The Seed Collectors

  Serotonin should be flooding into or out of Bryony’s brain right now. Or whatever the book said. But basically she should be feeling good, not bad. Could she be crashing from the potatoes already? But they’re not supposed to do that. Maybe she had one too many. Maybe the real problem here is sugar, the silent white killer, which was in the cake James made earlier but that Bryony wasn’t supposed to have. Maybe . . .

  ‘I’m not upset.’

  ‘Well, you certainly seem upset.’

  ‘I’m not upset.’

  ‘Well, you’re annoyed with me, then.’

  James sighs. ‘I don’t want to be. I just think . . .’

  ‘Look, I think it’s obvious that we all have too much sugar. I think you’re crashing from the cake you had before. I probably overdid the potato thing. We’re so emotional. Just look at us!’

  The first time Charlie and Fleur had sex, she lay quite still while he put his penis into her vagina and moved it in and out. There not being an internet yet, the only way they could look at porn was via one very well-thumbed magazine that Charlie got at school. This, combined with articles in Cosmopolitan, led to their second sex session involving some ball tickling, Charlie’s first blow job (you don’t actually blow, silly) and a bit of ‘clitoral stimulation’. The third time, he licked her out, which was the way you said it then. While Charlie did this, he also squeezed a nipple quite firmly between his finger and thumb, and the more firmly he did it the more he liked it and the more she liked it, and so the fourth time they had sex he made her bend over the bed and he spanked her. The fifth time they had sex, she was tied up with silk scarves. This idea came from Cosmo, not the porno magazine, and sounded quite tame, what with the scarves being silk and soft and ‘gently tied’. But tied up is still tied up. When your arms are free you can pull your lover closer or push him away. But without your arms, he is completely in control. The sixth time they had sex, Charlie brought along a cucumber from the garden, and when Fleur saw it she blushed and giggled and shook her head, but once the silk scarves were in place she wriggled only slightly as he pushed it into her. He fucked her with the cucumber, and she whimpered and looked tiny and that just made him want to hurt her, but in a pleasurable way that he couldn’t quite describe and that he knew she shared.

  The day after this was when Augustus told Fleur that he was her father, and whatever she was doing with Charlie would have to stop. That night, Fleur put on a lot of black eyeliner and an almost completely see-through floral summer dress. It was Bryony’s eighteenth birthday and there was to be a big party at the Grange. Fleur met Charlie a couple of hours before the party began, in the old summer house, and asked him what he thought the worst sexual thing was. ‘Worst’ in this kind of conversation obviously meant both worst and best. He chose two things: buggery, and rape. Do them both to me, said Fleur. And don’t stop if I scream, or say no. Hit me, if you like. I don’t care where. I’ll say I walked into a door. Did Charlie go too far? When he replayed that afternoon, as he did thousands of times afterwards, and which he could not ever do without becoming aroused again, because it was the single most intense sexual experience of his life, he couldn’t find the one thing that must have ruined it all. She didn’t scream. She did say no a few times, and sort of pleaded with him to stop, but in the same tone of voice that someone not playing a sex game would say yes and plead with you to carry on. It was obvious that she didn’t really want him to stop. Was she disturbed that he actually did all that she asked and didn’t ever say that he didn’t really want to hurt her? Was it when he slapped her face? When he pulled her hair? He did cringe for years afterwards, though, remembering some of his dialogue: ‘Suck my cock well, whore, and I’ll be merciful,’ for example. Where had that come from? He wondered for a long time if it had been that. Or even, sometimes, if the whole thing had actually been too tame. It was not until years later that he discovered what the problem really was.

  Imagine that one day you decide that you need to multitask more, and therefore while doing something boring like cleaning your teeth you will add some other boring thing like doing your daily calf raises, where you stand up on your toes first on one leg and then on the other for say 25 reps on each side x2. This you think of as a good use of time. In fact, for these two minutes of every morning it feels as if you have enslaved time, you have got one over on it. You are winning the war against it. In fact, you get so used to doing your calf raises while cleaning your teeth that you now can’t clean your teeth without automatically going up onto first one leg, then another. The mere buzz of your electric toothbrush gets your calf muscles quivering. You are Pavlov’s dog. But this is a good thing, because you are cheating time. Or so you think. Imagine that the act of cleaning your teeth while doing your calf raises becomes so automatic and unconscious that you can now do a third thing as well, further demonstrating your mastery over time. Perhaps, as well as doing your teeth and your calf raises you imagine what you’d do if you won a million pounds on the Lottery. Perhaps you write a To Do list in your head. A letter to someone from long ago . . . How aware are you now of the calf raises? How many have you done? Does it matter that this action, like so much else in your life, has now become so unconscious you don’t even know you are doing it? What other things did you begin doing long ago, long before the calf raises, that you do not feel or even know about any more? Who were you, before you forgot?

  The first-class quiet carriage is almost full. Skye Turner is incognito, sort of. Wearing no make-up and with her mauve cashmere hoody pulled loosely over her head she looks more eccentric than famous, although anyone who watches MTV would know it was her, especially with the blue hair and those cheekbones. Can normal people who watch MTV afford to sit in first class? Not usually, but it’s only ten pounds to upgrade at the weekend, which is, when you think about it, actually a good reason not to travel at the weekend at all. Then again, a tenner is a lot to some people. Skye remembers when a tenner was food and fags for a whole week if you shopped at Lidl and got your tobacco off Prince Albert in the Ship. Can you even travel by train if you’re properly poor? Not really. Skye Turner had never even been on an InterCity train before she’d done her first gig. And she never went first class until she had her first number 1 single. Anyway, there are no other young people in the carriage, so she’s safe.

  The train pulls into Newton Abbott station and a youngish woman gets on. She’s about the same age as Skye Turner and she’s saying goodbye to her parents, just as Skye Turner has recently done, although these parents look homely in their elasticated-waist trousers and fleeces, and probably smell of sprouts, whereas Skye Turner’s mum now refuses to wear anything that is not 100 per cent cashmere, linen or silk. The woman’s dad mouths ‘I love you’ through the window, and the woman gets out a tissue to dab at her eyes, but does not do it while they are still watching. She doesn’t notice Skye Turner because she’s too upset. Poor thing! Skye tries to send a beam of love to the young woman, and another one to the parents, now walking away hand in hand as the train pulls off. Skye thinks of her own mother, Tash, who rarely leaves the house now, and her father, Karl, who does not suit being rich, because it renders all of the activities he has ever really enjoyed – scavenging from skips, renovating broken guitars, going on endless demos including spending three months at Occupy, volunteering for the CAB and so on – completely useless and/or ridiculous. The Turners used to complain about the rich all the time, provoked by the internet, the Daily Mirror, Have I Got News for You, and the Class War pamphlets that Communist Mike used to drop through the door, but now they are rich they haven’t even got anything to complain about except how low the ceilings are in the £750k chocolate-box cottage in Dartington that Skye bought them. Skye wants to buy her dad a football team or a guitar shop so that he has something to do, but she’s recently realised that she is running out of money and if she doesn’t get to the studio soon to record the new album and get another tour booked, then basically she’s going to have to stop living in hotels,
kick Greg and his mates out of the flat and then sell it and – worst-case scenario – actually go and stay in Devon for a while to get her head together.

  But it won’t come to that, especially if her accountant can hold off the Inland Revenue for another few weeks until the next big transfer hits her bank. And if she gets some ideas. Or if she decides to record other people’s material, which means giving them most of the money and losing the small amount of credibility she has left. Lately, Skye has been visiting her parents in Devon every weekend. It’s certainly a lot cheaper than staying in London hotels. In fact, since the Turners ‘lost’ their cleaner, Skye often arrives on a Wednesday and does a bit of cleaning herself. It’s quite soothing after the rush and buzz of London. And somebody needs to do it. And then there’s the neighbour of course, or, to be more accurate, the neighbour’s son, who is all of twenty-one and kind of pale-haired and spotty but has those adorable legs, and who keeps texting her . . .

  Skye Turner tries to send another beam of love to the woman. She’s openly weeping now. Skye doesn’t look – she knows what it’s like to be looked at all the time, including when you don’t want to be looked at because you are crying. She goes back to the mindfulness book that Fleur recommended and reads a line or two about approaching every day with loving kindness. The woman picks up her white iPhone and starts typing. Poor thing; she obviously doesn’t realise it’s the quiet carriage, because her keyboard makes that tap-tap noise that anyone who isn’t – let’s be honest for just a second, mindfulness aside – a complete fucking idiot switches off the minute they start using an iPhone. Maybe she’s a bit deaf or something, like that friend of Greg’s who can’t hear anything at all that is not a loud drum sound. Perhaps she’s composing a message to her now-surely-weeping-too mother, thanking her for a lovely weekend and her Yorkshire puddings etc. (Tash Turner has never really cooked because Karl used to do it all from the stuff he found in skips and stole from farms, and now they have a fridge full of M&S Gastropub meals, but Nanny Barbs made beautiful Yorkshires.) Skye Turner tries to send another beam of love, but it misses, rebounds off the wall of the carriage, flips back over Skye’s shoulder, goes out of the window and hits a cormorant drying her wings on a rusted, wrecked boat on the River Exe just past Starcross.

  At the end of the carriage, four people have loudly cracked open a bottle of champagne and are making excited noises and talking about how much liquid you can take through security at Heathrow. The weeping woman has stopped weeping now. She picks up her phone again. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tappety-tap, like a fake typing-pool sound-effect in a black-and-white film. WHY is that noise so annoying? It’s only a little noise. It’s only because Skye’s hearing is so good that she’s even heard it. She slips her feet out of her sheepskin boots and rests them lightly on the seat in front of her. Then she takes out her hardback notebook because she really should try and write a song before they reach London, but who can write a song with all this tap-tap-tapfucking-tap going on? Skye breathes. She can smell dead animal wrapped in carbs. Fantastic. Some fucktard is eating a pasty. She thinks that if she were any good at mindfulness she just wouldn’t notice the sound or the smell. She’d be thinking much higher thoughts.

  Outside the window an egret takes off and flies over the estuary towards Exmouth.

  White bird. I thought you heard.

  I thought you heard me. White bird.

  You soar, and ignore me.

  White bird . . .

  If she carries on, this is going to be either the best or the worst song Skye has ever written. Apart from anything else, it has ballad written all over it. Skye Turner doesn’t do ballads. She doesn’t do songs about birds. But people have written great songs about birds. Like . . . OK, like those I’d-rather-be-a-sparrow-than-a-nail guys. Or whatever. And, er . . . Before she can think of any more, some guy by the vestibule starts listening to Phil Collins. That’s it. That is the very end of her concentration. Since everyone else in the quiet carriage is now making such a fucking noise, Skye decides to get her headphones out. She puts on the Arctic Monkeys at medium volume and imagines herself looking good on some dance floor while some guy she doesn’t know but who looks a bit like the neighbour’s son but without the spots gets a massive hard-on just from watching her. ‘But is he rich, babes?’ asks Tash Turner, the imaginary, archetypal version, who is basically exactly the same as the real version.

  In this brief fantasy, Skye Turner is five years younger and is wearing a cheap silver dress from Topshop. The problem, Skye Turner realises, and she has known this for a long time, is that she shouldn’t be sitting in first class at all. What about the time she played Korova in Liverpool and got the 5 a.m. train back to London the next day with all those commuters while totally still coming down off MDMA? She vomited in the toilets, what four, five times, and looked amazing the next day: thin, pale and wasted. She still has that guy’s number somewhere, not that she ever rang it. Then she went straight to a photo shoot in Spitalfields where the stylist gave her a double espresso laced with a bit of speed to pick her up. The problem now is that she doesn’t actually have a life to write about. If someone gives her their phone number now it’s because they want her money, not her soul. At least that’s what Tash always tells her. But even back then she was writing about her past because no one talks about the present when it suddenly involves: a) drugs, but not in a fun, young way but more in a president-of-something-or-somewhere kind of way, i.e. to straighten out more than get wasted; b) £5,000 beauty treatments; and c) an unfathomably deep loneliness that no one would believe in because if you are rich you can buy anything.

  Skye does not even have caffeine now. That’s how unreal she has become. That’s how far away she is from the eight-year-old girl she used to be who preferred sweet tea to any other drink. She carries her own rooibos teabags around with her and asks for boiling water whenever the trolley comes around. (Other things she carries with her at all times include Diptyque fig-scented candles, a cashmere blanket and her stuffed rabbit.) She’s been on this train for hours now and there has been no trolley. The train conductor keeps making dark-sounding announcements apologising for the lack of space in standard class and telling everyone to take any bags off seats so that the many people standing can sit down. Skye Turner has her bag on a seat. But then there’s no one waiting to sit down near her. No one else wants to upgrade to first class for a tenner. Or do they? If there are people standing . . .

  The conductor appears and gestures for her to take her headphones out.

  ‘This is the quiet carriage, you know,’ he says, pointing at the signs.

  ‘But . . .’ MINDFULNESS. ‘OK. Sorry.’ Hey, universe, look at this girl go! Check her out. ‘When’s the trolley coming round?’

  ‘No trolley on a Sunday. You’ll have to go to the buffet like everyone else.’

  Like everyone else? WTF? Has he recognised her, or is this some kind of dig at first-class passengers in general? Never mind. Breathe. Good. Karma ker-ching! Now that Skye’s headphones are out, though, it’s back to the tap-tap-tappety-tap of the woman who must have finished emailing her distraught mother by now and who therefore can now only be doing something less important, like tweeting. Skye Turner uses her train app to check when the next station stop is. It’s not for fifteen minutes, so she can get to the buffet and back without anyone needing her to move her bag or her coat or her packed lunch that she made this morning but needs a cup of tea even to be able to contemplate: five hard-boiled eggs with the yolks taken out (and given to the half-witted poodle Leon) and replaced with tuna mixed with fat-free yogurt and Tabasco. She also has roughly a quarter of one smoked mackerel fillet, three cherry tomatoes, one black olive, half a brazil nut and a jar of caviar.

  Behind her, the conductor is explaining about the trolley to an elderly woman who wants a gin and tonic. Skye thinks the conductor should offer to get the old woman a gin and tonic, but he doesn’t. Skye should offer to get her a gin and tonic, but she doesn’t either. It would make e
verything too complicated, and it’s complicated enough already.

  The buffet car is heaving. There is a very long queue that is taking up most of the carriage, but there are also, at the far end, a group of foreign students sitting on the floor, with grubby rucksacks and unbrushed hair. These are the kind of people who would recognise Skye Turner. The queue runs back along the train towards standard class. To get to the back of it, you’d have to fight your way past all of it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter because Skye Turner only wants a cup of boiling water, so she joins the queue at the front and waits for the man to notice her. But when he does, he simply gestures towards the other end of the car.

  ‘There is a queue,’ he says.

  ‘I only want a cup of boiling water, though.’

  ‘You’ve still got to queue just like everyone else.’

  Just like everyone else. What is it with people today? Skye Turner thinks of the elderly woman. She thinks of all the people in first class who have paid more money for a better service. The conductor appears behind her.

  ‘This system’s stupid,’ she says to him. ‘How am I supposed to even get to the back of the queue from first class?’

  ‘I’ve already told you you’ve got to queue up like everyone else.’

  ‘But this just makes it worse if you’re in first class. You basically have to push and shove all the way from here to the end of the queue. That’s not . . .’

  He chuckles. ‘All the way. You don’t know you’re born.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘There are no privileges on this train. You can either queue with everyone else or not. It’s up to you. Everybody else is queuing without complaining.’