PopCo

by Scarlett Thomas

  Mark Blackman’s talk has actually made me a bit more enthused about this project. I jot down some extra notes and thoughts at the end of what I wrote while he was talking, then glance back over the whole lot. Model student that I suddenly am, I find myself neatly drawing up a matrix of attributes I feel a teenage girls’ product could have, and then I add one column with only two words in it: ‘Automatic Transmission’. The product must be able to spread itself. I write another note to myself: If possible, the product itself should be the means of transmission.

  There is a knock at the door, which makes me jump. There I was, telling myself that I am OK about all the weird stuff going on here; now someone knocks at the door and I almost fall off my chair. Could this be Hiro, or Hiro’s friend, with this ‘longer message’? I open the door and instead find Ben, smiling.

  ‘Good. You’re here,’ he says.

  ‘Hi,’ I say back. ‘How was sailing?’

  ‘All right.’ He grins, and walks into the room. ‘When’s yours?’

  ‘Three. I was just getting some work done and then I was going to have a nap.’

  ‘Do you want some company?’

  ‘Yeah, that would be nice. I do have to get some sleep, though. I fell asleep with my clothes on last night and then woke up at six with my radio blasting in my ear.’

  ‘Yuck.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I get onto the bed and sit there with my legs crossed. Ben sits on the armchair.

  ‘So what’s this work you’re doing?’ he asks me.

  ‘The teenage girl thing.’

  ‘God, you’re keen.’

  ‘Keen? Hardly. I’ve only just started.’

  ‘This whole thing …’ Ben looks distracted, his dark eyes flicking around the room.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s pretty sinister, don’t you think?’

  ‘What is?’ I ask. He really does look freaked out. ‘Ben?’

  He crosses his legs, then re-crosses them the other way. ‘All that stuff about networks and phase transitions and viruses. I don’t know. It just spun me out a bit.’ He looks at his hands. ‘Is it right?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so,’ I say. Then it occurs to me that he doesn’t mean ‘right’ as in ‘correct’. He is asking if our project here is morally right. ‘We’re just doing our jobs,’ I say. ‘We don’t make up the rules, or assign the projects. If people don’t want whatever we make, they won’t buy it. It is their choice.’

  ‘Yeah, but we’re learning to create addictions. To tell lies. To make products that act like viruses …’

  I frown. ‘Yeah. I know.’

  ‘If you know, then why are you doing it?’

  ‘Um …’ I want to say that I am doing it because we are supposed to: because that’s why we’re here. But that doesn’t ring true at all. I’m not like that – I’ve never liked doing what I am told. But the real reason is somehow worse. ‘I like the challenge,’ I say eventually. ‘I like the idea of solving a really hard problem, or getting the solution to a puzzle. I know it’s a bit lame …’

  ‘God. I bet you like crosswords, too.’ He frowns.

  ‘I used to compile crosswords. That was my job before they asked me to come and work at PopCo.’ I look down at the floor. The rug on the floorboards has an interesting tiling pattern, regular geometric shapes.

  ‘You were headhunted, weren’t you?’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Something someone said. So PopCo decided that your puzzle-solving skills would be just what they needed. Interesting …’

  ‘You’ve gone all weird,’ I say. He has. He’s acting like I am a mystery he is trying to solve.

  ‘What? Oh, sorry.’ He shakes his head. ‘It wasn’t just the seminar. I’m feeling a bit …’

  ‘What? What happened?’

  ‘Oh, I was looking for something on the way back from sailing and I ended up over in that strange Kid Lab bit of the estate. Have you been over there?’

  ‘Not really. No. Not further than the canteen building.’

  ‘God.’ He lights a cigarette. ‘It fucking freaked me out. There’s this guy over there called Oscar. He’s in charge of the Kid Lab activities. He saw me bumbling around and offered me a tour. I had no idea what they did over there.’

  ‘I’m guessing that they have scary one-way mirrors …’

  ‘Yeah. Fucking hell. And they have this whole room laid out like, I don’t know, like some kind of paedophilic reception room or something. That’s what it made me think of. It made me think, This is the kind of place little kids would sit around waiting to be fucked by old men. It was horrible. It was all clean and glossy, with all these boxes of toys and carefully selected old junk that kids traditionally play with – like socks, washing-up liquid bottles and things like that. There were little play mats on the floor, and beanbags, and a fridge full of fizzy drinks and fruit. Oscar said that they bus in kids from nearby towns in term-time to take part in trials. In the holidays, like now, they give poor, inner-city kids a “free holiday” in return for the kids’ participation in focus groups. They get the room ready, depending on what test they are doing, so the children might have just PopCo toys or a collection of found objects, or both. Say a little kid would rather play with an old sock than with Sailor Sam or something – or the Bubblegum Tree or whatever else we produce – then the researchers want to know why. And then they try to work out what PopCo could make that’s based on the principle of playing with an old sock. Oscar was telling me about something called the Sock It to Me kit …’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘That’s in development. I didn’t know that’s where the idea had come from, though.’

  ‘What is it, exactly?’

  ‘It’s a kit that enables you to, I don’t know, funk up your socks or something. As far as I know, there are two kits in development. One, mainly for girls, is a kind of embroidery set – with loads of iron-on-ability – that lets you add eyes to your socks, and patterns and so on. I think the tagline is Friends You Can Wear. The other one is called Monster Foot, and it’s mainly for boys. It’s essentially a puppet-making kit, with stick-on googly eyes, crazy tongues made out of felt and so on. I think they were trying to work out which one would sell better.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘It’s all very intense at Battersea,’ I explain. ‘Everyone knows what everyone else is doing. Plus, I go outside and smoke, just like Mark Blackman said, and because of that I know a girl who was working on that project. Bloody hell, though. I didn’t know they got ideas like that. It is a bit creepy.’ Except I do know. I know what focus groups are like and this is no different. You just tune it out, though. You have to, otherwise you can’t get on with your job. And everything looks odd, if you look at it for long enough, even the word ‘and’.

  Ben puts his cigarette out in a PopCo ashtray. ‘What I don’t understand is that if kids like playing with old socks, why we can’t just leave them to it. Why do companies like PopCo have to jump in there and ruin everything? Is it just greed? I don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe one of the shareholders needs even more money,’ I suggest, and then we both laugh.

  After this, we get into bed and sleep for about an hour until I wake up sweating, still half-stuck in my dream that I am late for the sailing class. In my dream, when I get there I find that the boat has simply sunk into the floor.

  Chapter Twenty

  Saturday morning. We are leaving on our strange nature ramble in about half an hour. I have a sore throat, so I am chucking Aconitum down my throat like there’s no tomorrow (in homeopathic terms, this means I have actually taken two doses). I hate colds. I will do almost anything to avert a cold, including taking high doses of vitamin C, Echinacea and spoonfuls of honey virtually every hour if I think I have one coming on. I do have my reasons for this. When I was a kid, my dad and I lived in a damp council flat and since then I have always had a weak chest. Plus, it was colds (or, actually, varying degrees of the ’flu) that fi
nally killed both my grandparents. Whenever I get a cold, it cuts through to my chest with the sharpness of a sickle and I go around wheezing like an old woman for weeks. I have told myself that the next bad chest will be the sign that I have to stop smoking. I am not looking forward to that day, not at all.

  Aconitum is the Latin prefix for the Monkshood family of flowers and is poisonous, of course, in crude doses. In fact, Aconites are some of the most used poisons in history. Aconitum angelicum is the wild version, but Aconitum napellus, the domestic variety that you can still see in gardens today (and the variety used in homeopathic prescribing), was originally introduced in order that everyone could have his or her own supply of poison. Sixteenth-century herbals commonly warned that its charming, shy, blue flowers are not to be trusted. If you eat Monkshood, it kills you. The poisoning comes on suddenly, and always makes the victim panicky and terrified of their approaching death. If you find that you have an illness which has come on suddenly, and you think you might die (and even feel that you could predict the time of your own death), then you might need homeopathic Aconitum as a remedy. This is the thing about homeopathy: similia similibus curentur. Like cures like. Suddenness is therefore a particular keynote of Aconite, and many homeopaths suggest taking it at the first sign of a cold; when you go, in an instant, from feeling sunny and relaxed and normal to having razor blades in your throat and an inflated balloon in your head. I have quite a high-strength bottle of Aconite with me – 1M – so I think I have a good chance of staving off this thing.

  What do I need for a day on the moor? My mind briefly fills with thoughts of jam jars with wire handles, magnifying glasses and sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper. But no, I am an adult. I will take my survival kit, a bottle of mineral water and perhaps a packed lunch from the chefs, depending on whether anyone else is doing the same thing. We have been told to take a compass and a notebook. I have a compass in my survival kit, and I take my notebook with me everywhere. Are these adult things to take? I’m not sure.

  Thinking about my survival kit is like an electric shock of normal life, reminding me of a world outside PopCo Towers. I suddenly wonder if Atari is OK with Rachel, and if he enjoyed his corporate-sponsored ride over to her place. I realise that if I wasn’t here, on this odd project, I would be preparing the roughs for my survival kit presentation, originally due on Monday. Who knows when that will happen, now. And how long will it take me to finish? I am out of survival kit mode now and well into this other thing, whatever it turns out to be. Have I gone through a door that only opens one way? Will I be able to go back? I hate leaving things unfinished, and always have these fears about not being able to go back to them. I’m not sure I can even remember anything about survival. God.

  Before I leave the room I check again that no notes or letters have been delivered but there is nothing. I am meeting Ben, Kieran and the others by the sports hall in about twenty minutes so I had probably better go. I am planning to go the long way round, since I am not in the mood for playing Kieran’s card game (now christened Jack), and people tend to challenge you to games whenever they see you walking around. I simply feel too odd and sore-throaty to concentrate on anything today.

  So I am skulking around like some kind of weirdo, keeping to a route I think others will avoid: through the sunken garden, around the edge of the car park and along the side of the wood. I have found these Echinacea pastilles in my bag but I have been trying to resist sucking them because of the menthol they contain. Early twentieth-century homeopaths like James Tyler Kent thought that menthol (or camphor) and coffee work as antidotes to homeopathic remedies. I have never been sure what to think about this but I don’t want to take any chances with the Aconitum.

  I am thinking about Kent, and wondering whether to take another dose of Aconitum. It’s important not to repeat a remedy too soon, especially if it is working. Is my Aconitum working? I’m not sure. Quite lost in these thoughts, I almost don’t notice Georges walking briskly towards me. When I do see him, my stomach flips over like an extreme fairground ride. I never did anything about his note, or his business card. Oh yes, I did. I remember now. I burnt them. I burnt his mobile phone number, which I can never get again by any other means other than from him. What is wrong with me? When he speaks to me, perhaps I can ask him to give it to me again, just in case? But he doesn’t stop. He gives me a slightly strange look, and then a sad-ish smile, puts his head down and keeps going. Oh well. I suppose there’s only so much running a person can do before they just get tired and stop. Alan Turing may have found that some programs simply never terminate but this one obviously has. Does love terminate? Fucking hell. What am I thinking? I must be ill.

  My stomach flips again but doesn’t end up the right way around. I whisper it to the forest. I love him. I do fucking love him. I am in love with Georges Celéri. Then I feel like crying. OK. Calm down, Alice. That was a bit loud, for a whisper. Yes, yes, big revelation; and I think that maybe I am in love with him but I will never, ever do anything about it. I am a scruffy creative with a barely affordable mortgage. He is a millionaire. Yeah, if this was a romance story we’d be a perfect match. But it’s the real world and I am not for sale. It was OK talking to Georges about books and music; and when I looked into his eyes I felt something amazing, like we were the two missing pieces of an ancient puzzle. Yes, I admit it. I did feel those things. But they don’t mean I could ever fit into his world. What would I do? Move to New York and learn how to use cutlery properly? Spend my days having my nails done and buying art? It’s just not viable. Or he could move in with me and slum it for a while before eventually we have a conversation that begins, ‘Darling, I …’ and he persuades me to go for the first option after all. ‘All my friends are in New York,’ he’d say. And he’d point out that I have no friends in London, which is almost true, and it would all just go horribly wrong. My whole life would seem like a pathetic little novella to him, or a short poem about loss. Join me in my multi-volume, leather-bound saga, darling. No!

  Maybe he does just want to fuck me and nothing more. But if that’s the case, I’d rather not find out.

  No one would understand this. Everyone else finds Georges deeply annoying. Is it only me who sees his charisma? Or is everyone else simply daunted by it? I really don’t understand why I am in love with him and it definitely has to stop. Ben is exactly right for me at the moment. Maybe it is just sex – but it is pretty intense sex, which seems to be what I need. And we are not asking each other for anything. There are no promises that we’ll end up breaking. Ben probably lives in one room in some inner-city house-share in Reading, with mouldy coffee cups and science-fiction novels in little piles by his bed, probably a mattress on the floor. All his possessions would probably sell at auction for less than Georges would spend on a meal. Why am I thinking like this? It’s almost embarrassing to find myself thinking like this. Surely the point of love is not simply to find two guys and then go to bed with the poorest one? I don’t know if Ben is even poor, anyway. But he does have a hollow look, and he wears second-hand jackets.

  And I bet Georges has a massive family. I bet he has all kinds of wonderful warm relations in France and Japan and New York. I can just see myself on some big, shiny ship with an expensive scarf and possibly a lapdog, on my way to meet Mama and Papa and various cousins and aunts. And me, an orphan with nobody. I can contribute nothing to this fantasy world. Do people like me have children because it’s the only way of having a family again? But I don’t want that. I just don’t know what I do want. Perhaps Ben is the solution to my puzzle after all. Or perhaps there is no solution: not all puzzles have solutions, after all. Turing again.

  I am early for my rendezvous, and no one is anywhere near the sports hall when I arrive. Not wanting to be the lame one who has arrived first, I keep going in the direction of the Kid Lab buildings, walking purposefully, as if I haven’t yet reached my destination. I wonder if this guy Oscar will be around, but when I get there, there is no one at all. The door is
open, however, so I go in, finding myself in a square-shaped entrance foyer with bright coat-pegs all around its walls. There is also a coatstand painted to look like a frog, and a few chairs around a coffee table in the shape of a ladybird. The lights are off, and perhaps that’s why everything looks wrong, but I immediately register the same sort of sensation that Ben was talking about. This gets worse as I walk through an archway (with ‘cute’ spiders painted around it), and into a large play area. My skin tingles. Is this where they watch the kids? It must be. There are play mats everywhere, and boxes of different kinds of toys. I am a giant in this world, with doll-tables and doll-chairs and imaginary objects everywhere. I almost trip over a wooden building block and instinct makes me pick it up. I have this thing about reversing entropy. If something is disordered, I have to tidy it up; if something is out of place, I have to put it away. If I see that something has fallen off a shelf in the supermarket, I always have to pick it up and put it back; always. I can’t stand things being, well, not exactly out of place, but on the way to disorder. The block has a big red ‘A’ on two of its faces, pictures of acorns on two more, and apples on the other two. A is for Alice, I think, and smile before putting it back in one of the toy boxes. It’s a false smile, however. Why bother with a false smile when no one is here? Maybe there is someone here, though, watching me. I wouldn’t know. All I can see when I look at the mirrored walls is myself. Oh God. It must be the darkness that is unsettling me. Darkness and childhood don’t go well together. Time to leave. Ben’s right about this place. Something about it is frightening.

  What would I think if I was a kid and I had arrived here to test some product, or to be observed playing? How different would that be from what has happened to me anyway; coming here and being told I have to come up with a unique product plan? I expect I would be far more excited if I was a kid, of course. And perhaps I would feel important, too. It would have been explained to me, probably, that some exciting adults from the toy industry would be observing me, and maybe asking some questions about toys. I bet I would have loved that, as a kid.