This is the weekend that Rachel comes home for something called Exeat, which is Latin for weekend at home or something like that. We go riding together on Saturday morning, and I am faster, more daring than usual. In the afternoon we groom the ponies and talk about our schools. Rachel’s school is different from mine but in its own way is still a maze of awkwardness and embarrassment. You have to get changed in front of the other girls every night. You have to have a ‘crush’ on an older girl and then she becomes your ‘crush’ and you her ‘crushlet’. (Imagine what the girls at my school would say about that? It would be the most lezza thing they ever heard!) Rachel says it’s not at all to do with love or sex or anything, your crush is just something you have to have because everyone else has one. She says that popularity is measured by things like how many letters you get from friends outside (rather than from parents) and how good you are at music and acting.
I tell her about all the problems I’ve been having.
‘Bloody hell, Alice,’ is what she says.
‘I know,’ I say.
‘I’m so glad we don’t have boys at my school.’
‘Yeah. I know.’
‘You could move schools, you know,’ she says. ‘You could come to my school. You could move into my dorm and we could be best friends. It would be brilliant!’
Indeed it would. But when we bring it up with my grandfather, he simply says no. He has always had a soft spot for Rachel, but however much she cajoles him and smiles sweetly at him and asks for another jar of his delicious marmalade for her mother, he still says no. Well, he says yes to the marmalade, of course, but no to changing schools.
‘Even if we could afford it,’ he explains to me later, ‘I don’t believe in private schools. You’re better off where you are, mixing with ordinary kids.’
So I will have to get the money myself. I add up in my head what I could realistically expect to make from a bit of car-washing, factorising the RSA encryption code and working out what’s on my necklace and claiming all the treasure. Probably about one million, one hundred and twenty pounds. Or would some of it be in dollars? Anyway, I make myself a list and resolve to get cracking as soon as Rachel has gone back to school.
*
By about four o’clock I have created several montages in support of my bead/necklace idea. Using images cut from the magazines, and inspired by freeze-frames from the videos, my montages each take the form of a one-scene storyboard. In each one I have created a black-and-white pencil sketch of a group of teenagers and then added ‘colour’, both literally and figuratively, in the form of the objects cut from the magazine. It’s very similar in feel to the teenage girl’s bedroom we saw in the seminar last week. But of course this is all about the teenager as an individual. What do teenage girls actually wear/keep with them? What does it all mean? I make a note that as well as using markers to say ‘This is what I like,’ the beads on the necklaces/bracelets could also say things like ‘I’m available’, ‘I’m not available’, ‘I live in London’, or whatever.
At about half-past four, Dan turns up. He’s carrying a bag.
‘Hard at work, then?’ he says to me when he sees my montages.
Instinctively, I push them out of sight. ‘Kind of,’ I say.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asks, sitting down in the armchair which is still by the bed where Ben moved it.
‘So so,’ I say. ‘What’s in the bag?’
‘Navigation, baby,’ he says. ‘Compass, sea charts.’ He passes the bag to me. ‘You have been nominated as our navigator, so they’re for you.’
‘Oh.’ I pull out the contents of the bag. There is a big chart, folded down; a pair of binoculars; a ruler with wheels embedded in it and a compass which is rather different from compasses I’ve seen before. It’s a big plastic thing with a hole and no actual face or dial.
‘What’s this for?’ I ask Dan, still examining it.
‘It’s a hand-bearing compass,’ he says. ‘You use it to take bearings.’
‘How?’
‘You point it at things and look through the little window.’
I try this, pointing at the wall. The reading is 13 degrees northeast.
‘Oh.’ I try the other wall. ‘Where’s the sextant, then?’
‘Sextant?’ He laughs. ‘This isn’t the Middle Ages. We’ve got GPS, so we won’t exactly need a sextant.’
GPS. Global Positioning System. ‘If we’ve got GPS, why do we need all this?’
‘You still need to be able to plot bearings,’ Dan says, sighing. ‘And this is cool. You’ll like it. It’s all to do with triangles and maths. That’s why we nominated you to do it.’
‘So you haven’t just given me the duff job because I’m ill, then?’ I say.
‘What? No! The navigator is always one of the coolest crew members. You get to sit down below with your ruler and your charts and only poke your head up when you want to take a bearing. Everyone else is getting wet as fuck but the navigator is always warm and comfortable in the cabin, drawing triangles and trying to establish where the boat actually is. The thing about the sea is that it is huge, and it all looks the same. It is also full of rocks, remains of shipwrecks and so on. It’s a real skill learning how to find where you are in it.’
I think of Pythagoras for a moment and imagine that this will have something to do with measuring the hypotenuse of triangles, or something like that. I have to admit that it does sound better than fiddling with sails on the slippery foredeck, something that Gavin said wasn’t much fun if you’re at all scared of falling in the water/drowning.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘It does sound interesting.’
‘The only thing is, are you going to be well enough to sail on Saturday?’
‘Saturday. Um, yeah, I would have thought so. Bloody hell, it’s only Tuesday. If I’m not better by Saturday, I’ll be dead. Yeah, of course I’ll be OK.’
For the next hour or so, Dan explains how to take a bearing on the hand-bearing compass and then how to use this information to plot your rough position on the chart. Since we are, in theory, not going out of sight of land on Saturday, this involves looking for landmarks in real life that relate to things you can see clearly marked on the map. We are planning to sail into something called Start Bay. Notable landmarks, according to the chart, include the Dartmouth Day Beacon, the Start Bay lighthouse, the spire of a church in the nearby village of Stoke Fleming and the coastguards’ cottages – where, apparently, Dan’s grandfather grew up.
‘How will I know if I’ve chosen the right landmark?’ I ask.
‘I’ll help,’ Dan says.
I peer down at the large chart. There are several ‘wrecks’ marked on it. These must be boats that have sunk, and now provide a similar hazard to rocks: dark masses underwater that you just don’t see until it is too late.
‘What do you do if you have just sailed to somewhere for the first time and you don’t have anyone with local knowledge on the boat and you can’t distinguish between one church spire and another?’ I ask.
‘Um, you guess and hope for the best. Or you use another landmark, one that’s more easily recognisable. You can’t miss the lighthouse, for example, or the Day Beacon.’
‘Oh. OK.’ This doesn’t sound foolproof to me.
Apparently, what you do, once you have identified your landmark, is you point the hand-bearing compass at it and then look through the little window until you have established the bearing. Say the bearing is 19 degrees north-west, you take your ruler with wheels, and line it up so that its edge cuts through the value 19 degrees north-west on the compass rose on the chart, then slide the ruler along so it cuts through the landmark and then draw a line. Now you know you are somewhere on this line.
‘So now you simply take another reading from a landmark in another direction to find out where on the line you are!’ I say, triumphantly.
‘No, Butler. You take two more readings, which give you a triangle. You then know you are somewhere inside the triangle.’<
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He demonstrates with various made-up readings, eventually drawing a small triangle on the chart in pencil.
But this makes me uncomfortable. Surely the point of this is to plot a one-dimensional point, a certainty in the sea – not an uncertain, two-dimensional triangle. There’s infinity in a triangle, lots of it. What if you ended up with a right-angled triangle measuring 1 unit by 1 unit on the sides A and B? The hypotenuse would go on for ever! The square root of 2 never terminates, everyone knows that. (Or at least, no one has ever seen it terminate.) But a square root that never terminates would surely be dangerous out at sea. Perhaps that’s what resulted in the Bermuda Triangle. No wonder you could disappear in it and never be seen again. This is what happens when you tumble into infinity.
Anyway, I have got the point of this now. You make your triangle, make sure there are no rocks or wrecks in/near your triangle and then tell the captain what bearing to take to go in the direction you want to go to avoid rocks/land/shipwrecks/shallows. Next, Dan starts to explain to me how to read tide charts, and how to tell whether there will be enough clearance over certain rocks or not. My brain is now undergoing phase transition from absorption to rejection.
‘Enough!’ I say to Dan, clutching my head with my hands. ‘Leave the stuff here and I’ll just practise or something. Do you have a book I can refer to?’
He does. I am free.
‘Shall I get us a cup of tea?’ he says.
‘Yeah. Green, please,’ I say.
He goes off to the kitchen while I try to make the pile of navigation stuff look tidy on my bed. I suddenly realise that I didn’t take account of my tidying urges when I worked out my remedy yesterday. Then again, I am always a bit like this so it probably doesn’t matter.
After about five minutes, Dan comes back with two steaming mugs.
‘Did you watch the videos, then?’ he asks, nodding at the TV and VCR.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Well, I managed two of the documentaries. How many are there?’
‘Four.’ He laughs. ‘Oh, did you see the bit where that Finbar toy gets hanged off the light? It caused a total episode earlier on.’
‘An episode?’
‘Yeah. Esther completely flipped out.’
I frown. ‘Esther did? Why? What happened?’
‘Well, when the boys on the documentary were all going, “Kill the bear, kill the bear …” Kieran and a couple of others joined in, just as a joke. Then those plush-toy people, the ones from Scandinavia …’
‘What, Mitzi and Niila?’
‘Yeah. Well, they told them to shut up. They designed the Finbar’s Friends brand, so they were pretty upset about it. Anyway, we went outside for a break, and Mitzi’s there, all upset, and Niila is comforting her, and so Esther walks up to them and she’s like, “How dare you get sentimental over some piece of shit made in China using slave labour!” Then she starts laying into Mitzi about how all PopCo’s plush toys are made in sweatshops in China or South-east Asia. So now Mitzi’s really crying and your mate Ben has to come over and take Esther away. After that, Esther still wouldn’t stop going on about the conditions in these Chinese factories. How people there are paid less than a dollar a day, how they regularly lose limbs in the factories, blah blah blah …’
I think that if I had lost a limb, I wouldn’t suffix a description of it with the words ‘blah blah blah’.
‘Is that true, though?’ I say. ‘I thought our toys weren’t made in sweatshops. I thought there was some policy …’
Dan shrugs. ‘I expect it is true. I mean, it would make economic sense. But it’s too simplistic to take Esther’s approach, isn’t it? We don’t really know what it’s like over there. It’s better that people have work in places like China. What are we going to do? Take work away from them?’
‘I’m not sure about that,’ I say. ‘I think I’m with Esther on this one, if it is true. It really isn’t ethical …’
‘Who says it’s not ethical, though? You can probably live like a king on a dollar a day in places like that,’ Dan says. ‘I mean, you’re not going to pay someone thirty grand a year to make toys in a factory in China, are you? It has to scale down.’
‘A dollar a day isn’t that much anywhere, though,’ I say. ‘And anyway, it can’t be that good in these factories if people who work there lose limbs regularly. They must feel they have to work there or something. There can’t be any other choice.’
‘There is always choice,’ he says. ‘People can always choose not to work in them.’
And what? Lose their houses, lose their only source of income? It’s always easy to say that someone else should walk out of their job until you have to think about doing it yourself. I think about Dan, with his mortgage and his gym membership and his car. What would it take for him to give that up? Add a young family and a pregnant wife and a rise in interest rates and you’ve suddenly got a situation where losing your job means you could lose it all. Imagine telling your pregnant wife that you are going to have to move out of your large south London terrace with the parquet flooring you laid together and find somewhere cheap to rent instead, somewhere with horrible carpets and a greasy landlord who comes around every six months to examine the place and can throw you out with only two months’ notice.
But people don’t think of Chinese factory workers in the same way they think of themselves. I remember a writer I like saying that we sometimes look at old gravestones and see records of babies that have died at six months old, or nine months old – sometimes several in one family – and we think that these losses are somehow less painful because they happened often, and to strangers, and at some distant point in history. We think that these remote people would have ‘got used to it’, and that their pain would be less than ours would be at losing a child. But in doing this, we dehumanise these people. Of course the pain is the same. By imagining Chinese factory workers like this, as strange people, perhaps living four or five to a room, eating mainly rice, living on the scraps thrown to them by the companies that exploit their labour, and by thinking that even this imaginary, exotic version of these people are happy with what they have got …Well, it’s the same sort of dehumanisation, surely?
I suddenly remember something else. A saying. Where does it come from? I think that an ex-boyfriend’s father used to say it, a long time ago. He said: ‘Beware of cheap goods. If you buy cheap goods, you are stealing someone else’s labour.’
I look at the teenage magazine Dan’s flicking through now and suddenly think that probably 90 per cent of the clothes, purses and bags in there have been made or stitched in a sweatshop. Probably 95 per cent of the cosmetics have been tested on animals. How much blood, pain, slavery and torture exactly does go into creating all this stuff, which we are told is so frivolous, so much fun? People like us are paid vast amounts to come up with the concepts, and then the actual objects are made and tested … Where? Somewhere invisible. Somewhere that doesn’t matter. Somewhere very, very distant. Of course, we all know that actual objects don’t matter any more. What matters instead is the logo, the idea, the lifestyle, the brand. Companies are now required to spend millions of dollars establishing this brand, paying sports stars and actresses to endorse it, paying marketing gurus to tell them how to make it ‘go viral’ and so on. How can they compete otherwise? Perhaps there really is nothing left over to actually pay to make the product. Perhaps that’s why the people who make it have to live in poverty, and why the materials are substandard and glue shows on even the coolest trainers. They pay only to make the label, nothing else.
I wonder what my grandparents would say if they were alive today and someone took them on a whistle-stop tour of ‘cheap’ Britain (a place that they never really chose to visit, even though it had started to exist in their lifetimes). Would they stock up on cheap meat, cheap clothes and cheap knick-knacks that no one needs (but can’t resist because they’re so cheap)? Would they see it as progress that you can now buy a hundred different types of hair-grip in the supe
rmarket? Or would they in fact notice that, as so much has been loaded onto this side of the equation, a hell of a lot must have gone from the other side?
Dan drifts off eventually. I find I haven’t got very much more to say to him. The last ten days or so have fucked with my head. I feel like I have been reformatted, and Dan, an obsolete registry file, has been overwritten with something else, maybe blank space, maybe question marks. I wanted to ask him about his rumoured move to Kieran’s team but he didn’t bring it up. What’s wrong with me? Where are all my jokes about retreating and collaborating and being shot? It used to be that we would joke about the enemy, not really believing that the enemy existed. But maybe the enemy does exist after all. Maybe I have some idea of who the enemy is now. Maybe the enemy is me.
A few minutes after six and there’s another knock on the door. It must be Ben. But it’s not. It’s Chloë.
‘Hello,’ she says shyly, in her soft Celtic voice. ‘Can I …?’
‘Oh, yes. Of course,’ I say, stepping back to let her in.
She walks into the room, everything about her soft and somehow feathery. She’s wearing black linen trousers today, with a black polo-neck sweater; her hair twisted up behind her head in a large, translucent crocodile-clip. She’s holding a white envelope which she gives me.
‘You have a correspondent,’ she says, something dancing in her eyes. ‘It was outside.’
I take the envelope from her. It has the PopCo logo, the little sailboat, on the top right-hand corner, and my name typed in bold on the front. Am I being sent home? Sacked? Could this be the return message from the mysterious encipherer? I can’t look at it now so I put it down on the desk and then sit on the bed. Chloë half-sits on the chair as if she wants to be ready to spring up again at any moment.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asks.
‘OK,’ I say, although I do not feel OK. I wonder why she is here. I’ve barely spoken to Chloë since I have been here. I have the feeling I would like her a lot if I got to know her but there is something about her that makes me feel uncomfortable, too. It’s as if she wouldn’t let you get away with something if she thought it was wrong. Not that she seems judgemental at all, just that she seems certain. Of what, I don’t know.
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