PopCo (3 page)

There are two or three taxis sitting in the small station car park, on standby, with half-asleep drivers smoking roll-ups or listening to all-night FM radio. I will take one of these taxis once the sun has actually come up. I cannot turn up at Hare Hall at five in the morning; that would be too strange. Instead I am planning to explore this little/big town under cover of darkness, to see if it generates any interesting or useful ideas, and then find somewhere to have breakfast. This is another habit from work: you can justify doing the strangest things on the basis that they may ‘generate ideas’. This is actually not just bland justification – these oddities and displacements often do turn out to generate more ideas than anything else. Routine kills creative thought; everyone knows that. This, incidentally, is one of PopCo’s many mottoes, all of which come from our crazy/brilliant CEO Steve ‘Mac’ MacDonald.

My suitcase probably makes me look like a runaway, I think, as I come out of the station and turn right, towards a small parade of shops. As there’s no one to see me and think anything, I suddenly wonder if I exist at all. I can no longer hear my footsteps now that I am wearing plimsolls and this adds to the sensation of not really existing, moving silently through a town I don’t know, before dawn, in a place where no one is watching.

Recently I have realised that almost every technique outlined in the KidSpy, KidTec and KidCracker kits are things I use in real life all the time, even if they are entirely unnecessary. For example, if I want to look at a person or some people walking down the street, I use reflections in shop windows. When walking, I take illogical routes in case someone is tracking me or noting my routines. I try not to leave footprints anywhere. This started as role-play. The ability to ‘become’ a misfit 9- to 12-year-old at will is a necessary part of my job, and the fact that after having that thought I then think,
Cool, a secret identity – it’s like going into a phone box and
coming out as someone entirely new with secret powers!
just shows how closely connected to the 9- to 12-year-old psyche I now am.

The KidCracker kit was easier to put together than the other two
but somehow less fun. For the KidSpy and KidTec kits I was actually learning new things. Since codes and code-breaking have always been part of my life, that one didn’t turn out to be so challenging. It was just a case of writing down all the stuff I’ve known for ever. Despite this, it has slightly outsold the other two kits. The people in Marketing – with whom I have to liaise about absolutely everything these days – say that spying is too ‘cold war’ and detective work seems ‘lame’ and ‘old-fogey’ to kids living in our terrorist/space-age matrix-world. It’s never easy to know what to say to them. Because the KidCracker kit sold slightly more than the other two kits (despite being ‘lame’ etc., the other kits sold pretty well themselves), I am being pressurised to come up with something with more of a ‘code-breaking feel’. So I am planning to make the next kit a survival-in-the-wilderness thing. KidScout, perhaps, although that sounds too much like the Scout movement and definitely uncool. I am having problems with the name, although this is something I am usually OK at. Of course, I cannot now explain how survival is like code-breaking, although I managed to do it in a meeting in such a way that my boss and the people from Marketing were convinced. I think I stressed the interactive elements (my brands are all heavily interactive, of course, as they all involve learning skills). The other proposal I put in was for a magic kit: KidCadabra, but this was rejected. They agreed that it would sell in the current toy climate but concluded that it might damage the overall PopCo brand to be seen selling ‘black’ magic items to children.

There is every chance that even my survival kit won’t go ahead at all. It is fairly common for prototypes to be developed and then to fail in focus groups, or because someone spots something that might undermine the PopCo brand or lead to any sort of litigation. You have to be so careful with kids’ products. Regarding this kit, I already have notes from a meeting reminding me to ‘stress the back-garden elements of survival practice’, i.e. don’t tell 9- to 12-year-olds to actually go out into the wilderness and try to survive. Although it is hard, I am also having to take account of all the depressing statistics about children not really being interested in ‘more traditional’ toys any more. Younger and younger children would now rather opt for CDs, gadgets and videogames. Sometimes it feels like those of us stuck in the ‘more traditional’ parts of the toy industry are nowadays required to do little more than create
decorative characters for hamburger containers, breakfast cereal, cartoons and films. There was a suggestion at one point that my brands could be ‘updated’ by linking each one with a pre-existing character: a martial-arts detective from a Japanese cartoon; a kid spy from some big-budget summer holiday film. I am glad this never happened.

So I am walking down this unfamiliar street in this unfamiliar town and I am thinking about being a runaway and this immediately does feed into my survival kit ideas, although it’s a strange thought, that one of ‘my’ (this is also strange, that they are now ‘my’) 9- to 12-year-olds might be so traumatised, weird, loner-ish that they would actually run away and attempt to use the survival kit in a real-time, live situation, rather than in their back garden. Anyway, I wonder what would happen if you had run away and you were here, in this town, with these familiar shops casting unfamiliar dark shadows, and your parents looking for you. But … maybe your parents aren’t looking for you. Perhaps they have been kidnapped by a biotech company and there is a big man looking for you – the company needs you to complete the family group and thus complete the genetic code for their vile experiment. What would you do? Where would you go?

I’ve been thinking about kidnap a lot again recently. I read some book that was lying around the office, which started it all off. It was about understanding fear when marketing to children. You could manufacture a talking pillow, it suggested, into which a parent could record soothing words so that if the child woke up scared and alone, they could simply press a button on a pillow to feel reassured. I found this terrifying, and it has left me with something, some memory-link to my own childhood, perhaps, in which I was so scared of being kidnapped I slept in the same room as my grandparents for months. I didn’t even have parents at that point, let alone their recorded, ‘soothing’ voices.

In the day this street is probably full of people, good and bad. You’d never notice the bad people in the day. They would dissolve in all the other bodies, smells, thoughts, intentions, decisions, cars, buses, mobile phones, footwear, magazines, job resignations, fast food, that affair with your boss that everyone warned you about. No. What would a child see here in the day? Toy shops, I think,
as I approach one. This feels like work now. I look in the window and see a product that I knew about when it was an idea, in development, in design. My only almost-friend at PopCo, Dan, designed the packaging. I am not sure how I feel about packaging. He isn’t either. He’s into colour theory.

Perhaps a child would only see the bad people, even if they were partially dissolved in the fluid containing everyone else. They say that only children can see magical creatures, that by the time you are an adult, you have lost the ability. It’s the same with the dark side. Perhaps it is because children are so close to death, if death comes before life in some grand cycle. Children; magic. Elderly people; insanity. Maybe it’s all about proximity to death. And children can see bad things and bad people, too. They can see death in people’s eyes. Children run from death in their fantasies, running towards what? Adulthood? To be the killer rather than the killed, the hunter rather than the prey, in the middle of the cycle where you feel safer from what exists at both ends.

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.

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 whole 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 screened 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.