The Seed Collectors

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘No. Which is why . . .’

  ‘I see. So it’s a paradox. Impossible.’

  ‘Well, sort of. It’s . . .’

  ‘And you always knew this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And my mother never knew?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you didn’t tell her because . . . ?’

  ‘Look. Deep down your mother was a good person, as we all are. But she was trapped in a beautiful body. People would do anything for her. Piyali’s parents’ deaths . . . The Prophet losing his arm. She would have gone on and on trying and failing to create a sort of synthetic bliss. I mean, I’m not knocking it exactly but I don’t think it’s the best way for us to get out of the illusion. Not ultimately. Oleander agreed in the end too.’

  Fleur gulps. Breathes. Her mother died for information that was right there all along. But then what would Briar Rose have done to try to get hold of an enlightened person’s tears? Where would she have stopped?

  Skye looks at the bottle of fluid. These are someone’s actual tears? This is . . .

  ‘So what’s special about a church?’ she asks Ina.

  ‘You simply won’t be able to bear the bliss, at least not at first.’

  ‘In a church? Like, just a normal church?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Seriously? This kind of sounds a bit, um . . .’

  ‘Try it and see. You’re extremely lucky. I wouldn’t give this much of the last bottle to anyone else, but of course if it wasn’t for your mother I wouldn’t even have it. I mean, she brought the original pods back. And . . .’

  ‘So what exactly happens in a church?’

  ‘It’s hard to describe, but basically it doesn’t seem boring any more. In fact, you can look at anything you found boring before and it will now be entirely the opposite. The world will be turned inside out. All the shiny things the ego loves become dull. Shops seem grey, cold and pointless. Success is a big yawn. Everything expensive or difficult to obtain appears cheap and easy. But suddenly just sitting on a park bench looking at strangers is as exciting as watching the latest film which, in turn, now appears pointless and slow and fake. You won’t be able to go to graveyards at first, because you will get lost among all the spirits still there. But as time goes on you’ll learn to enjoy visiting them, in the same way good mediums do. You will be able to attend their great feasts and hear their incredible stories. But it’s impossible to describe. You really have to try it.’

  ‘And we won’t die?’

  ‘No. Well, it’s very unlikely. No one has. Not from this bottle.’

  ‘OK. Well . . .’

  Fleur and Skye look at one another. This feels a little like queuing for hours for a fairground ride and then trying to change your mind at the top. They are here now, and so they might as well . . .

  ‘There’s just one more interesting side-effect.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I can fly . . . !’

  ‘Me too! Oh, oh, oh . . . OK. This is . . .’

  ‘Breathe, girls. Breathe.’

  ‘Oh. My. God.’

  When Fleur says the word ‘God’ it feels ticklish inside and kind of orgasmic. It suddenly seems like too much for one word. Too much to say again, unless she really means it. Which is impossible, because . . .

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To Calanais, to look at the standing stones.’

  ‘And this won’t wear off while we . . .’

  ‘No, dear. It won’t wear off for, oh, about a year.’

  ‘A year!’

  ‘Well, give or take. You can squeeze a bit more out of it if you regularly meditate and remember to practise forgiveness. The initial exhilaration fades into a more comfortable kind of bliss after a day or so. You’ll still be able to fly, though. But most people forget that. Most people forget the whole thing afterwards, in fact.’

  The word ‘forgiveness’, when Fleur hears it now, means something rather different from when she heard it before. Before, it was a bit blah blah and also quite vast: a remote, dark purple mountain of a word with dangerous edges and a pretty steep drop on the other side. Now it is a beautiful, soft gift with silk and ribbons – the spiritual kind – that she can’t wait to give to someone else. But of course it’s just the same if you keep it . . . In fact, everyone has one anyway, and no one ever tires of opening it and looking inside it, and the contents never get dirty or boring or old. All Fleur wants to do is lie down and shut her eyes and relax into this feather bed of feelings. This is a Sunday morning for the soul that could last forever and ever and . . . But she needs nothing, she realises, nothing at all. She feels like a ball of pure energy bobbing around in some make-believe world that is so very sweet in some ways but also a total joke. The world has become a child’s drawing, something knocked up before lunch in a cosmic nursery, just like the pictures you find in an old cardboard box after your parents die or divorce or move to somewhere smaller. What a nice effort, you think. But, well, ridiculous, all the same. Blue people! And a green, not even totally round sun. And everyone hand in hand. Bless . . . As Fleur thinks this, the world completely fades out for a second, and there is a bright white light that feels – ouch, oh, stop, oh, more, no, wait – too much like . . .

  ‘She’s passed out,’ says someone very far away.

  ‘Fleur?’

  When she wakes up she is flying over the Atlantic. Calanais is only a few miles down the coast from Ina’s place. But why not fly around the world when you suddenly find you can? Fleur skims New York, its ghostly Twin Towers still there as an energy force, bright spectres of the past, emitting more light than anything else below her. Fleur realises that if she looks down in a certain way, with her mind as well as her eyes, she can see all of history embedded in the landscape, all fresh from a vast 3D printer, and she can see all the fish in the sea, and every scale on every fish, and all the atoms in one scale of one fish and all the electrons in one atom and all the quarks and – bang – there’s the white light again . . .

  When she wakes up this time she is flying over desert. Her mouth feels dry. She wishes she could discard her body, just peel it off like the set of clothes you were wearing that afternoon when you got caught in the rain. But it’s not time for that yet. It is much, much too early. ‘Take me to Calanais,’ she says to it, in the end, and then, just like that, she is lying on the ground somewhere between the tourist information stand and the public toilets. This is the best sat-nav in the world! But she feels slightly sick. Skye and Ina are looking down at her.

  ‘You OK?’ says Ina.

  Skye looks a little how Fleur feels. As they walk up the path towards the standing stones, concealed behind a mound (although Fleur and Skye can now see through things like mounds it turns out to be quite tiring, so they have stopped their brains from doing it all the time), she whispers to her, ‘Where did you go?’ ‘I went all around the world,’ says Fleur. ‘What about you?’ Skye smiles. ‘I went inside geometry,’ she says, ‘And then I wrote fifty albums. Oh – and a symphony! And I heard the cosmic song . . .’ And it all makes sense to Fleur, and everything is beautiful. The darkness around them is simply a curtain they can pull aside whenever they want to, although the light behind it is too dazzling to be of much use. So, with only a tiny crack in the curtain they walk up the path some more until they can see the standing stones in the distance. From here they look like a freeze-frame of a breakout session at a convention of giants. But as they get closer, Fleur sees that the beings they represent – no, are – are not giants but archetypes. Here is every possible shape an ego can inhabit. There is the great mother, with her cape swirling about her. And right in the centre of everything, the patriarch, acting as though everything is very important indeed. There, the little girl and the little boy who do not want to stand still, and beyond them all, the stranger who comes to the door in the middle of the night and changes everything. The outsider, the freak, the loner, the mistress, the forbidden lover, the criminal. Fleur sees h
erself first in this figure. She walks over and tries to touch the stone, but that ticklish, painful, orgasmic feeling returns and she finds she can’t even get close to it, because it is like touching her own insides. But gradually she realises she is all of them. She is mother, father, daughter, son, maiden, crone, hero, witch . . .

  And then the white light, again.

  Back at Ina’s, Fleur asks for another look at the photo album. And now she sees the lost orchid as Ina sees it. There, indeed, is Ganesh, and Shiva, and beautiful, mellow Jesus, first as a too-wise young man and then at the end. Now when she looks at it the crucifixion goes from being painful and real to being something different entirely, not a joke, exactly, because she realises how much he needed to concentrate to do it, and how much it was supposed to mean, and not a trick, exactly . . . Something like a proof. This is how little the body means. You can do anything to me and it does not matter, because I am not of this world and beyond it I will always be free. And whatever we do to each other, through this eternity and the next, you are me and I am you, and in the end none of it matters at all.

  ‘When I read those Judy Blume books when I was a child I was so confused all the time. I mean, what is baloney? What is a baloney sandwich?’

  ‘It’s a gross kind of salami. Like a huge sausage.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Well, obviously I Googled it, Mummy.’

  ‘Are you sure that book isn’t too old for you?’

  ‘It’s too late now anyway. I’ve read it. It has a penis in it called Ralph.’

  ‘Oh, Holly.’

  ‘If someone would find me a tennis court I wouldn’t need to read unsuitable books.’

  Or perhaps the proof is that there is no God, not here, not in the illusion, because what God would be the author of this story? What God would kill his hero in such a thoughtless way? What God would let anything he created suffer so much . . . ?

  We do this to ourselves. There is no one else involved.

  No one else is even watching.

  ‘Apparently if a man turns up on one of the islands claiming to be the seventh son of a seventh son you have to put an earthworm in his hand.’

  ‘Gross. Why?’

  ‘Because if he is telling the truth then the earthworm immediately dies.’

  ‘But why would anybody want to be the seventh son of a seventh son?’

  ‘Because you get supernatural powers.’

  ‘What, to kill earthworms? L.A.M.E.’

  The clue is always, always, buried deep in the boredom . . .

  Where do you feel most bored? Go there.

  ‘Of course, everything you do is better than what everyone else does.’

  ‘What is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Well, all this wholesome crap about walking and fishing and swimming, as if everything anyone else wants to do is inferior. WHO exactly decided that swimming in ice-cold water having your face bitten by clegs is better than watching TV all afternoon? I almost added “an old film” to make it more acceptable to you but what I am trying to say is that I am SICK of doing that. If someone wants to watch, I don’t know, Teletubbies all day then why do you feel you have to stop them?’

  Bryony thinks of that odd conversation she had with Fleur, when Fleur said that basically nothing you do in this life matters at all and has already been decided anyway. In which case Bryony had no choice other than to watch Australia’s Biggest Loser for five hours straight while the others tried to climb one of the Paps of Jura. She still feels tearful thinking of the woman who got so fat she could not ride her horse, and how lovely it was when . . .

  ‘Well, if that person is my child, then I do feel I have a responsibility to . . .’

  ‘And you think you’re so fucking healthy!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All this coconut milk, and butter and cream in everything. All the fucking cake. James, look at me. Do you think I need cake? I have never needed cake. But you’ve shovelled it into me virtually daily for the last ten years. And now I look like this. It’s almost as if you intended me to be . . .’

  ‘I don’t pour two bottles of wine down your throat every evening.’

  ‘Not this again. You know I only do that on a very special occasion!’

  ‘There were two bottles on the side this morning. Again.’

  ‘Well, Charlie . . .’

  ‘Charlie has about half a glass. Anyway, why does everything always have to come back around to Uncle sodding Charlie? Why is he always here? I never thought I was signing up to this.’

  ‘This is not about Charlie. It’s about you.’

  ‘OK. One last joke. An island one.’

  ‘Will it really be the last one?’

  ‘Good God . . . Right. There’s an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman who are stranded on an island after their boat is shipwrecked.’

  ‘Like in The Tempest?’

  ‘Yes, except that all the characters and the whole situation is completely different.’

  ‘Except for the shipwreck.’

  ‘Yes, except this is more of a little boat. So anyway, there they are on this desert island, and they find a magical bottle with a genie inside it. The genie offers them each a wish. The Scotsman goes first. “I wish to be back home with my family with a nice roast dinner in front of me,” he says. And, poof, he is gone. The Irishman has a similar idea. “Take me to Dublin, to the finest restaurant, and put a beautiful woman there with me.” And, poof, he is gone too. Now the genie turns to the Englishman. “What do you wish?” he asks. “Well,” says the Englishman, “it’s a bit lonely here on my own, and I need some help gathering food and firewood. I wish my two friends would come back.” Boom, boom!’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Shit,’ says Bryony, when she gets off the phone.

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Clem. From Edinburgh. We’ve got Granny problems.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘She’s got into a dispute with a noisy neighbour.’

  ‘I fear for the neighbour.’

  ‘Don’t joke. And she’s lonely, apparently.’

  ‘Everything all right?’ Fleur comes in with Skye Turner. They both look oddly peaceful at the moment. Have they been meditating too much? Fleur in particular looks like one of those silvery pears with a pink flush down the side, and . . . And how did they even GET here, to Jura, from the Outer Hebrides, or wherever it was they went? They say they flew, but not how they made it from the airport to the front door with basically no transport at all. And why is Bryony the only one who finds this weird?

  ‘Oh, everything’s fine. Well, except that Granny Beatrix is threatening to move in with one of us.’

  ‘Or Augustus,’ corrects James. ‘The Grange does belong to her after all.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’ says Skye.

  ‘Oh, she’s been abusing her neighbour. She lives in a very, very posh apartment in the Royal Crescent in Bath. The kind of place where you don’t abuse your neighbour. Although apparently the neighbour has been playing music very loudly, and . . .’

  ‘Beatrix is beautiful,’ breathes Skye. ‘I adore Beatrix.’

  ‘That’s right. Didn’t it turn out that she had bought . . .’

  ‘Downloaded . . .’

  ‘. . . one of your albums?’

  ‘Well, you can move in with her if you like,’ says Bryony.

  The universe does a tiny pirouette. Almost trips, and then rights itself.

  ‘You know what?’ says Fleur. ‘That’s actually . . .’

  ‘Could I really?’ says Skye. ‘I mean, it would be . . .’

  Disgraced pop star hides in old lady’s flat. But what if she could hide from the tabloids this time? She knows now to keep her voicemail switched off at all times. If they can’t listen to her voicemail, they can’t find her, right? There is nothing in the world to connect her with Bath. And she does sort of adore Beatrix. And she can fly to Sandwich to see Fleur whenever she wants. Becaus
e she does remember. Even though Ina said she wouldn’t, she does.

  ‘How was your meal, sir?’

  ‘Are you just being polite, or do you really want to know?’

  ‘Ollie . . .’

  ‘If you have feedback, then we . . .’

  ‘OK. Well, since this is about the twentieth time you’ve asked is everything all right and are we enjoying our meal I am assuming that you do really want to know. Let’s begin at the beginning. Your amuse-bouche was not amusing. It was pretentious, surprisingly bland and a very off-putting shade of green. Like everything else, it needed much more seasoning. And more heating. The starters looked pretty enough on the surface but the cucumber was too cold. It was also unpeeled and unseasoned. The salmon was fine, but then it would be, since all the chef had to do was open the packet. Ditto the salad, which needed dressing. And if you are going to have green beans arranged like little crucifixion scenes around the plate then they should not be overcooked and flaccid. The main course was far too ambitious. I did not need to have venison two ways: one way would have been fine, if it had been cooked properly and somehow kept hot until it reached our table. I believe restaurants have ways of achieving this. Deep-frying things does not automatically render them edible if they would otherwise be inedible. For example your fondant potato, and your ridiculous “string” French fries that, remarkably, do taste of string. If I did not need venison two ways I definitely did not need parsnip three ways, once of which was simply “boiled, 1950s style” and the other two of which were indistinguishable from one another and also from the strange lumps of celeriac I kept finding strewn around my plate. I could not identify the pink cubes. As for the puddings, of course we only had ice cream, which you only had to spoon from a tub, but the reason people serve ice cream in little bowls rather than on saucers is because it is really impossible to eat ice cream from a saucer unless you are a cat.’

  ‘I will pass your comments to the kitchen.’

  Triathlon

  ‘You said the word “Ollie” in your sleep last night, by the way.’