The Seed Collectors

by Scarlett Thomas

  Fleur has made the phone call and now stands in the kitchen watching the garden fade into the soft darkness of a late summer evening. The little bottle of fluid still sits in the shoebox. Next to it is a seed pod, the one she inherited. Short cuts, short cuts, but . . . If this life hadn’t already gone so wrong, then . . . If it was OK to love your brother, then . . . If it was possible to meditate your way out of this, then . . . But she’s done that. And anyway, she’s made the phone call now. Breathe. Steady your hands, girl. Steady. Find something clean. Maybe one of those teacups that Charlie gave her. Yes. In goes the liquid and in goes the pod and . . .

  All you can do is breathe, and wait.

  Clem has still not looked directly at Bryony. It seems that Bryony pressed the wrong button when her phone rang in the hotel room. It seems that she cannot even work a fucking mobile phone. The room smells bitter with all the emotion that has not been allowed to escape. It’s a combination of dried tears, stale breath and children’s food plates that have not yet been cleared away. Bryony notes that, despite all the trauma, James has made cauliflower cheese from scratch for them and Holly has left most of hers because, well, who does like cauliflower cheese when they are twelve? It’s the colour and consistency of pus. Holly and Ash are in the conservatory watching a DVD, which means that the adults are half whispering and sort of hissing at one another.

  Clem was here when James rang Bryony before, when it became apparent that Bryony is not only an immoral alcoholic who BETRAYS EVERONE but cannot – just to repeat this point – even use a fucking mobile phone. In fact, James was ringing partly because Clem couldn’t get through. They were so worried . . . Quite why they all couldn’t have just left her alone when she was at her graduation drinks, or supposed to be . . . But that doesn’t seem to be the point any more.

  ‘Why in God’s name did you ask her to listen to it too?’

  ‘Because at first I didn’t know what I was hearing. I thought you were being attacked. I thought that’s why you had answered your phone but weren’t able to speak. Then Clem recognised Ollie’s voice and . . .’

  ‘Well, it must have quickly become quite obvious that, no, I didn’t mean to answer my phone. How long did you both listen?’

  ‘We are not at fault here,’ Clem says. ‘Don’t try to . . .’

  ‘What would you say if you were me? I’ve fucked up. I’m sorry. There isn’t really anything I can say. I know I can never undo this. I think I’ll just . . .’ Bryony turns to go upstairs. To go anywhere. To die? If she could die at this moment . . . But she mustn’t think like that.

  ‘You are not walking away from this,’ James says. ‘We really need to talk about what we do next. The kids. The house.’

  ‘Don’t be so dramatic.’

  ‘You just slept with her husband. Of course this is fucking dramatic.’

  ‘Mummy,’ calls Holly from the conservatory, ‘when will we be able to do the pumpkin?’

  James wipes a tear from his eye.

  ‘I’ll take the kids to Fleur’s,’ says Clem. ‘You obviously need some time.’

  ‘Thank you,’ says James.

  ‘I’ll stay there too. Give you some space. Let me know later that you’re OK?’

  ‘Yes. Likewise?’

  For God’s sake. How wonderful it must be to be such innocent, self-righteous victims who are THERE FOR EACH OTHER and who have probably hugged at least once already. What about Bryony? Who exactly is she going to let know that she is OK? Who will be there for her? Who will hug her? Ollie won’t care. Fleur will be annoyingly neutral. Perhaps Charlie . . . But he won’t really understand. Bryony cannot believe this. She needs a drink.

  ‘At least I didn’t fuck my own brother,’ she finds herself saying. ‘Which you could actually ask Fleur about when you see her. Remember when she and Charlie were together? And then suddenly weren’t? Well. I’m not the only one in this family who has gone to bed with the wrong person. Not by a long way.’

  When Fleur looks at Charlie this time she allows herself to feel it, just for a second, and it is like sinking into a hot bath after being trapped in an icy cave for years.

  ‘Charlie,’ she says, and she almost does not have to say anything else. Could they speak to one another without words? Probably. But that’s for later.

  ‘Tell me,’ he says. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

  ‘Something big. Well, potentially.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘OK. The Prophet. He says that he’s my father.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Prophet says that he, not Augustus, is my father.’

  ‘How . . . ?’

  ‘My mother certainly slept with a lot of people. The Prophet thinks that he might have met her years before he came here to live, and . . .’

  Fleur watches as Charlie’s mind slips into the same hot bath and immediately softens. She watches as the warm water washes away the guilt and yearning of the last twenty years. She sees him imagining them together, he and Fleur, walking up a bright green hill wearing soft woollen scarves, with Holly as well, perhaps. She sees him imagine her touch. The very tips of her fingers. To actually be allowed to . . .

  But wait. In that case why is he basically still looking in a mirror, and . . .

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘Honestly?’

  The bath is going cold. There is no hill. ‘Yes.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then . . .’

  ‘He was just trying to be kind.’

  Charlie sighs. Rolls his eyes. ‘So we are still related?’

  ‘Yes. Sorry. But . . .’

  ‘Fuck, Fleur. Why are you doing this to me?’

  ‘Because – wait, sit down – I think you still feel what I feel.’

  ‘Which is what?’

  Breathe in. Breathe out. ‘Love.’ Breathe out some more. ‘Desire.’

  ‘But we can’t . . . We haven’t been able to . . .’

  ‘The Prophet made me see that we can. When he told me he was my father, I felt exactly the same things that you just felt. All these years of suffocating my true feelings. Of never even bothering to end things with Pi because I just couldn’t face having to go out there and find someone who wasn’t you. But then I realised. The Prophet may as well be my father. It doesn’t actually matter who is anyone’s father. I’m not planning to have any children. Are you planning to have any more?’

  ‘You know about Holly.’

  ‘I know about Holly.’

  They both pause. Breathe in. Breathe out. Wait for the universe to run its hand through its hair and smooth down its skirts.

  ‘Anyway, no, I’m not planning to have any more.’ Unless . . . God, that whole business with Izzy was even more stupid, now he thinks about it. Is she on the Pill? He didn’t even ask. All he knew was that he didn’t want to do things like that any more. Even as he was fucking her he was regretting it. And she was saying maybe they shouldn’t be doing this, but not really meaning it. And she was also saying ‘What about Nicola?’ And Charlie realised that this was the game, this was the thing, that these two were competing over him as if he were the last size-eight dress in the sale, and that Izzy only wanted him because Nicola had him, but she only got Nicola to have him because she wanted him, but she couldn’t want him unless he had been endorsed by someone else, and not unless there was competition involved and . . . And she was pulling him towards her, deeper into her, as if he were a flower and she an insect desperate for his cheap, sugary nectar. And he’d had enough. He had really . . .

  ‘Well, then,’ says Fleur. ‘We’re not eighteen any more. Surely . . .’

  ‘So what are you saying?’ Charlie asks.

  ‘I just think that reality is not all it’s cracked up to be. Rules, what people think, how people think things should be. Who cares if we’re brother and sister? Or, well, half brother and sister.’

  ‘The law?’

  ‘But we’re not legally related. Augustus’s name is not on my birth certifica
te.’

  ‘OK . . .’

  ‘I mean, someone would actually have to do a blood test. But there’d be no reason for them to. And anyway, no one knows. So . . .’

  Charlie breathes deeply. ‘You’re actually right,’ he says. ‘It’s so obvious when you say it like that.’

  ‘I mean, I don’t even think I feel weird about it at all any more.’

  ‘No. I’m pretty sure I don’t either.’

  ‘I did, once.’

  ‘You already knew, in the summer house, when we . . .’

  ‘Yes.’ Fleur looks down at the floor. ‘I was ashamed of that for ages. But I’m not any more. I just think that on my deathbed I want to remember love and passion and being wildly wrong, not being nice and careful and doing the right thing. I don’t even know whose rules we’re obeying anyway.’

  Charlie walks over and touches her hand. He raises it to his lips and kisses it. One finger, and then another finger, and then . . .

  The doorbell. Even Fleur’s doorbell is beautiful. It is a real little brass bell that tinkles in the hallway. It tinkles again now.

  ‘Whoever that is has great timing,’ he says.

  It’s Clem, with Holly and Ash. She is carrying a pumpkin. And there is a new, strange look in her eyes that both Charlie and Fleur immediately realise is, among other things, knowledge of them, of who and what they are, of what they did once and now can never do again.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on. I think you probably need a coffee.’

  James fills the vintage whistling kettle from the tap and puts it on the Aga.

  ‘I think I need a glass of wine.’

  ‘You do not need a glass of wine. I imagine you’ve had enough today.’

  ‘I don’t actually care about my health at this moment.’

  ‘This is not about your health. I want you to be able to listen to me.’

  ‘I can listen to you.’

  James sighs loudly. ‘Right.’

  ‘Perhaps if you weren’t so controlling, then . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry? YOU are the alcoholic, but I am somehow controlling? This is all my fault? What the fuck, Bryony?’

  Bryony goes to the fridge. There’s nothing there. What about the Wither Hills Sauvignon Blanc that was there yesterday? Surely she didn’t finish it? She goes to the wine rack. Empty. Now that is strange. She definitely didn’t drink all the . . . But OK, whatever, there is lots more wine in the cellar. But she finds it locked. Oh, great. What the fuck indeed.

  ‘When did you do this?’

  James shrugs.

  ‘Good job I’ve been to Hercules, then, isn’t it?’

  Bryony goes out to the car, her hands shaking. There in the boot is the box of wine that she meant to unload yesterday. But here’s the problem. A red will be a bit too cold to drink, and a white a bit too warm. Which to choose? If she puts a red by the Aga then maybe . . . She walks in with a Barolo. It cost thirty pounds, but this is turning into a thirty-pound-bottle-of-wine sort of day. James hasn’t thought to hide the corkscrew, so she opens the wine and pours a big glass while he watches.

  ‘I just cannot believe you are doing this.’

  ‘What, that I have chosen not to give up drinking on possibly the worst day of my life just because you’ve decided I should? I imagine you’re leaving me anyway. What do you care what I do?’

  ‘I didn’t say I was leaving you.’

  ‘But you will.’

  ‘Is that what you want?’

  Bryony hesitates. ‘No.’

  ‘I need you to make a decision. I need you to pour that bottle of wine down the sink. I really, really need you to make a decision now. The wine, or me.’

  The kettle begins to come to the boil. The whistle begins low and distant, like a faraway train in a long-forgotten film. Bryony could pour the wine down the sink, of course she could. She has plenty more in the car anyway. And it wouldn’t be the first time she has poured a bottle of wine down the sink during an argument. But that has always been her idea, to make her point. There was that 1965 Exshaw Grande Champagne Cognac that Augustus gave her for her thirtieth. She loved pouring that down the sink in front of James when he suggested she’d had one glass too many. ‘See how much I don’t care about cognac?’ she had screamed at him. Where were the kids that night? Probably in bed. So it can’t have quite been a scream, even though that’s how she remembers it. After James went to bed that night Bryony ate a whole box of chocolate liqueurs. Are there any more chocolate liqueurs in the house? The kettle whistles more loudly now.

  ‘Well?’ James says.

  Bryony takes her wine glass and sips from it. ‘I just need some space to think.’

  ‘Bryony, it’s the wine or me.’ James is now shouting to be heard over the kettle. Why doesn’t he just take it off the boil? ‘Choose.’

  ‘All right. I choose wine. Since you’ve forced the issue.’

  ‘What?’ He starts sobbing. ‘What is wrong with you?’

  ‘And please do something about that kettle. It’s going right through my . . .’

  James picks up the kettle. ‘This is how you make me feel,’ he says, as he pours the boiling water over his head. At least, he gets halfway through the last word before he starts to scream. ‘Help me! Oh God, please help . . .’ And then he passes out, melting onto the floor like a piece of butter in a frying pan.

  When Clem and the others have gone to bed Charlie and Fleur drink lapsang souchong tea, and Fleur tells him about her trip to the Outer Hebrides and the strange dreams she has had since going there. Her memory of everything that happened is a little hazy, but she remembers being told how to do it again, except that it was impossible to get hold of the fluid, for obvious reasons, but then suddenly this box and the bottle . . .

  She shows him the teacup. Tells him how dangerous the seed pod is. That she’s not sure about the liquid. It could actually be anything. But if it is an enlightened person’s tears, as the Prophet seemed to think, then . . .

  ‘Let’s do it,’ Charlie says.

  And so they fly away together, on something that is either a first date or a last night on Earth, or perhaps both, high over the English Channel, not knowing where they are going, or if they will ever . . .

  Of course Ollie takes the pod from the time-lapse film set Clem has rigged up in the spare bedroom, and which is still recording. After all, there are not many nature documentaries that end with the suicide of the filmmaker’s husband by ingestion of the very plant that is the subject of the documentary. Perhaps Clem really will win an Oscar for this one. Ollie hasn’t seen the plant for a while. He should have been interested, but has not been interested. When was he last interested in anything about Clem apart from how she reacts to him? Anyway, it certainly now has fruit. Or what botanists call ‘fruit’. It is really more of a bean pod. Like a vanilla pod, perhaps, but larger and not yet as shrivelled. Ollie remembers some dinner party with Clem talking about vanilla coming from an orchid, Vanilla planifolia, that Madagascan farmers have to pollinate themselves, because it is just too complicated or tiresome for the plant to do it itself. The vanilla orchid flowers in the morning and if it is not pollinated by the end of the day the flower simply drops off and dies.

  Does Clem have any idea how much she has broken Ollie’s heart with her words? The one that keeps going through his mind is ‘boring’. Boring, boring, boring. And after trying so hard not to be boring. After trying to make life anything but boring. But life without a job, without Clem and of course without any children could well become boring. Could Ollie become a priest? No. He is boring, and also not a Catholic. He could adopt, of course, but his children will probably come to hate him as much as Clem does. They will spend all their time with their birth certificates in their hands, trawling the internet in search of their ‘real’ parents, the people who made them from slime rather than love. The only person who has ever been impressed by him is Bryony. Even she does not know the real, boring him. She just uses him as a screen on to which to pr
oject her own fantasy. But then, of course, he does the same thing to Clem. Is that all romantic love is?

  Ollie has not yet really looked at the plant’s only flower, but he does so now. It is a sort of dark, minky grey and off-white with some spots of black and two peculiar holes. He pulls off the pod containing the seeds and puts it in his jeans pocket. The flower vibrates and then comes to rest. Without Clem here to pollinate it, it will probably just die. The dry calyx at the tip of the pod crackles faintly against the denim. He becomes aware of a scent, perhaps a little chocolatey, a touch of nutmeg or something spicy like cardamom, but also quite otherworldly and impossible to describe. He almost stops everything he is doing, almost manages to stop thinking for a second, because it is the most beautiful thing he has ever smelled. He knows the scent is coming from the pod. Is he sure about this? He sighs. Walks back to the door and opens it. Turns to switch off the light. But does not switch off the light because there, hanging onto the plant, is a ghostly image of his own face. He couldn’t see it close up, but now it is obvious. There, spectrally, improbably, insanely, is his high forehead, and his hollow cheeks and even his stubble, marked out in little black dots. The holes, of course, are his eyes. It hangs there for a moment and then drops to the floor.

  It is 07.17.

  And it’s impossible to describe in words what is on the other side. There are no words on the other side. But on the brink, in this cosmic edgeland, you can see eternities of people coming and going. You can see the last moments of individual souls before they melt into the oneness that from the outside seems eternally boring but inside is orgasmic. Ollie pauses now, on this precipice, and sighs long and deeply because he finally knows what real love is. He has left his body behind but calls on his lips, or the great lips of the universe, for just this one final kiss. Who with? Time moves so oddly in this barely-there place with its clocks only faintly ticking that he is able, finally, to make insane cosmic love to Clem without any resistance, indeed with her loving him back, pulling him into her and sweating and crying out for him. At the same time as this he finds he is kissing and stroking Bryony and calling her ‘my darling’ and ‘my love’ and breathing out again, long and deep, as every atom leaves his lungs and then his body and the three of them merge into one, into all lovers everywhere and finally into love itself. Holly, who arrives a long way behind them, has kept her whole body, plumper now and brimming with sparkle, has resurrected it in child form, because, as she hangs out on this strange, multidimensional, fizzing edge, she will get to have her perfect hit with Melissa again, for all eternity and beyond, until they merge into one another and into the silence that comes only when the last ball in the universe has bounced for the very final time.