PopCo

by Scarlett Thomas

  Chloë smiles. ‘Oh, it’s not called NoCo everywhere. Every company has its own name. It’s like mirror-branding. PopCo has NoCo. Another company will have its own version. You could have a company called, say, Smith and its version of NoCo might be called Jones. And just as we call the whole global organisation “NoCo”, they will call it “Jones”. It’s great because it means we can’t be pinned down or traced or understood. We have no brand name, no logo, no paperwork, no database. Only two things are important: that we remain connected and that we all follow the main principles. When you join NoCo – or whatever your version is called – you simply agree to use your labour in a positive rather than a negative way.’

  ‘That’s really clever,’ I say.

  ‘No one knows for sure,’ Chloë says, ‘but most people believe that the concept and the structure were created by two refugees in America – an Indonesian economist who’d spent time working undercover in a sweatshop, and an Iranian science-fiction writer. But like I say, no one knows for sure.’

  ‘Wow,’ I say.

  Chloë and I sit in silence for a moment, while a single drumbeat comes out of the radio, pounding, like a fist.

  ‘Chloë?’ I say.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you have to be anywhere for, say, an hour or so?’

  She shakes her head. ‘No, why?’

  I take a deep breath. ‘You know that I mentioned a secret I have kept for twenty years?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looks intrigued. ‘What’s that all about?’

  I take some more deep breaths and then look at the ceiling and then down at the blanket on the bed. ‘Look, I haven’t been able to tell anyone about it for various reasons. I mean, I literally haven’t told a soul in my life. Not my best friend, not any boyfriends. The only two other people in the world who knew about it are dead. But I really, really need to tell someone.’

  She looks flattered. ‘You want to tell me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘If you want to listen. You are the first person who has ever told me something that is bigger than it and therefore the only person I could logically tell. It’s a pretty good story, although it doesn’t have an end yet.’

  ‘Cool,’ says Chloë. ‘Shall I get more coffee?’

  ‘Yeah, I think that would be a good idea.’

  She picks up the mugs and turns towards the door.

  ‘What’s it about?’ she says.

  ‘A necklace,’ I say. ‘And quite a lot of treasure.’

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  There are five of us squashed into Esther’s car, on the way to Dartmouth. As well as me and Esther, the small car contains Ben, Chloë and Hiro. I have the navigation equipment carefully stashed in my canvas bag, along with all the usual junk I carry around with me. My head feels heavy after staying up half the night talking. But I have never felt so carefree in my life. The sun is shining and we are on the road. I have finally managed to tell my secret. Oh, and I am now part of a global resistance movement as well.

  Ben squeezes my leg. ‘How are you feeling?’ he asks.

  ‘Overwhelmed,’ I say back. ‘But in a good way.’

  ‘We have to get you on our boat, somehow,’ Chloë says. ‘We can have a NoCo meeting at sea. We could do with you as well, Esther. And Grace, actually.’

  ‘Boats are the best places for secret meetings,’ Hiro says. ‘Who could ever overhear you on a boat?’

  ‘I am so glad we can talk properly in front of Alice now,’ Esther says.

  ‘Me too,’ says Ben, giving me a big smile.

  ‘Is Grace in NoCo too?’ I say, a lovely warm feeling, like the opposite of an ache, spreading inside me. They want to have a NoCo meeting today, and they want me to be there. For the first time in my life I feel part of something – almost a gang – and I know I can be myself inside it. I know that if my grandparents were alive they would recognise the person I am now, the person I can be with these people.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ says Chloë. ‘She’s great. It’s very impressive the way she’s got into the virtual worlds group as well. We really need someone in there. Someone to unsettle things a bit. Have a bit of fun with the “delete” key.’ She laughs, the wind blowing through her long hair.

  We drive through Totnes again, avoiding the town centre. I look at the soft green hills swelling out of the ground; the wavy graph where the land meets the sky. And it’s all so beautiful. But when we stop at some traffic lights I see something with which I am more familiar: tiny weeds and grasses forcing their way between paving slabs and bits of cracked tarmac. A small clump of dandelions. A few daisies. Lots of little patches of grass. I realise suddenly that this is much more beautiful to me. You can tarmac the earth as much as you want but still the grass will struggle through.

  ‘So basically we want everyone from Dan’s boat on our boat, apart from Dan,’ Hiro is saying. ‘That’s going to go down well.’

  ‘I bet Dan would jump at the chance to get on the virtual worlds boat,’ I say. I remember that they were all in the same sailing team: Kieran, Violet, Frank and James. ‘If there was one less boat …’

  ‘Chloë’ll disable ours, then, won’t you?’ Ben says.

  ‘No. Then we’ll get distributed evenly among the others,’ she says. ‘Alice will disable Dan’s boat and then she, Grace and Esther can come with us. Dan, I’m sure, will naturally drift off to Kieran’s team. There, sorted.’

  ‘I can’t disable a boat,’ I say. ‘I’ve never even been on a boat.’ I look around the car with some panic. ‘Esther?’

  ‘Oh, I can’t be trusted to do something like this,’ she says.

  ‘I’ll explain what to do,’ Chloë says. ‘It’ll be fine.’

  We drive along a long country road lined with trees and hedgerows. Little cottages are snuggled into the sides of hills. I expect in the winter you would see smoke rising from their chimneys but it’s a hot day today and it’s impossible to tell whether these places are inhabited or not. We drive through a village with a little bridge and then another one with a large, old church. I look at this landscape and I think that this is the kind of place battles used to be fought, where armies would march on foot or ride on horseback. They’d get their food from farms, and safe house networks would spring up. I think I prefer this new war, fought in people’s minds, fought against the people who fund other wars and then watch them play out like global baseball games. I imagine trying to hide in this landscape, running through a forest avoiding poachers’ traps. And then I think about how well hidden I am in the landscape of my life, a world in which being British and middle class and talking about the state of the world is something that can go entirely unnoticed.

  We take a left and then a right-hand turn and then we are on a smaller track, with tall hedgerows on either side of us.

  ‘I’ll take you the scenic route,’ Esther says. ‘Along the sea.’

  ‘Can’t we go the quick way?’ Ben says. ‘If we got there before the others, Chloë could disable any one of the boats.’

  ‘Too late,’ says Esther. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Put this on,’ Hiro says, passing Esther a black cassette tape.

  I look at Hiro, this skinny, geeky-looking Go champion, and I wonder what’s on his tape. Esther grumbles a bit about people who get in your car and then expect you to play their tapes, but she slots it in the machine anyway. It turns out to be the Velvet Underground and we all sing along as we hurtle along this odd little road, the wind blowing through our hair like a cosmic fan.

  The sea appears in front of us and we turn left, driving along with the cliffs on our right. I feel happy just being part of this. Change the world. Maybe I will have something to report to my mother after all.

  When we get to Dartmouth everyone else is already there. I am feeling anxious about having to disable a boat but it turns out that we are one boat down anyway, due to some sort of error on the part of Gavin’s company. Dan has already defected to Kieran’s group, and as we walk past them, I hear him trying to convince Fr
ank that he should be skipper. Violet is standing on the embankment, watching the river, looking pissed off. We walk down some concrete steps to a rickety pontoon and then, wobbling a bit, right to the end, where people are waiting to be taken on a small launch out to the mooring position of their team’s boat. The idea is that we will motor down the river to the point where it becomes the sea and then switch off the outboard and practise sailing. Our picnics have already been put on the boats, apparently, along with some other items PopCo think we might need: wine, towels, bottle-openers. All this fuss because of what our minds do for them.

  Esther has gone to find Grace, and a few minutes later I watch the two of them walk along the pontoon towards the rest of us, laughing together. I also notice Hiro watching Grace and the way he casually looks away when she gets closer. As we stand there taking it in turns to get into the boat, his hand softly brushes hers. Whatever is between her and Kieran, I realise, is not going to last.

  When it is my turn to step into the launch, I copy what Chloë does and slip off my plimsolls and chuck them in the boat before, in bare feet, stepping onto the bow, balancing precariously for a moment, before I am able to take another step onto one of the little seats in the hull. Ben is already in, and offers me his hand. As soon as I sit down I feel excited. I am so close to the water now, I could trail my hand in it. The guy who is ferrying the teams backwards and forwards stands on the pontoon and unties the boat. Then, in one deft movement, still holding the untied rope, he pushes away from the pontoon and steps in to the boat, never looking as though he might fall. He starts the outboard motor and the boat fills with the sweet muggy smell of diesel. He swings her around and we are off, chugging upriver.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Ben says to me.

  ‘Yeah, I think so. You?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I love this.’

  I think I do too. I look at his feet.

  ‘What happened to the deck shoes?’

  ‘I decided to go au naturel.’

  ‘Me too,’ I say, smiling as he takes my hand.

  ‘Ben,’ I say. ‘I want to ask you something later.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s going to involve you taking some time off work.’

  ‘I’m intrigued,’ he says.

  ‘You will be.’

  We smile at each other and watch the land go by on either side of us until suddenly we are approaching a small blue yacht, rather fast.

  ‘Fend off!’ Chloë suddenly says.

  We don’t know what she means but we copy her anyway as she sticks out her legs and places her feet against the side of the yacht to prevent us from colliding with it. No one comments on this, so it must be normal. Then the launch is tied to the yacht and we clamber from one to the other. I stow the navigation equipment while the others bustle around doing what they’ve been taught while I was ill. Ben is unfurling the main sail; Esther and Hiro are attaching the jib to the forestay and then tying it down, I assume so that they can unfurl it more easily later.

  ‘Do you want to help me navigate?’ I say to Grace.

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ she says. ‘Hey … I’m glad you’re here.’

  I return the smile she gives me. ‘Yeah, me too.’

  Chloë unties the boat from its mooring and starts the outboard motor. She’s stuck her hair up in a loose ponytail and her face is relaxed and suntanned. I’ve never done this before; I’ve never been on the water, looking at land, only the other way around. And from the land you just can’t imagine what this is like. Everything feels different. On land, things feel hard and certain but out here everything is soft. The smell of diesel mixes with salt and cool air as we travel further towards the mouth of the river.

  ‘Do we need to start navigating yet?’ I say to Chloë.

  ‘No,’ she says, her foot on the rudder. ‘Not for a bit.’

  We approach an old castle at the river’s mouth and I think for the second time today about forms of warfare. I imagine sitting in the castle, firing arrows from a tiny window, trying to hold off a sea attack: something wet, dark and menacing that you probably couldn’t even properly see.

  ‘Check out the river chain,’ Esther says, pointing.

  ‘The what?’ Hiro says.

  She points again to a large bolt stuck into the side of the valley, with what appears to be a large link of a large chain attached to it.

  ‘It’s really old,’ she says. ‘When ships tried to invade Dartmouth, the townspeople would raise the chain. It joined from there,’ she points, ‘to the other side of the river. They would pull it up from the river bed to catch the keels of the ships as they came in.’

  ‘That’s clever,’ I say.

  We are at the mouth of the river now and the air is fresher; the water choppier underneath us. I shiver and pull my cardigan out of my bag.

  ‘Right, Alice,’ says Chloë. ‘You’ll need to start navigating in a minute. If you get the map out, I’ll show you where we’re aiming.’

  ‘OK.’ I climb into the little cabin and immediately feel sick. I quickly get out the map and try to straighten it out as I come back up to the deck. But now that we are properly in the sea, the small yacht has started to buck and heave with the increasing waves and doing anything at all is difficult. As I try to get my position back, the boat tips upwards with some force and I almost fall.

  ‘Is it supposed to be doing this?’ Grace asks Chloë.

  ‘Yeah, don’t worry,’ she says. ‘Careful, Alice.’

  I think about Francis Stevenson and for the first time I can imagine how lonely and terrifying it must have been at sea. But it’s exhilarating, too. Chloë starts shouting orders at the others and they hoist the sails while she cuts the engine. All I can hear above their voices is the slap, slap, slap of the waves and the vague memory-sound of motors somewhere in the distance.

  My insides really don’t like this. I feel sick. I make a strangled, gulping noise and clutch at my stomach.

  ‘It’s going to be a bit wallowy for a second,’ Chloë says to me. ‘You could go down below if you want, but it’ll make you feel more sick. Don’t worry. You’ll be OK in a minute once we start moving properly.’

  This feels like being in a bottle that someone is plunging in and out of a bowl of water very fast. This boat is tiny and the sea suddenly looks like it’s the rest of the world. On a map, it would seem like we were quite close to land. But being out here is very different. I hold on to the handrail as the boat heels over violently.

  ‘Hold on,’ Chloë shouts.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Grace says.

  I am still trying to open the map.

  ‘Did you think it would be different, out at sea?’ Ben says to me.

  ‘Did you?’ I am drawing a line on the chart, working out where we are. We still have land in sight, and, just as Dan showed me, I am using the lighthouse and the Day Beacon – a peculiar, grey triangular structure on the headland – as reference points.

  ‘Yeah. I thought it would be calmer.’

  My stomach has settled down now. I actually like this, the violence underneath us.

  ‘Ready to gybe!’ Chloë says. This is Ben’s cue to start pulling the sail round via a rope attached to a cleat just behind my back. I lean forwards and when Chloë gives the command Esther lets out the line on the other side of the boat and Ben frantically pulls his rope in, before tying it off on the cleat.

  ‘What did you want to ask me, before?’ Ben says, once the activity is all over.

  ‘It may involve more boats,’ I say.

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘Ready to gybe!’

  ‘I’ll tell you more later,’ I say, licking salt off my lips and sitting forward again.

  Somehow I manage to navigate us to the cove Chloë has chosen on the map. Ben goes with her to lower the anchor. Chloë worked out from the wind direction that it would be sheltered in here, and it really is calm and still. The little yacht bobs around as we all stretch, or sigh, or light cigarettes.

  ‘So, who
likes sailing, then?’ Chloë says.

  A few of us groan.

  ‘I do,’ Ben says.

  ‘Yeah, me too,’ I say.

  Hiro looks a bit green. ‘I’m going up front for a bit,’ he says. ‘Just need to get some air. Get my head together …’

  We take the picnic out from the galley store. Inside we find crusty baguettes, lemon and coriander hummus, deep-fried potato fritters with chilli jam, roasted vegetables, couscous, plump queen olives marinated in smoked paprika, onion tarts, guacamole, crisps and big, sturdy flasks of coffee. As well as a bottle of chilled white wine, there’s a big pack of beer.

  ‘Not too much,’ Chloë says as we all fall upon the beer.

  Hiro comes back just as we start eating. ‘Oh, beer,’ he says, taking a bottle. ‘Cool.’

  ‘So, Alice,’ says Chloë, once we are all settled. ‘Any more questions?’

  ‘Just one,’ I say. ‘How did you find out about my background?’

  ‘That was me,’ Hiro says. ‘Sorry. Personnel files.’

  ‘I see,’ I say.

  I bite into some crusty bread and take a swig of beer. The cold liquid hits my throat at the same time that a small breeze blows in off the sea. I turn my head towards the breeze and sip more beer.

  ‘Look, it’s a seal!’ Esther says suddenly. We all look. Sure enough, there is a seal playing in the water. We all keep completely still as the seal’s smooth, brown head emerges from the water and looks around.

  ‘Hello,’ I whisper.

  ‘That is the most beautiful thing,’ Ben says.

  Then the seal is gone, gone deep into the cove and possibly out to sea.

  ‘So, are you still going to leave PopCo?’ Esther says to me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I thought … I thought I might write a book.’

  I talked about this with Chloë last night. I have always wanted to write books – real books, not just the little guides I do for PopCo. It was something she said that properly put the idea into place.

  ‘You can hide things in books,’ she said. ‘Everyone knows that.’ I am going to have a go at coming up with this impossible-sounding code for NoCo, of course I am. But I’m not sure about staying in the company. The idea of staying at home with my crosswords and the Voynich Manuscript appeals to me too. And, I don’t know, perhaps a bit more hands-on sabotage, a bit of toy-wrecking on a Saturday afternoon.