The Seed Collectors (37 page)

‘I can fly . . . !’

‘Me too! Oh, oh, oh . . . OK. This is . . .’

‘Breathe, girls. Breathe.’

‘Oh. My. God.’

When Fleur says the word ‘God’ it feels ticklish inside and kind of orgasmic. It suddenly seems like too much for one word. Too much to say again, unless she really means it. Which is impossible, because . . .

‘Where are we going?’

‘To Calanais, to look at the standing stones.’

‘And this won’t wear off while we . . .’

‘No, dear. It won’t wear off for, oh, about a year.’

‘A year!’

‘Well, give or take. You can squeeze a bit more out of it if you regularly meditate and remember to practise forgiveness. The initial exhilaration fades into a more comfortable kind of bliss after a day
or so. You’ll still be able to fly, though. But most people forget that. Most people forget the whole thing afterwards, in fact.’

The word ‘forgiveness’, when Fleur hears it now, means something rather different from when she heard it before. Before, it was a bit blah blah and also quite vast: a remote, dark purple mountain of a word with dangerous edges and a pretty steep drop on the other side. Now it is a beautiful, soft gift with silk and ribbons – the spiritual kind – that she can’t wait to give to someone else. But of course it’s just the same if you keep it . . . In fact, everyone has one anyway, and no one ever tires of opening it and looking inside it, and the contents never get dirty or boring or old. All Fleur wants to do is lie down and shut her eyes and relax into this feather bed of feelings. This is a Sunday morning for the soul that could last forever and ever and . . . But she needs nothing, she realises, nothing at all. She feels like a ball of pure energy bobbing around in some make-believe world that is so very sweet in some ways but also a total joke. The world has become a child’s drawing, something knocked up before lunch in a cosmic nursery, just like the pictures you find in an old cardboard box after your parents die or divorce or move to somewhere smaller. What a nice effort, you think. But, well, ridiculous, all the same. Blue people! And a green, not even totally round sun. And everyone hand in hand. Bless . . . As Fleur thinks this, the world completely fades out for a second, and there is a bright white light that feels – ouch, oh, stop, oh, more, no, wait – too much like . . .

‘She’s passed out,’ says someone very far away.

‘Fleur?’

When she wakes up she is flying over the Atlantic. Calanais is only a few miles down the coast from Ina’s place. But why not fly around the world when you suddenly find you can? Fleur skims New York, its ghostly Twin Towers still there as an energy force, bright spectres of the past, emitting more light than anything else below her. Fleur realises that if she looks down in a certain way, with her mind as well
as her eyes, she can see all of history embedded in the landscape, all fresh from a vast 3D printer, and she can see all the fish in the sea, and every scale on every fish, and all the atoms in one scale of one fish and all the electrons in one atom and all the quarks and – bang – there’s the white light again . . .

When she wakes up this time she is flying over desert. Her mouth feels dry. She wishes she could discard her body, just peel it off like the set of clothes you were wearing that afternoon when you got caught in the rain. But it’s not time for that yet. It is much, much too early. ‘Take me to Calanais,’ she says to it, in the end, and then, just like that, she is lying on the ground somewhere between the tourist information stand and the public toilets. This is the best sat-nav in the world! But she feels slightly sick. Skye and Ina are looking down at her.

‘You OK?’ says Ina.

Skye looks a little how Fleur feels. As they walk up the path towards the standing stones, concealed behind a mound (although Fleur and Skye can now see through things like mounds it turns out to be quite tiring, so they have stopped their brains from doing it all the time), she whispers to her, ‘Where did you go?’ ‘I went all around the world,’ says Fleur. ‘What about you?’ Skye smiles. ‘I went inside geometry,’ she says, ‘And then I wrote fifty albums. Oh – and a symphony! And I heard the cosmic song . . .’ And it all makes sense to Fleur, and everything is beautiful. The darkness around them is simply a curtain they can pull aside whenever they want to, although the light behind it is too dazzling to be of much use. So, with only a tiny crack in the curtain they walk up the path some more until they can see the standing stones in the distance. From here they look like a freeze-frame of a breakout session at a convention of giants. But as they get closer, Fleur sees that the beings they represent – no,
are
– are not giants but archetypes. Here is every possible shape an ego can inhabit. There is the great mother, with her cape swirling about her. And right in the centre of everything, the patriarch, acting as though everything
is very important indeed. There, the little girl and the little boy who do not want to stand still, and beyond them all, the stranger who comes to the door in the middle of the night and changes everything. The outsider, the freak, the loner, the mistress, the forbidden lover, the criminal. Fleur sees herself first in this figure. She walks over and tries to touch the stone, but that ticklish, painful, orgasmic feeling returns and she finds she can’t even get close to it, because it is like touching her own insides. But gradually she realises she is all of them. She is mother, father, daughter, son, maiden, crone, hero, witch . . .

And then the white light, again.

Back at Ina’s, Fleur asks for another look at the photo album. And now she sees the lost orchid as Ina sees it. There, indeed, is Ganesh, and Shiva, and beautiful, mellow Jesus, first as a too-wise young man and then at the end. Now when she looks at it the crucifixion goes from being painful and real to being something different entirely, not a joke, exactly, because she realises how much he needed to concentrate to do it, and how much it was supposed to mean, and not a trick, exactly . . . Something like a proof. This is how little the body means. You can do anything to me and it does not matter, because I am not of this world and beyond it I will always be free. And whatever we do to each other, through this eternity and the next, you are me and I am you, and in the end none of it matters at all.

‘When I read those Judy Blume books when I was a child I was so confused all the time. I mean, what is baloney? What is a baloney sandwich?’

‘It’s a gross kind of salami. Like a huge sausage.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Well, obviously I Googled it, Mummy.’

‘Are you sure that book isn’t too old for you?’

‘It’s too late now anyway. I’ve read it. It has a penis in it called Ralph.’

‘Oh, Holly.’

‘If someone would find me a tennis court I wouldn’t need to read unsuitable books.’

Or perhaps the proof is that there is no God, not here, not in the illusion, because what God would be the author of
this
story? What God would kill his hero in such a thoughtless way? What God would let anything he created suffer so much . . . ?

We do this to ourselves. There is no one else involved.

No one else is even
watching
.

‘Apparently if a man turns up on one of the islands claiming to be the seventh son of a seventh son you have to put an earthworm in his hand.’

‘Gross. Why?’

‘Because if he is telling the truth then the earthworm immediately dies.’

‘But why would anybody want to be the seventh son of a seventh son?’

‘Because you get supernatural powers.’

‘What, to kill earthworms? L.A.M.E.’

The clue is always, always, buried deep in the boredom . . .

Where do you feel most bored? Go there.

‘Of course, everything you do is better than what everyone else does.’

‘What is that supposed to mean?’

‘Well, all this wholesome crap about walking and fishing and swimming, as if everything anyone else wants to do is inferior. WHO exactly decided that swimming in ice-cold water having your face bitten by clegs is better than watching TV all afternoon? I almost added “an old film” to make it more acceptable to you but what I am trying to say is that I am SICK of doing that. If someone wants to watch, I don’t know,
Teletubbies
all day then why do you feel you have to stop them?’

Bryony thinks of that odd conversation she had with Fleur, when Fleur said that basically nothing you do in this life matters at all and has already been decided anyway. In which case Bryony had no choice other than to watch
Australia’s Biggest Loser
for five hours straight while the others tried to climb one of the Paps of Jura. She still feels tearful thinking of the woman who got so fat she could not ride her horse, and how lovely it was when . . .

‘Well, if that person is my child, then I do feel I have a responsibility to . . .’

‘And you think you’re so fucking healthy!’

‘What?’

‘All this coconut milk, and butter and cream in everything. All the fucking cake. James, look at me. Do you think I need cake? I have never needed cake. But you’ve shovelled it into me virtually daily for the last ten years. And now I look like this. It’s almost as if you intended me to be . . .’