The Seed Collectors (16 page)

‘I’m not that hungry at all, actually.’

‘So . . . ?’

‘Well, I’ve got this new book that says that having a potato before bed stops you being depressed. And helps you lose weight. So I’m having a potato before bed. Well, a couple, as they’re quite small. You don’t question it. You just do it. And in fact . . .’

James puts the old whistling kettle on the Aga. ‘Are you depressed?’

‘I don’t think so. Well, I mean, maybe, now I’ve read this book and I know what some of the symptoms are. But the main thing is, I think I’m addicted to sugar. It’s very serious and affects loads of people, and so I basically have to gradually stop eating all carbs apart from potatoes before bed. Skye Turner said that most days she just eats steak and salad. Although I don’t think she does the potato thing. And of course there’s Charlie with his Paleo diet, and look at him.’ Bryony had a great time with Skye Turner at the funeral supper last week. She sat next to her for basically a whole hour talking about clothes and diets and gossip, and not in a pathetic, shallow way at all. Skye Turner gave Bryony a few beauty tips, like putting Canadian haemorrhoid cream, which is essentially shark liver oil and yeast extract, which makes the whole thing a kind of shark Bovril, under your eyes to get rid of dark shadows and wrinkles. Bryony had known about the haemorrhoid cream, but had no idea it worked, or that it had to be Canadian. Then Bryony told Skye all about the seed pods and how you could probably kill someone with one of them if you wanted to and no one would ever know, because the plant does not exist, has never been officially identified.

‘What about cake?’

‘I think there are still cakes you can have.’

‘What, without sugar?’

‘They use Stevia or something. Anyway, I’m just going to see what it’s like. In the meantime I’m also going to try this potato thing.’

‘So you don’t want any carbs except potatoes?’

‘Just at night. Before bed.’

‘And eating potatoes at night is supposed to make you lose weight?’

‘Don’t say it like that.’

James sighs and closes the fridge door. ‘Like what?’

‘What is wrong with you?’

‘I’m just . . .’ He sighs again. ‘I’m not talking about this now.’

He leaves the room.

What just happened? Bryony should follow him. She should. And she does, once she’s finished all five potatoes and the cheese, with a tablespoon of mayonnaise and some chilli flakes on top. She waddles – well, that’s what it feels like, suddenly – through to the front room. One of the cats looks as if he might be about to catch fire: he’s virtually lying on the dying embers inside the inglenook fireplace. James is reading the
Guardian
in that angry way he does sometimes, where it may as well be upside down for all the attention he’s really paying it. James knows everyone who writes in the
Guardian
. They all follow each other on Twitter. Bryony follows them all too, but hardly any of them follow her back. After all, she is little more than a cipher in James’s column: a character in a life much funnier and simpler than the one she’s actually living. What would the last five minutes look like if James wrote it up as his column?

My wife is unhappy. She is unhappy because she is fat. Completely ignoring the fact that I love her curves
. . . No, he wouldn’t write ‘curves’: that’s
Grazia
-speak, in which he is not even conversant, let alone fluent, despite quite a lot of exposure. Mind you, sometimes he appears in real life not to know this kind of thing and then it crops up in his column.
I have told her time and time again that her tits are fabulous
. No.
I love her body
. God, that sounds dry.
My wife’s body is beautiful, but she just can’t see it. At least, nothing from the waist down. My wife . . . My wife has decided . . . I love my wife. Every inch of her. Trust me, that’s a LOT of love
. It’s actually quite hard to write a column like James’s, especially when you are not James but in a room with him and he is not even looking at you, let alone talking to you.
So my wife has basically decided that the best way to lose a lot of weight fast is to eat as many potatoes as possible. What a stupid, fat bitch
.

Eventually he does look at her.

‘What?’ Bryony says. ‘What have I done?’

‘This potato idea is stupid.’

‘I know.’ She pauses. OK. No more potatoes. But she’ll still do the low-carb thing just like Skye Turner suggested, which is going to mean eating amazing things like smoked salmon and eggs for breakfast, or huge omelettes made from five eggs and butter, although to be honest Skye Turner said these should be egg-white omelettes with no butter, but who could really eat an egg-white omelette made with olive oil? Anyway, Charlie has butter all the time. She looks at James. ‘But this so obviously isn’t about that.’

‘Why don’t you just read it?’

Of course she knows what he means, but she still says, ‘What?’

‘I just can’t believe that you actually have your father’s journal from back then and you haven’t even opened it. I thought you wanted to know what happened.’

‘I thought I wanted to know what happened too.’ She sighs, leaving a space for James to ask a sensitive and loving question.

‘Like I said, I could read it for you, and . . .’

Bryony surprises herself with the force of her reply. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, for one thing he obviously didn’t want us to read it. Otherwise, why would Oleander have had it for all this time?’

‘But it might have something about your parents’ deaths in it.’

‘I know! Which is exactly what I don’t think I can handle at the moment.’

James sighs. ‘You don’t trust me. It’s just like at the funeral.’

‘When?’

‘When I wanted to go for a walk and you got into a huff with me.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, but who just “goes for a walk” when everyone’s waiting to be called in for a funeral? I mean . . .’

‘I was trying to support you.’

‘By abandoning me?’

‘I thought you’d want to come for a walk too.’

‘And leave Fleur with all those journalists? And not help with the whole Granny situation? I just can’t believe you went anyway.’

‘It was just really claustrophobic in there. I felt . . .’

‘What the fuck do you expect? It was a funeral. They’re not supposed to be, I don’t know,
light and breezy
.’

‘And you completely ignored me at the supper.’

‘I was sitting next to Skye Turner! Plus I was still totally pissed off. First you abandoned me to go for a sodding walk, and then you suddenly had to go off to make curries with Fleur. You’d basically ignored me all day anyway.’

‘So you thought you’d get back at me? That’s mature. We’re a married couple with two children; we’re not teenagers.’ He looks at the wall for several seconds, and then back at Bryony. ‘I’m still not sure you understand what that means.’

Another pause. ‘What?’

‘You heard.’

Bryony starts to cry.

‘And you’re drunk.’

‘I’m not drunk. I’ve had
one
bottle of wine.’

‘You’re turning into your mother.’

‘My mother drank at least two bottles of wine every night, plus . . .’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’

‘And, since you knew I did happen to be relaxing with a drink this evening, why couldn’t you have brought all this up earlier? Why did you have to wait until I was, yes, I’ll admit it, a little bit tipsy – but also actually totally tired? I’ve got a viewing at nine o’ clock tomorrow in bloody Patrixbourne. Why do you always leave things until so late? I can’t think properly when I’m tired. I mean I wouldn’t even have drunk any wine if I knew you were upset and needed to talk.’

Serotonin should be flooding into or out of Bryony’s brain right now. Or whatever the book said. But basically she should be feeling good, not bad. Could she be crashing from the potatoes already? But they’re not supposed to do that. Maybe she had one too many. Maybe the real problem here is sugar, the silent white killer, which was in the cake James made earlier but that Bryony wasn’t supposed to have. Maybe . . .

‘I’m not upset.’

‘Well, you certainly seem upset.’

‘I’m not upset.’

‘Well, you’re annoyed with me, then.’

James sighs. ‘I don’t want to be. I just think . . .’

‘Look, I think it’s obvious that we all have too much sugar. I think you’re crashing from the cake you had before. I probably overdid the potato thing. We’re so emotional. Just look at us!’

The first time Charlie and Fleur had sex, she lay quite still while he put his penis into her vagina and moved it in and out. There not being an internet yet, the only way they could look at porn was via one very well-thumbed magazine that Charlie got at school. This, combined with articles in
Cosmopolitan
, led to their second sex session involving some ball tickling, Charlie’s first blow job (you don’t actually
blow
, silly) and a bit of ‘clitoral stimulation’. The third time, he licked her
out, which was the way you said it then. While Charlie did this, he also squeezed a nipple quite firmly between his finger and thumb, and the more firmly he did it the more he liked it and the more she liked it, and so the fourth time they had sex he made her bend over the bed and he spanked her. The fifth time they had sex, she was tied up with silk scarves. This idea came from
Cosmo
, not the porno magazine, and sounded quite tame, what with the scarves being silk and soft and ‘gently tied’. But tied up is still tied up. When your arms are free you can pull your lover closer or push him away. But without your arms, he is completely in control. The sixth time they had sex, Charlie brought along a cucumber from the garden, and when Fleur saw it she blushed and giggled and shook her head, but once the silk scarves were in place she wriggled only slightly as he pushed it into her. He fucked her with the cucumber, and she whimpered and looked tiny and that just made him want to hurt her, but in a pleasurable way that he couldn’t quite describe and that he knew she shared.

The day after this was when Augustus told Fleur that he was her father, and whatever she was doing with Charlie would have to stop. That night, Fleur put on a lot of black eyeliner and an almost completely see-through floral summer dress. It was Bryony’s eighteenth birthday and there was to be a big party at the Grange. Fleur met Charlie a couple of hours before the party began, in the old summer house, and asked him what he thought the worst sexual thing was. ‘Worst’ in this kind of conversation obviously meant both worst and best. He chose two things: buggery, and rape. Do them both to me, said Fleur. And don’t stop if I scream, or say no. Hit me, if you like. I don’t care where. I’ll say I walked into a door. Did Charlie go too far? When he replayed that afternoon, as he did thousands of times afterwards, and which he could not ever do without becoming aroused again, because it was the single most intense sexual experience of his life, he couldn’t find the one thing that must have ruined it all. She didn’t scream. She did say no a few times, and sort of pleaded with
him to stop, but in the same tone of voice that someone not playing a sex game would say yes and plead with you to carry on. It was obvious that she didn’t really want him to stop. Was she disturbed that he actually did all that she asked and didn’t ever say that he didn’t really want to hurt her? Was it when he slapped her face? When he pulled her hair? He did cringe for years afterwards, though, remembering some of his dialogue: ‘Suck my cock well, whore, and I’ll be merciful,’ for example. Where had that come from? He wondered for a long time if it had been that. Or even, sometimes, if the whole thing had actually been too tame. It was not until years later that he discovered what the problem really was.

Imagine that one day you decide that you need to multitask more, and therefore while doing something boring like cleaning your teeth you will add some other boring thing like doing your daily calf raises, where you stand up on your toes first on one leg and then on the other for say 25 reps on each side x2. This you think of as a good use of time. In fact, for these two minutes of every morning it feels as if you have enslaved time, you have got one over on it. You are winning the war against it. In fact, you get so used to doing your calf raises while cleaning your teeth that you now can’t clean your teeth without automatically going up onto first one leg, then another. The mere buzz of your electric toothbrush gets your calf muscles quivering. You are Pavlov’s dog. But this is a good thing, because you are cheating time. Or so you think. Imagine that the act of cleaning your teeth while doing your calf raises becomes so automatic and unconscious that you can now do a third thing as well, further demonstrating your mastery over time. Perhaps, as well as doing your teeth and your calf raises you imagine what you’d do if you won a million pounds on the Lottery. Perhaps you write a To Do list in your head. A letter to
someone from long ago . . . How aware are you now of the calf raises? How many have you done? Does it matter that this action, like so much else in your life, has now become so unconscious you don’t even know you are doing it? What other things did you begin doing long ago, long before the calf raises, that you do not feel or even know about any more? Who were you, before you forgot?