PopCo

by Scarlett Thomas

  The doctor wants to listen to my chest.

  ‘You are very wheezy,’ he tells me.

  Well, I knew that. ‘I’m taking something homeopathic for it,’ I tell him.

  He ignores this. ‘Are you allergic to anything?’ he asks me, reaching for his bag.

  ‘No,’ I say sullenly, thinking, I’m allergic to doctors, to work, to contemporary life. At this moment I want to live in a bubble on another planet, if you must know.

  ‘Good. I can dispense all the items you need right now.’ He reaches into his bag and starts pulling out white boxes with blank labels that he fills in with my name and instructions. He leans on the bedpost to write, like he’s a man who doesn’t have time to sit down. ‘Here are some antibiotics. I don’t think you’ve got an infection but better to be on the safe side. Are you asthmatic?’

  This again. ‘I shake my head. No. Definitely not.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to give you an inhaler anyway, just in case. And some painkillers – nice strong ones, these, not usually available in the UK – and some decongestant and …’

  I look at the labels on the boxes he is giving me.

  ‘Isn’t Vicodin what Hollywood stars keep getting addicted to?’ I ask. ‘And this stuff …’ I look at the decongestant. ‘Isn’t that what people test positive for at the Olympics?’

  He sighs. ‘Are you planning to take part in the Olympics?’

  ‘Well, no …’

  ‘Then you don’t have to worry about being drug-tested, do you? It has a little tiny bit of amphetamine in it, that’s all. All decongestants have it. And if you don’t want the Vicodin, don’t take it. But I think you’ll find it will make you feel better. It has a cough-suppressing action as well as being a painkiller, which is why I have prescribed it for you.’ He smiles at me. ‘Is there anything else you would like, while I am here?’

  ‘Sorry?’ I say. Outside, the bird sings again. I love birds.

  ‘Well, is there anything else I can give you?’

  This doesn’t happen on the NHS. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Amphetamine? Your boss mentioned that you want to get back to work as soon as possible. If you want to take some, I’ve got some wonderful sleeping tablets you can have as well – the amphetamine can stop you sleeping, you see.’ He’s standing over me a bit like he is planning to operate. I look at his bag, placed on the end of my bed and I imagine it full of pills: pink pills, blue pills, a sweet shop of pills.

  I frown at him. ‘I thought you said there’s amphetamine in the decongestant?’

  ‘Well, yes, but not really enough to make a lab rat run around for longer than about five minutes.’ He laughs, and reaches for his bag. ‘So. You’ll want some of this, and …’ He’s taking out another box.

  ‘No, really,’ I say.

  ‘Take it. If you don’t want it, you can always give it to one of your friends.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘And here are the sleeping pills.’

  ‘Hang on …’

  I now have a pharmacy on my bed.

  ‘Actually,’ I say, ‘there is something I want.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Nicotine gum. I really could do with some nicotine gum, if you have any.’

  He frowns. ‘Nicotine gum? No. Sorry.’ He shakes his head and then adjusts his shirt. ‘No one’s ever asked for that before.’ Now he’s back in his bag. ‘I’ve got some tranquilizers, which can have a similar effect to nicotine. Valium, perhaps?’

  ‘Isn’t Valium a bit out of date, now?’ I say. I’m thinking about Mother’s Little Helper and that sort of thing. That was the 60s. That was last century.

  ‘No, no. Still does the same old job. Works in an hour or so. Makes you feel nice and relaxed. That’s what people want. Not three weeks like these new drugs. Although if you were actually depressed I could find something a bit more up-to-date …’

  ‘I’m not depressed,’ I say quickly. I cough again, and look down at the white boxes on the bed. Christ. ‘So what would happen if I took all this stuff at once?’ I ask. He looks alarmed. ‘Not the contents of all the boxes,’ I say quickly. ‘I just mean, well, won’t these things all clash with each other?’

  He smiles. ‘No, of course not. What will happen if you take all these drugs properly, as per the instructions, is that you will feel a lot better. Any infection you have will go. You will have no pain. You will be able to go back to work. You will be able to sleep at the end of the day. This miracle is what medicine – proper medicine – can do. Now, sign here.’

  He offers me a printed-out sheet, from which he has crossed off the few drugs in existence that he hasn’t given me. My name and address are already printed at the top which makes me do a double-take until I realise that my details must simply have been pulled off the Human Resources database. The bill for this will, of course, go straight to them, or Georges’s office, or some dark, remote part of PopCo. I am tired now, so I sign the form without asking any more questions. I just want to make him go.

  Once he has gone, I look at all this medicine that I don’t need or want. I wonder what would happen if I did take this lot all at once. Would I have a quiet death? A sleepy death? A pain-free death? A paranoid, angst-ridden death? I open the bottle of Vicodin and look at the clean white tablets inside. Maybe I could do with some serious pain-killing at the moment. I didn’t want these but now I’ve got them maybe I will give them a try. Just one. Maybe it will take the cigarette craving away a little. Or was it the Valium that was supposed to do that?

  There’s a knock at the door which makes me jump. I haul myself out of this mountain of medication and open the door. Ben comes in, looking tired.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ he says when he sees all the drugs everywhere. ‘Where did all this come from?’

  ‘Doctor Death,’ I say, getting back into bed. ‘I don’t know if he’s the official PopCo doctor or what. Georges sent him.’

  Ben doesn’t pick up on the reference to Georges, for which I am grateful. Instead, once I have got back into bed, he sits on the edge of it and starts looking at all the packets.

  ‘Shit. You’ve got Vicodin here. This is totally addictive. You haven’t taken any of it, have you?’

  I shake my head. ‘No. I didn’t want it. He just kept giving me more and more stuff. I don’t know what to do with it all, to be honest. Maybe I’ll just flush it all.’

  ‘No. I’ll take it to a chemist where they can dispose of it properly. Don’t want to flush all this into the water system.’ Ben frowns. ‘Fucking hell. What a racket. I bet that he gets a commission from the drug companies every time he prescribes one of their products. It must be great being a private doctor, employed by corporations. You can give out as much of this shit as you want, knowing that a big accounts department is going to unquestioningly pay your bill, knowing that you’re getting a nice kickback from the drug companies as well.’ Ben picks up one of the boxes, which contains the inhaler. ‘Are you asthmatic?’ he asks me, looking concerned.

  ‘No! I tried to tell him but …’

  ‘They give inhalers away to every second person these days. It’s not healthy to take this sort of medication if you don’t need it. God.’

  Ben seems to be getting more and more angry but after frowning for a few more seconds, he looks at me and laughs.

  ‘Sorry. Too many paranoid-conspiracy books, perhaps. Blame my job, and all the bloody research I have to do.’

  ‘No, I think you’re right,’ I say. ‘It all makes logical sense.’

  ‘Depressing, though.’

  Now I smile. ‘Well, if you’re depressed I could offer you, oh, I don’t know. Some Valium? Some speed?’

  ‘Don’t tempt me. It wasn’t too long ago that I would have fallen on these boxes with joy. Especially the speed. Let’s look at it?’ He takes the box. ‘Oh yes. Could get a few fun all-nighters worth of coding out of this. Mmm.’

  I take the box away from him.

  ‘What happened?’ I say. ‘Why did you …?�
��

  ‘What? Give it all up? Dunno. Got too old, I think.’

  ‘How old are you?’ I don’t even know this about him, I suddenly realise.

  ‘Thirty-one.’ He sighs.

  ‘That’s still young,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah, but … OK. Maybe it wasn’t just age that did it.’

  ‘What did, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. A lot of things… How can I put it? A lot changed for me about a year or two ago. Got rid of the drugs, got healthy again, went vegan.’ He stares past me at the wall, a lost expression in his eyes. ‘I … Oh, I can’t really tell you the whole story but … I read a few books while I was researching The Sphere that made me think differently about the way the world works. Investigative reports about the environment, animal rights, the effects of junk food, corporations. All the reading was because of the central idea in The Sphere, that there’s this evil corporation which dupes the public into believing that what it is doing is good for them. We’ve modelled the Dream Prison on various ideas from battery farming, animal experimentation labs and sweatshops. So I had to read a lot of horrible material.’ He snaps his eyes away from the wall and shakes his head, looking at me. ‘It really wakes you up when you know what’s going on. But it’s hard to talk to people about it, because they think you’re nuts, or you’re making it all up. I mean, there’s stuff going on out there that certainly sounds made-up.’

  ‘People would rather believe in a thirty-second bit of marketing than the truth anyway,’ I say. ‘It’s easier to listen to stuff you want to hear.’ I know this because I, too, am like this. I fit into this category myself. I don’t like the amount of packaging we use at PopCo but whenever they send an e-mail around saying that we are reducing it, or that we have met 80 per cent of our ‘environment targets’ I allow myself to feel a warm glow. But deep down I know it’s all bullshit and we still use hard plastic wrapping on everything.

  ‘That’s true,’ Ben says.

  ‘But I don’t think you’re nuts,’ I say. ‘So this stuff actually made you vegan, then?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ben says. ‘There’s something about the way we treat animals that just seems so, I don’t know, dystopian: like contemporary life is like some far-fetched science-fiction novel.’ He gives me a serious look that mutates into a grin. ‘You know, I read about this series of experiments where they got animals to ask for food by pressing buttons. Birds had to balance on a lever. Other animals like pigs and cows used their snouts. The researchers found that cows liked to be stroked, so much so that they would press a button to make it happen. The pigs in particular were so advanced that they learnt every single thing they were taught. They were happily pressing buttons for food, for strokes, for toys. I looked at the pictures of these pigs sitting in front of these consoles and I thought, “Fucking hell, I can’t eat an animal that can play videogames,” and then I became a vegetarian. I hadn’t felt right about eating meat since I got my dog, actually, and this book I read just confirmed it. Then, a bit later, I did the whole thing and went vegan. That’s my vegetarianism in a nutshell, actually,’ he laughs. ‘Don’t eat anything that can play videogames.’

  ‘Where does butter come into this?’ I ask, also laughing. ‘I mean, why go totally vegan …?’

  ‘Do you really want to know?’ he says, frowning suddenly.

  ‘Yeah. Why not?’ I say back.

  ‘Well, do you know how milk is produced?’

  Do I know how milk is produced? I’m not sure. I scan my mind for images but all I can come up with is a scene from some of the marketing material for Farmyard Friends, where a ruddy-cheeked milkmaid is sitting on a milking stool next to Daisy or Buttercup in a green plastic field. That’s not how you get milk now, is it? I can see a grainy image of cows in stalls in my mind but nothing else comes. This is stupid. I drink milk all the time. How can I not know how it is produced?

  ‘Dairy cows have a pretty horrible time,’ Ben says, cutting into my thoughts. ‘Forced to be pregnant year after year, killed once their milk production dies off a bit – usually when they are only about two or three years old – and in this constant torment looking for their calves …’

  I frown. ‘Looking for their calves?’

  Ben nods. ‘Yeah. Well, the calves are taken away as soon as they’re born. Then they’re killed for veal, or just killed. It’s … it’s so sad the way that the cows keep calling for their calves and looking for them. I don’t know. It got to me, anyway.’

  We sit in silence for a few seconds while I digest this.

  ‘Where is your dog?’ I say, eventually.

  ‘With my cousin. We live together. He’s looking after her while I’m here.’

  ‘Do you miss her?’

  ‘God yes.’

  ‘I have a cat,’ I say. I think for a moment. Then I say to Ben, ‘I don’t know much about it, but conventional farms don’t really have yards any more, do they? They’re not like the “farmyard” toys we sell, are they? I mean, it’s not just the dairy cows that have shit lives, is it?’

  ‘No,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘No. Now farms are like prisons.’

  Usually, when I think about the word ‘farm’ I see it in terms of toy cows and pigs and little pretend fences. Perhaps thinking about the world in terms of toys makes things easier to cope with (even the fences are cute!) Or maybe not. What about when you realise that the fences aren’t pretend? I know one vegetarian (Rachel) and now one vegan. But it’s not a ‘normal’ thing to be, is it?

  And then I think another odd thought. Does marketing do this? Is it marketing that makes us think that something like being a vegetarian is as stupid as wearing shoulder pads and too much blusher? Is it just marketing that makes us feel good about tucking into a 99p slab of dead cow at lunchtime? That, and the fact that everyone else does it too, perhaps. Who said that recently? Mark Blackman, in the network seminar. The more people that do something, the more likely you are to do it too.

  And I wonder. Was Ben right about cows liking to be stroked?

  ‘I think you’re brave,’ I say to Ben, eventually.

  ‘Me, brave? Why on earth would you think that?’

  ‘Most people would think you’re nuts being a vegan,’ I say. ‘But I don’t know why. Now I think about it, everything seems a bit nuts.’

  He gets onto the bed next to me. ‘Yeah. Well.’ Ben strokes my head slowly while we both look at the ceiling.

  ‘Are you happy?’ I ask him. Are you happy? I think of the coded message that asked me that. I still don’t know the answer. What does my happiness matter anyway? Perhaps that’s the most logical response. Does it matter?

  ‘What, now?’ Ben says.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Yes. I’m happy now. Right at this tiny moment in time, I am very happy.’

  ‘But everything’s so fucked up.’

  ‘Yes, but you just do what you can about that. You do what you can, and then you stop. Believe me, you can almost go mad otherwise.’

  ‘Do what you can? Like being a vegan?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He sighs. ‘And other stuff. I … I wish I could talk to you about everything.’

  ‘Why can’t you?’

  He bites his lip. ‘I just can’t.’

  I pause for a second. ‘Does being a vegan help, then?’

  ‘Yes. Well, I think so.’

  ‘How? I mean, does it help more than say, just being a vegetarian?’

  ‘I think so. I mean, you’re not buying anything connected to the meat industry, which has to be good. Look it up sometime and you’ll see what they do to geese and pigs and chickens. By being a vegan you’re not giving profits to the scum in those industries. You’re, I don’t know, unplugging yourself from the Matrix a bit.’ He shrugs.

  I think about Mark Blackman again. ‘But you’re just one person. Everyone else is still buying animal products.’

  ‘Yes, but I spend, what … ten thousand or so quid a year on food. At least. We all do, well those of us with salaries like ou
rs do, anyway. None of that is going into the meat industry now. Like I said, you do what you can do and then stop. Those things are what I can do.’

  ‘And the “other stuff”.’

  ‘Yes. And the other stuff.’

  ‘Is it legal?’

  ‘Huh? Oh yes. It’s not that. I just really can’t talk about it now.’

  ‘Ben?’

  ‘What?’

  I look at all the stuff on my bed. ‘Shall we just take a load of these drugs?’

  ‘No. They’ll make us feel worse.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I really wish I could have a cigarette.’

  Chapter Twenty-four

  At my old school, getting changed for PE took place in a comfortable warm room next to the school hall, in which we did self-expression (dancing around with bits of material) and dance (dancing around without bits of material). Otherwise we would go outside to play netball on the courts just beyond the classrooms. I don’t remember it being at all traumatic.

  PE is not like that here. At my last school, if you forgot your PE kit you just had to sit quietly and read a book while the other kids did PE. At my new school, if you forget your PE kit, you have to do PE in your underwear. This isn’t a joke! The actual PE kit is almost as bad as underwear, anyway. For girls it’s a very short blue pleated skirt, blue PE knickers and an aertex top in the colour of your school house. There is no comfortable heated changing room here. Instead, there is a concrete outbuilding split into Boys and Girls. The girls’ half is a dank cave of dark metal hooks, thin wooden benches and – horror of horrors – communal showers. PE is the most evil and stupid thing ever invented. At eleven years old, with all the precise codes and conventions of being that age, the very last thing you want to do is be naked in front of your classmates. The second last thing you want to do is be forced to walk around outside in the cold wearing a skirt so short and revealing that, if you tried to wear it in any other normal life situation, people would stare and whisper and probably have you arrested for indecency. Yet we have to do both these things, three times a week.