PopCo (2 page)

A steward checks me onto my train and shows me to my compartment. It has bunk beds, although the top one has been closed up against the wall. There is also a sink with a lid you have to lift up, and a little cotton towel. The bottom bunk bed is made up with crisp cotton sheets and a thin wool blanket.

The only bad thing about sleeping compartments in trains is what they do to my hair. I don’t know if it’s the air-conditioning, or the static, or the velveteen stuff with which the compartments are lined but something here makes my hair freak out like fluff stuck on flypaper. Perhaps I am vain, thinking like this. Perhaps frizzy hair makes you vain. I wait for the steward to check my ticket for the last time and then shut the door and apply a tiny bit of Vaseline (it’s just like serum) to my hair, which I then tuck under a shower cap I have brought with me for this purpose. The shower cap is pink and cream, with a repeating pattern of kittens playing with balls of wool. I have lots of these shower caps. My hair doesn’t respond well to getting wet, and it doesn’t seem to enjoy becoming too dry either. It’s like a fragile hanging garden that I constantly have to tend to prevent it from wilting or dying. I often wonder what I would have looked like in the Middle Ages, and what you would have done to control hair like mine before they invented products to do it for you. Would animals have lived in it? Maybe that would have been fun-ish.

I look at myself in the mirror over the sink and laugh silently at my odd reflection. Perhaps this could be the ‘look’ to finally shut them all up. What would they call this one? Lunatic Asylum? I pull faces at myself for a while, trying to make myself look as weird as possible, imagining situations I could ruin by turning up like this. I list family reunions and weddings among these, despite never having been to either. Could you have sex like this? What would someone say if you tried? Maybe there are shower-cap fetishists out there – there seem to be fetishes for everything else. Could this be my look for the whole POW event? If only I dared.

My old brown suitcase contains the following items: pyjamas; wash bag; plimsolls; hair products; spare shower caps; hair grips
and bands; spare knickers; spare tights; clean shirt; spare cardigan; other assorted clothes, including my favourite corduroy skirt; nail clippers; guitar picks (although I have not brought a guitar I have to take picks everywhere); green tea; chamomile tea; a bar of ‘emergency’ chocolate; a flask of hot water; some muesli; three 1B pencils; a sketch-book; a notebook; my fountain pen; a pencil-sharpener; and spare ink cartridges for my pen. In a smaller army-style canvas bag I have two books, a few homeopathic remedies, my survival kit, my purse, a transistor radio, tobacco and cigarette papers, two or three miscellaneous items and various black and white hairs from my cat, Atari.

The survival kit is an experiment and contains items I think I might need in a survival situation, like plasters, water-purifying tablets, matches, candles, batteries, a small torch, a compass, a knife, several organic ‘energy’ bars, a large sheet of plastic and some Rescue Remedy. Rescue Remedy is great for almost everything – shocks, sick pets, wilting plants – and since it is suspended in brandy, it also works as an emergency antiseptic. Whenever I have had toothache, I have dropped some Rescue Remedy on the affected tooth and it has improved immediately.

The survival pack and my transistor radio are the two things I’d grab if, say, the enemy boarded the train now, and I had two minutes to escape. I would not take the shower caps. In a survival situation I don’t think I would care about my hair at all. I read once that when packing you should ask yourself which items are necessities and which are comforts, and take only the necessities. Of course, hardly anything is really a necessity. If I was forced to choose only the absolute necessities from my bag I would take only my homeopathic Carbo Vegetabilis tablets, which I need due to my allergy to wasp and bee stings. Maybe also the plastic sheet, although I have already forgotten how you use it to collect water. I’d take my necklace, too, although I wouldn’t have to remember that: it’s been on the same chain around my neck for the last twenty years.

Everything else I have brought is really a luxury; even fantasies about the enemy. The enemies we have now are not the type to invade on foot or stop trains. Does anyone even know who the enemy is any more? Avoiding the real world as much as possible, I usually tend to think of ‘the enemy’ only in the context of my
brands. This means I am constantly looking over my shoulder for shadowy, storyboard men with stubble: spies from the other side, or sterilised criminals on the lookout for animals or children to kidnap/use in crazy experiments. Perhaps this explains me also seeing my creations where they don’t exist. That was certainly an odd experience I haven’t had before.

My cat is called Atari not after the videogames manufacturer, as people have occasionally thought, but after a position in the game Go, which, like ‘check’ in chess, denotes a position in which one player can take another player’s piece in one move. It’s not as fatal as in chess, however, as Go has many pieces (stones), some of which you probably would not mind sacrificing as part of your strategy. My cat is black and white, as are the stones in Go. Go is about balance, yin and yang, sacrifice and victory; and many of its positions or sayings (there are thousands) can be applied, in metaphor form, to various situations in life, including military strategy. Atari is so named because his black and white hairs seem to be in competition, and are always falling out, as if they are constantly losing Atari situations with themselves.

Everyone at PopCo plays Go; it’s virtually a prerequisite for working there. Each toy company has its signature game, in the same way that a sports team may have a song, or a mascot. At Hasbro, apparently, this game is Risk, which, along with Scrabble, is one of their bestselling boardgame brands. Risk feels like a less abstracted form of Go, and you can use many of the same strategies within it. It is about world domination but, of course, you are always at the whim of the dice. It is a long-term strategist’s kind of game. The game they all play at Mattel is chess. Like us, they are very fixated on strategy. But while we are very philosophical about it all (you can’t win without also losing and so on), they take the military stuff very seriously. There is no chance in chess. It’s a very bang-bang game, where victory can sometimes happen in very few moves. In 1995 Mattel tried to take over Hasbro. It was an ugly situation.

Every year at PopCo we have a big Go tournament, which everyone gets very excited about. I didn’t make it past the first round last year, having made one simple error in the first few moves of my only game. Since 1992, PopCo has offered a million-dollar prize
for anyone who can write a computer program that can beat a professional Go player. No one has claimed it. While fairly ordinary chess programs are now beating world masters, no one has ever come up with a computerised form of Go that anyone other than a beginner or a child can’t beat. However, the rules of Go are very simple. You have a 19x19 board, like a big chess-board, and two players – one playing white, one playing black – take it in turns to place their stones on it. You place the stones on the intersections (not in the squares) with the aim of capturing territory, and the other player’s stones. You capture pieces and territory literally by surrounding them, although if you’re not careful you can become surrounded while you are attempting this. Go is 3000 years old and has more potential formations than there are atoms in the universe.

The night train feels heavier than ordinary trains, in the same way that being asleep feels heavier than being awake. As it starts moving out of the station I get out one of my books and lie down on the little bed to read. I am soon distracted by the lights outside, though, and I put down my book and open the little blind over the window to see better. The window is one of those frosted things that you can’t really see out of (or into, I suppose, which must be the point), and which can’t be opened. But something about the way you can’t quite see where the little orange and white lights are coming from outside makes them more interesting. I am hypnotised. This train does not shoot towards Reading like day trains do. Instead, it just ambles along as if there were something wrong with it. Soon it becomes possible to hear drilling, and to notice something that both looks and sounds like arc-welding. This feels like being in a post-apocalyptic Japanese videogame, travelling through a city ravaged by anarchy and war with a big sword and, possibly, some magic spells. I can’t read with all this going on, so I get under the covers and lie there listening and watching until I eventually fall asleep.

Just before four in the morning, there is a soft tap at my door. Through my sleep I can hear an unfamiliar voice saying something like
Hello? Wake up call
. It feels like I only dropped off five minutes ago and opening my eyes is very difficult indeed.

The door opens slowly. ‘Your water,’ whispers a woman, giving
me a small tray. ‘We’ll be at Newton Abbot in about fifteen minutes,’ she adds.

With the door open I can sense the stillness in the corridor, and almost smell the sleep coming from all the cabins along it. I realise that everyone employed here must do everything softly, slowly, quietly. Do the people who work here whisper when they are off duty, in the same way I can’t stop thinking about the kind of things 9-12-year-olds would enjoy playing with, even when I am not at work? With various unformed thoughts emerging, I pull myself into a sitting position and take the tray from her, whispering a quiet, sleepy thanks as my shower cap rustles around my ears.

She closes the door – softly – and I am alone again. The tray has a small teapot on it and when I look inside they have indeed just given me the boiling water I requested last night, along with the Great Western Railway biscuits they seem to give you with everything. I take the small bag of green tea from my suitcase and drop a pinch of it in the water, watching it immediately swell. I blow and sip for a minute or two, needing the caffeine. I close my eyes for thirty seconds and then open them again.

My sense of time feels distorted and I suddenly don’t know how long I now have to get ready before the train stops at Newton Abbot. Twelve minutes? Eleven? I tend to panic about getting off trains at the right time. Once, I was almost the last person to get off a busy train somewhere near Cambridge. After I had alighted, and as I turned to walk down the platform towards the exit, I became aware of someone shouting something. I looked back and saw a man still inside the train struggling to open the door. He had the window open and was tugging at the outside handle. ‘I can’t get this damn door open,’ he said loudly. I turned to go and help him but at that moment the train started to move away. He suddenly became panicked and started beating the outside of the door with his fists. ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘I’m getting off here!’ It was too late for anyone to do anything, and the train pulled away with him saying something like ‘Help me …’ Perhaps missing your station isn’t that big a tragedy in the scheme of things; maybe it just depends how inconvenient it would be to travel to the next station and then come back. In my case, if I miss Newton Abbot I will have to stay with the train until Plymouth, and then wait two or so hours for a connection back in this direction. Train connections become more difficult in the middle of the night.

While picking at my bag of muesli and taking sips from my tea, I quickly change out of my pyjamas and put on the clothes I was wearing only a few hours ago, although I can’t face the shoes now and so wear my plimsolls instead. This means I have to fit my shoes into my small suitcase, which is already overloaded with stuff. It takes me a good 90 seconds to do this, which is a tenth of the total time I have to get ready and off this train. Slightly flustered, I soon emerge into the corridor where I wait for what feels like two hours before the train eventually slows, shudders and stops. Time is playing tricks on me, as it usually does.

I am the only person getting off the train at Newton Abbot. The first thing I notice is how clean and cold the air is here. Once the train pulls out of the station the silence is almost overwhelming, until a solitary early bird starts singing in one of the trees across the road. I have never been here before and I don’t know what to expect. All I discovered when I booked my train ticket was that although this is not the closest station to Hare Hall, it is the closest station at which the night train stops. I worked out that a cab journey from here to Hare Hall would cost something in the region of £20, compared with something closer to £50 if I stopped at Plymouth instead. It’s all expenses; but expenses I may at some point have to justify. My night travels have just about slipped through the net so far but I wouldn’t want to have to try to explain why I needed to spend £50 on a cab, before dawn, as part of a trip for which everyone else will have normal, lower expenses.

Sometimes, night travelling can become depressing. If you feel at all depressed travelling at night, the trick is to remind yourself what an adventure it is, and how much more of the world you see when you are outside, awake and moving at a time when most people are inside, asleep and still. What a thrill to arrive in a place you have never been, when the sun has not yet risen in the sky and no one else is there. If the bomb dropped, killed everyone else and somehow missed you – perhaps because you were in a unique kind of bunker – this is how it would feel to emerge afterwards; to see the world uninhabited, as if people had left in a hurry. The night works for me, it really does. I am not scared of the dark, nor of strange men. I used to be but it turns out that being frightened is all in the mind. Once you strip down the fears you have of, say, walking through a town in the dead of night, or finding yourself
alone in a dark forest, you soon realise that the only fear you actually have is of being alone. I remind myself that I know what to do in the event of many terrifying things – usually because I have studied them for work – and that I am not afraid of being alone, and start walking out of the station.