The Seed Collectors (6 page)

‘Wow. Now there’s a screenplay.’

‘Or a nature documentary.’

Clem’s office smells lovely, but in a way that Zoe can’t quite fathom. It’s not any particular one of the lavender candles, or the large succulent plants, or even all of them together, although they probably contribute to it. Today there’s also a scuffed cardboard box containing small plants with white flowers, but they are new and the smell is always there. What is it? It could be Clem herself, perhaps. It’s damp forests, but in a good way. Perhaps a touch of the tropics. Clem is the only person in the department to have bare floorboards in her office instead of the institutional carpet. She has also had all the fluorescent lights removed from the office. Yes,
removed
, which is about a thousand times more weird and interesting than just deciding not to turn them on, which is what a normal person would do. Instead of the lights she has various old Anglepoise floor lamps that she says she found in a forgotten cupboard somewhere in the basement. And instead of having an institutional computer whirring away all day, she has a silent, beautiful, tiny laptop that she brings from home in a thin canvas bag. Sometimes she even puts it away in a drawer and works in sketchbooks instead. Zoe only started working at the university in September, and so far her office contains not much apart from the desk, chair and beige computer the department gave her. She has a
bright orange carpet that, apparently, her predecessor actually
chose
. She aspires to something like Clem’s office, but with an iMac and a bit less sadness.

‘This place would be improved if there were fewer emails in general – like a ban on any emails from family, friends and partners, for a start. And, of course, students.’

‘Don’t let them hear you say that,’ Zoe says. ‘They love you.’

It’s true. The students do love Clem. They love the fact that she directs real documentaries, and therefore can tell them how to do it. Clem also replies to their emails, even if she often takes a couple of days – OK, sometimes a week – to get around to it. But some lecturers never reply to emails at all, which is pretty shit when you’re paying over three grand a year to do a course. Clem never tells anyone off for anything. She makes low-key jokes. She doesn’t patronise them. When she hears them talking about sex instead of lighting (‘Oh. My. God. You actually slept with her and no one told me? I don’t care. I’m SO happy for you’) she simply raises an eyebrow and watches them all explode into giggles. She has never been late for a class, and always gives them fun things to do, like those spoof nature documentaries where they get to do the worst possible voiceover to go with their footage of rabbits or blackbirds on campus (‘
The blackbird is now surely thinking, Why is that Emo tosser pointing a camera at me?
’). She’s old enough for them not to be aroused by her. She certainly doesn’t freak them out as much as Zoe, who is much closer to them in age and appearance and has worked on things they actually watch. Most of the students know that Clem was nominated for an Oscar, but they haven’t seen any of her documentaries, not even
Palm
. But several of the boys in the class have wanked themselves silly to things Zoe has written, especially that teen lesbian drama set in Wandsworth. It’s pretty crazy, being taught by someone whose words have made you, well, do
that
.

‘How have you even got time for staff development?’ Clem asks
Zoe. ‘I mean, I hope you’re not being too stretched. I don’t remember this coming up in your probation plan.’

Zoe shrugs. ‘It’s new. Different. Defamiliarising, probably. I might get something to put in a screenplay. Also, of course, I’m working towards my Very Important Equal Opportunities Certificate.’

‘We should probably add that to your next probation report. It’ll look good.’

‘Yeah. Anyway, I just wanted to see if you’re maybe around for coffee later.’

‘What time does it finish?’

‘Four thirty, I think.’

‘A whole day?’

‘I believe there are case studies. And role play.’

‘OK, well, knock on my door when you get back. I’m sure I’ll still be here. At this moment I feel like I’ll be here forever.’

‘Cool. By the way, what’s in the box?’ Zoe asks.

‘Chilli plants. Do you want one?’

Zoe shrugs. ‘Sure. Well, I mean, are they hard? I so do not have green fingers.’

‘They’re easy. They’re just annuals, as well, so . . .’

‘What’s an annual?’

‘They just have one growing season and then they die. One of my PhD students needed them for his film so I brought some in. Now they’re looking for homes. They grow really nice chillies. Quite hot.’

‘I do love chillies.’

‘Yeah, I’m kind of addicted too. I’ll bring you one later.’

Cocks.

Hundreds and hundreds of cocks. Perhaps three of them are in fact birds with feathers and beaks and so on, looking rather ridiculous in
this context. But the rest . . . Some of them are in men’s mouths. Some of them are in women’s mouths. Some of them are in teenagers’ mouths. Some of them are in men’s anuses. Some of them are in women’s anuses, hands, or stuffed between their breasts. Most of them are in women’s vaginas. Some women have one cock in their vagina and another in their mouth. Some have yet another cock in their anus. The images are accompanied by captions, for example, ‘Young teen gags on hot cock’ or ‘MILF takes it both ways’. Beatrix meant to type ‘clocks’ into Google Images, but here she is, looking at cocks. To be properly accurate, it was last month that Beatrix meant to type ‘clocks’ but actually typed ‘cocks’, at which point she was prompted about what level of safety mode she wanted. Since Beatrix has never much cared for being protected from things, she switched safety mode, whatever that even was, off. And. Well.
That
was a strange afternoon.

Today she meant to type ‘cocks’ (although if she was discovered, then, of course, ‘clocks’ was what she really meant . . .
Very
shocked indeed . . . Can’t imagine what sort of perverts would actually choose . . . Unmitigated filth . . . etc. etc.). In fact, for the last month she has been doing this almost every morning after early trading is over. It’s not ideal, though, now that she’s used to the images. She wants something more, but she doesn’t know what. There are too many black cocks on Google Images. Beatrix liked them at first, but now they seem vulgar, and she has realised that at least some of them must be fakes. Some of them are as long as an arm. Beatrix has discovered that she likes medium-sized white cocks: the kind of cock she imagines her husband would have had. She never saw it erect in all the years they were married. She felt it enter her and withdraw from her but she knew she shouldn’t touch it or acknowledge it in any other way. He did the minimal amount of touching needed to get it into her. She tried to manually stimulate him once, but he moved her hand away and she had the impression for some weeks
afterwards that he thought she was some sort of . . . Well, some sort of whore.

Black whore. Asian Whore. Teenage whore. Whores gagging for it.

Cartoon whore.

Now
they
are strange.

Beatrix’s orgasm flutters through her like a tired goldcrest. Afterwards, she gets up and makes herself a pre-lunch gin and tonic. In the kitchen, the laptop showing one of her ADVFN stock-market monitors flickers blue, red and green. Mostly blue today, which is good, although that often means red tomorrow. Once the blood goes back to wherever it came from, Beatrix finds she can’t quite believe that she just looked at all those pictures of miserable looking people being, frankly, violated (she has to be honest with herself and admit that ‘in the moment’ she likes the miserable ones best, but anyway). Beatrix feels very flat at this time of day, around about the time she used to take Archie for his walk. She could still go on her own of course, but she doesn’t. At first she enjoyed seeing other people out with their dogs, but now she doesn’t. She used to feel like a dog-owner who had lost her dog (in relation to Archie she can’t say the word
died
, and even the word
death
, used so frequently about friends, relatives and even a husband, a word that she previously felt was clean, to-the-point and brave, is so wrong in this situation; just as it was about her beautiful daughter Plum) in some sort of temporary way, but now she doesn’t; now she’s just an old woman doddering about on her own, and it’s as if she never had a dog. It was two years ago when he . . . Well, anyway, it was not long after that when she began scrapbooking her investments (a strategy taught by that incredibly tall man at that strange seminar she went to in London), which was why she was looking for pictures of clocks, sort of, but never mind that. Beatrix can’t possibly hold the thought of what she just did at the same time as thinking, however fleetingly, about Archie. She sips from her drink and gets one of the scrapbooks down from the
shelf. The tall man (what was his name?) had suggested scrapbooks based on sectors: travel and leisure, perhaps, or food and drug retailers. But grandchildren works for Beatrix. Not precisely as they are in real life, but . . .

This is her favourite one, really. In Clem’s scrapbook she is not married to ghastly Ollie. Clem is married to Bill Gates, who is not just rich and powerful but surprisingly easy to cut out. This gives Clem a potential budget of billions. What would she do with all that money? Quite clearly, she’d change her life completely. Of course she wouldn’t want simply to be Bill Gates’s trophy wife. In the scrapbook, Clem has decided to leave her lecturing job in London, get a PhD in Botany and set up her own botanical garden somewhere in the West Country. Her father Augustus, alone again after the sudden death of his young second wife Cecily – from something viral, Beatrix imagines, something old-fashioned and messy like Spanish flu – will pick up his gardening gloves again and become Chief Botanist. Yes, it’s based on the Eden Project, and that’s what Beatrix has used for her scrapbook, but in her mind it is much more beautiful, and is closed to the public on one day a week when Clem gives tea parties and talks about science and the latest plant research projects. Instead of going off to silly places in JEANS to film palm trees wandering about (which Beatrix doesn’t really believe in) Clem spends her days floating around orchid houses in perfect white dresses. She never has periods. Occasionally she gives press conferences in lemon Capri pants. The Capri pants are from Dior, of course. And from about 1982. But that doesn’t really matter. Sometimes Beatrix puts things in her scrapbooks simply because she likes them.

Beatrix has a copy of this month’s
Vogue
and a pair of scissors and is planning Clem’s outfit for the funeral on Thursday. There’s a Reiss dress worn by Kate Middleton that would work, although is it too cheap for someone married to Bill Gates? Then again, if it is too cheap for a billionaire, then maybe it’s within the range of a relatively well-off grandmother taking her granddaughters to London for shopping and
lunch (Saturday) and art galleries (Sunday). Last time they went to an art gallery Clem made her look at a skull covered with diamonds and a sun made of dead flies. This time Beatrix will choose. Perhaps those botanical illustrations at the V&A. They won’t be able to get an outfit in time for the funeral, of course, but that’s fine; since Beatrix’s scrapbooks exist outside normal conceptualisations of time and space, the outfit can be added much later. And the scrapbooks are to help visualise investments anyway. Not that Reiss is listed on the Stock Exchange, but still. Maybe one day it will be. Beatrix wonders where a busy young woman like Clem – either the imagined version or the real one – might buy a funeral outfit in a hurry. Then she buys some shares in ASOS.

After she has checked her email – nothing from Clem, Augustus or Charlie – and moved on to Bryony’s scrapbook – now there’s a problem – the Schubert begins again. It’s not that Beatrix does not like Schubert. She does like Schubert very much. Sometimes when she’s searching for c(l)ocks on the internet she does it with Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major playing on the stereo system that Augustus bought her for her ninetieth birthday. Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major is, to use a word that Beatrix has learned from the internet, ‘dirty’. It is also quite ‘rough’, the last movement in particular. But she likes to choose when she hears it. Not that the person upstairs ever plays the String Quintet in C. It’s always the piano sonatas. Because of the c(l)ocks, Beatrix has missed
You & Yours
on the radio, which is just a lot of old people moaning, really, but can be helpful when she is in the mood for shorting. But she has no intention of also missing
The Archers
. Would the kind of person who thinks it appropriate to listen to Schubert at full-blast at midday also be the kind of person who would remember to switch it off in time for
The Archers
? Perhaps not. Beatrix goes back to her study and Googles ‘spying on neighbours’. Around a million hits come up, but most of them are just more pornography.