PopCo Read online

  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.

  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 y
ou 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.