PopCo

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘Are you embellishing this a little bit, Butler?’ Dan asks, laughing.

  ‘No, no,’ I say, also laughing. ‘This is exactly as I heard it when I was ten or so.’

  Esther looks worried. ‘What does she do?’

  ‘Well,’ I say. ‘That’s where the lateral-thinking puzzle comes into it. There is something she can do. What is it?’

  ‘Is it kicking the man in the balls and running away?’ Dan asks.

  ‘No. It’s nothing like that. It’s a lateral-thinking puzzle, which means that it has a neat answer that, if you haven’t thought of it yourself, feels like … a bit like the punchline to a joke or something and it seems so obvious you think you should have thought of it yourself.’

  ‘She can’t just tell on him?’ Esther says.

  ‘No. She can’t call the man a liar or a trickster without the fear of being executed. She has to trick him back. How can she do it?’

  Chapter Eleven

  Warren has been on the loose for some time. Now he’s suddenly at our table, peering down at our notebooks. Esther’s is almost a cubist tableau by now and mine is blank. Dan has drawn a front-on view of an Italian restaurant with a man lying dead in front of it, a gun in his hand.

  ‘Good,’ Warren says, pointing at Dan’s work. ‘A visual mind, eh?’

  ‘I am a designer,’ says Dan.

  ‘So, how are you getting on?’ he asks us.

  ‘Slowly,’ says Esther.

  ‘I think it’s something to do with an albatross, although I can’t think why,’ I say, innocently.

  ‘You’ve heard it before?’ Warren says, sounding a bit alarmed.

  ‘No, definitely not. I just think it’s something to do with an albatross. It’s just a hunch.’

  Warren walks away with slightly narrowed eyes.

  ‘So, there are two black stones in the bag,’ Esther says. ‘Hmm. Did you work it out when you heard it?’

  ‘What me?’ I say. ‘No. God, no. I’m terrible at lateral thinking. I only know all of the answers because of my grandfather. He wasn’t that great at solving them either, actually. But years ago he used to do the puzzle column for a weekend newspaper and he always used to have a lateral-thinking puzzle in there. Like, “A man pushed his car. He stopped when he reached a hotel at which point he knew he was bankrupt. Why? He was playing Monopoly.”’ It’s really years since I’ve thought about the Mind Mangle. While doing the crossword for one newspaper, my grandfather was the Mind Mangle for another. And at the time, I thought this was really quite ordinary. Then I became a teenager and it all seemed a bit strange.

  ‘I give up,’ Dan says eventually.

  ‘Yeah, go on,’ Esther says. ‘But I know I will kick myself …’

  ‘All right,’ I say. ‘This is what the girl does. When the rich, sadistic man holds the bag out to her, she picks a stone out of it, just like she is supposed to. Then she pretends to fumble and drops the stone. “I beg your pardon sir,” she says – or something like that – to the rich man. “I seem to have dropped the stone.” The rich man is angry. “We will have to start again,” he says. “Pardon me, sir,” the girl says. “But perhaps there is another way. If you look in the bag to see which stone is left, it will be clear which one I dropped. If the stone in the bag is white, then I must have dropped the black one and will remain here for ever. If, however, the stone in the bag is black, then I picked the white one and should go free.” The crowd murmurs its approval. Of course, the stone in the bag is black, there having been two black stones in there to begin with, and the rich man is forced to let the girl go free. Her trick was ultimately better than his trick.’

  ‘That is very cool,’ Esther says. ‘I like that.’

  Dan looks like he’s going to start a What if-type conversation but at that moment Warren asks everyone to stop working on his puzzle. My eyes are already itching with that heavy, trapped classroom feeling. I wish I was outside. I wonder if we are going to be able to go for a break soon but when I look at the clock on the wall it says it’s only 10:30. I yawn as everyone stops talking and looks at Warren.

  ‘Anyone got any ideas?’ he says.

  Everyone is silent. I look around the room. The dark-haired guy and the fawn-haired girl are sitting together without any other ‘team’ members. Elsewhere in the room, people seem to have paired up or got into groups of three with people they knew already. The PA I recognise from Battersea is sitting with a designer I don’t really know at all but who I think is called Lara. The PA’s name, possibly, is Imogen, but I really can’t remember.

  ‘You two,’ Warren says, pointing at two people I have never seen before this weekend. ‘What are your names?’

  ‘Richard. Well, I’m Richard and she’s Grace,’ says one of them. He has got spiked, blond hair and she is the Chinese Goth I noticed at Saturday night’s meeting.

  ‘Good,’ says Warren. ‘Grace, did you solve the riddle?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Sorry. We had a go, but …’

  Warren chuckles. ‘Pretty impossible, isn’t it? Now, more importantly, what did you learn about your team-member?’

  ‘He’s a twat?’ Grace offers. We all laugh, including Richard.

  Warren looks concerned. ‘Do you two know each other already?’ he asks.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Grace. ‘Of course. He’s my boss. So I probably shouldn’t call him a twat, and …’

  Warren interrupts. ‘Who else is in a team with people they already know?’

  We all put our hands up.

  ‘OK.’ He frowns. ‘Right.’

  ‘I think it’s all gone tits up,’ Esther comments in a whisper loud enough for most people in the room to hear. I feel someone’s stare tickling the back of my neck and look behind me to my right. I am just in time to see the dark-haired guy look away from us disapprovingly. What is up with him?

  ‘Did anyone get the answer to this puzzle?’ Warren asks, tiredly.

  ‘Was it something to do with the meal they ate?’ Lara asks. ‘Was it poisoned?’

  I wonder how the actual answer is going to go down with the people in this room. Poor Warren. I see what he was doing now: giving us something impossible to work out and hoping that we would ‘bond’ while doing so. I imagine him planning this class on the train from London, visualising us all laughing together over the stupidity of the lateral-thinking puzzle, having just made friends with the person on our right. He wasn’t to know that most of us already are friends with the person on our right. Mind you, you would think that Mac would have briefed him.

  ‘One of the men is an executioner,’ offers Richard. ‘Like a Mafia hit-man or something. He has taken the other man out to talk “business” but this guy knows for certain that he is going to be killed. Once he has tasted his food, nausea rushes over him. He decides that he would rather die by his own hand, and excuses himself from the table. Then he blows his brains out in the road outside.’

  That’s actually very good, compared to the real answer. I think I prefer it.

  ‘Very imaginative, Richard,’ is what Warren says, in a slightly patronising way.

  ‘I do imagine for a living,’ Richard says back.

  This isn’t going very well. You know the way you can just tell what a group is thinking, when you are a part of that group? I know that everyone now thinks Warren is a bit of a wanker. He has now reached a critical mass whereby he has changed from being someone ‘in charge’ to being someone we don’t particularly respect. If Warren was plotted on a graph, he would currently be flat-lining somewhere near zero.

  ‘All right,’ he says. ‘Here is the answer. I’ll just read it out to you quickly and then we’ll have a break before moving on. The answer was never the main part of this – what I wanted to do was introduce lateral thinking in a “fun” way while you all got to know each other. But, since you already know each other we will get straight into the learning section after our break.’

  ‘Warren?’ says Lara’s companion, Imogen.

  ‘What
?’

  ‘We don’t all know each other, most of us just know the person we’re sitting next to. You could, like, jumble us up or something.’

  Warren sighs and tells us the answer to the lateral-thinking puzzle.

  Esther’s already skinning up by the time me and Dan get outside.

  ‘Drugs already,’ Dan says, disapprovingly.

  ‘That’s not a fucking puzzle,’ Esther says. ‘That’s a soap opera. I need drugs after that.’

  ‘I told you,’ I say, rolling a cigarette.

  ‘So it’s like … The dish they ordered was albatross. The man knew as soon as he tasted it that whatever he was eating was something he’d never tasted before. From this he surmises that when he had “albatross” on some desert island all those years ago he must have been eating his son, who had died just after they reached the island.’

  ‘Yep,’ I say.

  ‘That’s fucked up! You could never work that out from the information you’re given. Plus, surely the guy would check that they hadn’t just given him the wrong meal or something before shooting himself? Jesus. Or what if the people on the island gave him, I don’t know, swordfish or something and said it was albatross? It doesn’t follow that he ate his own son. God. I am so over this Warren guy. I’m over this whole thing. Fucking hell. We – or at least you – already know how to have ideas and do product proposals and stuff. Why do we need all this extra tuition?’

  ‘It would be all right if he knew what he was doing,’ Dan says. ‘Maybe it’ll improve this afternoon. I was quite looking forward to learning how to have good ideas and stuff …’

  ‘What do you do? Normally, I mean,’ Esther asks Dan.

  ‘Not telling,’ he says.

  She smiles, as if she’s in a joke she doesn’t quite understand. ‘Huh?’

  ‘Well, you haven’t told us what you do.’

  I try making a face at him but he’s not looking.

  ‘Oh, haven’t I?’ Esther says casually. ‘I’m in the computer admin team. I thought I said.’

  ‘Oh,’ Dan seems slightly wrong-footed by this. ‘Oh. Well, I’m a designer. But not like Alice. I don’t design products on my own. I get assigned to people who need artwork, on the whole.’

  ‘You get assigned?’

  ‘Well, sort of. Like, sometimes the people who do the mechanical stuff have a particular mechanism that needs a product shell. That’s probably when I get to be the most inventive. I’ll get a brief saying something like: “This is a doll that crawls”, with technical diagrams and so on, and I will then design the way the doll looks, or at least the roughs. Occasionally I get to design the whole thing once the mechanics are done, but that’s rare. Usually if it’s a new brand another team will have decided on the name, the personality and so on and I’ll just be briefed to present, say, fifteen different eye-colours and a collection of skin-tone swatches. Most of the time, though, I’ll work with someone like Alice, and do the artwork on her proposals and finalise images and colours and so on for the actual product. I’m basically just an art guy.’

  ‘You’re not just an art guy,’ I say, slightly defensively.

  ‘Yeah, I am. I don’t really mind, though.’

  ‘So of the three of us you’re the only one who has ever proposed an actual product?’ Esther says to me. ‘That’s weird, isn’t it, considering the project we’re working on?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Especially since I’ve never done anything for the teenage market. And the two other people here that I recognise – one’s a personal assistant and the other is just a junior designer. It is odd.’

  ‘They wanted a new approach, though, didn’t they?’ says Dan.

  ‘Maybe they’ve already tried everyone else,’ Esther says.

  We finish smoking and go back into the classroom.

  I don’t believe it. It’s the fucking Balloon Game.

  ‘So, the criteria for this exercise is that you’re in a group of about four people, with no one you already know,’ Warren says. There are twenty-six of us in this room. How many different ways are there of dividing us into sets of four or five? How do you take into account the parameters of the existing associations between us? Wasn’t there some classic maths problem along these lines? The Travelling Salesman problem, or maybe something to do with students in college dorms? I can’t remember and I am way too tired to try to work out what the maths might be. I just have a suspicion that it’s one of those almost-impossible things. In any case, I just stay where I am until three people I don’t really know drift towards me and sit down.

  My group eventually contains, apart from me, Richard, Lara and the guy with the dark hair from the cafeteria. His name, it turns out, is Ben. He very briefly smiles at me, as if we sort of know each other, and then says nothing. Richard, who works in robotics, and Lara, who is, as I’d thought, a junior designer, both present entertaining cases for why they should stay in the balloon. When it is my turn to plead to stay in the balloon, I don’t bother. I offer myself as a willing sacrifice. This is not what is supposed to happen in the Balloon Game.

  Ben looks at me in an odd way and then says, ‘Yeah, chuck me out too.’ His voice is deep, like he’s stuck at the bottom of a very dark well.

  This is pretty much the end of the Balloon Game.

  *

  There are now thirteen notches on the side of my boat. I haven’t been to school since about notch seven. I haven’t had a bath, or washed my hair. I am allowed in the bath on my own but I am not allowed to run it. Apparently you can get the water too hot and scald yourself when you get in. However unlikely this sounds, I have to follow the rules.

  On the fourteenth day, and before I have had a chance to add my notch, my grandparents turn up. They have, apparently, received a postcard from my father apologising for disappearing ‘like that’, and asking after me. They have obviously been panicking. What did my father mean when he wrote, ‘Thanks for looking after Alice’? Could I be dead? When they find me alive my grandmother actually cries and my grandfather beams as if he has just won the Pools.

  ‘You’re coming to live with us, now, Alice,’ my grandmother says, gently.

  ‘And not before time,’ says my grandfather.

  I tell myself that I have been picked up by a fishing trawler.

  Going to live with my grandparents actually turns out to be better than staying at home on my own with all my self-imposed rules and restrictions. The trip there is like books where a summer holiday begins and children are ferried off to somewhere far more exciting than home, to have adventures involving wilderness, mud, hastily constructed camps and small deserted islands. As we travel up the dual carriageway in the Morris Minor my grandparents whisper hasty plans while I look out at the grass verges and think about the wildlife they might contain. I have only stayed overnight with my grandparents on a handful of occasions, and not for ages. They have recently moved from their big red-brick house in the centre of Cambridge to a cottage in one of the villages nearby. Will I be able to ride horses there? It’s hard to tell.

  I am given my own bedroom, which is not at all similar to my old bedroom. It is painted pale pink with a sloping, low ceiling and has really old furniture including a big brown chest of drawers that is entirely empty when I open it. Is it all for me? More intriguing: I have been standing in the room for about five minutes, wondering whether to unpack my things, when my grandfather walks in and presents me with a hand-made wooden sign that says Alice’s Room. He must have made this ages ago, not in the space between hearing I’d been left on my own and rushing into the city to pick me up (I estimate this space as being something not exceeding five minutes). So I always had a room here and my grandfather even made a sign for it. No one told me that.

  ‘We always hoped you would come and stay,’ my grandfather says in a happy/sad way, and I sense grown-up politics that I don’t understand. Is there a connection between the arguments my father and grandfather have been having and the fact that I have never been here? Almost
certainly; although I don’t know why. It’s not as if I was involved in their disagreement.

  ‘Do you still wear the necklace?’ he asks me, after I have taken the door sign from him and put it on the bed.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I say, pulling it out on its thin silver chain to show him. Of course I still wear it: he told me never to take it off.

  ‘Good,’ he says. Then: ‘We’re going to have fun, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. And then, once he has left the room, I cry, thinking of my abandoned ship, and all the bowls of porridge I made.

  Chapter Twelve

  There is a five-columned matrix on the desk in front of me. This is what is says:

  Product Category Special Powers Theme Kid Word Random Word

  Ball Lights up Pirates Cool Round

  Board Game Explodes Witches/ghosts Clever Lawn

  Wheels (bikes, skateboards etc.) Floats Wilderness Scary Mountain

  Doll Big Saving the world Silly Elves

  Videogame Small Animals/fish/ environment Mysterious Complex

  Building kit Invisible Outer Space/ UFOs Gross Serpent

  Activity set Fast Martial arts Special Extinct

  Plush/soft 'Real' Acquiring/ collecting Cute Bubble

  Robot Shows emotion Mastery Grown-up Armour

  Everyone else has roughly the same thing in front of them, as this matrix is what we have been making all afternoon, with a facilitator called Ned. Most of the columns have been created by us all just shouting ideas out as they have come to us, but now we have been left on our own to finish compiling the random word columns individually. Ned is young, together and certainly not a fuckwit like poor Warren, who was almost crying by the end of the morning session. With Ned, we are ‘recapping’ the process of compiling matrices, most of us having done it before, and adding this new thing: the random words column, which is pretty new to most of us.

  The notion of randomness is a big part of any kind of lateral/creative thinking. It’s all connected to that idea that you can’t really trust your brain, that any ideas you have on your own may well turn out to be simply bad ideas or just ones that aren’t at all original. Just as routine kills creative thought, so too apparently does, well, thought itself. Our brains are just not wired up to be original on their own. But with this thing called ‘Random Juxtaposition’ (an idea of Edward de Bono’s, of course), well, you can have many good ideas.