The Seed Collectors (31 page)

‘What time is the ferry?’

James shrugs. ‘You’re in charge of this journey,’ he says.

Bryony sighs. ‘Right. Well. Um . . .’

The ferry timetable is on a website on her iPad, but she didn’t look at it closely because she assumed it would be one of those back-and-forth kinds of ferries and they’d just get the next one when they arrived, but now there’s no 3G or any kind of mobile signal at all so she gets out of the car to look at the timetable pinned to the wall of the ferry office. But what it says can’t be right, so she asks a woman sitting in the sun leaning up against the ferry office with a book.

‘Are you waiting for the ferry?’

‘Yes.’

‘When does it go?’

‘Six thirty.’

‘But that’s over an hour from now.’

The woman shrugs. ‘Sunday service.’

‘Oh,
Mummy
,’ Holly says when Bryony tells them. ‘I knew Daddy should have organised this.’

And Daddy can drive a fucking ferry, can he?

Port Askaig, where they are stuck, has about five houses, a pub and a shop, which is closed. Through the window it is possible to see stickers saying
I
♥
Port Askaig
, and postcards and tea towels of local whisky distilleries. Opposite, there is a tiny beach, where clear, cold-looking water laps nonchalantly at some bright green seaweed.

‘Ow!’ says Holly, adding at least one unnecessary syllable as usual. ‘Ow!!!’

She starts swatting at the air. These must be the famous Scottish midges that they have heard so much about. Whenever James makes them all watch
Springwatch
, which is set in Wales, but same diff, the presenters are always complaining about being attacked by midges. You can see why. Bryony thought they’d be smaller, but they are like normal-sized flies, and they bite quite hard.

‘Ow,’ says Ash. ‘Get off! Mummy!’

Bryony has packed seven different types of insect repellent: Citridol, Jungle Formula in ‘Natural’, Jungle Formula in ‘Outdoor
and Camping’, Boots own brand in ‘Natural’, DEET from the camping shop, tropical strength Ultrathon and, hilariously, Avon Skin So Soft, which was raved about on TripAdvisor as being a cult product used by all Scottish fishermen, workmen etc. as well as people in the Caribbean, even though it’s supposed to only be a body moisturiser and is not designed to repel insects at all! Bryony grabs the DEET spray as it’s the nearest and also the most horrible-looking.

‘Oh. My. God. Mummy, that’s disgusting. It’s in my mouth!’

‘My eyes!’

‘MUMMY!’

James, of course, refuses insect repellent.

‘Shall I get us some drinks?’ he asks.

‘I’ll get them,’ says Bryony.

She knows she should appear with only a mineral water, which is why she has a double Laphroaig at the bar. After all, it’s made on Islay, and when else do you get the chance to drink a single malt on the island it comes from? But the rest of the family probably wouldn’t understand that. So it’s a Diet Coke for Holly, which she usually isn’t allowed because it gives you cancer, or at least gives cancer to rats – but they are on holiday, which everyone knows makes you immune to cancer – and an apple juice for compliant little Ash, who does what he’s told far too much for it to be good for him, and the same for James, except now he’s sticking his head through the door . . .

‘Actually, Beetle, get me a half of something local.’

‘OK, I’ll join you, I guess.’ She smiles.

She considers getting half pints of whisky, as that’s the only thing that’s really local, but then it turns out that there’s something called Islay Ale, so she gets that.

Back outside and those midgey things really are persistent. Bryony is sure she’s being bitten, regardless of the DEET. But when she looks again there are no red marks, so who knows what is happening? James and the kids paddle in the water and then walk around the little port
looking at ropes and creels and boats. When they come back they are full of stories of cormorants and seals. Seals!

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘You never like looking at nature, Mummy.’

After waiting for an hour and fifteen minutes they drive the car onto the ferry for the five-minute journey across the Sound of Islay. And then they are on Jura. It’s all craggy shoreline, sparkling blue water, dark green bracken and acres of pink foxgloves. But where are all the people?

‘We’re here!’ says Ash.

‘Yep,’ says Bryony. ‘Only about another twenty-five miles to go.’

The bald guy speaks first, straining his face as if it were a muscle about to reach failure on a set of very hard reps.

‘OK, so the basic thing – do you know the basic thing? No? Right. OK, so the basic thing is, well, did you ever have that thing when you were a kid and you wondered how there could be a God when everything in the world is so shit? I did. I remember watching the famine in Ethiopia on the news and going into RE the next day at school and asking the teacher, and the teacher saying that God moves in mysterious ways, and then all the other kids were making Ethiopian jokes anyway, and basically that was the first time I contemplated suicide because I could not bear to live in a world that cruel.’

‘I was already trying to be a Buddhist then,’ says the woman in dungarees, who is called Mog. ‘My teacher – what was her name? – anyway, I remember very well her saying that the starving people must have accumulated so much bad karma in previous lives that they had to suffer through this one. I thought that can’t be right. I mean, I got all the stuff about reincarnation and karma but I didn’t see why it had to be so . . . Yes, I suppose the word is cruel, like Joel said.’

‘Evolution did it to me,’ says Tony. He looks like a garden gnome. His wife is called Mary but has not yet spoken.

‘Why evolution?’ asks Ina.

‘Maybe not evolution, exactly, but nature. When we went on our gardening trip last year, that was when I first realised. The whole thing’s a bloody competition. Every beautiful garden is the result of dreadful violence and mass slaughter. And it’s not just stupid things killing other stupid things, like bindweed versus penstemon, or blackfly versus sweet pea. All the snails, slugs, aphids, weeds. Humans kill those. Who decided that these things do not deserve to live and other things do? I gave up being a vegetarian when I realised that animals eat each other, that it’s “natural” to kill things and eat them. But it’s horrible. I don’t really want to eat a sandwich made out of something that could fly, and had feelings, and probably felt very frightened at the moment that . . .’

‘I look at the birds on my bird feeder,’ says Edith. ‘And I think, You poor little terrified things. They take one mouthful of food and then look around for predators. Another mouthful, another look. Eat, look, eat, look. Imagine having to eat your dinner like that? But of course some people do, in Africa, probably, or the Middle East.’

Stan looks like a giant novelty candle. He is very, very fat, and from New York. He has been living on the Isle of Lewis for several years and met the others in Stornoway at the Amateur Dramatics society. Apparently they did
Midsummer Night’s Dream
together, then all signed up to a herbalism course with someone called Rainbow, then the gardening trip, then Reiki (also with Rainbow) and now this. And with Ina offering these retreats right here on the island, well. And they’ve all read the book,
A Course in Miracles
. Well, most of them have. Well, they’ve bought it at least, off Amazon: £37 for the hardback edition or £6.99 for the Kindle version. It’s a pretty strange book, to be honest, though, which is why you need a retreat to understand it.

‘I hate the human body,’ he says. ‘I mean who came up with the idea of having to go to the bathroom every twenty goddamn minutes? And carrying your waste around with you in an internal sack like some kind of sausage full of shit until you can find a hole full of water in which to . . .’

‘Are we losing the concept of God in this?’ Ina asks.

‘This is the bit I have trouble with,’ says Mog, sighing.

Fleur and Skye exchange a look.

‘Who can bring Fleur and Skye up to date?’

Joel frowns. ‘OK, so it’s pretty difficult for any of us to believe in a cruel God who zaps people and makes earthquakes and cripples and stuff, right? So we might wonder, if God didn’t make the universe, then who did? For years I thought no one made it, that it was just an accident. Just a few bits of crap swirling in a void, colliding and retreating, expanding and contracting, all for no reason whatsoever. I was your basic atheist. But if atheism is right, then what is to stop people just raping and murdering whoever they want? All the good moral stuff in the world comes from religion . . .’

‘A hell of a lot of bad stuff too,’ says Stan.

‘Yeah, of course. But . . .’

‘I think what Joel is saying is that the world as many of us see it is a paradox,’ Tony says. ‘One where half of us – actually a lot more than half of us – throw ourselves on the mercy of this entity who is supposed to be all-knowing and all-loving but in fact is cruel and brutal and seems to want to humiliate and belittle us, and the other half pretend that life is spiritually meaningless, and that “this is it”, and that although in theory we are just part of a pattern that includes, I don’t know, hedgerows, say, and pecan nuts, and polar bears, in just the same random way that it includes us, in reality we teach our kids a bit of religion just in case, and base our legal, political and moral systems on notions of “good” and “right” and “equality”. Meanwhile, the God that is supposed to represent the pinnacle of enlightenment
in fact demands that we get down on our knees like the scum we are, and sing tuneless hymns at him every week, and send prayers not full of love but full of worship, as if he was just another mad dictator demanding more palaces and statues. Meanwhile, the atheists have started going to church to sing the praises of their cleverness, their nothingness . . .’

‘I think what Tony is saying is this: What if God did not make the world? But what if it isn’t random either?’

‘Surely that just means there’s another God,’ says Skye. ‘Like if the universe is not random then something must have created it. And if there’s a creator then they have to be nice or horrible, but you’d kind of hope they were nice, although I totally get your point about earthquakes and stuff, and . . .’

‘There’s another solution,’ says Ina. ‘Joel? You look as if you’re about to say something.’

‘The central idea is this,’ he says. ‘God didn’t make the world. God made us, and then
we
made the world, and that’s why it is so fucking awful.’

‘But there is actually only one of “us”,’ says Mog. ‘The idea that we are separate is just an illusion. In fact, the whole world that we made is only an illusion. None of it is real. Just like the Hindus say, and the Buddhists, more or less.’

‘The reality,’ says Ina, ‘if you can call it that, is that we are imagining everything. This world is a bad dream. Think of it like this. There we were, blissfully happy with God, the most contented, pampered child you could ever imagine, far beyond space and time, where no one ever dies and nothing bad ever happens and everything is perfect, and will be for all eternity. But then this child wondered what it would be like to be separate from God. What if he went off and did something on his own, away from the creator? This tiny, awful thought was really the beginning of the ego. The ego is the part of us that thinks, “Maybe it would be better if . . .”, or, “Perhaps I could have
more . . .” or, “Wouldn’t it be exciting if things were different?” or, “I have to prove I am better,” or even, “Where is the drama?” But this ego-driven desire to be separate from God, the most loving entity imaginable, led to a flash of guilt so tremendous that it became the Big Bang that made this universe, in which we are now trapped, fragmented and disparate, trying to find ways to come back together and remember who we are so we can switch the whole thing off. But in the meantime the ego has taken over. War! Shopping! Sex! Violence! And if anyone turns up saying that things could be different they get crucified for it. Or people simply find them boring. And then everything they ever said gets written down wrong and people end up using messages of peace as excuses for war and turning the son of God – who is all of us, who represents all of us together – into jewellery and swearwords and Christmas cards. And here I am now getting angry about it, feeding the ego, when . . .’

‘You have to forgive,’ says Joel. ‘That’s the only thing to do.’

Ina now laughs. ‘Which is easier said than done, of course, as we’ll find out.’