The Seed Collectors (44 page)

‘Mummy?’

‘Yes, Holly.’

‘Mummy? When can I play tennis again?’

‘When you’re better.’

‘And when will I be better?’

‘When you weigh at least six stone.’

‘BUT, MUMMY.’

‘I’m not arguing about this, Holly.’

‘Has Dave rung you yet?’

‘No. You must have made a mistake.’

‘I did not make a mistake!’

‘In any case, you don’t want to play county tennis. It would completely take over your life. You know, some of those Olympic gymnasts from Russia lost their whole childhoods, and . . .’

‘BUT, MUMMY, ALL I WANT TO DO IS PLAY TENNIS.’

‘You don’t need to shout.’

‘It is LITERALLY the only thing I enjoy doing.’

‘You enjoy reading.’

‘Compared with tennis I hate reading.’

‘Well, what about watching films on the laptop?’

‘I only like watching tennis matches on YouTube on the laptop.’

‘Well, I just don’t think tennis has been very healthy for you so far.’

‘This is so, so unfair.’

Things Charlie does before running:

Takes 2 Nurofen

Takes 2 Devil’s Claw tablets

Takes 3 magnesium tablets

Massages calves gently with Pro-Tech massage stick

Eats one dried apricot

Eats half a tablespoon of honey

Does calf raises

Performs myofascial release on calves with old tennis ball

Applies arnica gel to lower back, knees, shins, calves and Achilles tendons

Puts on compression socks

Performs myofascial release on lower back with spiky massage ball

Puts on Vibrams

Runs on the spot for two minutes

Stretches hamstrings

Stretches quads

Performs myofascial release on quads and ITB with Pro-tech massage stick

Eats one more dried apricot

Stretches calves

Uses foam roller on calves, hamstrings, quads, lower back

Applies Biofreeze gel to lower back, knees and quads

When Fleur and Skye sit together now it is just pure sitting. Skye has the blue cushion and Fleur has the red cushion, although sometimes it’s the other way around. And they wear anything. Not the kind of ‘anything’ that takes thought, preparation, a glance in the mirror. This is not about doing ballet with tights ripped just so and your hair brushed to look unbrushed with nude lipstick and brown mascara. In
fact, Fleur and Skye do brush their hair for these sessions. They brush it and neatly tuck it behind their ears. They don’t wear make-up: it feels sticky and wrong. But if they did it wouldn’t matter either. Today Fleur is wearing pink socks, blue jeggings and a yellow T-shirt with a red heart on it. Skye is wearing denim-effect hot pants with Nike pool sliders and a T-shirt someone left at Namaste House that has hot-rock holes and says ‘Rap for Jesus’. Fleur has just finished teaching her Body and Soul yoga class which this week contained ninety per cent arthritic old ladies from Sandwich and ten per cent famous tennis player, and all the old ladies laughed because he still could not cross his legs AT ALL and was even less flexible than them and could not do a headstand because he was too scared. Nice muscles though, they all agreed. Great shoulders. Terrible feet though, with no toenails at all on his left foot, and all that tape . . .

When you can fly, there is something even more amazing about sitting still. When you can fly alone, then sitting with someone else becomes a strange kind of privilege, although this whole thing is becoming harder and harder to describe. They don’t always use the meditation room but they do sometimes. Sometimes they do it in water, in the warm spa pool, just standing there looking into each other’s eyes. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Nothing is matter . . . Skye thinks about when she was first with Greg and they used to sleep tucked up against one another and she deliberately did not breathe when he breathed because she did not want him to think she was copying him, trying to be him. She did not want to be like those cheesy couples who do everything together, have his ’n’ hers stuff and beans on toast every Tuesday night. She also did not want to fall into a pattern that he could break. If she let her breathing fall in with his then it was an implicit admission that he was powerful, he was in charge. If her breathing fell in with his and then he changed it then that would be a rejection for sure. So night after night she lay there waiting for his breathing to meet hers and it never did.

And now this.

Fleur and Skye breathe together. They hold hands, create a circuit.

They could die now and everything would still be perfect.

They breathe in and breathe out.

The man is, as always, incompt and untrig. He sloggers around his rooms in his black and grey ragtails like an elderly magpie with those bleep bleep noises going all around him, a choir of dying things. The bleep bleep noises sometimes enter the robin’s licham and make him abubble and a little gunpowdered. When this happens the robin bobs up and down and sometimes the man then speaks to him. He says things like ‘All right, little red breast? Right little raver, aren’t you?’ and laughs as the robin flies through the window and into his dark rooms. Everywhere in these rooms are thin pieces of deadtree sewn together with lengths of cotton, and the pieces of deadtree have symbols on them, written in the dark liquid made from deadthings. Mostoftentimes the deadtree symbols stay the same but in one deadtreething they change and the man had this deadtreething and then he lost it and it made him all agloom. The bleep bleep noises come from circles made from sap that the man revolves in a box on a table. While he does this, the robin flies into the back room and takes the halfpod that the man has left for him. ‘Cheeky little thing,’ the man will say, smiling. And the robin will fly back to the leafmoss-hair of his last female’s nest and open the pod and . . .

After the pod the robin’s flight is swipping and meteorous and he does not need to visit the bird table at all. He is wick! He is fire-swift! He can also sit in stilth and ro for longtimes and mull, and for a time he forgets about the sparrowhawks and pussycats and the long grey squirrel. In his merrow head he hears whirleries of human poetry and other meaningthings from far, far away. But often the meaningthings
are too many and the robin must sing ahigh to remove them. After the podseeds the robin hears and knows all ancient songs ever sung, including the cosmic song. The man has been searching for the cosmic song all his life, he told the robin once, and the robin bobbed and nodded and bobbed. Is it true, the man asked the robin, that in this dimension songs sound different but in the dimension above they are all the same? Is that why songs are so similar when you think about it, and why we only have twelve musical notes? During conversations like this the robin always simply bobs and nods.

After he sings the cosmic song the robin tarries quietfully around the grounds of Namaste House – the large red-brick structure with its big doors and windows next to the smaller, cosier cottage with gardens full of roses and papavers – and sees all the things he has ever seen, and all the things all his ancestors have ever seen, at the same nonce, togethers. There is the first one of Fleur’s sort, with her long black hair, all cold here after the heat of India. Men with cotton-things and woolthings on their heads. A big argument between the elderlings and then the great one, Oleander, whose name he does know, as he knows Fleur’s, making of the big house a vast nest full of songs and smoke and colourful souls with great scurries of feeling. He also knows the name Briar Rose, not just Fleur’s mother but, the man says, mother of the podseeds. Ah, Briar Rose. With her bright feathers and her big, soft nest. The robin sees her mapreading and planmaking with other familiar people, now gone, but of whom the incompt man often speaks: Quinn and Plum, the great explorers from the nearby village of Ash, Grace, the botanical artist and Augustus, her botanist husband, he who was longtimes in Briar Rose’s nest and made the egg that became Fleur. And the incompt man longed for Briar Rose’s nest too, as did all redblood living beings, according to the incompt man.

After eating the podseeds the robin singsandsings, and thinksgreat-thoughts and balladsmuch long after darkness comes. He stops to
sleep and wakes only when the redbreast man comes on his bicycle with thin deadtreethings and stringthings. Sometimes the incompt man is there to greet him and he takes away podseeds hidden in drearihead murk-coloured cubes of pulplayers. He takes them away! However much the robin sings his great songs of sadness and killing and deep black danger, the redbreast man still takes them away, far away, where they are turned into puffs so ferly and ghastful that no one can ever sing of them, where not only the bodies but the very souls of their victim are rived and betorn forever.

‘I think I’d like to buy ITV. They were nice to me when I went on
X Factor
.’

‘Very well, dear. We’ll just have a look at Level 2 first.’

‘Level 2?’

For the last week or so Skye has been learning about how to buy and sell shares, mainly because Beatrix seems so much to enjoy teaching her. She has her own trading account now, and her own monitor, which is the best reason yet for keeping her iPad charged up. Now, instead of endless fan mail and weird shit from Greg and the
Mail on Sunday
, she looks at a screen of red, blue and black with the odd splash of green. When there is activity on a share it highlights yellow, and then red or blue depending on whether the price has fallen or risen, whether it is being bought or sold. Since Skye has had her ADVFN monitor she has felt a good deal less alone in the world because every tiny flicker is, well, the flicker of a person, an action, a desire, a movement . . . Even at night when the LSE is sleeping, she can watch shares ticking over on the NYSE or in Hong Kong or Tokyo. Money never stops moving. People never stop moving it. It’s like watching ants carrying corpses and bits of cake around in a tiny garden. But in a good way, because something about seeing those
colours moving on that screen makes Skye feel alive in a way she can’t quite . . .