The Seed Collectors

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘Right. Forgiveness. So everybody needs to choose someone they hate.’

  ‘Like Hitler, or something?’

  ‘No! Hitler will be far too hard. Just choose someone in your life who has annoyed you a lot, someone you really feel pissed off with in some way.’

  ‘Maybe my mother?’

  ‘Parents are usually too difficult as well.’

  ‘I don’t hate anyone,’ says Mary.

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘No, actually, after reading about the Course on Wikipedia I realise that I already do all the things it says. I’m not even really sure I need . . .’

  ‘So if someone came in here and murdered your husband . . .’

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ says Tony.

  ‘Well, how would you feel about that?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, would you be able to forgive them?’

  ‘Of course not. What a silly question.’

  ‘Out of interest, what do you think should happen to murderers?’

  Mary frowns. ‘Well, I must say I do believe in bringing back hanging.’

  Gasps. ‘You don’t!’

  ‘All right, all right . . . Back to forgiveness. The main thing about this sort of forgiveness is that it does not assume that I am better than you, and you need forgiveness and I am superior and therefore I can give it. That is definitely NOT what we are trying to do here. Forgiveness is more of a gift of love. If your beloved dog drops her tennis ball in the river, you might feel momentarily annoyed, but actually you then find you think it is quite sweet, and rather funny, and very her, and when you get home you’ll tell your wife and you’ll both ruffle the dog’s fur and say something like “Oh, you silly thing”, but in a loving way. You forgive her for losing the ball. It’s real forgiveness. It’s not grudging, or done for show or for some reward. Or what about when someone you love falls over on the way to the kitchen to fetch your birthday cake, or make you a cup of tea, or feed the cat? You don’t laugh, do you? You want to help, to love them. You forgive them for looking stupid, and almost making you have to drive them to Casualty. When you see someone you know and love in an unexpected place, say in a secondhand book-shop, the delight you feel when you greet them and say how well they look . . . You forgive them for holding you up, being in your way, changing your plans for the day. Forgiveness means being able to apply these loving feelings to all human beings at all times, not just your loved ones at times when you are feeling affectionate towards them. What if you saw everyone the way you see that old friend, relative or lover in the bookshop? What if you treated the most annoying person in the supermarket with the love you show to your dog?’

  ‘You’d end up acting like a loony!’

  ‘You’d get arrested.’

  ‘You certainly can’t just go up to strangers and ruffle them . . .’

  ‘No, well, exactly, but . . .’

  Afternoon tea at the Caledonian Hotel, Edinburgh, costs fifty pounds, which is more than what Zoe is paying for her whole room in the Travelodge. Clem orders two, assuring Zoe that the festival will cover it. Apparently they are covering all her expenses, including her laundry.

  ‘I actually put a clean pair of socks in by mistake,’ she says. ‘But who cares, right? I think I might get a massage too.’

  ‘If I tried to get a massage at the Travelodge they’d probably send round a prostitute.’

  ‘Stay here with me if you like. I’ve got a massive bed.’

  ‘Really?’ That strange feeling again.

  ‘Of course. Well, I mean, I’d have to let you in, obviously, and I’m out until so late at these events, but presumably you’ll be at more or less the same things, so actually . . .’

  ‘No, don’t worry. I really am fine where I am.’

  ‘Well . . . I suppose there’s Ollie’s possible arrival to think about as well.’

  ‘And all the Swedes are at the Travelodge anyway. They’ve got loads of hash.’

  Zoe sees a look flick across Clem’s face. She’s too old. She can’t keep up. Could it even be cooler to be staying in the Travelodge? Clem can impress Zoe with her CV, and her huge house, and the fact that she employs not only a cleaner but a gardener too, and actually pays her council tax and TV licence, and would never consider doing something as vulgar as playing a videogame or having a duvet day. Zoe is almost certain that Clem would not know what a duvet day even was. But Zoe’s life is hard and real and authentic. So whose life is more impressive really? Is Clem’s life better? Just because Zoe is impressed and wants to impress Clem back does not mean any of these things are objectively impressive. But it’s hard to tell whether Clem actually cares or not.

  ‘All the other judges are smoking in their rooms,’ Clem says. ‘It’s become a thing.’

  ‘What, hash?’

  ‘No, just fags. Even though all the rooms are non-smoking. One of them takes her own handmade mother-of-pearl ashtray everywhere with her and just relies on the fact that she’s so famous no one will bother her about it. Another one smokes out of the window. Another one smokes in the bathroom with the shower running full blast and hot, and then flushes the evidence. You’re not still smoking?’

  ‘Only hash. Only sometimes.’

  ‘I wish Ollie would give up.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Does Clem realise that she has started comparing Zoe with Ollie like this, out loud, making it totally obvious that . . .

  ‘I mean, breath mints never work, right? People just smell of mint and fags.’

  ‘Oh, that sort of reminds me. My chillies are actually growing!’

  ‘Oh, how cool.’

  ‘It was amazing. The little flowers dropped off but behind them was this green swelling kind of baby chilli thing . . .’

  ‘That’s the ovary.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When you pollinated the flowers, you sort of made them pregnant. The next thing is that the ovary swells and . . . Why are you making that face?’

  ‘It’s just that, well, you have to admit “swollen ovary” sounds pretty gross.’

  Clem laughs. ‘I never thought of it like that. All fruit is basically swollen ovaries.’

  ‘What, like apples and pears and cherries and . . .’

  Clem laughs again. ‘You’re just like my students.’

  ‘OK. This is basically how the ego works. It convinces us that, rather than being fragments of one perfect being that needs to come back together, we are separate beings, in competition for everything from food, shelter and land to love, power and dignity. In order for one person to feel good – having, say, got a hundred per cent on an exam, or been asked to join the hockey club, or bought some amazing shares – someone else must fail the exam, be excluded from the hockey club, sell the shares. Now, I’m not saying that everyone should always succeed and everything should be wonderful all the time. In this world that’s impossible anyway. Not everyone needs to join the hockey club. Failing a test can be a sign that you should be doing something else with your life. But this is actually about the feeling you get when you do something better than someone else. That little pumped-up feeling, that swelling, that inflation . . . Perhaps you don’t realise it, but this is actually a feeling of violence. Because on some level, you don’t just want to beat your rival, you want to smash them into the ground. And let’s go further. You want failure to be punished. You want people to CRY because you beat them, or even because someone else did. You think you don’t, but if you search your heart you’ll find that you do. And when you find yourself behind a hearse at some traffic lights, and you see that the one man inside has his head bowed, you hope that he is crying – not completely consciously, but you do – and you hope that he feels more alone than anyone ever thinks possible because that means you are OK, somehow, you are better than him, and you are winning . . .

  ‘Meanwhile, if you are winning, then the losers want you to die. And you want anyone more successful, wealthy and powerful than you crushed, brought down to size, f
ound out as a cheat, a fraud, a con artist. The popular crowd at school, the people who bullied you and laughed at your hair, wouldn’t it be great if they were all in a plane crash? What about that teacher who was always mean to you? What if he was caught smoking crack with a prostitute and had to resign and then KILLED HIMSELF? How about rich people, beautiful people, anyone with a castle or a private jet? The Royal Family? You loved it when Diana died. Everyone loved it when Diana died. Diana’s death had all the deep, warm pleasure of a great tragedy but with the added excitement of being real. Marie Antoinette said that stupid thing about cake and didn’t understand poor people so of course SHE SHOULD DIE . . .

  ‘Let’s face it, YOU are a better driver than that fat bitch who just cut you up. She should die. As for the slow, old people in the supermarket – hurry up and die! And what about the ticket inspector on the train who made you get your railcard out even though it was obvious you were asleep. If he’d woken up the next day with terminal cancer, wouldn’t that have been a good thing? Wouldn’t he have deserved it? And you don’t think you think these things, but if you search your heart you’ll find that you do.’

  ‘I definitely don’t think any of those things,’ says Mary.

  And of course at that moment everyone sort of wishes she would die.

  ‘But the first step in forgiving others is to forgive yourself. To stop feeling guilty about having these thoughts and just accept them. Let them go. Give yourself a break. It is only by doing this that we can forgive others. Only if we recognise the other as, in fact, the self, can we achieve enlightenment, and leave the cycle of birth and death forever.’

  ‘But surely thinking those awful things is . . . I mean, we should try to stop doing it, right? Not just do it and accept it?’

  ‘If you truly believe that the person cutting you up on the road is just a part of yourself, how do you think you’d feel about them then? Wait – it’s not obvious, this one.’

  ‘I’d basically feel the same. I’d still hate them. Possibly even more.’

  ‘Exactly. Our hatred of others really stems from a hatred of ourselves. If we stop hating ourselves, then we automatically stop hating other people. If we beat ourselves up and feel guilty all the time then we hate ourselves, and by definition we hate other people. Even if we don’t ever come to accept that we are in fact one being, one organism, we’ll have a much better time here.’

  ‘What do you call a deer with no eyes?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘No idea. Get it? No. Eye. Deer. What do you call a copulating deer with no eyes?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘No fucking idea.’

  ‘Charlie . . .’

  ‘They’ve heard the word “fucking” before. Anyway, last bit. What do you call a copulating deer, frozen in the moment of orgasm?’

  ‘Do deer have orgasms?’

  ‘Do you give up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Still no fucking idea.’

  ‘Hilarious. Fucking hilarious.’

  ‘Children.’

  The pff-pff sound of sit-ups pauses. ‘You are both really, really disgusting.’

  ‘Mummy? Were all these pieces of deer part of a real deer once?’

  ‘Lots of real deer.’

  ‘Deers.’

  ‘Deer.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Right, one more. You’ll like this one, kids. So a man kills a deer and brings it home for dinner . . .’

  ‘Do they do that here?’

  ‘Probably. Anyway, his wife cooks it . . .’

  ‘Why can’t he bloody well cook it himself?’

  ‘In the joke, his wife cooks it. They serve it to the children but don’t tell them what kind of meat it is. “Mmm,” say the children. “This is delicious, Mummy. What is it?” And so she says, “All right, I’ll give you a clue. It’s what I call Daddy sometimes.” The children immediately scream, “Oh my God, we’re eating arsehole!” Boom, boom.’

  ‘That’s actually quite funny, Uncle Charlie. Although . . .’

  ‘If James killed a deer and brought it home, I think these two would notice.’

  ‘G.R.O.S.S.’

  When the retreat is over, Sylvia drops Ina, Fleur and Skye back at Ina’s place. They go via the hotel and pick up their stuff. Ina has said they can stay with her, and her place is so much nicer than the bland hotel with its nylon sheets and see-through curtains. If this is all an illusion then Fleur really has made Ina’s little part of it rather enchanting, with the beautiful peat fire and the nips of dark, earthy whisky and now this gorgeous dinner of thick, creamy Cullen skink followed by haggis, blue cheese and fruit cake.

  The only problem is the book.

  ‘It was definitely blank before,’ Fleur says.

  While they were out, someone has clearly been into their hotel room, stolen the blank red hardback and replaced it with the blue hardback that Ina thought it was in the first place: A Course in Miracles.

  ‘It was A Course in Miracles when I gave it to you,’ says Ina. ‘Which means . . .’

  ‘Fleur’s gone bananas?’

  ‘No, dear. I think we have The Book back.’

  ‘The Book?’

  ‘Yes. It needed to become blank to get you here. Very clever.’

  ‘How much do you actually know about your parents’ disappearance?’

  ‘Not much,’ Fleur says. ‘In theory I should know more than anyone, but I don’t really know anything. All I remember is Oleander giving me two passports – mine and Piyali’s, which I’m pretty sure was forged by some acquaintance of the Prophet’s – and then half packing a bag and being taken to Heathrow in the dead of night. It was 1989. I was fifteen. Then Bryony’s dad, Quinn, met me at Bombay and took me in some weird rickshaw to another airport and on another plane to Cochin. I didn’t even see my mother. And I didn’t know why I was even going to India. I thought they’d been on some island – they called it the Lost Island? – in the Pacific. I spent half a day waiting in a room above a spice shop in the most intense heat . . . Bryony’s mother, Plum, gave me a sealed parcel to put in my suitcase and take back to Oleander. Grace – Charlie and Clem’s mother – was there too. They introduced me to Pi. I had to say he was my cousin if anyone asked . . . My mother was supposed to be catching the next plane home with the others. That’s what Uncle Quinn said. But . . . that was the last anyone ever saw of any of them.’

  ‘Do you know what was in the parcel?’

  ‘I guessed it was seed pods.’

  ‘And you realised that Piyali’s parents – Ketki’s sister and her husband – had just been killed.’

  ‘Yes. But it was all a total blur. I didn’t understand any of it. Pi didn’t speak much on the plane. I guess he was in shock. He spent a lot of time with Oleander when we arrived. At some point he became fine, although I suppose he was never totally fine. He never really mentioned his parents. I guessed it was the seed pods. But to be honest I was more worried about my mother. I kept expecting her to come back and then she never did. And then that anthropologist, Professor May, went to the island and they weren’t there and . . . But how are you connected to all this?’

  Ina sighs. ‘I was – am – an anthropologist too. Obviously I’m retired now, although I still see some of what I do here as a kind of participant observation, although I try to integrate and, ha ha, forgive. I first visited the Lost Island in the seventies. I heard about it when I was doing some fieldwork in Northland, New Zealand. There was this rumour going around about a US airman who’d lost his mind and claimed to have crash-landed on this island full of magical plants and weird shamans and a tribe full of immortals he called the Enlightened Ones. You couldn’t get there by boat because of high cliffs, and there was no runway for a plane, but you could in theory fly there in a helicopter. It wasn’t long after the Philippine government had invited anthropologists to go and study the Tasaday people on the island of Mindanao. Even though the Tasaday tribe was later found to be a hoax, basicall
y a bunch of normal islanders with loincloths over their usual underwear, every anthropologist wanted to find their own lost tribe. Anyway, for various reasons I came back to the UK, and, not long after, had a pretty spectacular nervous breakdown. I went on a retreat at Namaste House – one of the first ones, actually. At first I told myself I’d do a participant observation thing there, you know, an objective study of tie-dyed freaks smoking pot and talking about the time George Harrison dropped by for tea. Then I, well, I basically became one of them. Went native, as they say. Oleander and I became great friends.’

  ‘Wow. OK, so . . .’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t shake off this idea of the Lost Island, and when I ended up back in Northland for another lot of fieldwork I took a couple of boats out to an island closer to where the Lost Island was supposed to be. Then I managed to find a guy with a helicopter to fly me out there. It took us three attempts to find it. Basically blew my whole budget. Anyway, in July 1978 I decided to go for a month. The idea was that this would give me a chance to see what was there and learn enough of the language to make sense of the people, and then I could get back for the new university term in September with a view to writing a proposal for further study. I arranged with the helicopter pilot that he would come back for me on August twenty-second. I paid him in advance. He asked if I was sure about all this. When we landed on the island there seemed to be no one there at all, and I don’t think he thought much of my chances. But in those days I knew how to survive in places like that and I actually didn’t much care if I lived or died – I just wanted to write a great book about a great tribe and make a name for myself. Anyway, of course the pilot never came back . . .’