PopCo (45 page)

‘Sounds about right,’ Ben says.

‘Actually, now I think about it, Erdös had a whole Supreme Being/afterlife system worked out just like yours,’ I say, looking at Esther. ‘He believed that the SF keeps a book – with a transfinite number of pages – in which perfect proofs for every mathematical problem in existence are recorded. Whenever someone came up with a really elegant proof, Erdös would say, “It’s straight from the Book.” He believed that when you die, you get to see the Book.’

‘That’s cool,’ Esther says.

‘I heard this theory once,’ Ben says, ‘that you can’t go to heaven until we invent it. The argument is that the point of our life on Earth is to construct some kind of viable afterlife for ourselves – not just in our imaginations, but to actually construct it. Perhaps it will be some way of releasing our consciousness at the point of death, possibly into a computer simulation or something like that. Anyway, until then, we are all reincarnated, and new people are born and the population is exploding … Once we learn how to release our consciousness from our bodies, we will stop being reincarnated, and move on to the next level of evolution, where we exist as pure energy.’

‘Like the advanced beings you see in science-fiction films?’ Esther says.

‘Exactly.’ Ben laughs, and reaches for a sweet. ‘It’s a slightly
warped form of techno-Buddhism,’ he says. ‘I can’t remember who thought of it. What do you think, Alice?’

‘It’s almost convincing,’ I say. ‘But if the point of evolution is to reduce ourselves by a dimension, is our ultimate goal to not exist at all? I don’t know. I’ve always had this hope that when you die you go to a big library which has not just Erdös’s Book, but a transfinite number of books explaining everything you would ever want to know about life. I imagine that as well as being able to read all these books, you get to watch any events on Earth, from any period of history, from any perspective you want. You could spend fifty or so years living Hitler’s life, if you wanted to understand him, or a hundred years sitting inside a tree in a park in France watching people go by, or a few lifetimes inside ordinary people’s heads. In my afterlife, everything has been scaled up to another level. Knowledge is infinite facts – answers to as many questions as there are in the world – and entertainment isn’t fiction any more but real lives …’

‘Come on, Ben,’ Esther says. ‘Now tell her that her afterlife is the Reality TV channel on cable …’

‘No,’ he says. ‘I think her afterlife sounds cool. What’s the point of life on Earth, though, in this version? Why do we live at all?’

‘For two reasons,’ I say. ‘Firstly, to understand what life is and to learn as many skills as possible for interpreting it. Life is where we get to have a good guess at solving the puzzle before we die and get to see the answer, and also where we learn what questions to ask. Secondly, the point is to live a good life and be nice to people.’

‘Why bother, though?’ Esther says. ‘If you’re going off to your cushy afterlife afterwards?’

‘Oh, because in your afterlife, there are lots of other dead people. At first, you sort of choose who you want to hang around with in the afterlife. But of course, if I got to the afterlife and looked up some old friend from school, the first thing I would do is go back and look at her life to see what she was really like. If it turned out that she had simply pretended to like me for all that time, I would ditch her in the afterlife. So if you go through life betraying people and lying to people, you could end up on your own up there.’

‘You see,’ Esther says. ‘Everyone has their own afterlife worked out, just like I said.’

‘Hang on,’ I say. ‘Ben hasn’t.’

‘What?’ he says, getting up and stretching. ‘Oh. Um, I think I’ll join your religion if that’s all right,’ he says to me. ‘I’ll go to the big library in the sky with you.’

‘Oh, yuck,’ says Esther. ‘You two make me sick.’

‘I like the way we’ve bypassed planning for our retirement or anything like that and gone straight for the afterlife experience,’ I say. ‘Pretty good going after a week.’ Ben’s face falls. Oh shit. It was just a joke … Backtrack, Alice. ‘Anyway,’ I say. ‘I would
love
to have you in my exclusive religion. You can even be the cofounder.’

‘Yeah, well, unless I get a better offer,’ he says back.

Esther sticks around while Ben goes to get dinner for all of us.

‘Chloë was looking for you earlier,’ I say. ‘It seemed important-ish.’

‘Maybe I should have escaped,’ she says dreamily.

‘What were you escaping from? Not Chloë?’

She gestures around her. ‘No. Just … this. Everything. PopCo. I don’t suppose you know that I’m Mac’s niece, do you?’

‘You? You are Mac’s niece? Not really, though?’

‘Yep. Not by blood or anything – yuck, imagine that. No. My mother’s sister was his secretary years ago when he was MD of a carpet firm. They fell in love and he married her. She wasn’t exactly the right class or anything but Mac’s parents thought she was charming. Well, they would. Aunt Sarah is that type. She did elocution lessons and ballet and always had proper hairstyles and manicured nails. She knew that the way she could become rich and pampered was to marry an MD. So she did. But my mother was pretty much the opposite. She was an art-school hippy with a drug habit and the beginnings of a drink problem. She would turn up at Mac and Sarah’s country house for ‘spontaneous’ weekends with them, dragging along whatever dropkick she was seeing that week. When she became pregnant with me, they disapproved – she wasn’t married or anything and this was 1974 – so they fell out of contact for a long time.

‘So, fast forward quite a while, and there I am, and I’m, like, twenty-one and I’ve just finished my degree and I don’t have a job or anywhere to live. My mum’s still drinking, and we’re both living
in Teignmouth – not far from here, in fact – but I badly want to move to London and get a place to live. I was sort of a loser, to be honest, but I had a good bunch of friends from university, and we wanted to set up our own company, creating videogames. My mum was like, ‘Why don’t you call Uncle Steve? He’s CEO of PopCo now. He’ll give you a job in videogames.’ And I was like, ‘Who wants to work for that corporate shit bag?’ But, hypocrite that I am, I phoned him and asked for a loan of some money to go towards this company we wanted to set up. Anyway, he said no to the money but did offer me a job. He said I could work up in London at the Battersea office and that he had a really special role in mind for me.’

‘So obviously, you took it?’ I say.

‘Yeah. What could I do? At first I had plans to use the money I was earning towards art projects but you know how it is. Friends drifted away, I got caught up in my job. I live online now, mainly.’

I think of Kieran and his virtual worlds. ‘Online?’ I repeat.

‘Yeah. You know, you can get caught up in newsgroups and bulletin boards and Ultima and EverQuest. I’ve got some good friends online. And a few enemies …’

‘Esther?’ I say, suddenly. ‘What is your job?’

‘My job. Ah.’ She gulps. ‘You’ll hate me if I tell you. Or I almost hope you will …’

‘I don’t understand.’

She takes a deep breath. ‘I make websites.’

‘What? You work on the PopCo site?’

‘No, no. I make websites. I come up with a persona, like, oh … On one site I’m a girl from London called April, and I make April’s homepage. The idea is that I keep a diary, like a blog, as April, and lists of likes and dislikes and whatever, and every so often – not often enough so it would be obvious but enough to have an impact – I become “obsessed” with a PopCo product, usually some K thing, or Finbar’s Friends. So one day I’m April, writing in my blog about this new Finbar toy that’s just been released that I just
have
to have. The next day I might be Tabitha, battling with anorexia, pictured wearing K products, looking sexily underweight. I might be a couple of friends who have set up the “unofficial” Finbar fan club. I tend to do that one over the weekend. I’m also supposed to mention PopCo products on Ultima and EverQuest and various chat rooms. It’s called guerrilla marketing. That’s my job. That’s why I had to
see Mac afterwards last Saturday. He was sorting out for me to have a laptop so I could maintain the sites from here.’

‘And Hiro, too,’ I say slowly.

She looks down at the floor. ‘Yeah. Hiro, too.’

‘He does the same thing? As teenage boys?’

‘He doesn’t have personas as such. It’s not so important for boys to see personas online. Hiro does all the videogame fan sites. Well, not all of them. I expect PopCo have twenty or so of us doing these jobs. We don’t know about each other. Well, we’re not supposed to, but I’ve known Hiro for a while.’

‘How did you meet?’ I ask.

‘What? Oh, a chance meeting online.’ I can tell she’s lying but I don’t know why.

‘At least I see now why it’s a secret,’ I say.

‘Yeah. No one wants anyone to know about these jobs, even staff. I suppose it seems dishonest.’

‘It is dishonest,’ I say. I shrug, but then don’t say anything else.

‘It’s all dishonest, though, Alice,’ she says. ‘All of it.’

She’s right. The way the products are designed, focus-grouped, manufactured and sold. It’s all dishonest, all of it.

*

For the next three years my grandmother continues failing to prove the Riemann Hypothesis (but writes some interesting papers about subjects connected with it); my grandfather continues failing to solve the Voynich Manuscript (but publishes two more Mind Mangle collections); and I continue to fail to crack the necklace code.

For GCSE English we have to do a project on a book of our own choice. I pick
Woman on the Edge of Time
, the moving and disturbing book I last read when I was almost twelve, and didn’t properly understand. I pick out themes of oppression and resistance and write an essay well beyond the requirements of the syllabus. For this, and all my other GCSEs, I get A grades. After the chess-tournament incident, Moron went on sick leave for a long time. A new teacher came, a woman called Miss Rider, and I moved up to top set in time for the exams. It’s a good job I did – people in sets 2 and 3 were only put in for the Intermediate paper, where the highest possible grade you could achieve was a C.

Rachel gets the same results as me and we confer about where we should do our A levels. I am, of course, not keen to go back to Groveswood for what will surely be another few hundred days of torture. Rachel has become bored with being locked up in the middle of nowhere with what she calls ‘a bunch of anorexic rich kids’. It’s all changed at her school in the last few years. Fitting in there is as complicated as fitting in at Groveswood, but you never get to go home. Everything has to be right: the way you shower, your deodorant, the tapes you listen to in your Walkman at night, the records you bring into school, the boys you know, the letters you receive. While Rachel was in the 5th year, I would sometimes send her letters as a boy called Rupert, which apparently helped somehow. She started smoking at school because there was nothing else to do. I am learning to smoke now, too. We have promised each other that we will give up when we are twenty (ages away) but we both love the advertisements: the purple piece of silk slashed through in so many different ways. Cigarette companies soon won’t be allowed to advertise directly and this one company is already cleverly making their advertising into code. When Rachel and I go into town together, the summer we are both sixteen, we look at these big, glossy billboards and, without having to talk about it, we understand that these pictures represent our futures. This is what our village is not. This is London and glamour and sex and being grown up. This is art films and kisses and having your own car.

We are both accepted to do our A levels at the local sixth-form college. Over the summer we spend hours in a coffee shop off the market square in town, scaring/thrilling ourselves with stories of how the people at this college are all in bands, or have dyed hair, or take drugs, or are weird, loser-ish dropouts. We are both scared of these things but we both also want to be them. We each want an identity more complex than, simply, ‘Virgin good-girl from village who brushes her hair properly every night’.

We sit in this cafe, drinking espresso even though neither of us like it, and smoking cigarettes from our purple and white packets. We say things to each other like, ‘I really
need
a cigarette’, until the point when it’s not a lie any more. We dare each other to go into the dark, smoky record shop and mingle with thin boys in black. We wish and hope and pray that one day two young guys
will ask to share our table in the cafe: two guys with long black coats and DMs and badges and record collections and their own flats. This never happens.

We save money from our babysitting jobs and buy ripped 501s and black polo-neck jumpers. We go on diets. We rent films from the local video shop, films about fucked-up ballet dancers and holiday romances and kids from small towns where parties are illegal. We rent French art films in which girls no older than us swish around smoking and having intense-looking sex. We plan our own ‘first times’. We buy postcards of naked black men holding white babies, stylised pictures of beaten-up pink ballet shoes, and that big poster of the tennis player showing her bum. We cut out Sunday supplement versions of the cigarette advertisements we like and stick those above our desks with Blu-Tak. We decide that chart music is for ‘plebs’ (Rachel’s word) and we contrive to get into what is called indie music. In order to do this, we get big floppy music newspapers and we buy whatever these papers say is ‘in’. We sit around in the evenings listening to music and carefully fraying our jeans. We sew on patches – the American flag on one leg and a VW patch on another; or paisley patches and yin and yang signs. We talk about stealing real VW signs to wear in other ways – this is a craze we have read about. We also read about how it is ‘trendy’ now to wear branded sports trainers with our 501s, so we start doing this. We think about going to America. We dissect song lyrics looking for hidden meanings. We obsess, briefly, over Marilyn Monroe. We wear loads of black eyeliner and pink frosted lipstick. We are going to hit our college with force.