The Seed Collectors (24 page)

Ketki and Ish are not supposed to know, but they do know. They know about the boxes. And of course Oleander knew too, even though she never got involved, barely even spoke to the Prophet after everything that happened with Briar Rose and something to do with a magical book that he stole.

Fleur still doesn’t ask where the boxes are sent.

And then Skye Turner appears with red eyes and some stuff in a carrier bag and a link to YouTube, on which she is a huge star but totally the wrong sort, and she can’t afford to stay in Namaste House any more and even if Fleur didn’t charge her one of the other celebrities would probably say something to someone and then the press would arrive, and so Fleur hides her in her own cottage and they
drink tea and talk into the night about their mothers and the seed pods and weird shit about money. Skye suggests tasting the seed pod, but instead of this Fleur gives her some special tea and explains again that the seed pod is likely to be very deadly indeed. Skye asks why they all have them in that case. What is the point of them? They are valuable in some way that no one quite knows, Fleur says, and her mother probably died for them. Fleur is all shrugged-shoulders about the whole thing but Skye keeps asking questions because it is interesting to talk about late at night. Skye offers to teach some of Fleur’s yoga classes for her, which is ever so sweet, really, but she’s still all over the tabloids, and then she’s ringing the neighbour’s son, just a bit of phone sex because she is so lonely, and maybe the odd fantasy about murdering Greg, and, OK, she leaves him ONE voicemail saying where she is if he wants to send that demo, and then suddenly there are journos camped out in the estate agent’s garden behind the ecotreehouse because that’s where they think she is and if only she could get some peace and sodding quiet somewhere . . .

The man’s face is such a strange shade of grey that it refuses to be lit. The student Clem got in to do the lighting has already burned her hands on the barn doors, so Clem is lighting him herself. Clem apparently never does pre-interviews; she always records her subjects a little cold, so they feel disempowered and a bit Petri-dished, and more likely to tell the truth. She told Zoe all about it in the car on the way over. Zoe half listened and half drove, at one point trying to impress Clem by chasing an ambulance halfway down the Commercial Road while smoking a roll-up that may have had a tiny bit of hash in it.

In one way, making documentaries is entirely different from making drama, because of course it’s the truth, and drama is made up. But documentary is made up too, because it has scripts and storyboards,
and interviewees are often chosen on the basis that they will say the thing in the script, for example that grey squirrels are evil or that pencil skirts are big this autumn. And fiction attempts to get at the truth in a different way. All of which everyone already knows, obviously. But then there’s that insanely magical moment in both forms when the characters ‘take over’ and say things you’d never thought they would say, and they say them so perfectly that you never could have thought of them yourself. When Clem’s characters – who are real people seated on knee chairs to make them not just comfortable but also a little uncomfortable in the way that leaning forward for a period of time does, with the overall effect being that they look oddly wistful and a bit confessional – start speaking, Clem will either look very bored or very fascinated. She looks bored when the character is saying something great, and fascinated when they aren’t. This is deliberate. It gets more out of them, apparently.

‘Zoe, would you mind just holding this white sheet up over there?’

And documentary makers even do their own white-balancing, which Zoe didn’t even know about until this week.

Is Clem nervous? It’s always hard to tell. Today’s subject is the main protagonist in her documentary, so she probably is. Zoe can’t remember his exact name, but he is the first person to have created life in a laboratory, from scratch. He looks a bit like a god, or someone’s father, oldish and bearded. Much of what Clem said in the car went over Zoe’s head, especially as Zoe was not just driving but imagining what might actually be between Clem’s legs, and under what circumstances she would be able to see it, or even touch it, and . . . But there is one fascinating detail that she does remember. Basically, this god-dad scientist builds up genes into sequences of his own devising, which is fucking creepy, but creepier still is that the genes each have letters and can be turned into a code and . . .

‘Is what you do essentially like microchipping a pet?’

The interview has started. Clem asks questions like this deliberately
in the hope that the subject will begin the response by using the wording of her question and this, when edited, will look as if he has come up with it himself.
What we do is in no way like microchipping a pet
. . . But he doesn’t fall for it this time.

‘Not really,’ he says.

‘Explain to us in your own words, then, how exactly you use your genetic code to identify your creations.’

‘Well, genetic code is made up of four letters: G, T, C and A. Now, if you think that a whole system of communication can be based on simply a dot and a dash – Morse code, of course – or a one and a zero – binary – then you’ll understand how simple it is to create a code from four letters.’

‘And you ended up using this code in quite an innovative way.’

‘Well, yes. Of course the principal use of the code is to create a genotype, which will manifest itself as a phenotype. In other words the code dictates eye colour, hair colour, the way an organism stores fat. Although, our organism is so simple that it does not have eyes, hair or fat of course. Our organism is not really more than a few cells bunched together. But it is also possible to create genetic code that rather than doing something,
says
something. One can use it to communicate.’

‘Can you go on?’

‘We refer to it as “watermarking”. It enables the creation to be traced back to the creator. We are able to write email addresses and URLs inside the genetic code so that future geneticists can see at once that this organism they have is synthetic, or a descendant of a synthetic organism, and they can find out information about the creator of that organism and even get in touch with him or her or visit their website.’

‘You seem fond of this term “creator”.’

A shrug. ‘I suppose I have become interested in the term “creator”.’

‘And what do you feel about creating something that can never read its own genetic code?’

‘Sorry?’

‘What do you feel about creating an organism, a living thing, that can never read its own genetic code?’

‘We are talking about viruses. Algae. Why would algae want to read its own genetic code? How would algae be able to access the internet, or use an email address?’ He laughs.

‘You’re saying that you have created life that is intrinsically incapable of becoming self-aware. Life that cannot ever know its creator, or communicate on the same level as its creator. What if the algae evolves? Becomes conscious? Finds it has “junk” DNA . . . ?’

He laughs again. ‘I am a god of algae . . . Interesting.’

Zoe notices the nice pause between ‘algae’ and ‘interesting’. She already knows enough about the way Clem works to hear the sentence without its wry ending.
I am a god of algae
. She could see this being remixed by a DJ. Maybe even featuring in her next screenplay somehow. A club scene, with everyone dancing to this new tune that begins with a manic laugh and those words:
I am a god of algae. And I give you . . . slime!
Or maybe something . . . Zoe is a little stoned, she realises.

Think about all the time you spend asleep. Now add to that all those painful last ten seconds of holding a yoga asana, or competing in a 5k race, if you have felt these. Add to this every second in your life you have wished something would just hurry up. Add all those minutes, indeed, hours, you’ve spent waiting for trains. Add all the minutes ON trains, unless you’ve been reading a life-changing book, or talking to someone you love. Now add all the minutes you spent reading books you’ve forgotten, or that turned out to be disappointing, or that didn’t change your life. Books where you believe the author may have ‘rushed the end’. Now add minutes spent talking to people you only thought you loved, but no longer speak to. Add all the time you spent on the phone to them, dressing for them, writing things
especially for them, crying over them, holding them while they cried. Add any orgasms you’ve ever faked, or not enjoyed as much as the ones you have while masturbating. Add all the time you’ve spent masturbating. Now add minutes at work. Minutes spent on holidays that you thought would be more exciting then they were. Any minutes spent anticipating anything at all that did not live up to your expectations. All those times you wished you were somewhere else. What about all the time you spent shopping for things you later threw away? Childbirth, your own birth, death, grieving, mourning, hoping, the unreal euphoria of being intoxicated. All those minutes can go. But of course by now you must be wondering what is left when you take those minutes away from your life, all those minutes that the ego made for you, and then made you undo. What indeed?

Bryony really needs a beautiful vagina. She needs her vagina to be like a celebrity’s vagina. She’ll want a landing strip, of course, which will probably come afterwards. But there needs to be some reason for landing in the first place, and therefore the main thing is that Bryony’s vagina should smell like summer meadows or spring rain or basically something really expensive and non-vaginal. And she has the money to pay for it; that is not the problem. The problem is that she has Googled ‘intimate wash’ and so far the only things that have come up are medical-looking bottles called things like Vagisil and Femfresh and SebaMed. Bryony knows how Skye Turner gets rid of bags under her eyes, but she really wants to know how she cleans her cunt. No one uses soap, presumably, because of thrush. But what else are you supposed to use? This has not, as far as Bryony knows, been covered in
Grazia
.

The next thing she Googles is ‘expensive vaginal wash’ but all that leads her to is articles by well-meaning petit-bourgeois housewives saying things like ‘Who needs an expensive vaginal wash? My daughters
and I simply use vinegar.’ FFS. Vinegar. Right. Who, exactly, would really put vinegar up their cunt? And how would they even do it? One of those thrush-cream syringes, probably. But this is not what Bryony sees in her mind when she imagines softly soaping the inner and outer flaps of her vagina. She does not see herself standing in the shower in the en-suite – which, frankly, has been, along with its mould patches, removed from Bryony’s fantasy life and replaced with something more like the shower they had that time in the Langham – with some kind of vile plastic syringe, inserting
vinegar
into her vagina. She sees a pink frothy mousse, not unlike her Guerlain foaming face wash, costing at least fifty pounds. For a moment she imagines herself on that TV programme, presenting her new product idea to a panel of . . .

‘Mummy?’

‘What?’