PopCo

by Scarlett Thomas

  Another set of shelves also contains books; and I realise that these are all mine. Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Samuel Beckett, Raymond Chandler, William Gibson, Umberto Eco, Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood. The kits I have created for PopCo are here too, but changed. Instead of colourful boxes carrying the PopCo logo, the material now appears in grown-up books, with my name, Alice Butler, on the spine. For a second I feel like an author, how I have always wanted to feel. Then everything feels odd. I realise that this cottage is the inside of my brain, and I think that it’s probably dangerous to go wandering around inside your own brain, even if it is disguised as a cottage, and you are, objectively, inside a dream.

  On the floor, there is a single wooden block, with the letter A on two of its faces. The other four faces are blank. It’s not that messy in here, apart from the block on the floor, but I am thinking, I have to tidy this up! I have to make it make sense! I have to get out of here. I concentrate as hard as I can, almost meditating, and everything in this room starts to melt into code. I wonder where it’s going – the cottage and its contents – and then I realise that it’s filling the blank faces of the wooden cube. I don’t know how this is happening but, some time later, I blink and find that the process is over, the cottage has gone and I am in the forest alone again. When I touch my necklace, as I always do after some dramatic or dangerous event has occurred, I find it has changed shape. I frantically pull the chain out and see that instead of carrying a locket with a number inside it, it now carries a little wooden block, with all the information from the cottage inscribed on its six faces. Even though I know the necklace number by heart and haven’t really lost anything, I shout No! so loudly that my voice echoes in the whole forest, and birds fly out of the trees like dust beaten from an old sofa.

  When I wake up, it is the middle of the night. I have slept for hours. With a thick head and a gravelly throat, I think about getting up but somehow can’t, so I just lie there on my bed in Room 23 feeling sorry for myself instead. I wonder whether anyone will come in the morning or whether, as usual nowadays, I will have to be ill on my own without anyone’s help or comfort. Even Atari doesn’t usually care that much when I am ill. In the language of Paul Erdös, cats are bosses, not slaves. Don’t be pathetic, Alice. There’s no point, anyway. Being pathetic only has a point if there’s somebody watching. Aching all over, I get up and run myself a glass of tap water. I take a book from the shelves and get back into bed. It’s cold in here, or maybe that’s just the fever. I probably should take something for this.

  What have I got with me? Some Arsenicum, some Lycopodium, some Nux Vomica and some Gelsemium. Hmm. Not a very big choice considering that there are tens of thousands of homeopathic remedies. But I feel cold, and I still feel like tidying up all the time. Do I feel nervous about the future? No. Do I think I might die from this? Yes, irrationally, I do. I think every cold I get will kill me. Fastidiousness implies both Arsenicum and Nux, as does coldness. However, I don’t feel particularly angry or snappy (Nux), and the fear of death is certainly Arsenicum. I don’t feel as restless as Arsenicum usually does but, still, I take an Arsenicum 200 and, without even looking at the book I have selected, I go back to sleep.

  *

  By the time the summer holidays start, I have finished as much of the prime factorisation as I can do without going mad. I ask for a two-week break. My grandfather says I have done enough, anyway, and takes me off the whole project for the time being. My grandmother approves of his releasing me from this huge task to enjoy a ‘normal summer’ like ‘other children’. I feel exhilarated at being able to abandon the rest of this task but, as the holidays get under way, I get an aching sense of having left something unfinished. I hate this feeling. It’s like being away from school on the day of a test: you miss the test but also the nice feeling of the test being over.

  On my birthday, my grandparents present me with several gift-wrapped boxes: a new fountain pen to use when I go back to school (I am changing up to the comprehensive this year, which I am excited/nervous about), an RSPB bird-watching book, a set of my own cricket stumps, a David Gower mug, a radio cassette player and a small silver digital watch. This is the best present haul I have ever had! Perhaps it’s because I am a prime number of years old. My grandfather explained to me last year about my prime number birthday but of course I was ten then: 2 x 5. Now everything about me is prime! Once I have finished opening my presents, my grandmother starts to explain about the large tea-chest my grandfather is dragging into the sitting room.

  ‘It’s from your mother,’ she explains. ‘Books. Diaries. I don’t know if you are too young … But she did say that she wanted you to have them when you turned eleven. So here you are.’

  My grandfather finishes dragging it into the middle of the room and then stands there looking at it, puffing slightly. I don’t know what must be happening to my face. My mother? Bloody hell.

  ‘Well…’ He says. And I think this is going to be a ‘Well…’ that means I am going to have to examine this box now, with them both watching me. Instead, my grandparents exchange a slightly concerned look, and leave the room.

  Oh God. I’m sitting there staring at the box, not sure what to do. I didn’t know my mother had left me anything of hers. Why did no one tell me sooner? When I still lived with my father I would have given anything to touch even a hair of hers. If I could have found anything at all – a single earring, a thin bangle, a small torn-off corner of an old shopping list – I would have guarded it more carefully than I guard anything in my whole life, even my necklace. But there was never anything. As if my mother was a habit my father had given up, every tiny trace of her was removed less than a week after her death. When I returned to the flat (I had been staying in my grandparents’ old house in town) everything to do with her was gone. Everything. There were no bras, no books, no chewed old biros, no brown bread, no postcards of ballerinas, no tins of mints, no pot plants, no cassette player, no tapes, no notebooks, no apple cores, no lipstick, no violin, no nothing. And he thought I wouldn’t notice.

  Now this. A whole box of things that she has touched; books she has actually read. Diaries? Imagine that. With my eyes wide, I approach the box. It is open at the top. Bloody hell! There aren’t just books in here. There is a teddy bear, old and battered, his head poking out from a pile of novels. There is also a cassette which I later discover contains a series of violin recitals taped from the radio. I spend the rest of my birthday morning slowly and carefully taking my treasure upstairs in small, easy-to-carry piles. Then I take the empty box up and re-fill it with the piles of books. The teddy is now on my pillow. I play the tape in my new stereo. I still haven’t opened any of the books.

  I don’t know anything about my mother at all. When she died, there was no one to ask. Everyone was just too upset to deal with questions from me so I just learned not to ask them. Perhaps everyone thought I was too young to understand. This is why I am surprised when, suddenly, today, my grandparents offer to tell me anything I want to know about her.

  ‘Really, Alice,’ my grandmother says gently over lunch. ‘Anything at all.’

  ‘Did she like maths?’ is all I can think of to ask.

  They both laugh. ‘Oh, no,’ says my grandmother. ‘Not even through her music. She didn’t have any interest in it whatsoever.’

  My grandfather looks a bit sad, so I don’t ask anything else. After lunch, he settles down with the Voynich Manuscript calculations, and my grandmother puts on a silk scarf and goes over to Tracey’s nan’s house to make the birthday tea for my party.

  I spend the afternoon on my bed, flicking through novels and music books. There is a diary that I haven’t plucked up the courage to examine yet. When I eventually do, at about four o’clock, I don’t actually read it. I simply sit there touching the writing, wishing things had been different, not allowing myself to cry.

  There is hardly any time to get ready for my party. I’m not sure I even want a party now but t
he village hall is booked and invitations have gone out and the tea is probably already made and on its way to the hall; flowery china plates covered in cling-film, and jugs of orange squash. My tummy hurts just thinking about it. I begged and begged to have this sort of party because all my friends have them but I don’t really like any of the people I have invited. Will anyone from school actually come? I have seventeen returned slips from the invitations – all with little ladybird patterns on them which I liked when I chose them from Woolworth’s but on reflection seem a bit babyish – but I sent out twenty-five. And this was before we broke up for the holidays, so maybe everyone has forgotten. My grandparents agreed to the hall but not to a professional disco, so my grandfather will be in charge of the music, using my cassette player and some borrowed tapes (mainly Rachel’s). Will this be a disaster? Boys are coming, too. Will this be a disaster? How many disasters can one party have? I wish this was someone else’s party, not mine.

  I end up wearing my blue dress and red sneakers. I am not sure they go together but I don’t really care. I brush my hair and braid it carefully into two plaits, the way I have been doing since I was about six. Then I rub a flannel over my face and go downstairs. My grandfather is still there with the Voynich Manuscript.

  ‘Time to go,’ I say.

  The village hall is like a witch’s house; small, grey and pointy with climbing plants all over it. You enter it through a vast, wooden, creaking door that can be held open with a huge brass hook (which is good, because this door is so heavy, and on such a tight spring, that children could easily be crushed to death by it trying to close). This door leads to a tiny foyer, cobwebby and dark, with five rusty coat-hooks and a broom. Then another door, thin wooden slats, leads to the hall itself. This hall is a repository for memories of bingo, bridge tournaments, chess club (which my grandfather created but which is no longer going), Brownies, Scouts, Guides, Boys’ Brigade, Girls’ Brigade, the Woodcraft Folk (also defunct), the Wallflower Theatre Society, the Women’s Institute and the Amateur Operatic Club. A local rock band also practise here on a Thursday evening. Even our house, which is half a mile from the hall, vibrates on a Thursday evening. The band has a girl singer who always dresses in black. She smokes long, thin cigarettes, too. When I first saw her, I wanted to be her so much that my stomach ached for two weeks. She was carrying an electric guitar.

  In the afternoon, the sun coming through the windows of the village hall is like something coming from heaven, and you imagine angels playing in the dust-storms inside. Directly in front of the doors, about twenty paces beyond them, is the stage, made of dark, shiny wood. You can’t climb on to the stage from the hall if you are a child; it’s too high. Instead, if you want to go on the stage, you have to negotiate the maze of little back rooms – kitchen, backstage, dressing rooms, broom cupboard and store – to get to the actual stage door, beyond which there are seven shiny wooden steps which lead up to it. I used to come to Brownies here, which is how I know all of this.

  Everyone at my party wants to get on to the stage. I am the queen of all hostesses in my blue dress, because only I know the ancient secrets of the stage. While the grown-ups stand around the fold-out tables talking, and my grandmother regards the geometry of the birthday tea with evident satisfaction (right-angled jam sandwiches, cheese footballs as neatly spherical as Riemann’s zeros, jellies in the shape of ellipses) we all take off our shoes and creep through the haunted passageways until we get to the seven magical steps and then we spend about half an hour skidding up and down the shiny stage in our stockinged feet. My grandfather fires up my new cassette player and selects a tape from Rachel’s collection. The first five or six songs are recent pop hits that everyone knows from the weekly chart countdown on the radio. My guests and I create a game where we stand on the very edge of the stage, waiting for the climax of the song, at which we all jump off simultaneously. This seems to have been inspired by something called The Kids from Fame, although I don’t know what this is. After we have jumped off the stage we immediately race around the back again, almost forgetting about the ghosts, ready to jump off at the next climactic bit of the song. Even the boys do this! Could I be having the best party ever?

  Rachel, back from boarding-school for the summer, is easily the most sophisticated person here. As an outsider, and the only person who doesn’t attend my school (which, like the Brownies, I have actually left but this hasn’t sunk in yet), unspoken children’s rules suggest that she shouldn’t fit in: that no one should talk to her or want to be seen standing next to her. However, Rachel has developed a special kind of presence since she’s been at her boarding-school. She walks in a floaty way, and sometimes wears mascara. She’s like a pretty ghost-child from a film. When the first of two slow songs come on, she has the pick of the boys to slow dance with. And, because she and Robert, the most eligible boy in the class (Rachel also has impeccable taste), are slow dancing, everyone else does too. I am not sure how I feel about the idea of being in such close proximity to a boy but, somehow, my slow-dance partner happens to be the only boy in the class that I like. He’s called Alex and is good at maths. He is Russian, too!

  ‘Do you have no parents?’ he asks me, as we sway on the spot, his accent as round and soft as a doughnut.

  My head is on his shoulder. ‘No,’ I whisper back. ‘I don’t have any parents.’

  ‘Me too,’ he says. ‘I have no parents as well.’

  Later, Alex kisses me on the cheek. Rachel, of course, kisses Robert on the lips.

  I sleep with my mother’s teddy bear that night, and I feel happy.

  * * *

  It’s about ten o’clock on Sunday when I am awoken by someone banging on my door. It is Ben, carrying a tray.

  ‘Breakfast,’ he says, following me into the room.

  I fall back into bed and he places the tray on the small table and starts bustling around like some sort of home-help, opening the curtains, opening the window and, finally, leaning behind me to fluff up my pillows. Then he places the tray on my lap. I am only half-awake and I stare at him with sleepy eyes, not knowing why he is doing this, but grateful all the same. In fact, I am so grateful that I can feel tears welling up in my eyes. Don’t cry, Alice. Never cry.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say.

  ‘Just call me Nurse Ben,’ he says, grinning. ‘And sorry I was in a shit mood yesterday. Of course I still want all your diseases.’

  Was he in a shit mood yesterday? I was too ill to really notice.

  I look down at the tray. There is a pot of boiling water, a selection of teabags, a mug, two slim jugs of milk, a bowl, two mini boxes of cereal, a plate with two slices of wholemeal toast, a tiny dish containing two pats of butter, a small jar of Marmite and a selection of jams.

  ‘I didn’t know if you were a meat-eater or a vegetarian or a vegan or what,’ Ben says. ‘There’s milk and soya milk there. The soya milk is in the pale blue jug. I didn’t know whether to bring butter or not so I did. I thought you had butter with your roll yesterday but I wasn’t sure.’

  ‘I’m a vegetarian,’ I say, sleepily pouring water from the teapot over one of the tea-bags: Green Tea with Lemon. ‘Recently converted by the unmentionable stew last Saturday.’

  He smiles. ‘That stuff looked foul. What did it taste like?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t eat it. It was the fact that I was spared by claiming to be a vegetarian that actually made me one. That was the day when me and Dan drank the red wine and you looked at me disapprovingly.’

  ‘That was supposed to be “I want to go to bed with you”, not

  “I disapprove of you”.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Oh.’ I smile, then look awkwardly down at my two jugs of milk. I wonder what soya milk is like. ‘Apparently there are lots of vegans here,’ I say conversationally, my mind still trying to wake itself up, not wanting to deal with the horror of how I must look and smell after lying in bed feeling like death for almost twenty-four hours.


  This seems to make him flinch, slightly. ‘Who said that?’

  ‘The chefs.’

  ‘I’m a vegan.’

  ‘Oh.’ I start buttering my toast. ‘So what does that actually mean?’

  ‘I don’t eat any animal products at all.’

  ‘What, no cheese or milk or butter?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  I consider saying something like, So what can you eat, then? Or, Doesn’t that get really boring? Or, I could never give up cheese. However I suspect that these sorts of things must sound a bit clichéd if you’re a vegan. Logic suggests that Ben must eat all sorts of things or he would waste away and die of either starvation or boredom, so I say nothing and carry on buttering my toast, vaguely wondering what could be wrong with butter. Then I find myself thinking about Gödel starving himself to death, imagining an old man in a grey dressing gown looking at the contents of a larder and being able to touch nothing in it. From Gödel I move on to Virginia Woolf, and I think of her method of suicide, damp and silent. What did she eat before she walked into the water? Did she care? My thoughts are a mess. I could think about the suicides or untimely deaths of geniuses all day but this probably wouldn’t be a good idea. But my thoughts won’t switch off so easily and I find myself thinking of poor Ramanujan, the Indian mathematician who worked at Cambridge with G. H. Hardy. He was so unhappy, so far from home, so sick of trying to live as a vegetarian in the twenties at Cambridge that he tried to throw himself under a train. He was saved from this death and then tuberculosis got him. People are still deciphering the amazing formulae in his notebooks. Then I think about Georg Cantor, burnt out at forty, and persecuted to the point of madness by people opposed to his ideas about transfinity.

  Morbid thoughts. I always think morbid thoughts when I am ill. At least my throat doesn’t hurt today. But my limbs all ache and my head feels heavy. Could the Arsenicum have caught this in time? Gödel could have done with some Arsenicum, I realise. Ben is in the bathroom with the door closed. I can hear water running, and the clink of glass. A few moments later he comes back into the room with some water and three small glass phials.