PopCo

  Brand names, brand names, brand names. (A typical child is exposed to 8000 brands every day. I could clock up about half that in a couple of hours here, easy.) A small bookshop. A traditional department store, which makes me think of Christmas. But where could you hide around here? Not in an alley or a shop doorway. I am thinking (and have been thinking, for weeks now, actually) about A-frame shelters and ways of stuffing your clothes with dried grass to keep yourself warm and how to collect and filter water. I realise I need grass under my feet now, and keep walking.

  After wandering for a while I come to a recreation ground with two old-looking cricket nets. There are recent chalk-marks on the worn green astro-turf. I think about my grandfather, for a second or two, and how he taught me to bowl leg-spin in our small garden in Cambridge. I imagine that the kids who play here have parents not that much older than me: shell suits, logos, designer glasses, office jobs. Yet somehow I still feel like a child, with a grandfather who played cricket in whatever he happened to be wearing at the time, smoking a pipe as he did so. The piece of netting hanging in-between the two practice wickets has a big hole in it, and flaps around in the light wind. I think about mosquito nets and children running away from home in a hot country and how my kit would work in different climates. Is it easier to survive when it’s hot? Perhaps, although there is dehydration to worry about. In the cold you can literally freeze to death. I will have to make battling against both of these things seem fun in my product.

  I hate the word ‘product’. I am having ideas, but they are not very good. Did I come here to have ideas? Yes. I did. I really did. I didn’t come here because I didn’t have anything else to do, alone in a strange town in the middle of the night. Sighing, I sit down on the driest bit of grass I can find and open my bag. I pour a cup of boiling water from my flask and place it on the ground, before adding a small pinch of green tea. I then take out a packet of blue cigarette papers and drop a slightly smaller pinch of brown tobacco into it, adding a filter tip before rolling it up, placing it in my mouth and lighting it. Don’t look at yourself from the outside. Don’t see what other people see. You are sitting on a cricket field in a small town having a cup of tea in the middle of the night. It is completely normal. But I am an anomaly. A night-time apothecary living on leaves. Green leaves to drink; brown leaves to smoke. I watch the sun come up like this, milky orange ice-lollies, and then I walk back to the station to take a cab to Hare Hall, via some forgettable breakfast place. I won’t ever tell anyone I did this, tonight. To myself, I will explain it as work.

  Chapter Three

  The moor is a surprise. This is wilderness, real wilderness, in which you could genuinely get lost and die of exposure. There are several hills with broken-looking stone structures at the top of them. Forts? Ancient settlements? I will find out. Then mist, lots of mist and a drizzle that makes me think of see-through umbrellas and shower caps. One cattle grid, a ‘Please Take Moor Care’ sign, then some big, shaggy-looking cows and another cattle grid. It is not quite nine o’clock in the morning but I have already completely lost my bearings. The cab driver hasn’t really said anything since Newton Abbot. It is vaguely freaking me out.

  ‘The moor is actually quite big,’ I say, lamely.

  The cab driver snorts. We haven’t seen any other cars, shops or road markings for about half an hour now. I am not even sure this is a real road.

  ‘Just don’t get lost in it,’ he says eventually, and then laughs.

  Hare Hall is a jagged shape in the mist, emerging incomplete, like something in a Magic Eye picture, perhaps a fantasy-style image of a castle with turrets. I imagine unicorns and fairies also living here. And I’m thinking about hares as well: the Hare and the Tortoise, which is a story I have always liked, and also some spooky, nightmare-inducing puzzle book I had as a child, which included clues for finding a magic, golden hare. That was around the time of the kidnap problem I had. I remember being scared to look at the book in case I somehow established the location of the golden hare and was kidnapped because of my knowledge, or that I accidentally found the hare and was kidnapped because of that. The golden hare book was a huge craze at the time and someone got it for me because I was interested in code-breaking.

  The cab driver has to speak into an intercom in order for a rather large gate to be opened, although I am not sure how he knows to do this, as the intercom is tiny. Then we are on a long, curling driveway with, intriguingly, a small roundabout at the end. What kind of house needs its own roundabout? But this is a vast mansion, it turns out, made of what must be thousands and thousands of grey stone slabs. In the middle of the roundabout is a large statue of what from a distance looks like a gigantic garden gnome but actually turns out to be the PopCo company logo: a pale blue toy boat with yellow sails, set on a red circular background. The wheels of the cab resist the gravel and the car takes a second longer than it should to come to a halt.

  I pay the driver. ‘Can I have a receipt, please?’ I say. I always say this. Today it makes me feel comfortable in a strange way; more like me. I may not know where I am, or where I have been recently, but I am on expenses. I have a job. It is, to some people, important. The cab driver writes out a receipt and drives off. I am alone.

  So I am here, four hours early for lunch, the first event of the conference. I wonder if the mist will still be here when everyone else arrives, and whether anyone else will mistake our logo for a gnome. I am standing on gravel in my skirt, plimsolls, jumper and shirt, with my hair now in two plaits and my brown suitcase by my feet, wondering where to go next. Then a man appears. He walks towards me and – oh, shit. It’s Steve ‘Mac’ MacDonald, our CEO. He is here, on the gravel, looking confused. Jesus Christ. I had hoped to ‘check in’, or whatever you have to do here, without anyone noticing, and then go for a walk in the grounds. In a worst-case scenario I would have been discovered doing something unusual, like turning up four hours early for lunch, by my immediate boss, Carmen the second. (The previous boss was called Carmen as well. It’s a long story.) This is much, much worse than that.

  ‘Hello,’ he says.

  Do I call him Steve, Mac, or Mr MacDonald? ‘Hello,’ I say back.

  ‘Battersea?’ he says.

  ‘Yes.’

  He almost smiles. ‘You’re a bit early.’ He looks like a prime minister on a photo-op at an American president’s ranch. He is wearing new-looking jeans and a thick sweater with green wellies. He is holding a dog leash. He is worth billions.

  I mumble something about how I was doing some research locally and then stayed overnight with a friend. My brain is running to catch up with itself. ‘And then my friend had to go to work this morning and she only had one key so …’

  It’s Saturday, error, error, but he doesn’t seem to notice. I suppose my friend could have a Saturday job but when was the last time I knew someone who worked on a Saturday morning? Probably when I was about eighteen, and my friend Rachel worked in some fast-food place. ‘Good,’ is all he says, rather disconcertingly. Then he stares at me, as if he expects that I am going to do the thing I would have done next if he hadn’t turned up. I don’t know what that is.

  ‘Well,’ I say. And I want to escape from the CEO of this global corporation for which I work but I don’t know where to go, and he knows I don’t know where to go, so I just stand there dismissing everything my brain wants to do as either lame, stupid or totally ridiculous. In the end I do something lame anyway. I quote one of Steve ‘Mac’ MacDonald’s mottoes back at him. ‘Routine kills creative thought after all,’ I say, not really knowing why, while all the cells in my body, including the ones making this weird smile I have on my face, are on a protest, telling my brain, eject, eject. This is an impasse. He’s not moving. I’m not moving. A million years go by.

  Eventually, a small black Labrador puppy runs over. ‘Ah, there she is,’ he says, starting to bend down to greet her. But instead of returning to him and his dangling leash, she runs over to me and wags her tail excitedly, her whol
e back half going off like a metronome. I love dogs. I bend down to stroke her, which really seems to get her going. She jumps up at me excitedly and when I look down I find I have two muddy paw-prints on my skirt.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ Steve MacDonald says, walking over and clipping the leash on the dog. She jumps up at him a lot while he is doing this, and I realise that he is already slightly muddy. ‘Oh dear. We’re both muddy now. Oh dear.’ Then he smiles. ‘Now what are we going to do with you?’ For a moment I think he’s talking about the puppy but then I realise he’s talking to me.

  ‘I suppose I just need to find out where to go,’ I say. ‘Is there someone …?’

  ‘No, no, not this early. I’ll show you where to go. I’m Mac, by the way.’

  As if I didn’t know. Oh well, at least I know what to call him now. Dan will possibly go pale and stammer when I tell him I have been this close to our leader. I suddenly realise that I am compiling anecdotes in my head before anything of note has actually happened. I hate anecdotes.

  We walk in silence around the house, or at least this wing of it, to a small stable-style door, which Mac opens, and through which the puppy, now unleashed, runs. Somewhere inside a woman says something like ‘Steve, there’s not much milk left.’ This feels more of a family kind of situation than a corporate one now, and I feel uncomfortable, as if I have turned up at the CEO’s house, at a weekend, uninvited. Mac closes the door and turns to me.

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Now.’

  ‘Sorry to put you to this trouble,’ I say. ‘I would have come later if I’d known.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ he says. ‘And – sorry – you are?’

  ‘Alice. Alice Butler.’

  ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Yes. The code-breaker.’

  How does he know this? Has he memorised details of every one of the few thousand creatives in the whole company? Probably. It’s probably in one of those management books about cheese or something. Memorise your employees’ names. Or maybe not. This is weird. The code-breaker. Could he possibly know about my grandfather? That’s even more doubtful. What’s going on? Help me.

  The word Yes comes out of my robot mouth, and I am so polite it’s killing me. I don’t want to speak to anyone at the moment, let alone Steve MacDonald. Right now I just want a cigarette. Or maybe it’s tea I want. Or sleep. I really, really want to put down this suitcase. I decide that when this is all over I am going to have a cigarette and a cup of tea and my emergency chocolate (even though I don’t really like chocolate) and I am going to dance around my room, wherever that ends up being, laughing and pulling faces and taking deep breaths, celebrating the fact that this isn’t happening any more.

  ‘So if you could change one thing at PopCo, what would it be?’ Mac says, as we walk back towards the PopCo roundabout and turn left down a gravel path.

  I’m too tired for this. If I could change one thing at PopCo I’d fire all the marketing people, for a start (although we now, apparently ‘are all responsible for marketing’). Or what about actually launching all those products that have been pulled due to some focus group research involving kids who are too young or too old or just too stupid for that particular product? And the coffee machine in the second-floor ‘chill-out zone’ at Battersea uses boiling water, rather than the hot-but-not-boiling water required to make good coffee. There is no car park. I hate our logo. I hate what is happening to the toy industry. I hate having to dumb down (‘make accessible’, in their language) my brands to appeal to more mainstream kids when my brands are obviously for the geeky ones. I would like to call a moratorium on staff conferences, under whatever name, and be paid about five times as much as I am.

  We are still walking down the gravel path and I am really getting a sense of how big this place is. We have come to a stop at a little gravel crossroads with tennis courts to my right and the side of the main house to my left. The gravel path continues in front of me towards another little roundabout, with stables on the right and another gravel path to the left. I don’t know why we have stopped. Maybe it’s because Mac is still waiting for me to answer his question.

  ‘Be honest,’ he says. ‘Don’t try to impress me.’

  ‘All right then,’ I say bluntly, catching his eye briefly before looking back at the stables. ‘I wish we could use less packaging, and I wish all the marketing promotions didn’t involve bits of throwaway plastic.’ His face tells me that this isn’t quite what he’d expected, despite PopCo apparently having all these ‘ecological’ targets now. ‘And I’d like it if we could take more risks,’ I add. Does he like this one? Yes, he does. He’s a CEO. They love talk about risks and danger, especially now that it seems impossible to do anything without the board’s approval; without safety nets and parachutes. ‘I wish that we could be, well, a little bit more autonomous …’

  ‘You don’t like it that everything is done by committee,’ interrupts Mac, and I nod. ‘Hmm. Interesting.’ His eyes meet mine. ‘I think you may find this conference – sorry – event, very interesting indeed. Although in defence of the committees, creatives do sometimes forget how much it costs to launch a product these days. Perhaps we’d all like to take more risks.’ His eyes twinkle for a second and then die, like a pair of shooting stars. Have I just been approved of or told off? I’m not sure. He pulls a key out of his pocket and his manner seems to change from contemplation to business-as-usual. ‘OK. If you could wait here, I’ll be back in just a moment.’

  This place, or at least its outside, smells like the perfect teenage girl’s bedroom. The air is clean and flowery, with birds rising and falling in it as if in some sort of celebration. Suddenly, I imagine that I can also smell something like a school canteen, somewhere in the distance, this smell now cutting through everything else like a rusty axe. For a moment I also imagine I can hear children playing.

  When Mac comes back he is carrying a clipboard.

  ‘You’re in the Old Barn,’ he says. ‘Not the grandeur of the main house, I’m afraid, but it’s quiet, at least.’

  ‘OK,’ I say, because I can’t think of anything else. ‘Thanks.’

  As we continue down the gravel path, past the stables and towards the second roundabout, the school-canteen smell becomes stronger, as does the sound of children playing. I frown, trying to pick out distinct sounds. There are definitely children here. This is playground noise: I would recognise it anywhere.

  ‘Kid Lab,’ Mac says.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Kid Lab. That’s what you can hear. We’ve got about fifty children on site at the moment. Focus groups, observation, research. Ideal location for it, isn’t it? You’ll probably get to meet some of the kids very soon. What you can hear might be some of them working with the Games Team, who, as you may know, are now based here on Dartmoor all the time.’

  I didn’t know that. I thought the gamers were all in Berkshire.

  ‘Videogames?’ I say, uncertainly.

  Mac laughs. ‘No, no. Real-time, live-action team games. Football, hockey, cricket, paintball. Only we’re inventing a new game, of course. We have a Sports Hall, and a games pitch right here on site, just around that corner.’ He points off to the right.

  I wonder what he means by ‘we’. We’re inventing a new game. Is this just ‘we’ as in PopCo, or does Mac actually get involved in this himself? I have heard that this is his country retreat, paid for by the company. Does he hang around here at weekends, tinkering with these outdoorsy, wholesome projects? Is he a team-game type of guy? I bet he plays cricket, actually. I imagine him as a fast bowler who gets his wickets with well-timed slower balls.

  ‘This is an amazing place,’ I say. It is, too, even if I am trying to be polite.

  ‘You haven’t seen half of it yet. Used to be a boarding school, although you guessed that, right?’

  No, but then I’m too tired. I say nothing.

  Alone again, now Mac has gone. I am in what appears to be a dormitory in a converted barn. There are four beds in the room, each one scre
ened off with these unstable-looking blue things on legs. I pick the bed on the far side of the room, next to the window, and put my case on it slightly tentatively. The idea of sleeping in the same place as other people does not appeal to me and I am irrationally hoping that no one else comes to share this room. The floorboards under my feet are dark and polished. Each bed has a cabinet next to it, as if this were a hospital, although each one is different. Mine has a small lamp on the top of it, three drawers and an open compartment at the top. It is made from dark wood like the floor. I sit on the bed and the blue screen adds to the hospital effect, leaving me with the feeling that I am about to be examined. I badly want to sleep now but I am not sure enough of my surroundings to allow any form of unconsciousness.

  The water in my flask isn’t completely hot any more but I use it to make some chamomile tea anyway. Then I roll up a cigarette which I smoke out of the window while drinking the tea. The emergency chocolate doesn’t seem necessary any more; neither does running around celebrating. It’s hard to know exactly what to do next. I don’t want to leave this room in case I meet Mac again. What would I say to him? We’ve surely already had the only conversation we could ever have. Now I imagine him driving off in an SUV to get milk for his wife, vaguely laughing at this geeky girl he just met, a tiny atom in a tiny molecule of whatever metaphor you may like to use for this corporation. (A virus? A lump of green goo they sell in toyshops? A hive of industrious insects?) My brain keeps running this jerky film of Mac: planning his after-lunch speech, thinking dismissive thoughts about his underlings, thinking about playing cricket with members of the PopCo board, and then, suddenly, my mind becomes intriguingly blank of any ideas about anything else at all. No toys. No useful thoughts. Nothing. My inner 9- to 12-year-old child has gone off in a sulk. This is all too grown up for it. I yawn. And, although I have tried to avoid it, my internal scene shrinks to a repeated whisper, and a hazy fade-out takes me into sleep, propped up on my bed, still vaguely waiting for the enemy.