The Seed Collectors

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘Downton Abbey’s on. New series. Do you like that?’

  ‘Vulgar,’ says Beatrix. ‘Too much about the servants.’

  ‘I’ve never seen it.’

  ‘It’s far too twee for you, dear.’

  Skye Turner keeps scanning. What’s that thing that Tash and Karl are obsessed with? It seems to involve a group of mild-looking people trapped in a tent with a lot of carbs. Skye has tried not to watch it, partly because it’s for old people. Beatrix is an old person. But then again . . .

  ‘I think I might like to look at Game of Thrones,’ says Beatrix.

  ‘Isn’t that all blood and guts and swords and stuff?’

  ‘Have you seen it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I read about it in Vogue.’

  ‘OK . . . I can’t find it though. Is it definitely on?’

  ‘I think I managed to video the series.’

  Beatrix does not ‘Sky+’ things, and would never involve Sky, a company with whom she has an uneasy relationship due to its share price falling from 850p to 692p virtually overnight just last month, in any kind of verb formation. Even though she insists on calling what it does ‘videoing’, she is pretty nifty with Sky+. When Skye looks, she finds, as well as Game of Thrones, several nature programmes, a documentary about perfume, and four episodes of Midsomer Murders.

  ‘And I’ll have a cup of tea and a date. But only if you’ll join me.’

  ‘Pranayama’, Fleur says to the tennis player.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what it’s called. It’s just different ways of breathing.’

  Ever since she came back from the Isle of Lewis Fleur has had the ability to see what people need; well, more than usual anyway. She knows that Georgina from the Tuesday morning Rise and Shine class needs to drink more water. She knows that Martin, the only man in the Wednesday afternoon group, needs to stop online gambling. In some odd way that she can’t explain she also knows that she can’t change what will happen to them. But the tennis player has come to her and asked for help, which is different. If Martin asked her for help what would she say? Probably the same thing. Breathe. Sit still, and breathe. It really is the only way. But Fleur somehow also knows that Martin will give up online gambling after his wife dies, and that he has needed to go through this experience in this lifetime, that although it has been incredibly, horribly shit, in some ways it has helped him grow, and he sort of – whisper this bit if you like – kind of chose it.

  ‘It doesn’t matter where you sit, as long as your spine is relatively straight.’

  ‘Well, you’ve seen me try to sit cross-legged. That was a fucking joke . . .’

  ‘Can you kneel?’

  ‘What about a chair?’

  ‘No. Let’s try you in the Hero pose. Vajrasana.’

  ‘I certainly ain’t no hero.’

  ‘Yes. Well. We’ll see about that.’

  ‘It’s certainly no fucking wonder she is so obsessed with food.’

  ‘What is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You obviously have an eating disorder. Kids pick these things up.’ Eyebrows. ‘What, from a second cousin, once . . .’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Anyway, I have an eating disorder? That’s rich. I have nine per cent body fat.’

  ‘You know what percentage of your body is fat! I repeat: you have an eating disorder.’

  ‘My blood pressure is a hundred over sixty . . .’

  ‘For God’s sake.’

  ‘I am about as healthy as it gets.’

  ‘Physically, maybe . . .’

  ‘What is that supposed to . . .’

  Bryony sighs. ‘Come on, surely there is more to life than . . .’

  ‘Anyway, you know your body fat percentage too. What was it? Forty . . .’

  ‘It’s thirty-six and a half now, actually.’

  ‘Why does me knowing my body fat percentage mean that I have an eating disorder, and you knowing yours mean you don’t?’

  ‘Because you don’t need to know yours! You’ve basically got a perfect body.’

  ‘Maybe Holly wants that too. What is so wrong with . . .’

  ‘SHE ALMOST DIED.’

  Charlie is quiet for a few seconds.

  ‘Maybe we’ve all got some level of eating disorder.’

  ‘Maybe we have. But the point is that Holly isn’t following my example.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  ‘This isn’t going to get us anywhere.’

  Bryony goes to the fridge. ‘Let’s sit down with a glass of wine and talk about this properly.’

  ‘Look, Bry, there’s not much to talk about. Basically if you don’t tell her, I will.’

  ‘It’s not the right time.’

  ‘It is the right time.’

  ‘But James . . .’

  ‘What about James?’ says James, coming in.

  Think of a substance you’d like to give up. Perhaps it’s a drug. If it’s a drug, it’s likely to be a plant. Perhaps it’s a food plant that acts like a drug? Decide on your substance now, and visualise it in its processed form, or in the form you take it. Think of all the other people who indulge in this substance. See them walking around. Now imagine the plant (or plants) from which this substance is made. See them growing. What do they look like? What nourishes them? Are they attractive or not? Now think again of all the people who also take this substance. How many of them do you think would like to give it up? Imagine yourself walking among them, the only one who has broken free of the substance. How do you feel?

  ‘Mummy?’

  ‘Yes, Holly.’

  ‘Mummy? When can I play tennis again?’

  ‘When you’re better.’

  ‘And when will I be better?’

  ‘When you weigh at least six stone.’

  ‘BUT, MUMMY.’

  ‘I’m not arguing about this, Holly.’

  ‘Has Dave rung you yet?’

  ‘No. You must have made a mistake.’

  ‘I did not make a mistake!’

  ‘In any case, you don’t want to play county tennis. It would completely take over your life. You know, some of those Olympic gymnasts from Russia lost their whole childhoods, and . . .’

  ‘BUT, MUMMY, ALL I WANT TO DO IS PLAY TENNIS.’

  ‘You don’t need to shout.’

  ‘It is LITERALLY the only thing I enjoy doing.’

  ‘You enjoy reading.’

  ‘Compared with tennis I hate reading.’

  ‘Well, what about watching films on the laptop?’

  ‘I only like watching tennis matches on YouTube on the laptop.’

  ‘Well, I just don’t think tennis has been very healthy for you so far.’

  ‘This is so, so unfair.’

  Things Charlie does before running:

  Takes 2 Nurofen

  Takes 2 Devil’s Claw tablets

  Takes 3 magnesium tablets

  Massages calves gently with Pro-Tech massage stick

  Eats one dried apricot

  Eats half a tablespoon of honey

  Does calf raises

  Performs myofascial release on calves with old tennis ball

  Applies arnica gel to lower back, knees, shins, calves and Achilles tendons

  Puts on compression socks

  Performs myofascial release on lower back with spiky massage ball

  Puts on Vibrams

  Runs on the spot for two minutes

  Stretches hamstrings

  Stretches quads

  Performs myofascial release on quads and ITB with Pro-tech massage stick

  Eats one more dried apricot

  Stretches calves

  Uses foam roller on calves, hamstrings, quads, lower back

  Applies Biofreeze gel to lower back, knees and quads

  When Fleur and Skye sit together now it is just pure sitting. Skye has the blue cushion and Fleur has the red cushion, although sometimes it’s the other way around. And they
wear anything. Not the kind of ‘anything’ that takes thought, preparation, a glance in the mirror. This is not about doing ballet with tights ripped just so and your hair brushed to look unbrushed with nude lipstick and brown mascara. In fact, Fleur and Skye do brush their hair for these sessions. They brush it and neatly tuck it behind their ears. They don’t wear make-up: it feels sticky and wrong. But if they did it wouldn’t matter either. Today Fleur is wearing pink socks, blue jeggings and a yellow T-shirt with a red heart on it. Skye is wearing denim-effect hot pants with Nike pool sliders and a T-shirt someone left at Namaste House that has hot-rock holes and says ‘Rap for Jesus’. Fleur has just finished teaching her Body and Soul yoga class which this week contained ninety per cent arthritic old ladies from Sandwich and ten per cent famous tennis player, and all the old ladies laughed because he still could not cross his legs AT ALL and was even less flexible than them and could not do a headstand because he was too scared. Nice muscles though, they all agreed. Great shoulders. Terrible feet though, with no toenails at all on his left foot, and all that tape . . .

  When you can fly, there is something even more amazing about sitting still. When you can fly alone, then sitting with someone else becomes a strange kind of privilege, although this whole thing is becoming harder and harder to describe. They don’t always use the meditation room but they do sometimes. Sometimes they do it in water, in the warm spa pool, just standing there looking into each other’s eyes. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Nothing is matter . . . Skye thinks about when she was first with Greg and they used to sleep tucked up against one another and she deliberately did not breathe when he breathed because she did not want him to think she was copying him, trying to be him. She did not want to be like those cheesy couples who do everything together, have his ’n’ hers stuff and beans on toast every Tuesday night. She also did not want to fall into a pattern that he could break. If she let her breathing fall in with his then it was an implicit admission that he was powerful, he was in charge. If her breathing fell in with his and then he changed it then that would be a rejection for sure. So night after night she lay there waiting for his breathing to meet hers and it never did.

  And now this.

  Fleur and Skye breathe together. They hold hands, create a circuit.

  They could die now and everything would still be perfect.

  They breathe in and breathe out.

  The man is, as always, incompt and untrig. He sloggers around his rooms in his black and grey ragtails like an elderly magpie with those bleep bleep noises going all around him, a choir of dying things. The bleep bleep noises sometimes enter the robin’s licham and make him abubble and a little gunpowdered. When this happens the robin bobs up and down and sometimes the man then speaks to him. He says things like ‘All right, little red breast? Right little raver, aren’t you?’ and laughs as the robin flies through the window and into his dark rooms. Everywhere in these rooms are thin pieces of deadtree sewn together with lengths of cotton, and the pieces of deadtree have symbols on them, written in the dark liquid made from deadthings. Mostoftentimes the deadtree symbols stay the same but in one deadtreething they change and the man had this deadtreething and then he lost it and it made him all agloom. The bleep bleep noises come from circles made from sap that the man revolves in a box on a table. While he does this, the robin flies into the back room and takes the halfpod that the man has left for him. ‘Cheeky little thing,’ the man will say, smiling. And the robin will fly back to the leafmoss-hair of his last female’s nest and open the pod and . . .

  After the pod the robin’s flight is swipping and meteorous and he does not need to visit the bird table at all. He is wick! He is fire-swift! He can also sit in stilth and ro for longtimes and mull, and for a time he forgets about the sparrowhawks and pussycats and the long grey squirrel. In his merrow head he hears whirleries of human poetry and other meaningthings from far, far away. But often the meaningthings are too many and the robin must sing ahigh to remove them. After the podseeds the robin hears and knows all ancient songs ever sung, including the cosmic song. The man has been searching for the cosmic song all his life, he told the robin once, and the robin bobbed and nodded and bobbed. Is it true, the man asked the robin, that in this dimension songs sound different but in the dimension above they are all the same? Is that why songs are so similar when you think about it, and why we only have twelve musical notes? During conversations like this the robin always simply bobs and nods.

  After he sings the cosmic song the robin tarries quietfully around the grounds of Namaste House – the large red-brick structure with its big doors and windows next to the smaller, cosier cottage with gardens full of roses and papavers – and sees all the things he has ever seen, and all the things all his ancestors have ever seen, at the same nonce, togethers. There is the first one of Fleur’s sort, with her long black hair, all cold here after the heat of India. Men with cotton-things and woolthings on their heads. A big argument between the elderlings and then the great one, Oleander, whose name he does know, as he knows Fleur’s, making of the big house a vast nest full of songs and smoke and colourful souls with great scurries of feeling. He also knows the name Briar Rose, not just Fleur’s mother but, the man says, mother of the podseeds. Ah, Briar Rose. With her bright feathers and her big, soft nest. The robin sees her mapreading and planmaking with other familiar people, now gone, but of whom the incompt man often speaks: Quinn and Plum, the great explorers from the nearby village of Ash, Grace, the botanical artist and Augustus, her botanist husband, he who was longtimes in Briar Rose’s nest and made the egg that became Fleur. And the incompt man longed for Briar Rose’s nest too, as did all redblood living beings, according to the incompt man.

  After eating the podseeds the robin singsandsings, and thinksgreat-thoughts and balladsmuch long after darkness comes. He stops to sleep and wakes only when the redbreast man comes on his bicycle with thin deadtreethings and stringthings. Sometimes the incompt man is there to greet him and he takes away podseeds hidden in drearihead murk-coloured cubes of pulplayers. He takes them away! However much the robin sings his great songs of sadness and killing and deep black danger, the redbreast man still takes them away, far away, where they are turned into puffs so ferly and ghastful that no one can ever sing of them, where not only the bodies but the very souls of their victim are rived and betorn forever.

  ‘I think I’d like to buy ITV. They were nice to me when I went on X Factor.’

  ‘Very well, dear. We’ll just have a look at Level 2 first.’

  ‘Level 2?’

  For the last week or so Skye has been learning about how to buy and sell shares, mainly because Beatrix seems so much to enjoy teaching her. She has her own trading account now, and her own monitor, which is the best reason yet for keeping her iPad charged up. Now, instead of endless fan mail and weird shit from Greg and the Mail on Sunday, she looks at a screen of red, blue and black with the odd splash of green. When there is activity on a share it highlights yellow, and then red or blue depending on whether the price has fallen or risen, whether it is being bought or sold. Since Skye has had her ADVFN monitor she has felt a good deal less alone in the world because every tiny flicker is, well, the flicker of a person, an action, a desire, a movement . . . Even at night when the LSE is sleeping, she can watch shares ticking over on the NYSE or in Hong Kong or Tokyo. Money never stops moving. People never stop moving it. It’s like watching ants carrying corpses and bits of cake around in a tiny garden. But in a good way, because something about seeing those colours moving on that screen makes Skye feel alive in a way she can’t quite . . .

  ‘Level 2 is where you can see the order book for a share,’ says Beatrix.

  ‘The order book?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There is something called an order book for shares?’ Skye Turner sees something huge and leather-bound on the desk of a serious-looking God somewhere beyond the clouds. And a scribe is writing in it with the most exquisite . . .

&nb
sp; ‘Yes, dear. Of course. Otherwise how would they know who to give them to? If you can see the order book, then instead of simply seeing the spread you can see all the orders in the market. I went to a very informative seminar about it. It is rather complex. But if you put it on histogram mode you can see all the orders standing up straight in rows, almost marching towards each other, rather like soldiers on a battlefield, and I find it useful to imagine each order bringing down soldiers on one side or the other. Bang, bang, and then . . .’

  Skye knows what the ‘spread’ is. It is the difference between the highest buying price and the lowest selling price on a share. But she thought men in pinstriped suits made up these spreads in their heads. She didn’t realise . . .

  ‘Look,’ says Beatrix. She opens a new window on the screen of her vast iMac. A box appears. Beatrix types ‘LSE:ITV’ into it, and suddenly there is a new kind of cascade of numbers. At first it is completely incomprehensible. But you can sort of work it out. There on the left-hand side of the box are all the orders to buy. ITV is cheap at the moment. It has fallen to just under 53p a share. Skye can see seller after seller on the left-hand side of the screen, wanting to offload their shares for 52.9p or 53p each. But the much shorter list of buyers will only pay a maximum of 51.9p for the share so the screen freezes until something changes, and then a cascade of orders are suddenly tumbling over themselves to be filled, and in histogram mode it does kind of look as if the soldiers are flipping over and dying, and the spread drops a halfpence and then a penny and then Sky Turner buys her first shares. Five thousand shares for £2,582.50. At the end of 2013 they will be worth four times that much, but of course by then everything will be different, and anyway, who needs money when they can . . .