PopCo

by Scarlett Thomas

  There are indeed chefs still in the dining room. Could they even be 24-hour chefs? Anything’s possible when PopCo is in charge. I slightly apologetically ask if it would be possible for me to have something to eat, and then present them with a list of my unusual requests.

  ‘Miso soup,’ repeats one of the chefs. ‘Chamomile tea. Pain au chocolat. Scrambled eggs on wholemeal toast.’ He grins. ‘I think we can manage that. Got the munchies, have we?’

  ‘Er, sort of. I missed dinner,’ I say.

  ‘No problem. You know we are here all night?’

  PopCo really do think of everything.

  ‘Do I have to eat it here?’ I ask. ‘Or …’

  ‘You want take-away? Yep. We can do take-away.’ He shouts the order through to someone else and I go to one of the small tables to sit and wait. I wish I had something to read.

  Back in my room, I pick a ‘young adult’ title from the bookshelves and then pull the foil off the plates and start to eat. The miso soup has come in a big flask and my craving is satisfied after two cups of it. The scrambled eggs have grated parmesan and basil leaves sprinkled on the top. I eat them all, with the wholemeal toast, reading the beginnings of this novel, which is about a lonely girl and her horse. The girl is lonely because her family has moved to a remote house on a moor in Scotland and she has no friends. Every day she has to get up at five to groom her horse and then walk two miles to the bus stop to be taken to school. When she is there she is too sleepy to make friends with anyone and gets behind with her work. At the weekends she pretty much just gets into dangerous scrapes with her horse. The first time she tries to ride him over unfamiliar moorland they get lost in a storm; the next time they get stuck in a bog. On their third time out, she meets a wild boy riding his own horse. They look at each other and then, without speaking, ride faster and faster into the wind, challenging each other, competing in an uncertain event. He doesn’t stop to tell her his name but simply disappears over a hill, shouting something like, ‘Tomorrow …’. But tomorrow he isn’t there. She then starts looking for him, trying to find him again so she can at least ask his name.

  The tea is finished and I am smoking. This is actually quite a gripping book. Will she find the boy? Who is he? I could finish reading this right now but that feels greedy, somehow, and faintly absurd. What time is it? Nine, ten? Maybe I’ll have another go at finding Esther. Or maybe I should just stay here and read after all, with cigarettes and more valerian. There is also, of course, the possibility that I could do some work, now I am reaching my peak time for alertness and enthusiasm, not that I feel particularly alert, or enthusiastic. A blast of wind hits the window and there is a curious whistling noise outside. Is there a storm coming in? Maybe I will go for a wander now rather than later. Even if I don’t find Esther I can have a cup of tea with Dan. Then there’ll be loads of time to come back and actually get on with something. I brush my teeth and put some lip-balm on my lips before I leave, pulling my cardigan around me against the wind. As I cross into the stone walkway on the West Wing I again imagine I can hear footsteps, just like before. I am so distracted by the sound that I almost walk straight into Ben, who appears to be walking in the opposite direction to me, towards the East Wing. It has started to rain.

  ‘So this is where you are,’ he says, his deep-well voice soft and uncertain.

  What my eyes do now must require the activity of about a billion neurones. You were looking for me? they say. And, then, subtly, Come with me, then, through this arch. I dare you. His eyes say something almost question-markish back, but he does; he walks with me through the arch. We walk, slowly, in the rain, around the outside of the main building towards the steps leading down to the sunken lawn. We must seem like old drunks; Ben is so close to me that we are swaying and bumping together as we walk. At some point I put my finger to my lips and make a Shhh noise but I don’t have to. Neither of us is going to say anything. In this almost-gone light Ben looks like a solemn ghost; his wet black hair and rain-spattered glasses giving the impression that when alive this ghost was a South European intellectual, perhaps sometime between the wars. My heart is a tap-dancing speed-freak, despite my evening of downers, and my legs suddenly feel crazy, like they could be a tail. For a second I am a mermaid. Could I have been thrown out of the storm to tempt him? Did he come out of the storm for me? Again, I think back to the moment we shared earlier on during the Balloon Game. For once in my life, I am pleased I played the Balloon Game.

  Did I intend to lead him to the gazebo? Perhaps. But neither of us can wait that long. As soon as we are in the forest and well out of sight of the main house, we take a sharp left, look around to finally check we are alone, and then, as intensely and as hard as we can, we kiss. We kiss as if neither of us had names, addresses, To Do lists, phone numbers, friends, enemies or anything else in our lives at all. Ben’s arms are surprisingly strong as he presses me against a tree. ‘Don’t speak,’ I whisper, and he doesn’t speak, not once, as he pulls up my skirt, takes a condom out of his pocket, and then begins to unbutton his trousers.

  Back in my room I take off my wet clothes and put on the white PopCo dressing gown. Delicious, delicious. I will not wash tonight. I sit on my bed and it all seems quiet, perhaps too quiet. There is less rain now, and no sounds from anyone along the corridor. Should I have stayed with Ben? Should we have talked afterwards; swapped details of our childhoods and our jobs and our ex-partners and our unsavoury habits? No. This is right. This is how I wanted it. And, of course, I won’t talk about this, or tell anyone what happened, especially not a woman. You didn’t speak at all? You did it against a tree? Well, he’ll think you’re easy, won’t he? You’ve got to make them run, Alice. You can’t let them have you so easily. Of course, he didn’t ‘have me’; we had each other. But you try explaining that to a woman who thinks that all men are out for one thing and won’t respect you if you ‘give’ it to them. I wonder what Esther would say? Probably not that, at least. But I still won’t tell her.

  It must be past eleven now. I get up off the bed and sit down at my desk. Teenage girls. I write this on a piece of paper and then look at the words suspiciously. Are we supposed to be diving straight into this problem or practising lateral thinking and matrices first? What would happen if someone came up with the definitive teenage girls’ product tonight? Would we all simply go home tomorrow?

  I’ve only been sitting there for three or four minutes when there’s a soft knock at the door. For a moment I think, Ben, but when I open it it’s Dan, carrying two mugs of tea and smiling almost naughtily.

  ‘This is like some boarding-school story,’ he says, walking into the room. Then: ‘Oh – you’re not dressed.’

  ‘Just had a bath,’ I lie, taking a mug of tea from him. ‘Where did you get these?’

  ‘Made them in the kitchen.’

  ‘Great. Thanks. So … Do I need to get dressed or can you handle me in a dressing gown?’

  He grins. ‘I’ll control myself, Butler.’

  ‘Good.’ I start rolling a cigarette. ‘So how’s stuff?’

  ‘Really cool. I am so into all these lateral-thinking ideas. And the matrices … I haven’t really thought about things this way before. I am definitely going to crack this teenage girl problem. I mean, how hard can it be?’ His eyes are sparkling orbs of enthusiasm.

  ‘God. You’ve gone a bit …’

  ‘What?’ He sounds slightly defensive.

  ‘Well, it’s a change from all that “The world is only pictures” stuff from the other night. You’ve turned into, I don’t know, Super PopCo Man or something. Don’t get too sucked in. Remember: they are an evil cult and they will brainwash you.’ I don’t actually mean this. It’s just, like so many other things, something we say because it sounds funny. Dan doesn’t laugh, though. He just looks thoughtful.

  ‘It’s all because, well, I’ve never been asked to actually pitch a new product before. I don’t know. I know you probably think it’s a bit sad or something, that I’m so
excited about this. But I just … No one’s ever valued my ideas before. It’s always been, “Oh, Dan, that’s a lovely blue,” or “Oh, Dan – can you help me with this storyboard?” I’m sort of enjoying there being no “Oh, Dan” about this. It’s a chance to work on my own and actually do something important.’

  ‘Until we get to the teambuilding class tomorrow, when, I guess, we’re going to be told how to work effectively as a team.’

  ‘Maybe.’ He sighs. ‘Oh, you know what I mean, anyway.’

  I smile. ‘Yeah, I do.’

  Dan sips his tea. ‘So, there’s a man lying dead in a field beside an unopened package. There is no one and nothing else in sight. What has happened?’

  ‘His parachute didn’t open. Please don’t tell me that you have actually learnt how to solve those things, because that would be too scary.’

  He grins. ‘No. I like them though. I also really like what de Bono says about using chance to help generate ideas, or solutions to problems.’

  ‘What, all that open-the-dictionary-to-a-random-page stuff?’

  God, Alice, can you sound any more dismissive?

  ‘Yeah. I’ve never thought of things that way before. Do I sound lame?’

  ‘No! Not at all. Sorry. It’s me. I think I’m a bit tired.’

  Yes, because you’ve been outside in the rain fucking for the last hour.

  ‘You can shoot me if I defect,’ Dan says.

  ‘I will be the first to shoot you if you defect,’ I assure him.

  But later it occurs to me that we are at war with no one, no one at all.

  Chapter Thirteen

  There is a boat in the middle of the Great Hall.

  ‘What the fuck?’ says Esther.

  ‘Cool,’ says Dan. ‘Sailing.’

  I experience some brief butterfly-wing memory of having seen a picture of something like this a long time ago, and then I am distracted by Mac’s voice from the small stage.

  ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Welcome to SailTogether.’

  ‘Do you think that’s one word, or two?’ I ask Dan.

  ‘It’s one,’ he says, indicating the logo painted on the side of the boat. ‘Look.’

  We are standing in clusters around the hall, like pictures of a virus. I haven’t made any sort of eye-contact with Ben yet, although he is in the next cluster along, standing with Chloë and Hiro. Everyone is looking at the boat. How did it get here? Why is it here? It’s peculiar, seeing a boat out of water, like this. And something is missing from it but I can’t work out what.

  ‘What’s wrong with that boat?’ I say to Dan. ‘It looks, I don’t know …’

  ‘There’s no keel,’ he says. ‘And they’ve flattened the bottom. It must be just for demonstration or something.’

  ‘Demonstrating what?’

  ‘Probably how to sail.’

  ‘This is Gavin Samson,’ Mac says in a loud voice, gesturing towards the tall, thin, suntanned man standing on the stage with him. ‘Gavin has worked with PopCo on many different occasions. When he first joined the company, in 1980, he worked as an artist for the General Mechanics division, completing technical drawings for various mechanised toys. He then moved on to work more closely within the “Bath Time” brand, eventually creating successful sub-brands like the Tiny Trawler and the Saturday Sailboat.’

  The Tiny Trawler isn’t made any more but it was one of PopCo’s big successes in the 80s. When I was a kid I knew people who had Tiny Trawlers. They were little wooden fishing boats that came complete with their own miniature string-operated outboard motors. You could play with them in the bath or, if you had the remote control model, the local fish pond, river or lake. The Saturday Sailor was a small toy sailing yacht which came with little masts, sails, rigging and rope. Again, you could actually sail the boat, but not anywhere out of reach as you had to be able to get to it to set the sails (and retrieve it when it shot off in the wind). However, the product did OK-ish with sailing families and was often bought as a novelty gift for the grown-ups, or as an educational aid for their kids to play with in the bath or the paddling pool.

  Mac continues. ‘Gavin’s particular successes at PopCo also include the original drawings for Sailor Sam and his Amazing Clam, who, I am sure Gavin won’t mind me saying, started life as simply a doodle on an abandoned technical drawing. Those who know their PopCo lore will also recognise Gavin as one of the co-designers on the 1984 PopCo logo redesign project. The design consultants were so taken with some of his boat and ship diagrams that he was brought in to help modify them into the graphic we now use. Gavin left the mechanics division some years ago to complete his solo voyage around the world, which, some of you may remember, PopCo sponsored.’ Mac pauses at this point and we all clap Gavin’s achievement. ‘Now it seems that we are collaborating again. Gavin’s new company has designed a range of products intended for the trainee sailor or for those who want to learn to become a team through sailing. We are trialling it here over the next two weeks and I am sure you will give Gavin all your support in making this work for him and for PopCo. And for those of you surprised to see a boat inside this hall – shame on you! Read your lateral-thinking notes again. And be prepared, because there are a lot more surprises in store for you with Gavin. So I will hand you over. Ahoy!’

  ‘He is so embarrassing,’ mutters Esther.

  Mac leaves via the stage door and we are left standing there looking at Gavin.

  ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Well, I don’t think I’ll be able to live up to that introduction.’

  He has an honest face and scruffy blond hair. We laugh politely.

  ‘Before I begin, any questions?’

  Dan puts his hand up. ‘What was it like sailing around the world?’

  Gavin smiles. ‘It was, well, hard to describe, actually. Tell you what, I couldn’t walk on dry land for almost a week afterwards. My balance wouldn’t adjust. Anyway, the whole experience was very intense. There are these amazing moments when you just feel like you are part of the sky, and then the sun starts to set and you suddenly really understand that you live on a planet. Some nights the sun would seem to set for hours, and the whole sky would be red. Then there were the storms. One time I didn’t think I was going to make it. I couldn’t get the sails down quickly enough and I lost my jib in the sea. And then there was the loneliness, which could get very intense. You just don’t speak to anyone for weeks at a time. But then that’s all part of it; the solitude. You come out of the experience a different person, that’s for sure. And no one recognises you because of the suntan and the beard.’ He looks around himself awkwardly. ‘I think I might get off this stage now. I feel like I’m at a book event, although there are far too many of you for that to be true.’

  He hops down and walks over to the boat. He pulls a chair over and sits down. Those of us who aren’t sitting down now do so as well. ‘There, that’s cosier,’ he says, although he looks odd sitting down, like he’s the kind of person who should be constantly moving around, doing things to sails.

  ‘Did you write a book?’ asks Mitzi.

  ‘Yes. But don’t make me tell you about it. Then this really will feel like a book signing. And there’s nothing more depressing than a book signing.’ Gavin gets up again and starts walking around the boat, touching things. ‘OK. Now, Mac has told you that the purpose of this is teambuilding. That’s true. You are going to learn to sail, in small teams. But I am hoping that some of you have sailed before, because those who have are going to function as team-leaders. Mac did indicate that some of you had included sailing as a hobby on your CVs. So who here is an experienced sailor?’

  Five or six people put up their hands, including Dan and Chloë.

  ‘Great,’ says Gavin. ‘Marvellous. You can never be sure with PopCo admin.’

  Weird. I’d have said that PopCo admin always get everything spot on; mysteriously so.

  Gavin calls the experienced people over to the boat next to him. ‘Great. Now, could each of you tell us a bit about your
self? You could include where you learnt to sail, your strong points and your weaknesses and anything else you want to add.’

  The first person to speak is Chloë. She pushes her long hair behind her ears before starting. I don’t think I have actually heard her speak before. She has a soft accent that I can’t place but sounds vaguely Celtic.

  ‘Hello. My name is Chloë, for those of you who don’t already know. I’m based at the videogames division in Berkshire, working with the RPG team, where I work on concept design and storyline development. Um, I learnt to sail with my parents, from being really very small. There isn’t really anything more to say. I’ve sailed small yachts on my own. I’ve got a couple of RYA certificates and that’s about it.’

  ‘Thanks, Chloë,’ says Gavin.

  The next person up is the guy I thought looked like a bouncer/philosophy student before, Frank.

  ‘Yeah, um, hi. I work with Kieran’s team in the Virtual Worlds Development division in Berkshire. I grew up in a children’s home by a river and they taught us all to sail there. After I left there, I crewed boats for a while before I came to work for PopCo.’

  Next up is Xavier, a designer from Spain, who has his own yacht. Then Imogen, the PA, who sails every summer with her boyfriend. Then it’s Dan’s turn. I never knew he sailed, so this is new for me too.

  ‘My grandfather was a fisherman in Dartmouth before the war,’ he says. ‘My father learnt to sail from him and I learned from them both. There’s not much more to say. After I graduated from art college I did a brief stint working for a racing yacht design firm before I applied for the PopCo job. I haven’t sailed for a while but I remember everything about it. It’s not really something you forget; like driving a car.’