The Seed Collectors (22 page)

‘Anyway, you must like it when your wives wear beautiful shoes and carry beautiful bags. And they do have to come from somewhere.’

‘What does that say on there?
Prada
. Pretty flash. Bit beyond my missus, I reckon. What’s Céline?’ He pronounces it ‘saline’.

‘Oh, that’s much worse,’ Bryony says, and giggles again.

‘Reckon I’d give my missus a bit of a slapping if she came back with all that.’

‘Start having to charge my mates to have a go,’ says one of the others.

‘You love it really,’ Bryony finds herself saying to them. ‘You love shoes and bags as much as we do. You love it when we look sexy. You know you do.’ She tosses her hair slightly. When did she last toss her hair?

They laugh, but in a nice way, and Bryony gets off the train wondering why everyone does not drink all the time because it really makes life a lot more pleasant. Onto the train for Sandwich, although – shit – isn’t the car parked at Ramsgate? Fuckfuckfuck. Bryony could have stayed on that train. Although should she really drive in this condition? Might she be, by now, a tiny bit over the limit? She’ll have to ring James. Also, this train has a first-class carriage in which Bryony can now sit and think about what would have happened if she had stayed on the other train. She imagines going to the toilets, and the ugliest bloke – the one who talked about slapping his wife – following her. She imagines him following her in, shoving her roughly against the sink and then, well, having his way with her, despite her fat, and her age, and everything else. She imagines him being quite rough and . . .

Before she knows it, Bryony is in the toilets trying to masturbate, which is a challenge partly because of the uniquely sour Southeastern trains toilet smell, and partly because it’s so small. In the end she has to get her feet up on the wall in front of her to be able to spread her legs wide enough that she . . . Oh . . . OK . . .
And all his friends
. Imagine him charging fifty pence each time one of them fucks her. And this happens every time she buys anything from Prada, which means she does it every week and does not feel guilty. Not that she feels guilty now, but anyway. Two of his friends at once. Maybe three. One in her mouth, and . . . Bryony whispers, ‘Go on, fuck me, then, you disgusting fat slob,’ because the men in her fantasy are disgusting fat slobs, like the ones you see on paedophile exposés on Channel 5, and then comes, convulsing slightly while someone coughs outside.

Back in her seat. What was that? WTF
was
that? Was that actually
totally HILARIOUS or, basically, fucked up? If it was fucked up, was this in a Nietzschean way or not? Do men really do that to their wives? Of course not. It’s just a fantasy, just a harmless . . . But what about what those guys said? They were joking, right? Oh God. Bryony giggles again, just to herself. It was funny really. Imagine telling . . . OK, you can’t
really
tell anyone that you had a wank in a Southeastern train toilet while imagining being domestically abused and raped by yobs. Can you? Not really. Not unless you were very pissed. Bryony opens one of the packets of Percy Pigs and eats them all. She lies back in her seat and realises she does not know what to think or do next.

Then, out of nowhere, the feeling comes to her that she is completely invincible. If a yob came to rape her she would simply crush him in her fist: she would crumple him up like a used tissue. She would rape
him
. She could do that. She imagines herself stepping calmly out of the train – yes, just melting through the window while it is still going along, because that is how invincible she is – and picking it up – yes, the whole train – in her right hand and hurling it deep into the universe. Life is a joke, she suddenly realises. Here she is, sitting on this train and following all the rules of being a puny human when in fact she is a cosmic badass. She can step out of the train, out of life, out of the universe, whenever she likes. But she doesn’t do it now; for now, being a puny human is, well . . .

Back at home, and James has taken the kids around junk shops and to auctions ALL DAY LONG and Holly wanted to play tennis instead and Ash is hungry and Holly now has yet another box of books that look far too old for her and Ash has a bruise from where Holly pinched him, but Holly only pinched him because he hit her first and kept calling her Lolly for no apparent reason. Bryony’s headache begins at the front of her head and spreads around to just above her ears. She remembers the one remaining bag of Percy Pig sweets and gives it to the kids to share. But Holly throws the whole packet to Ash, deliberately mistiming it so that it hits him on the head.

‘Holly . . . !’

‘Whoops.
Sorry!
He can have them all anyway. And, Mummy, I thought you knew that Percy Pig sweets are actually made from pork gelatin, which means they are made from grinding up pigs’ feet and bones, which means they are actually made from dead pigs that may even have been called Percy, which makes them totally one hundred per cent gross. And each one is thirty calories, which means that if you ate ten you’d have to do six hundred sit-ups to burn them off again.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘No one. I read the packet. Anyway, Mummy? You smell a bit funny.’

James raises his eyebrows. ‘You do smell a bit like a brewery, Beetle.’

Bryony smiles. ‘Oh, you know what Granny’s like. I suppose I had one more glass than I should have over lunch. I think I’ll go and have a bath.’

One of the interesting things about getting as fat as Bryony is now, is that you only have to run half a bath because you fill the rest of the tub with your flesh. And Bryony’s flesh means something to her. This roll of fat here: that was Holly. A lot of fat came with Holly. And that one, the next one down: that was Ash. Bryony gained around three stone in the year following her parents’ disappearance, but that parachuted in slowly and silently, billowing onto her in creamy folds at night while she was asleep, so she didn’t notice what was happening at first. Instead of just getting a bit of a tummy, like Clem, she got larger all over, in the way that digital images increase when you pinch them outwards. In the bath, Bryony now feels immense, like a sea creature or a space monster. It is not an entirely unpleasant feeling. It’s actually . . . Bryony drifts off to sleep and only wakes up when the water goes cold. She needs another drink.

But before that: out of the bath. Fluffy towel. Make-up off. Three more Nurofen. Fuck it: four. Now it’s time for moisturiser. Bryony unwraps the £190 jar of Crème de la Mer Moisturizing Gel and rubs some carefully on her face. But what about her neck? Granny has
always moisturised her face in what she mysteriously calls ‘the Continental way’, but her neck looks like an elephant’s leg. Bryony applies moisturiser to her neck, perhaps a bit more than you’d really need, but enough to prevent elephant-leg developing, at least overnight. Then she moves on to her décolletage. There was something in some magazine about celebrities with ‘dodgy décolletage’. Surely Crème de la Mer will be good for this area too? And what about her arms? Her breasts? Her stomach? Bryony finishes the pot of moisturiser, which was too expensive anyway, by rubbing some into her knees.

My perfect girlfriend:

The morning of the day that Piyali inadvertently ruins, no,
saves
, no, maybe just
changes
his life begins normally enough. It is a Monday and so he wakes up in Fleur’s cottage with that sick feeling that always comes on a Monday. If the feeling was a word, then the word would be ‘late’. Pi’s homeopath – gasp, breathe, is he seeing her today? Because if he is then he is extremely late, but no, breathe out, it’s OK, he moved his appointment to Thursday because of the thing with the car – tends to work on the level of the word. Each person, she says, has one word that sums up their central theme, or essential dilemma, their whole problem in life. It’s similar to a writing theory that Pi read about where each character has an objective that you can boil down to one word: power, control, safety, success. Knowing this word means you can focus your character, keep them on track, not lose them.

The idea in real life, or at least with his homeopath and certainly at Namaste House, is to get rid of your word, to zap it, delete it, find-and-replace it with love or peace or some other soft frilly thing. And then what? Go through life with a soppy smile on your face chanting and wearing unflattering clothes and making everyone else feel bad? What is actually wrong with normal, honest suffering? Suffering means you are alive, you are real, you are free. Mindfulness – which is what Fleur has gone to teach this morning, leaving Pi alone in the big feather bed that smells of her perfume and her hair – seems
intended to turn you into a docile animal that stands in its field all day never complaining and never smashing down fences and . . .

Pi does not write on the level of the word. Some people manage to do that. Their sentences trot along like happy horses until, suddenly, one horseshoe-nail word appears that makes the horse bolt, throw its rider and run away. It’s clever, but anyone with a good dictionary can do it. Pi used to want instead to write on the level of the sentence, like Hemingway and Carver – although didn’t it turn out that Carver’s sentences were created by someone else? His editor, whatshisname? Yes, yes, of course, and Pi was going to look at it with his creative writing students last year and then forgot to order the photocopies in time and . . . When Pi writes now – which is rare, because life gets in the way so bloody much – it is on the level of the scene, like Tolstoy and his mushrooms, which is something else that he should photocopy in fact, but . . . Pi yawns. At least mindfulness stops all this chitter chatter. But he still hates it. Although he did send that student off for yoga classes last week. Which means nothing. Yoga is suffering too. It’s fine. It’s just all this other crap that is a problem.