‘What do I do now?’ asks Skye.
‘Just wait, dear. Or buy another share. You can watch the Level 2 screen for a bit longer, or look at another share on it. I find it quite soothing to watch shares I don’t own, and to watch all the colours change and, well . . .’
Beatrix doesn’t have to finish. She and Skye have both sensed that they feel exactly the same way about monitors. Skye looks for LSE: EZY. She has had a soft spot for easyJet since her very first holiday with them. The share price is 307.7p. She watches the flickering of the Level 2 screen for several minutes, imagining planes taking off and landing, and people sitting there in their silly holiday hats and big sunglasses, before she notices something strange is happening.
Skye realises that she is seeing – really seeing – Paul, a retired airline pilot in Manchester, with his copy of The Naked Trader and his slice of toast, having set himself up with a DMA account, which means he can put orders directly into the book without going through a broker. She sees him quite clearly sitting there, on a bright red knee chair to help with his sciatica. And then, as soon as his order is met, he is gone. And then she senses a man at a desk in a big open-plan office with empty food cartons everywhere and a strange smell of goats. He stays a little while, sitting on a lowish stop loss, using most of the space on his two screens to trade bonds, which is his actual job. And then she sees beyond into his life, all laid out like a spreadsheet before her. She sees a bathroom with a bright red cactus that flowers every winter, and a brother who never phones. And . . .
It is raining on the morning of the triathlon.
‘Well, I suppose you’re going to get wet anyway,’ Bryony says to James.
He remains under the covers. ‘I can’t believe I’m actually doing this.’
‘You’ll be all right.’
‘I feel sick.’
‘Imagine if you win.’
‘Beetle, I promise you I am not going to win. Just staying alive is my goal.’
‘Well, OK, what if everyone else dies? Then you’ll win by default.’
‘It doesn’t have to be competitive. I’m only really competing against myself. And like I say, just finishing is my goal.’
‘I thought you said staying alive was your goal?’
‘I suppose I would quite like to finish.’
‘You will.’
‘I might not.’
‘You will.’
‘It doesn’t matter anyway. I’d like to finish, but it really doesn’t matter.’
‘Right. Well, I’ve been thinking, and I’m going to do the 5k,’ says Bryony.
‘What?’ James sits up.
‘You can enter just the 5k on the day as a kind of fun run. I’ll do it with Holly. She does so much want to do it, and she’s promised to eat a big dinner afterwards . . . And she’s so missing her tennis, and, well . . .’
Bryony expected James to be impressed with the idea that his fat, somewhat unhealthy wife is planning to run five kilometres, but instead he sounds annoyed. He’s annoyed about everything to do with Holly lately.
‘What about Ash?’
‘Fleur’ll watch him, I’m sure.’
Here’s the other thing. What if Bryony wins? OK, not the whole 5k race, because one of the triathletes will certainly win it, but what if, in her age group, and of the people just doing the 5k, what if she wins? She’s looked up the times posted in other local 5ks, and found that people actually do it quite slowly, compared with the times she has been doing recently. It’s sort of inconceivable, but rather delightful . . . For some reason Bryony is much slower on the treadmill. But when she goes out with her Nike+ wristband on she can knock off a 5k in twenty-seven minutes. Maybe it’s the joy of being outside? Maybe the treadmills are a bit old. In any case, winning the 5k would certainly prove to everyone that . . .
‘So you won’t be waiting for me at the end, then?’
‘Yes, of course I will. The run ends at Fowlmead, doesn’t it? And that’s where the cycling is.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Oh, I see. You’re worried I’ll take all the glory.’ Bryony laughs and pinches James. ‘Don’t be so silly.’
He sighs, but says nothing.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No, really. What have I done?’
‘Nothing. I just . . .’
‘What?’
‘I suppose I was just thinking it was nice that something was going to be about me for a change.’
‘Well, isn’t it nicer that it’s going to be about all of us?’
‘Not poor Ash.’
‘Ash hates sport. I’m not making him do a bloody fun run.’
‘I thought you hated sport too.’
‘I do! But you know I’m trying to lose weight and . . .’
‘Can’t you just be happy with things as they are? Why do you always have to try and change everything?’
‘Um. Right. I’m losing the thread of this conversation. I think I’m going to get up now.’
‘I just wanted someone there to watch me swim.’
‘Right.’
‘For God’s sake. In case I drown.’
‘Whatever.’
Skye sees. She sees much more than she should be able to. Like when she puts on a CD, her CD, the first and best one when she wore that flesh-coloured dress, and does that third-eye meditation thing, suddenly she can see all the people who are listening to the same CD in the world right now. When she was a kid listening to Abba or whatever and she wondered how many other people were listening to ‘Take A Chance On Me’ RIGHT NOW AT THIS MOMENT she thought it might be billions or millions but definitely thousands because the world was so big, but if you think about it, even now there are search terms that no one has ever used on Google. The world is actually small. So small that in fact at this moment there are only 125 people listening to Skye’s first album, which is actually kind of awesome if you think about it and better than nothing. It turns out that she can flick through them, flick through these people like a Rolodex, and choose one, yes, choose one, not the naked one, and sort of put in the co-ordinates and . . .
All the advice on racing says not to begin too quickly. But running at a comfortable pace, one where she can breathe through her nose and still hold a conversation (who with?), has meant that Bryony is in last place in the fun run. What is fun about that? She can’t be last! She can’t lose. Holly has already broken away and is running towards the front of the pack. An oldish lady, perhaps around seventy and wearing a pink tracksuit, totters past Bryony. OK. She was not in fact last, but she is now. This is ridiculous; this is humiliating. Bryony summons some effort and passes the old lady, who then passes her again. They are vying for second-to-last place. FFS. It is still raining, and a bitter north-easterly is coming in off the sea. Bryony wasn’t sure of the etiquette with her iPod but there is no one to even see her if she puts it on now. Her gym playlist begins. And everything is different, suddenly, and more alive. She can do this. She passes the old lady. Keeps going. Spies three fat women ahead with Mums for Justice T-shirts. Passes them. She is really doing this!
She is nowhere near Fowlmead when her Nike+ device tells her that she has run 5k. Well, that’s just outrageous, to advertise a 5k run that turns out to be way more than that. WTF? Bryony is absolutely fucking knackered. She has run 5k and has not even finished the race! She is wet. She is cold. She needs a drink. If she stops now she might freeze to death. And there’d be no one to rescue her. She has to keep going. OK. Start the playlist again. Except . . . Bugger. The battery is low. Stumble. Get up. Put one foot in front of the other. Do Not Cry. No one else is crying.
It’s the panting she hears first, the hot breath of wet men coming up behind her. Right. Great. To cap it all, the triathletes are now beginning to overtake her. In first place is some tall thin guy she has seen at the gym from time to time. Then – OMG – it’s Charlie! Closely followed by Ollie. Charlie doesn’t acknowledge her as he runs past, his face
rigid with concentration. But Ollie slows, slaps her on the shoulder and says, ‘Come on, babe. Race you to the end? Last one in buys the drinks.’ And that is in fact what it takes to get her going again. Of course, she loses sight of Charlie and Ollie quite quickly, and by the time she makes it to Fowlmead they are already on their bikes. But she has done it! She has finished a 5k that actually turned out to be . . .
When she gets her breath back she confronts one of the organisers.
‘Not very accurate, is it?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Your course. More like 7.5k than 5k.’
‘And what did you measure it with? That?’ he asks, nodding at her Nike+.
‘Yes, and I’m sure it’s a damn sight more accurate than . . .’
‘Did you calibrate it at all?’
‘What?’
‘Did you calibrate it?’
Oh God. Bryony doesn’t know what this means, but she does remember some word like that appearing in all the blah blah of the instructions she threw away, because really, who needs instructions to operate a bit of plastic you stick on your wrist and . . . Actually, she did have to get the instructions back out of the bin to work out how to connect the little thing you put on your shoe to the thing you put on your wrist, but that was surely all you needed to do, and . . .
‘Mummy, you are such a wally.’
Holly came third overall in the fun run, and first in her age group, but she does look a bit pale. Bryony makes her put on her tracksuit and then gets her a Coke and an ice cream from the van. Then she finds Fleur and Ash.
‘Where’s James?’ she asks.
Fleur shrugs. ‘He hasn’t come in yet. But the others are going well. It’s still between Charlie, Ollie and that guy.’
Poor James. He will finish, but in last place.
‘About that drink . . .’ Bryony says to Ollie, while James is doing his final lap.
‘Well, you’re definitely buying,’ says Ollie.
‘What about graduation day? We could make an afternoon of it.’
‘Just you and me?’
‘Yeah. Why not?’
‘All right. Yeah. Good. As long as you’re buying.’
At first, Skye Turner appears as herself. She melts through the windows of teenagers in Detroit and Manchester and Barcelona and appears at the ends of their beds just like that. Hello, I’m a fucking celebrity, and who are you? Not that she says this. Not that this is what she even means, but . . . Are they happy about it? Not on the whole, no. They drop their PlayStation controllers in horror. They kick their keyboards onto the floor in fear. They spill their cans of drink. They gasp, they scream, occasionally they throw up. It’s . . . well, it’s not like having a mini-audience for a personalised gig. It’s not the life-changer Skye hoped it would be. It seemed like fun at first to just start singing along with her own song, to be the live version of the CD or the MP3, but most of the kids just thought they were tripping and they really, really didn’t like it. They didn’t like it that something magnificent, impossible, crazy was happening to them. Let it happen to someone else, for God’s sake! They didn’t want to see a ghost, an apparition, a freak of physics. Not in their bedroom. Not now. So Skye Turner goes through a phase of just watching them, knowing them, learning from them – without ever letting them see her. OK, she performs the odd minor miracle. Hides some kid’s pot before his mother searches his room, whispers in the ear of a girl not to go down that road tonight, creates a diversion that stops someone’s father beating up on him yet again. She removes bullets from the guns of soldiers – on both sides. Drops money in the laps of the poor. One day she turns up at someone’s door looking like a bomb victim, because of a mission that did go a bit wrong in the Middle East somewhere, and she asks this person for a glass of water, and they give her a glass of water and also a meal and a bath, even though she stinks and looks extremely suspicious, and she is so moved and so grateful that she begins to cry . . .
Fruit
The sunflowers! Why does she always forget everything? This morning, driving into Goodnestone, and the sunflowers were up in the PYO field, which means they must be selling sunflowers at the shop, and there was that thing James said about the sunflower he tried to grow as a child and . . . Anyway, it’s gone five thirty, so they’ll definitely be shutting, but they look open, so . . . But Bryony can’t be bothered to turn around. Or . . . OK, but she is turning and going back. Perhaps she is a decent human being after all, whatever the fuck that even is. Perhaps this means she can stop crying now? Yes. Bryony will get sunflowers for James and everything will be all right.
There are no other cars in the car park, so Bryony pulls up next to the shop entrance and goes in. There’s the guy from last time who looks a bit like a scarecrow. Bryony looks around the shop. It’s low-lit, end-of-dayish, and sunflowerless.
‘Sunflowers,’ she says. ‘I was hoping you’d have some sunflowers . . .’
‘Only in the field,’ he says.
‘Oh. Are they pick-your-own, then?’
‘Yes.’
Pick your own sunflowers. That’s actually very cool. So . . .
‘Can I pick some?’
‘We’re closing soon.’
‘How soon?’
‘Like ten minutes ago?’
‘I’ll be really, really, super quick.’
‘OK. Well . . .’
‘Thank you! Oh, how do you do it?’
A girl comes out. ‘I can lend you a spade.’
A spade? WTF???
‘I’ll be all right, thanks. Except, actually, how do you do it without a spade?’
‘You just snap them off with your hands.’
Right. So here’s Bryony striding through the field, on what seemed at first to be a short cut, with her ankles actually being stung by nettles, which just shouldn’t be anywhere at a PYO, unless people want to PYO nettle soup or nettle tea or whatever, somehow CRYING AGAIN, because all the good sunflowers seem further and further away, and what if when she gets to them they’re like the dead ones from that art gallery in New York? Van Gogh, she remembers. Of course. In the Met. And the amazing pumpkin ravioli afterwards, with that Louis Armstrong record playing that she’s never been able to track down, and that honey-coloured Chardonnay . . . Ah, sunflower, weary of time. Yeah, that’s about right. We’re all weary of time, baby. Is that what it even means? Bryony remembers the way Ollie said it in his William Blake seminar. Ah, sunflower, making it sound like Arse, sunflower, which is what he said Blake would have expected people to make of those sounds, which wasn’t actually 100 per cent convincing.
Bryony is ridiculous in this field. She is too big for it. Too grey and urban and fat, in her Oska clothes, with her Toni&Guy hair and her bare ankles. But the sunflowers are clothed by angels and their hair is made of free love and weird science and the purity of the silent universe and they stand in the field like a row of Marilyn Monroes, each one playing a contrite farm girl slightly too sassily, with her chin jutting out and her apron hanging half off. Arse, sunflower. But what about the youth pining away with desire? That’s Charlie, of course. Or is it? What about constant, taken-for-granted, gentle James, with his ridiculous soups and puncture repair kits, and Radio 4, and finding recipes for date syrup? And he loves sunflowers. Who knew?
The sunflower stalk is so huge that Bryony can’t close her hand around it. In fact, everything about these sunflowers seems outsized. They are not like the puny things you get in supermarkets. They’re . . . actually, they are really surprisingly hard to break. You can snap the stalk easily enough but the thick fibrous strands that run down it cannot be broken so easily. Is that what the spade would have been for? But Bryony can’t visualise it. In the end she pulls and pulls and imagines the sunflower screaming, like in that documentary her parents worked on, all those years ago. She imagines the plant screaming and pleading with her to stop, but still she pulls and pulls and the fibres peel off slowly like thick pieces of skin until they are virtually at ground le
vel, where they snap. But of course the stalk is now ruined. The fibres took so much flesh with them that the sunflower cannot stand up properly. It droops, dying. Arse, sunflower, weary of time. Bryony discards it and starts again.
‘What are you doing?’
Pi is standing in the doorway in the thick black dressing gown that Fleur bought for him. He is wearing the cashmere slippers that she knitted for him. He is holding an empty Wedgwood mug. The one that she bought for him, specially, to be his mug when he is here. He is still here. Fleur is sitting at her writing desk, writing.
‘Hmm?’ As well as writing, she is watching the robin, who has just finished his morning bath. What is it about birds when they bathe? They manage to look both comical and fiercely proud. Fleur always feels so happy when a gift she has offered is accepted. For the first few days the birds ignored the birdbath. Now they all use it, even the woodpecker. And also the squirrel, and the estate agent’s cat. Elsewhere in the garden, a bee sucks the dregs of nectar from a drooping verbena like it is 5 a.m. at a party in a place with carpet on only the middle part of the stairs.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m writing.’
‘You don’t write.’
‘Well, I am. I mean, just . . .’
‘What on earth are you writing?’
‘Just stuff that Oleander used to say. I’m getting the Prophet to give me stuff too. And recent clients like Skye Turner. You know, like . . .’
‘Oh, I see. “What does your heart say?”’
‘Well, yes, and also . . .’
‘“What would Love do?”’
‘Yes, but as well as that . . .’
‘You don’t need to write it down. Just go and get a Paulo Coelho book. She was ripping him off for years.’
‘Yes, but I think that Oleander’s stuff goes a bit beyond . . .’
‘And then all the things she didn’t say, but just implied, like “Slavery is OK”.’
‘What? She never said slavery was . . .’