PopCo

by Scarlett Thomas

  Corporations in the toy, clothes, fast-food and music industries are known for applying the most cutting-edge techniques for having/obtaining ideas. Many corporations have things called ‘idea labs’ or ‘think-tanks’. McDonald’s has something near Chicago called the Core Innovation Centre where they experiment with different ways of arranging queues, serving food, cooking it and so on. People at Levi’s use a lot of trend-spotters and spend plenty of time in what they call ‘infodumps’, which are like brainstorming sessions. In these industries, if you can find a good idea and it works, it could well mean billion-dollar profits, happy shareholders, global brand-recognition and success. Because of this, there are many companies that just sell ideas.

  At PopCo, however, we’re not buying them. There has been a recent move towards keeping ideation in-house and, to some extent, intuitive. We are supposed to remain cutting edge without using any outside idea agencies. This is all part of Georges’s long, rambling creative philosophy. Thus my two-week period of paid leave. I have been researching, alone, and now all this at-work stuff feels like it’s killing me. I forgot how much you have to concentrate simply to be at work, interacting with other people. And I didn’t bring a tracksuit, either. That ‘All Departments’ e-mail must have passed me by.

  Chapter Five

  It turns out that almost no one has brought any kind of sports clothing at all, sports clothing not being even slightly in fashion at the moment, and all the people in charge of this event obviously having forgotten to send the e-mail informing us that we would be needing it. One of the girls from Iceland claims to have two tracksuits, but despite her offering to lend one of them to someone, that still leaves roughly a hundred and ninety-eight of us without. I don’t know what they would do in other industries, but as we all walk over to the Great Hall for Mac’s speech, there is a buzz in the air that ‘they’ (the PopCo directors? the minions?) are ordering two hundred tracksuits to be delivered in time for four o’clock this afternoon.

  The Great Hall is at the back of the main house: a vast, high-ceilinged space, the original structure of which seems, to my untrained eyes, faintly medieval. I glance at Dan as we walk in together, my initial look saying something like, Wow, this is amazing, and then mutating into something more like, Don’t start trying to ‘connect’ with the walls or I’ll pretend I am not with you. I’m not sure how much of this I could possibly have communicated with my eyes and Dan simply smiles at me. He doesn’t touch the walls, though.

  There are several rows of wooden chairs in the centre of the hall, with further seating available in one gallery at the top – ‘The Gods!’ Dan hisses as soon as he sees it and drags me up there – and two areas at the sides that go up, in a step-style fashion to several large stained-glass windows. At the front of the hall is a small stage, constructed from pale wood. It looks a bit like something a busy professional couple might create in their garden on a dry Saturday afternoon, inspired by DIY shop promotions and home-makeover shows. I am somehow able to make this connection without ever having watched a home-makeover show. It’s funny; in the same way that Dan tries to connect with inanimate objects (albeit jokingly – at least I think it’s a joke, it’s relatively new behaviour), I seem genuinely able to pluck the details of mainstream pop culture from the air. It must be from the air. Bad TV shows do, after all, travel through it all the time; particles hitching a ride on passing waves of light. It’s a sobering thought, actually, that as you walk around – doing your shopping or popping out to feed the ducks in the park – all this invisible stuff is churning in the air around you. TV broadcasts, radio waves, mobile phone signals, global positioning systems, fragments of advertisements. You probably have bits of advertisements trapped in your navel, in fact, along with all that pink fluff, and maybe also that radio play you’ll never listen to. Perhaps this accounts for how I know many of the characters in the two most popular UK evening soap operas, and all the other stuff too. You can’t escape these things – I can’t anyway – no matter how hard you try.

  This isn’t why I am at PopCo. Before I got this job I didn’t really pay much attention to the media, brands or toys. Roughly three years ago, someone at PopCo (Mac? Georges?) decided the company should headhunt a ‘new type of creative’. At the time I was compiling crosswords for a broadsheet Sunday newspaper. After several years working my way up in the crossword world, I had my own code-name, and a particular style that the regulars could identify. I used to get letters, sometimes, from the occasional ‘fan’, although the job was in no way glamorous. I never went to the newspaper offices, only ever spoke to my editor on the phone and was paid very little. I spent most of my life in my pyjamas or, if I had to go out, old jeans. If I did go out, it was usually to hang around with my friend Rachel at London Zoo, where she works. Sometimes, when money was very tight, or I was feeling very lonely, I would think about applying for an actual job at the zoo. Other times, I would think about writing a book. Mostly, though, it was the crosswords and my grandfather’s big project. These things occupied all my attention.

  Most people who compile crosswords are retired vicars from Surrey or elderly military people. I was unique in my age and gender and thus appeared once in a small ‘My Job’ column in one of the business supplements. Rachel had already done it and had recommended me to the journalist. Shortly after the piece appeared, I got a letter from PopCo. They wanted ideas people, they said; ideas people with ‘unconventional’ ways of generating their ideas. Would I come in for an informal chat? I didn’t know what they had me pencilled-in as, back then. Someone who would write the puzzles for their videogames? Perhaps I entertained vague notions of creating board games or puzzles. Perhaps that is in fact what they wanted me to do. They weren’t very specific. During the two informal chats we had, they talked to me more about ways of generating ideas than my puzzle-creating skills and it was all very confusing. I remember it being a rainy kind of summer. My grandfather was in hospital and my car had conked out. I was going everywhere by bus, reading books about the war. I missed the stop for the Battersea offices both times I went there.

  PopCo eventually offered me a job with a fairly large salary and a chance to actually go to a building and work with other people. At the time I needed both these things. The brief was fairly relaxed. ‘Design something,’ they said. ‘Put in some proposals. No pressure.’ Of course, my first ideas were fairly lame – hilarious in retrospect – but there really was no pressure. I was encouraged to blend into the ‘team’, to watch what they did and how they did it and learn by my own mistakes. In the end, I concluded that I should work with what I knew already; that advice writers are always given. Secret codes were what I knew already, so I put in the proposal for the KidCracker kit. I didn’t just ‘put in the proposal’ of course. At Battersea, people are always coming up with new ways to present their ideas to the rest of the team. I made little teasers; in code. The idea was an immediate hit.

  My grandfather, who taught me everything I know about crosswords, cryptography and cryptanalysis, died while I was working on this first kit. It was expected but I still couldn’t bear it. Among other things, he left me with an unfinished project and a locket engraved with a strange code I was supposed to try to work out. I don’t like thinking about those days very much at all, and when I see my grandfather in my mind, sitting awkwardly on our old brown carpet screwing up his eyes to see the letter on a Scrabble piece, or pushing a rook forward on our chessboard, I still want to cry.

  * * *

  Mac is standing on the decking-style stage going through sales figures for last year, via another plasma screen. Every so often people cheer or clap; sometimes little groups, presumably responsible for whatever brand is on screen at the time. My brands won’t be a part of Mac’s presentation, none of them having been launched last year, so I am able to relax. I try to pick out people I know in the audience. I see Carmen somewhere near the front, and, of course, Chi-Chi. Chi-Chi is a kind of evil genius, and is responsible for PopCo’s main mirr
or-brand, K. Mirror-branding, when you first come across it, can seem perplexingly anti-brand – like, why have a huge international brand like PopCo unless you stick the logo on everything? Surely the logo is what makes the toys sell? Well, most of the time, except when you’re selling to what has recently been termed the the No Logo demographic. The No Logo kids, also referred to in some marketing study as ‘Edges’, have money too and want to spend it on small, independent brands.

  Completely web-based, K has several brands within it, the most popular being an orphaned space kid called Star Girl and a post-apocalyptic rabbit called Ursula. The whole thing has a Japanese-cutesy-cartoon feel but without the little-kid factor or the theme-park worlds. It’s Hello Kitty injected straight into an ironic, wannabe alienated, sixth-form audience. Each character is a brand in its own right and kids from all over the world can buy T-shirts, purses, badges, hoodies, skateboards, bags, toothbrushes, bandanas, hairgrips, drawing pins and so on from each character’s range. The Star Girl character is the most popular. Her motto is ‘No one loves you in space’. The idea of K is that when people visit the website they feel that they have found something non-corporate, small, cool and exclusive. K claims to be based in a small lock-up in Tokyo, and even goes so far as to display its first screen in Japanese, with a little ‘English’ button. Somehow, this makes the kids feel they’ve really found something authentic. Dan worked on all the original graphics for the site but he doesn’t work with Chi-Chi any more. They had a few problems working together.

  Mac is going through the motions now, concluding this part of his presentation. Images flash up on the screen from the younger kids’ brands: Doctor Dan, Lucy, The Bumblebuzz Babies, Sailor Sam and his Amazing Clam, Moo-Moo and Li-Li, the Drondles, the Smoogs, the Curly Cake Bake Factory, Grumpy Mr Duck, Laser-Eraser, Floppington Village, the Bubblegum Tree, Farmyard Friends, and the big hit of last Christmas, the Glitter Fairy Magic Glitter Wings and Secret Wish Wand Set. Most of the other little kids’ brands are TV or film tie-ins or fast-food promotions. The term tie-in implies that the TV show came before the toys, although this isn’t usually the case. Usually, these days, they are created together. It’s quite surreal.

  For some reason I start thinking about miso soup, and now, suddenly, I’ve got a real craving for it. This is what a lack of adrenaline does to you. Throughout Mac’s final inspirational speech I consider how I could get some miso soup today. It took half an hour to get here from the nearest town. Would it even have a shop selling miso soup? Could I get back there? Unlikely. This is turning into a real craving. Oh, God. I can almost taste it in my mouth, salty, cloudy miso-heaven, with those little green bits floating on the top and the sea-vegetables on the bottom. And I realise that this is a complete flashback situation, reminding me of school assemblies during which I would think, exclusively, about food and yawn a lot. So I am feeling a bit off the planet when Dan nudges me.

  ‘What the fuck?’ he’s saying.

  ‘What?’ I hiss back.

  ‘Look.’

  Mac appears to be about to start reading from a sheet of white paper.

  ‘… in no particular order,’ he is saying, sounding like he is carrying on from something he was saying before. He starts reading out names of staff. I don’t recognise many of them. But, this being a big corporation, and Mac being our sort of God, the fact that he is mentioning individuals by name at all is rather thrilling.

  ‘What’s this for?’ I ask Dan.

  ‘It’s … all he said was that he was going to read a list of names of people who he wants to stay behind afterwards or something.’

  This really is like school. ‘Probably to get sacked,’ I say. A long time ago, my father worked at a factory making buttons. When the firm was on the verge of going bust they would read out a list, virtually every week, of people being laid off. He was on the list somewhere around week four.

  ‘Maybe they want volunteers to give out the tracksuits,’ Dan says.

  We laugh quietly. Then Dan’s name is called, and we abruptly stop. It’s rather unsettling hearing such a familiar name being read out in a hall like this. It must be the context. Even if Mac was only calling a register, it would still feel somehow wrong. And – oh, no – then my name too. My stomach feels a bit electric-shockish as the last couple of names are read out. I vaguely note that my name was almost last, which is unusual – my surname being Butler usually means I am somewhere near the top of any register or list.

  ‘We’ve got to what …?’ I say to Dan. ‘Stay behind?’

  He shrugs. ‘Yeah, I think so.’

  We are definitely going to be sacked. My head feels hot, and one of my toes starts to itch uncontrollably. I never really got into trouble at school and have never been in trouble before at work. What have I done? I feel sick. Is this something to do with meeting Mac earlier? What did I say wrong?

  Someone comes in – is it Georges’s assistant? It looks a bit like her – and whispers a couple of things to Mac. He looks down at his piece of paper and then back up to her and nods a few times. They laugh, briefly. Then Mac does that thing he did earlier, and rapidly switches his face back to business-as-usual. He walks back over to his microphone stand.

  ‘OK, slight change of plan,’ he says. ‘Those people on the list are to come back here after dinner this evening, please. We are running slightly over time, so if everyone could leave via the main door, and take a tracksuit each from the boxes which have been placed there … Thanks.’

  Georges’s assistant, I think it definitely is her, now comes to the microphone, as Mac gathers up notes and prepares to leave. ‘Thank you, Steve,’ she says, waving one arm at him like a magician’s assistant. Everyone claps. ‘Right, yes, please do help yourselves to tracksuits from the boxes. I trust that you all have trainers but if anyone is in dire need, there are a few pairs which have been put in the changing rooms in the Sports Hall. Please get changed and make your way over to the Sports Hall for, let’s say …’ she looks at her watch. ‘Ten past four. OK. Thank you.’

  There are no clocks in this room. Dan nudges someone on the way out and asks them the time. It’s apparently almost four o’clock. ‘Ten bloody minutes,’ the person groans before becoming lost, like everyone else, in the many-armed monster that is all the PopCo creative staff grabbing slithery plastic-wrapped packages from the cardboard boxes outside.

  My arm doesn’t feel entirely comfortable, stretched above my head like this.

  ‘And over. Feel the stretch,’ says one of the Games Team, a girl wearing a faded pink sweatshirt. She’s leading the warm-up. ‘And the other side. That’s great.’

  The last time I did any proper sport was when I played cricket with my grandfather, two or even three years ago. Since then I’ve had one disastrous game of tennis with Dan (he was way too good for me and I barely got to hit the ball, and when I did hit it I invariably got it wrong, leading with my elbow like you do in cricket) and two goes on a skiing arcade game we had for a while at work. So this feels odd, standing out here in this grassy field, stretching and bending and so on. We are in a group of about ten or so, and there are other similar groups dotted all over the sports field. I don’t know anyone in this group apart from Dan. In the next group along I can see the dark guy from lunch and his companion, concentrating on what their Games Team person is saying. The next group beyond that seems to be full of people laughing and I feel a momentary longing to be part of that group rather than this one.

  ‘OK,’ says the girl in the pink sweatshirt, once we’ve finished warming up. ‘These are called “Paddles”.’ She is waving around two things that look a bit like mini lacrosse sticks. My grandmother was a lacrosse champion before the war, and she once told me all about the game but I have never actually played it. ‘You have two each,’ the girl continues. ‘Like this.’

  She holds one stick in each hand. They are made from red plastic, rather than wood and string, and remind me of those soft-ball rackets you get in beach activity sets, but with a slig
ht scoop in the centre, as if someone had used one to try to hit a tiny meteorite that hadn’t quite burnt all the way through.

  ‘Is this PopCo’s new game?’ someone asks.

  The girl smiles secretively. ‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘This is the first real product test, so who knows?’ She looks back at the Paddles in her hands. ‘So you have a Paddle in each hand, and a ball, like this.’ She places a ball into the Paddle in her right hand. She immediately starts moving the Paddle around in this circular motion, and I realise that this is to stop the ball falling out. I actually remember my grandmother telling me about doing this in lacrosse. What was it called? Cradling. That was it. Cradling the ball. I always like the idea of that. It sounded comforting.

  ‘This is called “Vibing”,’ the girl says. ‘You do this to keep the ball in the Paddle. While you have the ball in your possession, you must move it between the Paddles like so.’ She vibes the ball for a second or two and then flips it, underarm, to the other Paddle, in a sort of spooning motion. Sweeping up the ball with the other Paddle, she then vibes it for two seconds before flipping it back again, this time in a more overarm movement, this action seeming more like casting a fishing line than spooning. When the ball reaches the other Paddle she almost instantly tosses it back, this time using a different move, more overarm than before. Then a deeper underarm movement to bring it back. Suddenly she’s doing it really quickly and the movements seem fluid and graceful. The ball moves from head height down to her knees and then way up in the air, her arms looking like they are conducting the most crazy piece of experimental music ever. Then she starts running with the ball, never keeping it in either Paddle for more than a couple of seconds but instead keeping it way up in the air, or just in front of her, each time passing the ball with one Paddle and catching it with the other.