The Seed Collectors (34 page)

‘Meanwhile, if you are winning, then the losers want
you
to die. And you want anyone more successful, wealthy and powerful than you crushed, brought down to size, found out as a cheat, a fraud, a con artist. The popular crowd at school, the people who bullied you and laughed at your hair, wouldn’t it be great if they were all in a plane crash? What about that teacher who was always mean to you? What if he was caught smoking crack with a prostitute and had to resign and then KILLED HIMSELF? How about rich people, beautiful people, anyone with a castle or a private jet? The Royal Family? You loved it when Diana died. Everyone loved it when Diana died. Diana’s death had all the deep, warm pleasure of a great tragedy but with the added excitement of being real. Marie Antoinette said that stupid
thing about cake and didn’t understand poor people so of course SHE SHOULD DIE . . .

‘Let’s face it, YOU are a better driver than that fat bitch who just cut you up. She should die. As for the slow, old people in the supermarket – hurry up and die! And what about the ticket inspector on the train who made you get your railcard out even though it was obvious you were asleep. If he’d woken up the next day with terminal cancer, wouldn’t that have been a good thing? Wouldn’t he have deserved it? And you don’t
think
you think these things, but if you search your heart you’ll find that you do.’

‘I definitely don’t think any of those things,’ says Mary.

And of course at that moment everyone sort of wishes she would die.

‘But the first step in forgiving others is to forgive yourself. To stop feeling guilty about having these thoughts and just accept them. Let them go. Give yourself a break. It is only by doing this that we can forgive others. Only if we recognise the other as, in fact, the self, can we achieve enlightenment, and leave the cycle of birth and death forever.’

‘But surely thinking those awful things is . . . I mean, we should try to stop doing it, right? Not just do it and accept it?’

‘If you truly believe that the person cutting you up on the road is just a part of yourself, how do you think you’d feel about them then? Wait – it’s not obvious, this one.’

‘I’d basically feel the same. I’d still hate them. Possibly even more.’

‘Exactly. Our hatred of others really stems from a hatred of ourselves. If we stop hating ourselves, then we automatically stop hating other people. If we beat ourselves up and feel guilty all the time then we hate ourselves, and by definition we hate other people. Even if we don’t ever come to accept that we are in fact one being, one organism, we’ll have a much better time here.’

‘What do you call a deer with no eyes?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘No idea. Get it? No. Eye. Deer. What do you call a copulating deer with no eyes?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘No fucking idea.’

‘Charlie . . .’

‘They’ve heard the word “fucking” before. Anyway, last bit. What do you call a copulating deer, frozen in the moment of orgasm?’

‘Do deer have orgasms?’

‘Do you give up?’

‘Yes.’

‘Still no fucking idea.’

‘Hilarious. Fucking hilarious.’

‘
Children
.’

The pff-pff sound of sit-ups pauses. ‘You are both really, really disgusting.’

‘Mummy? Were all these pieces of deer part of a real deer once?’

‘Lots of real deer.’

‘Deers.’

‘
Deer
.’

‘Whatever.’

‘Right, one more. You’ll like this one, kids. So a man kills a deer and brings it home for dinner . . .’

‘Do they do that here?’

‘Probably. Anyway, his wife cooks it . . .’

‘Why can’t he bloody well cook it himself?’

‘In the
joke
, his wife cooks it. They serve it to the children but don’t tell them what kind of meat it is. “Mmm,” say the children. “This is delicious, Mummy. What is it?” And so she says, “All right, I’ll give you a clue. It’s what I call Daddy sometimes.” The children immediately scream, “Oh my God, we’re eating arsehole!” Boom, boom.’

‘That’s actually quite funny, Uncle Charlie. Although . . .’

‘If James killed a deer and brought it home, I think these two would notice.’

‘G.R.O.S.S.’

When the retreat is over, Sylvia drops Ina, Fleur and Skye back at Ina’s place. They go via the hotel and pick up their stuff. Ina has said they can stay with her, and her place is so much nicer than the bland hotel with its nylon sheets and see-through curtains. If this is all an illusion then Fleur really has made Ina’s little part of it rather enchanting, with the beautiful peat fire and the nips of dark, earthy whisky and now this gorgeous dinner of thick, creamy Cullen skink followed by haggis, blue cheese and fruit cake.

The only problem is the book.

‘It was definitely blank before,’ Fleur says.

While they were out, someone has clearly been into their hotel room, stolen the blank red hardback and replaced it with the blue hardback that Ina thought it was in the first place:
A Course in Miracles
.

‘It was
A Course in Miracles
when I gave it to you,’ says Ina. ‘Which means . . .’

‘Fleur’s gone bananas?’

‘No, dear. I think we have The Book back.’

‘The Book?’

‘Yes. It needed to become blank to get you here. Very clever.’

‘How much do you actually know about your parents’ disappearance?’

‘Not much,’ Fleur says. ‘In theory I should know more than anyone, but I don’t really know anything. All I remember is Oleander giving
me two passports – mine and Piyali’s, which I’m pretty sure was forged by some acquaintance of the Prophet’s – and then half packing a bag and being taken to Heathrow in the dead of night. It was 1989. I was fifteen. Then Bryony’s dad, Quinn, met me at Bombay and took me in some weird rickshaw to another airport and on another plane to Cochin. I didn’t even see my mother. And I didn’t know why I was even going to India. I thought they’d been on some island – they called it the Lost Island? – in the Pacific. I spent half a day waiting in a room above a spice shop in the most intense heat . . . Bryony’s mother, Plum, gave me a sealed parcel to put in my suitcase and take back to Oleander. Grace – Charlie and Clem’s mother – was there too. They introduced me to Pi. I had to say he was my cousin if anyone asked . . . My mother was supposed to be catching the next plane home with the others. That’s what Uncle Quinn said. But . . . that was the last anyone ever saw of any of them.’

‘Do you know what was in the parcel?’

‘I guessed it was seed pods.’

‘And you realised that Piyali’s parents – Ketki’s sister and her husband – had just been killed.’

‘Yes. But it was all a total blur. I didn’t understand any of it. Pi didn’t speak much on the plane. I guess he was in shock. He spent a lot of time with Oleander when we arrived. At some point he became fine, although I suppose he was never totally fine. He never really mentioned his parents. I guessed it was the seed pods. But to be honest I was more worried about my mother. I kept expecting her to come back and then she never did. And then that anthropologist, Professor May, went to the island and they weren’t there and . . . But how are you connected to all this?’

Ina sighs. ‘I was – am – an anthropologist too. Obviously I’m retired now, although I still see some of what I do here as a kind of participant observation, although I try to integrate and, ha ha, forgive. I first visited the Lost Island in the seventies. I heard about it when I
was doing some fieldwork in Northland, New Zealand. There was this rumour going around about a US airman who’d lost his mind and claimed to have crash-landed on this island full of magical plants and weird shamans and a tribe full of immortals he called the Enlightened Ones. You couldn’t get there by boat because of high cliffs, and there was no runway for a plane, but you could in theory fly there in a helicopter. It wasn’t long after the Philippine government had invited anthropologists to go and study the Tasaday people on the island of Mindanao. Even though the Tasaday tribe was later found to be a hoax, basically a bunch of normal islanders with loincloths over their usual underwear, every anthropologist wanted to find their own lost tribe. Anyway, for various reasons I came back to the UK, and, not long after, had a pretty spectacular nervous breakdown. I went on a retreat at Namaste House – one of the first ones, actually. At first I told myself I’d do a participant observation thing there, you know, an objective study of tie-dyed freaks smoking pot and talking about the time George Harrison dropped by for tea. Then I, well, I basically became one of them. Went native, as they say. Oleander and I became great friends.’

‘Wow. OK, so . . .’

‘Well, I couldn’t shake off this idea of the Lost Island, and when I ended up back in Northland for another lot of fieldwork I took a couple of boats out to an island closer to where the Lost Island was supposed to be. Then I managed to find a guy with a helicopter to fly me out there. It took us three attempts to find it. Basically blew my whole budget. Anyway, in July 1978 I decided to go for a month. The idea was that this would give me a chance to see what was there and learn enough of the language to make sense of the people, and then I could get back for the new university term in September with a view to writing a proposal for further study. I arranged with the helicopter pilot that he would come back for me on August twenty-second. I paid him in advance. He asked if I was sure about all this.
When we landed on the island there seemed to be no one there at all, and I don’t think he thought much of my chances. But in those days I knew how to survive in places like that and I actually didn’t much care if I lived or died – I just wanted to write a great book about a great tribe and make a name for myself. Anyway, of course the pilot never came back . . .’

‘What! How long were you there?’

‘Ten years, give or take. That was how long it took the next anthropologist – dear old Professor David May – to hear the rumours, charter a helicopter, find the right island. By then of course I was indistinguishable from the other Lost People. When I spoke to him in English David May just assumed the language had been passed down from a missionary or something. But there were never any missionaries there. You literally couldn’t get there without a helicopter. Anyway, David insisted I travel back to London with him, although at that point I think I’d resigned myself to remaining on the island forever. I went back to Namaste House and told Oleander what had happened. Briar Rose – your mother – and Quinn and Plum Hunter were very interested in my story. They had started calling themselves ethno-botanists by then – basically drug hunters. And they were into the whole rave scene and the 1988 Summer of Love which meant drugs for pleasure, not finding a cure for cancer or anything like that . . . Oleander became interested as well. She wanted stuff for her retreats.’

‘But what was it like there? On this island for ten years? Did you go mad?’

Ina shrugs. ‘It’s almost impossible to describe. I did end up considering it my home but I’m not sure I’d go back. The first year was hard. Sex rituals. Psychedelics that left you feeling upside down for days afterwards. But the main thing was the plants; the island was full of plants that did impossible things. The seed pods that you inherited – they came from the island. You know what they do?’