PopCo (43 page)

I wonder what my grandparents would say if they were alive today and someone took them on a whistle-stop tour of ‘cheap’ Britain (a place that they never really chose to visit, even though it had started to exist in their lifetimes). Would they stock up on cheap meat, cheap clothes and cheap knick-knacks that no one needs (but can’t resist because they’re so
cheap
)? Would they see it as progress that you can now buy a hundred different types of hair-grip in the supermarket? Or would they in fact notice that, as so much has been loaded onto this side of the equation, a hell of a lot must have gone from the other side?

Dan drifts off eventually. I find I haven’t got very much more to say to him. The last ten days or so have fucked with my head. I feel like I have been reformatted, and Dan, an obsolete registry file, has been overwritten with something else, maybe blank space, maybe
question marks. I wanted to ask him about his rumoured move to Kieran’s team but he didn’t bring it up. What’s wrong with me? Where are all my jokes about retreating and collaborating and being shot? It used to be that we would joke about the enemy, not really believing that the enemy existed. But maybe the enemy does exist after all. Maybe I have some idea of who the enemy is now. Maybe the enemy is me.

A few minutes after six and there’s another knock on the door. It must be Ben. But it’s not. It’s Chloë.

‘Hello,’ she says shyly, in her soft Celtic voice. ‘Can I …?’

‘Oh, yes. Of course,’ I say, stepping back to let her in.

She walks into the room, everything about her soft and somehow feathery. She’s wearing black linen trousers today, with a black polo-neck sweater; her hair twisted up behind her head in a large, translucent crocodile-clip. She’s holding a white envelope which she gives me.

‘You have a correspondent,’ she says, something dancing in her eyes. ‘It was outside.’

I take the envelope from her. It has the PopCo logo, the little sailboat, on the top right-hand corner, and my name typed in bold on the front. Am I being sent home? Sacked? Could this be the return message from the mysterious encipherer? I can’t look at it now so I put it down on the desk and then sit on the bed. Chloë half-sits on the chair as if she wants to be ready to spring up again at any moment.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asks.

‘OK,’ I say, although I do not feel OK. I wonder why she is here. I’ve barely spoken to Chloë since I have been here. I have the feeling I would like her a lot if I got to know her but there is something about her that makes me feel uncomfortable, too. It’s as if she wouldn’t let you get away with something if she thought it was wrong. Not that she seems judgemental at all, just that she seems
certain
. Of what, I don’t know.

‘I was looking for Esther,’ she says.

‘Esther?’ I think about the laptop, and her giggling with Ben. When was that? Yesterday? The day before? ‘I haven’t seen Esther for ages,’ I say.

‘Has she not been to visit you?’

I shake my head. ‘Not today.’

‘Oh.’ Chloë looks disappointed. ‘I can’t find her anywhere.’

‘She seems to be good at disappearing,’ I say with a little smile. I don’t share my hypotheses from last week that Esther can make herself invisible or turn into a bat. Sometimes I do say these kinds of things to people, as surreal almost-jokes but they tend to look at me blankly and just say something like, ‘Er, right …’ and then change the subject.

‘She does indeed,’ Chloë says. She pauses, and looks at her hands. ‘Not that I’ve seen much of Ben lately, either.’ She looks up at me and I am braced for a sad/possessive look which will complicate everything between Ben and I. But instead of this look, Chloë’s face becomes one big, kind smile. ‘He’s happy with you, you know,’ she says.

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Um …’

‘I haven’t seen him this happy for a long time.’

Oh God, now I see where this is going. There’s a long pause, though. Am I supposed to say something now? I’m not sure I know what to say.

‘This isn’t just a conference fling for you, is it?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know,’ I say honestly. ‘I don’t think so.’

Her eyes flick to the floor, like she’s embarrassed.

‘He thinks you’re pretty great, you know?’

I laugh, also embarrassed. I hate conversations like this. ‘Um … That’s, er … God. I think the same about him, I think.’ I look around at my room and across my bed, in which I have been living for the past few days. For a second it blurs and seems like a boat, stranded at sea. Then it’s a bed again. Old memories. ‘I don’t know why he would think that, though,’ I say. ‘I don’t think I’m great. In fact, the way I feel now, I …’ I’m about to go on about how ill and un-sexy I feel but I don’t know Chloë very well so I take a few steps backwards in my head. ‘I don’t even know who I am half the time,’ I say instead.

Do I sound like the lame teenager I almost certainly once was?
I’m just mad. I’m SO confused. My life is so complicated. Me, me,
me. Look how muddled I am. Do you think I might be on drugs?
My madness makes me sophisticated. Oh, I need more strong coffee
and more French cigarettes
.

But Chloë just smiles and says, ‘He’s a good judge of character.’ So now I am expecting the big ‘Don’t hurt him’ speech but it doesn’t come. Instead, Chloë gets up and fiddles with a strand of hair that has come loose from the clip.

‘If Esther does turn up, will you tell her I’m looking for her?’ she says, walking towards the door.

‘Sure,’ I say.

And then she is gone.

So what’s in today’s envelope, then? I pick it up off the desk and consider taking a short cut and just burning it before I have even read it. But I don’t. I ease open the flap and pull out the contents. There’s a letter, written on PopCo headed paper, and something else, another sheet of paper. I open this out. Fucking hell. It’s a share certificate. What’s going on?

Dear Alice Butler, the letter says. Thank you for taking part in
our Games Testing programme and for offering the suggestion of
Paddle Z as the name for the game you played. Although we
received many feedback cards and suggestions, we all felt that your
idea most strongly encapsulated the feel of this product. We particularly
liked the playful juxtaposition of the functional word Paddle
with the symbol Z. We were very excited by the versatility of this
conjunction. Does the ‘Z’ refer to some sort of ‘Z’ factor (much
more impressive than an ‘X’ factor), or does it imply a cutting-edge
plural:
PaddleZ
? The options are all there. Therefore, we are pleased
to inform you that we have now officially selected it as the brand
name. Please find enclosed 1000 PopCo shares. A crate of champagne
will be delivered to your home address when you return from
your current assignment. Thank you once again for your valuable
input. With best wishes, blah blah blah
…

Bloody hell. I only wrote that because I couldn’t think of anything else. 1,000 shares. What are they worth? Probably a lot less than you’d pay a professional brand designer to come up with a product name, but a lot more than I would earn in a month. Maybe I won’t burn this piece of paper. What am I going to do with a crate of champagne? I could share a bottle with Rachel, perhaps while I tell her about my strange adventures here. Perhaps Ben will want to come round and share a bottle with me. I shiver unexpectedly, imagining Ben in my house, in my bed. Will this indeed be more than a conference fling? Will he want it to be more?

Where is he, anyway? Bizarrely, I find that I am really missing him.

*

My new strategy for surviving at school is a constantly evolving entity. At first, I take a jumble of things – images, ideas, people – and pack them for school every day as carefully as my grandfather packs my lunch box (I told him that school dinners weren’t working out). I take ideas about imprisonment and freedom from
Woman
on the Edge of Time
. I tell myself that no one’s life is as bad as the heroine Connie’s life. She is locked in a cruel mental institution despite not being mad. I am trapped in this school but at least I can lock the door when I go to the toilet. On the other hand, Connie has the ability to time travel to a better world. I do not have this ability. But sometimes, when things are really bad, I imagine that I too can summon this future up in my head and step into it as easily as stepping through a door. I take this image of another world around with me all the time, folded up in my head like an old map.

Other things I carry around with me, in my head: snapshots of Roxy, of Jasmine, of the blue-haired girl in the clothes shop. They wouldn’t take any shit, I know that. (I am using words like ‘shit’ now a lot in my head. This is what happens when you are exposed to so much adult literature before you are even twelve.) Sometimes, if one of the boys says something to me, something designed to hurt my feelings or humiliate me (and there are myriad ways of doing this at school, believe me), I say something so horrible back that they leave me alone for a while. When Mark came up to me recently and asked why I don’t have any friends, I looked at him with Roxy eyes, and imagined myself with blue hair and said, ‘Get fucked, Mark.’ No one says things like this at school, not in the first year. Another time, the other kids got hold of one of those anti-vivisection leaflets. ‘Where’s your cat, Butler?’ they kept saying. I didn’t know what they were talking about until they slapped this image down on my desk – a cat with wires coming out of its exposed brain – and said, ‘We found your cat, Butler. Sorry to say it’s not in a very good state.’ They all laughed, probably imagining that I was about to cry, or wet myself or something. Instead, I looked coolly down at the image and then looked up at them in a confused, grown-up way and said, ‘I don’t have a cat, you morons.’ I didn’t let them see that they had upset me. I have learnt various rules. Cry in the toilets, not in public. Use the scary, dark toilets on the third floor for this purpose, as no one else uses them. Use swear words that they don’t understand. Scare them before they can scare you. Never appear weaker than them.

Every day, I eat my lunch with the Rural Studies goats, and I do my homework there in the field, so I have more time to spend with my grandparents when I get home. I mark off days on a sheet of paper I carry around as well. I have worked out that my sentence here is something like 1,205 days. It’s slightly depressing that I have only served about thirty of them but I haven’t completely given up on Plan B yet either, although it’s almost as hard to find people in the village who want their cars washed as it is to work out what my necklace actually means.

Gradually, though, the other kids do stop picking on me. I have made it quite simple. I am weird and I am mean and if they do try to pick on me I give it back to them worse. There’s no way I can keep this up for longer than a couple of weeks but, as I thought, I don’t have to. Hit the weakest targets first, that seems to be the main agenda of the popular kids. And I won’t let myself be a weak target, so they move on to other people, eventually. My strategy has worked. I can’t have a best friend, of course, or any sort of friend. It would be too dangerous, as there would be a definite risk of this person feeding information back to the popular kids. Divide and rule. But if you don’t add yourself to anything you can’t be divided. I don’t disclose any of my secrets and I have my special reflector shield, too. They can’t get me!

A few weeks into this experiment, I decide that I might join chess club and computer club after all. If you’re popular you can never contemplate doing anything as geeky/weird as this. But I am not popular. I can do what I want. And what would they say to me anyway? ‘Alice, you like playing chess!’? Here are some more rules I have learnt. You must never ignore them. You must never use sarcasm back at them. You shouldn’t try to reason with them. You must never talk to them in a soft voice, or avoid eye-contact. All these things are losing moves. If one of them says to you, ‘You like playing chess,’ you say back to them something like, ‘Well, you like playing with yourself, but I’m not making a big deal of it.’ You make it short, snappy and loud enough for the rest of the class to hear (but never the teacher). Remember that you have the advantage. You know in advance what embarrassing hobbies you are about to take up, so you can work out responses beforehand. The only danger in this method is that you will occasionally get challenged to actual physical fights, but that’s OK in my case
because all arranged fights take place in the field after school and I am already on my bus by then.

Sometimes, if you go too far, the other kids will say you are ‘gross’ or ‘disgusting’. Then you simply say, ‘Do you want me to tell everyone how disgusting you are? I’ve heard all sorts of things about you …’ When you have spent some time inside the popular group, this will make them nervous. Sometimes this person will try to catch you on your own and say things like, ‘What did you hear?’ Then you know you have won. And you also know that they do have a disgusting secret. After all, who doesn’t? At school we may all act like those neutered dolls you can buy, the ones with a smooth plastic space where their genitals should be, but under our clothes we all have holes through which we pee and shit.

So, one Wednesday, not long before Christmas, I go along to the orange-carpeted library in which chess club takes place. The boys look at me nervously and/or contemptuously as I take a seat at one of the desks to wait for Mr Morgan/Moron to come. But I have forgotten how awful Moron actually is. When he enters the room he performs a comedy double-take and then laughs at me.

‘What do we have here?’ he says. ‘A damsel in distress?’

‘I’ve come to join chess club,’ I say.

All the boys in the room, including Alex, are looking at me.

‘You’ve come to join chess club,’ Moron repeats. ‘Oh dear. Tell me, Miss Butler, what set you are in for maths.’

‘Two,’ I say.

‘Now boys,’ he says to the others in the room. ‘Tell Miss Butler what set you are all in for maths?’