The Seed Collectors (46 page)

‘Mummy, you are
such
a wally.’

Holly came third overall in the fun run, and first in her age group, but she does look a bit pale. Bryony makes her put on her tracksuit and then gets her a Coke and an ice cream from the van. Then she finds Fleur and Ash.

‘Where’s James?’ she asks.

Fleur shrugs. ‘He hasn’t come in yet. But the others are going well. It’s still between Charlie, Ollie and that guy.’

Poor James. He will finish, but in last place.

‘About that drink . . .’ Bryony says to Ollie, while James is doing his final lap.

‘Well, you’re definitely buying,’ says Ollie.

‘What about graduation day? We could make an afternoon of it.’

‘Just you and me?’

‘Yeah. Why not?’

‘All right. Yeah. Good. As long as you’re buying.’

At first, Skye Turner appears as herself. She melts through the windows of teenagers in Detroit and Manchester and Barcelona and appears at the ends of their beds just like that.
Hello, I’m a fucking celebrity, and who are you?
Not that she says this. Not that this is what she even means, but . . . Are they happy about it? Not on the whole, no. They drop their PlayStation controllers in horror. They kick their keyboards onto the floor in fear. They spill their cans of drink. They gasp, they scream, occasionally they throw up. It’s . . . well, it’s not like having a mini-audience for a personalised gig. It’s not the life-changer Skye hoped it would be. It seemed like fun at first to just start singing along with her own song, to be the live version of the CD or the MP3, but most of the kids just thought they were tripping and they really, really didn’t like it. They didn’t like it that something magnificent, impossible, crazy was happening to them. Let it happen to someone else, for God’s sake! They didn’t want to see a ghost, an apparition, a freak of physics. Not in their bedroom. Not
now
. So Skye Turner goes through a phase of just watching them, knowing them, learning from them – without ever letting them see her. OK, she performs the odd minor miracle. Hides some kid’s pot before his mother searches his room, whispers in the ear of a girl not to go down that road tonight, creates a diversion that stops someone’s father beating up on him yet again. She removes bullets from the guns of soldiers – on both sides. Drops money in the laps of the poor. One day she turns up at someone’s door looking like a bomb victim,
because of a mission that did go a bit wrong in the Middle East somewhere, and she asks this person for a glass of water, and they give her a glass of water and also a meal and a bath, even though she stinks and looks extremely suspicious, and she is so moved and so grateful that she begins to cry . . .

Fruit

T
he sunflowers! Why does she always forget everything? This morning, driving into Goodnestone, and the sunflowers were up in the PYO field, which means they must be selling sunflowers at the shop, and there was that thing James said about the sunflower he tried to grow as a child and . . . Anyway, it’s gone five thirty, so they’ll definitely be shutting, but they look open, so . . . But Bryony can’t be bothered to turn around. Or . . . OK, but she
is
turning and going back. Perhaps she is a decent human being after all, whatever the fuck that even is. Perhaps this means she can stop crying now? Yes. Bryony will get sunflowers for James and everything will be all right.

There are no other cars in the car park, so Bryony pulls up next to the shop entrance and goes in. There’s the guy from last time who looks a bit like a scarecrow. Bryony looks around the shop. It’s low-lit, end-of-dayish, and sunflowerless.

‘Sunflowers,’ she says. ‘I was hoping you’d have some sunflowers . . .’

‘Only in the field,’ he says.

‘Oh. Are they pick-your-own, then?’

‘Yes.’

Pick your own sunflowers. That’s actually very cool. So . . .

‘Can I pick some?’

‘We’re closing soon.’

‘How soon?’

‘Like ten minutes ago?’

‘I’ll be really, really, super quick.’

‘OK. Well . . .’

‘Thank you! Oh, how do you do it?’

A girl comes out. ‘I can lend you a spade.’

A spade? WTF???

‘I’ll be all right, thanks. Except, actually, how do you do it without a spade?’

‘You just snap them off with your hands.’

Right. So here’s Bryony striding through the field, on what seemed at first to be a short cut, with her ankles actually being stung by nettles, which just shouldn’t be anywhere at a PYO, unless people want to PYO nettle soup or nettle tea or whatever, somehow CRYING AGAIN, because all the good sunflowers seem further and further away, and what if when she gets to them they’re like the dead ones from that art gallery in New York? Van Gogh, she remembers. Of course. In the Met. And the amazing pumpkin ravioli afterwards, with that Louis Armstrong record playing that she’s never been able to track down, and that honey-coloured Chardonnay . . .
Ah, sunflower, weary of time
. Yeah, that’s about right. We’re all weary of time, baby. Is that what it even means? Bryony remembers the way Ollie said it in his William Blake seminar.
Ah, sunflower
, making it sound like
Arse, sunflower
, which is what he said Blake would have expected people to make of those sounds, which wasn’t actually 100 per cent convincing.

Bryony is ridiculous in this field. She is too big for it. Too grey and urban and fat, in her Oska clothes, with her Toni&Guy hair and her bare ankles. But the sunflowers are clothed by angels and their hair is made of free love and weird science and the purity of the silent universe and they stand in the field like a row of Marilyn Monroes, each one playing a contrite farm girl slightly too sassily, with her chin jutting out and her apron hanging half off.
Arse, sunflower
. But what about the youth pining away with desire? That’s Charlie, of course.
Or is it? What about constant, taken-for-granted, gentle James, with his ridiculous soups and puncture repair kits, and Radio 4, and finding recipes for date syrup? And he loves sunflowers. Who knew?

The sunflower stalk is so huge that Bryony can’t close her hand around it. In fact, everything about these sunflowers seems outsized. They are not like the puny things you get in supermarkets. They’re . . . actually, they are really surprisingly hard to break. You can snap the stalk easily enough but the thick fibrous strands that run down it cannot be broken so easily. Is that what the spade would have been for? But Bryony can’t visualise it. In the end she pulls and pulls and imagines the sunflower screaming, like in that documentary her parents worked on, all those years ago. She imagines the plant screaming and pleading with her to stop, but still she pulls and pulls and the fibres peel off slowly like thick pieces of skin until they are virtually at ground level, where they snap. But of course the stalk is now ruined. The fibres took so much flesh with them that the sunflower cannot stand up properly. It droops, dying.
Arse, sunflower, weary of time
. Bryony discards it and starts again.

‘What are you doing?’

Pi is standing in the doorway in the thick black dressing gown that Fleur bought for him. He is wearing the cashmere slippers that she knitted for him. He is holding an empty Wedgwood mug. The one that she bought for him, specially, to be his mug when he is here. He is still here. Fleur is sitting at her writing desk, writing.

‘Hmm?’ As well as writing, she is watching the robin, who has just finished his morning bath. What is it about birds when they bathe? They manage to look both comical and fiercely proud. Fleur always feels so happy when a gift she has offered is accepted. For the first few days the birds ignored the birdbath. Now they all use it, even the
woodpecker. And also the squirrel, and the estate agent’s cat. Elsewhere in the garden, a bee sucks the dregs of nectar from a drooping verbena like it is 5 a.m. at a party in a place with carpet on only the middle part of the stairs.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m writing.’

‘You don’t write.’

‘Well, I am. I mean, just . . .’

‘What on earth are you writing?’

‘Just stuff that Oleander used to say. I’m getting the Prophet to give me stuff too. And recent clients like Skye Turner. You know, like . . .’

‘Oh, I see. “What does your heart say?”’

‘Well, yes, and also . . .’

‘“What would Love do?”’

‘Yes, but as well as that . . .’

‘You don’t need to write it down. Just go and get a Paulo Coelho book. She was ripping him off for years.’

‘Yes, but I think that Oleander’s stuff goes a bit beyond . . .’

‘And then all the things she didn’t say, but just implied, like “Slavery is OK”.’

‘What? She never said slavery was . . .’

‘Come on, in Oleander’s world everything is OK.’

‘Well . . . I mean, I don’t really think that . . .’

‘She never even bothered to read the
Bhagavad Gita
properly.’

‘Well . . .’

‘Anyway, what have you written? Can I see? “Imagine you are very poor”.’ Pi laughs. ‘Yeah, right, but she wasn’t, was she? None of your lot are. “Imagine you are a squirrel”?’ He laughs again. ‘You are insane.’

Imagine you are a squirrel storing nuts for winter. You spend your days scouring fields, woodlands and gardens for acorns or, if you are lucky, nuts from a bird feeder. It takes you a very long time to find food, and then to bury it for the long winter ahead. Morning, noon and night you scurry this way and that, sorting, burying, hoarding. If you are lucky you manage to store ten nuts each day. You have to eat quite a lot to fuel your search, and to try to put fat on before the first frosts.

One day you are roaming through a garden when, beyond a clump of mushrooms, you find a gap in the fence that has not been there before. You investigate. Here is a tunnel you have never seen before. You check right, left, behind you, and then right and left again. You twitch your whiskers. Everything seems OK, and there are calm vibes coming from the nearby orb spider, which is usually a good sign, so you enter the tunnel. It is long and dark, but you can smell peanuts, and peanuts are your very, very . . . Oh my! At the end of the tunnel is a perfect garden. The main thing that is perfect about the garden is the huge pile of peanuts in its centre. There are enough peanuts here to keep you going not just for this winter, but for years and years to come. You pause for a moment, twitching your whiskers. There must be great danger . . . ? But you sense no danger. There are no scents here. No cat scent or dog scent or stinking fox scent. No other squirrel scent. You are alone with the peanuts. What do you do now?