The Seed Collectors (23 page)

Pi does a headstand to prove he still can. Tweaks his back coming down.

A hot shower. Hotter than Fleur can take it. Does he turn the setting back to where she has it? No. Let her suffer a little too, next time she gets in. Fleur doesn’t have real breakfast food, just a lot of raw birdseed and cold, thin yogurt, so once he is dressed he walks across to the main house and finds Bluebell in the kitchen already making the dal for lunch. Late. Late. LATE! Yesyesyes, but seeing Bluebell is soothing and eating a real hot breakfast means he won’t need lunch and so he is in fact saving time and in any case he doesn’t actually have anything to do today except begin his new novel again and do the shopping so that Kam has the ingredients for supper and Nina has something for her packed lunch, which is what she says now, rather than tiffin, and when he suggested that they visit India together
she just said something like ‘Yeah, Dad, whatever’, and then began a long moan about bikinis and bare shoulders and how impossible it is going on holiday to these backward places where you can’t even get a good suntan.

Bluebell makes medu vada, his favourite. Hot, soft, savoury doughnuts made from black dal and spices . . . South Indian, which means they are specially for him. All those recipes she found and learned when he arrived at the house years ago, to try to make him feel at home, which he never did. He suspects that the medu vada are deep fried, which means he shouldn’t have them, but lentils are always healthy, right? She serves them with coconut chutney and a sambar with a tiny bit too much tamarind for Pi’s liking. Then a bowl of fresh fruit with just half a pistachio kulfi, today the front section of a Tardis. Two cups of coffee. There will be nothing on the ridiculous train he has to catch because he has no car. And Fleur can’t even drive, which means she doesn’t even have a car to lend him. Women!

There’s a familiar person at Sandwich Station. At first Pi can’t place him. He is wearing different clothes from usual. This ensemble, complete with jaunty trilby hat, is clearly a London Outfit. But underneath the hat it is definitely James Croft, hen-pecked husband of fat Bryony. Pi goes to the other end of the platform in the hope that James will not see him. It is over two hours going to London this way and who wants to have to talk to someone for two hours? And anyway, Pi has his book, and the
LRB
, and he doesn’t like the way that his nervous cough comes out when he has to speak to someone new. But, oh dear, here comes James down the platform towards him.

‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Been visiting?’

No, I’ve just arrived from space. ‘Nice hat,’ says Pi.

‘Oh, thanks,’ says James. And then he rabbits on and on about his hat so that they are still talking when they board the train, which means it is natural for them to sit together, and it turns out that James is actually a very serious and warm person – a writer too, in fact,
which Pi had almost forgotten – and on his way to meet his editor, on whom he admits to having a slight crush, harmless of course. And then that deep sigh. He asks Pi about women. How does one cope with women?

‘At least you only have one to cope with,’ says Pi.

And then, for reasons he later can’t understand at all, he tells James everything.

The gym is full of old people. They all sit there watching MTV Dance, which has so far only shown music videos with extreme close-ups of women’s arses in Lycra, denim or plain cotton, wiggling, twerking, on a motorbike, a bed, a zebra, or some combination of these. It’s not entirely unappealing, although who knows what the old people think. One man has brought a hardback library book, which he reads with a towel over his head, but everyone else just looks at the screen nearest to them because, well, because the screens are there, and what they show is quite arresting. For example Lady Gaga, at this moment wearing only a pair of white knickers and a bra, singing about being born this way, looking as if she could die of malnutrition any minute, but actually making Bryony wonder why
she
wasn’t born that way, which is probably what you’re supposed to think. And presumably you are also supposed to wonder what would happen if you went out wearing only a pair of white knickers and your period started or some yellow discharge came out or you realised you’d forgotten to wax your bikini line or you had waxed your bikini line but an ingrown hair had become infected or you just peed yourself a little bit . . .

‘Hasn’t got a pretty face, though, has she?’ says one of the old women to the old man on the next exercise bike.

This is Bryony’s third session at the gym. During the first two she
learned never to attempt any of the following ever again: the rowing machine, on which she managed a bare thirty-two seconds, despite her exercise plan suggesting ten minutes; the treadmill, on which she reached a maximum speed of 6kph before asking the fitness instructor if there was any way of making it go downhill, which did not make him laugh at all; anything in the weight room, full of young men with tattooed necks and almost certainly shrivelled dicks who did not look at Bryony even once. Not even once! And she is prettier than Lady Gaga, objectively, sort of, despite weighing approximately four times as much. According to the magazines that they keep on the filing cabinet in the corner, which are too lowbrow for Bryony to ever actually buy, but are one of the few pleasures of coming to the gym, even Kate Moss is now fat. What hope is there for anyone else in that case? Surely that is the point where the editors of these magazines would decide to slash their wrists or drink a bottle of bleach because, well, if the most beautiful woman in the world cannot live up to the standards of even the thinnest, cheapest, crappest magazine, then . . .

But the true-life stories are quite funny. And they often feature people fatter than Bryony, for example the woman whose husband lost half his head – his actual head – in a blender. And the man who grew a nose on his forehead. And the fourteen-year-old who has already had liposuction, a tummy tuck and a gastric band. The only people who are thin in these magazines accompany stories like ‘I lost both my arms to heroin’, or ‘I gorge on crisps and chocolate but only weigh four stone’. Everyone else is fat, even the woman who didn’t let disability stop her from selling her body. Actually, another semi-pleasure of the gym is that several people who go to it are also fatter than Bryony. There’s one now, being helped onto the treadmill. Bryony wonders when he last saw his dick. At least her fat doesn’t stop her having sex. She simply gets on all fours. Or she could if she wanted to. But what if you were a man and you were so fat that your penis actually disappeared?

When MTV Dance is not showing Lady Gaga or Rihanna videos it shows endless ads for companies called things like Wonga and QuickQuid – really – that will give you £200 until payday and charge you £50 interest, which is 326% APR; or you can get a loan of £1,200 over ten months at a cost of only £1,631.34, which means you have to pay back £2,831.34, which is an APR of 1,362%. Bryony thinks of how happy Granny is whenever she makes ten per cent on something. Or when vendors realise that the value of their house has gone up by fifteen per cent. These places must be raking it in. Except that the saps who would go for such a bad deal are presumably so poor that they can never pay it back. Imagine being that poor. And really fat. And losing half your head in a blender.

Bryony is on one of those bikes with big seats that recline, so you can read a magazine and feel almost like you’re relaxing, except for the fact that your legs are going round and round. But there’s so much to watch in the gym. Lady Gaga, dickless men, the cartoon old people who go to Wonga, as if any old person would ever borrow anything apart from maybe a cup of sugar, and of course all the ridiculous ‘challenges’ that the fitness instructors pin up on the noticeboards to encourage all the hopeless, morbidly obese losers who come here. At the moment they have a challenge to see how many Easter eggs you can burn off before Easter. A Cadbury’s Creme Egg apparently has 180 calories. A Flake Easter egg has 810 calories. A large Dairy Milk Easter Egg has 1,800 calories. Some twat has made little stickers in the shape of these different-size eggs that you can add to your chart to show how much exercise you have done. You’d think you could then go and eat what you’ve burned off, but no: the chart informs you that instead of, say, two Cadbury’s Creme Eggs, which would be really quite a modest amount of Creme Eggs to eat in one go, let alone in one day, you should really eat a small steak and some broccoli. Right. Bryony has been on this exercise bike now for fifteen minutes and has burned only eighty calories.
This whole exercise thing does not add up. It must be wrong. Bryony really needs a drink.

Monday morning in the Alpine House, where miserably tiny plants cling to barren-looking rocks in an artificially cold and dry climate. It is everyone’s least favourite glasshouse, although schoolchildren are always taken there first, perhaps as some sort of punishment. When will people learn that the only things kids want to see at Kew are the pitcher plants and anything else that is even slightly carnivorous or looks like a dick? A surprising amount of plants look like dicks. More, of course, look like vaginas, but kids aren’t quite as used to seeing the insides of vaginas as they are to seeing dicks. Or maybe they are now, what with the internet, and . . .

‘So?’ says Izzy.

‘This is stupid.’

‘What?’

‘I feel like I’m reporting to you.’

‘Well, she won’t tell me what happened. She just keeps going on about how
amazing
you are.’ Izzy raises an eyebrow. ‘And how
gorgeous
your body is . . .’

‘Why does it matter what happened?’

‘I need to keep an eye on you. Lest you transgress. Again.’

The only remotely interesting thing that ever happened in the Alpine House was when a crime novelist came for a whole week to observe the plants and atmosphere so that she could set a murder there. The easiest way to murder someone in the Alpine House is simply to make them stay there for quite a long time until they die of cold or boredom. It was amazing that the crime novelist herself survived. Or maybe she didn’t. Charlie can’t actually remember what happened next, or if the novel ever even came out. Maybe she’s still in here somewhere.

‘I still don’t know what I’m supposed to have done wrong in the first place.’

Izzy sighs and rolls her eyes. ‘Oh, never mind.’

Fleur has one celebrity in the guest wing and another one in the attic. There is a further celebrity in the eco-treehouse. The Prophet has been instructed yet again not to walk around in his underpants, although he is increasingly unpredictable in that respect. It is only week two of the new yoga term. Fleur can’t cancel everything, basically, and just run off to the sodding Outer Hebrides after some woman who left her a blank book instead of . . . what? She tries to talk to Ketki about it, tries to ask what Oleander meant to leave her, but the old woman just clicks her tongue at her. Fleur has no idea what she has done this time and Ish won’t tell her. They didn’t inherit seed pods from Oleander, but it can’t be that, surely. First, who wants a deadly seed pod? Second, the house is full of seed pods and has been for twenty years. Fleur got one too, from Oleander, wrapped in turquoise tissue paper. It looks exactly the same as all the others. So what the . . . ?