The Seed Collectors (13 page)

He puts his hand on her thigh and pulls her back down under the covers.

‘You’re gorgeous,’ he says to her.

‘Really?’ she says.

Ollie’s Oral B Triumph SmartGuide, a slab of plastic stuck to the wall on his side of the bathroom (yes, such a thing exists), has gone mental. It’s haunted, or something, like, literally. It’s a Zombie
SmartGuide. Last month, or maybe even the month before, the batteries ran out. Of course, the batteries on Clem’s identical SmartGuide have not run out, and she definitely cleans her teeth more than Ollie does. But that’s incidental. Ollie’s batteries ran out, and so for weeks he’s been standing here cleaning his teeth with no SmartGuide because its screen has been blank, dead, kaput, gone, always thinking he should ask Clem for more batteries but always forgetting literally the moment he finishes brushing his teeth. But then, like a week ago, the screen began flickering. A few days later it was back to life. Under normal circumstances, like when it has working batteries, the SmartGuide counts down thirty seconds for each quadrant of your mouth until all four are complete, when it displays a happy face and four stars – actually five, plus a dimple on the happy face if you’ve used the ‘intensive’ setting, but who has time for that? – and shows a sad face and a red exclamation mark if you press too hard. It also displays the current time when you are not brushing your teeth.

Now that the dead battery has come back to life it does some really weird shit. For example, it acts out wholly fictitious toothbrushings in crazed fast-forward. You’re pressing too hard! No, you’re not! Now you are again! Now you’ve done three quadrants but only TWO SECONDS have gone by. But now you’ve done none. Now you’re BRUSHING YOUR TEETH BACKWARDS. The face is sad!
☹
The face is happy!
☺☺☺
Now the face is happy but the red exclamation mark is there too !!
☺
!! Now it’s 07.17. Now it’s 13.09. Now it’s sad again
☹
. Now it’s 12.23; 14.34; 06.14. And so on. The Zombie SmartGuide works much harder to construct these fictional, time-travel tooth-brushing scenarios than it ever did on normal tooth-brushing scenarios when it was alive. It literally does this all day long. Lately it’s taken to showing the transition from 07.16 to 07.17 quite frequently. What’s the significance of 07.17 to a SmartGuide? Is that the moment it was born? Is it the moment it
will die? Are its selections truly random in a mathematical sense, or only random in the way students mean the word? Basically, is it trying to tell Ollie something?

Imagine you are very poor. One day you return to your grotty bedsit to find a letter. It tells of an anonymous benefactor who has arranged for you to have a luxury holiday in a beautiful hotel somewhere in southern Europe. For the first day it is bliss. All you do is lie on the beach reading books that make you feel good about yourself, and swim in turquoise water with soft yellow sand underfoot and multi-coloured fish all around. Back in your room, you admire the tapestries on the walls, the mosaics in the bathroom, the towels that feel like cashmere on your long-neglected skin. Each day the housekeeper leaves you two chocolates and a flower on your bed. But then one day the flower doesn’t come, and you feel inexplicably sad. Suddenly your books don’t make you feel good about yourself, and there are clouds in the sky that were not there before. The next day the chocolates don’t come either, and you wonder just why that bitch of a housekeeper has decided to ruin your day – no, your life. Suddenly the towels don’t feel so great any more. In fact, the next thing that goes wrong is that the housekeeper forgets to replace the towels. The next day the chocolates and the flower are back, but you become so worried that they might disappear again that you wish they’d never been there in the first place.

Fleur waits until Ina has gone and then opens the package. The first thing is a note from Oleander.
Dearest Fleur, it is very important that you read this carefully
.
If you have this package then it is very likely that I have gone. I hope not to have to come back. You will understand everything when you read the enclosed. If for any reason something is not clear, you must find
Ina and ask her
. Then, wrapped in light red tissue paper is a dark red hardback book with gold edging on the pages like a bible. But when Fleur opens the book, it contains nothing at all. There is simply blank page after blank page. The paper is very nice, soft and slightly porous, and certainly seems like the kind of paper that one would read from rather than write on. It’s not a notebook. Or is it? There is a space on the front for a title, but there is no title. What on earth is the meaning of this? Is this one of Oleander’s riddles? Too late, Fleur realises she has no contact details for Ina apart from a postal address on the Isle of Lewis. She rushes out of the door and down the gravel driveway until she can see the bus stop. There is no one there. Ina has gone.

Holly’s Friendship Tree

I
t is a chilly spring morning in Hackney, but in Charlie’s mind he is somewhere else, somewhere perhaps sub-tropical, definitely pre-fertile-crescent, somewhere where there is no wheat swaying in the breeze and quietly enslaving people. In this place, Charlie, a hunter-gatherer wearing a simple garment made not from cotton but from skin, plucks some blueberries from a tree. He steals a small amount of honey from a bees’ nest, perhaps led there by the honey-guide – a bird that evolved along with humans and uses its song to tell people where to find bees’ nests in return for the beeswax the humans drop. Perhaps there are some primitive wild oats too – dodgy, but not as bad as contemporary wheat, which studies have shown stimulates the same neurological pathways as opiates. Charlie should use these ingredients to make a simple muesli, in which the nuts and fruits far outnumber the oats, but, even though he knows it is unlikely that you would come across a microwave in this pre-agricultural, sub-tropical wilderness, he still fancies porridge after his run.

Charlie was brought up to be a proper scientist, and not to fall into the trap of giving evolution by natural selection (evolution on its own has been around for a lot longer) the indignity of consciousness, even though the whole thing sped up almost seems conscious in the same way that the walking palm sped up seems to be walking. He should not think that the honeyguide deliberately
decided
to help the humans in return for the beeswax, because this is not how nature
happens. In nature everything is completely random, and the things that work, well, work and so they endure. That’s it. Oh, except for the Darwinian twist which is that things only change when life is so dangerous that everything that doesn’t work dies. This is why humans are now so pathetic: they have no predators. Since the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, which led to barns full of grain, basically
living seeds
that don’t want to be eaten, not really, and will get their revenge, but for the time being meant people could stop starving and start political debates, legal systems and wars, there has been no selection pressure on human beings.

Even the obesity epidemic, some believe
caused
by the barns of grain, does not stop people being able to reproduce. There is nothing that kills screwed-up humans before they can fuck, except perhaps online bullying and severe anorexia. Charlie had a very interesting conversation about this with Skye Turner at Oleander’s funeral supper last week. Skye Turner and Bryony were talking about high heels, and Skye Turner said that evolution had made people become taller in the last 200 years. Charlie laughed at her, and Bryony glared at him. But he explained that this is simply not true because in that time period nothing came along and wiped out the short people. The gene for being short was not destroyed. In the history of civilisation there has never been a famine that favoured tall people (and presumably also giraffes?) by providing food that only grew at the tops of trees. In the last 10,000 years, Charlie said, he would guess that very few short people have died because they can’t reach fruit, or catch fish or kill enough prey or because they get eaten by taller things. Short people just go to Sainsbury’s like everyone else.

‘So why did people get taller, then?’ Skye asked him.

‘Phenotypes, baby,’ said Charlie. ‘Expression of genes.’

And even though Bryony kept glaring at Charlie, Skye Turner lapped this up to the extent that, OK, she did give him her number, which meant he could have fucked her. A pop star! With really a very nice . . .
And then Fleur glared at Charlie as well, which meant he threw the number away, and in her kitchen bin too, hoping that she would notice. As Charlie opened Fleur’s bin to do this he was taken aback by how elegant, colourful and exotic its contents were: the dark yellow wrappers from her homemade hibiscus truffles; the pieces of bright green lime from the cocktails; the poppy leaves smeared red with saffron. Yes, Fleur manages to have a beautiful bin. How is that even possible?

Charlie makes his porridge with bottled spring water, of course, as Palaeolithic man would not have had access to anything resembling North London tap water, that in any case often tastes of bleach, metal, hash and/or semen and in which traces of cocaine have recently been found. Of course, Charlie’s double espresso is also not quite authentic, although he reckons that Grok, which is what nerdy people on the internet call the ideal primal man, would not exactly have turned it down if some other caveman had offered it to him. The big question, of course, is whether Palaeolithic man had sex toys. According to some evolutionary psychologist whose name Charlie has forgotten, and who was actually a bit of a twat, once fire was discovered, women agreed to cook stuff for men in return for their protection, thus beginning the first ever dysfunctional nuclear family. And as if men couldn’t cook for themselves anyway. But in this scenario all you have to do is go ‘Ug, ug’ at another caveman every so often and in return you get hot food and fucking. But what kind of fucking? In the shower Charlie imagines his really quite young cave girl on all fours with one dinosaur bone in her cunt, and one up her arse, sucking his cock, while a fire burns in some sort of primitive cauldron. He is halfway through really quite a nice wank when he hears his phone bleep a text message. Izzy? He’s dreading facing her this morning, and a friendly message would just . . . But when he gets out of the shower he finds it’s just his daily text from his bank, telling him he is nearing his overdraft limit.

Someone call a fucking mathematician! Ollie’s To Do list (yes, since he turned forty he has To Do lists) is taking so long to write that it’s becoming clear that even writing the list is going to have to be one of the things on the list. Can a To Do list contain its own construction? Can it exist as a set within a set, or an instruction within an instruction, as a recursive positive feedback loop or whatever? Ollie imagines himself at a dinner party with Derrida, and this is what he’s saying to him, and Derrida is nodding and laughing in a French way and saying that this is the most insightful thing about a To Do list that he’s ever heard. Barthes is there too, saying that if he could only come back to life and rewrite
Mythologies
, then he would include this concept of the To Do list, and Ollie’s reading of it, and use it as a way of defining and, yes, OK,
almost
satirising (if close reading can be satirical on purpose, which Ollie actually doubts) the whole of the work-mad early twenty-first century.