The Seed Collectors

by Scarlett Thomas

  Bryony comes in.

  ‘What on earth is going on?’

  ‘Mummy? He pulled my hair.’

  ‘SHE HIT ME.’ Again, in this loud, low, pathetic, sob-wracked voice.

  ‘Did you hit him?’

  ‘No! Well, a tiny slap because . . .’

  ‘We don’t have hitting in this house.’

  ‘BUT, MUMMY, HE IS IN MY ROOM.’

  ‘Holly! Ash! Lunch!’

  ‘Daddy’s been calling you for lunch for ages now.’

  ‘Well, I was on my way down and then this little freak came in and attacked me. I had my Private Keep Out sign on my door as well. But it’s impossible to get any bloody privacy in this place. I don’t want any lunch anyway. I don’t feel very well.’

  ‘We don’t say “bloody”, Holly. What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘I don’t feel very well.’

  Now Holly starts to cry.

  ‘Well, if you’re ill you’d better stay in this afternoon. You’d better not go to tennis today.’

  ‘But, Mummy!’

  ‘Well, if you want to go to tennis this afternoon you’d better have some lunch. Did you even have any breakfast?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you have?’

  ‘Daddy made me porridge.’ Which everyone knows is toenail clippings mixed with snot. Which is about as gross as . . .

  ‘But did you eat it?’

  ‘Yes! Most of it. At least one big spoonful.’

  ‘Well, you’re not leaving this house until you eat a proper lunch. It’s no wonder you feel like this if you’re not eating properly.’

  ‘I feel like this because Freakface came INTO MY PRIVATE SPACE AND THEN PULLED MY HAIR. It’s so unfair.’

  Ash doesn’t like being called Freakface, so he tries to give his sister a dead arm by punching her as hard as he can. He completely forgets that his mother is standing right there.

  ‘OW! Get your bloody hands off me, you little freak.’

  ‘Right,’ says Bryony. ‘No lunch for you until you apologise, and extra lunch for you, madam. Downstairs, both of you, now.’

  Sunflower seeds. A hundred million sunflower seeds. Each one hand-crafted in porcelain by one of many workers in a rainy town in China and now poured by the sackful into the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, London. It used to be possible to walk on them, or lie down in them, or pour hundreds of them through your hands. Presumably you could also steal them. But now, due to concerns over the dust produced by the porcelain, you can only look at them from the viewing area to the side, or from above. Given the themes of the exhibition, it seems both ironic and fitting that rich Londoners are now protected from the dust created by trampling the work of Chinese people who are so poor they leave price tags on items of clothing to show their value. But it is frustrating not to be able to touch the seeds. They look so very touchable. Charlie reads something on the wall about each seed being hand-painted. Nearby, a film is playing, showing how this happened. Three or four strokes for every seed. That’s around 350 million strokes of a paintbrush. ‘Presumably not the same one,’ jokes a middle-aged woman in an anorak.

  ‘This is interesting,’ Charlie says to Nicola.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed this before. In the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao was always depicted as the sun, and the people were the sunflowers turning towards him. It also says here that in times of poverty people used to share sunflower seeds, which meant . . .’

  Nicola reaches into her bag for her phone.

  ‘It would be better if we could touch them,’ she says.

  ‘I know, but . . .’

  ‘It’s quite boring otherwise.’

  ‘I wouldn’t exactly say that.’

  She smiles. ‘Sorry. I’m dreadful with art.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Anyway, Izzy’s texted. Her ballet class has just finished. She wants to meet us in Covent Garden. OK with you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  When Bryony goes to the kitchen to look for some chocolate, James is holding the seed pod she inherited from Oleander. Bryony stuck it in an old ice-cream tub and put it at the back of the highest cupboard when they got back after the funeral supper. She only realises now that she has entirely forgotten ever doing this. She must have been quite tired. But anyway . . .

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

  ‘Just looking. Smelling. I mean, these things really smell quite . . .’

  ‘Put it away. Now.’

  ‘God. Chill, Beetle. It’s only a seed pod. It’s lovely. Here, look.’

  It is long, black and oily-looking, very much like a vanilla pod. But . . .

  ‘Right. OK. One of those probably killed my . . .’

  ‘You don’t know what . . .’

  ‘One of those probably killed my parents.’

  ‘Calm down. There’s no need to shout.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake.’ Bryony starts crying. ‘Just put it back.’

  ‘It’s just a plant, Beetle. Just a plant.’

  ‘Oh Christ, I hate it when people say things are just plants, just herbal . . . If my parents taught me one thing, it was . . . Look, do you have any idea, have you ever really stopped to think about what plants do? Would you be happy standing there holding deadly night-shade or a piece of a fly agaric mushroom? Or, I don’t know, hemlock?’

  ‘This is just a seed pod.’

  ‘Right. Like seed pods are never dangerous. Have you ever heard of an opium seed pod? Yew berries – well, they’re really cones, but whatever – will kill you in a few minutes, and then there are castor beans, which you can use to make ricin and . . .’

  ‘This is not an opium seed pod, or a yew berry or whatever.’

  ‘No. It’s probably much, much worse.’

  Bryony starts sobbing now. This is so frustrating. And he won’t even give her a tissue. Not that she wants anything he’s touched after he’s been holding one of those pods.

  James sighs. ‘If the seed pods are really that bad then why exactly do we have one of them in the house?’

  ‘Because we – I – inherited it.’

  ‘Right, well, if it’s as toxic as you seem to think, perhaps it would be a good idea for you to hide it from the children?’ James replaces the pod in the plastic tub and gives it to Bryony. ‘I’d better get on with dinner.’

  ‘Wash your hands before touching food.’

  He sighs. ‘You are being extremely paranoid.’

  ‘You are being fucking stupid.’

  ‘Oh God, I did one of those phone lines once.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Just stuff like, I’m pulling my pink panties off. Or Mmm, baby, you’re making me so wet.’

  ‘What, and you could hear them, like, you know . . . ?’

  ‘What, wanking? Yep. They always wanted me to hurry up, but our instructions were to slow down. We all sat around in cubicles with the heating turned up and the windows open, breathing heavily for hours. You could hear what the other people were saying. Sometimes it was hilarious.’

  ‘Like . . . ?’

  ‘I can’t remember now,’ says Nicola. ‘Mind you, there was this girl who got sacked for getting one of the masochists round to help decorate her flat. I mean, on the one hand, what kind of idiot gives out their address on a premium phone sex line? On the other hand, she charged him three hundred quid to steam a load of woodchip off her walls, which is so not fun, while she hit him with a riding crop – provided by him – and called him a worthless faggot.’

  ‘I hate woodchip,’ says Charlie.

  ‘You’d hate our place, then,’ says Izzy. ‘We totally need to get a masochist round.’

  ‘It took days to get rid of mine.’

  ‘Maybe more than one masochist, then. Can you hire them in groups?’

  ‘Someone should do a kind of sex-employment
agency.’

  ‘Oh God. Making BDSM actually useful.’

  ‘You’d need a spreadsheet.’

  ‘“Spreadsheet” sounds quite rude now, when you say it like that.’

  ‘I know.’ Giggling. ‘Spreadsheet.’

  And so the afternoon goes on.

  If you discovered that you were the only person in the world, and everything you see around you was in fact a part of you, dramatised, how would that change what you are doing now, right this very instant? What would you stop doing? What would you start doing? What would suddenly not matter at all?

  ‘We’ll go through the main doors,’ says Beatrix to Bryony and Clem.

  They always go through the main doors, because it feels more historic and because, well, they are the nicest doors. Why go in through doors that are second best or, worse, that open onto Street Fashion, where you can get three badly made T-shirts for ten pounds? Why not make a proper entrance?

  ‘I do love Selfridges,’ says Bryony. And she does, she really does love Selfridges. She loves walking in through the main doors, feeling a bit like a celebrity in her huge Chanel sunglasses, carrying her Mulberry handbag. Her feet already hurt, though. Why did she decide to come shopping in high heels? They’re not even very expensive high heels; they cost £200 rather than the £600 or so you’d pay for a pair of Louboutins upstairs. The good thing about these shoes is that they make Bryony feel ever so slightly more like SJP, or even Skye Turner. The bad thing is that they make the balls of her feet feel as if they have had all the flesh removed from them. She may have to take out the Converse trainers she has in her handbag sooner rather than later, which would be a shame, especially as her Converse fit into her handbag rather better than her high heels. Her Converse have been in the washing machine so many times that they have a faded look and holes that are seen as really very stylish among middle-class mothers of East Kent. But perhaps that will not quite hold in Selfridges, or with Granny.

  Bryony’s very favourite shoes are a pair of delicate Dior diamante strappy sandals that she bought off the internet one time after watching Sex and the City. They are beautiful, but impossible to walk in. As well as them, she has maybe twenty pairs of high heels that she has worn on average three times each. James doesn’t like her in high heels. He laughs at her and mimics her wobbling. Fleur can wear high heels without wobbling, but spends most of her time barefoot or in those ridiculous toe socks that she gets all her celebrity yoga students to buy. Fleur gave Clem several of one of the celebrities’ prescription painkillers to take before wearing the shoes she’d bought for the Academy Awards ceremony. Apparently that’s what they all do. It means they get more of a buzz off the one glass of champagne they are allowed, too. Maybe three Nurofen is the answer. Or perhaps . . .

  ‘It’s not too loud down here for you, Granny?’ asks Clem.

  Over the speakers, Skye Turner is singing about the pain of leaving the guy she fell in love with (OK, shagged) last summer while she and Greg were on a ‘break’. ‘Too Perfect For Me’ has just reached number 1 in the singles chart. Or whatever they call it nowadays.

  ‘No, darling. I rather like this song. Now, where’s Mulberry?’

  Beatrix always likes to visit ‘her’ brands: the companies she has invested in on the basis of what she reads in Vogue, or what her granddaughters tell her – although increasingly they are too old to know. Bryony, though, can be a fairly reliable marker for what is ‘hot’ right now. Bryony is not at all forward thinking. She will buy a Mulberry handbag right at the exact moment that everyone else does. But certainly before investors are aware that a great fashion event is happening. Beatrix bought Mulberry for 562p in November after reading yet again about their handbags in Vogue. Today they are on 1,361p. Beatrix bought shares worth £10,000, which are now worth around £24,000. Of course, she’ll have to decide when to get out, which is part of the reason for these trips. Mulberry could now ‘tank’, or it could keep going. It may have reached the top of the market, or it may not. It’s hard to tell.

  You can quite easily see which brands have ‘it’ and which do not, though. No one needs the FT to tell them which fashion brands are doing well when they can just walk into Selfridges and see for themselves. This was one of the reasons Beatrix dismissed her old broker last year and began trading online. He knew, to put it in a modern way, fuck all. Beatrix has a lifetime of knowledge of the fashion and cosmetics industries, and what she knows about science is certainly not redundant either. But this is the part of investing that Beatrix loves. She loves the way it smells: of leather and gardenia and fine crushed powders. There are always a lot of people crowded around the cheap brands, whether they are doing well or not. But which of the more expensive brands is ‘doing something’? You can tell just by the atmosphere. Do they have new products? Limited edition lines? Are the staff happy and helpful? Would Beatrix, or at least her twenty-five-year-old self, actually want this product? Or . . .

  ‘Oh my God, I want everything!’

  ‘But why, darling?’

  It’s too late for sensible conversation. Bryony has taken off and is now moving around the display of handbags like a large tornado moves around the east coast of the USA. She’s only around seventy per cent predictable, and could arrive anywhere, without warning. She ends up looking at make-up bags. Why would someone want a prestigious make-up bag when the whole point of buying these expensive products is so that everyone sees you with it? Why indeed? But then why does Bryony sit around in ball gowns on the rare occasions that everyone’s out, wearing her most expensive shoes and drinking champagne? What she does in public is VIEWINGS and COURSEWORK and HOUSEWORK and CHILDCARE. It’s what people do in private that makes money for investors.

  Clem is looking at an Oversized Alexa in oak soft buffalo. She’s trying it across her body and then over her shoulder. It would rather suit her: it does look like something an academic would carry. She could put her laptop in it, probably, and some books. At least these handbags are not covered in gold chains and unnecessary detailing, or ‘hardware’, like the ones a couple of seasons ago. Clem looks rather elegant with the big brown bag slung, once more, across her body. She visibly checks that Beatrix and Bryony aren’t looking, and then pouts, ever so slightly, into the mirror. Beatrix would have bought one of these handbags when she was twenty-five, she realises. She would have saved up for one. Now? Now, of course, she still uses the Hermès Kelly bag she bought in 1956. Well, all right, not exactly the same one, which eventually collapsed under the weight of tissues, paperbacks, mints and Guerlain lipsticks. But one that someone never used and ended up at auction for just under £3,000.

  Bryony is handing over her credit card for a make-up bag. Clem seems to have lost interest in the Alexa and is looking back towards cosmetics. Beatrix likes to have lunch early, and her favourite restaurant is just above the bags. She moves towards the stairs, with Bryony sort of following but trying to organise her purse at the same time with her handbag still undone. She is a horrible crumple of train tickets, old receipts and free coffee vouchers. And when she could be so elegant, with her shiny Mulberry carrier bag done up with a beautiful mauve ribbon.

  ‘Can I join you in a moment?’ Clem asks. ‘I just want to smell something.’

  ‘Smell something? Oh, scent. All right, darling. Shall we order you a salad and a glass of something?’

  ‘I’ll choose when I get there. I’ll honestly only be a moment.’

  Beatrix uses her watch to time exactly how long it takes for the Spanish-looking waitress to notice them, and from then how long it takes for her to actually come and see to them. It is, as always, far too long. Still, the chef here is wonderful, and last time they visited Beatrix had something called ‘credit crunch ice cream’ which made everyone laugh. Another rather disgraceful amount of time goes by before the waitress brings a menu.

  ‘I want everything,’ sighs Bryony.

  ‘Be sensible, darling.’

  ‘Granny! For heaven’s sake. I’m not reall
y . . .’

  Clem returns, slightly breathless. Bryony wrinkles her nose.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Angel, by Thierry Mugler.’

  ‘Gosh, darling, it’s rather . . .’

  Bryony frowns. ‘It’s horrible.’

  ‘I know.’ Clem smiles and sits down. ‘Have we ordered yet?’

  ‘No. And I’m . . .’

  ‘If you know it’s horrible, then . . . ?’

  ‘I’m wearing it ironically. Well, no, actually, that’s not really it. I suppose I know someone who wears it ironically and so I’m wearing it in honour of her. A kind of non-ironic homage to irony. It’s quite pretty when it settles down.’

  ‘Pretty?’

  ‘Well, sort of. Actually, sort of dirty. A bit sluttish.’

  Clem has never been a good indicator of anything but very niche markets.

  ‘What’s everyone having? Bry?’

  ‘It all looks so nice . . .’

  What Bryony should be doing now is choosing something low-carb, for example the spiced chicken salad with avocado and coriander. What she really wants is steak and chips. Of course, the classic lowcarb meal is steak and salad, which Bryony has been having quite often recently, and is on the menu here. Or – wow – buttered green vegetables. But how many carbs are there in chips, really? After all, potatoes are vegetables, not grains. No one would fatten a cow on a pile of potatoes. They can’t be that bad. But then again what about pudding and/or afternoon tea? Bryony had sort of decided that since today was a special occasion she was going to allow herself one, just one, little carby treat. She had thought that a scone with cream and jam would be nice, with a cup of Earl Grey, for tea. So now she should have steak and salad. She’ll just have steak and salad and . . . It would help if someone would just come, before . . .