PopCo

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I think her afterlife sounds cool. What’s the point of life on Earth, though, in this version? Why do we live at all?’

  ‘For two reasons,’ I say. ‘Firstly, to understand what life is and to learn as many skills as possible for interpreting it. Life is where we get to have a good guess at solving the puzzle before we die and get to see the answer, and also where we learn what questions to ask. Secondly, the point is to live a good life and be nice to people.’

  ‘Why bother, though?’ Esther says. ‘If you’re going off to your cushy afterlife afterwards?’

  ‘Oh, because in your afterlife, there are lots of other dead people. At first, you sort of choose who you want to hang around with in the afterlife. But of course, if I got to the afterlife and looked up some old friend from school, the first thing I would do is go back and look at her life to see what she was really like. If it turned out that she had simply pretended to like me for all that time, I would ditch her in the afterlife. So if you go through life betraying people and lying to people, you could end up on your own up there.’

  ‘You see,’ Esther says. ‘Everyone has their own afterlife worked out, just like I said.’

  ‘Hang on,’ I say. ‘Ben hasn’t.’

  ‘What?’ he says, getting up and stretching. ‘Oh. Um, I think I’ll join your religion if that’s all right,’ he says to me. ‘I’ll go to the big library in the sky with you.’

  ‘Oh, yuck,’ says Esther. ‘You two make me sick.’

  ‘I like the way we’ve bypassed planning for our retirement or anything like that and gone straight for the afterlife experience,’ I say. ‘Pretty good going after a week.’ Ben’s face falls. Oh shit. It was just a joke … Backtrack, Alice. ‘Anyway,’ I say. ‘I would love to have you in my exclusive religion. You can even be the cofounder.’

  ‘Yeah, well, unless I get a better offer,’ he says back.

  Esther sticks around while Ben goes to get dinner for all of us.

  ‘Chloë was looking for you earlier,’ I say. ‘It seemed important-ish.’

  ‘Maybe I should have escaped,’ she says dreamily.

  ‘What were you escaping from? Not Chloë?’

  She gestures around her. ‘No. Just … this. Everything. PopCo. I don’t suppose you know that I’m Mac’s niece, do you?’

  ‘You? You are Mac’s niece? Not really, though?’

  ‘Yep. Not by blood or anything – yuck, imagine that. No. My mother’s sister was his secretary years ago when he was MD of a carpet firm. They fell in love and he married her. She wasn’t exactly the right class or anything but Mac’s parents thought she was charming. Well, they would. Aunt Sarah is that type. She did elocution lessons and ballet and always had proper hairstyles and manicured nails. She knew that the way she could become rich and pampered was to marry an MD. So she did. But my mother was pretty much the opposite. She was an art-school hippy with a drug habit and the beginnings of a drink problem. She would turn up at Mac and Sarah’s country house for ‘spontaneous’ weekends with them, dragging along whatever dropkick she was seeing that week. When she became pregnant with me, they disapproved – she wasn’t married or anything and this was 1974 – so they fell out of contact for a long time.

  ‘So, fast forward quite a while, and there I am, and I’m, like, twenty-one and I’ve just finished my degree and I don’t have a job or anywhere to live. My mum’s still drinking, and we’re both living in Teignmouth – not far from here, in fact – but I badly want to move to London and get a place to live. I was sort of a loser, to be honest, but I had a good bunch of friends from university, and we wanted to set up our own company, creating videogames. My mum was like, ‘Why don’t you call Uncle Steve? He’s CEO of PopCo now. He’ll give you a job in videogames.’ And I was like, ‘Who wants to work for that corporate shit bag?’ But, hypocrite that I am, I phoned him and asked for a loan of some money to go towards this company we wanted to set up. Anyway, he said no to the money but did offer me a job. He said I could work up in London at the Battersea office and that he had a really special role in mind for me.’

  ‘So obviously, you took it?’ I say.

  ‘Yeah. What could I do? At first I had plans to use the money I was earning towards art projects but you know how it is. Friends drifted away, I got caught up in my job. I live online now, mainly.’

  I think of Kieran and his virtual worlds. ‘Online?’ I repeat.

  ‘Yeah. You know, you can get caught up in newsgroups and bulletin boards and Ultima and EverQuest. I’ve got some good friends online. And a few enemies …’

  ‘Esther?’ I say, suddenly. ‘What is your job?’

  ‘My job. Ah.’ She gulps. ‘You’ll hate me if I tell you. Or I almost hope you will …’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  She takes a deep breath. ‘I make websites.’

  ‘What? You work on the PopCo site?’

  ‘No, no. I make websites. I come up with a persona, like, oh … On one site I’m a girl from London called April, and I make April’s homepage. The idea is that I keep a diary, like a blog, as April, and lists of likes and dislikes and whatever, and every so often – not often enough so it would be obvious but enough to have an impact – I become “obsessed” with a PopCo product, usually some K thing, or Finbar’s Friends. So one day I’m April, writing in my blog about this new Finbar toy that’s just been released that I just have to have. The next day I might be Tabitha, battling with anorexia, pictured wearing K products, looking sexily underweight. I might be a couple of friends who have set up the “unofficial” Finbar fan club. I tend to do that one over the weekend. I’m also supposed to mention PopCo products on Ultima and EverQuest and various chat rooms. It’s called guerrilla marketing. That’s my job. That’s why I had to see Mac afterwards last Saturday. He was sorting out for me to have a laptop so I could maintain the sites from here.’

  ‘And Hiro, too,’ I say slowly.

  She looks down at the floor. ‘Yeah. Hiro, too.’

  ‘He does the same thing? As teenage boys?’

  ‘He doesn’t have personas as such. It’s not so important for boys to see personas online. Hiro does all the videogame fan sites. Well, not all of them. I expect PopCo have twenty or so of us doing these jobs. We don’t know about each other. Well, we’re not supposed to, but I’ve known Hiro for a while.’

  ‘How did you meet?’ I ask.

  ‘What? Oh, a chance meeting online.’ I can tell she’s lying but I don’t know why.

  ‘At least I see now why it’s a secret,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah. No one wants anyone to know about these jobs, even staff. I suppose it seems dishonest.’

  ‘It is dishonest,’ I say. I shrug, but then don’t say anything else.

  ‘It’s all dishonest, though, Alice,’ she says. ‘All of it.’

  She’s right. The way the products are designed, focus-grouped, manufactured and sold. It’s all dishonest, all of it.

  *

  For the next three years my grandmother continues failing to prove the Riemann Hypothesis (but writes some interesting papers about subjects connected with it); my grandfather continues failing to solve the Voynich Manuscript (but publishes two more Mind Mangle collections); and I continue to fail to crack the necklace code.

  For GCSE English we have to do a project on a book of our own choice. I pick Woman on the Edge of Time, the moving and disturbing book I last read when I was almost twelve, and didn’t properly understand. I pick out themes of oppression and resistance and write an essay well beyond the requirements of the syllabus. For this, and all my other GCSEs, I get A grades. After the chess-tournament incident, Moron went on sick leave for a long time. A new teacher came, a woman called Miss Rider, and I moved up to top set in time for the exams. It’s a good job I did – people in sets 2 and 3 were only put in for the Intermediate paper, where the highest possible grade you could achieve was a C.

  Rachel gets the same results as me and we confer about where w
e should do our A levels. I am, of course, not keen to go back to Groveswood for what will surely be another few hundred days of torture. Rachel has become bored with being locked up in the middle of nowhere with what she calls ‘a bunch of anorexic rich kids’. It’s all changed at her school in the last few years. Fitting in there is as complicated as fitting in at Groveswood, but you never get to go home. Everything has to be right: the way you shower, your deodorant, the tapes you listen to in your Walkman at night, the records you bring into school, the boys you know, the letters you receive. While Rachel was in the 5th year, I would sometimes send her letters as a boy called Rupert, which apparently helped somehow. She started smoking at school because there was nothing else to do. I am learning to smoke now, too. We have promised each other that we will give up when we are twenty (ages away) but we both love the advertisements: the purple piece of silk slashed through in so many different ways. Cigarette companies soon won’t be allowed to advertise directly and this one company is already cleverly making their advertising into code. When Rachel and I go into town together, the summer we are both sixteen, we look at these big, glossy billboards and, without having to talk about it, we understand that these pictures represent our futures. This is what our village is not. This is London and glamour and sex and being grown up. This is art films and kisses and having your own car.

  We are both accepted to do our A levels at the local sixth-form college. Over the summer we spend hours in a coffee shop off the market square in town, scaring/thrilling ourselves with stories of how the people at this college are all in bands, or have dyed hair, or take drugs, or are weird, loser-ish dropouts. We are both scared of these things but we both also want to be them. We each want an identity more complex than, simply, ‘Virgin good-girl from village who brushes her hair properly every night’.

  We sit in this cafe, drinking espresso even though neither of us like it, and smoking cigarettes from our purple and white packets. We say things to each other like, ‘I really need a cigarette’, until the point when it’s not a lie any more. We dare each other to go into the dark, smoky record shop and mingle with thin boys in black. We wish and hope and pray that one day two young guys will ask to share our table in the cafe: two guys with long black coats and DMs and badges and record collections and their own flats. This never happens.

  We save money from our babysitting jobs and buy ripped 501s and black polo-neck jumpers. We go on diets. We rent films from the local video shop, films about fucked-up ballet dancers and holiday romances and kids from small towns where parties are illegal. We rent French art films in which girls no older than us swish around smoking and having intense-looking sex. We plan our own ‘first times’. We buy postcards of naked black men holding white babies, stylised pictures of beaten-up pink ballet shoes, and that big poster of the tennis player showing her bum. We cut out Sunday supplement versions of the cigarette advertisements we like and stick those above our desks with Blu-Tak. We decide that chart music is for ‘plebs’ (Rachel’s word) and we contrive to get into what is called indie music. In order to do this, we get big floppy music newspapers and we buy whatever these papers say is ‘in’. We sit around in the evenings listening to music and carefully fraying our jeans. We sew on patches – the American flag on one leg and a VW patch on another; or paisley patches and yin and yang signs. We talk about stealing real VW signs to wear in other ways – this is a craze we have read about. We also read about how it is ‘trendy’ now to wear branded sports trainers with our 501s, so we start doing this. We think about going to America. We dissect song lyrics looking for hidden meanings. We obsess, briefly, over Marilyn Monroe. We wear loads of black eyeliner and pink frosted lipstick. We are going to hit our college with force.

  One day, about a week before term starts, we are in town as usual, pretending to be older than we are, on drugs, in the middle of interesting crises and so on – our usual fantasies of adult life. We are on a mission to buy new lipsticks: they have to be exactly the right shade of pale pink. We have to have them. Really, we live for this sort of thing. We occasionally see people I used to know from Groveswood in town. For example, Emma is now a junior assistant in Miss Selfridge, and Lucy works in the bank. We think they are really stupid, and we laugh at their hair and clothes and jobs. We would never fall into the establishment rat-race rut of working in something as pathetic as a bank or a mainstream clothes shop. They spend all day doing what they are told, with their back-combed pony-tails and their red lipstick and blusher, and we talk about how ridiculous they look. Only someone who had sold their soul to Thatcher/Hitler/Reagan would seriously want to look like a cheap doll in red (of all things) lipstick and black skirts and tights. And they all wear high heels. Every mission that Rachel and I go on is about not being this. Our lipstick, our jeans, our hair – these things, so carefully put together, say that we don’t like what everyone else likes. Or, at least, we don’t like what the plebs in this town like. In London, or Paris, maybe somewhere like that, maybe we’d fit in.

  So we are on this mission for our pink lipstick. Outside Boots, the animal-liberation stand is there as usual. We approach it, smoking cigarettes.

  ‘I want to join that,’ Rachel says to me. It’s not a surprise. She loves animals and always has. She wants to be a vet. She’s wanted to be a vet since she was about ten.

  ‘I do, too,’ I say. ‘But I’m scared.’

  We giggle. ‘I am too,’ Rachel says. ‘But I don’t know why.’

  ‘I think they might tell us off for smoking,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah. And wearing make-up,’ Rachel says.

  ‘Do you think it’s true, what they say they do to the animals?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Rachel. ‘It must be a bit exaggerated.’

  ‘Yeah. It would be too horrible otherwise.’

  ‘No one would let them get away with it.’

  ‘No. Exactly.’

  ‘But I do agree with them, though.’

  ‘Yeah, me too.’

  So, having added that to our identities, we swish into Boots in our jeans and we buy our lipsticks. We laugh at the tragic pictures of models on the make-up displays, and we giggle at laxatives and Durex. We don’t think any more about the animal-rights stand, and the people outside in the rain. We don’t make any particular connection between our lives and theirs. We don’t consider not coming to Boots any more. After all, no one else stocks our favourite lipstick! But mostly, we expect that while we are being young and doing this, someone else will care, and someone else will sign the petitions and we can simply tell all our friends (the ones we are bound to make) that we support animal liberation. We don’t really think that the stands, or the people in the rain, will ever just go away.

  * * *

  College is everything we thought it would be. There are rockabillies and psychobillies and girls who dress like punks and boys who dress like 50s American movie stars. These people, however, look at us as though we are children. We need to raise our game but we don’t know how. We look OK. We like the right music – although there’s no easy way of getting this across. We sit in our favourite cafe and dream of the day when we will have been coming here for enough years so that we can send funny postcards from abroad and they will be displayed on the wall. We plot ways of being invited to the other kids’ parties and invent ways of getting into the pubs where they all go. We think about how to obtain some cannabis and where/when we could learn to smoke it like they all do. We long for the day when one of the skinny boys in black will speak to us.

  More than anything, we wish there were more things for us to buy, and easier ways of finding out what we should buy. We trawl charity shops and fancy-dress shops but we still don’t quite know the secret of being as trendy as the other people at college. We could be saying so much more with our style. Rachel, who started doing Biology, Chemistry and Physics, swaps so she is doing Biology, English and French. This won’t get her into university to study to become a vet, but all the interesting people are i
n the arts groups, not the sciences. I am doing Sociology, English and French. A lot of the most interesting people are in my group for sociology. On the day the Gulf War starts, we have a discussion about the end of the world. Then we organise a sit-in protest.

  ‘We thought you two were just really aloof,’ a girl called Harriet says to me and Rachel during the sit-in. We are all telling secrets and making friends and flirting. Harriet is a couple of years older than us and has only recently come back to college after something thrilling like a nervous breakdown or a period of drug-rehabilitation.

  ‘We thought you just didn’t like us,’ Rachel says, honestly.

  And then we can’t stop talking.

  We have just become friends with Harriet! After the sit-in, she invites us to our first party. We ring up our parents/grandparents and tell them that the sit-in is going to go on all night, and because of our political beliefs, we really feel we have to stay on. When my grandfather says he is proud of me for standing up for what I believe in, I feel a little bit sick. But then I reason that all the people at the party are all the people from the sit-in so it’s almost like an extension of the same thing. It’s not a complete lie.

  When Rachel tells her parents, they say, ‘Just stay with Alice, she’s sensible.’

  The party is in a squat in a huge mansion off Mill Road. This is simply the most amazing place we have ever been to. They have it all connected up so there is a second-hand or stolen telephone in each room, all networked so that, say, the girl who lives upstairs can call the sitting room downstairs and ask for a spliff to be brought up to her. All the people who live here ride bicycles, many of them stolen. They are living the same kind of anti-establishment life we have seen in films and magazines!

  This turns out not to be a dancing/eating sort of party. Instead, everyone sits around in the big, dusty living room or in the dirty, cramped kitchen, passing round spliffs and talking about politics or music or protest marches they have been on. Rachel and I don’t have to go home until the morning and so we definitely won’t. We drink cider and vodka and smoke our first spliffs. Our eye makeup smudges and our breath goes sour. Our stomachs rumble. We haven’t eaten since lunchtime. A student called Toby starts talking to me, while his friend, a musician called Gary, talks to Rachel. We both lose our virginity that night, on opposite sides of the same room, each while we think the other is asleep. Voodoo Ray is playing on an old, half-broken stereo when it’s my turn.