PopCo

by Scarlett Thomas

  Children who make footballs in factories, or stitch trainers and sweatbands and purses for us … they won’t ever play with toys like these. They will make them but never play with them. I reach into the packet I have just opened and feel for a seam. Once I have located it, I rip it all the way down. Then I leave the packet open. There. That’s one unit PopCo won’t be making a profit on.

  I leave the shop and cross over the road again and head for the museum to meet Ben. I feel this stupid glow inside – something I have only felt once before in my life, after I played a prank on a maths teacher who humiliated me. I have cost PopCo one unit of stock. I have not hurt any animals today. It’s not much but it’s more than I was doing before.

  Later, when we drive back to Dartmoor, the sky is a dusky blue, with an almost full moon punched in it like a hole.

  ‘Bats,’ Esther says, as soon as we leave town. ‘Look.’ But I am still looking at the sky.

  It was a Sunday evening, almost a year ago, when I began finally to let my grandfather go. I was driving back from Cambridge to London, having just broken up with this guy called Paul who I’d been seeing for a few weeks. The relationship was never going to work out. For one thing, it kept taking me back to Cambridge, a place I didn’t want to be: a place buttered with memories like the crumpets I used to eat in my grandparents’ garden. For another thing, I had this problem, this inability to feel anything at all. I had even argued with Rachel over it.

  Paul was an artist/art director who had come into the Battersea offices to get some props for an ad he was doing for one of our products (I forget which one). A couple of after-work drinks had turned into sex at my house, after which he told me that he wasn’t planning to come back to London for a while, and asked me to spend the next weekend with him in Cambridge. Although my mind was still foggy with loss, and generally over-stimulated from work, it was a fun-ish weekend. He had three flatmates who all looked alike and were the sort of people who were ‘up for anything’. I’d taken a prototype of a board game and we all played it together, shouting like we’d known each other for ages. At the time I was much better in company than alone, although the rainbow of my possible moods/emotions/feelings had merged into a dirty brown mess in my mind and I just couldn’t bring myself to feel anything for Paul. On the third weekend he said he was falling in love with me. On the fourth, I drove there to tell him I wouldn’t be coming back. I couldn’t tell him why. I just sat there spewing clichés and thinking, Actually, this stuff makes sense. It really is me and not you. I really don’t know why.

  I never drive back from Cambridge on the motorway (which comes out in north London eventually) but always on the back roads, with hedges and scenery and occasionally wild animals. It was mid-July and the days were still long. I’d eventually said my final goodbye to Paul at around ten o’clock and then hit the road, quite fast, still not really caring about anything very much. As I was driving up a steep hill, with fields on either side, I suddenly became aware of a strip, like a ribbon, of pale blue light on the horizon. At first I didn’t know what it was. Then I realised that this was the last part of sky that hadn’t yet been taken by the already impressive sunset: a baby blue sliver of day, which I could only just glimpse through the trees. At one point, when there were no trees, I saw it span the whole horizon; the day dying before my eyes, with blood everywhere. Then a hedge obscured it and the whole, tantalising scene was just gone.

  Higher ground. I had to get to higher ground. Instead of taking my usual turn-off, a downhill section like driving into the centre of a very deep bowl, I turned off randomly, pushing the car upwards, further, trying to find a place to look down on the dying sky. I had to see it; all of it. For some reason nothing else mattered and I raced against the clock to get up the hill before night-time reached critical mass and the sunset was gone. Finally I found the perfect viewing spot: an abandoned, darkened shell of an old burnt-out petrol station. Switching off my car headlights made all the difference. The sunset now spanned the entire horizon in front of me: miles and miles of sky. Behind me, it was already night-time. But I was like a furtive god up there, surveying the last long sliver of the day, still with its afternoon-blue set beneath not just oranges and reds but grey, black, purple: all these swatches of sky bruising and smearing together. You couldn’t draw this. You couldn’t capture any of this in a photograph. I had never even seen anything like this in my life. This was the sky ripped in two with its insides spilling out. Black silhouettes of trees and houses looked like burnt-out ruins set against the bright mess in the sky. I realised that I was actually sitting in a real burnt-out ruin, randomly, on my own, with no family left in the whole world. I started to cry.

  And it all made sense. The world was beautiful, even if people you loved died. In fact, if this sky was a kind of death, then maybe it wasn’t so bad. Was heaven in there somewhere, behind all those colours? This sky made me believe, for the first time, in heaven. It made me believe in heaven and ghosts and the afterlife in a way I had never imagined I could or would. This wasn’t an intellectual belief, with empirical proof or rational argument. This was a feeling of miracles and love and a vast, infinite future. This was a sky from fiction, and I believed in it, then. I believed in it all. If this was nature, then maybe nature was all right. Maybe death was as natural as this sky. And suddenly I didn’t need that brown veil any more. All I felt was hope; and the loss I felt about my grandfather’s death seemed to bleed away with the remains of the sky until I was sitting there in complete darkness with my face wet, unable to move.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  It’s 7:58 and my mind is running at 100 per cent processing power, my heart pumping blood around my body at what feels like three times the normal speed. Ben has gone. I’ve tidied up. I’ve had a cigarette. I’ve smoothed down my skirt and looked at myself in the mirror. What did I see in the mirror? A twenty-nine-year-old woman with schoolgirl plaits, shiny lips and understated eye make-up. What else did I see? A lonely child? A confused adult? Who am I today? What is this war in which I am being enlisted? Do I even want to join up? Choose Box B. Even the ghost of Charles Babbage seems to know more about my life than I do.

  War thoughts again. I think back to the business cards from that health shop earlier on. I think about the miniature wars that individuals fight all the time. They fight against cellulite, or negative emotions, or addictions, or stress. I think about how we can now hire all different sorts of mercenaries to help us fight against ourselves …Therapists, manicurists, hairdressers, personal trainers, life coaches. But what’s it all for? What do all these little wars achieve? Although it is part of my life too, and I want to be thin and pretty and not laughed at in the street and not so stressed and mad that I start screaming on the tube, it suddenly seems a little bit ridiculous. All the time we do these things we are trying to enlist ourselves into a bigger war. We are trying to join up, constantly, with the enemy. It’s the enemy voice in your ear that tells you your kitchen is too untidy, or your bathroom does not sparkle; that your hair isn’t shiny enough, your legs not thin enough, your address book not bulging enough, your clothes not cool enough. My grandparents did not collaborate. So how did I slip so easily over to the other side? Perhaps it was because no one told me that anyone was even at war.

  Hitler tried to impose his shiny, blonde, neat, sparkling world on us all and we resisted. So how is it that when McDonald’s and Disney and The Gap and L’Oréal and all the others try to do the same thing we all just say, ‘OK’? Hitler needed marketing, that’s all. His propaganda was, of course, brilliant for its time, everyone knows that. What a great idea, to make people feel that they belong to something, that their identity makes them special. If Hitler had been able to enlist a twenty-first-century marketing department, would he have been able to sell Nazism to everyone? Why not? You can just see a beautiful, thin woman with her long blonde hair moving softly in the breeze, and the tagline ‘Because I’m worth it’. I am worth it. Me. I am worth the lives of others.
>
  There’s a knock at the door. I gulp. As I open it, I expect to find a group of people standing there (including Ben). But there’s only one person at my door. It’s Chloë.

  ‘Hello,’ I say.

  ‘You got my note?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. And then: ‘I was expecting you.’

  She comes in and sits down. ‘You knew it was me?’

  I smile. ‘You’re the one who seems to tell everyone off when they step out of line.’

  She laughs. ‘Yeah, it’s been a bit weird having a group of us together all at once here, in this situation. I hope it hasn’t been too obvious. Maybe you’re just very observant. I would have thought you would be, with your background.’

  I blink slowly. ‘You know my background.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I pause for a moment, the minor notes of Chloë’s voice like a memory of a haunting folk song in my ears. She isn’t saying anything else. It’s as if she’s waiting for me to ask more questions. And I have plenty of those.

  ‘Why?’ I say. ‘Who are you? What’s this war? I don’t …’

  She nods. ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘No.’

  I’m sitting on the bed, with my legs folded underneath me. Chloë’s on the chair. She sighs, stands up and walks over to the door. She opens it and looks out. Then she closes it and walks back over to the chair.

  ‘We can’t talk much here,’ she says. ‘What’s on either side of you?’

  ‘The kitchen is on that side,’ I point. ‘And a cupboard on that side. It’s pretty safe to talk in here.’ I suddenly think about the wires in the walls. Paranoia, paranoia. Still, I reach up and switch the radio on quite loud. ‘If we talk quietly we should be OK,’ I say.

  I haven’t retuned the radio since Ben set it to Zion Radio. I worry for a moment that it never existed, and that all I’ll find now is static, but when I switch it on I instantly hear the sound of a guitar feeding back and then the woman’s voice. I hear the words Slitscan and Laney. Idoru, I think.

  Chloë laughs gently. ‘I hoped you’d be like this,’ she says softly. ‘But we just didn’t know …’

  ‘Who is “we”?’ I say. ‘You’re some sort of anti-PopCo thing, I guessed that. But … How do you know my background? Why the coded notes?’

  ‘OK.’ Chloë looks around and then half-sits on the chair again. ‘This has been hard. We badly wanted to recruit you but we didn’t know how. Until yesterday, you were a bit of a mystery to us.’

  I’m still confused. ‘Who’s “us”?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in a moment. I’m … I’m new to this, or at least to doing things in this way. I suspect you could probably teach me more.’ She looks at the radio, burbling away. ‘It’s a kind of paradox, like those puzzles we were doing last week. We decided we wanted to recruit you to help us, but we weren’t sure you would actually want to join us. We can’t afford to compromise the secrecy of what we are doing so we couldn’t ask you outright. But, without asking you outright we could never work out whether you would want to join us.’ She laughs again. ‘OK, I’m talking like a spy thriller now. It was only when we heard that you were leaving PopCo that I felt bold enough to send such an obvious message. But even now I am nervous about telling you more. I want to say, “This is what we’re for! Are you with us?” but I am scared that if I do, you will tell someone else.’

  ‘Who would I tell?’ I say.

  She raises her eyebrows. ‘Georges?’

  ‘Georges?’ I’m fiddling with the end of one of my plaits but now I let go. Shit. ‘How …?’

  ‘How do we know about you and Georges?’ She looks at her hands, a little embarrassed. ‘Hmm. Yes. He sent an e-mail to a friend about you. He said, “What do you do if you are falling in love with a creative? Do you have to sack them before you make a move?” Then it said something like, “Find out some stuff for me.” Then he gave your name. Bit of a stupid thing to send as an e-mail actually, if you’re Georges.’ She looks at me. ‘A bit of a heartbreaker, aren’t you?’

  I feel sick. ‘Does Ben know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Will you tell him?’

  ‘No. But we were – are – concerned at your closeness to the PopCo Board. Trying to recruit you directly seemed like it would be too risky. We had to try to find out if you really were Little Miss Corporate or not.’

  ‘So …’ Shit. It’s falling into place now. ‘So you sent Ben to spy on me?’

  She laughs. ‘No, Alice. We sent Esther. Whatever is between you and Ben is entirely natural.’ She laughs again. ‘Well, I don’t know about natural, exactly – I know Ben – but it’s your thing. No one sent Ben to you.’

  ‘But Esther …?’ I thought Esther was my friend.

  ‘Esther refused to play along, actually. She said she didn’t want to compromise her friendship with you. She never follows instructions. Her latest thing is she refuses to lie … I don’t know what I am going to do about Esther, actually. Anyway, I believe you had one conversation where she talked about how much she hates the PopCo Board. After that she refused to do any more. But we still didn’t know where you were on the whole PopCo thing. I mean, Christ … On file you’re a model employee.’

  I think about this and nod. ‘Yes. On file, I probably am.’

  Chloë smiles and shakes her head gently. I notice she is still wearing those earrings with brown feathers on them that almost seem part of her hair. I don’t think the feathers are real, though. I wonder what they are made of.

  ‘You haven’t done anything rebellious at all,’ she says.

  ‘Haven’t I?’ I think back to earlier on today; the feeling of that seam splitting against my fingers. I look at Chloë, sitting on the chair. I wonder what she sees when she looks at me. Is it just that: model employee?

  ‘The only good sign was that you didn’t seem to tell anyone about the messages you received,’ she says.

  I smile now. ‘They were pretty strange messages.’

  Chloë smiles back and pushes her hair behind her ears.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m new to this.’

  ‘Why did you send the one that said, “Are you happy”? I couldn’t work that out.’

  ‘I wanted to contact you but I was scared to say anything that would compromise the group … Once I’d sent the first message, I needed to follow it up to keep the communication going but I didn’t know what to say. I decided to send that and see if you told anyone. Do you mind if I smoke?’ she asks.

  ‘Go ahead,’ I say, reaching for my bag. I pull out tobacco and papers and roll one up myself. ‘Chloë?’

  She looks up at me. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Not only did I not tell anyone about the messages, I carefully burnt them all, and the keys I made for the decodes. I once kept a secret for over twenty years. Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on? Look at what you’ve already got on me. You could tell Ben about Georges if you wanted. You could tell everyone about Georges. Hey – I fiddle my expenses. You could tell them that, too.’

  ‘We all fiddle our expenses,’ she says, blowing smoke out into the room. ‘And you are leaving, so maybe you wouldn’t care if they know all that stuff …’

  ‘I’m not leaving Ben.’

  ‘No.’ She frowns. ‘No, I suppose not.’

  This feels like being eleven again. I am offering her the equivalent of ‘I kissed Georges’ in return for whatever she has to tell me. The thing is, I suspect that what she has got to tell me is much bigger than that. If I was her, would I tell me? Definitely not.

  ‘Look,’ I say, suddenly. ‘If you don’t want to tell me, then don’t. But since it is what you came here to do, maybe you should just get it over with. I really won’t tell anyone, even if I disagree with you. Unless … OK, if I am honest, I do have to say that if I think what you’re doing is morally wrong, like if what you’re doing hurts animals or children, then I probably would tell someone. But I doubt that will be the case.’

  She sighs. ‘Yeah,
we’re pretty much the opposite of that. And you have just said exactly the right thing …’

  The key to the door, I think.

  She reaches for the ashtray. ‘We’re called NoCo,’ she says. She sighs again, as if realising that she has entered a one-way function, and starts talking softly as the music on the radio changes to more Bach, with more Idoru. ‘We’re a resistance organisation, which I think you guessed. We are resisting a world in which CEOs like Mac and all the others earn millions a year while the people who make the products for them to sell are on starvation wages. We are resisting a world in which people like us are employed to mislead people into buying things they don’t need.’

  I smile at Chloë. ‘I agree with all that so far,’ I say.

  ‘It’s particularly interesting being based in a toy company,’ she says. ‘All the bitter ironies are so much clearer here. You think about childhood, and what it is, and it is all lies and contradictions. Mummy or Daddy sits there in their leather shoes going “Moo cow” while you look at pretty pictures of cows in a field. You don’t make the connection with “Moo cow” a couple of years later when you’re begging for your Happy Meal. Moo cow is one thing and a beefburger is another. We don’t always know it, but the job of people like us is to keep those two ideas separate so we can sell Moo cow books and Happy Meal toys at the same time. We can sell Finbar’s Friends to happy suburban kids who are able to think of toys as something Santa makes, not third-world slaves. We can sell them fluffy animals that they curl up with in bed. How odd that a Western child’s source of comfort is such a potent symbol of misery and oppression. We can sell animals as long as they are pretend. The animals will be loved as long as they remain pretend. We sell the sort of attachment to objects and sentimentalism that means that a kid will run back into a burning house to rescue a toy rabbit, but Dad won’t swerve in the car to avoid a real one. That is the real power of brands, when you think about it. One rabbit has a label on its arse, another one doesn’t. You can love the one with the label and everyone accepts that. Risk your life for a real animal and people say you’re mad.’