The Seed Collectors

  Pi has offered to cover all Fleur’s sessions – except the ‘mindfulness crap’ – while she and Skye are away. Which is so incredibly generous, of course, but then Fleur has a dream that when she comes back he has changed the locks and painted the house yellow and had her cottage shipped to Kansas. Which is obviously WTF in the way all dreams are, but also: what if he does take over? He’s already acting all man-of-the-house with Bluebell and Ketki. What if Fleur is sidelined? She might own Namaste House on paper, but in reality everyone knows that no one owns anything and everything just runs on invisible lines of power and personality. Usually when she touches the frankincense tree each evening she offers it some of her energy and she feels the tree take it, in the way an elderly person accepts a seat on the tube. But the last couple of nights it has offered some back. What does that mean?

  During meditation Fleur’s thoughts, which are clouds floating past that she should observe without attachment, or bubbles floating around her head that she must pop, have become unkind. For example all the thoughts about how it is probably easier to love a millionaire, which is what Fleur now is. Or that now she has Namaste House she finds that she does not want to share it. What a selfish bitch! That she particularly does not want to share it with the man she supposedly loves is problematic.

  She wants to share it with the man she really loves and . . .

  Pop-pop-pop, go her thoughts.

  The Outer Hebrides

  June, 1999

  Dearest Charlie,

  I know you will think I am a coward for not telling you this in person, and especially for not telling you this in person months ago, but anyway, I am telling you now. Here goes. I am lying in my hospital bed holding my beautiful daughter and I just have to tell you that she is yours too. I never meant this to happen, but I am holding OUR beautiful daughter. How do I know? You’ll see for yourself when you meet her. I have known for a while now, mainly because of the timing. I’d like to say we have been unlucky – after all, there was just that one time – but honestly, Charlie, she is so beautiful that you will not think it bad luck at all, but good luck, and you will forgive yourself for what we did, just as I have forgiven myself. James knows, and has agreed that he will bring her up as his own daughter. He says he already loves her as much as if she was his own child. We will let her believe that he is her father, at least at first. I do hope you will accept that this is the only thing that can happen. He suggested not telling you (which may give you some idea of his state of mind), but I couldn’t not let you know. What will you do about Charlotte? Obviously you are not long married and we certainly don’t want to rock the boat at this end. Perhaps you’ll be happy to become a very special Uncle Charlie? Or perhaps you’ll never speak to me again. Anyway, I also wanted to let you know that I have named her Holly. Do you know the Emily Brontë poem ‘Love and Friendship’? Love is like the wild rose-briar, / Friendship like the holly-tree—/ The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms / But which will bloom most constantly? That’s the beginning. There is more. Anyway, I wanted her to be a celebration of our – hopefully – enduring friendship. Perhaps a child made more from friendship, albeit a rather passionate moment in that friendship, than from love will have some particularly special qualities. I’d like to think so. As you can imagine, James is taking some time to come to terms with what we did. But once the storm passes I would like you to come and meet your daughter as soon as possible.

  In loving friendship,

  Bryony

  Who would put Fleur Meadows and Skye Turner in the emergency exit row? Seriously? Just look at them. Look at their eyes. Look at their lipstick. Actually, both of them could put lipstick on straight in the CERN particle accelerator if they had to: Skye from sheer practice and Fleur because it matters in ways that she can’t quite . . . But here’s the point: no one wears lipstick on a plane from Glasgow to Stornoway. What would you be needing lipstick for, in Stornoway? And would a properly rational person have even let them, these lipsticked, drunk, ponytailed disasters, on the plane at all after seeing the way they reacted to it at Glasgow airport, doubled over in laughter, calling it, among other things, a toy plane, a miniature plane, a ‘shrunken shrinky-dink plane you could put on a keyring’.

  But here they are. Fleur by the window or – to be more accurate – door. Skye is next to her, with a preposterously sharp high-heeled shoe sticking out into the aisle. They are both wearing huge sunglasses. They look a little bit as if they have each been allowed to take one thing too many from the dressing-up box. Have they read the instructions as they were asked? Well, sort of. Well, Fleur has tried. There’s a picture of a man being attacked by a red arrow that seems to want him to jump from the plane. It’s a bit disturbing, actually. But to be honest the more compelling thing to look at, right now, is the way that only one black, plastic propeller seems to be moving, and the other one is obviously broken and the whole thing is increasingly like a toy: but more like something you’d put in the bath than something that could actually fly.

  The plane is so small that it has only one steward, or cabin crew, or whatever, and then one guy with a moustache in charge of flying it. He’s called Dave and she’s called Maggie. Fleur counts the seats in the plane: thirty-six. How would something like this take off, though, really? And with only one propeller? Could she open the emergency exit by mistake while they are flying along? Could she fall into a dream-like state and do it by accident and KILL EVERYBODY? The plane taxis to the runway. At Heathrow they saw a hawk hunting on a strip of grass right there with planes waiting to take off. Here there are mountains, well, hills, and lots of other places for hawks to hang out. And – excellent – the second propeller has come on. And now the engine, which is surprisingly loud, and . . .

  ‘Little thing goes pretty fast,’ Skye says.

  But Fleur can’t reply because taking off makes her feel amazing but a bit sick, especially after all that Chapel Down she managed to drink on the BA plane. She doesn’t usually drink very much, and neither does Skye, but apparently it really helps with air travel, which Skye does a lot and Fleur hasn’t really done since she was fifteen and went to Mumbai, then still called Bombay, to get Piyali. It’s a little bit like coming up on opium, although really . . .

  Dave seems to be avoiding the clouds as he works the little plane up into the sky, penetrating it slowly, and really quite gently. It’s like, it’s like . . .

  ‘It’s actually a bit like a bicycle with wings.’

  Maggie comes with the trolley.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ she offers. ‘Biscuit?’

  ‘Have you got any wine?’

  ‘Just tea, love, sorry.’

  ‘Are they chocolate biscuits?’

  ‘Yes, love.’

  ‘OK. What is the maximum amount of biscuits we can have?’

  Maggie drops her voice. ‘I can let you have two each,’ she says. ‘But don’t tell.’

  ‘Make it three?’

  Maggie sighs and gives them five biscuits to share. They turn out to be those things that the posher housing-estate mums used to put in kids’ lunchboxes back in the early eighties. They are basically several layers of polystyrene and sugar wrapped in the kind of chocolate that the EU used to want to condemn and call ‘vegolate’ on the basis that its cocoa density was so tiny. They have shiny red and silver packaging that is half open on all of the biscuits.

  The cloud clears a little as they fly over Ullapool and then a bit of Atlantic, with the Stornoway ferry chugging along beneath them. When they begin their descent it turns out that they are on the wrong side of the plane so they abandon the emergency exit row and take new seats by the opposite windows while other passengers tut and complain about who will open the doors in an emergency. (In an emergency, in an aircraft, what use are doors really?) But it’s so beautiful, coming in to land on this island that really looks like an island, with edges like on a small jigsaw puzzle piece.

  Landing at the airport is like landing on someone’s driveway. All right
, a celebrity’s driveway, but still. The airport itself fits neatly into one large room. It’s actually great if you’re wearing shoes like Skye’s or even like Fleur’s. You can stumble down the steps off the plane and then by the time you’ve righted yourself you’ve fallen through the door to baggage reclaim, which is a bit of a joke really, as you can see your bags coming off the plane and being wheeled around to a hatch and then loaded on to the carousel when they could just basically hand them to you. There is no security and no customs. Fleur buys a postcard of the plane. Skye buys twenty Marlboro and a box of chocolates with a picture of a different, even smaller plane landing on the beach at Barra. They get in a cab and give the female cab driver the name of their hotel. On the map it had looked as if this hotel might be maybe ten minutes from the airport, but in fact the cabbie says it’s going to take forty-five minutes to get there and will cost fifty pounds. On the way there they see houses that are bare and basic and grey. They see rocks. They see sheep. They see an egret a bit like the one Skye Turner saw from that train, just before everything that happened happened.

  ‘Holiday?’ asks the cabbie.

  ‘Research,’ says Fleur.

  ‘Oh, I thought you looked like . . . I’ll tell you what I thought. I thought to myself, Maybe TV. We do get TV people here sometimes, but they never stop for long and they never come back. Are you TV?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Film?’ She says it ‘fillum’.

  ‘We’re botanists.’

  ‘Oh aye.’ There’s quite a long pause. ‘Really? You’ll know all about the orchids then.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘You know, the Hebridean spotted orchid?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Who else comes here?’ Skye asks.

  ‘Walkers. Artists sometimes. We had a novelist last year. Mind you, we’ve already got a novelist living here, so . . .’

  On one side of the road there’s a huge rock. On the other side a sheep eats a thistle. There is barely anything on this island apart from sheep, rocks, ugly houses and thistles. What’s missing? Something’s missing. There’s . . .

  ‘And you’ll know about the Sabbath,’ says the cab driver.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Everything closes. No buses, no taxis, no nothing. No restaurants, although you’ll be all right because your hotel’ll serve food all day, but for residents only of course.’

  ‘So there are restaurants?’ Skye imagines cute little fish places on a cosmopolitan, charming, bustling waterfront that looks not unlike Nyhavn in Copenhagen, where she went once for some reason she’s forgotten. She imagines eating a dozen oysters and drinking champagne while watching the sun set over the Atlantic. Just around the next corner there could be anything, there could be . . .

  ‘Oh aye. Back in Stornoway. In the hotels. Some of the pubs serve food.’

  ‘And shops?’

  ‘What will you be wanting to buy?’

  Shoes, lipstick, Vogue magazine, spiritual and/or uplifting books, deodorant, mascara, socks, probably, and also some hiking boots, more cigarettes, nail varnish, a new blusher brush, a tea set, some interesting wallpaper, art, ironic souvenirs, ethnic rugs/throws, Diet Coke, Vaseline, a meditation cushion, an eye-pillow, an iPhone charger, an iPad charger, some toothpaste. The last hotel Skye stayed in had vending machines for everything, from champagne to diamond tiaras. It was a thing. Is this a thing? What kind of thing is this? There has not been one single establishment that would sell you anything in the twenty miles they have already covered. Not even a petrol station for milk and fags. How do people even survive here?

  ‘Er . . .’

  ‘You won’t really be finding a shop that close to where you are.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Do either of you drive at all?’

  Skye shrugs. Fleur shakes her head.

  ‘You do know you’re going to be a bit remote, then?’

  ‘We’ll be fine. Thanks. We’ll call a cab if we want to go anywhere.’

  ‘Och aye, well, but not tomorrow, remember?’

  ‘Right.’

  The hotel, which costs over £100 a night, looks oddly like the working-men’s club that Karl and Tash Turner used to go to of a Saturday night after Gladiators. It had almost exactly the same swirling turquoise and orange carpet. Its bar had the same smell that this bar has. It, too, had no open fire or anything quaint or touristy about it at all. It, also, had Radio 1 playing behind the bar, and chicken Kiev on the menu. It did not, however, have 200 different single malt whiskies.

  ‘Which one do you recommend?’ Skye asks the barman.

  ‘To be honest, love, they’re all about the same.’

  Fleur orders a double Jura Superstition. Skye has the same. They go through to the hotel lounge, which is a posh version of the bar area done out in a mint green colour with a sofa facing a fireplace with candles in it. Why is there no open fire? The room smells cold: of grease, fly spray and furniture polish. There is a vacuum humming faintly upstairs somewhere. On the wall are pictures of stags and thistles.

  ‘Why have I heard of Jura?’ Skye asks.

  ‘It’s where we’re going after this. Meet the others at the lodge.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Duh. Didn’t someone burn a million quid on the Isle of Jura? Some pop group from the nineties?’

  ‘Did they?’

  ‘Yeah. The K Foundation. Or the KLF. Whatever.’

  ‘I’d like to burn a million quid.’

  ‘I sort of have.’

  ‘Yeah, well, me too I suppose. Sort of.’

  They clink glasses. Skye sighs.

  ‘Everyone hates me.’

  ‘It’ll be all right. Look what happened to Rihanna.’

  ‘She was a victim of something. I’m more like . . .’ Skye lets a space open up in the air in which both of them replay their own version of what happened on that train. Fleur wasn’t there but has heard all about it, of course. Skye has edited her version slightly. For example she has written out the phrase ‘fucking fuckbag gyppos’ and the bit where she threw the cup of boiling water at the man in the corner who had not done anything more innocuous than just play Phil Collins on his new (now ruined) phone. All the bits she has written out were, obvs, in the video on YouTube that has so far been viewed over two million times.

  ‘What about Kate Moss? It all looked like it was over for her back in whenever. You know? With all the coke and stuff. And now . . .’

  ‘I’m not Kate Moss.’

  ‘Yeah. Well.’

  ‘Kate Moss did not keep dead birds in her bath.’

  ‘No.’

  They sip whisky. Skye thinks about the tabloids getting into her parents’ place. Quite why they had to choose the day that Skye’s alcoholic aunt decided to collect all the dead birds from around the house – which is weird enough, admittedly, but it’s just the age the cats are and how frisky they have been since coming to Devon, and how little clearing up Skye’s parents ever do – and . . .

  ‘This is like an old people’s home.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Are there really no shops, do you think?’

  ‘There’ll be something. We’ll look in the morning.’

  ‘What about the Sabbath thingy?’

  ‘There’ll be a Londis or something.’

  ‘Have you got a map on your phone?’

  ‘No. You?’

  ‘Yeah, but the battery’s flat.’

  ‘Charger?’

  Skye shakes her head.

  ‘What about your iPad?’

  ‘I’ve got like thirty per cent battery left. I thought I’d better ration it.’

  ‘Charger?’ Silly question.

  ‘Why . . . ?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why don’t you just take your chargers when you go away?’

  Skye shrugs. ‘It’s like my ritual when I arrive somewhere, like buying new ones. I don’t know. It gives me something to do. Probably stops me feeling lost and lonely or whatever, you know, if I
have a mission. Or maybe deep down I don’t want to charge them up, because . . . Anyway, you’ve got your phone presumably.’

  ‘Yeah, but my phone’s just a phone.’

  ‘We so need a proper map.’

  ‘We’ll get it off your iPad while you’ve still got battery, and copy it out or something. Do you want another drink?’

  Clem’s drunk, which is the first unusual thing. The second unusual thing is that she has rung Ollie from her hotel in Edinburgh rather than just texted him goodnight. The third thing is that she has rung Ollie to TALK ABOUT HER FEELINGS. To whom does she normally talk about her feelings? Fleur? Bryony? But they’ve both been wrapped up with other things since the funeral – and, indeed, aren’t they both on different Scottish islands at the moment anyway? – and so now Ollie is in with a chance to be supportive and impressive and, well, a bit of a metrosexual (does that mean thoughtful, or actually just gay?) hunk. But this is something of a sticky problem.

  ‘So you’re upset because no one wants to rape you?’

  ‘No! Of course not. Don’t twist what I was saying . . .’

  ‘I wasn’t . . . I was just . . .’ Ollie has no idea how TWISTING, which is always a part of their arguments, but never a part of any kind of supportive chat (do therapists twist things? Do counsellors and priests twist things? Well, actually, well, never mind . . .), has suddenly come into this. It’s, frankly, a bit much. But she’s off again.

  ‘I was just saying that I feel so fucking old. And so ugly. And even though I feel sort of semi-glamorous at work – except compared with Zoe of course – that’s only because, on reflection, everyone at work goes around in soup-stained jumpers with no make-up on. Here, here . . . Here, basically I’m just a washed-up academic with orthotics, for God’s sake, not that anyone can see them, but even so, and a three-month old haircut, and a paunch, and wine-stained teeth . . .’