PopCo

by Scarlett Thomas

  This time, Georges does get the ball but forgets to let go of it, or vibe it, or pass it to his other Paddle so the whistle goes and the ball is given to Mac for a free shot. Mac tries to pass the ball between his Paddles, like the red-faced guy did, but it all goes a bit wrong and Rebecca easily gets the ball from him as he fumbles it. She passes it to Esther, who passes it to me and we try to repeat our performance from before. The other team are onto us, though, and one player is getting a bit close to me, marking me slightly too aggressively for my liking (I think I said before that I don’t like being touched by strangers). It is the guy from lunch, slight and fast and smelling of mint. I try to back off but he follows me. The next time Esther passes the ball in my direction, he intercepts it and starts trying to run down the field with it. Esther quickly attaches herself to his team mate – the fawn-haired girl – and Rebecca is marking Mac. Even Georges is doing some kind of tribal dance in front of the red-faced guy. The guy with the ball is therefore left without any passing options. He tries to pass it to himself but I slither in and manage to get the ball as it crosses awkwardly between his two Paddles. Esther is now being heavily marked by the fawn-haired girl so I attempt a long-ish pass down to Dan. Amazingly, he catches it and slams it in the net again. 2–1.

  I almost slept with Georges once, which is why I try not to catch his eye as we come off the field. We have won, the final score being 3–1. Esther really does look like she might die now. Someone has very thoughtfully brought out orange and lemon quarters so Dan and I sit sucking on those while Esther lies on the ground and coughs a lot.

  No one ever knew about me and Georges. He’d come over to take the team out one night and we did genuinely hit it off. I liked him. He had an air of rebellion and boyishness about him, but also a deep, deep power. We talked, first about toys, and then, later, about other things: an experimental musician we both liked; a writer. The conversation was not at all like one of those consumerist questionnaires that new acquaintances sometimes give you (What’s your favourite film? Band? Club? Album? Designer label?). Instead we talked about how this musician – who I thought no one else had ever even heard of – somehow made you want to get into bed on your own with citrus fruits, and rub them all over your body; and how the writer used crazy, semi-conscious metaphors that made you want to eat the actual book. It was one of those intense nights in Soho; close and hot, about to rain at any moment. When we left the club (a strip club, of course) the thunder started and we ran giggling into a company car. How far did it go? His hands on my breasts, on my thighs, my skirt pulled up in the back of the car and his hands creeping to the edge of my knickers and then … I stopped him. You don’t sleep with the boss, do you? You just can’t. But I did want him; I really did, even if I still don’t know why. How is it possible to feel that attracted to a man more than ten years older than you, who regularly takes women – that he employs – to strip clubs without thinking they might be embarrassed, who has so many shares in this company it’s just obscene, who probably has a wife back in New York? He even had manicured nails. But being with him felt like … Not like being in a film, which wouldn’t have appealed to me as much. No, it felt a bit like being in a comic or a graphic novel, comfortably enclosed within squares on a page, with rainy, inked-in evil all around but one safe place, a secret, dark place that only exists at night: a hideout, or a whole identity. Secrets only work at night, really, don’t they? Maybe that’s why I couldn’t do it. Perhaps I knew I wouldn’t be able to face the morning. To his credit, Georges has never held it against me or even mentioned it again. He probably forgot it ever happened. He winked at me before but he probably winks at everyone.

  ‘Alice?’ It’s Dan.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘We’re back on in a minute.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  Afterwards we are given forms to fill out, like we’re kids in a focus group. Overall feeling about the game? Playability? Feelings about terms used? And so on. Then, finally: Suggestions for a name for this game? (Winner will receive PopCo shares and a crate of champagne.) We got to the final of the tournament but lost 2–1 to the team who had laughed all the way through the warm-up, and which included both Chi-Chi and Carmen.

  After we are all showered and changed back into normal clothes it’s time for Georges’s speech in the main hall. One exchanged look confirms that Esther and I won’t be going. We have lost track of Dan but he probably wouldn’t want to skive off something like this anyway. Me, I just can’t sit and watch that man for an hour or more, imagining his hands on my legs and so on, and Esther is just too fucked to be able to keep still in a big hall. She has that look of a cat that needs to be let out to piss, probably in the neighbours’ garden.

  ‘I think I overdid it,’ she says, as we slip off towards the forest behind the car park. ‘Too much running around.’

  I quite like Esther, I think. I wonder why I haven’t seen her around that much at Battersea. If I had seen her, I don’t think it would have been possible to ignore her. She’s like phosphorous or something, fizzing all the time. Perhaps we would have become friends, if I’d seen her at Battersea. She’s not like the other people I work with, anyway. Now that we’re changed, she’s wearing a short green tartan pleated skirt, a T-shirt with a skull on it, an old cardigan and red scruffy trainers. She definitely wouldn’t hit the right frequency with the in-crowd at work. I am wearing a knee-length corduroy skirt with my plimsolls and a thick jumper. Preppy look today Alice? But no one who cares is here.

  ‘What did you say you did at Battersea?’ I ask Esther.

  ‘Just hang around and stuff.’

  ‘I mean, are you a designer or what?’

  We are in the forest now. It’s dark and a bit damp-smelling. I am glad of my jumper: today is one of those days where you have to be either running around or actually standing in the sun to be at all warm. We start following a path through the trees and there are noises: lonely birds, damp insects; a brief fluttering and a constant hum. There is a fairly wide path on which we are walking, with reddish, dry earth beneath our feet. As I walk I become aware that my footsteps feel soft, and I entertain the idea that this path is the top of something hollow. It can’t be, though, really. Perhaps it’s something to do with the density of this earth. It makes me think a bit of pottery, especially old earthenware containers.

  ‘I bet people have died in here,’ Esther says, wrinkling her nose. I don’t think she’s going to tell me what she does at Battersea. And I don’t think I should push it. I don’t quite understand how it can be a secret, though, but whatever.

  ‘This used to be a boarding school,’ I say. ‘So I bet all sorts of scary stuff has happened in here.’ I think about my conversation with Mac again, and the Kid Lab noises. ‘I wonder where all the kids went,’ I say, suddenly.

  ‘What, from the boarding school?’

  ‘No. Sorry – two trains of thought. No, there were kids before, at the Sports Field. I just wondered where they all went.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about this place,’ Esther says.

  ‘Oh, I got here a bit early.’

  I’m not going to tell her about Mac, or my night-journey. So now we are both keeping secrets.

  There’s a gazebo deep in the forest: old, with chipped paint on the outside and rusty hinges. We fall on it excitedly and start trying to open the door. It takes a few tries but eventually it does open, with a broken-sounding creak, and we enter it like naughty schoolkids who’ve found a secret grotto. There are crispy old leaves inside, and a platform for sitting on. The window frames are greenish with mould and all you can see through the smeared glass is the idea of trees. We sit on the platform and Esther starts rolling a joint.

  ‘Fuck it,’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She sighs. ‘Why aren’t you at Georges’s speech, then?’

  ‘Because I’m here?’ I try.

  ‘No, come on. Really, why?’

  ‘Really why?’ I sigh. ‘Oh
– can I tell you some other time?’

  Esther shrugs. I half expect her to start questioning me – I have accidentally given her a question-mark after all – but she doesn’t. She just kicks around some of the leaves under our feet.

  ‘I wonder how it’s going,’ she says. ‘Georges and his speech.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Why do they think they’re better than us?’ she asks, suddenly.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mac. Georges. The Directors. Why? They’re something here, yeah. But in, say, my local supermarket they’d be nothing. If you didn’t know who they were, you could bump them with your trolley and not have to sweat about it for two months and send all your friends e-mails saying you can’t believe who you saw in the supermarket and what you did to them … They’d just be a nobody, and so would you, and none of it would matter.’

  ‘Well, they sort of are nobodies. We all are, really.’

  ‘Not all of us. Not …’ She kicks around some more with her scuffed trainers. ‘Pop stars. Film stars. If the lead singer from say …’ She thinks for a while and then names the most successful rock band in the country. ‘If he walked in here now you wouldn’t treat him like nobody. You couldn’t.’

  I would actually be more interested in the lead guitarist but I don’t want to confuse the issue. In fact, it’s odd that she’s mentioned this band, as I often have odd dreams about the lead guitarist: not wanting to fuck him or anything, more wanting to be him. I even want his hairstyle. But I won’t say any of this. ‘So …?’

  ‘Are you going to any festivals this year?’

  ‘No. I don’t like crowds.’

  ‘You don’t like crowds?’ She sounds pleased.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Being in them, or from above?’

  ‘Huh?’ I frown. ‘From above?’

  ‘Being in a mass … You can only really see how horrible a crowd is when you see it from above, like when they televise festivals. When you’re in the crowd, you’d be, what? A dot, a nothing, a statistic. Whose statistic? Some PR firm? An advertising agency?’ She puts on an advertising-style voice. ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if we were all connected to the same mobile phone network? Wouldn’t it be just great if we could all text message each other pictures of ourselves watching the same band in the same crowd, at the same time? I don’t want to be in the fucking crowd. I’m not an insect. I don’t want to be the same as the person I am standing next to. I don’t want to be in the fucking audience anyway … I want …’ She trails off, looking vaguely through the window at the almost-forest outside.

  I actually know what she means, though, which is rare. Usually when someone starts talking passionately I end up tuning out, even if I don’t mean to. I find it hard to connect. But then I’ve never liked crowds myself, and I’m not that big on advertising, either. I also don’t like doing things that thousands of other people do.

  ‘I want …’ she repeats.

  ‘You want to be in the band,’ I suggest.

  She looks at me strangely. ‘Yeah. Maybe, but …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Being in the band means that those insects give you meaning. Being in a band means that you’d be the reason for the crowd, you’d be responsible for an emerging demographic: fans of your band. What can we sell them? Flame-grilled burgers or burgers with gherkins? Oh? This demographic is mainly vegetarian? OK, well let’s have a brainstorm about the packaging for that fruit drink – I’m thinking a self-referential, knowing, playful Utopia pastiche, kind of hippy in style – and maybe something for those flapjacks. Meanwhile, back at Team PopCo: Oh my God, the cool rock stars are all wearing sweatbands this year! We have to design the Star Girl and Ursula sweatbands this week. Get them on the website now and I’ll get on to Manufacturing …’

  ‘Does the band know this, though?’ I interrupt.

  ‘Of course they do. I haven’t even started on the record companies yet. Big rock bands try to be anti-establishment,’ Esther says. ‘Some of them, anyway. And then we just sell anti-establishment stuff to their fans. We watch what they wear on stage and sell it off our websites. Their record companies don’t care as long as there’s a market – they just send out briefs for artwork that say “anti-establishment” on them. These cunts don’t care if you’re anti-them, as long as you make them some money. So you’re a star in this system? You’re famous? Great. You’re making someone else loads of money. Let’s all go and have hamburgers to celebrate! It’s like a bunch of vampires sucking one corpse dry. Who wants to be a vampire or a corpse? No one. But everyone is. Everyone apart from Georges and Mac and people like them and all the fucking shareholders in the world.’

  I think I have just heard the reason why Esther has skipped Georges’s speech.

  ‘Look, I know you don’t want to say what exactly you do,’ I say. ‘But you must work with Chi-Chi on K. I mean …’ People burn out all the time working on K. I’ve seen it happen. They get a kind of intense pop culture overload and it’s very unpleasant; worse than the measles. It almost happened to Dan, then he and Chi-Chi fell out and he was spared.

  Esther laughs and it comes out almost like a squeal. ‘Shit, I’m totally ranting, aren’t I? Look, you’ll have to remember to just tell me to shut up when I start going on … Fuck. I can’t end up like a malfunctioning version of one of Chi-Chi’s evil automatons.’ She gets up and starts staggering around the small gazebo like a robot, with her arms held out in front of her. ‘I – will – be – cool – I – will – use – my – evil – thoughts – in – a – positive – way – rebellion – is – cool …’

  ‘So you don’t work on K?’

  ‘I’m not actually allowed to tell anyone what I do,’ she says. ‘And I wasn’t even supposed to say that, so you’d better stop asking me.’

  ‘OK,’ I say, too quickly. ‘I heard nothing.’

  Esther looks slightly alarmed. ‘It’s not that big a deal,’ she says. ‘But thanks. I fucking hate Georges, though, don’t you?’

  Chapter Seven

  ‘I heard nothing.’

  It’s my dad, not very long before he disappeared. We’re living in the centre of the city, about a month before the lay-offs started at the button factory. My grandfather has come over, but instead of sitting down to drink milky tea and play chess with me, he’s arguing with my father.

  ‘Please, Bill,’ he says.

  ‘Look, I told you. I heard nothing. It’s zipped, all right.’

  He mimes pulling a zipper over his mouth. When I do this with my friends it’s a sign of absolute secrecy and trust, and we do it with big solemn eyes. But my father’s eyes are blank and cold, and his fingers look wrong making the movement. They’re too big and grown-up. His middle finger is stained yellow from smoking, and his hands shake. They always shake; more so when my grandfather is here.

  ‘Yes, but Bill?’ my grandfather says.

  ‘What?’ my father replies. I can’t remember – this memory is as brown and dusty as our old sofa – but I think my dad is coating two slices of bread with lard while the frying pan heats up. ‘What?’ he says again.

  ‘If they find out that I know anything I …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just – please – don’t say anything else, all right? Think of Alice, if nothing else.’

  ‘I am thinking of Alice,’ my father almost hisses. ‘Why do you think this is important to me? These things … This …’ He seems to search for a word he cannot find. ‘It … It always seems to be just a game with you. A bit of fun, an intellectual challenge, like doing the sodding crossword. And this time, when it could actually be useful to us, when it’s not just messing around but something real … You chuck it all away. You just chuck it away like it’s rubbish, and …’

  ‘No. You’re the one treating this like a game.’

  ‘Oh, come on. You talk about danger this and danger that … It’s just fantasy.’

  ‘No.’ My grandfather sighs. ‘But anyway, it is up to me, not you.’
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  ‘You’ve got a house, yeah? You’ve got a sodding house and a sodding garden and you don’t have to worry about making ends meet in the real world. Look at what we’ve got. And then ask yourself why this matters to me.’

  ‘It’s just a stupid dream, though. It probably doesn’t exist. It’s bad enough that we are arguing over it. We are certainly not risking our lives over something that might not exist. I absolutely forbid it.’

  ‘You forbid it?’ My father can’t seem to believe that my grandfather is speaking to him this way.

  ‘Yes. I forbid you to do anything else that will put us in danger.’

  ‘If you just told me, then I could … I’d take the chance … It wouldn’t involve you.’

  ‘No. Now – please – that really is the end of this.’

  And I’m sitting there with a book, pretending not to listen, playing with my necklace, wondering if the secret it contains relates to the secret my dad isn’t allowed to tell. Think of Alice. And I want to know it, this secret, so badly that I get a stomach ache that lasts for a week. I have examined this necklace but I can’t make sense of it at all. It is a silver locket with a strange combination of numbers and letters engraved inside it: 2.14488156Ex48, and a little swirling pattern.

  Think of Alice. Think of Beatrice.

  Beatrice was my mother. By the time things started to go wrong between my grandfather (her father) and my father, she had been dead for almost two years. She was the one who gave me my name, my books, my identity. She stamped it on me when I was a baby, a mark I refused to wash off. One night, during that winter when we hardly had money for the meter and he argued with my grandfather constantly, my father took my necklace. He copied out the numbers and letters, and the little swirling pattern, and then put it back around my neck when he thought I was asleep. You have to wonder about parents sometimes. You’re not asleep when they are pretending to be Father Christmas, and you’re certainly not asleep when they are stealing secret objects from you so they can copy them. How is it that they don’t realise this?