PopCo

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘This is insane,’ Dan says to me.

  ‘I quite like it,’ I say.

  The girl comes back, slightly out of breath.

  ‘OK, so that is the way you keep possession of the ball,’ she says. ‘There are goals at either end of the field, and of course the aim is to take the ball to the goal and score. There are similarities with football and hockey. You can play the game with either five or eleven a side and the team with most goals at the end of ninety minutes wins the game. But I’m getting slightly ahead of myself here …’

  ‘How do you foul?’ someone asks.

  ‘Right, I’ll come to that. Good question. I’ll just run through a few of the rules first and then tell you about the fouls. The main thing is that you can’t catch the ball in the Paddle you have just thrown it from. Throw with the right, catch with the left – or vice versa. You can’t hold the ball in one Paddle for more than three seconds, so you have to keep it moving. You can only move when the ball is moving, too, which is slightly confusing.’

  ‘Is it like netball?’ someone asks.

  ‘Yes,’ the girl says. ‘Or maybe closer to basketball. You have to vibe the ball when you stop, but you can’t stop for longer then three seconds. You can’t just stand there flipping it to yourself, basically. You have to be on the move when the ball is moving, which is most of the time. You might want to stop to look and see where your team mates are, or to pass the ball to one of them, so you have three seconds to do that. Anyway, when you pass the ball to your team mates, or even when you are flipping it to yourself, the other team will try to intercept the ball. They can use virtually any means to do this: they can hit your Paddle with theirs to get the ball out – if you are vibing at the time – or they can try to intercept it as you are flipping it either to your other Paddle or to someone else on your team. There is no body-contact between players, so if you shove against someone or trip them up, that’s a foul. You must not hit another player with your Paddle, although that’s sometimes difficult, and you mustn’t break the general rules.’ She has been talking quite fast, and now, having finished, she slowly sighs. ‘I’m Rebecca, by the way, if you want to ask anything. Now … If everyone could just take two Paddles from the box here …’

  It’s not actually that easy to learn how to do this. The right-handed movements feel surprisingly natural, but trying to catch, and then keep, the ball in the left-handed Paddle is almost impossible for those of us, like me, who are right-handed. The lefties, like Dan, have the problem the other way around. I manage to vibe the ball OK in the right Paddle but then, having just about caught it in the left one, I only seem able to hold onto it in a vaguely egg-and-spoon way for about two seconds before it simply falls out onto the grass. Dan seems to have given up on his weaker hand and instead stands there flipping the ball up and down, and occasionally vibing it, with his left Paddle. It looks quite good but is, of course, wrong.

  Rebecca comes up to me.

  ‘Good,’ she says, uncertainly. ‘That’s it, keep it going with the right hand. Now, flip!’

  I toss the ball over to my left-hand side and catch it in the paddle, where it just sits there. I am too scared/uncoordinated to try to vibe it with this hand so I just hold it there for a second or so, my arm quivering with limpness, before trying to flip it back. It doesn’t take flight very easily and immediately falls on the grass again. I go to pick the ball up with my hand but Rebecca shows me how to scoop it up with the Paddle. ‘Like this,’ she says, bending over and hoovering it up with one of her Paddles. ‘Go at it quite quickly, though. Too slow and you’ll just push it along the grass and it won’t go in.’ I practise this for a few minutes and then she drifts on to someone else.

  ‘This is like trying to wank with the wrong hand,’ Dan says, attempting to vibe the ball in his right-hand Paddle.

  ‘Oh, yuck,’ I manage, before we are called back together as a group.

  There is going to be a small tournament, it transpires, even though we are all fairly rubbish at this. A rumour has started that Mac and Georges are both going to play, which is mildly frightening, and some people are also moaning that we are going to go way over time again and miss some activity that was supposed to happen before dinner. It turns out that two half-size pitches have been marked out on the sports field, so four teams can play at once.

  Our team is comprised of the people with whom we warmed up and learnt skills just now, with Rebecca as our captain. We are sitting on the grass in the watery, pink grapefruit sunshine, watching the first teams play, feeling slightly nervous that we are up next.

  ‘Does anyone know what they’re supposed to be doing in this game?’ a girl in new-looking trainers asks.

  ‘No,’ says another girl. She has black hair, blue eyes and turquoise eye shadow. ‘I’m more worried about this fucking meeting with Mac. Were any of you on the list?’

  I glance at Dan. ‘We were,’ he says to her. No one else says anything.

  The others start talking about positions in this game while the three of us huddle and concoct conspiracy theories as to why we may have been chosen. It turns out that the girl with black hair is called Esther, and that although we’ve never seen her before, her base is at Battersea.

  ‘Although I am out on research quite a lot, though,’ she says, blushing slightly. ‘Or over at the computer centre.’

  ‘What do you do at the computer centre?’ Dan asks her.

  ‘Oh, just stuff,’ she says. ‘So anyway, what’s this game called? Do we know? Was I just not listening or did they forget to tell us?’

  ‘Yeah, that would make sense,’ Dan says. ‘That would be very PopCo.’

  ‘Maybe they haven’t given it a name yet,’ I say.

  ‘It’s very similar to lacrosse,’ Esther says.

  ‘I thought that too,’ I say.

  ‘Do you play?’

  ‘No, but my grandmother did. You?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Esther fumbles in her bag and pulls out two hair-bands, one of which she uses to tie half her hair into a bunch on the left side of her head. ‘I was captain of the senior team at school, if you can believe that.’

  Dan frowns. ‘So you can do all the fiddly bits, then?’

  ‘No.’ She laughs. ‘Well, only with my left hand.’

  ‘Oh – I’m left-handed too,’ Dan says.

  ‘I’d rather do it with two hands, like lacrosse,’ Esther says, sticking the other hair-band in her mouth and miming two hands cradling a lacrosse stick. It looks like she’s grinding a really slippery pepper mill. Now she gathers the rest of her hair into another bunch and ties that. ‘Fuck it. I’m just going to die running up and down here. I hate games where you can’t legitimately keep still. I almost died playing netball once.’ We laugh. ‘No – seriously. I was rushed to hospital and everything. I kind of like hospitals, though … the atmosphere or something. Oh shit, I’m rambling. Sorry.’

  ‘How do you almost die playing netball?’ Dan asks.

  ‘Yeah, good question. I don’t know. I was really stoned; maybe that was it. It was in sixth form,’ she adds, as if that explains everything. She looks at me. ‘I bet you played Goal Shooter in netball.’

  ‘Huh?’ I say. ‘Why?’

  ‘You seem clever, but quiet. Sort of cunning. And you’re tall. I bet you have a good aim, too.’

  ‘I bet you played Wing Attack, then,’ I say back to her.

  ‘Because …?’

  ‘Wing Attack is even more cunning, because you have to attack without shooting. You’re forbidden from entering the semi-circle, too, which is interesting…’

  ‘What is this?’ Dan says. ‘The Tao of fucking netball?’

  ‘Did you, though?’ Esther asks me. ‘Did you play Goal Shooter?’

  ‘Yeah, I did most of the time. And you?’

  ‘Yep. Wing Attack.’

  ‘OK, you’re both freaking me out now,’ Dan says.

  ‘Don’t worry, there are only seven positions in netball,’ I say to him.

 
; ‘Please, no probabilities,’ he begs.

  I could have explained it, though. There are seven positions in netball, one of which, after the way she described it, Esther wouldn’t have played, i.e. Goal Shooter. So that leaves six possibilities. I eliminated Goal Keeper because she’s not tall enough, and Centre because she doesn’t seem like a ‘Centre’ sort of person. That leaves only four choices. I guessed that she would have played attack, which leaves only two possible positions. A fifty-fifty chance of being correct, then – the same chance you’d have, incidentally, of finding two people with the same birthday in a room of twenty-three people. Was it that example that originally put Dan off probability? I can’t remember, although it is the sort of thing he would argue about. Maybe it was the Monty Hall Problem that he got annoyed about: most people do.

  The Monty Hall Problem, popularised by maths columnist Marilyn vos Savant, is this. You are a contestant in a game show and you have reached the final stage, at which point you are shown three identical doors. Behind one of these doors is a car. Each of the other two doors has a goat behind it. The game-show host asks you to pick one door. If you pick the door with the car behind it, you will win the car. If you pick a goat, you win nothing. So, you randomly pick one door out of the three. The host then makes a big show of opening one of the doors you didn’t pick, and reveals a goat. The audience cheer. The host, of course, knows which door has the car behind it. Now he asks you if you want to change your choice. There is a car behind one of the doors, and a goat behind the other. You know that. You don’t know whether you picked the car or the goat. The question is, would it be in your favour to change your mind now and swap to the other door?

  Most people, given this choice, will stick with the door they had chosen originally. Most people will say that there is a fifty-fifty chance of the car being behind either of the doors, so really it makes no difference whether you swap or stick to your choice. But this is wrong. You actually have a greater chance of winning the car if you swap doors. The maths for this is pretty simple. When you first made your choice, you had a 1/3 chance of being correct, or a 2/3 chance of being wrong. The chance that you would pick the wrong door was greater than the chance you would pick the right door. The host has now eliminated one of the goats. Considering that there was a 2/3 chance that you picked a goat in the first place, you should now swap. If you do so, you will double your chance of winning the car from 1/3 to 2/3. If you swap, the only circumstance under which you would not win the car is if you had picked the car with your first choice. But, as there was only a 1/3 chance that you would have done that, it makes sense to swap.

  But most people don’t believe this.

  Chapter Six

  If you lie on the grass and close your eyes, this could almost be a Sunday afternoon cricket match. There are small, tentative bird sounds and the smell of freshly cut grass. On top of this, the wind-blunted voices of competitors: ‘Now!’ ‘Run!’ ‘No!’ ‘Mine!’. Only – you don’t have a bloody whistle in cricket. It seems to be going off all the time, presumably because of the three-second rule. This feels, or at least sounds, like netball: unpleasantly so. I keep almost-dozing and then being woken up by the whistle. In the end I stop trying to doze and sit up instead, wishing I had my tobacco with me, or a flask of something interesting.

  Esther seems to be loading up a small pipe with skunk weed.

  ‘We’re on in a minute,’ Dan says.

  ‘Does anyone know what positions we’re playing?’ I say.

  ‘Forward,’ Esther mumbles. ‘All forward.’

  She lights the pipe and puffs on it urgently, holding in the smoke. Without saying anything she passes it to Dan, who looks at it suspiciously before passing it straight to me. Dan’s not big on substances. He did it all when he was ‘younger’, or so he tells me, and says that now all that kind of thing just gives him panic attacks. I, on the other hand, spent much of my youth in hibernation, wrapped up in a nest of grandparents and homemade stew and crossword puzzles and the wireless. Since then I have found many reasons to embrace some recreational drugs, adopting the same attitude towards them as I do towards other exotic things that never appeared on my grandparents’ wonky old radar (Thai curries, seafood, tofu, miso soup, garlic, croutons, unsalted butter, Parmesan cheese and so on): if it sounds/looks nice, and has less additives than children’s orange squash, it’s worth trying at least once. (Although my grandfather’s motto, Everything in moderation, applies very much here.)

  Esther’s pipe is a small green enamel thing on a chain.

  ‘It’s for crack,’ she explains. ‘But I only use it for weed.’

  ‘Where in God’s name do you buy crack pipes?’ Dan says.

  ‘Camden Market,’ says Esther.

  I take the lighter from her and light the mass of oily green leaves and buds in the pipe. Then I inhale the heavy smoke, trying not to cough. This is nice, actually: the weed tastes sweet and flowery, perhaps like thick honey. I pass back the pipe, nod a sort of acknowledgement and lie back on the grass for a few seconds, watching the clouds. When I sit up again, the sports field is pleasantly hazy. ‘Thanks,’ I say to Esther. ‘I needed that.’ She finishes the pipe and then makes another one. I don’t want any more; just a taste is usually enough for me.

  Her eyes are like tiny ink dots when Rebecca comes over.

  ‘We’re on,’ she says.

  ‘Us three are playing forward,’ Esther says to her, firmly.

  ‘Yeah, sure, OK,’ says Rebecca, looking slightly scared.

  ‘Hide your bloody eyes,’ I say to Esther, as we walk over to the pitch.

  ‘Why?’ she says.

  I laugh. ‘You look totally insane. Like you may have explosives strapped under your tracksuit or something.’

  ‘Good,’ she says seriously. ‘Let’s kill the opposition.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Dan says. ‘No. Oh no. Don’t look.’

  But we do look. And it seems that Mac is playing for the other team. And – what’s this? – Georges is jogging over in a silver (seriously) tracksuit, presumably to join our team. He winks at me before taking his position in the centre of the pitch. Oh God, why does he have to wink at me? Dan’s looking at me in a worried way. Am I swaying or something? I make a question-mark face at him and then he just grins. I look over at Esther and she really seems like some feral street child: small and wiry; jumping up and down making faces at the opposition. The three of us are indeed the forwards for our team, which I know is going to be disastrous. Dan is playing in some kind of striker/shooter position and Esther and I are on the wings: me on the left and her on the right (she thinks this will work out best with me being right-handed and her being left-handed). I would have felt more comfortable as the shooter/striker but it wouldn’t make any sense having the two lefties on both wings, apparently. Am I actually on the left or the right, I suddenly wonder, helicoptering my brain above the field and imagining an aerial view. I suppose it depends which way you look at the pitch. This is too confusing. I can do on and off sides. I can do slips and mid-wicket and cover and point and silly mid-off and square leg. I just thought I’d left wings behind ages ago.

  The way this game begins is as follows: Mac and Georges play-fence with their Paddles for a few minutes before being told by the umpire, a member of the Games Team, to take their places in the small centre circle. At this point Mac steals the ball and runs away with it, before Georges somehow gets it back and hides it in his tracksuit bottoms. They are laughing so much that the game is in danger of never starting. Eventually they stop messing around, and the umpire blows the whistle to begin the game. The umpire throws the ball high up into the air and Mac catches it in his Paddle. He starts running in our direction before someone points out to him that he should be going the other way. Despite all this activity, there doesn’t seem to be much reason for us to move at all. But yet – Esther has broken rank and has sprinted down the field where she is now tackling Mac, beating his Paddle from behind until the ball falls out. She
scoops it up in one seamless movement and starts running back up the field with it, doing a not completely terrible job of passing the ball between her Paddles. It actually looks pretty impressive. Even Mac stands there looking pleased-ish.

  ‘Alice!’ she calls.

  Oh God. The ball is flying through the air towards me. It’s a perfectly timed pass, you have to give her that. All I have to do is run forward a few paces and … Shit. I caught it. OK, so now I am running forward and it’s been like two seconds but I can’t face trying to pass the ball to my left Paddle, so I flip it, underarm, back to Esther instead. Something happens in her dark, stoned eyes and before I know it she is doing the same thing: running with it in her left Paddle for a second or two and then passing it back to me. In this way, we make it down the field towards Dan, with a couple of defenders from the other team chasing, but not catching us. They were never marking us: perhaps they didn’t think the balance of the game would change so quickly. This is actually a very efficient way to do this.

  ‘Dan,’ I call, once we are near him.

  He shakes his head but I toss the ball as near to his left Paddle as I can. Somehow, like the bit of a dream just before you wake up, he catches it and slams it into the goal. The three of us run around wildly for a few seconds as the ball is retrieved from the netting and thrown back up towards the circle. Esther soon stops celebrating and goes all killer-eyes again. I accidentally catch Mac’s eye as we walk back up the field to resume our positions. He mimes clapping. Is it sarcastic or not?

  Then he is back in the centre circle facing Georges. What’s this called? Teeing off? Bullying off? This game needs a bit more terminology as it’s hard to know what to call everything. Anyway, Georges fails to get the ball again but this time Mac passes it straight to their captain, a red-faced guy from the Games Team. He runs the length of the pitch, passing the ball expertly between his Paddles, and then passes it to their shooter who immediately drops it. One of our team then makes a good effort at sweeping in and picking up the ball but then keeps it in her Paddle for longer than three seconds, and the whistle blows. Mac and Georges are talking to one another near the circle but most of the other players on the field are now closing in on the Forward from the other team who is playing the free shot. It doesn’t make any difference. The player who takes the free shot is the red-faced guy, and the ball pings into the back of the net before anyone’s really sure where it has gone. The whistle blows and it all starts again.