The Seed Collectors (28 page)

‘I’m in,’ says Ollie.

‘James is in,’ says Bryony.

‘Game on,’ says Ollie.

Skye’s dance routines have fucked up her knees big time so she sometimes spends over an hour on one of the pink foam rollers in Studio B, the only place in Namaste House with frosted and very high windows, lying on her front, going up and down and up and down her thighs, often with tears of pain rolling down her face. When the fronts of her quads are done she does her iliotibial bands, down the outer edges of her thighs. She moans and groans her way through this while Fleur sits with her back against the mirrored wall, writing. She’s not writing into the actual book, not yet. Because that might not be what it’s all about at all. That might be totally fucking wrong. Anyway, she can ask Ina quite soon. The plane tickets are booked. She and Skye are going on a trip! To the Outer Hebrides! Apart from anything else, poor Skye needs to get away and hide somewhere more remote than Studio B. The tabloids won’t leave. And with Piyali suddenly stalking the cottage because Kam has ‘gone away’, and Ketki growling her way around the main house it seems to make sense for both of them to hide out in the studio; but obviously it can’t go on forever. One of the celebrities is doing the Silent Retreat while the other two have opted for the Get up and Glow package. People are having trouble remembering which is which. Ish keeps talking to the silent one – the cricketer – about betting scandals and leg-spin bowling. This is the sort of stuff Oleander used to control.

But for now Fleur is only interested in what Oleander used to say.

‘How did you first hear about Oleander?’ Fleur asks Skye.

Of course Skye was Oleander’s client originally. Then, when she needed someone to meet her in London, Fleur would go. And then there was the swapping of dresses and lipsticks and the hair brushing and recently Fleur telling Skye things too, which would be wrong if she had ever had any training but of course she has never had any training and . . .

‘One of my aunts.
Mail on Sunday
.’

‘Oh, that thing.’

‘Like the Madonna thing.’

‘Madonna never even came here.’

‘Yeah. Nice publicity, though.’

‘OK, anyway, so what was the most helpful thing Oleander ever said to you?’

A long pause. Up and down on the left ITB band. A low groan.

‘She said that giving love was the only way to receive love. No.’ Skye shakes her head, and her hair tumbles over and then – ouch – under the foam roller. Fleur wonders if this could lead to a really gruesome accident, but now Skye retrieves her hair, scrunches it into a brown band, sits up and rearranges the foam roller so she can lie on it lengthways. She breathes in and then starts rolling her spine up into a lowish bridge. ‘Actually, that’s wrong, because she always said that you would receive love anyway, no matter what you did, even if you’d, like, murdered someone or run them over or whatever. But this was more like a short cut or something.’

‘Yeah. But you can’t see it like that.’

‘No. Exactly. It has to be genuine.’

‘You have to really love the person in that instant.’

‘Which is when you realise how hard it is to love someone else, really.’

‘And how fucking hard it is to love yourself.’

‘Which is the same thing.’

They go to Deal, even though Granny doesn’t like it because it is full of homosexuals. There’s a westerly blowing gently, so it’s even quite hot walking down the pier. It’s Bank Holiday Monday, which means that everyone has come out to complain about the weather, but the weather is actually rather nice so no one has anything to talk about. Except . . .

‘The turnstones!’ says James. ‘They’re still here.’

All this toing and froing that birds do. It must be quite tiring. Why not just find somewhere the right temperature all year round – like Benidorm or Auckland – and stay there? But everyone loves the turnstones, even though they are known for eating anything, including used condoms. They look like a proper water bird, with black, brown and white feathers that work with shingle and stormy weather. They also have nice orange beaks with which they supposedly turn stones, but around here are more likely to use to turn chip packets and drink from dirty puddles. They scurry along the pier in quite a cute way, though, trying to steal the fishermen’s bait, or their catch. They are supposed to only be in Deal for the winter, but it’s no surprise that they have not left somewhere that has such rich pickings and – usually – can’t be that much less freezing than wherever they’d normally go.

‘Didn’t they say on
Springwatch
that some of them have started . . .’

‘Look,’ says Ash. ‘That one’s only got one leg.’

‘Started what, Granny?’ Bryony needs a drink.

‘Staying for the summer. Gosh, he has only got one leg, poor thing.’

‘We’ll call him Hopalong,’ says James.

‘It’s got a leg, stupid,’ Holly says to Ash. ‘It just doesn’t have a foot.’

They walk around the end of the pier, where Bryony gets a text
message welcoming her to Belgium. This happens all around the coast here. More often it’s France, which at least you can see from the end of the pier. This is usually funny enough to tell people, but she’s too hungover, and Granny won’t understand anyway. Then back. And there’s Hopalong again.

‘He’s following us,’ says Ash. ‘Maybe he likes us.’

And then he’s down by the fishermen again. And then on the bench. Hopalong is everywhere, it seems, hopping along with a stump where his foot should be. He certainly has no difficulty in getting around, poor thing.

Then Bryony realises. There are four or five turnstones on the pier and each one is missing a foot. Now there are six, now seven . . . Dark piano chords thump painfully in Bryony’s mind. They are all footless. Which means . . . ? They have some disease that will spread and wipe them all out? Or maybe they are being snagged on fishing lines. Maybe there is some psychopath who . . . In any case, what if they are not migrating because they can’t, because like so many other organisms in this sad, crumbling universe they have ended up broken and stuck where they are? But when she looks up she sees that no one else has noticed, and Granny is now offering to buy the kids ice creams and Holly is asking if she can have a new can of tennis balls instead.

Posters have gone up around the public areas in Namaste House: the entrance lobby, the spa and the gift shop. GROUP READING: THE BHAGAVAD GITA. BEGINNING WEDNESDAY 8 P.M. Who is doing this? Pi is doing this. Pi is still here. Kam, having ‘gone away’, has not come back. Kam’s sister, it turns out, got on the same train that Pi and James were on, because she lives in Folkestone, but they didn’t see her. Bluebell has been muttering over her condensed milk about a possible divorce. Ketki is still not talking to Fleur. Anyway, it’s not
that it isn’t lovely having someone else around the place helping with the activities. It’s a bit like the old days. Pi has started an advanced men’s yoga group, which Fleur thought was ambitious until men actually began turning up for it: a tennis coach from Deal, a hipster with a bright orange beard from Canterbury, two triathletes from Sandwich, a gym instructor and two very flexible sixty-somethings who had been going to Fleur’s yoga for years but came and told her that in fact they prefer Pi’s approach because it is more ‘intellectual’.

Pi has offered to cover all Fleur’s sessions – except the ‘mindfulness crap’ – while she and Skye are away. Which is so incredibly generous, of course, but then Fleur has a dream that when she comes back he has changed the locks and painted the house yellow and had her cottage shipped to Kansas. Which is obviously WTF in the way all dreams are, but also: what if he does take over? He’s already acting all man-of-the-house with Bluebell and Ketki. What if Fleur is sidelined? She might own Namaste House on paper, but in reality everyone knows that no one owns anything and everything just runs on invisible lines of power and personality. Usually when she touches the frankincense tree each evening she offers it some of her energy and she feels the tree take it, in the way an elderly person accepts a seat on the tube. But the last couple of nights it has offered some back. What does that mean?

During meditation Fleur’s thoughts, which are clouds floating past that she should observe without attachment, or bubbles floating around her head that she must pop, have become unkind. For example all the thoughts about how it is probably easier to love a millionaire, which is what Fleur now is. Or that now she has Namaste House she finds that she does not want to share it. What a selfish bitch! That she particularly does not want to share it with the man she supposedly loves is problematic.

She wants to share it with the man she really loves and . . .

Pop-pop-pop, go her thoughts.

The Outer Hebrides