The Seed Collectors Read online

  Also by Scarlett Thomas

  Fiction

  Our Tragic Universe

  The End of Mr Y

  PopCo

  Going Out

  Bright Young Things

  Non-Fiction

  Monkeys With Typewriters

  Published in Great Britain in 2015 by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  www.canongate.tv

  This digital edition first published in 2015 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Scarlett Thomas, 2015

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84767 920 8

  eISBN 978 1 78211 180 1

  Export ISBN 978 1 84767 921 5

  Typeset in Perpetua by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  For Sam and Hari

  ‘Crown yourselves with ivy, grasp the thyrsus and do not be amazed if tigers and panthers lie down fawning at your feet. Now dare to be tragic, for you will be redeemed.’

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Ah! sunflower, weary of time,

  Who countest the steps of the sun,

  Seeking after that sweet golden clime

  Where the traveller’s journey is done;

  Where the youth pined away with desire,

  And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,

  Arise from their graves and aspire;

  Where my sunflower wishes to go.

  William Blake

  Contents

  Family Tree

  Funeral

  Holly’s Friendship Tree

  The Outer Hebrides

  Triathlon

  Fruit

  Family Tree (revised)

  Acknowledgements

  Family Tree

  Funeral

  Imagine a tree that can walk. Yes, actually walk. Think it’s impossible? You’re wrong. It’s called the walking palm. Its thick dreadlocky roots rest on the ground rather than inside it, and when it has had enough of being where it is, it quietly uproots itself, like a long-wronged wife, and walks away, at a speed of just over one metre per year. In the time it takes the walking palm to flounce out, nations will fall, people will die of old age, ancient secrets will be told, and new-born babies will grow into actual people who . . .

  Bryony and the children have gone, and Fleur is now listening to her friend Clem Gardener on the radio talking about the walking palm, Socratea exorrhiza, and the challenges of filming its journey. It took over ten years to film it walking just fifteen metres, out of the shadow of a recently erected logging station. On the time-lapse film it staggered along desperately like something that had just been born or was just about to die. But the walking palm certainly knows how to travel. It does not need tickets, or require transfers, or have to fill in visa forms. It does not put so much hand luggage in the overhead compartment that it falls on people. It just goes. Most species in Clem’s Academy Award-nominated documentary Palm find some way of travelling, of course. If they can’t move themselves around, then they produce seeds and get birds to move them, or animals, or us. And some plants have amazing ways of producing seed. The talipot palm, Corypha umbraculifera, which can live to over 100 years old and only flowers once in its life, produces the biggest inflorescence in the world, made of millions of flowers. Now there’s a real commitment to the next generation. Some of the 2,400 species of palms around the world are known to actually flower themselves to death. It’s called hapaxanthy . . .

  ‘You mean they commit suicide by flowering too much?’ says the presenter.

  ‘It’s quite common,’ says Clem, in her low, underwatery voice. ‘They put all their energy into flowering – or, in other words, attempting to reproduce – and there’s nothing left for anything else. Their roots wither and die.’

  ‘So it’s not just because it’s beautiful?’

  ‘Nothing in nature is “because it’s beautiful”, not really,’ says Clem.

  Fleur is finishing her tea. It’s a homemade blend of dried pink rosebuds, passion flower, cinnamon and honey. It’s very soothing. Since Bryony and the children have gone, she has also added some of the opium she grows in the garden. She looks out of the window of the old dowager’s cottage that Oleander gave her on her twenty-first birthday and raises the antique teacup to the robin she has kept alive for the last seven winters. He cocks his head. Fleur is still in the cottage. If she goes out to do some gardening, there might be live worms, or the slugs that she sometimes puts in a saucer for him. But Fleur won’t garden today. He’ll have to make do with the dried fruit she put on his table yesterday.

  ‘Oleander is dead,’ she tells him through the window. ‘Long live Oleander.’

  She drinks deeply from the cup.

  The robin understands, and begins to sing his oldest and most sorrowful song.

  ‘Mummy?’

  Bryony barely hears the word any more.

  ‘Mummy?’

  ‘Hang on, Holl.’

  ‘OK. But, Mummy, just quickly?’

  ‘I’m trying to listen to Clem, Holly. You should listen too. She’s your godmother.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, and she’s also like my millionth cousin, a thousand times removed.’

  ‘She’s your second cousin, once removed. My cousin.’

  ‘We could have stayed at Fleur’s to hear her.’

  ‘Yes, but I think Fleur wanted to be on her own for a bit. And anyway, we’ve got to get home. Daddy’ll be making dinner. And you’ve got homework to do.’

  Bryony turns up the car radio, but Clem has stopped talking. Now there’s a guy who had to be rescued from somewhere, possibly Antarctic Chile, although Holly was Mummying over that bit. The format of this programme is supposed to be a group discussion, but Bryony knows that Clem probably won’t speak again. At school she had a habit of saying one clever thing in every class, and then drifting off to God knows where while Bryony highlighted all her notes in one of three fluorescent colours and Fleur learned mindfulness by stabbing herself with a protractor. Every so often the biology teacher said something about how sad it was that these three weren’t at all like their mothers. In fact, at fourteen, their mothers – frail, beautiful Grace, bold Plum and the legendary Briar Rose – had also been terrible students, interested only in the Rolling Stones, but no one remembers that, because it doesn’t fit the story of how they become famous botanists. Or famous-ish. Or famous-ish mainly for disappearing while on the trail of a miracle plant that probably never existed, or possibly killed them all.

  ‘Mummy? Am I a tree? She said that people aren’t like trees, but I am, in a way, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yes, Ash. You are, in a way.’

  ‘More than I’m a village anyway.’

  Having a son called Ash, while living in a village called Ash, hadn’t seemed anything worse than a bit cute when they named him. There aren’t that many botanical names for boys, after all, and at least Ash could be short for Ashley if he ever wanted to get away from the plant thing. Bryony’s husband James was very keen on the old Gardener family tradition, though, and in the end it came to a toss-up between Ash and Rowan. Ash himself has since pointed out that they could have chosen Alexander, William or Jack (in-the-hedge). On that occasion – Ash’s eighth birthday, or perhaps it was his seventh – James told Ash he was lucky not to be called Hairy Staggerbush, Fried Egg Tree, Thickhead or Erect Lobster Claw, all of which are apparently real plants.

  Bryony and James have no idea of the stupid conversations Ash has pretty much every day at school when someone asks him, yet again, why he’s called Ash when he lives
in Ash, as if he named himself. Being named after a grandfather or a footballer or a TV character is fine. But a whole village? All kids know that no one should be named after the place they live, unless they are Saint Augustine or something, or Saint Stephen or Saint George – but in those cases you become famous first and then someone names a place after you. On his own, Ash likes being named after a tree that has magical powers. But he’s hardly ever on his own. He is dreading going to secondary school in Sandwich or Canterbury, where people will ask his name and where he comes from and both answers will be the same, which will make him sound retarded. He is already practising shrugging and saying ‘Oh, just some boring village’, but it’s not that convincing. Maybe the house will burn down, on some lucky day when there are no people or cats inside it (which is virtually impossible: there’s always life in Ash’s house), and they’ll have to move.

  ‘Clem doesn’t make cakes like Fleur,’ says Holly. ‘And she wears really weird clothes. But then I suppose that’s because she makes documentaries, and . . .’

  ‘Don’t you think Fleur wears weird clothes?’

  ‘No. Fleur’s pretty. She wears dresses. And interesting combinations of things.’

  Bryony sighs. ‘Well, yes, I suppose everyone knows that dresses make you pretty.’

  ‘What does that mean, when you say it like that?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Is it irony?’

  ‘How do you know about irony?’

  ‘Er, school? Anyway, Mummy, you wear dresses.’

  It’s true. But while Fleur wears things you’d see in the thicker magazines, or on the size-zero celebrities she works for, Bryony usually wears a version of the clothes Holly wears but better cut and in darker colours: jersey dresses or big jumpers over leggings, all made by Backstage, Masai or Oska. What Bryony used to think of as fat people’s clothes. Yes, yes, of course all the styles come in S and even XS, but it remains unclear why thin people would need clothes with elasticated waists and asymmetric folds around the middle. Almost everything Bryony now wears goes in the washing machine at forty degrees and doesn’t need ironing. Bryony loves fashion, but it doesn’t love her. She’d like to be a Jane Austen heroine – or actually even one of the heroine’s shallow friends who only cares about fashion and won’t go out in the rain – but she’s way too fat for that. This season it’s all about clashing florals and colour blocking. You can clash florals if you’re a thin seventeen-year-old. If you do it at Bryony’s age you look as if you don’t own a mirror. If you colour block at Bryony’s size you look like a publicly commissioned artwork.

  ‘Mummy?’

  ‘I’m still trying to listen to this.’

  ‘Can’t you go on Listen Again later when you’re filling in your food diary?’ says Holly. ‘Anyway, Mummy?’

  ‘Hang on.’

  ‘Mummy? How many calories are there in a cake?’

  ‘What kind of cake?’

  ‘Like the cakes Fleur made.’

  ‘Did she make them? I thought she bought them. Or didn’t she say that Skye Turner sent them?’

  ‘No, Mummy, she said Skye Turner sent her cakes once. But they were like weird low-carb brownies or whatever. She made these ones. They were spicy and everything – not like stuff you can buy. Anyway, how many calories do they have?’

  ‘You shouldn’t be worrying about calories.’

  ‘I’m not worrying. I’m just interested.’

  ‘About two hundred, I think. They were quite small.’

  ‘So in a day, you could eat, like . . .’

  In the rear-view mirror, Bryony can see Ash screw up his eyes like a little potato.

  ‘Don’t say “like”, Ash. Say “around” or “roughly” or something.’

  ‘Like, seven and a half cakes,’ says Ash. ‘Wow.’

  ‘Yeah, but only if you eat basically nothing else,’ says Bryony.

  ‘Awesome,’ says Ash, in something like a loud whisper.

  ‘Cake is for babies,’ says Holly. At the party all the girls made sugar sandwiches with white bread and huge slabs of butter and honey to help the sugar stick and the grown-ups didn’t even stop them. The grown-ups were too busy smoking at the bottom of the garden and talking about whether they would rather fuck a fireman or an anaesthetist and looking at pictures of holidays on someone’s phone. Holly’s insides now feel a bit gluey. And the thought of the butter she ate – yellow shiny poo – makes her want to vomit.

  ‘How many cakes does Fleur eat, Mummy, do you think, in a typical day? Or a typical week. Would you guess at closer to ten, fifty or a hundred? Mummy?’

  ‘As if anyone would eat a hundred cakes a day, you total spaz,’ says Ash.

  ‘Mummy?’

  ‘What? Oh, who knows? I think she makes a lot more than she eats. I think she likes the way they look more than the way they taste.’

  ‘Mummy?’ says Holly. ‘Is that why Fleur’s so thin in that case, if she only looks at cakes but doesn’t eat them?’

  ‘Who knows? Maybe she’s just got lucky genes. She’s always been thin.’

  Lucky genes. Is that what it comes down to? Or maybe Fleur doesn’t eat family packs of Kettle Chips when no one is watching. Maybe she doesn’t add half a bottle of olive oil to a pot of ‘healthy’ vegetable soup like James and Bryony do, or use three tins of coconut milk (600 calories per can) in a family curry as James does. Maybe she’s still on the Hay diet, like Bryony’s grandmother Beatrix, who always talks of ‘taking’ food, never ‘eating’ it, and has given Bryony some kind of food-combining cookbook for the last three Christmases. Food combining means not eating protein and carbohydrates together. That would mean no Brie with crusty bread, no poached egg and smoked salmon on toast, no roast chicken and potatoes. Bryony feels hungry just thinking about it.

  ‘Mummy? Have I got lucky genes?’

  ‘Depends what you think is lucky.’

  They have left Deal and are driving on the main road back towards Sandwich. It’s a warm day, and very bright. Spring is certainly coming. On the right, somewhere beyond the flat fields and the country park built on the old colliery slagheap, is the English Channel, with its wind turbines and ferries and migrating birds. On the left, more fields, full of scarecrows. In the distance Bryony sees the reassuring old Richborough Power Station cooling towers huddled together like three fat women on an eternal tea break. Then, in one of the fields on the left, she suddenly sees something hovering, perfectly balanced above the scarecrows.

  ‘Mummy, why are we stopping? Arrrgh . . .’

  ‘Oh. My. God. Mummy, you are even worse than Daddy.’

  Both children wave their arms and legs about, pretending they are having a car crash, as Bryony pulls into a farm’s small driveway.

  ‘Look at that,’ she says softly.

  ‘At what exactly, Mummy?’

  A huge bird of prey. Swooping. It’s beautiful, and it’s just . . . there. Bryony struggles to remember the names of local raptors that James has told her. Could it be a hen harrier? A marsh something-or-other? A kestrel? Or do you only see kestrels in Scotland? It doesn’t matter; she can look it up in the bird book when she gets home. Maybe they can all look together.

  ‘Oh, I must tell Daddy . . .’

  She begins noting its features. And then she sees the wire holding it up.

  ‘What are we supposed to be looking at?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Bryony restarts the engine. How stupid. How could she not have seen the wire from the road? The raptor is a fake, like the scarecrows. Even the starlings aren’t fooled; hundreds of them are flying around everywhere.

  ‘Mummy, did you think that was a real bird?’

  Ash and Holly start to giggle.

  ‘Mummy, you’re a right wally.’

  Which is exactly what James will say.

  ‘So how was your swim today?’

  ‘Fucking awful.’

  Clem is rooting around in the drawer for something. They have finished listening to the repeat of her radio p
rogramme and the kitchen is suddenly very quiet. Ollie is not going to try asking about Oleander again. Or if he does he will make sure he does not mention the inheritance, which made him sound like a total cunt before.

  ‘What have you lost?’

  ‘My vegetable peeler.’

  Despite being married, they have separate vegetable peelers, just as they have separate gym memberships at separate gyms with different swimming pools.

  Ollie shrugs. ‘I haven’t had it.’

  Clem sighs. ‘What went wrong at the swimming pool this time?’

  ‘This time.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, you say it as if I’m some kind of twat who can’t even go to the swimming pool without some major drama, and . . . What?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She has now found her vegetable peeler, that minimalist piece of stainless steel that looks as if it would slash your wrists in an instant. Ollie’s peeler has a sensible rubber grip. With Clem’s you can peel every which way, as if you were fencing, or literally doing battle with your vegetable, really fucking killing it. Ollie’s just peels sensibly. Clem starts killing something. It’s a butternut squash.

  ‘Anyway . . . ?’

  ‘Well, OK, so basically I’d just finished in the gym when the bus turned up. And – don’t look at me like that – I know this is going to sound cruel but I totally wasn’t in the mood for twenty – yes, twenty – and no, I’m not going to say the word “spaz”, or “flid”, OK? – people with “learning difficulties”. Obviously I’m sure they are all lovely and wonderful and I’d fucking hate their lives but they don’t have enough helpers. And they don’t wash them before they put them in the swimming pool. And that pool is disgusting enough to begin with, as you know. Like, for example, the clump of hair is still there. After a YEAR. Stop looking at me like that. And try not to slash your wrists with that thing. You think I’m exaggerating? OK. Right. One of them was literally a woman with a hunchback – WHICH I AM NOT JUDGING, OK – but she was also covered in hair. I mean she looked like a yeti. A hunchback woman yeti in my swimming pool. The guys are also all perfectly lovely, I’m sure, although my personal preference would be to have them wash before getting into a pool with me, but one of them not only does not wash, he wears these huge corduroy shorts that probably still have things – like used tissues, if he actually used tissues – in the pockets, and he goes to the deep end and just bobs up and down picking his nose while I’m trying to swim. And then there’s this other one who is huge and black – YES, I KNOW IT DOESN’T MATTER BUT I AM TRYING TO PAINT A PICTURE FOR YOU – who does this superfast front crawl which is quite impressive really, but he keeps his eyes shut and his head entirely underwater so he spends his whole time mowing down babies and the elderly while the yeti shakes with fear and sort of moos in the shallow end. I mean, can’t they just shave her?’