‘How is that possible?’
If she was his daughter he would KILL, yes, KILL anyone who did not want to be her friend.
A fragile smile. ‘Well, no real friends. I mean, not any more.’
‘Because?’
‘And my doctor says I’m suffering mild depression.’
‘But why?’
‘It was like a drug thing. It doesn’t matter. MDMA.’
‘Right.’
‘And I . . .’
‘What?’
‘Well, I sort of tried to kill myself.’
Ollie is surprised by how he finds himself feeling about this. Does he laugh? No, you can’t laugh at someone who has just said they tried to commit suicide. As a conversational moment, though, it is unexpected, and moments like that do make one laugh, or scream, or gasp, or something. If this conversation were a walk along some cliffs then it is as if Ollie has gone too close to the edge and . . . Or is it that she, Charlotte May Miller, has gone too close to the edge, and he is watching and he . . . ? But of course if he was watching he would be the one to save her, or shout something to her or, let’s be honest, not let her go anywhere near clifftops at all. A series of images go through Ollie’s mind: her seminar group without her; her funeral; finding someone to blame (the doctor? Could the antidepressants have caused this?) and then KILLING them; talking to the press; crying at night because you can do all sorts of things to students but you can’t actually LOSE them; they cannot DIE. Then it all clears and Ollie has something like a pure orgasm of sadness. It moves through him in a rush of hot authenticity that is unlike anything he has ever felt before. He wants to cry. He still, stupidly, wants to laugh. He also wants to hit Charlotte May Miller, really to beat her quite violently, for making him feel this way.
‘What made you contemplate something so stupid?’ he says.
‘Just, like, a bad combination of drugs. MDMA comedown plus antidepressants plus some pill that someone gave me to try to help but actually made it worse.’
‘Who gave you this pill?’
‘I don’t know. I was pretty out of it.’
The sadness orgasm starts again, somewhere in Ollie’s toes. He literally can’t bear to have this conversation any more. He imagines this girl, this pure, beautiful, shiny girl, being so ‘out of it’ that ‘someone’ could give her ‘a pill’ and she could know hardly anything about it. What else did this ‘someone’ do to her? You’d be able to do anything to anyone who was in that state, rag-dolled and pathetic on some nightclub toilet floor, or on someone’s horrible sticky sofa.
‘What did your parents say about this?’
Her eyes crawl somewhere off under Ollie’s desk. ‘They don’t know.’
‘But how . . .’
‘And you can’t tell them. I’m over eighteen.’
Ollie can’t take much more of this. There’s only one thing for it.
He smiles. ‘And you really think USC is the answer? USC has made plenty of people . . .’ suicidal. Boom, boom! But you can’t really joke about suicide, can you? You can’t joke about suicide to someone who has recently given it quite a good try. ‘Uh, depressed. USC is a very, very depressing committee.’
‘You’ll be there.’
‘That is true. And look, I mean, do you have anyone grown up and sensible you can go to when things like this happen?’
‘It won’t happen again.’
‘But if it does.’
‘I’ve got an older sister, but she’s about to give birth, like, any minute.’
‘And you really can’t tell your parents?’
‘I could, but they said if they ever found out I did drugs they’d take away my car.’
‘Right.’
‘Well . . .’
‘Look, can I give you my number? In case you do need someone.’
‘No, honestly.’
‘Please. I’d never forgive myself if something happened to you and I could have helped.’
‘Are you sure? I mean I won’t need it, but . . .’
Ollie gives her his mobile number. She immediately missed-calls him so he has hers too. In his mind Ollie goes back to Charlotte May’s funeral scene, with someone asking him if he suspected anything. ‘Yes, I knew all about it,’ he is saying. ‘I even gave her my mobile number just in case, and I told her she could call it day or night, but she never did. She never fucking did.’
Izzy is not in her office. Izzy is not in the tea room. Charlie eventually finds her in the Herbarium, looking through old broomrape specimens.
‘Oh, come on,’ he says, when she glares at him. Why are women always glaring at him? ‘What?’ More glaring. But she agrees to accompany him to the Palm House, which even people who work at Kew have to agree is romantic. Charlie’s favourite glasshouse is the Princess of Wales Conservatory, because of the orchids. But he does not want to be distracted by orchids today. He finds it bizarrely exciting that Izzy is so cross with him. She is cross with him in such a way that she is making a thing of it. If she really hated him she would surely just ignore him. She would certainly not make a thing of it.
‘Nicola is very vulnerable,’ she is saying now.
‘So am I!’
‘You are not vulnerable. I cannot think of anyone less vulnerable.’
Above them, one of the palms is in the final stages of hapaxanthy. It’s very beautiful but also a little sad, like a young princess who has decided to wear all her dead mother’s jewels at the same time. In a couple of weeks it will be dead too.
‘Well, there are things you don’t know about me.’
‘What things?’
‘Just things.’
Izzy sighs. ‘You’re going to have to phone her.’
‘I’ll drop her a text later.’
‘If you don’t phone her, I will never speak to you again.’
Somewhere in the world there is a magical book. What does this book do? It simply changes itself to become the book you most need at this point in your life. If you are poor, perhaps it transforms into a very expensive book. But this is unlikely, because your soul knows of all the things you really need, and it is unlikely that wealth will be the most pressing thing. Does such a book really exist? Of course, it is impossible to tell for sure. And even if you had it, it would be so easy to lose and more or less impossible to find again. What would you search for on eBay? To you it is one particularly essential book; to me, something else. If I gave it to you as a gift I would not even know what I was giving you. Not that anyone in their right mind would give such a valuable book away. Or maybe they would. Maybe, once enlightened, which of course does not just mean seeing the light but also becoming lighter and less weighed down, they would leave it on a bus. How long would it stay there? It would not look like a magic book. It would look . . . off-putting religious? Dull? Perhaps even too light? Maybe it would be The Seagull by Chekhov. Perhaps it would be a book of spells. Perhaps it would be A Course in Miracles. The Upanishads. If you have ever not picked up a book left behind on a bus, it is almost certain that you ignored The Book. You ignored your destiny. You ignored your chance to get out of this bloody universe once and for all. But that’s what most of us spend every lifetime doing, so it’s no big deal. But just imagine if you found the book. What would it look like? Would you even know you were reading it?
Bryony really needs a potato.
Don’t think about it; just eat the potato. Don’t beat yourself up about it; just eat the potato. Don’t tell yourself ‘I’m a worthless, gigantic sack of lard’; just eat the potato. That’s what the book said, pretty much. It was very comforting, and also solved a lot of the mysteries about Bryony’s life. Does Bryony, when faced with a plate of freshly cooked chocolate chip biscuits (the book said ‘cookies’, but whatever) that are still warm: a) act cool; b) not eat any if she is not hungry; or c) bruise her mouth by stuffing them in so fast that she can hardly breathe? We all know the answer, but the reason, according to the potato book, is that Bryony is addicted to sugar. It’s
not her fault if she’s a fat, nervous wreck: she, like all Americans (the book only covers Americans, but Bryony assumes it’s the same for people from Kent) is addicted to sugar, the silent white killer, which . . . Hang on. Is she a nervous wreck? Not exactly, but she is fat and she would eat the chocolate chip cookies, which is two out of three, and that means she has to have a potato now. There is a very long process that Bryony should have gone through before getting to the potato stage: roughly a month of small lifestyle and dietary changes until she is more or less carb-free during the day. She should also have stopped drinking for several weeks, and certainly not had a bottle of Côtes du Rhône while reading the book.
The book only arrived today, but Bryony read it the way she would eat the fictional cookies, and so can’t remember a lot of it. She does remember though, she was supposed to eat breakfast (tick! she always eats breakfast) and have lots of snacks (tick! Bryony always manages to snack). Anyway, it’s bedtime, which means potato time, because a potato before bed gets your serotonin going or something Bryony can’t remember but basically WHO WOULDN’T WANT A POTATO BEFORE BED? Bryony is prepared to cook a potato (well, let’s say some potatoes, because no one normal cooks just one potato) from scratch, but it turns out that there are still some roast potatoes in the fridge from last weekend. Because of Bryony’s diet, she hasn’t eaten any of them. But that was before she found out that they will actually help her lose weight. Bryony knows that each of these potatoes is at least 100 calories, and with the goose fat James cooked them in probably more like 200. But who gives a fuck about silly numbers when what you want is more (or is it less?) serotonin. She puts four – no, five – in a bowl. While they heat up in the microwave, she cuts some cheese (which she doesn’t weigh, but is around 150g, which is another 500 calories).
James comes in.
‘You still hungry?’ he says. ‘Didn’t you like your dinner?’
‘Of course I liked it. It was lovely.’
Because Bryony is on a diet, James has started using more organic chicken breasts and other lean cuts from the butcher. Tonight they had Moroccan chicken stew with apricots and pomegranate seeds, served with giant couscous from a women’s cooperative somewhere in the Middle East. Holly only ate the apricots and the pomegranate seeds. But the others did seem to like it. James doesn’t say anything. The remains of the stew are still in the pan on the stove, but now cool enough to clingfilm and put in the fridge along with all the other leftovers that James is always trying to persuade the rest of his family to take to work or school in lunchboxes.
‘I’m not that hungry at all, actually.’
‘So . . . ?’
‘Well, I’ve got this new book that says that having a potato before bed stops you being depressed. And helps you lose weight. So I’m having a potato before bed. Well, a couple, as they’re quite small. You don’t question it. You just do it. And in fact . . .’
James puts the old whistling kettle on the Aga. ‘Are you depressed?’
‘I don’t think so. Well, I mean, maybe, now I’ve read this book and I know what some of the symptoms are. But the main thing is, I think I’m addicted to sugar. It’s very serious and affects loads of people, and so I basically have to gradually stop eating all carbs apart from potatoes before bed. Skye Turner said that most days she just eats steak and salad. Although I don’t think she does the potato thing. And of course there’s Charlie with his Paleo diet, and look at him.’ Bryony had a great time with Skye Turner at the funeral supper last week. She sat next to her for basically a whole hour talking about clothes and diets and gossip, and not in a pathetic, shallow way at all. Skye Turner gave Bryony a few beauty tips, like putting Canadian haemorrhoid cream, which is essentially shark liver oil and yeast extract, which makes the whole thing a kind of shark Bovril, under your eyes to get rid of dark shadows and wrinkles. Bryony had known about the haemorrhoid cream, but had no idea it worked, or that it had to be Canadian. Then Bryony told Skye all about the seed pods and how you could probably kill someone with one of them if you wanted to and no one would ever know, because the plant does not exist, has never been officially identified.
‘What about cake?’
‘I think there are still cakes you can have.’
‘What, without sugar?’
‘They use Stevia or something. Anyway, I’m just going to see what it’s like. In the meantime I’m also going to try this potato thing.’
‘So you don’t want any carbs except potatoes?’
‘Just at night. Before bed.’
‘And eating potatoes at night is supposed to make you lose weight?’
‘Don’t say it like that.’
James sighs and closes the fridge door. ‘Like what?’
‘What is wrong with you?’
‘I’m just . . .’ He sighs again. ‘I’m not talking about this now.’
He leaves the room.
What just happened? Bryony should follow him. She should. And she does, once she’s finished all five potatoes and the cheese, with a tablespoon of mayonnaise and some chilli flakes on top. She waddles – well, that’s what it feels like, suddenly – through to the front room. One of the cats looks as if he might be about to catch fire: he’s virtually lying on the dying embers inside the inglenook fireplace. James is reading the Guardian in that angry way he does sometimes, where it may as well be upside down for all the attention he’s really paying it. James knows everyone who writes in the Guardian. They all follow each other on Twitter. Bryony follows them all too, but hardly any of them follow her back. After all, she is little more than a cipher in James’s column: a character in a life much funnier and simpler than the one she’s actually living. What would the last five minutes look like if James wrote it up as his column?
My wife is unhappy. She is unhappy because she is fat. Completely ignoring the fact that I love her curves . . . No, he wouldn’t write ‘curves’: that’s Grazia-speak, in which he is not even conversant, let alone fluent, despite quite a lot of exposure. Mind you, sometimes he appears in real life not to know this kind of thing and then it crops up in his column. I have told her time and time again that her tits are fabulous. No. I love her body. God, that sounds dry. My wife’s body is beautiful, but she just can’t see it. At least, nothing from the waist down. My wife . . . My wife has decided . . . I love my wife. Every inch of her. Trust me, that’s a LOT of love. It’s actually quite hard to write a column like James’s, especially when you are not James but in a room with him and he is not even looking at you, let alone talking to you. So my wife has basically decided that the best way to lose a lot of weight fast is to eat as many potatoes as possible. What a stupid, fat bitch.
Eventually he does look at her.
‘What?’ Bryony says. ‘What have I done?’
‘This potato idea is stupid.’
‘I know.’ She pauses. OK. No more potatoes. But she’ll still do the low-carb thing just like Skye Turner suggested, which is going to mean eating amazing things like smoked salmon and eggs for breakfast, or huge omelettes made from five eggs and butter, although to be honest Skye Turner said these should be egg-white omelettes with no butter, but who could really eat an egg-white omelette made with olive oil? Anyway, Charlie has butter all the time. She looks at James. ‘But this so obviously isn’t about that.’
‘Why don’t you just read it?’
Of course she knows what he means, but she still says, ‘What?’
‘I just can’t believe that you actually have your father’s journal from back then and you haven’t even opened it. I thought you wanted to know what happened.’
‘I thought I wanted to know what happened too.’ She sighs, leaving a space for James to ask a sensitive and loving question.
‘Like I said, I could read it for you, and . . .’
Bryony surprises herself with the force of her reply. ‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, for one thing he obviously didn’t want us to read it. Otherwise, why would Ol
eander have had it for all this time?’
‘But it might have something about your parents’ deaths in it.’
‘I know! Which is exactly what I don’t think I can handle at the moment.’
James sighs. ‘You don’t trust me. It’s just like at the funeral.’
‘When?’
‘When I wanted to go for a walk and you got into a huff with me.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, but who just “goes for a walk” when everyone’s waiting to be called in for a funeral? I mean . . .’
‘I was trying to support you.’
‘By abandoning me?’
‘I thought you’d want to come for a walk too.’
‘And leave Fleur with all those journalists? And not help with the whole Granny situation? I just can’t believe you went anyway.’
‘It was just really claustrophobic in there. I felt . . .’
‘What the fuck do you expect? It was a funeral. They’re not supposed to be, I don’t know, light and breezy.’
‘And you completely ignored me at the supper.’
‘I was sitting next to Skye Turner! Plus I was still totally pissed off. First you abandoned me to go for a sodding walk, and then you suddenly had to go off to make curries with Fleur. You’d basically ignored me all day anyway.’
‘So you thought you’d get back at me? That’s mature. We’re a married couple with two children; we’re not teenagers.’ He looks at the wall for several seconds, and then back at Bryony. ‘I’m still not sure you understand what that means.’
Another pause. ‘What?’
‘You heard.’
Bryony starts to cry.
‘And you’re drunk.’
‘I’m not drunk. I’ve had one bottle of wine.’
‘You’re turning into your mother.’
‘My mother drank at least two bottles of wine every night, plus . . .’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’
‘And, since you knew I did happen to be relaxing with a drink this evening, why couldn’t you have brought all this up earlier? Why did you have to wait until I was, yes, I’ll admit it, a little bit tipsy – but also actually totally tired? I’ve got a viewing at nine o’ clock tomorrow in bloody Patrixbourne. Why do you always leave things until so late? I can’t think properly when I’m tired. I mean I wouldn’t even have drunk any wine if I knew you were upset and needed to talk.’
The Seed Collectors Page 11