The Seed Collectors (19 page)

Holly feels a bit funny between her legs, or at least she’s trying to feel a bit funny between her legs because that is what the book says she should feel when thinking about someone she knows at school – male or female – who she would like to kiss. But there isn’t really anyone she’d like to kiss because kissing, or at least what Chloe told her about kissing – grown-up French kissing, where you have to rub tongues together with a boy, inside his actual mouth – is disgusting and she wouldn’t want to do that with anyone. The book says,
Have you ever put a pillow between your legs?
And
Did it feel good?
And
Did you squeeze?
And you have to put a tick in a box next to the things you did feel or do, and Holly’s not sure that what she feels between her legs is what you are supposed to feel, and she’s also not sure that this
whole thing isn’t just REALLY GROSS and she would absolutely die before she showed this book to anyone but sometimes she just can’t help herself and she has to get it down off the shelf and read it again.

This book has pictures of willies in it, which Holly likes looking at; at least she likes them more than she likes thinking about kissing. There are lots of little boys with little willies, but her favourite picture is of an erection, which is a big, more adult willy sticking up, which Holly has never seen in real life. Obviously if she did ever see one she would have to shut her eyes and maybe even giggle a bit because it would be SO gross, but in that tingly way that some gross things are. Because of this book, Holly now imagines the characters in her Famous Five novels with willies (the book says penises, but that’s just revolting) and vaginas, and sometimes she imagines them all being captured and forced to strip while some smugglers take photos of them naked and then send the pictures to a newspaper which puts them on the front page by accident so everyone in the entire world sees them!

Here’s another thing that could happen: George in the Famous Five is often mistaken for a boy, so perhaps she will get locked in a boys’ only cell by some gypsies or pirates and then the gypsies or pirates will say something like ‘Prove to us that you are really a boy’, and George won’t be able to, and then they will pull her knickers down and see that she has no willy, and then they will examine her really closely with whatever implements they have to hand, probably a pencil and a ruler, just to make sure, and then they will spank her bare bottom with the ruler as a punishment while Julian and Dick and Timmy the dog watch. And Julian and Dick will have had their pants pulled down too, to prove they are boys, and so George will be forced to look at their willies for the whole time this is going on.

‘Holly! Lunch!’

Oh no! Not her dad’s voice. Not while she is thinking . . . Anyway, Holly doesn’t even want lunch. The very idea of lunch makes her feel
sick. Her dad puts so much garlic in everything, and horrible green stuff like coriander or basil – although Holly quite likes basil on garlic bread, which also has garlic in it, so maybe it isn’t garlic she doesn’t like after all. Maybe just at lunchtime. And too much ground pepper, basically. And sourdough bread, which tastes like envelopes with puke inside them. And goat’s curd, which is just like that stuff that gets in people’s arteries when they smoke, which Holly saw on a school DVD and now can’t quite get out of her mind. Not that she doesn’t like her dad’s food. She wouldn’t say that even if a man came in now with a gun and said, ‘I’ll shoot you between the legs unless you say you hate your dad’s cooking.’ Or maybe just, ‘I’ll shoot you in the head’. Something about the feeling that may or may not be between Holly’s legs, and the feeling she definitely does not feel about her dad’s cooking, do not go together at all. The thoughts about all these things are now churned up in her head like sick.

‘Holly!’

Her door bursts open. God! She tries to slip the book under her pillow but she’s too late. Ash skips across the room.

‘What’s that?’

‘A-A-ASH!’ She draws out his name into a kind of indignant yell, making it into at least two syllables, maybe even three. ‘MUMMY!’

He reaches for the book but she can’t let him see it. It’s her private book and it’s not suitable for young children, or for boys, or for little brothers in general. But Ash has pointy, searching, often sticky, little hands, and so the only way she can prevent him from touching her book and seeing – actually, she can’t think those thoughts now about what he might see – is to whack him on the arm really hard. Twice. She finds herself gritting her teeth as she does it, sort of enjoying the pure hatred she feels in this moment. She wishes Ash would die.

‘Ow! DADDY!’

Now Ash pulls Holly’s hair sharply – at least having forgotten about
the book – and starts to cry. If you made the stupidest sad-face expression right now, with your lip-edges pulled down as far as they could go, and then if you pretended you were in a slow-mo scene or something and said the word D-A-D-D-Y as slowly and as sadly and as loudly as you could, then you’d sound just like Ash. Holly really, really hates him. She REALLY wishes he would die or at least become suddenly paralysed and have to live in a wheelchair forever.

Bryony comes in.

‘What on earth is going on?’

‘Mummy? He pulled my hair.’

‘SHE HIT ME.’ Again, in this loud, low, pathetic, sob-wracked voice.

‘Did you hit him?’

‘No! Well, a tiny slap because . . .’

‘We don’t have hitting in this house.’

‘BUT, MUMMY, HE IS IN MY ROOM.’

‘Holly! Ash! Lunch!’

‘Daddy’s been calling you for lunch for ages now.’

‘Well, I was on my way down and then this little freak came in and attacked me. I had my
Private Keep Out
sign on my door as well. But it’s impossible to get any bloody privacy in this place. I don’t want any lunch anyway. I don’t feel very well.’

‘We don’t say “bloody”, Holly. What’s the matter with you?’

‘I don’t feel very well.’

Now Holly starts to cry.

‘Well, if you’re ill you’d better stay in this afternoon. You’d better not go to tennis today.’

‘But, Mummy!’

‘Well, if you want to go to tennis this afternoon you’d better have some lunch. Did you even have any breakfast?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you have?’

‘Daddy made me porridge.’ Which everyone knows is toenail clippings mixed with snot. Which is about as gross as . . .

‘But did you eat it?’

‘Yes! Most of it. At least one big spoonful.’

‘Well, you’re not leaving this house until you eat a proper lunch. It’s no wonder you feel like this if you’re not eating properly.’

‘I feel like this because Freakface came INTO MY PRIVATE SPACE AND THEN PULLED MY HAIR. It’s so unfair.’

Ash doesn’t like being called Freakface, so he tries to give his sister a dead arm by punching her as hard as he can. He completely forgets that his mother is standing right there.

‘OW! Get your bloody hands off me, you little freak.’

‘Right,’ says Bryony. ‘No lunch for you until you apologise, and extra lunch for you, madam. Downstairs, both of you, now.’

Sunflower seeds. A hundred million sunflower seeds. Each one hand-crafted in porcelain by one of many workers in a rainy town in China and now poured by the sackful into the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, London. It used to be possible to walk on them, or lie down in them, or pour hundreds of them through your hands. Presumably you could also steal them. But now, due to concerns over the dust produced by the porcelain, you can only look at them from the viewing area to the side, or from above. Given the themes of the exhibition, it seems both ironic and fitting that rich Londoners are now protected from the dust created by trampling the work of Chinese people who are so poor they leave price tags on items of clothing to show their value. But it is frustrating not to be able to touch the seeds. They look so very touchable. Charlie reads something on the wall about each seed being hand-painted. Nearby, a film is playing, showing how this happened. Three or four strokes for every seed. That’s around
350 million strokes of a paintbrush. ‘Presumably not the same one,’ jokes a middle-aged woman in an anorak.

‘This is interesting,’ Charlie says to Nicola.

‘Hmm?’

‘I hadn’t noticed this before. In the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao was always depicted as the sun, and the people were the sunflowers turning towards him. It also says here that in times of poverty people used to share sunflower seeds, which meant . . .’

Nicola reaches into her bag for her phone.

‘It would be better if we could touch them,’ she says.

‘I know, but . . .’

‘It’s quite boring otherwise.’

‘I wouldn’t exactly say that.’

She smiles. ‘Sorry. I’m dreadful with art.’

‘Right.’

‘Anyway, Izzy’s texted. Her ballet class has just finished. She wants to meet us in Covent Garden. OK with you?’

‘Sure.’

When Bryony goes to the kitchen to look for some chocolate, James is holding the seed pod she inherited from Oleander. Bryony stuck it in an old ice-cream tub and put it at the back of the highest cupboard when they got back after the funeral supper. She only realises now that she has entirely forgotten ever doing this. She must have been quite tired. But anyway . . .

‘Oh my God.’

‘What?’

‘What the fuck are you doing?’

‘Just looking. Smelling. I mean, these things really smell quite . . .’

‘Put it away. Now.’

‘God. Chill, Beetle. It’s only a seed pod. It’s lovely. Here, look.’

It is long, black and oily-looking, very much like a vanilla pod. But . . .

‘Right. OK. One of those probably killed my . . .’

‘You don’t know what . . .’

‘
One of those probably killed my parents
.’

‘Calm down. There’s no need to shout.’

‘For fuck’s sake.’ Bryony starts crying. ‘Just put it back.’

‘It’s just a plant, Beetle. Just a plant.’

‘Oh Christ, I hate it when people say things are
just
plants,
just
herbal . . . If my parents taught me one thing, it was . . . Look, do you have
any
idea, have you ever
really
stopped to think about what plants do? Would you be happy standing there holding deadly night-shade or a piece of a fly agaric mushroom? Or, I don’t know, hemlock?’

‘This is just a seed pod.’

‘Right. Like seed pods are never dangerous. Have you ever heard of an opium seed pod? Yew berries – well, they’re really cones, but whatever – will kill you in a few minutes, and then there are castor beans, which you can use to make ricin and . . .’

‘This is not an opium seed pod, or a yew berry or whatever.’

‘No. It’s probably much, much worse.’

Bryony starts sobbing now. This is so frustrating. And he won’t even give her a tissue. Not that she wants anything he’s touched after he’s been holding one of those pods.

James sighs. ‘If the seed pods are really that bad then why exactly do we have one of them in the house?’

‘Because we –
I
– inherited it.’

‘Right, well, if it’s as toxic as you seem to think, perhaps it would be a good idea for you to hide it from the children?’ James replaces the pod in the plastic tub and gives it to Bryony. ‘I’d better get on with dinner.’