The Seed Collectors (21 page)

Beatrix is craning her neck around looking for someone to come and serve them. When she does spot someone she starts trying to hail her as if she was a taxi. Eventually the waitress arrives.

‘Can I help you?’ she says, with a strange element of surprise in her tone, rather as if they had knocked on her door in the middle of the night. Her accent is perhaps Polish, not Spanish. What on earth does she think they want?

‘We’d like to order some lunch,’ Beatrix says, adding, ‘if that’s not too bizarre a request.’

‘I am sorry. You like to order . . .
what
? I do not understand.’

‘LUNCH.’

‘Oh, lunch.’ Only now does she get out her little pad. She sighs.

‘Steak and chips, please,’ says Bryony, ‘with a side of sourdough.’

‘Avocado and chilli on toast, please,’ says Clem.

‘Oh, that sounds nice. I’ll have that too,’ says Beatrix. ‘And we’ll have a bottle of Nyetimber to share. That all right with you, girls?’

‘Oh, thanks, Granny,’ says Clem. ‘That’s lovely.’

‘Can we have some sparkling mineral water as well?’ asks Bryony. ‘Oh, and a large glass of Rioja for me.’

Bryony sees an afternoon of extreme shopping ahead. Just one more day like this, she tells herself. Just one more day. How much harm can that do? And then tomorrow she’ll be different. A thousand pounds. She won’t do more than a thousand pounds. Not counting
the make-up bag. So, one thousand
more
pounds. And she won’t have more than three cakes later.

‘We only do medium – one seventy-five.’

‘That’s fine.’ Four cakes, then.

‘You’d think that, of all the words in English, she’d recognise “lunch”,’ Beatrix says when the waitress walks away.

They don’t do credit crunch ice cream any more, so afterwards Beatrix and Clem have peppermint teas, and Bryony has another glass of Rioja and some double chocolate ice cream to help soak it up. Beatrix and Clem are planning to go around the rest of Beatrix’s companies (Prada, Dior and the LVMH brands) and then find a pair of noise-cancelling headphones for Beatrix and an anti-ageing face cream for Clem. Bryony arranges to meet them for afternoon tea and then lurches off down the stairs rather like a container ship that has just been launched in a harbour slightly too small and shallow for it. Bryony will dock for a few moments on the ground floor. She will begin and end here, with some quick refuellings, before going upstairs to take on a load of fine goods.

What some people don’t realise about shopping is that if you do it right it does what heroin does, and what alcohol does, and what smoking does, and what a litre of ice cream, or a whole box of chocolates or three tubes of biscuits or two large packets of cheese can do. It changes your body chemistry and gives you an
actual hit
. Even though it’s just shopping! For example Bryony really needs a moisturiser – unlike Clem she has been using anti-ageing creams for years, not that she needs to as her fat makes her look about fifteen, but when she’s thin she will be glad she did it – and so goes straight to Crème de la Mer and buys a 60ml jar of Moisturizing Gel Cream for £190. If this is the physical-hit equivalent of a refreshing pint of beer after a long day, then the £40 Lip Balm that Bryony adds at the last minute is a little vodka chaser and the £230 Radiant Serum she adds at the very, very last minute is quite a good hit of cocaine in the
toilets and . . . and . . . Fuck. That’s already £460, so maybe it’s time to start again. Right, a thousand pounds starting from now.

That feeling,
right there
: that’s the one. Oh . . .

Breathe. One nude Dior lipstick to start things off again. Escalators.

Bryony can’t buy clothes in Selfridges because she is too fat. But there are lots of other things she can buy, and the main thing she can buy is also becoming her favourite thing: shoes, which they always have in a size thirty-nine. But not just shoes. Bags, scarves, jewellery: a lot of stuff does not have a size at all. Which should make it possible to actually buy it without too much trouble, but . . . She waits for approximately seven minutes at Marni for the thin, beautiful and rather snotty shop assistant to come back and inform her that they don’t have a floral print shopping bag without that strange streak on it and ask her if she wants one anyway. For £195. Er, right. Whatever. No thank you, skinny bitch! On to the shoe galleries and into Prada where Bryony is hoping not to bump into Clem and Beatrix. Ankle boots, ankle boots. But where is the fucking assistant now? Bryony sighs, rolls her eyes and sighs again. The assistant emerges.

‘Hello. How are you today?’ An Asian with a child’s voice. Happy, happy.

‘Fine, thanks.’

But now she’s gone to fiddle with some shoe on the display as if . . . Basically as if Bryony is too fat and not fashionable enough and not even from the suburbs but so far outside Zone 4 into the fucking COUNTRYSIDE where Hunters that only cost around £100 are regarded as expensive footwear, whereas Prada ankle boots cost £500, and . . . Bryony sighs and rolls her eyes a bit more.

‘Can I help you?’

‘Well, yes, I actually wanted to buy a pair of those boots.’

See, you happy little tiny nobody, how you JUDGE people and then those people turn out to be RICH and then you have to do what they want no matter how fat they are, or where they live. See?

‘You want try?’

‘I want to BUY. In a thirty-nine, please. And I’m in quite a hurry.’

‘You want buy without try?’

‘Is that not something you do?’

OMG. She has turned into her grandmother. But never mind that . . . Obviously Bryony will try them in the toilets and return them if they don’t fit. She’s not so drunk that she’s forgotten that she doesn’t have space in the eBay room for any more stuff, any more mistakes, any more abandoned things. And £500 gives you such a great hit when you spend it all at once that it sometimes is worth returning the item so you can get the hit again somewhere else; a bit like throwing up, having a big glass of water and starting again. Not that Bryony has ever thrown up on purpose, of course. But anyway, these boots are beautiful. They are a perfect shape with a heel, but not too high. And they’re not made out of some old piece of leather that’s just been found lying around somewhere; no, some soft baby animal has been
skinned
for these. And then the skin has been pierced with a few hundred silver metal studs. OK, on second thoughts maybe the heel is rather high, but there is a platform, which helps. And a little hole for her toes to peep out of, which is very S/S11. Maybe they are a bit car-to-bar, but . . .

Bryony pays for them. Breathes. Tornadoes slightly wonkily with her Prada bag and her Mulberry and Crème de la Mer bags down the stairs to Vivienne Westwood where she holds out her white iPhone to show the assistant the picture she took of the magazine page with the perfect pink Get A Life silk/wool blend scarf. The assistant sends her to the OTHER Vivienne Westwood concession which is miles away upstairs but where Bryony finds a delightful male assistant who beams, yes, actually beams, at her as she approaches.

‘Do you have this?’ she asks him, holding out her phone really quite boldly, feeling for a second like Kate Moss, or maybe Kate’s stylist, or perhaps someone who knows her stylist’s mother slightly but definitely lives in London and has a job that requires her to live
on sashimi and spend her lunch hour sewing up the backs of things and buying tights and crying over love.

He takes her iPhone. Scrutinises it. ‘Oh,’ he says, a touch of colour appearing in his cheeks. A bit like in real life when you show a real-life person a picture of a kitten. But that’s it.
Oh
. And he keeps looking at the phone.

If a tornado, or a large ship, had eyebrows and was able to raise them . . .

‘Oh?’

‘It’s beautiful,’ he says.

‘That’s what I thought. Which is why, I, well, thought I’d . . .’

‘And I
stupidly
didn’t order any. But now, well.’

‘Well?’

‘I can see I should have ordered it. It would look beautiful on you.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You
need
this scarf.’

‘I know.’

He swivels, quite abruptly. ‘Now obviously you know where the main Viv shop is, yeah?’

‘Well, obviously . . . Actually . . .’

‘But I’ll write the phone number down for you in case you want to ring ahead. Unless you’ve already . . . ?’

‘Not on this phone, unfortunately.’

He catwalks over to the desk where he pulls out a yellow card and starts writing on it, very slowly, with a black Muji biro. He hands it to Bryony as if she is a serious genuine person who is actually going to buy this scarf. This must be the kind of thing that happens to stylists and fashionistas. This kind of thing has never happened to Bryony. She has never had an actual conversation with an actual fashion person that has not ended in her crying, swearing at them or spending approximately £500 to £1,500 to prove that it is better to be rich and fat than thin and working as a shop assistant, which she doesn’t
even believe. She suddenly can’t move. This is the only shop assistant she has ever, ever . . .

But of course she’s not going to actually go to the Vivienne Westwood shop! She doesn’t want the scarf that much. She just likes showing people pictures on her phone and saying ‘Have you got that?’ But now she’ll have to pretend to leave Selfridges if she is to continue this rather marvellous . . . And of course the only way to pretend to leave Selfridges is to actually leave Selfridges, which she is not going to do before she has eaten four cakes, and probably a couple of the little sandwiches they bring with the cakes. And a glass of champagne. Or maybe two. Although if she really, really wanted that scarf she would leave now. She would fly to Conduit Street (he did write out the address as well in the end) on magical wings, with her Prada, Mulberry and Crème de la Mer bags weighing her down only ever so slightly.

‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘I’ll ring, I think. I’m meeting my grandmother and my cousin for tea soon, and I might just have to go back to Céline first too. There’s a, well . . .’ He now gives her such a camp look that she giggles. When did she last giggle? ‘A bag . . .’

‘Oh, darling! The new yellow snake clutch?’

‘How did you know?’

It was actually a nude tote, but whatever.

‘You’ll already have the Boston, presumably?’

‘Of course.’

‘Oh.’ There is a very long pause. A slight eye roll. The flush again. ‘I know people who are still on the waiting list for the Boston. What colour did you get?’

‘Well . . .’

‘Don’t tell me.’ He mimes ‘being a clairvoyant’ for a few seconds but then frowns.

Bryony laughs. ‘The nude.’

There must be a nude. There always is. Or something that can be
called nude, depending on what colour you are, and what colour you think nude is, or ought to be.

‘Oh, darling.’

Over to Céline, then. The clutch is basically £1,000, but Bryony buys it because, well, everyone else obviously wants it, and she has the money, sort of, so why not? Bryony thinks for a second about her bank accounts, but the thought feels wrong when she is so happy and having so much fun so she stops thinking it. And she also doesn’t think that she wanted the nude tote as a book bag for university, but only if it was less than £500 and she could pass it off as ‘something from Primark’ to the other students, and that she basically doesn’t have anywhere to take a yellow snakeskin clutch, however beautiful it is. But by the time she has had afternoon tea, which in the end includes three glasses of champagne, only small ones of course, she feels better again. And when she leaves she is – and this is hilarious, but so wonderful –
thinking of Nietzsche
! Which just goes to show that shopping and drinking and eating all day does not make you shallow and ruined but actually takes you to the Dionysiac EDGE of things and makes you see things that ordinary mortals do not see. It prevents you from being timid. Timid people scuttle around like small mammals looking only at things on SALE RAILS and wearing anoraks and cheap trainers and VISCOSE. They buy things from catalogues and Peacocks. They do not have the guts, or the money, to buy things made out of snakes, and they SHOP AROUND for things when everyone knows that half of what you pay for in a place like Selfridges is the atmosphere – which, frankly, they ruin anyway with their existence – and when we are all going to die anyway what is left apart from atmosphere? What really matters apart from how you feel? And at this moment, Bryony feels fucking amazing. Totes amazeballs.

Taxi to St Pancras station –
whoosh
– where Bryony has just missed a train. That doesn’t matter! Bryony loves just missing a train at STP because there is just so much to do there. For example, you can sit
at Sourced Market and have a small glass of Petit Chablis while watching the world go by (more timid people in viscose pathetically queuing for train tickets or egg mayonnaise sandwiches while Bryony flies high above the world like an eagle or maybe Concorde, or something magnificent anyway) before popping over to M&S for one of those plastic glasses that come already filled with wine, and a large bar of salted caramel-filled milk chocolate. Oh, and a couple of bags of Percy Pig sweets for the kids. Then – quickly – into Boots for some hair bands, bamboo tights, Nurofen and . . . Bryony realises how mundane, how TIMID are these purchases and so immediately adds three of Clinique’s new Chubby Sticks, one each of Mega Melon, Whopping Watermelon and Super Strawberry.

On the train there are some football fans drinking cans of beer while Bryony drinks her glass of wine. It feels companionable. Here she is with her weekend afternoon fun, and here they are with theirs. When she gets up to change at Ashford, one of them actually speaks to her. Even though she is fat and old!

‘Someone’s had a good day,’ he says.

‘Not her husband,’ says one of the other blokes.

Bryony giggles. ‘It’s my money. Anyway, it’s just shoes and a bag.’

The first guy groans. ‘Shoes and bags, eh?’

‘No worse than football.’

‘Fair point, love, fair point.’ He nods sagely.