PopCo by Scarlett Thomas
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
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.’
Esther is looking at the whiteboard in a confused way. The puzzle is written on it in electric blue board-marker. She frowns and then draws a neat square in her notebook. Then she adds perspective lines and makes the square into a cube. She starts shading one of the sides of the cube; a perfect shadow. How odd. I doodle in exactly the same way as this, although I sometimes add spirals drawn inside rectangles.
‘What do you think?’ she says to Dan.
‘Fuck knows,’ he replies. ‘Are the clues in the question? They must be.’
‘A million pounds,’ Esther says absent-mindedly.
‘Why the sullen expression, Butler?’ Dan asks me.
‘This is the stupidest lateral-thinking puzzle in the world,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t make any sense at all. He could at least have asked us to do the one about the black and white stones, or something. At least that one’s satisfying.’ He is the guy leading this seminar. His name is Warren and he is an expert in team-building and problem-solving. He’s from a small, exclusive London ideation facility called Lattice.
We are in a south-facing room in the small block adjacent to the main building. At least, I assume it’s south-facing – sunlight is already streaming in. I remember when I was a kid I became briefly obsessed with compass readings and charts. But now all I know about points on the compass is that south is the direction in which middle-class, young, professional people want their gardens to face. There are about twenty-five or so people in the room: basically everyone who was at Mac’s ‘secret’ meeting on Saturday night. Warren is sitting at the front looking over some notes while everyone tries to work out this strange puzzle. I glare at the itineraries we have been given: lateral thinking until lunchtime today, then something called ‘How to Think’. Early this evening we have a meditation class, and then team-building all day tomorrow. All the team-building I have ever done has been the urban, flip-chart sort. I remember some article I read once about trainee managers walking over hot coals and sailing unsteady rafts across a raging river, taking it in turns to be blindfolded. I hope we don’t have to do that kind of thing here.
‘What’s the “black and white stones” puzzle?’ Dan asks me.
‘It’s long-ish,’ I say.
‘Go on,’ he says, putting down his pen. ‘I can’t get my head around this one. Maybe if I have an example I’ll know what I’m supposed to be doing.’
I glance at Esther. She looks interested, too. ‘All right. Well the problem is this. A merchant has fallen on hard times and has borrowed some money from a very rich, but very evil man. The merchant pays the first instalment of the loan but the next day the rich man’s servant comes and informs him that he also needs to pay rather a lot of interest. The interest is so high that it’s impossible for the man to pay. He tells the servant to inform his creditor that he cannot pay such a huge sum and offers some of his livestock in lieu of this interest. The servant returns again with a different proposition. The merchant has a very beautiful daughter, who is also very clever and is coveted by all the men in the kingdom. If he will give his daughter to the rich evil man for him to use as his slave …’
‘Sex slave?’ says Esther.
I smile. ‘Yeah, possibly. Anyway, if he will give his daughter to the rich, evil man then his debt will be written off. If not, he will lose everything and his whole family will starve. It’s a horrible choice to make but eventually the daughter herself makes it. She appears in front of her father carrying her suitcase, ready to offer herself to the rich man. Her mother and father cry as she leaves in one of the rich man’s carriages: they fear they will never see her again. Now, the rich man is not just evil but also sadistic and cunning. One month later he calls the beautiful girl’s family to his castle, saying he has a proposition for them. When they get there, they find various people from the town assembled in the large castle courtyard, waiting to see what spectacle is going to occur. The courtyard is covered with small black and white stones – legend has it that this exotic, elegant gravel is the rich man’s pride and joy. It reminds him of his favourite pastime, chess, and he has the stones shipped in regularly at great expense. It’s a shame he wasn’t into Go, actually, as these things are basically like thousands of Go stones all over the ground.
‘The girl is brought out to the courtyard by a servant. She is not crying but instead seems calm and brave. The challenge is explained to her and she nods. A 50–50 chance of being free is more than she thought she would be able to hope for, and she prays that she will be able to pick the right stone. Then the rich man bends down to pick the stones from the ground. He does this in such a way that the audience can’t see what he is doing but it is absolutely clear to the girl that he has picked up two black stones and placed them in the bag. This is so unfair! She can’t be condemned by trickery to spend the rest of her life in his service, available to indulge his every sadistic whim …’