PopCo

by Scarlett Thomas

  When the ship Ophelia left Plymouth, its crew of forty men included John as ship’s surgeon and several recently escaped servants who acted as gunners, cooks and boatswains. Francis was strict with his crew. As well as the usual rules to do with not smuggling women on board dressed as men and not gambling and so on, Francis had a new rule on board his ship. The ‘Indian’ crew members were to be treated like other men, he said, and anyone found treating them as anything less would be marooned immediately. And so, with its crew of escapees on their way home, and captained by a runaway, the Ophelia moved silently through the deep blue waters of the Atlantic, making a speedy passage to Virginia, arriving only fifty-one days later. The reception in Virginia was not quite what Francis would have hoped for, however. The new settlers were delivered without too much difficulty, but the leader of the existing settlement decided to cause trouble. As soon as the Indian crew members were off the ship, he took them prisoner. Francis was livid with rage. Had he brought these men all this way for them to be captured immediately and sent back as servants – or worse? Had he brought them to their historic homeland so they could serve the men who had arrived little more than five minutes ago? After consulting with his remaining crew, he decided to launch an attack on the settlement to release John Christian and the others.

  With the ship loaded with tobacco and furs and ready to go, Francis and his crew waited patiently for darkness to fall. They attacked just as the settlers thought the ship was about to leave. With considerable gun power, and armed with their sharp swords, he and his men cut through any resistance they found until John and the other captives were freed. Unfortunately, in so doing Francis had killed the head of the settlement. He knew the punishment for that. Death. That was what would await him on his return to Plymouth. In the darkness of the night, with gunpowder fumes and the cries of women and children ringing in their ears, he and his men – including John and the other released captives – re-boarded their ship and sailed away into the night, not at all sure about what to do next. The ship held over £1000 worth of tobacco and £500 of furs, but its captain would soon be a wanted man. There was only one thing they could do. They turned pirate.

  Francis asked the men to vote. Anyone who didn’t vote for piracy could be marooned somewhere habitable, he offered, but he couldn’t have any dissenters on board his ship. The vote was unanimous. The ship was renamed the Rebecca and the new Articles of Agreement drawn up. The Articles of the Rebecca have never been found but would have included the usual stipulations and rules found on Articles of pirate ships of this period. There would have been the usual ‘no prey, no pay’ principle, of course, although the Rebecca did start her pirating adventures already in possession of valuable goods. The Articles would have outlined exactly how this and any further plunder or profits would be divided, how the men would be compensated for injury and what practices would and would not be acceptable on board the ship. After the men had agreed on the Articles, they voted for their captain. Of course, they chose Francis Stevenson. Then they set off towards the West Indies.

  The tobacco was sold easily in Jamaica, and the men of the Rebecca were suddenly rich. Then the real piracy started. There were enough targets nearby: Spanish ships, Portuguese ships, French ships. Francis had an intriguing policy regarding the taking of other ships’ treasures. Once he had captured the ship, he would apologise to the crew and then, after asking them to avert their eyes, he would kill the captain. Having disabled all the ship’s guns, and confiscated all hand weapons, he would simply bid the crew a good day before sailing away. It was this practice that gave Stevenson the nickname ‘The Gentleman Pirate’, although how much of a gentleman he really was remains uncertain. Stevenson would have been as violent as all pirates in this period, his business after all being to kill for treasure. The only thing that could be said in his defence was that he stood by the pact he had made with God, and took no man prisoner. He killed them instead. Still, as his intentions had been humanitarian from the start, it is also thought unlikely that he engaged in cruelty, rape and torture, as many pirates did. He had no need to take towns. He was a pirate who existed purely at sea, plundering ships and selling the resulting treasure in the islands of the Caribbean.

  This continued for several months before things started to go wrong. Various crew members had decided to settle in Jamaica or other islands with which the Rebecca traded, meaning that new crew members had to be found. John Christian and some of the other Indians settled on a Caribbean island, urging Francis to stay with them. But he could not abandon his ship. ‘We will keep a place set at our table for you,’ John assured him. ‘You will come and join us one day, perhaps.’ And perhaps that is what Francis meant to do, eventually. He never had the chance. Within a month he had been marooned on a remote island by the new crew. Not wanting him as captain any more, with his strange ways, and wanting to properly plunder towns and engage in more serious forms of violence, they simply voted for someone else and then marooned him.

  Francis had been clever, though. Before John and the others had left the Rebecca, he had buried one particular haul of treasure, probably on one of the Pacific islands near what is now Tahiti. Francis was the only person in the world who knew where this treasure was. Although it is not clear how he achieved this, he did record that he had made ‘devilish’ use of blindfolds and trickery, at that point not trusting his crew at all. Francis made a map of the location of the treasure, which he wrote using one of his secret codes from years ago, concealed it about his person, and the Rebecca set off again. No one knows why exactly Frances buried this treasure at this moment. Perhaps he knew that he wouldn’t be able to carry on pirating for ever and meant to go back for it. No one knows what he planned. Marooned on an island probably near Hispaniola, he set about trying to build a boat. It is unclear exactly how long he managed to live off the land, although some of his history and day-today life was recorded in a journal before the paper he had and the one pencil he used to write with ran out. Francis did one other thing while on the island. He wrote out a version of the treasure map, encoded of course, and addressed it to Molly Younge. Then he sealed it in the one bottle he had – the bottle which had contained the small amount of water he had been allowed to take with him when he was marooned – and threw it into the sea.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Wednesday morning. I am bored with all my clothes. Maybe not bored, exactly, that’s probably the wrong word. Perhaps the problem is simply that everything I have here now feels slightly grubby. What did the PopCo coordinators think we would do about clean underwear and so on? They must have thought of something; they seem to think of everything else. There is probably a whole room full of clean designer knickers and pants somewhere in this vast building; it wouldn’t surprise me at all. Or a laundry service. That’s it. There must be a laundry service. Why didn’t I think of that before? I will ask someone later.

  There is a small group of girls here – one of them works in dolls, I think – who all wear their hair in a similar way. I have been studying it. They pin sections of it back with small silver grips, these grips forming a halo of attractive, slightly odd, flat sections in their hair. Why do I have the urge to do something similar to my own hair today? I would never, ever act on this urge. So why is the thought even beginning to form? Have I been impregnated with some vile, emerging trend? Abort, abort. This trend is unwanted. While I am thinking, considering the enemy thought trying to lodge itself in my brain, I slip on my corduroy skirt and a T-shirt and plait my hair again. I do like my plaits: they make my hair look like two pieces of rope. And nobody else does this with their hair – not here, anyway.

  Skirts over jeans, that’s another thing. A few months ago, someone came into work wearing a tiny A-line denim skirt over these faded, flared jeans. It looked peculiar at the time. Then, a few weeks later, maybe ten people in the office were wearing similar outfits regularly. Of course they all ‘individualised’ these outfits. One girl favoured thin flowery skirts that bounced just
over her bottom as she walked, skirts so short that jeans underneath were pretty much compulsory. Another tried the look with a knee-length pencil skirt over extreme-flare jeans with flowers embroidered on the legs. Now, if you wear plain, un-skirted jeans into the office you seem almost naked. How does that work? And how is it that while there are still people starving in the world anyone has time to think about all this? In some form or other I suppose this has always happened, though. Look at Elizabeth I’s amazing dresses, worn while peasants starved in the countryside. Perhaps it’s no wonder that when the pilgrims ejected from this country a few years later they did so in the plainest clothes possible.

  I remember one of Chi-Chi’s many scary, cocaine-induced speeches explaining how we, at our small red brick building in Battersea, are actually at the centre of the world. ‘We’re a young team,’ she said. ‘We’re artists and designers and visionaries. We create the very foundations of youth culture every day. We make toys, sure, but we also make catch-phrases and attitudes and lifestyles. This is what we do for a living. Then we go out drinking with people from Levi’s and Diesel and MTV. Everyone knows everyone. Watch Top of the Pops next week and you’ll see kids in bands wearing clothes, or combinations of clothes, that originally started life on someone in this office, designed or marketed by one of their friends. What we do is important. We, and our friends, are the centre of this fucking town.’ Chi-Chi scares me, she really does. I have never been drinking with any of those people. I have never worn anything that would appeal to someone in a girl group or a boy band. I am nowhere near the centre of anything.

  The first seminar of the day consists of us all reporting back on the product plans we have made using our matrices. I quickly present my plan for an alien frog bandit character, and then drift off while everyone else presents their ideas. All I keep thinking is, Am I happy? I really don’t know.

  At lunchtime, Dan and I take some sandwiches and a flask of tea up to the hill fort. I almost want to confide in him about the coded messages and Georges and everything else, but he gets in first.

  ‘What were you like as a teenager, Butler?’ he asks.

  ‘Huh?’ I say. ‘What? As a teenager? Why?’

  ‘Well, I just … Come on, what were you like?’

  ‘Is this audience research?’ I ask, suspiciously.

  ‘Well, yeah, sort of. I’ve got no idea what teenage girls think about anything, or what life is like for a teenage girl. I just want some insights before I seriously start work on my draft product plan.’

  ‘Aren’t we going to be doing this all afternoon?’ I ask. This afternoon we have a speaker coming to talk to us about emerging trends in youth culture. He’s a researcher from a major new study called Branded: Loyalty, Recognition and Awareness of Consumer Brands in 13-17 Year Olds. We are having this research presented to us before it is made public in book form, and PopCo is ‘very excited’ by this, according to the memo we all received yesterday.

  ‘I want some real stuff,’ Dan says. ‘First-hand. You are a girl, so …’

  ‘I wasn’t normal, though, as a teenager. Not at all.’

  Dan laughs. ‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’

  There is a haze over the moor today. It is still hot, but with almost zero visibility. Looking down, I can’t see much more than a thin film shimmering over everything like fairy dust. The enemy could attack on a day like this and you wouldn’t know they were coming until they had arrived.

  ‘What sort of things did you do when you were, I don’t know, say, fourteen?’ Dan asks me.

  ‘Fourteen? God. Um, got up, went to school, came home, did my homework, went to bed.’

  ‘Butler!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, what about when you weren’t doing those things?’

  ‘I read a lot. I helped my grandfather with his various projects. I learnt how to compile crosswords …’

  He shakes his head. ‘So basically you really were the most boring teenager in the world.’

  He’s joking but I suddenly feel angry.

  ‘So at age fourteen your spare time would have been filled with what? Saving the world? Talking to aliens? Being a spy?’

  He doesn’t seem to know if I am joking or not. ‘I don’t know. When I was fourteen I think I just watched loads of cool stuff on TV.’

  ‘Oh right. TV.’ Now I really am cross. I can’t help it.

  ‘What? What’s wrong with TV?’

  ‘TV fools you that you’ve had a life you haven’t had. Don’t you know that? At least I had a life, even if it was, as you say, boring.’

  ‘God, settle down, Alice.’

  ‘No. I hate it. All that retro stuff that’s around at the moment. Remember when we all watched that thing on TV in the seventies and it was so ironic? I don’t even know what any of it’s called because we didn’t have a TV. It all just seems to be this stupid nostalgia for something that never existed in the first place. Just shapes on a screen. You were the one talking about everything just being pictures the other day. You must know what I mean.’

  ‘I do. But I don’t agree.’ He sips his tea calmly.

  ‘What? You think all that stuff has some sort of point?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I think that there is no difference between a narrative on TV and a narrative in a book. They are both told in pictures, really, it’s just that the little pictures on the page – the letters – spell out words, and the pictures on the screen are visual references. But you can’t tell me that sitting down and reading something is intrinsically better than watching the same story acted on a screen. That’s just snobbery.’

  ‘No it isn’t. When did you last see a fifteen-hour-long TV drama that had no adverts and wasn’t written so a child could understand it?’

  ‘What? I don’t …’

  ‘Or a TV drama you could cast yourself? Choose your own locations? Edit your own script? That’s what happens when you read a book. You have to actually connect with it. You don’t just sit there passively …’

  ‘You are such a snob, Butler!’

  ‘I’m not. Anyway, for the record, I never said that books were always better than anything on a screen. All I know is that on the whole I prefer books, but I have to say that I’d rather watch a classic film than read a trashy novel. And I love some videogames, of course. But that’s just my choice. I don’t care what anyone else does …’

  ‘Snob.’

  ‘Dan!’

  He smiles. ‘What?

  ‘I hope you know you are really winding me up now.’

  ‘All right, all right. Sorry. You are a terrible snob, though.’

  ‘Dan.’

  ‘Oh all right.’ He throws a sandwich crust for some invisible bird. ‘I can’t even remember how this started anyway.’

  ‘You said I was a boring teenager.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Sorry.’

  ‘Then I said you can’t have been that much more interesting.’

  ‘I wasn’t. I just wanked all the time.’

  ‘Yuck!’

  ‘And dreamed about being a fighter pilot or an astronaut.’ Dan pours some more tea from the flask into both our cups while I start rolling a cigarette. ‘So, what did you dream about? What were your teenage fantasies?’

  ‘The interview continues,’ I say, sighing. ‘Fantasies? Do you mean sexual ones?’

  ‘You know very well that I don’t.’

  ‘All right. Well, most teenage girls fantasise about men, or boys, or whatever you call the opposite sex at that age. Boyfriends, true love, marriage, babies … Or friendship. That’s a big part of everything.’

  ‘So that’s the kind of thing you were interested in, then?’

  ‘No. God.’

  ‘Well, what did you think about?’

  ‘Um …’

  ‘This is like getting blood out of a stone.’

  ‘Sorry. I did tell you I wasn’t normal. Um, well, I worried about things a lot. My dad ran away when I was a kid, as you know, so I wondered about him. You
know, where he was, whether he’d ever come back and so on. I read a lot of books as well, adult books. It gives you rather an odd perspective on life when you are a child reading adult books … Um, I thought about maths problems, and chess, and all these weird revenge fantasies. I started working on a plot to take over the world but it got too complicated … A lot of the time I was just trying to stay afloat in an incredibly complicated world, where you could be popular one minute and bullied the next, where coming into school wearing glasses for the first time would see you relegated from normal kid to “Four Eyes”. I didn’t get glasses until I was almost fifteen. One time, they broke and my grandfather mended them with gaffer tape. I didn’t really have any friends at the time but if I had, well, I doubt they would have been speaking to me that day.’

  ‘I had my glasses mended with sticking plaster once,’ Dan says. ‘My girlfriend dumped me because I looked so stupid. I must have been about twelve.’ He looks sad for a second. ‘Have you got contacts now? Instead of glasses?’

  ‘Yeah. I think I might go back to glasses, though. Contacts hurt my eyes.’

  ‘Oh, I know where you can get the coolest glasses …’ he starts saying. I don’t want cool glasses, though. Inside, I suddenly feel odd for a second or two, like I might cry. Cool glasses. Why? I just want some cheap glasses that I can mend with gaffer tape when they break and I don’t want any part of that to be a style statement. Why doesn’t that seem to be possible, now? And what’s wrong with me? I should want to be stylish, I know, but I just can’t.

  More NDAs before the talk this afternoon.

  ‘We don’t want the press to see the results before we draft the press release,’ an assistant explains when I hand mine back. ‘Thanks.’

  The speaker is David Furlong, head of the Branded research team. Furlong introduces himself, makes a few jokes about the research process (some responses that fell in the river, an e-mail that accidentally went viral) and then tells us that, as instructed by Mac, he will mainly focus on what this study has to say about teenage girls today. After telling us something about the sample group size and other statistical details, he starts his presentation.