The Seed Collectors

by Scarlett Thomas

  Afterwards, Melissa offers Holly a sip of her drink. It’s sweet and herby.

  ‘Don’t ever say sorry again,’ Melissa says. And then she leaves.

  Dave comes over. ‘That was more like it,’ he says.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘So what’s the problem when you play Stephanie?’

  Holly shrugs.

  ‘I mean, why are you throwing the . . .’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You won’t do that when you’re in the county squad, will you?’

  ‘I, uh . . .’

  ‘Twelve, aren’t you? So you’ll be in the 13Us.’

  ‘The county squad?’

  ‘Yep. Do you live far away? We’ll need you here on three weeknights, sometimes four. And get you an address here so you can play for us. We’ve got another girl doing that, so don’t worry. Anushka. You’ll like her.’

  ‘I live in Kent.’

  He frowns. ‘Kent. Could be worse. OK, I’ll call your mum.’

  ‘Oh my God! Thank you. Thank you. I’ll train all the time . . . I’ll . . .’

  More sit-ups. No more Freddo bars. Only green vegetables. Maybe a touch more protein. Lots of squats and lunges. Resistance-band work.

  ‘I don’t want to ever see you throw a point again. No matter who is bullying you or what they are saying. Kill them on the court. Don’t be anyone’s bitch.’

  ‘I, er . . .’

  ‘I totally shouldn’t have said that. Anyway, if I see you throw a point again you’ll be out of the squad. Got it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Holly frowns. ‘What if it’s by accident?’

  ‘You can lose a point, flower. You just can’t do it on purpose.’

  It isn’t then that Holly passes out, as she thought she might do when Melissa spoke to her. It isn’t after her hot shower that evening, although she does feel a little faint then. It’s not at dinner, because she doesn’t go, and no one makes her, and it’s not when the pizza she has ordered through the hotel does not come. Holly goes to sleep empty but happy. Happier than she has ever, ever been. It’s at breakfast the next morning when she hits the deck, right at Stephanie’s feet. And she doesn’t wake up for a whole day, and when she does come round, there are Uncle Charlie and her mum and her dad standing by her hospital bed and they all seem to be cross with one another.

  Reasons for giving up smoking:

  Live longer

  Better breath, especially in a.m.

  SWIMMING – lap times will improve

  Annoying cough will finally go

  Will not have to be slave to something

  Not have to worry about cancer any more

  Not have to stand outside in the rain

  End embarrassment at work – must not be caught by D again

  Smell in office/on clothes/in car will go

  Will not have Del Boy feeling on holiday

  Can attend long meetings w/o cravings

  Also not get stressed in cinema, theatre, flights etc.

  No more staining on fingers

  Will be able to speak more clearly, and project voice more in lectures

  Will save money

  Will be more attractive to C?

  ‘You think that lettuce just sits there innocently on the ground hugging itself with its soft billowy leaves and dreaming of nothing more ambitious than being part of a salad or a mildly soporific soup? All lettuce wants is sex. And violence. Just like all plants. It wants to reproduce, and it wants to kill or damage its rivals so they don’t reproduce. Of course you’re welcome to think that lettuce does not “want”, that lettuce does not desire. But if you watch it, and other plants, sped up I am pretty sure you will change your mind. The walking palm seems so dignified, struggling along, alone, right? But if there was another, weaker plant in its path it would not go around it. It would trample it. It would mow it down.’

  ‘Really? This is what the film will show?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All you need is a new time-lapse camera?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Let’s say that in one lifetime you have a difficult relationship with your mother. Like, really difficult. Not one of the many lifetimes where she does not quite understand you, or makes the odd mean comment about how you never became a doctor or a lawyer, or does not buy you a pony. This is one of those lifetimes where she sleeps with your new husband while you are in the pool, or sells you to a man with a turquoise turban who calls at the house looking for beautiful young girls, or lets her husband rape you every Saturday night after X Factor is over. How would you forgive a mother like that? It would be impossible, right? And how would she ever get over the guilt? You might not think that bad people feel guilt, but they do. And of course in the next lifetime she is the little girl and you are the rapist, however much you try not to be. And in that lifetime perhaps you come to think life is cheaper than you do now. Life is less fair, more brutal. Perhaps you drink? Of course you drink. All you want to do is go back to that beautiful black hole from which you sense you came. All you want is the bliss of oblivion. You’ll do everything you can to get that oblivion back, and your eyes will glaze over and your soul will harden like the branches of a shrub cut back for winter and you simply won’t see the wounds you inflict on others, even when they bleed onto the floor in front of you.

  And then there will be those lifetimes when you do not have a strong connection with this soul at all. Lifetimes where you are a relatively happy graphic designer and she is the one hygienist at your dentist who you never much like visiting. Or perhaps you are a journo on a junket and she is an airport waitress. Maybe you only meet each other once in this lifetime, in a lift, and no, it does not break down, and no, you do not reveal your great secrets to one another while waiting for the engineer. In this lifetime you have no significant relationship at all, but often when you do see one another your feelings, actually based on lifetimes of betrayal and disgust and sometimes deep love, but in the sensory world based on no more than instinct, or feelings of ‘instant dislike’, seem so far out of proportion that you really wonder whether you might be losing your mind.

  ‘And why exactly was my daughter playing with a seventeen-year-old county player? She’s twelve years old, for God’s sake. What were you trying to do to her?’

  ‘Mrs Croft, it was just that she was throwing games against kids her own age. We wanted to see what she could do if she . . .’

  ‘Throwing games? Maybe she was just losing.’

  ‘We know what throwing a game looks like, Mrs Croft. And anyway, she . . .’

  ‘But you obviously don’t know what a serious eating disorder looks like.’

  ‘A lot of the kids we see are very lean. They do a lot of sports. If you were concerned, then why did you even send her . . . ?’

  All right. Advantage whatever-his-name-is. It’s true. Who does send their anorexic – Bryony can hardly think the word: it’s new, like the word alcoholic, and seems so horribly final – daughter to stay in a downmarket Hounslow hotel for TWO WEEKS on her own with nothing to do apart from play tennis all day? Oh yes, and promising to double whatever food money she saved? Good one, Uncle Charlie. What a fucking twat. What a total, total . . .

  ‘Anyway, how is Holly?’

  ‘She’s home now. Back at school. Seeing a counsellor . . .’

  ‘Because we’d still really like to have her in the squad.’

  ‘No,’ Bryony says. ‘Sorry. You’ve already almost killed her once.’

  ‘But what does Holly think?’

  ‘Holly thinks she wants to finish school and go to university like a normal person and not throw her childhood away on something as meaningless as . . .’

  ‘Mrs Croft, I really can’t stress enough just how talented your daughter is.’

  For a moment Bryony hesitates. A tennis match starts playing in her head. A huge, muscular black woman is playing a smaller, sleeker blonde. One of them has some sort of knee brace, like something Bryony saw in the gym earlier, and she is limp
ing between points a little. The camera pans to each of the competitor’s families. They look wracked with tension. Eventually one player wins; let’s say it’s the black woman. The blonde woman cries. Her family look distraught and disappointed. Maybe next time the black woman loses, and she cries, and now her family look distraught and disappointed. Bryony instantly knows two things. First, she is not prepared to give up her life to tennis, even if her daughter thinks she is. She is not going to be in that distraught and disappointed family. And second, what is the point of training for hours every day to be one of the best in the world at something, and then finally to get there, and then to be beaten by another one of the best in the world at whatever it is and then CRY? Even if you become the very best in the world for a while and win everything, it never lasts. And then what do you do? Marry another has-been tennis star and do cereal commercials?

  Doctors, lawyers, bankers, vets . . . They are all quite clearly happier than tennis players. You don’t go to hospital and find your surgeon CRYING because another surgeon just did a marginally better operation, do you? You don’t go to the bank to find all the tellers in tears because Aimee in business banking can count 100 ten-pound notes faster than anyone else. And when someone in normal life does something well in their job, for example a teacher correcting a child’s spelling, they don’t have to get up and do a stupid dance afterwards or start fist pumping and shouting ‘Come on!’ There is absolutely no point in sport: Bryony has discovered that in the gym. Not that the people there play sports exactly, but that dead look that comes over them when . . .

  ‘I know that families have pressure, Mrs Croft, but . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry. My decision is final.’

  ‘Well, tell Holly that if she changes her mind, I’ll be here ready to coach her. For free.’

  ‘Have you had your lover round?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I said, Have you had your lover round?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There’re two plates in the dishwasher. You’re not very subtle.’

  Clem rolls lazily from one side of the sofa to the other.

  ‘Oh.’ She laughs.

  ‘You think it’s funny?’

  ‘I was trying one of Zoe’s macrobiotic brown rice recipes but I put the rice on the plate before I weighed it, so I had to take it off, weigh it, and then obviously I didn’t want to put it back on a dirty plate so I got a new one.’

  ‘And two wine glasses?’

  ‘The first one got a bit seaweedy.’

  ‘How can a glass get seaweedy?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘And how do you explain the two forks?’

  ‘I used chopsticks.’

  ‘Aha! And washed them by hand and dried them and put them away to fool me. And then left two forks in the dishwasher to fool me even more.’

  ‘But it seems you are not so easily fooled.’

  ‘And what did you eat with the rice? Hang on.’ There are sounds of Ollie opening the bin and looking inside it. ‘Tofu. You really are disgusting. You and your lover eating a whole packet of tofu.’

  ‘There’s actually half a packet left in the fridge. I thought I’d make sushi tomorrow. Will you get an avocado in the morning?’

  ‘So where did you conceal the other packet? Or does he not eat much?’

  Clem rolls her eyes. ‘My lover doesn’t eat that much. Yes, you’re a genius.’

  ‘So you admit it! Ha!’

  ‘It looks like I’m going to have to in the end.’

  ‘Is he really big?’

  ‘Yes. Oh, what, you mean his dick? Yes, he has a really big dick.’

  ‘Bigger than mine?’

  ‘Anyone’s dick is bigger than yours.’

  This month the stupid challenge in the gym is to see if you can cycle, run, row, cross-train (which is what form of transport exactly?) your way to popular holiday destinations like Margate (17 miles), Calais (37 miles), Amsterdam (175 miles), Paris (237 miles), Blackpool (326 miles), Bilbao (804 miles) Torremolinos (1,356 miles) and, finally, Faliraki (2,309 miles). Then there is a chart to help you convert kilometres, which are used by every machine in the gym, to the miles recorded on the chart. Why did they not just put kilometres on the chart? Anyway, all the usual people have started putting their stats up. Some twat called MIKEY, who rowed his way through a deluge of Easter eggs, has already made it to Bilbao after only THREE DAYS. Is that even possible? Bryony imagines going to Margate, and then having to get from Margate to Calais, and then to Amsterdam, then back to Paris before having to find your way to Blackpool. It would be fucking dreadful. Bryony thinks how much nicer it would be to go to Bath, Edinburgh, Nice, Florence, the Maldives, Kerala . . .

  ‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ says Rich, the fitness consultant.

  They go into his little office. There are the scales of doom, that told Bryony how morbidly obese she was last time she was here. And that she was forty-four per cent fat.

  ‘So how’s it going?’

  ‘I still hate exercise.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I suppose I don’t mind cycling. I went up to Level 7 the other day. And I’ve made a playlist like you suggested. Oh, and I’ve started doing occasional sprints, which I suppose are quite sort of euphoric, and . . .’

  ‘Well, that’s all positive. Let’s have a look at your stats.’

  Bryony takes off her trainers and socks, and gets on the scales. She has lost a kilogram, despite all the lapses. And she is now thirty-nine per cent fat, which is still a lot, but SHE IS OUT OF THE FORTIES! However, Rich looks concerned.

  ‘I suppose you’ve put on a bit of muscle,’ he says. ‘But . . . Well, I would have expected a more impressive result by now.’

  How is this not impressive? SHE IS IN THE THIRTIES!

  ‘How have you been getting on with the diet?’

  ‘I’ve stuck to the calories. Fifteen hundred a day.’ Give or take the odd egg or handful of nuts here and there. Oh, and croissants on trains, because what you eat on trains doesn’t count. And all the nibbly things she has when she is drunk. And lunches with Emmy at the Black Douglas. And all the bits of James’s cakes that she doesn’t really eat, but sort of really does. And all the times that she stops looking at the kitchen scales because she doesn’t want to know what they actually say, especially when weighing butter. Oh, and that time the battery was running out and would not go beyond five grams however much stuff you put on it. Bryony had a lot of five-gram portions of things that week.

  Rich frowns. ‘I think you’ve gone into starvation mode.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Your body thinks it’s starving and so hangs on to fat.’

  ‘But I’ve actually lost . . .’

  ‘You need to take your calories up a bit.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Eighteen hundred a day.’

  ‘Eighteen hundred?’

  ‘Yep. You getting enough carbs?’

  ‘Ah. Well, actually, that’s one thing I have changed. I’ve gone, well, a bit, because of my cousin who . . . Well, basically sort of primal.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Like a low-carb diet, but with . . .’

  ‘Don’t do that. Your body needs carbs.’

  ‘But that’s not what . . .’

  ‘People give up carbs on these extreme programmes, but they don’t realise that for a balanced diet you need them. Without carbs all you lose is water.’

  ‘But what about all the fat that the scales . . .’

  ‘Go and get yourself some wholewheat bread. And some pasta. Are you losing energy in workouts?’

  How can anyone do a workout without losing energy? Bryony can now do eight minutes on the rowing machine on Level 6, and can go up to 8.5kmph on the treadmill at an incline of 1.5 for a total of five minutes. But she does feel a bit knackered afterwards.

  ‘I suppose so,’ she says.

  ‘You’ve hit the wall. No glycogen in your muscles.’
<
br />   ‘Right.’

  ‘You need pasta.’

  Everything Bryony has read in the last three months would suggest that she does not need pasta, that pasta is the very last thing she needs. But Rich’s voice is drowning it all out. Your body needs carbs. Your body needs carbs. When she leaves the gym she goes straight to Sainsbury’s and buys a French stick, a large bar of milk chocolate and a jar of strawberry jam. And also a packet of six large jam doughnuts. And a family bag of sea salt and balsamic vinegar crisps. Oh, and a loaf of wholewheat bread and some wholewheat pasta.

  Gym Playlist

  If You Let Me Stay – Terence Trent D’Arby

  Sweet Little Mystery – Wet Wet Wet

  I Luv You Baby – The Original

  We Got A Love Thang – CeCe Peniston

  Out Of The Blue (Into The Fire) – The The

  Angels Of Deception – The The

  This Is The Day – The The

  Yes – McAlmont & Butler

  Your Woman – White Town

  Bonnie And Clyde – Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot

  On Your Own – Blur

  Give It Up – KC and the Sunshine Band

  Time To Pretend – MGMT

  They finish the Everyman crossword in about an hour. Skye Turner had never done a cryptic crossword before coming to stay with Beatrix, but it turns out she has an uncanny ability to see anagrams in her head. And to get those amazing clues like Of of of of of of of of of of (10), which of course is ‘oftentimes’, a word that Skye Turner is somehow aware of, despite never having used it. Perhaps she has read it somewhere, in some old-fashioned schoolbook. Now she is scanning the Radio Times to try to find something for their evening viewing.