The Seed Collectors (39 page)

‘This is called the Fishing Game.’

Ollie wonders if it will be like the fishing game he plays with Spencer at the fishmonger in Herne Bay every week. Or used to play. For various reasons, he and Clem have started buying more fish from Ocado lately. Anyway, this fishing game is happening at the university, in the glass-and-stone building usually reserved for VIP visits and executive group meetings. It is part of a day of activities and team building on the theme of ‘co-operation in the university’. Why is Ollie at something so redundant, lame, and, what with it being run by a sodding anthropologist, probably ideologically unsound? Why indeed. It was someone’s idea that Ollie should represent the junior, or as they are known now, ‘unpromoted’ staff from the School of English. Alongside him in his team are David, Frank and Megan, sometimes known as Mystic Meg, who teaches Magical Realism and has somehow made it to Senior Lecturer before Ollie. These are all people that Ollie wants to impress. Except for Mystic Meg, whom he wants, in some unexamined way, to crush.

Although Ollie wants to impress David and Frank, he nevertheless
spends quite a lot of time and energy avoiding them, perhaps because he believes his absence to be more impressive than his presence, at least until he finishes his book. For example he never, ever goes up the stairs to the main level of the School of English building. He has an arrangement with one of the prettier secretaries that she will post the contents of his pigeonhole to his house every day. The only other reason for going upstairs (apart from to see people, but who needs to see people when you can email people?) is to use the School of English kitchen, which is a zone fraught with danger and a high likelihood of conversation, not just with David or Frank, but indeed with any of Ollie’s colleagues. If Ollie wants a cup of tea and has scheduled roughly two and a half minutes in which to make it he really does not want to have to take part in a fourteen-minute conversation about someone’s dog, cat, illness or – horrors – baby. He does not want to look at pictures of people’s grandchildren. He does not want to have to make yet another witty comment about the teaspoon amnesty. He doesn’t want to smell things that other people are microwaving.

The anthropologist is droning on about a Nobel prize-winning economist called Elinor Ostrom. After about ten minutes of waffly introduction he says that in fact he doesn’t want to say too much about the fishing game because he wants everyone to see for themselves how . . . The Vice Chancellor clears her throat. She is on a team with other members of the Executive Group. Ollie is terrified just looking at her. This is humanities day. The winning humanities team will go forward to compete against other winning teams from around the university. But from what the anthropology dude is saying, winning is not that simple. You have to decide how many fictional fish to catch, but if everyone catches too many there won’t be any left, which means that winning can actually become losing and . . .

The other way of getting a cup of tea is to go and queue for it somewhere on campus. But this always takes approximately nineteen minutes – even longer than talking to colleagues – and you never
know who you could end up queuing with. And there’s the guilt about the paper cups, and, of course, the cost. And the weather. And the likelihood of running into students, as well as colleagues. And of people laughing at you or accidentally throwing a Frisbee in your face. Ollie has therefore designed a system that is almost perfect. He has had a kettle in his office (Sainsbury’s Basics: £5) for a long time, but never used it because using it involved going to the School of English kitchen to fill it, empty it, wash mugs etc. And the thing you wash the mugs with is always over a year old and stinks and has been regularly TOUCHED BY POSTGRADUATES. But every problem is just a question looking for an answer. Now, each morning he takes in a bag of clean cups, plates, knives, forks and teaspoons, and each evening he takes home a bag of dirty cups, plates, knives, forks and teaspoons to go in the dishwasher. He buys a six-pack of two-litre bottles of cheap spring water each Monday with which to fill his kettle and, when he has to, empties old water from his kettle out of the window. He has also bought a mini fridge (Amazon: £49.99) for milk and storing his packed lunch. All so he doesn’t have to see the two men he is now sitting next to.

After quite a lot of fiddling, the anthropologist shows a YouTube film explaining the concept of the tragedy of the commons. Well, OK, at least tragedy is something humanities people get. A cute drawing of a meadow appears. The meadow, probably in pre-enclosure England, is common land, explains the American voice-over. Every farmer in the village can graze his cows on it. If one farmer decides to double the amount of cows he has, he can double his profits (profits??? In pre-enclosure England? A few people titter at that, including Ollie, but you’re clearly not supposed to, and indeed this is GETTING AHEAD and CHEATING) without increasing his overheads, so obviously he does this, because there is nothing STOPPING him from doing this, so then the other farmers decide they may as well do the same and before you know it the cows have eaten all the
grass and shat everywhere and the MEADOW IS GONE. It’s the same with fishing without quotas, apparently. A bunch of selfish cunts ruin everything for themselves and everyone else. Obviously they should be KILLED, but . . .

Apparently old-fashioned economists thought you needed lots of laws to stop people fucking up their meadows. Then some other economists thought that people should be left to fuck up their meadows if they want to because once you have made a profit from this meadow you can always leave and find another meadow. Neoliberal twats.

But what if . . . what if . . . Ollie yawns and drifts off. Wakes up again.

Quite what the fuck any of this has to do with the university is anyone’s guess.

The anthropologist enlists help from a couple of historians and hands out three sheets of instructions and figures. He starts talking about tribespeople fishing in a shared lake just outside the village. The lake is the same as the meadow, right, like a
tribal version
of a meadow, like a shared resource, a COMMONS, and . . . When Ollie’s sheets arrive he feels queasy. He can’t do maths! Who, in English, or indeed in any of the humanities except maybe politics, can do sodding maths? Of course, now he thinks about it, both David and Frank are excellent with figures, especially when it comes to massaging the incomprehensible student satisfaction survey stats. There are groans around the room and other noises and gestures of confusion. It is as if a woman wearing a leopard-print outfit has just walked past the big cat section of a zoo. The animals recognise it, they just don’t understand why or how . . .

‘Is that clear?’ finishes the anthropologist. Fuck. ‘Decide how many fish you are going to catch and write the number in the box.’

Silence breaks out.

‘What are we supposed to . . . ?’ says Ollie to Mystic Meg.

‘Shush!’ says the anthropologist. ‘No communicating – yet.’

‘It’s like a game,’ Megan whispers back.

‘Oh, I forgot to say,’ says the anthropologist. ‘There’s a prize for the winning group, and a prize for the winning individual.’ He holds up a bottle of champagne and a big box of chocolates.

Ollie likes games. He likes champagne. He really likes chocolates. But more than any of that, he likes winning. He loves the feeling he gets in the swimming pool on the rare occasion that someone else is doing real lengths, and not just randomly dribbling snot or bobbing up and down with a visible erection, and he easily overtakes them – as he always does – feeling a little piscine himself, if he’s honest, with a clean, sleek, scaly power that makes him feel almost as if he has merged with the water. If he wins this, then he will not just get the usual buzz of victory, but will be able to accomplish something for the School of English despite the fact that he has not yet completed his book. And he will be noticed by the Vice Chancellor. So . . .

What do you have to do to win? Ollie scans the sheet in front of him. It seems that the basic idea is that people put in ‘orders’ for fish, or in other words tell the anthropologist how many fish they intend to catch. Even though the fish are free, because they come from your shared tribal lake, in this exercise they have a price, but the price is not determined until everyone has put their order in. So it’s all a bit of a gamble. The orders are secret, says the anthropologist. No one knows how many fish their neighbour is secretly catching . . . But everyone knows that overfishing has a severe cost, which in this exercise is represented by the price of each fish going up dependent on the total amount of fish caught. So it’s in everyone’s interest to catch only a few fish, because then they will be affordable for everyone. But since everyone knows that, and everyone is therefore likely to catch only a modest amount of fish, then why not be the ONE PERSON who catches a lot of fish just when everyone is expected not to catch a lot of fish?

Ollie doesn’t quite realise this until the second round, which is
when everyone else realises it too. BLAMMO! The meadow is gone. All the fish are dead. It’s the tragedy of the commons! It’s also the Prisoners’ Dilemma! It’s that situation when no one gets their kids vaccinated because they assume everyone else will . . .
Ha ha
, goes the anthropologist.
See
. So then for the next round everything is different. In the next round you can
talk
to your team members. You are still playing as an individual, though, and your order is secret. Your order is still
secret
. That can only mean . . . For a second it’s as if the other guy swimming laps has got cramp and Ollie can glide past him like a calculating cold-water salmon . . . This is basically his chance to win it for himself, but also for his team, none of whom will do anything quite so . . . And of course the system needs someone to do what Ollie is going to do now. And all the people sitting around him are so soft and liberal and
Guardian
-reading that they probably think winning is vulgar and all they are thinking of is SHARING their fish, and perhaps giving them away to poor people, and maybe going vegetarian and not even eating fish at all.

‘So we agree that we’ll get twelve fish each,’ says Megan.

‘I think fifteen is fine,’ says Frank.

David is replying to messages on his BlackBerry.

‘I definitely think twelve,’ says Ollie.

And then he orders twenty. After all, they’ll be at a very good price . . . And of course he is sacrificing himself, and his own integrity, only to help prove this clever theory of the tragedy of the commons, and how there will always be someone who will come in and order more fish than they are supposed to. And win.

The orders are in, and the anthropologist adds them all up.

The next round is the same. This time, when the anthropologist adds them up he frowns quite a lot.

‘You are definitely all talking to each other, right?’ he says.

David looks up from his BlackBerry. ‘Someone’s cheating,’ he says. ‘The numbers are wrong. If we’re ordering only twelve fish each, the
price should be less than this.’ Then he goes back to his BlackBerry. But . . . OMG. The way he said it. The way he said, ‘Someone’s cheating.’ Like saying ‘Someone’s going to have to go.’ Or ‘This research record just isn’t good enough.’

He calls over to the anthropologist. ‘Someone cheating, right?’

The anthropologist nods.

How, exactly, is trying to make a profit and trying to win, when those are the terms of the game, cheating???!!! But Ollie doesn’t say this. Ollie looks down at the desk and pretends to doodle, even though he isn’t a doodler. In meetings Megan often doodles flowers. He starts trying to do one of these now: a circle with petals around it. But he does his petals too big at the start and has to finish the whole thing off with one that is tiny, stunted and all wrong.

‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ says Megan.

‘Of course not,’ says Ollie.

But now he’s sweating. The Vice Chancellor has realised that Someone Has Cheated and is frowning and looking around the room, sort of peering at people. One of the pro Vice Chancellors whispers something to her and she looks at David.

‘OK, well, apart from a small blip there, that worked quite well. But before we discuss what you should have noticed, let’s now open it up to the whole room. You can now discuss with everyone what your fishing plans are. Let’s see what you can achieve now.’

Oh fucking fuck. So this was an exercise designed to
disprove
the tragedy of the commons. To prove that in real life people don’t tend to fuck up their meadows. To prove that people are essentially good and nice and capable of managing their own resources. To prove that real communities communicate and cooperate and would probably stab someone like Ollie to death with a pitchfork or a boning knife or a tribal implement. Shit, shit, shit. Ollie has never felt more of a total cunt than he does now. Well, maybe when . . . He starts sweating more heavily. He has cheated in public. He has cheated in front of
his line manager, and
his
line manager and . . . But OK, maybe it’s not too late. The only way to compensate for what he did before is to act in the opposite way now. Now he will be a
Guardian
-reading fish hugger too! Especially given that he does actually read the
Guardian
and does (sort of) believe in community and sharing and being kind and good and . . .

‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ asks David, after approximately three minutes of this.

‘Well, I just thought that someone had to . . .’

David looks away, shaking his head.

At the end of the exercise each team is required to add up their total profit. The Executive Group has made a total of 55 units of profit. History has managed 42. English has somehow only got 42 as well, despite Ollie’s efforts. But the winners overall are Theology, with a grand total of 398. The anthropologist presents them with the chocolates and the champagne. The overall winner, some chick from Divination called Kimberley, immediately opens the chocolates to share – get ready to vomit – not just with her team but with the whole sodding room. Ollie would have taken them home to share with Clem. And Ollie is of course feeling too slimy and wrong at this moment to even bring this up with anyone but, actually, he can’t resist saying to Megan . . .