PopCo by Scarlett Thomas Read Free Book Online

plastic designer shapes with Go boards etched into them. In one corner there is a DJ booth. One wall is taken up with a large plasma screen, currently showing kids playingwith some PopCo products in slow motion. On the other side is a raised area with two more plastic tables, probably for Mac and his ilk. At the far end of this is – oh, my God – a flip-chart. In this business you can never entirely escape the flip-chart.
    Dan and I are now standing in a queue, holding trays.
    ‘What is this all about?’ he says, looking around. ‘Is this some kind of school-dinner thing?’
    ‘Mmm. I think so. It’s concept-driven, anyway.’
    ‘Yes.’
    Many of the expressions Dan and I use originally started off being things that other people said that we made fun of. Ending sentences with the word ‘baby’ was something that Carmen-the-first’s assistant, Katerina, used to do. She was Russian and in the middle of an extreme love-affair with Western capitalism. When she came back from shopping (AKA ‘research’), you wouldn’t have to ask her what she’d bought because she would come into the office holding up paper carrier bags and saying ‘Levi’s, baby’, with this proud smile on her face, like she was a feral dog returning with a bloody chicken. ‘Concept-driven’, ‘High concept’, and ‘Conceptled’ are forms of criticism that emanate from Richard Ford, Carmen the second’s boss. His role in the company is to come into Battersea every so often and trash all our ideas. ‘It’s got an intriguing feel,’ he will say. ‘But ultimately it’s too concept-driven.’ Nobody has ever worked out what he means by this, or why it’s a bad thing. Surely kids’ toys are always concept-driven? Although I occasionally see Dan outside of work, we haven’t got together that often since the cable TV incident. As a result, our friendship is strictly work-bound, full of references to work and office in-jokes. We are probably the closest thing to ‘best friends’ inside the office but outside we are still little more than strangers.
    I am now at the front of the queue.
    ‘Vegetarian or meat?’ a woman asks, abruptly.
    Dan pokes me. ‘Go for veggie,’ he hisses. ‘Veggie. Veggie.’
    ‘Ow! Sorry. Vegetarian,’ I say.
    The woman sighs, and then passes me a cling-filmed plate of sandwiches and salad. ‘Next,’ she says, and then gives Dan the same thing. It turns out that the non-veggies are being given an evil-looking stew.
    ‘How did you know that?’ I ask Dan. ‘About being a veggie?’
    ‘Ex-girlfriend. Boarding-school stories.’
    This is the thing about Dan being ‘gay-ish’. He only ever seems to have ex-girlfriends, never boyfriends. It’s intriguing.
    Because we were almost the last in, we are virtually at the end of the queue. The only other stragglers are the two people behind us, neither of whom I have ever seen before. As we are ushered over to the last free table by a woman wearing a blue boiler suit and headset, I try to work out where they might be from. The girl has long fawn-coloured hair, and is wearing a brown shift-dress and earrings made out of dark brown feathers. The guy is dressed all in black cotton, or possibly hemp: combats and a short-sleeved shirt. Are they Berkshire people? He has three biros in his top pocket, one green, one red and one blue, and is wearing black-rimmed glasses. Our eyes meet for a second before we sit down. For a moment I misread his expression and think he is about to say something to me, so I open up my face and half-smile. Then he looks away and says something to the fawn-haired girl instead. The connection, if there ever was one, is broken.
    We are barely in our seats before the music starts.
    ‘Oh Jesus. Please no,’ Dan says.
    It’s this weird bouncy music I have never heard before. Or is it slightly familiar? I don’t think so. ‘What is this?’ I ask Dan.
    ‘You don’t know? Oh yes, your TV thing. Lucky you.’
    My ‘TV thing’ is that I