The Seed Collectors (18 page)

When Skye Turner got her first big cheque (which she would think of as a small cheque now – for a mere £8,000) she bought a pair of sensible boots (but from Donna Karan!!!), and a shearling jacket and a new sofa and a holiday to Morocco for her and Tash. Tash told her to save some of the money, but Skye had a good feeling about her next single and the gigs she had lined up so she didn’t bother. With the next cheque she bought her parents’ council house outright. She threw out basically everything she had ever owned except her stuffed rabbit. All her Body Shop make-up went, even the green eye-shadow she’d only just started. Her polyester, fire-hazard duvet, stained from all the times she used it with no cover: out. Her lumpy pillows: gone. She even threw out every book in the house (there were fewer than twenty) and bought newer, shinier copies from Amazon. All her old shower gels and moisturisers: dumped. She even got a skip so that she could throw away her old life in one go, because she realised that for her whole life, that was all she’d ever wanted to do.

They weren’t due to take the skip away for about a week, and said they couldn’t come earlier, so, after two nights of looking out of her bedroom window at rain pouring on what she used to be, she checked into a hotel in Marble Arch and ate three cream teas in a row. Then she threw them up and got on with her life. She has never looked back. Except for sometimes when she’s drunk and she cries over her old Topshop silver polyester dress, and the covers of her old Enid Blyton books (and the fact that in the new ones the children aren’t called Dick and Fanny but Rick and Frannie). Decluttering is always a work in progress, of course. Skye loves cashmere jumpers, but can’t
spend her whole life at the dry cleaners, so every garment she owns that cost less than £500 (there are limits) goes in the washing machine – on the silk programme, of course, if it’s delicate – and it either survives this, or it does not survive this. As a result there is about £3,000 worth of shrunk cashmere-blend (pure cashmere does not shrink) jumpers in the back of one of the wardrobes at the flat. Skye cries sometimes when she thinks of those too. But most of the time she realises that with cashmere it has to be survival of the fittest and that’s just how nature is. It’s not a decision she made. If she was in charge of the universe, no jumper she bought would ever shrink.

The first time Fleur had sex with Piyali, it was actually supposed to be a massage. It was her idea that he should learn how to become a masseur. Now that he was eighteen, why shouldn’t he pay his way at Namaste House, just like everyone else? When Fleur wasn’t making teas and remedies she was selling them at the local market. And this was as well as her yoga classes. Even the Prophet had started running some dodgy mail-order thing from his room that no one liked to ask about, but which Oleander said more than covered his share of rent and expenses. Ketki and Ish both offered massages and various other treatments, but neither of them got much return business. Fleur thought that a certain type of middle-aged woman might like to be massaged by Piyali, what with that jawline and those shoulders. So one afternoon she made him put down his book – probably Hemingway, perhaps
The Old Man and the Sea
– and come and learn how to be a masseur.

She explained to him about the paper panties, and putting a towel over the woman’s breasts. She got him a bottle of wild rose oil – that she had made – and lay down on her front, naked except for the paper panties, with her head in the massage table’s hole, giving him
a few basic instructions as he began with her feet, and then moved on to her calves, thighs and buttocks, parting her legs only slightly so that he could get to as much flesh as possible. He soon had the technique down so well that Fleur wondered if he had done it before. But how could he have done? He’d left India at fourteen, and his parents had not exactly been into this kind of . . . By the time he reached her inner thighs the panties were damp and the only thought in Fleur’s mind was,
Go higher. Please, go higher. I’ll do anything
. This thought turned into more thoughts. Pi would take her from behind. He would thrust all his fingers into her and she would let him, no, she would PAY him, and he would say ‘Fuck your money’, and then screw her really hard to punish her for . . .

‘Turn over,’ he said, once he’d finished her back.

He looked at her tits. He forgot to cover them with the towel. She forgot to remind him. He started at her feet again, and once again gently parted her legs so that he could reach around. Could he see anything? Fleur sort of hoped so. She parted her own legs a little more, to help, but also perhaps to tell him something. He seemed not to notice. His hands swept up! And then down! And then up! Oh, actually, perhaps that time they did sweep a little higher but . . . Now it seemed to be time for him to massage her abdomen, which is not something that usually happens in massages, but actually it was rather interesting, and certainly not something worth stopping. Higher, higher his hands went, carefully avoiding her breasts. His hands swooped this way and then that way until inside her mind she was begging him to . . . And then, suddenly, he
was
massaging her breasts. Both of them at once, kneading them as if they were balls of dough, but with his thumbs gliding over the nipples in an ambiguous way.

Should she stop him? If he had pulled out a contract at that moment asking her to sign away all her possessions and even her soul in order for him to keep going, she probably would have done. So no, she was not going to stop him, even if she should have done. Was this even
sexual? She knew that Indians saw the body differently from Europeans. Massaging women’s breasts is not
necessarily
transgressive or even sexual. But then he started again on her inner thighs. This time she let out a little moan and parted her legs a tiny bit more than you would if you were just being helpful. His hands went higher. His thumbs brushed up against the edges of the paper panties. His hands moved higher still, and this time they went just inside the paper panties. Swoop, swoop, a little higher each time until his hands were further inside the paper panties and eventually both thumbs were inside her and then on the next swoop he pulled her to the edge of the massage table and she heard his zip being undone and . . .

The second time they had sex, Pi had made his massages a bit more mystical. He prayed over every one of Fleur’s chakras and even put gemstones on some of them. Fleur didn’t find this especially arousing, but once he put his hands on her it was the same as before. Was he teasing her? It seemed to take an awfully long time for his fingers to enter her panties, although she enjoyed the tit massage more this time, because she knew, or at least reasonably hoped, that it was the build-up to more.

The third time they had sex, Pi had installed chains in his treatment room. These enabled him to walk on the backs of his clients without hurting them, or, at least, without hurting them more than the maximum amount they were willing to pay for. By this stage he was seeing almost all the middle-aged women and, judging from the return business they were getting, he was fucking most of them. Did they tip him? Did he charge them for extras? Or was the sex completely free? Did they use condoms? Fleur didn’t know how to ask all these questions. This time he walked on her back, and her legs, and her breasts and pushed her legs apart with his feet.

‘I’m going to make tea for the window cleaners.’

She says this in a way that totally implies that he should be doing it. Her very neutrality is utterly condemning. She doesn’t have to add any tone. She can do all sorts of things without tone. He is a man. He should do it. To reverse years, no,
centuries
of . . . But it’s too late. She’s gone to the front door. Whenever Ollie has to talk to builders or window cleaners or the postman he can’t help putting on a faint how’s-yer-father accent that is reminiscent of granddads and cousins from his Working Class Past. Clem has no such thing in her background and can only sound low-voiced and posh, but in that soft pancakey way. Or probably crêpes rather than pancakes. Or whatever. Anyway, what she’s doing now is intriguing. She’s speaking to them in her normal, posh, authentic way but what she is saying is like something someone else would say.

‘White with one,’ she’s saying, ‘and white with none, right?’

She may even be smiling and raising an eyebrow. But here’s the thing.
She has remembered how they take their tea
. And she’s saying it the way they would say it, not the way she would say it. ‘White with one’! WTF??? One what? One sugar, yes, but she’ll have to use caster sugar as usual because she and Ollie are far too posh to have sugar in their tea, and therefore in their cupboards, although caster sugar is different because it goes in cakes, which are different from sweet tea in some way that Ollie has never fathomed. She has made it sound as if she takes orders for working-class tea (Ollie has been banned from calling it ‘Builders’ Tea’) literally every day. If any of Clem’s friends come round and she offers them ‘tea’ and they accept, they get loose leaf Earl Grey in a yellow teapot. Ollie made that mistake when he first visited the Grange. Earl Grey is a perfumed monstrosity, designed to repel rats, and anyway . . .

Clem comes back to the kitchen and puts the kettle on.

‘What?’

Ollie is laughing at her. ‘Nothing. Just . . .’

‘What?’

‘
White with one and white with none
.’

‘Yes, all right, I know.’

‘It’s like the beginning of window cleaner porn or something.
White with one and white with none
. You should be standing there in a pinny with a pink feather duster or something. And no knickers.’

‘I was aiming more for something like Land Girl, to be honest.’ She goes to the baking cupboard for the caster sugar. Ollie does not acknowledge the existence of the baking cupboard, and if he ever has to wash up the rolling pin, the pastry brush or any of those round metal things you cut biscuits with, he leaves them on the side for Clem to put away. ‘Or like comforting-warden-of-air-raid-shelter or something. You know, kind of matronly but not in a completely asexual way. But . . .’ She smiles. She laughs. ‘Oh.’

‘But? Oh?’

‘One of them was different. I remembered a different window cleaner’s tea order. But I didn’t realise he was different until he said he wanted two sugars.’

Ollie laughs too. ‘You’ve reduced the window cleaners to their tea order.’

‘Yes.’

‘To you, they
are
just their tea order.’

‘I know.’

‘You’re a posh bitch.’

‘Yes.’

‘Come here.’

‘I’m kind of . . .’

Ollie sighs. ‘Of course you are.’

‘Maybe later?’