The Seed Collectors

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘Phenotypes, baby,’ said Charlie. ‘Expression of genes.’

  And even though Bryony kept glaring at Charlie, Skye Turner lapped this up to the extent that, OK, she did give him her number, which meant he could have fucked her. A pop star! With really a very nice . . . And then Fleur glared at Charlie as well, which meant he threw the number away, and in her kitchen bin too, hoping that she would notice. As Charlie opened Fleur’s bin to do this he was taken aback by how elegant, colourful and exotic its contents were: the dark yellow wrappers from her homemade hibiscus truffles; the pieces of bright green lime from the cocktails; the poppy leaves smeared red with saffron. Yes, Fleur manages to have a beautiful bin. How is that even possible?

  Charlie makes his porridge with bottled spring water, of course, as Palaeolithic man would not have had access to anything resembling North London tap water, that in any case often tastes of bleach, metal, hash and/or semen and in which traces of cocaine have recently been found. Of course, Charlie’s double espresso is also not quite authentic, although he reckons that Grok, which is what nerdy people on the internet call the ideal primal man, would not exactly have turned it down if some other caveman had offered it to him. The big question, of course, is whether Palaeolithic man had sex toys. According to some evolutionary psychologist whose name Charlie has forgotten, and who was actually a bit of a twat, once fire was discovered, women agreed to cook stuff for men in return for their protection, thus beginning the first ever dysfunctional nuclear family. And as if men couldn’t cook for themselves anyway. But in this scenario all you have to do is go ‘Ug, ug’ at another caveman every so often and in return you get hot food and fucking. But what kind of fucking? In the shower Charlie imagines his really quite young cave girl on all fours with one dinosaur bone in her cunt, and one up her arse, sucking his cock, while a fire burns in some sort of primitive cauldron. He is halfway through really quite a nice wank when he hears his phone bleep a text message. Izzy? He’s dreading facing her this morning, and a friendly message would just . . . But when he gets out of the shower he finds it’s just his daily text from his bank, telling him he is nearing his overdraft limit.

  Someone call a fucking mathematician! Ollie’s To Do list (yes, since he turned forty he has To Do lists) is taking so long to write that it’s becoming clear that even writing the list is going to have to be one of the things on the list. Can a To Do list contain its own construction? Can it exist as a set within a set, or an instruction within an instruction, as a recursive positive feedback loop or whatever? Ollie imagines himself at a dinner party with Derrida, and this is what he’s saying to him, and Derrida is nodding and laughing in a French way and saying that this is the most insightful thing about a To Do list that he’s ever heard. Barthes is there too, saying that if he could only come back to life and rewrite Mythologies, then he would include this concept of the To Do list, and Ollie’s reading of it, and use it as a way of defining and, yes, OK, almost satirising (if close reading can be satirical on purpose, which Ollie actually doubts) the whole of the work-mad early twenty-first century.

  So Ollie does add Write To Do list to his To Do list, partly as a philosophical, mathematical, metaphysical joke, yes, joke, but mainly so that he can, in theory at least, start the day by crossing something off. Ollie has never, ever seen Clem write a To Do list, but if she did write them they’d probably be specific, achievable and so on. Ollie’s To Do lists are not like that. They always contain everything that he intends to do with the rest of his life, more or less, or at least the next two years, and he makes no distinction at all between short-term goals and long-term goals, or between things to do today, this week, this month and this year. As a result, Ollie can not only never finish writing his To Do list (all right, yes, keep laughing, Derrida, you big-haired fucking French genius) but has to keep infinite fragments of To Do lists strewn around his desk because Ollie can never cross off all the items on any To Do list he ever makes, because they always contain things like ANSWER ALL EMAILS and Organise next year’s teaching and Apply for big grant and Book dental appointment and Overhaul Eighteenth-century website (which would give Derrida another laugh, if you think about it).

  Did Derrida have to blow-dry his hair like that, or did he in fact . . .

  There’s a knock at Ollie’s door. Ollie’s door is always closed, because he always has things to do. Other colleagues leave their doors semi-open if they don’t mind being disturbed, which is probably what Clem does all the time, not that Ollie is allowed to visit her at work because it might be seen as unprofessional or too domestic or something. Ollie can’t possibly ever have his door semi-open because he is never even semi-available because he has SO MUCH TO FUCKING DO, as evidenced by his To Do list, to which he has just added, as well as Write To Do list, Read papers for USC, which he has to do by half one today. As well as that, he has to, as usual, ANSWER ALL EMAILS. At this moment, Ollie has 3,000 emails. Yes, literally 3,000. Well, 3,124. And what the hell is he supposed to do with 3,124 emails? He spends literally all his fucking time filing his emails, replying to (some of) his emails, and deleting his emails, but they always come back. There are always, give or take, 3,000. They are probably zombie emails. That is why they cannot die.

  One of Ollie’s favourite jokes is this: a woman, let’s call her Jacqueline, goes for a night of passion with an elderly wine enthusiast but is disappointed to discover he only has a Semillon. Do you get it, Derrida? Of course you do, you high-cheekboned dreamboat. Ollie never remembers jokes, but he has remembered this one so he takes out his iPhone and brings up his Note called Jokes and adds it. He’ll tell it to Clem later, despite the fact that he has probably told it to her before. He needs a system not just of remembering his jokes, but who he has told them to and when. Maybe a kind of spreadsheet.

  The only way to approach 3,000 emails is to file them by sender and then basically play Asteroids with them, blasting them in clusters. Everything from Amazon: BLAMMO. Barbican Music: a shame, but they are all out of date anyway, so KER-POW. British Gas: those cunts deserve to be BLOWN AWAY. Virgin Wines: GONE. Every single email from the new secretary, Zelda (really), not exactly shot down in flames but brought under control and imprisoned in Ollie’s ADMIN folder. If Zelda really needs those 131 things, like, REALLY, REALLY needs them, then she can fucking well chase him for them. Ollie does not work his way through the alphabet logically. In fact, the emails he is trying most to avoid are under D for David, the Director of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies (known colloquially as CECS, obviously pronounced SEX), and also F for Frank, the Director of Research, who keeps wanting to know why Ollie has not yet had any books published, despite being in the department for SIX YEARS. Clem hardly ever sends him emails, and when she does they are usually Re: Alison or Re: Shopping or, most recently, Re: Granny. Still, he has never, ever deleted anything she has sent him. Nor has he ever thrown away anything she has given him. He has every ticket of every concert, art exhibition and play they have been to. Often he has to go and get her ticket or stub or sometimes even – yes – programme from the bin in her study, which otherwise only ever contains tissues and pencil shavings. It’s not because she doesn’t care that she throws things out. It’s just how she is. She literally throws everything out.

  Another knock at the door. FFS. Who could it be?

  ‘Come in,’ he says in a low, nonchalant, just-wrapped-up-another-bit-of-admin sort of way. Ollie’s PhD supervisor, whom he misses more than he thought possible, had a lovely reassuring voice. He was from some ex-colony that messes with your vowels so ‘come in’ always sounded like ‘come un’ and those two words, spoken by that one man, was, at that time, the most comforting thing Ollie could ever hope to hear. His supervisor had huge plants in his room – also ex-colonials, creeping up the walls and around the windows. He also had a really good coffee maker and one spare mug available at all times. How anyone would manage to keep one clean mug in their office at all times now, what with the REF and USC and MARKING is an
yone’s guess. ‘Come in,’ he says again, more loudly. It comes out as a passive-aggressive singsong. Who ever decided that the more you sing a word, the more sarcastic it becomes? Have you swept the floor yet? Ye-es. Have you remembered to . . . ? Yes, I ha-ave. Life is a musical comedy.

  The door opens. OMG, it’s an undergraduate. Not just any undergraduate, but her. Charlotte May Miller. Yes, she uses both forenames, and yes, it’s very cute. And, OK, she has that sulky expression they all have, but she enhances it with a strange, wet-looking, vulva-pink lipstick. She wears the kind of clothes they all do: skinny jeans, boots, tops; but hers are clearly more expensive and are never crumpled or muddy. She wears a cologne that smells faintly of Earl Grey tea. And she is thinner, much, much thinner than the others. She is clean; she is rich; she has an iPad.

  Ollie used to prefer the grubby ones, but that was back when he still had a sex drive. This is different. Charlotte May has remained more or less the same for the three years he’s been teaching her, which makes her a total freak. You can print out a sheet with the students’ pictures on at the start of term so you can pretend you’ve learned their names, but in fact they should give a HUGE CASH PRIZE to anyone who can even match up one student with one photo (apart from Charlotte May, obvs). The ones with glasses don’t have them any more or are wearing their contacts today. The ones with long hair have just had it cut, and the ones with short hair have had extensions. The thin ones have become fat, and the fat ones have become thin and muscular and now turn up to seminars in VESTS in the middle of winter. A crash diet, a bout of intense depression or a trip to the hairdressers: all these can render undergraduates unrecognisable. They are masters of disguise. But Charlotte May always looks the same. She looks like, she looks like . . . OK, TBH she looks like something from the cover of Cosmo Girl magazine. Ollie has never read Cosmo Girl, or even Cosmopolitan magazine. Sometimes Harper’s Bazaar makes it into the house but it’s more likely to be The New Yorker, in which all women wear glasses and have wispy greyish hair. But whenever he browses the covers of women’s magazines at train stations or airports, which he obviously only does when he has literally hours to wait, it’s Cosmo Girl that he likes most, because the girls on the cover look so cheerful and fresh and young. They are exactly the kinds of daughters he’d like to have.

  It’s quite new for Ollie to feel broody at work. Usually when he contemplates, say, his second-year class and imagines that one of them could be his child – his sweaty, stupid, clumsy, unfashionable, underachieving, semi-alcoholic, pasty, boring child – and he could be paying £3,000 a year (rumoured to be rising to £9,000) for this child to divide its time between working in a coffee shop, being in a band and shagging someone even uglier than it and spending maybe fifteen minutes a week preparing for its seminars ON WIKIPEDIA and using words like ‘incidences’, he is almost glad to be infertile. Surely the parents of, say, Mark from the Tuesday group, who sometimes turns up in his football kit and thinks all eighteenth-century novels are ‘too long’ and ‘just didn’t do enough to keep me interested’ and ‘could have got to the point more quickly’, secretly wish they hadn’t had him.

  But then there’s this one, with her neat blue skinny jeans and her little leather jacket and her PINK LIPSTICK on those lips and that cute diamond in her nose. She has the same handbag as Bryony, the one she’s always going on about that cost almost a thousand pounds. How could a student pay a thousand pounds for a handbag? But Ollie realises that if he had a little girl with those sulky lips, who, like Charlotte May, was liable to intense panic over small things like where she left her pen, or what time her train goes, or where she can get a DVD of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and who uses those big blue eyes really rather skilfully and, let’s be honest, knowingly, to make people do things for her . . . If that little girl belonged to Ollie, he realises, he’d do anything for her. He’d buy her ten handbags. He’d pick her up from nightclubs in the rain. He’d tell her how beautiful she looked. He’d buy her dresses, and encourage her to wear those rather than jeans. He’d build a castle for her to live in and he’d lock the gates and . . .

  ‘Have you got five minutes?’

  In fact, for the first time ever, Ollie understands why some of the adults from his own childhood – and particularly his childhood books – required children to be clean and polished and presented to them in stiff little outfits. After all, if you happened to have a girl like this and you’d had the good sense to call it something beautiful like Charlotte May (if Ollie and Clem had a child it would have to have a botanical name of course, so perhaps Lily Anne or Briar Rose, although wasn’t that the name of Fleur’s evil mother who KILLED everyone and RUINED everything?) you would want it looking beautiful and shining and polished at all times. You would never, ever want it to build dens or climb trees or step in dog shit or pick up its food with its hands. You would buy it handkerchiefs, and get the uniformed nanny to IRON them.

  ‘Of course.’ Ollie swivels a little in his chair. ‘Sit down.’

  Last time Charlotte May came to see him it was tearfully to confess just how much she wanted a First. Since then Ollie has bumped all her 68s up to 72s, and, just to make sure, all her 72s up to 75s. He has always marked her up by, on average, two marks anyway, just for being so pretty and having such a lovely name. The students are always going on about having more anonymisation so that this kind of thing can be eradicated, but what they don’t realise is that full anonymisation would mean everyone would get lower marks. In this age of grade inflation and league tables and increased fees and MUMSNET, of course the students get marked up, and if the prettier ones get marked up a little more then it’s because, in aesthetic terms at least, they deserve it. And, after all, that’s what will happen in the real world. In the real world people like Rihanna and Beyoncé did not succeed because they had OK voices and turned up to sixty per cent of the things they were supposed to and tried quite hard. That is not why Microsoft Word now automatically adds the acute accent at the end of Beyoncé.

  Charlotte May sits down softly on the edge of Ollie’s sofa. Other students will often spend up to three minutes removing or adding layers before sitting down or standing up. They come in wet, or covered in snow, or muddy, or having spent the last seven hours FRYING PORK (which is what it sometimes smells like, literally). They unwind their scarves and put them on one of Ollie’s pegs, which is wrong, wrong, wrong, because those pegs are HIS; they belong to HIM, in the same way that his desk belongs to HIM, but that doesn’t stop some of them actually crossing the room to lean on it and put things on it, despite it being HIS DESK. Ollie has taken to liberating scented candles from the house and placing them in the exact spots in his office that students want to touch, or put things down on or interfere with in some way. Charlotte May never removes any item of clothing or interferes with anything. She is like a doll who has emerged from the workshop already dressed, with her porcelain clothes permanently attached to her porcelain body. She sits neatly with her knees together and her handbag at her feet and writes the date in her Moleskine notebook with her silver Cross fountain pen.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about the Undergraduate Studies Committee.’

  ‘USC? Why?’

  ‘Oh, well, I’m the new student rep.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For my CV?’

  ‘Isn’t working towards a First going to be far better for your CV than serving on a pointless committee? And USC! It will take literally years off your life. Do you know the meetings typically go on for fifteen hours?’

  Her blue eyes puddle a little. ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, three hours. I’ll give you a tip. Say you HAVE to leave at half past two and just go. I thought you wanted to do your masters anyway? You don’t need to worry about your CV yet.’

  ‘My dad isn’t sure about me doing my masters. It’s quite expensive.’

  What a cunt. ‘That’s a shame. He does know you’re headed for a First?’

  ‘He doesn’t really believe I’ll get
one though.’

  Twat. Knob. Prick. If Ollie had a daughter who wanted to do a masters there would be no discussion. NO DISCUSSION. Ollie’s daughter would do a masters and a PhD and he would pay for it because that is what you do. Clem told him the other day about people holding up the queue at the train station because they could not agree on whether to pay an extra ten pounds – yes, only ten pounds – to upgrade their daughter’s train ticket, a return from Canterbury to LEEDS, to first class. In the end they decided not to, in case she ‘got used to it’. What utter cunts!!! Clem hadn’t understood Ollie’s reaction at all, and went a bit funny when he said that people like that should be compulsorily sterilised because they do not deserve children. But let’s face it, their children would be much happier if they were taken away from them and given to people like Ollie and Clem who would line their cots with real fleece and pay for them to travel first class every single day of their lives if that was what they wanted.

  ‘You do know that the chair of the committee is literally insane?’

  More big eyes. A tiny giggle.

  ‘And that the last student rep ended up on tranquillisers after having to attend a FIVE-HOUR faculty USC meeting with him and then explain to him afterwards what had happened because he: a) doesn’t understand any kind of data at all, whether it’s presented numerically, graphically or in some other format; b) can’t read without at least four pairs of glasses; c) can’t hear anything; and d) is always drunk.’

  Another minuscule giggle, like a doll hiccupping. ‘I really don’t . . .’

  ‘I’m probably exaggerating a bit, but only a little bit. Save yourself!’

  The hiccupping stops and now the huge eyes drop to the floor. ‘OK, look. I’ll be honest. There is something else.’

  ‘Yes?’

  She reaches in her bag for a tissue. ‘It’s just . . . well . . . I’m supposed to get involved in more things because I don’t have any friends.’