PopCo

by Scarlett Thomas

  There is a swimming-pool next to the Sports Hall complex, apparently, so after our sailing session is over I leave the others and walk back to my room and dig out some navy blue knickers that look like shorts and my bikini top, which I put on under my clothes. I grab a towel from the bathroom and start walking slowly across the grounds, thinking about cold water on my body. As I walk, I hear the Kid Lab noises again but they fade as I get nearer to the Sports Hall. When I get there, the sounds have completely gone. There are no children anywhere.

  The small swimming-pool is entirely deserted, the water as flat as a mirror. It is not full of leaves and dead things as I had feared but is surprisingly clean and fresh-looking. Next to it are some gazebo-style changing rooms, which, it turns out, have cardboard boxes full of little plastic packages containing PopCo swimsuits and towels. The swimsuits are white, with PopCo written across the chest. I decide to stick to my own clothes. After stripping down, I drop my towel by the edge of the pool and dive straight in. That’s better. Ice, ice, and then, gradually, body temperature. I swim a couple of lengths and feel almost normal again. My hair is getting wet, which is a bad thing, but I may just keep it plaited for the foreseeable future and then it won’t matter what happens to it. Two plaits, and a slick of Vaseline; that’ll do it. I don’t think it’s actually that normal to put Vaseline on your hair but I refuse to pay for all that brightly packaged funky-hair shit they sell in chemists. It’s all just grease, whatever they call it. It’s bad enough that I buy anti-frizz shampoo and conditioner.

  I am sitting on the edge of the pool, dangling my feet in the water, when I realise someone is walking this way. Ben, I think, for a second. But it’s not. It’s Georges. What’s he doing here?

  ‘Alice,’ he says, coming over to where I am sitting.

  ‘Georges,’ I say back.

  He’s wearing knee-length shorts and a thin linen shirt with some expensive-looking sports sandals. He slips these off and sits down next to me, dangling his feet in the water next to mine.

  ‘God, it’s a bit cold,’ he says.

  ‘You just have to get used to it,’ I say. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Me? Busy, stressed, you know how it is.’

  I laugh. ‘I’m a creative. I never get stressed.’

  He laughs too. ‘So …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How are you finding all this? The project?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I say honestly. ‘Ask me again in a week.’

  ‘I hear that some of the lateral thinking hasn’t been up to much.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I say. Then I frown. ‘Are we focus-grouping or something?’

  ‘What? Oh, no. Sorry. I did actually come looking for you, because …’

  ‘Because …?’ I turn to look at him, trying to erase what’s in my eyes before he sees it. There’s always been something about Georges; there always will be. I notice how skinny his brown legs look in his shorts and I can see him, suddenly, as he must have been as a child. But this man is the corporate face of all the creatives at PopCo. He is our boss. He is almost as remote as the moon. When he turns to kiss me, I allow myself to want him for five seconds, which I count in my head, as his lips meet mine, his hand resting lightly on my arm. But then I pull away and stand up.

  ‘In a parallel universe,’ I say, before I walk away. And then, perhaps not loud enough for him to hear me: ‘In dreams.’

  My room feels cool and almost dusty after the heat outside. Somehow I manage to get inside and flop onto the bed before I realise that two envelopes have been pushed under the door. For a few more seconds I lie there with the pleasant chill of the duvet on my back, frozen in time, incommunicado. Then I get off the bed and pick them up.

  One envelope has my name on the front. The other is blank. I open the one with my name first. It’s from Georges. On my way to find you to give you this, it says. If I don’t find you (or if I screw it up) here it is anyway. There is a business card, blank except for Georges’s name and his mobile phone number. I hold the thin card in my hand as the highlights of another life play in my head. I don’t know how this life ends, or even how it would begin.

  The next envelope is exactly what I feared it would be. Another thin With Compliments slip, this time with the following letters on it: PFTACJVPRDNN? I sit down at my desk and start working it out, using only the POPCO lines of a Vigenère square, which I quickly draw up on a piece of paper. It’s cool in this room but yet I suddenly feel desperately hot. As I work on each letter of the text, I find myself hoping that the completed message will tell me something about who the sender is and what he or she wants. But this message turns out to be even weirder than the last one. It finally comes out as: areyouhappy? Are you happy? What? What does this mean? Why has someone sent this to me? It has definitely been sent by an amateur, I know that now. The use of the question mark has given them away. No one uses punctuation in cryptography; there really is no point. Rather than consider the contents of the note, I turn my attention to other factors: mode of sending, ink, handwriting and so on. The PopCo With Compliments slip is an innocuous enough piece of paper to use, I suppose. Everyone has piles of those things at work. But we’re not at work. Did someone bring compliments slips with them to Devon? Did he or she bring them specifically to use for this purpose? I haven’t seen any compliments slips since I have been here but then I didn’t know that there were swimming costumes provided for us, or chefs. I examine the With Compliments slip again. Something about it is different from the ones we usually have, not that I even see those very often. Of course. The address. The address on these slips is the address here, not the UK headquarters in London. Does this mean anything?

  Whoever sent this must have delivered it by hand today. Quite obviously that means that it is someone who works here, someone on the project, or Mac or Georges. Georges was at PopCo Towers both times I have received one of these notes, but why would he bother to send me one message in code and another in plain text? And giving me his phone number is far more incriminating than sending a note simply asking whether I am happy. I don’t think it is likely to be him.

  I roll a cigarette and, after lighting it, I use my lighter to burn the partial Vigenère square and the decipherment I have just completed. I know what it says and don’t need evidence of it lying around. I am not sure yet that I want my correspondent to know that I am easily deciphering these messages. In fact, I am not sure I want this correspondent to know that I care. More importantly, though, I particularly don’t want someone to find the deciphered message. This would compromise not only the message itself but also the key. However insignificant or absurd a message seems, you must never compromise the key.

  You have to do things now, if you are going to do them at all. You really don’t know what is going to happen in five minutes’ time. If I don’t burn this stuff now, I may never get the chance again. Anything could happen. I could go back to the swimming-pool, bang my head and wake up three months later in hospital. ‘We cleared out your room, Alice. What were those weird bits of paper? Why were you decoding messages?’ Since I don’t know who is contacting me, I don’t know whether or not I want to be connected with them. Putting things off is one of the great comforts of our lives. I’ll be home at the end of the day. My husband will come back. There will be food in the supermarket. If I run out I will just get some more. But you never know. People threw food away before the siege of Leningrad because they didn’t know what the next day would bring, and a few months later they were boiling up handbags for soup. You never know if you will wake up one day to find your mother dead or your father gone or that war has broken out. You just don’t know.

  Am I happy? I really don’t know.

  I look down at the surface of the desk, at Georges’s card and the With Compliments slip. Then I burn them both, too.

  *

  ‘If you want me to start at the beginning,’ my grandmother says, ‘this may take some time. We have to go back to the start of the Second World Wa
r, or even a bit before.’

  ‘The war?’ I say.

  She nods and sips her drink. ‘You may have noticed that I seemed sad when we were discussing Bletchley Park recently. I was surprised that you didn’t ask whether or not your grandfather was there during the war …’

  ‘Was he?’ I ask, thrilled at the thought of this.

  ‘No. I was.’

  ‘You were?’

  ‘I was one of very few women cryptanalysts. I worked with Turing on the Naval Enigma. It was hard work but very exciting. Your grandfather and I were already lovers by the time war started, and we planned to marry. However, war puts so many plans on hold and there weren’t many weddings in those years, I can tell you. We had both studied at Cambridge. I was one of the first women to actually be allowed to take a proper degree, and I, like your grandfather, read mathematics there. Alan Turing was a Fellow at Cambridge when I was an undergraduate in the thirties. I remember that he was very passionate about the anti-war movement at first, before things became more muddled after about 1934 or so. Hitler was doing all kinds of things, whipping and murdering people in the streets of Vienna and so on, and we were hearing stories all the time but no one knew what to believe. Hardly anyone wanted a war. But then it was suddenly inevitable.

  ‘In the last two or three years before the actual declaration of war, I had graduated and started working towards a fellowship thesis but your grandfather was in a lot of trouble. He was a stubborn man even then, and was always on the wrong side of those in authority. He was passionately against war of any kind, and, one night not long before his graduation, he wrote a series of pacifist messages in chalk on some of the walls around the university. He was forced to own up eventually, and although it was chalk and washed off perfectly, they wouldn’t give him his degree. They said they would do so only if he made a formal apology, but he refused. It had been a political statement, not a silly prank, he said, and then he simply left the university, vowing never to return. He stayed in Cambridge, however, and still socialised with a big group of us from the university but he always refused to apologise for what he did. It was a funny time. Turing had gone to Princeton, hoping to meet a mathematician called Gödel, but had met another Cambridge man, G. H. Hardy, instead.’

  ‘Is this the Hardy who sent the postcard?’ I ask.

  ‘Gosh, you’ve got a good memory. Yes, it is the same man.’

  ‘So what was his postcard?’

  My grandmother laughs. ‘This is slightly off the subject but at least it will explain your grandfather’s comment earlier. Hardy was an eccentric mathematician, not unlike your grandfather in some ways. He was obsessed with cricket and proving the Riemann Hypothesis. And God. He was obsessed with a strange war he was determined to fight with God. He was always trying to trick God. He would turn up at cricket matches with a pile of work to do, pretending that he hoped it would rain so he could get some work done. He was actually double-bluffing God. He thought that God would see that he hoped for rain and give him sunshine instead – which was what he actually wanted all along. Hardy’s postcard was well known. He sent it to a friend just before he was about to get on a ship to sail on some very rough seas. The postcard said he had found a proof for the Riemann Hypothesis. By this time, the Riemann Hypothesis was one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics. Hardy knew God wouldn’t let him drown after he had sent this postcard. He would have become famous overnight if he had drowned, for ever known as the man who had solved the Riemann Hypothesis and then died. He just knew that God wasn’t about to make him immortal like that, thus his “insurance policy”. One very funny thing, actually, was when Paul Erdös met Hardy. Erdös is a completely eccentric mathematician as well. His name for God is the SF – the Supreme Fascist. You can imagine how the two of them got on! Anyway, that should explain Hardy’s postcard.’

  ‘I see,’ I say, although I’m not sure how this fits into the argument before.

  My grandmother makes another, smaller drink for herself and puts on the kettle again, possibly for more tea for me. It has started to rain outside, tiny hooves on the window, and I hope my grandfather is all right. My grandmother does make me more hot sweet tea, and switches on the gas fire before sitting back down on the sofa.

  ‘Where were we? Oh yes. Turing had been working on the Riemann Hypothesis for some time, and meeting Hardy had made him wonder if in fact he should be working on disproving, rather than proving it. He returned to Cambridge in a strange mood, filled with even crazier-than-usual ideas about mind machines and real machines that he would build. He particularly wanted to create a machine to work on the Riemann Hypothesis, and I assisted him for a time at Cambridge. I remember my head was full of thoughts about my heroine, Ada Lovelace – Lord Byron’s daughter, another woman mathematician – and I was a little bit in love with Turing although that was silly because he was, at least at Cambridge, openly gay.’

  ‘Gay?’ I say, shocked. At school, someone is ‘gay’ if they do something stupid. I know it really means men loving men, or women loving women, but I just find the idea confusing.

  ‘Yes, Turing was gay. He was persecuted because of it and that is why he killed himself.’ She looks at me sharply. ‘Never judge anyone like that, Alice, ever. You don’t know what it will do to them.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I say, seriously.

  ‘Good. Now, when war was finally declared, several of us from the mathematics department were advised to go and offer our services at this place called Bletchley Park. There were rumours about it being somewhere intellectuals could spend the war solving puzzles, which sounded right up your grandfather’s street. He hadn’t been told to go, having been ostracised from the university, but he came along anyway. Unfortunately, he was one of the few who were turned away. He didn’t have enough discipline, they said, and couldn’t be trusted with official secrets. I was accepted, which was a shock to us both. We said farewell and promised to write to each other. For years – even after the war ended and we were married – I was forbidden by law to tell your grandfather what went on at BP. He was always so good about it but it had hurt him deeply, being turned away like that. I don’t think he was ever jealous of me being there with several of our friends, though, and I loved him all the more for that.

  ‘After he was turned away from BP, he hung around for a year or so doing nothing much of note. By then he wasn’t quite the pacifist he had been. Reports of what Hitler was doing were now coming through thick and fast and, mingled with the wartime propaganda, well, you couldn’t have not been against him. Your grandfather tried to join up to go and fight on several occasions but was always declared mentally unfit. One day he came up to take me for tea on my day of leave. I had heard of people coming through the French Resistance to England and then being sent off to train with a secret organisation based somewhere in London. Members of this organisation were being parachute-dropped behind enemy lines all over the world where their brief was simply to blow things up, cause mayhem, indulge in sabotage – anything that would help stop the Germans. Some members of this organisation were to be sent in to help the Maquis – French freedom fighters who were organising themselves to try to overthrow the occupying army. France was of course occupied by the Germans at this time …’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I say. ‘I’ve read lots of war books.’

  ‘Oh, good. Well, your grandfather went to London and made the necessary contacts. He was interviewed in an apartment somewhere near Baker Street. This organisation – SOE, it was called – was the one that attracted all the rebels during the war. The strong ones were trained up to be dropped behind enemy lines – into France, or elsewhere – but others stayed behind working on things like local customs, dialects and particularly disguises, which involved researching French dentistry, German sewing methods, the best ways to conceal cyanide pills and so on …’

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘Dentistry? Why?’

  ‘Well, everyone dropped into France was to pretend to be German or French. The German
s were on the lookout for any inconsistencies at all. Everybody who was dropped into France had their dental work redone. You couldn’t turn up in France with English fillings – that would be the end of you. You had to be completely fluent in French as well, of course, which your grandfather was, then. Anyway, your grandfather’s stunt at Cambridge actually impressed the people at Special Operations Executive. It was the fact that he had stuck to his guns and not caved in. They needed strong-willed people like that who would not crack under interrogation. During the psychological test, a doctor showed him ink-blot pictures and told him to say what he thought they looked like. Your grandfather went mad. He hated all that psychological mumbo-jumbo, and so he basically told this chap to stop wasting his time with pictures of nothing and get out there and fight Hitler like a real man. He couldn’t help himself. These outbursts were the kind of thing that meant he so often failed these sorts of tests and hadn’t made it into the Army or Navy. But this was again exactly the sort of thing SOE wanted. He was accepted, and then sent to their remote training camp in Scotland, where, for thirteen weeks, he learnt how to parachute, how to kill people with his bare hands, how to pick locks, make bombs and the best way to blow up bridges. He was even observed to make sure he wouldn’t sleep-talk in English! He was in his element. By the time the training was over, he was desperate to go to France, but there was a lot of waiting around in SOE. He spent a lot of the war simply waiting.’