PopCo

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘In these experiments,’ she explains, ‘a subject would come along to take part in what he or she believed to be one of a series of memory tests. Milgram did the experiment in various ways, but essentially the subject was shown another person, the ‘learner’, who was hooked up to a device that would administer electric shocks. The subject would ‘teach’ the learner a series of word pairs, from a sheet. Then he or she would test the learner. The learner was always actually an actor, primed to start giving wrong answers fairly soon. When the learner gave a wrong answer, the subject was prompted to administer an electric shock, using a button. Of course, the shocks weren’t real, but each time the button was pressed, the actor would say something like, “Ow!” or “I can’t stand the pain.” With each wrong answer, the subject was prompted to give the learner a more powerful electric shock. Milgram wanted to know at what point the subject would refuse to take part any more, and how the presence of the authority figure would influence his or her decisions. The authority figure had a set script. At the point the subject complained or questioned what he or she was doing, the authority figure would say, ‘Please continue.’ The next complaint would have him saying, ‘The experiment requires that you continue.’ The last level was: ‘You have no other choice. You must go on.’ There were various variations as well, in which the learner claimed to have a heart condition, for example.’

  ‘It sounds extraordinarily cruel,’ says my grandmother.

  Jasmine smiles. ‘Well, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, the same experiment could not be conducted today. All the subjects were properly debriefed after the experiment, however, and asked what they felt they had learnt from the experience. One person, when he found out what he had really been doing, was so fascinated he asked for a job.’

  ‘So what did Milgram discover?’ my grandfather asks, poking at his pipe.

  ‘He discovered, essentially, that a large number of people would indeed continue to administer what they believed to be painful, very painful or even dangerous electric shocks to the learner when told by an authority figure that it was OK to do so. The book makes for very sobering reading. Milgram starts off discussing the Nazis, and the idea that any brutal regime or army needs to have great levels of the kind of obedience to authority he explores. It is very, very interesting to look at human cruelty, and how often it has to be endorsed by an authority figure. Left to themselves, I suspect, most people are kind and sensible. But give someone an electric shock button and tell them it is all right to use it and many people become monsters.’

  My grandfather starts talking about various things he believes fall under this category. People thinking it’s OK for the police to beat up striking miners because the police are authority figures and the miners are not. People believing that it is OK to experiment on animals because the government endorse it and because the people who do it are important scientists in white lab coats. People believing that it is all right to have nuclear weapons pointing at other countries because some political scientists and logicians say it makes us safer. Then the three of them start talking about Nazi concentration camps, and the officers there who were ‘just acting out their orders’.

  But I am thinking about school. I am thinking about an incident last week, when our group came upon Liz eating lunch on her own. ‘Got no friends, then?’ Lucy said to her. ‘She’s too fat to fit in the dining hall,’ said Sarah. And we all laughed. Even me. I believed it was wrong to laugh at Liz but I still did it, because Lucy and Sarah made it seem OK. I also did it because I don’t want to be like Liz. By laughing at her, I was able to distance myself from her. I am the one who laughs, not the one who is laughed at. That, for the time being, is my identity.

  Going around with the popular girls gives me a shell. I can’t afford to lose this shell. There is too much about me that they can pick on: too much that wouldn’t stand up to their examinations. I can’t allow myself to be in Liz’s position because it would be just so easy to pick on me, if they knew how. After all, the best way to avoid having an enemy is to join that enemy. For the first time ever, I understand what made people into collaborators in the war. Every time I read a story about someone who sold their friends to the Nazis I could not understand how they had done it. I would be brave, I always thought. If it was me, I wouldn’t talk even if they tortured me to death. Yet I have become a betrayer over nothing more complicated than not wanting to be teased at school. What is wrong with me?

  I am so lost in thought that I don’t realise that all three adults in the room are looking at me, smiling.

  ‘So?’ says my grandmother.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I was miles away.’

  ‘There’s a pink elephant in this room,’ Jasmine says to me.

  Have I heard her right? What’s going on? Maybe it’s the start of a joke.

  ‘OK,’ I say, waiting for whatever comes next.

  They laugh.

  ‘I said this wouldn’t work on Alice,’ my grandfather says.

  ‘Is there a pink elephant in the room?’ Jasmine says to me now.

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Look around. There isn’t a pink elephant here. How would it get in? Also, pink elephants don’t exist, so I know that there can’t be one here.’

  ‘I say there is a pink elephant in the room.’

  ‘OK,’ I say, shrugging. I don’t know where this is going.

  ‘Can you prove that there isn’t?’ she says.

  Bloody hell. I think for a minute, frustrated. This isn’t maths. This kind of thing won’t submit to a proof, I can see that instantly. All you’ve got is the evidence of your senses, plus your inherent sanity, plus a faulty non-logic based on experience. I could prove Pythagoras’s Theorem if someone gave me a piece of paper but I can’t prove that there is no pink elephant in this room. I think about everything I have learnt at school over the past few weeks, and the strange games I now know how to play and I look Jasmine in the eye.

  ‘No, I can’t prove it,’ I say. ‘Therefore I conclude, like you, that there is indeed a pink elephant in this room.’ There. I have a feeling that this is not how you are supposed to play this game but I sense I have won.

  Jasmine smiles and shakes her head. ‘Do you know, I have never had that response before. How bizarre.’

  ‘That’s Alice for you,’ my grandmother says.

  ‘I’ve tested hundreds of children, who all tear their hair out trying to convince me that there isn’t a pink elephant in the room.’

  ‘Why have you tested hundreds of children?’ I say.

  ‘It’s an experiment about how people define reality, and how they feel reality is constructed,’ she says. ‘It’s about the forms of reasoning people will use to convince me that there isn’t a pink elephant in the room. Some children say, “Look, you can see there’s no pink elephant.” So then I say, “Well, if I was blind, how would you convince me?” They go through the senses one by one. After that, I say that the pink elephant is invisible, which is why they can’t see it, and then ask them again to prove that it is not there. Most of them say that invisibility is cheating, or not real – but they find it difficult to prove. Or they say, “So how do you know it’s pink if it’s invisible?” and that takes us down a whole different avenue altogether.’

  ‘What does Alice’s response mean?’ my grandfather asks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Jasmine. ‘Alice? Why did you agree that there is a pink elephant in the room when it’s obvious that there isn’t?’

  I am tired now, and feeling contrary. ‘Isn’t there?’ I say. ‘I thought you said there was.’

  Jasmine laughs. ‘Yes, yes. We both know there isn’t one here really.’

  ‘Prove it, then,’ I say.

  And I’m thinking that the reason I agreed with her is because I am tired, and I stole and lied today, and I really don’t care if there’s a pink elephant in the room or not. If Jasmine wants to b
elieve there is, well, then, that’s fine. I’ll even agree with her. What do truth and reality matter anyway? Right now, the only thing a pink elephant could do to actually change my life, if it were in this room, would be to sit on me and put me in hospital long enough so I never have to see my ‘friends’ again.

  The grown-ups laugh, again.

  ‘All right, clever clogs,’ my grandfather says. ‘Time for bed.’

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Shortly after breakfast on Tuesday morning there is a knock at the door. When I open it I find a woman I haven’t seen before, and a man who looks like an engineer. The woman is carrying a clipboard and a pile of magazines, and the man is wheeling a large trolley with a TV and VCR on it.

  ‘Are you Alice Butler?’ the woman asks.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘Good. We have a TV for you here.’

  I frown. ‘I don’t need …’

  ‘And videos. Since the material being presented to the other delegates today is in video format, someone suggested that you needn’t actually miss out because you are ill in bed. So we have brought the videos to you. This is John, our site technician. He’s going to hook you up.’ She smiles a big smile. ‘OK?’

  ‘OK,’ I say. ‘Thanks.’

  She pulls a few A4 sheets from her clipboard and gives them to me. The heading is just a number: 14. The sub-heading is: Adult or Child? She marks something off on the remaining sheet on her clipboard, and then gives me the pile of magazines too.

  ‘Everyone is being issued with these. They are to help with your research.’ She places the pile of magazines on the end of my bed, gives me another big smile and leaves. Why do people with clipboards always have big smiles? Maybe I should get one.

  I feel the same today as I did yesterday, which I am finding frustrating. Being in bed ill is all right for a couple of days but then the whole thing starts to feel a bit old. I have tried to will myself better overnight but the cough is still there and my insides still feel so heavy that I can barely walk across the room without feeling incredibly tired. When I woke up this morning I did what I do every morning when I have the ’flu. I went through a series of experimental steps: breathe, cough, sit up. When I am ill, I always have this hope that one day I will wake up and find that I feel miraculously better, and that my cough (or whatever it is) will simply have gone, taken away in my sleep – perhaps by fairies or other magical creatures. But today there is no change. Still, while I was in the bath earlier someone came and changed my sheets and brought me back some clean laundry, which was nice. I could have changed the sheets myself, though. It makes me feel uncomfortable that someone is doing these things for me, that it is someone’s job to do this for me.

  John is fiddling around with a remote control, having set up all the other equipment.

  ‘There you go,’ he says, handing it to me. ‘Video and TV controls both on there. If you want to ditch the corporate video and watch soap operas or satellite TV, press this blue button here.’ He grins. ‘Hope you feel better soon.’ Then he leaves.

  The magazines, glossy and perfumed, look precarious on the end of my bed, so I reach forward and move the pile so it is next to me. There are about seven or eight of them altogether, all this month’s issues. I remember a couple of the titles from when I was a teenager but things have changed a lot since then. Some of the more successful women’s lifestyle magazines now have baby-sister versions of themselves, their main brand name suffixed by the word ‘Girl’. Then there are the newly invented magazines for a whole new demographic of girls who are under fourteen but also want to be told about pop stars and make-up and sex. Videos first, I think.

  Ben has filled up my flask with boiling water, so I make myself some green tea before pressing Play on the remote control. Someone told me recently that the universal Play button, the > sign, has only been in existence since Sony invented it in the 60s or 70s, they weren’t sure which. Now, of course, it’s a universal icon. I think of more universal icons: the picture of the wastepaper bin on a computer desktop, the ‘mute’ button, the letters www, the Golden Arches, the letters ‘txt’, triangular ready-made sandwich containers and the @ sign. All these things found their home in my lifetime, along with the digital watch, the video recorder, the Walkman, the microwave, the laptop, the chilled ready-meal, the satellite dish, the CD, the mobile phone, the DVD, the Post-it note, the retail park, the blog and even the remote control. I think about everything that a teenager today would take for granted that was pretty much unheard of even fifteen years ago: text-messaging, e-mail, instant chat. There are kids who can’t even remember a time when the Internet didn’t exist in the way it does now, when you had to go to the library to look everything up or actually ask in record shops for the 12" you heard at that party. Shall I write some of this down in my notes? I can’t be bothered, even though my notebook is next to me on the bed, along with the magazines and my lip balm. Maybe I’ll jot some ideas down after the video has finished.

  The programme is about to start, so I fluff up my pillows and lie back in bed, sipping my tea. An introduction informs me that this series of documentaries forms part of a study – the first of its kind, blah blah blah – of teenagers in Britain today. What are their attitudes on sex, life, money, school, work, porn? Are they children or adults? Should they be allowed to vote, leave school, have sex? The production company’s logo flashes up, and a voiceover explains that this series of documentaries has been partly funded by one of the terrestrial TV channels, and sponsored by PopCo. Our logo flashes up briefly, and then the first programme starts. I expect that when this is broadcast on TV, our logo will not be there any more. This is the corporate, rather than the mass-market version of the recording.

  The first documentary is about a group of ten fourteen-year-olds – five girls and five boys – living together, with no adults, in a suburban house for a week. There is no TV, music system or any videogames. As if they are protesting about not being supervised (‘Will we get into trouble?’ ‘There’s no one here, is there, so we might as well do what we want …’), the teenagers immediately trash the house. I can’t help smiling as they cover the walls with painted slogans. Over the course of the week, the two most ‘popular’ girls (the ones who look most like TV presenters) flirt with the boys, play a few kissing games, and then decide they don’t want to do that any more and gang up with the other girls against the boys. At one point, the boys hang one girl’s Finbar toy from a light fitting, with a noose around its neck. ‘Kill the bear,’ they shout. She cries and then they stop. The girls give each other make-overs, talk about boys and make up dance routines in the garden while the boys create extravagant water bombs and laugh at them. They live on crisps and microwave meals. The kitchen disintegrates.

  The next programme shows a similar experiment, but this time a different set of kids are put in a luxury apartment containing a huge home-cinema system, some decks, a big stereo system, a Jacuzzi and a mini-arcade. The kids do not trash this place. For one week, they – almost literally – sit in front of the TV watching music videos and advertisements, and discuss which items they would buy if they could, what it would be like to be famous, and who on the screen is ‘cool’ and who is not. These kids still make a mess of their kitchen but organise themselves in an almost eerie way. They decide to have a ‘club night’ on the Wednesday, and an ‘Arcade challenge’ on the Thursday. These are the only times they leave the TV, except to go to bed. Later in this experiment, two of the girls get into bed with two of the boys, and their parents, who are allowed to watch all the time on a hidden webcam, want to intervene but the production company persuades them not to.

  I start to make a few notes. I am intrigued by the homogenisation of youth culture. They all watch the same things on TV, they all seem to have similar aspirations (basically, variations on ‘Be famous’) and most of the southern teenagers speak with exactly the same London accent. This isn’t the ‘Mockney’ of my own youth but a black, south London, hip-hop voice. I can�
�t say I don’t like it but it is intriguing. Where does it come from? Is it a nice example of multiculturalism, that all these kids try to speak the same way, in a voice that to my grandparents would have sounded distinctly foreign, or is it a weak protest against the blandness of their culture – we’ll be different, but we’ll all do it the same way? There even seem to be regional versions of this voice. Oh well, at least people can’t complain about Estuary English any more (which I have always been accused of speaking, despite never having been anywhere near the Thames Estuary in my life).

  The only ones who speak differently are the public-school kids, but even their voices aren’t the normal Received Pronunciation you’d usually associate with public school. If the other kids have taken Urban Black as their language, these ones have Beverly Hills Shopping Mall. In each programme, the token public-school girl was the thinnest, the most attractive and was wearing the ‘coolest’ (to my adult eyes) clothes. Yet it took both girls a while to fit into the ‘group’. They seemed more style-magazine, somehow, with their designer ballet skirts, turned-up jeans, striped socks, leg-warmers, sweatbands, cute tees, personalised denim jackets and baseball boots. The instantly popular girls seemed to go for the safer option of hipster jeans, vest tops, studded belts, and trainers. All the girls (apart from one in each group – the unfashionista) wore sweatbands, which are this year’s coolest accessory (I know this because of Chi-Chi et al.), and seemed to deliberately expose their bra-straps. Why wasn’t fashion like this when I was a teenager? When I was that age the whole point was to try to find a bra that didn’t show, an almost-impossibility. If you had gone around then, as kids do now, wearing a red bra under a sheer white vest-top, with the straps showing, people would have instantly condemned you as a freak/drug addict. How times change.