PopCo (35 page)

He offers me a printed-out sheet, from which he has crossed off the few drugs in existence that he hasn’t given me. My name and address are already printed at the top which makes me do a double-take until I realise that my details must simply have been pulled off the Human Resources database. The bill for this will, of course, go straight to them, or Georges’s office, or some dark, remote part of PopCo. I am tired now, so I sign the form without asking any more questions. I just want to make him go.

Once he has gone, I look at all this medicine that I don’t need or want. I wonder what would happen if I did take this lot all at once. Would I have a quiet death? A sleepy death? A pain-free death? A paranoid, angst-ridden death? I open the bottle of Vicodin and look at the clean white tablets inside. Maybe I could do with some serious pain-killing at the moment. I didn’t want these but now I’ve got them maybe I will give them a try. Just one. Maybe it will take the cigarette craving away a little. Or was it the Valium that was supposed to do that?

There’s a knock at the door which makes me jump. I haul myself out of this mountain of medication and open the door. Ben comes in, looking tired.

‘Fucking hell,’ he says when he sees all the drugs everywhere. ‘Where did all this come from?’

‘Doctor Death,’ I say, getting back into bed. ‘I don’t know if he’s the official PopCo doctor or what. Georges sent him.’

Ben doesn’t pick up on the reference to Georges, for which I am grateful. Instead, once I have got back into bed, he sits on the edge of it and starts looking at all the packets.

‘Shit. You’ve got Vicodin here. This is totally addictive. You haven’t taken any of it, have you?’

I shake my head. ‘No. I didn’t want it. He just kept giving me more and more stuff. I don’t know what to do with it all, to be honest. Maybe I’ll just flush it all.’

‘No. I’ll take it to a chemist where they can dispose of it prop
erly. Don’t want to flush all this into the water system.’ Ben frowns. ‘Fucking hell. What a racket. I bet that he gets a commission from the drug companies every time he prescribes one of their products. It must be great being a private doctor, employed by corporations. You can give out as much of this shit as you want, knowing that a big accounts department is going to unquestioningly pay your bill, knowing that you’re getting a nice kickback from the drug companies as well.’ Ben picks up one of the boxes, which contains the inhaler. ‘Are you asthmatic?’ he asks me, looking concerned.

‘No! I tried to tell him but …’

‘They give inhalers away to every second person these days. It’s not healthy to take this sort of medication if you don’t need it. God.’

Ben seems to be getting more and more angry but after frowning for a few more seconds, he looks at me and laughs.

‘Sorry. Too many paranoid-conspiracy books, perhaps. Blame my job, and all the bloody research I have to do.’

‘No, I think you’re right,’ I say. ‘It all makes logical sense.’

‘Depressing, though.’

Now I smile. ‘Well, if you’re depressed I could offer you, oh, I don’t know. Some Valium? Some speed?’

‘Don’t tempt me. It wasn’t too long ago that I would have fallen on these boxes with joy. Especially the speed. Let’s look at it?’ He takes the box. ‘Oh yes. Could get a few fun all-nighters worth of coding out of this. Mmm.’

I take the box away from him.

‘What happened?’ I say. ‘Why did you …?’

‘What? Give it all up? Dunno. Got too old, I think.’

‘How old are you?’ I don’t even know this about him, I suddenly realise.

‘Thirty-one.’ He sighs.

‘That’s still young,’ I say.

‘Yeah, but … OK. Maybe it wasn’t just age that did it.’

‘What did, then?’

‘I don’t know. A lot of things… How can I put it? A lot
changed
for me about a year or two ago. Got rid of the drugs, got healthy again, went vegan.’ He stares past me at the wall, a lost expression in his eyes. ‘I … Oh, I can’t really tell you the whole story but … I read a few books while I was researching
The Sphere
that made me think differently about the way the world works. Investigative reports about the environment, animal rights, the effects of junk food, corporations. All the reading was because of the central idea in
The Sphere
, that there’s this evil corporation which dupes the public into believing that what it is doing is good for them. We’ve modelled the Dream Prison on various ideas from battery farming, animal experimentation labs and sweatshops. So I had to read a lot of horrible material.’ He snaps his eyes away from the wall and shakes his head, looking at me. ‘It really wakes you up when you know what’s going on. But it’s hard to talk to people about it, because they think you’re nuts, or you’re making it all up. I mean, there’s stuff going on out there that certainly sounds made-up.’

‘People would rather believe in a thirty-second bit of marketing than the truth anyway,’ I say. ‘It’s easier to listen to stuff you want to hear.’ I know this because I, too, am like this. I fit into this category myself. I don’t like the amount of packaging we use at PopCo but whenever they send an e-mail around saying that we are reducing it, or that we have met 80 per cent of our ‘environment targets’ I allow myself to feel a warm glow. But deep down I know it’s all bullshit and we still use hard plastic wrapping on everything.

‘That’s true,’ Ben says.

‘But I don’t think you’re nuts,’ I say. ‘So this stuff actually made you vegan, then?’

‘Yeah,’ Ben says. ‘There’s something about the way we treat animals that just seems so, I don’t know,
dystopian
: like contemporary life is like some far-fetched science-fiction novel.’ He gives me a serious look that mutates into a grin. ‘You know, I read about this series of experiments where they got animals to ask for food by pressing buttons. Birds had to balance on a lever. Other animals like pigs and cows used their snouts. The researchers found that cows liked to be stroked, so much so that they would press a button to make it happen. The pigs in particular were so advanced that they learnt every single thing they were taught. They were happily pressing buttons for food, for strokes, for toys. I looked at the pictures of these pigs sitting in front of these consoles and I thought, “Fucking hell, I can’t eat an animal that can play videogames,” and then I became a vegetarian. I hadn’t felt right about eating meat
since I got my dog, actually, and this book I read just confirmed it. Then, a bit later, I did the whole thing and went vegan. That’s my vegetarianism in a nutshell, actually,’ he laughs. ‘
Don’t eat
anything that can play videogames
.’

‘Where does butter come into this?’ I ask, also laughing. ‘I mean, why go totally vegan …?’

‘Do you really want to know?’ he says, frowning suddenly.

‘Yeah. Why not?’ I say back.

‘Well, do you know how milk is produced?’

Do I know how milk is produced? I’m not sure. I scan my mind for images but all I can come up with is a scene from some of the marketing material for Farmyard Friends, where a ruddy-cheeked milkmaid is sitting on a milking stool next to Daisy or Buttercup in a green plastic field. That’s not how you get milk now, is it? I can see a grainy image of cows in stalls in my mind but nothing else comes. This is stupid. I drink milk all the time. How can I not know how it is produced?

‘Dairy cows have a pretty horrible time,’ Ben says, cutting into my thoughts. ‘Forced to be pregnant year after year, killed once their milk production dies off a bit – usually when they are only about two or three years old – and in this constant torment looking for their calves …’

I frown. ‘Looking for their calves?’

Ben nods. ‘Yeah. Well, the calves are taken away as soon as they’re born. Then they’re killed for veal, or just killed. It’s … it’s so sad the way that the cows keep calling for their calves and looking for them. I don’t know. It got to me, anyway.’

We sit in silence for a few seconds while I digest this.

‘Where is your dog?’ I say, eventually.

‘With my cousin. We live together. He’s looking after her while I’m here.’

‘Do you miss her?’

‘God yes.’

‘I have a cat,’ I say. I think for a moment. Then I say to Ben, ‘I don’t know much about it, but conventional farms don’t really have yards any more, do they? They’re not like the “farmyard” toys we sell, are they? I mean, it’s not just the dairy cows that have shit lives, is it?’

‘No,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘No. Now farms are like prisons.’

Usually, when I think about the word ‘farm’ I see it in terms of toy cows and pigs and little pretend fences. Perhaps thinking about the world in terms of toys makes things easier to cope with (even the fences are cute!) Or maybe not. What about when you realise that the fences aren’t pretend? I know one vegetarian (Rachel) and now one vegan. But it’s not a ‘normal’ thing to be, is it?

And then I think another odd thought. Does marketing do this? Is it marketing that makes us think that something like being a vegetarian is as stupid as wearing shoulder pads and too much blusher? Is it just marketing that makes us feel good about tucking into a 99p slab of dead cow at lunchtime? That, and the fact that everyone else does it too, perhaps. Who said that recently? Mark Blackman, in the network seminar.
The more people that do something,
the more likely you are to do it too
.

And I wonder. Was Ben right about cows liking to be stroked?

‘I think you’re brave,’ I say to Ben, eventually.

‘Me, brave? Why on earth would you think that?’

‘Most people would think you’re nuts being a vegan,’ I say. ‘But I don’t know why. Now I think about it, everything seems a bit nuts.’

He gets onto the bed next to me. ‘Yeah. Well.’ Ben strokes my head slowly while we both look at the ceiling.

‘Are you happy?’ I ask him.
Are you happy?
I think of the coded message that asked me that. I still don’t know the answer. What does my happiness matter anyway? Perhaps that’s the most logical response.
Does it matter?

‘What, now?’ Ben says.

‘Yeah.’

‘Yes. I’m happy now. Right at this tiny moment in time, I am very happy.’

‘But everything’s so fucked up.’

‘Yes, but you just do what you can about that. You do what you can, and then you stop. Believe me, you can almost go mad otherwise.’

‘Do what you can? Like being a vegan?’

‘Yeah.’ He sighs. ‘And other stuff. I … I wish I could talk to you about everything.’

‘Why can’t you?’

He bites his lip. ‘I just can’t.’

I pause for a second. ‘Does being a vegan help, then?’

‘Yes. Well, I think so.’

‘How? I mean, does it help more than say, just being a vegetarian?’

‘I think so. I mean, you’re not buying anything connected to the meat industry, which has to be good. Look it up sometime and you’ll see what they do to geese and pigs and chickens. By being a vegan you’re not giving profits to the scum in those industries. You’re, I don’t know, unplugging yourself from the Matrix a bit.’ He shrugs.

I think about Mark Blackman again. ‘But you’re just one person. Everyone else is still buying animal products.’

‘Yes, but I spend, what … ten thousand or so quid a year on food. At least. We all do, well those of us with salaries like ours do, anyway. None of that is going into the meat industry now. Like I said, you do what you can do and then stop. Those things are what I can do.’

‘And the “other stuff”.’

‘Yes. And the other stuff.’

‘Is it legal?’

‘Huh? Oh yes. It’s not that. I just really can’t talk about it now.’

‘Ben?’

‘What?’

I look at all the stuff on my bed. ‘Shall we just take a load of these drugs?’

‘No. They’ll make us feel worse.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘I really wish I could have a cigarette.’

At my old school, getting changed for PE took place in a comfortable warm room next to the school hall, in which we did self-expression (dancing around with bits of material) and dance (dancing around without bits of material). Otherwise we would go
outside to play netball on the courts just beyond the classrooms. I don’t remember it being at all traumatic.

PE is not like that here. At my last school, if you forgot your PE kit you just had to sit quietly and read a book while the other kids did PE. At my new school, if you forget your PE kit, you have to do PE in your underwear. This isn’t a joke! The actual PE kit is almost as bad as underwear, anyway. For girls it’s a very short blue pleated skirt, blue PE knickers and an aertex top in the colour of your school house. There is no comfortable heated changing room here. Instead, there is a concrete outbuilding split into Boys and Girls. The girls’ half is a dank cave of dark metal hooks, thin wooden benches and – horror of horrors – communal showers. PE is the most evil and stupid thing ever invented. At eleven years old, with all the precise codes and conventions of being that age, the very last thing you want to do is be naked in front of your classmates. The second last thing you want to do is be forced to walk around outside in the cold wearing a skirt so short and revealing that, if you tried to wear it in any other normal life situation, people would stare and whisper and probably have you arrested for indecency. Yet we have to do both these things, three times a week.

‘I’m not wearing this outside,’ Emma says, during our first proper PE lesson. This takes place on the Friday of our second week at school because of all the induction activities. ‘Miss?’ She starts waving her hand in the air, trying to get the attention of the PE teacher, Miss Hind. ‘Miss?’

‘What is it?’ Miss Hind says.

‘Do we have to go outside wearing this?’

‘What’s your name?’ asks Miss Hind, sharply.

‘Emma.’

‘Well, yes,
Emma
, you do.’

‘But it’s disgusting, Miss.’

‘I’m sorry, Emma? It’s
what?
’

‘Disgusting.’

‘Yeah,’ I say, backing her up.

‘There’s boys out there, Miss,’ says Michelle.

I will later find out that what Michelle wears for ice-skating is much, much more revealing than our frumpy PE skirts. But I will also learn that she would rather die than have anyone see her in these outfits.

‘Why don’t boys have to wear skirts?’ says Tanya. ‘It’s really sexist.’

‘Why can’t we just wear tracksuits?’ I say.

‘Professional sportswomen wear skirts like yours,’ Miss Hind says.

‘But we’re not …’ Tanya starts.

‘Or, if they’re athletes, they wear just knickers. Haven’t you seen them on the telly?’

Our classmates are looking at us with a mixture of admiration and awe. It is so great going around with this lot. I have never had people look at me like this before. But so far we are the only girls who will stand up to the teachers so I suppose we do deserve some sort of recognition.

‘In fact,’ Miss Hind says. ‘
You
will be the ones wearing only knickers if you complain again. All of you. Do you understand?’

‘We’ll go on strike if she tries to do that,’ Emma whispers to me. But we do stop complaining at this point. We know deep down that resistance is futile in these situations and that teachers always get their own way in the end.

‘Right,’ Miss Hind says. ‘All jewellery in here please.’

She starts walking around with a tattered cardboard box. This bit takes ages. Various girls have only recently had their ears pierced, and can’t take out their studs in case their holes close up. These girls are issued with bits of tape to stick over their studs. It looks very stupid. Although all my friends have had their ears pierced for ages, I’m not going to have mine done until the holidays (if my grandparents even let me). There’s no way I am going to draw attention to myself by going around with tape stuck to my ears. Other people have valuable crucifixes that they don’t want to put in the box, even though Miss Hind assures them that the box will be locked in the PE safe during the lesson. When she gets to me, I’m so busy talking to Emma that I hardly notice she’s there.

‘Necklace, please,’ she says sternly.

Everyone looks at me. I can feel myself blush.

‘What, me?’ I say stupidly.

‘Necklace, please. Hurry up.’

‘But …’

‘Necklace!’

‘I’m not supposed to take it off, Miss.’

She is cross now. ‘I have just about had enough of you girls. Put the necklace in the box, please.’

‘I had a note from my parents …’ I can’t say grandparents. No one knows that I don’t live with my parents like any normal child. No one in this room attended my birthday party, and even if they had they wouldn’t know my domestic set-up because of the village hall. Alex is the only person to have ever noticed I don’t have parents. ‘… at my last school. I just need a new one. I …’

‘Have you ever seen someone’s head ripped off because they have been wearing a necklace during sport? It’s not very nice. Or watching someone’s face turn blue as they choke to death, strangled by the crucifix they “have to wear because of Jesus”? I am not going to lose my job because one of you girls is too stupid to listen and follow rules correctly. No excuses. In the box.’

I am almost crying as I fiddle with the clasp on the necklace. I don’t even know how the clasp works, as I have never taken it off before. In the end, Emma helps me, for which I am very, very grateful. I go to drop it in the box but Miss Hind grabs it as it is about to slide in.

‘What is this thing, anyway?’ she asks, opening the catch and looking inside the locket. As she does this, the small picture inside (of my mother) flutters onto the ground. I go to pick it up but she is quicker than me. Now she’s holding the locket in one hand and the picture in the other hand. I thought she would look at the picture but it’s too late. She’s seen the code.

I feel like I will definitely cry in a minute. Why is she doing this?

‘What on earth is this?’

As an adult, you could say something nonchalant, like, ‘Oh, it’s from a boyfriend. It’s a coded message of love.’ Or, ‘Oh, my grandfather was interested in cryptography a long time ago. It simply says “I love you, Alice” in secret code.’ But I am a child.

‘It’s a picture of my mother,’ I say, playing dumb.

‘Not that. These numbers and letters. 2.14488156Ex48,’ she reads out, slowly. ‘What do they mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say.

‘You don’t know?’ Miss Hind sneers at me. ‘You wear this on your neck. You must know what it is.’

Everyone is staring at me. Even my new friends are looking at me like I am a weirdo or something.

‘I don’t know,’ I manage to say, again, as tears start to form in my eyes. If only there was something I could say. But there isn’t. I can’t say it’s a phone number or a birthday or anything like that. No one goes around with a jumble of numbers inside a locket. No one. I can’t tell her the story of why I have it, in front of the whole class. Apart from it being weird and embarrassing, my grandfather told me never to tell anyone about the necklace. This is why I put the picture in it. But I never thought anyone would actually be able to examine it the way Miss Hind is doing now. The silence seems to go on for ever.

‘Well?’ she says.

Will I ever escape from this?

‘It is probably a hallmark, surely?’ someone suddenly says, in an odd accent. I look around and see that it is Roxy, this French girl no one ever speaks to. Being French is even weirder than having no parents in this school. Don’t ask me why. ‘Perhaps you have never seen one before?’ she says to Miss Hind. ‘If it’s a Paris hallmark then you would only have seen it if you bought the most exclusive jewellery, which I find doubtful …’

All I know about Roxy so far is that she previously went to an English-speaking school in Paris and speaks English and French perfectly. She is a year older than the rest of us and gets picked up from school every day in a sleek black car driven by a good-looking man in blue jeans. I am thinking,
Yes, I’ll say my dad bought it for
me in Paris
, but Miss Hind has already lost interest in the necklace. In about one second it is in the box and she is on the other side of the room, pinning Roxy up against a rusty sanitary towel machine.

‘You little …’ she starts to say.

‘Put her down, Miss.’ This is Emma. ‘Miss, you shouldn’t do that.’

Roxy’s pale face is still defiant. ‘Hit me if you want,’ she says to Miss Hind in her soft French accent. ‘But if you do, my father will make sure you get the sack.’

This PE lesson is definitely not going well.

Miss Hind releases her hold on Roxy. ‘You three,’ she says, meaning me, Emma and Roxy. ‘Get out of my bloody sight. Now!’ Teachers don’t usually say ‘bloody’. Michelle, Lucy, Sarah and Tanya are regarding us with both sympathy and distrust.

‘Where are we supposed to go?’ says Emma.

‘Headmistress’s office. Now.’

We leave the changing rooms still wearing our PE kit. All I keep thinking, as we walk across the concrete playground into the main building, is that my necklace is in there, in that box. How will I ever get it back now? I can’t go home without it and leave it here all weekend. I want to be wearing my proper school uniform, not my PE kit. But I am not going to cry.

‘Thanks,’ I say to Roxy.

‘Bloody hell,’ says Emma. ‘We’re in so much trouble.’

But it is thrilling, in a way.

‘You know, there is no such thing as a Paris hallmark,’ Roxy says.

We all laugh. We are in trouble, but we are free. The only problem with my laughter is that there is a terrible anxiety hidden inside it. I have to get my necklace back.

The headmistress is called Miss Peterson.

‘Why are you three here?’ she says, once we are inside her room. Her room is off the newly refurbished school foyer, which is next to the school hall. It is hot and stuffy and smells of glue and school dinners.

‘We have no idea,’ Roxy says, sweetly. ‘There was a minor disagreement with Miss Hind and …’

‘Miss Hind pinned Roxy against the wall,’ Emma blurts out.

‘We were really scared,’ I add.

‘All right,’ Miss Peterson says. She sighs. ‘I am fairly sure that you are exaggerating, as girls your age are prone to do. Members of my staff do not pin people against walls. Roxy?’

‘Yes Miss,’ she says. ‘I think it was a misunderstanding.’ The way she pronounces the word ‘misunderstanding’ makes it seem to go on for ever. She turns the ‘s’ sounds into ‘z’, rolls the ‘r’ in a disconcerting way, and when she gets to the ‘stand’ bit of the word, she pronounces it ‘stond’. She spoke more normally when she was just talking to me and Emma. I wonder if she just plays up her accent when confronting people like Miss Peterson. I would if I was her, and a bit braver than I am.

Miss Peterson sighs again. ‘You have been here less than two weeks,’ she says. ‘The fact that I have seen you so early is a bad
sign. A bad sign.’ I hate it when teachers repeat things like this. It’s as if they think they are performing Shakespeare, not talking to eleven-year-olds. ‘I am going to keep an eye on you three,’ she continues, pointing at us. ‘Understood? If I see you in here again before the end of term it will be letters home. Now get out of my sight.’

We troop out into the glossy foyer. It has a weekend feeling to it already. The canteen at the far end of the hall has its silver shutters rolled down and there are no oniony cooking smells. A couple of men seem to be bringing equipment in from a van outside. It must be for the senior disco, which is happening tonight. The junior disco isn’t for another two weeks but my friends are all planning to go. I don’t know how I will be able to go. I wouldn’t be allowed to go home on the bus afterwards but being picked up by my grandfather could be fraught with problems. Anyway, I can’t worry about this. I have to get my necklace back.

‘Why didn’t you tell on Miss Hind?’ Emma says to Roxy, as we walk out of the main doors into the car park.

Roxy rolls her eyes. ‘You don’t tell on teachers,’ she says. ‘If they find out you have told tales on them they will go out of their way to give you hell. Besides, headmistresses always back up the teacher. It is better to get revenge your own way.’

There is another hour left until the end of the PE lesson and therefore the end of school. We wander out of the building and around to the deserted changing rooms.

‘Do you think we should get dressed, then?’ Emma says.

Roxy is already changing into her school skirt.

‘Yeah,’ I say, shrugging. ‘I don’t see what else we are supposed to do.’

This lost hour into which we have tumbled is very difficult for us to understand. Everything is so planned and structured at school. You never find yourself floating free of structure and timetables and supervision. But we are, somehow, free and unsupervised. For the next two or three minutes we struggle into our school uniforms, scared that someone will turn up and we will get into more trouble. Then we look at each other blankly. We are not allowed in the library or the canteen (which is shut now anyway) or in any of the playgrounds while lessons are going on.

‘Bloody hell,’ says Emma. ‘Shall we just go home?’

‘I have to wait for my father to come,’ Roxy says.

‘I get the bus.’ I say. ‘And I have to get my necklace back.’

‘Miss Hind is a right cow,’ says Emma. ‘What are we going to do, then?’

‘We will break into the safe,’ Roxy says.

‘She’d know,’ Emma says. ‘Then we’d get letters home.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘She would know if we took it.’

‘If we could even break into it in the first place,’ Emma says.

I bet I could get into it but I don’t say this. ‘I’ll have to wait for the end of the lesson and then ask her for it,’ I say instead. The thought makes me shiver.

‘We will stay here with you and wait for her,’ Roxy says. ‘No one should be with that bitch on their own. You don’t know what she might do.’

Emma and I exchange a glance. No one our age uses the word ‘bitch’, especially not in this film-star accent. Roxy is someone we shouldn’t be friends with. She’s too odd. But yet we know we will be friends with her. Especially me. I am odd too, of course, although I do a better job of covering it up.