The Seed Collectors

  What has happened to him? It is hard to say. He has grey hair, like all really old people, but it is streaked with red and tied into a horrible ponytail that crawls down his back like a dying snake. His teeth – all four of them – are black. His cheekbones sit so high on his face that he looks like a skeleton. In fact, in a way he looks a bit like all those pictures they showed Holly when she went to the clinic, of girls who ate even less than she did. What a stupid idea that was. The pictures were supposed to scare the girls, but instead they used them as inspiration. Thinspiration, in fact, which is a word Holly learned while she was there. Before she went to the clinic she didn’t eat because she just didn’t really like food and preferred tennis. Now she doesn’t eat because she wants to beat those skeletons. She wants to beat the skeletons 6–0, 6–0. The double bagel. But she does not want to turn out like this shrivelled little man in front of her and . . .

  ‘I could use a little girl,’ he says.

  ‘Er . . . I think I should go back to Aunt Fleur now.’

  ‘Sit down,’ he says.

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Sit down.’

  ‘Oh God. Look, I’m really sorry I came into your private space and . . .’

  ‘Sit down. I am assuming you can type?’

  ‘Type? Well . . .’

  ‘Since you’re here, and since you’re not supposed to be here and are therefore in trouble, I’m going to tell you my life story and you are going to write it down for me. It’s hard for me to type with ONE ARM MISSING after all. Think of it as a sort of punishment. And in return . . . Well, I’m going to take a wild guess that you’re here to steal my seed pods.’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Are you or aren’t you?’

  Holly closes her eyes. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll give you five.’

  Opens them again. ‘Thank you. But . . .’

  ‘Quinn and Plum’s granddaughter, aren’t you. Read the journal?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you probably know all about this.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know how your parents got all that money?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘But you don’t know everything.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘SIT DOWN FOR FUCK’S SAKE.’

  Holly goes to the computer and sits down. She realises she is shaking. There is another plastic willy next to the computer. She doesn’t like it. Where is Ash? Where is Aunt Fleur?

  ‘All right.’ He fingers his horrible, straggly grey beard. ‘What is the number one question you have?’

  Holly thinks. ‘What actually happened to my grandparents and Fleur’s mother?’

  The Prophet roars with laughter. Well, it comes out like a croak. Like a dying toad.

  ‘You think I know that? No one knows that. They went back to the Lost Island and probably got murdered by some shaman who was pissed off with people constantly turning up in his village looking for free drugs.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Number two question.’

  ‘Why are the seed pods worth so much money?’

  ‘Good. Better. Intelligent little girl, aren’t you?’

  Holly shrugs. ‘I just . . .’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, I read that the seed pods kill you and then instead of being reincarnated or whatever, your soul leaves the universe, which a lot of people think is a good thing, but which actually sounds . . .’

  ‘Ever heard of biological warfare?’

  It’s 15.25. There are no more viewings. Bryony is not having her first drink of today until 18.00 so the big question is what to do between now and then. The obvious answer is admin, but that is very boring. And also quite hard at this lazy, pre-evening, pinkish, oscitant time of day. On the one hand this time of day is exciting, because it is only two hours and thirty-five minutes until Bryony can have a drink, and therefore relax and sink into herself and, frankly, switch off. This isn’t a terrible time of day. This isn’t, thank God, 10 a.m., the heavy drinker’s equivalent of being in Oxford and longing for the sea. But the fact remains that there are two hours and thirty-five, make that now thirty-four, minutes to fill. Make that thirty-three.

  Do a pee.

  Thirty-one.

  Bryony watches a YouTube video of a man hip-hop dancing onto a treadmill and then falling off. She Googles Clem. She Googles Skye Turner. Watches Skye melting down on YouTube for what must be the hundredth time, and admires how thin and beautiful Skye looks even when she is being so embarrassing. She watches it again. At least the tabloids haven’t found her at Beatrix’s place. She sets the Sky+ for the rest of the series of MasterChef.

  Bryony three-finger-swipes to her email inbox. It’s horrible! Her spreadsheets. Dire! The five – count them – property descriptions she should have finished by this afternoon. No! She three-finger-swipes back to Safari. What else can she do? Outnet or Amazon? Or both? The Outnet is more absorbing, but Amazon gives her that buzzy, clicky, happy feeling in a more immediate way. Just because she has forbidden herself from ever going onto eBay again does not mean that she can’t . . . And she could do with some new trainers. So . . . Trainers and then Women’s, and then Sports and Outdoors, and then Athletic and Outdoor Shoes. Then sort: Price, from high to low. Ooh. There are some trainers that are £258! But they seem to be only for cyclists. Bugger. The most expensive trainers in Bryony’s size are made by Ecco, which means they are for old people. So, on to the Outnet. Or, fuck it, Netaporter. Nike Airs or Lanvins? Both. Ker-ching!

  A brief, small buzz, which fades after about fifteen minutes.

  When Bryony feels like this there is only one thing to do and that is get out of the office, get some fresh air and clear her head by going to Two’s Company a few doors down the High Street and buying approximately £300 worth of scarves and jewellery. Yes, yes, it’s more shopping, but it stops her thinking about wine. When she goes there today she finds a dress that almost looks as if it could fit her. It is a beautiful deep crimson silk with the kind of nipped-in waist and expensive cut that – potentially – makes even someone quite fat look beautiful and arresting, like a woman from a painting with a lot of fruit in it. Could she wear it for her graduation? Might it send the wrong message? Or – worse – the right one? There is also a rather lovely hunting jacket and a crisp white shirt and, OMG, the XL in both the jacket and the shirt ACTUALLY FIT. The shirt is rather billowy, like something from a ship, or the eighteenth century. But the dress, the dress. Whisper it, but . . . it fits too. Perhaps she could wear it at home, for a dinner party, with bare feet and a delicate silver anklet, and afterwards she and James . . . But lately thinking of fucking James is as exciting as thinking of replastering the house or getting that blue soapy stuff topped up in the car. She buys the dress quickly to neutralise these thoughts. And a big necklace to go with it.

  At 17.47 she takes the small bottle of M&S wine from her office fridge and puts it into her cool bag. She drives to the seafront, as far north as possible where she is less likely to see anyone she knows walking past. It’s reasonable, right, to want to have her first drink of the day in peace and quiet on her own? Of course, she has nicer wine at home. And she’ll have that when she gets in. But increasingly she needs something to take the edge off walking through her own front door. And also, she needs to be on her own to think about Ollie.

  OK. Obviously nothing – as Holly might say, N.O.T.H.I.N.G. – is happening, is going to happen or ever will happen. It’s hard to think of a more forbidden love than this, although Fleur and Charlie were pushing it, weren’t they, all those years ago? How extraordinary. But a tiny bit of incest, if it’s true love and there are no other obstacles . . . That’s surely not quite as bad as this, which would be adults choosing to wreck their whole entire lives? Then again, in some ways it is sort of worse. After all, Fleur and Charlie could never marry, whereas Bryony and Ollie . . . If anything ever happened between Bryony and Ollie, that would be the end of the whole family. But they could le
gally marry. Of course, Bryony is fairly sure that Ollie does not share her feelings. Even she does not fully share her feelings. What on earth is she even thinking? That stupid dream. Touching his arm. And now a red dress . . . She imagines kissing him, just once. Could that be enough? Just one kiss? If she could engineer it so that he would . . . No. She loves James. Ollie would be bad for her. She sips her wine. At least she feels normal now.

  Fleur waits at the bus stop. She’s put the Book in a Thais Are Us carrier bag given to her by Bluebell. The bag dangles from her wrist as if it contains something she’s taking back to the library or returning to a friend. When the bus comes she pays the fare to Canterbury. But in fact she gets off at the next stop, and leaves the book to finish the journey to Canterbury on its own. Does it arrive? Does it hitch a lift back? Maybe someone picks it up long before that, in Ash or Wingham. Perhaps it’s on someone’s bookshelf before Fleur has even finished walking home. Who knows?

  It’s beginning to rain as Charlie and Izzy enter the Shirley Sherwood Gallery in Kew Gardens. They are miles away from anything. Well, they are quite close to the Temperate House. But they are a ten-minute walk away from their offices, and on a grey afternoon like this one it feels as if they are miles away from anything. It is a misty, low-cloud sort of day in which even London buses look a bit like alien craft emerging from the gloom, with their ascorbic orange dazzle. Not that they can see any buses from here. They can vaguely hear them passing, flashes of their dazzle only slightly visible above the wall. And of course there is the usual roar of planes coming in to land at Heathrow, but no one at Kew hears those any more. Bright green parakeets fly damply from tree to tree and grey squirrels bob up and down. The nights are drawing in, and the last of the wasps have already retreated inside clammy buildings where some will find a sleeve or a gardening shoe in which to sleep out the coming winter, but most will hurl their now heavy bodies against window panes and into fluorescent lights until they die.

  Inside the gallery there is an exhibition called the Art of Plant Evolution, but that is not why they are here. Or, at least, Charlie doesn’t think it is why they are here. Izzy won’t say why they are here. The botanical paintings are arranged in evolutionary sequence. So the first thing is Alexander Viazmensky’s painting of Amanita muscaria, the classic red toadstool with white spots that has hallucinogenic properties but is also very deadly. Early plants like algae and mosses do not have seeds: instead, they multiply through spores. Charlie wonders for a second why plants bothered to invent such complex reproduction mechanisms as flowers, resulting in fruits containing seeds to make more flowers. What’s wrong with just throwing your spores around, like nature’s equivalent of having a wank? And especially if you can reproduce that way, well, who needs other organisms? It seems a whole lot less complicated than what evolution eventually produced: vast complex entities that require not just a bit of damp earth and a fair wind but designer clothes, deodorant and a late-night tube service. Charlie and Izzy walk past the algae and the mosses, past a wall full of gymnosperms, with their strange, otherworldly cones. But of course the angiosperms are what everyone wants to see, because the angiosperms have flowers which are beautiful and . . . Here are the lilies and peppers and magnolias.

  ‘I’ve always sort of preferred monocots,’ Izzy says, as they walk on. ‘Is that weird?’

  Charlie laughs. ‘Sort of, with you being an expert in fuzzy, complex leaves . . .’

  She shrugs. ‘I’ve never liked working on my favourite plants.’

  ‘What is your most favourite plant?’

  ‘I’m fond of lilies. You?’

  Charlie shrugs. ‘I’m an orchid fan myself, so . . .’

  ‘What is Nicola’s favourite plant?’

  Good God. This again. ‘How would I know?’

  ‘You’ve been on lots of dates. You’ve never been on a date with me and you know my favourite plant.’

  ‘Um . . .’

  ‘What do you think it might be?’

  ‘I really wouldn’t . . .’

  ‘Do you think she’d like roses?’

  ‘Are you trying to get me to send her . . .’

  ‘No! I just wonder if you can tell things about a person by what plants they like.’

  ‘Maybe it’s more relevant if you work with plants, and . . .’

  ‘Roses are quite obvious, I suppose. But then Nicola is a bit . . .’

  ‘Most people don’t really know what roses are. I mean, Rosales? Yes, I’m fond of Rosales.’

  ‘The whole order?’

  ‘Yep. All that lovely fruit. Sloe berries and figs and . . . My sister does this thing with her students where she gets them to work out the connection between apples and roses – like, greeting-card roses in a vase, Rosa damascena or whatever – and apparently most of them can’t get it. They don’t know that apples are also part of the Rosaceae family, don’t understand that an apple tree grows flowers that look like roses before they fruit. I mean, apparently they don’t even know that flowers do fruit. Oh, there they are over there.’ There, indeed, in the Rosales section is a painting of three hyperreal-looking apples. They set off diagonally, leapfrogging quite a few evolutionary steps. But then there are the spathes of the Philodendron muricatum which make them stop again.

  ‘I do love Margaret Mee.’

  ‘So do I. Her plants always look sort of evil . . .’

  ‘You know that one’s pollinated by scarab beetles?’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘They go inside the spathes and mate all night long.’

  ‘Like little sex booths.’

  ‘So many flowers are basically little sex booths.’

  ‘Of course that’s actually an inflorescence, not a . . .’

  ‘Shut up. We’re like completely off duty.’

  There is no one else in the gallery. It is late, and wet, and grey, and Tuesday. Who goes to look at botanical paintings on a wet Tuesday?

  ‘Right.’

  There is a jangle of keys and the bloke from the gift shop comes through.

  ‘I’m going to knock off if it’s all right with you guys,’ he says. ‘I’m sort of on a promise, and, well . . .’ He looks at the door leading to the way out.

  ‘You’re joking,’ says Izzy. ‘But we just got here. And it’s so wet outside, and . . .’

  He smiles. ‘You both work at Kew, right?’

  He leaves them the keys with such little fuss that for a second Charlie wonders if Izzy actually . . . But no, all Izzy wants to do is talk about Nicola. The last time Charlie saw Nicola was Friday night. She turned up at his place covered in gold sparkle and Guerlain perfume and offered to take him clubbing in Soho. In the end, though, they couldn’t be bothered to leave the house. Nicola had some weed with her and so they got stoned instead. Charlie remembers her annoying him by finishing his sentences – wrongly, each time – and then trying to gatecrash the jazz band’s practice by claiming to be an experienced blues singer. He still fucked her, of course, but he pretended she was the cave girl from what has become his regular morning wank fantasy, and persuaded her to put her hair in bunches for him to hold while he . . .

  ‘So you’ve got a list of attributes your perfect girlfriend would have?’

  ‘It’s from when I was like eighteen or something.’

  That’s right. He showed Nicola his list too. He shows all women his list at some point. He has a box of ‘amusing stuff from the past’ that contains things like his school photo from when he was nine, and a certificate for competence in, of all things, gymnastics. Then there’s the list, written in turquoise ink on yellow paper. Both the ink and the paper were given to him by Fleur. The whole list is obviously about Fleur, well, more or less. But basically the list never describes the woman to whom it is shown, which, now he thinks about it, must sort of be the point and . . .

  ‘What’s the worst thing on it?’

  ‘Oh, um, quite a detailed description of how firm her bum should be.’

  ‘Oh, Charlie. You sho
uld be ashamed of yourself!’

  ‘I was eighteen!’

  ‘So how firm should her bum be?’

  And here’s the problem. Izzy has exactly the bum he described back then. Basically Fleur’s bum, which Fleur still has of course, but that Charlie can never see or touch or think about ever again. How does Izzy know? Why is she doing this? Is this all a complete coincidence, or . . .

  ‘I suppose it is basically your bum,’ he says, shrugging.

  ‘Really?’ she says, taking a step closer.

  After the graduation ceremony, Bryony meets the others in the Abode Hotel Champagne Bar for drinks. Ollie was supposed to text everyone to tell them where to meet but he’s fucked it up somehow and so only Grant, Helen and Bryony make it. After two bottles of champagne – paid for by Bryony, even though they got the PhD scholarships and all she inherited was a bit of cold mansion a million billion miles away, Grant and Helen drift off to the house they share with a poet and a postcolonial theorist. Once Bryony is ninety-five per cent sure that Ollie is not coming she switches to a table at the back of the bar, drinks a glass of red wine, eats two omelettes and a large salad, and then leaves.

  Without the others she feels strange in her gown, with the beautiful red dress rustling underneath. There is drizzle in the air, and even the Caribbean market stall looks grey and desolate. A fruit seller is trying to flog off the last of his local Cox apples for ninety-nine pence a bag. Schoolchildren trail around soggily in their polyester school blazers, all heading for McDonald’s or the bus station. Perhaps Bryony should have taken her kids out of school and insisted that James bring them to her graduation. But then of course she wouldn’t have been able to get pissed with Ollie, which she has been looking forward to since they talked about it at the triathlon. Not that there is any Ollie. He was there in the cathedral; she saw him as she walked past: a blur of jeans, stubble, white shirt, crooked tie, cracked iPhone . . . Was he texting during the ceremony? But where is he now? They were definitely, definitely going to meet for drinks.