got roughly ten minutes to get to dinner. Do I need to change? No. I’m not changing more than twice in one day, even if I do have to see Mac. I try thinking about seeing Esther again, as a sort of experiment. I don’t feel sick. That’s a good sign. Sometimes when you make a new friend it can feel a bit muddled and stupid afterwards; worse, even, than bad sex.

New friendships can also be like a children’s birthday party; a big table laden with cakes, sweets, crisps and multi-pack chocolate bars wrapped in foil. It’s as if there’s just too much sugar there, all at once, piled on the table. You stuff yourself but it’s too much and you just can’t think about sweets again for a long time. Or sometimes new friendships – the ones destined to be focus-grouped but never launched – can be like playing an out-of-tune string instrument; when you find yourself carefully fingering the chords for your favourite song but hearing the sound coming out all wrong. Your input is the same as always but the thing responds erroneously, playing you back an unfamiliar non-tune which gives you a headache. Your favourite (and only) amusing story is batted back with a ‘what happened next, then?’, or a discordant, polite nod. So far, this isn’t like either of those situations. Well, it isn’t for me, anyway. But perhaps it is one of them for her. Making friends never gets any
easier. Even if everything’s right: you’re having fun at the party and the music sounds OK, you might find you are a discordant sugar-overload for the other person. This happens all the time.

I yawn and wonder how quickly I can get to bed after seeing Mac. Will there be more activities? I heard someone saying something about after-dinner games before. Maybe I will wake up: I do like games. Maybe we are going to be fired, though, and we’ll just have to leave after seeing Mac.
Time to get up off this bed, Alice.
Don’t fall asleep
. I’ll count to five. I’ll count to five and then I’ll get up. Then I realise that something about my belongings, laid out on the bed, is not right. Nothing’s missing – on the contrary, there are too many things here. There’s something from my
Hide It!
pack that I didn’t put there: a folded-up piece of paper. I feel prickly as I consider that someone else has been here and found my things. Then I open the piece of paper. It’s a PopCo
With Compliments
slip, with the following letters written on it.

XYCGKNCJYCJZSDSPPAGHDFTCRIVXU

To an unaccustomed eye, perhaps this would seem like a barcode or maybe even a really crazy reference code from some official letter. It is, of course, a code, but neither of those sorts. This is a cipher that someone wants me to break.

I’m almost the last in line at the cafeteria. Dan waited for me by the entrance, so it’s me and him again, standing just in front of the two people from lunch – the dark-haired guy and the girl with the feather earrings – as if coming to the cafeteria is such a small subroutine in the videogame version of our lives that it has been programmed to happen in only one way.

‘Ah, it’s the vegetarians,’ the woman says from behind her hatch. She glances beyond me and Dan to the couple behind us. ‘Many vegetarians,’ she says, laughing to herself. ‘Here you go.’ Four plates appear, each with a pile of red sludge.

This time we’ve got it wrong, not that we had any choice. The meat-eaters are getting Steak au Poivre.

‘Oh well,’ Dan says, shrugging. ‘There’s a load of cheese boards on the tables.’

‘I think I might actually become a vegetarian anyway,’ I say,
randomly. Even though I love Steak au Poivre, my stomach can’t handle anything very complicated at the moment. The red sludge may actually turn out to be something hot and comforting, perhaps with lentils, which would suit me right now.

The coded note crackles in my pocket as I walk across to the dining area. Esther’s there, waving. ‘Saved you both seats,’ she says. This is the only free table left anyway. In fact, it’s the only table in the room that isn’t full and won’t become full, which gives me a thrilling sense of unpopularity, of being an un-clique. Glancing across the room, I can see Carmen and Chi-Chi sitting with some of the K people. They’re all wearing T-shirts featuring nonsensical English expressions from Japan. ‘
Cream Pain’. ‘Oops! Hair’. ‘Bullying Peter’.
‘Moon Hazard: Space
’. Stuff like that. As far as I understand it, there used to be a little website devoted to this stuff and then PopCo bought it. They haven’t amalgamated it with K or anything; they’re just keeping it going as it is, but with the extra marketing push only PopCo can give. The K crowd always seem to be laughing (when they’re not going bonkers, of course). I never understand why. Surely life isn’t that hilarious?

The guy and the girl from the queue sit down at the other end of the table and grab the bottle of red wine before we get the chance. This time, though, as soon as they’ve tipped more than half of it into their glasses, a new bottle appears from somewhere.

‘Cool,’ Dan says, grabbing it. ‘Wine, ladies?’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Thanks.’

‘No. Don’t drink,’ says Esther. She has a plate of red stuff too.

‘Ah, the vegetarian trick backfired on you, too,’ Dan says.

‘What?’ she says back, confused. She thinks for a second. ‘Oh, I see. No, I am an actual vegetarian. Well, a vegan, actually.’