PopCo (12 page)

It’s hard trying to cook dinner for yourself when you are nine.

For one thing, it’s actually impossible for me to reach the grill unless I stand on a chair. I wasn’t allowed to do this before my father left; am I allowed to do it now? No. If I slip and fall now there’ll be no one to look after me or go to the phone box to ring for an ambulance. I have to be more careful now, like the way I’m being careful not to cry. Anyway, things you use the grill for, like sausages, are too complicated and I can’t afford sausages any more. Today, for the third day in a row, I am making porridge with water from the tap and the big box of oats in the cupboard. I haven’t told anyone what has happened. I haven’t told my best friend Yvonne, who isn’t talking to me anyway, and I haven’t told a teacher or a grown-up friend. I can look after myself.

Ten days ago I came home from school to find that my father had simply gone. There was a note:
Sorry. Had to go. Ring your
grandparents and they will look after you
. Why haven’t I rung them? I don’t know. Perhaps it’s something to do with being so angry with my father that I can’t bear to follow his stupid instructions. Anyone knows that you don’t leave a nine-year-old child on her own. And maybe it’s something else, too: a vague sense that, if I can just hang on and weather this storm of unreality, the big waves of loneliness, fear and uncertainty will pass and things will just steady themselves back to normal. Dad will return from wherever he has gone, kiss me on the top of the head and apologise. However angry with him I am, my rationale is that I have to give him that chance. Phoning my grandparents would be tantamount to telling tales on him; I mean, if they knew he had left me here alone they would go ballistic. They’ve been complaining lately about me being what they call a ‘latchkey kid’, something to do
with the fact that until my father stopped working, I used to let myself in when I came home from school. I have a feeling they will view this much, much more seriously than that.

I am using sailing words a lot and thinking of things in terms of the sea because there are sailing books all over the house. In fact, they must be due back at the library soon. Dad will probably get a fine as well as everything else. I don’t think he cares, though. Maybe I’ll take them back for him. But I’m not sure I can carry them all. And they’re interesting, too. I have been reading one of them; a true story called
Survive the Savage Sea
, about a family stranded in a dinghy in the Pacific for two months. This book makes me feel better. If I have an orange while I am reading, I split it into small sections and give them to myself in rations, as if this was the last food I had in the world, and I pretend I am on an adventure with my family, far out at sea. I imagine a big family, with laughter and exciting stories and the ability to survive even a shipwreck.

I wish I had a pet. Not a dog or a cat or anything – that would be asking too much. A gerbil, guinea pig or fish would be ideal. I would give it a really nice name and feed it and look after it all the time. I would teach it to do special tricks, and tell it all my secrets. Dad always says the ‘novelty’ of a pet would wear off but I know it wouldn’t. He said once that I won’t know how I’ll feel in the future and that your future self is always going to be a surprising stranger with thoughts and feelings you don’t recognise. He didn’t say things like that before Mum died but now he says them all the time, with a misty, philosophical look in his eyes.
You
don’t know who you’ll become, Alice
. I only wanted a bloody gerbil. This is why I haven’t risked asking for a dog or a cat.

Has he gone sailing somewhere? Are the books connected to his disappearance or merely a red herring? Dad gets a lot of strange, sudden ideas and goes to the library to research them – but they very rarely lead to any direct action. Has this been an exception? Ideally he will just come back or – and this is what I think about late at night – I will work out where he has gone, find him and bring him back. If he comes back then my grandfather and grandmother won’t need to know that this ever happened. This is the plan at the moment.

You have to be careful with porridge because it is dangerous when it is boiling. If you spilled it on yourself you could get scarred
for life – maybe even on your face if you were really unlucky. So after I have let the water and oats boil in the pan for one minute precisely (which I count in my head:
one elephant, two elephants
and so on because my digital watch doesn’t have a timer) I simply switch off the gas and leave the pan to cool before I touch it. This is one of my emergency survival procedures. I am making a list of what these are. So far I also have:
Do not stand on chairs; Do not
use the grill; Do not plug things in or unplug them unless the switch
is definitely turned off
. One of Dad’s friends recently told us a story of being ‘thrown across the room’ by an electric shock. I don’t like the idea of that happening to me here on my own. Every time I remember something I have been told not to do in the past, I am adding it to the list. That’s the system. Sometimes you have to trust grown-ups, perhaps more so when they are not there to actually supervise you. It is only in the middle of the night that my resolve fails and I want to ring my grandfather but the phone box is two streets away and I am not allowed out after dark.

I am concerned about where I am going to get money for the gas and electricity meters. My food money has also almost run out. The food money came from my piggy bank in my bedroom. There was six pounds in there only ten days ago but it’s surprising to note how quickly it goes. It probably didn’t help that I had fish and chips for the first three nights, and spent one whole pound at the sweet shop a few days ago. Again, though, it’s hard to budget when there are no grown-ups around telling you what you are and are not allowed to buy. This, perhaps, is why children are not usually allowed to be in charge of money.

The Hoover is out-of-bounds so I don’t use it. I am also not allowed to use bleach. I have never actually done much cleaning: I used to help Mum before she died but after that Nana Bailey came to ‘tide us over’. Nana Bailey never lets me help with anything. ‘Get out from under my feet, Alice,’ is what she always says whenever I go anywhere near her. Dad’s pretty good at cleaning but was always ‘too tired’ when he came home from work. This is why Nana Bailey was helping us but she stopped when Dad lost his job. I was quite pleased about this but I didn’t say anything. Anyway, at least I don’t have to worry about her coming around now – I really do have enough to worry about. Still, I haven’t done a very good job of the
washing up over the last ten days. My first big mistake was to leave it to build up for about four days before tackling it properly. Then I couldn’t get any hot water to come out of the tap. I still don’t know how hot water works. I think it’s something to do with the red switch next to the boiler but I was always told not to touch that. It isn’t easy washing things in cold water, though, although I expect this is what you would do on a boat.

My bed is my boat. I have moved it away from the wall and put things from the bathroom (two rubber ducks and a fish-shaped sponge) around it as if they were bobbing in the sea. I have stuck the broom in the end of the bed, wedged between the mattress and the frame, and attached a sheet to it so it looks like a picture of a sail in my book. Notches in the side of the boat tell me how many days I have been here, alone at sea. There are ten so far. I have several books in my ‘boat’: obviously
Survive the Savage Sea
, a dictionary to help me with the complicated words (I have a reading age of sixteen but it is an adult book), a book of maths puzzles my grandfather got me last Christmas and two other sailing books I found lying around the house. I know three knots, now: the bow line, the reef knot and the clove hitch and I think – although I am not sure – that I have my sail rigged correctly. I think that tomorrow I will stay in my boat and not bother about school. Yvonne still isn’t speaking to me and I want to finish my book. Our maths topic is long division (which I can do already) and our English topic is ‘the seasons’ (which is boring) so it’s not as if I am going to miss anything.

*

PopCo Towers, as we have christened it, is again shrouded in mist on Monday morning. Sunday turned out to be a bit of a blur. After staying up thinking about the coded message until about five, I slept until almost midday. This nocturnal thing is becoming a bit of a habit, actually, which I am going to have to watch out for. Could it be natural? It’s hard to say. Being at home for the last couple of weeks researching my KidScout/KidTracker kit was relaxing mainly because I made the most of the night. I found myself still up at three in the morning usually, reading by my desk lamp. For two nights I actually camped in my small garden and made notes on ‘Creatures You Can Observe When Camping’. Because of the ‘back
garden feel’ that was requested at the last product meeting, I have made sure that the animals in this section of the book are mainly common, suburban or domestic in nature. While in my own garden I saw one cat (Atari), one hedgehog, two frogs, a toad, several slugs and snails and a dead mouse. I heard one owl hooting, the rustling of one fox/burglar and next door’s rabbit moving around its hutch.

By the time I was up and about yesterday it was too late to do anything useful, so I ended up getting a quick lunch on my own in the cafeteria and then walking around the gardens thinking about my survival research and trying to identify flowers and shrubs. I didn’t catch up with Dan until the evening and then we simply sat around playing cards until bedtime. I tried not to think of the message I received, although it has left me with an uncomfortable sense of anticipation. Will the person contact me again? It seems probable.
I knew you would be able to read this
does sound like a set-up for further correspondence. In my rational mind, I know that anyone who had my KidCracker kit would be able to send a message like that. And sending it to me would be logical: of course I would understand it – I invented the kit. Yet a paranoid part of me is saying,
What if?
What if it has started now, all these years later? Could someone know about the necklace? This is the kind of thing everyone was worried about back then. But no. I am being stupid.

There were events going on all day yesterday but I didn’t go to any of them. And as for Mac’s ‘Goodbye Speech’, well, it’s not goodbye, really, is it? Dan called me a ‘terrible skiver’ when I caught up with him and it’s true – I
do
skive off all the time. I don’t know why but sometimes I just get a complete mental block on organised activities. I never have a problem with any actual work but for some reason being in a specified place at a specified time and doing what I’ve been told to do sometimes trips the wrong set of switches in my brain. Sadly, the seminars planned for the following few weeks at PopCo Towers are all completely compulsory so it’s probably a good job I gave myself Sunday off. I have also ticked off the one item on my To Do list. I phoned Helen Forrest and organised for someone to go and collect Atari and take him to Rachel’s house. I have been imagining him travelling in a corporate cat box on a red cushion in a PopCo limousine. I think he would quite enjoy that.

Dan and Esther both have study bedrooms in the West Wing.
Mine is in the East. Other things I have discovered about being housed in the Main Building: there are small kitchens at the end of every hallway; each wing has its own ‘Common Room/Library’ and there is another, almost secret dining area down near the Great Hall in which, it turns out, there are actual chefs available to cook for us. Dan and I had dinner there last night, and are planning to have breakfast and lunch there today. Apparently, the chefs will make you up a packed lunch if you want to picnic in the grounds, or go walking on the moors. And we haven’t told them we are vegetarians – although I think I am definitely going to become one.

In the end I don’t see Dan in the dining room at breakfast time. I am bleary-eyed and confused, and manage only one slice of toast before I decide to take a cup of tea outside with me. As I walk out of the dining room I note a general sleepiness, but also a slight buzz in the air.

Esther is already outside smoking.

‘Bloody early,’ she mumbles.

‘Yeah,’ I say, lighting a roll-up.

‘Good idea,’ she says, gesturing at the fact that I have brought a cup of tea out with me. ‘I might get another cup before this all starts.’ She yawns. ‘Fucking hell.’

‘So how’s it going?’ I ask her. I haven’t actually seen Esther properly since Mac’s talk on Saturday night. I don’t even know what he wanted to talk to her about. Can I ask her directly? Probably not, although I am curious as hell.

‘All right,’ she says groggily. ‘Not sure about all this, though.’

I smile. ‘What, our secret assignment?’

‘Yeah. I don’t know. It’s sort of exciting to be chosen but …’

‘Weird.’

‘Yeah.
Weird
. I totally can’t work out why we were all picked. I don’t know anyone here apart from you and Dan, and I only met you on Saturday. Who are all these people?’

‘I don’t know either,’ I say. ‘Maybe they’re robots.’

‘Maybe.’

Two men go into a restaurant and order the same dish from the
menu. After tasting his food, one of the men goes outside and immediately
shoots himself. Why
?

I don’t believe this.

‘Jesus Christ,’ says Esther. I am in a ‘team’ with her and Dan. We have been in this room for only about two minutes so far and we have been asked to split into teams to solve this lateral thinking puzzle. I think it’s a hello/bonding exercise. There’s been no sign of Mac yet today, just the guy leading this seminar.

‘I know the answer anyway,’ I say. ‘So I’d better sit this one out.’

‘Why – or
how
– do you know the answer to such a stupid question?’ Esther asks.

‘My grandfather was an expert on lateral-thinking puzzles,’ I explain. ‘I think I know them all. By the way, I’ll give you a million pounds if you can get the answer to this one.’