The Seed Collectors. Scarlett Thomas

Well, sort of. I don’t know.’

      The staff common room is almost empty. It has a strange old municipal feel to it despite the posh vending machines and bright red sofas. Zoe has taken her hair down and put on some sheer lipstick, because, well, it is conceivable that she might be meeting people afterwards. Between Clem and Zoe on the table is a chilli plant in a rolled-down Waitrose carrier bag.

      ‘So anyway, what do I do with this?’ Zoe asks Clem, touching the bag, but not the plant.

      ‘Put it on a sunny windowsill. Give it a lot of water – like twice a day. It’ll prefer being in the garden if you’ve got one, but aren’t you in a flat? Anyway, the only semi-complicated thing you’ll need to do if you keep it inside is hand-pollinate it. Don’t make a face. It’s easy. I’ll show you. You take your little finger like this and rub it in the flower gently and look, it’s covered with pollen. Then you rub the same finger – gently again – into another flower and that’s it pollinated. Now you want to go back to the first flower with pollen from the second. Then to a third flower. See? Keep doing it whenever you see flowers. It can be a bit random. Just pretend your finger is a bee.’

      ‘Don’t bees know what they’re doing, though?’

      ‘No. It’s completely accidental. They go to the flowers for nectar and accidentally pollinate the plants. A little finger is as good as a bee.’

      ‘And this pollen stuff? It’s not like poisonous, is it?’

      Clem laughs. ‘It’s the plant’s version of sperm.’

      ‘Yuck,’ says Zoe, but she starts gently rubbing her finger in one of the flowers and smiles when it comes away covered in yellow dust. She gently pushes her finger into one of the other flowers. ‘Have I basically just enabled this plant to have sex?’

      ‘Yep. Exactly,’ says Clem.

      Zoe pulls the plant towards her. ‘I’ll look after you,’ she says to it. ‘You’ll get to fuck all the time.’

      ‘Oh, guess what I heard today?’ Clem says.

      ‘What?’

      ‘They’re going to do the UK premiere of Palm at Edinburgh in June. And it’s up for their big documentary award. They sent me an email last week which I totally would’ve missed if I hadn’t had a good blitz today. Honestly, someone emailed earlier asking if he could come and do a PhD at our “illustrious universe”. And I’ve had another three from my grandmother since I saw you this morning. Apparently someone won’t stop playing Schubert in the flat upstairs from hers, and this is why she’s coming to the funeral in the end. It’s like . . .’ Clem sighs.

      ‘I know. Fucking family, right? But that’s amazing news, though.’ Zoe strokes a leaf on the chilli plant. ‘I mean about the award.’

      ‘Yeah. Thanks. And I’m going to be on the judging panel for the nature documentary prize while I’m there. Should be really interesting. Feel a bit like I’ve fallen behind with what people are doing at the moment. The last nature documentary I even watched was Heidi Cohen’s Snow. My god. That was actually last year. Shit. What happens to time?’

      ‘You go to the Oscars. You sit on planes next to plants.’

      ‘How do you know about that?’

      ‘You told me. It stuck in my head. What was it?’

      ‘An Echinacea. I’d completely forgotten. God, that guy who put his whole family in Economy and then sat in Business with his Echinacea plant on the seat next to him.’

      ‘Anyway, it’s all in the screenplay I’m writing about your life.’

      ‘Be serious.’

      ‘I am. I’ll ask for your permission when it’s done, obviously. And check all the plant names or whatever.’

      ‘God.’ Clem groans, but does not look displeased.

      ‘Anyway, all great for the REF. Esteem indicator thingies, or whatever. I mean award nominations and panels and stuff.’

      The Research Excellence Framework is basically what the World Cup would become if academics organised it. It comes around every six or seven years in some form or other but it’s always changing its name and its rules. But essentially whoever publishes the most and best books and does the most glamorous things with the biggest audiences wins. What do they win? Government funding for their department. This has been so vastly reduced in recent years that even the maximum amount is not even worth getting any more, at least not if you’re in the arts or humanities. But the more funding the department gets, the better everyone thinks it is. The winners will always be Oxford and Cambridge so the pressure is on to get that third place, which last time went to the London School of Economics. Being on TV, as Zoe’s work has, is particularly good. But she’ll need to get at least one more film out before 2014. Clem has Palm, which is better than anything anyone else in Film has. Of course, she still needs to finalise her whole entry. She’ll put in Palm and that new documentary she’s working on, Life. And then she’ll probably have to write a couple of journal articles to make up her four outputs. Zoe can get away with two – maybe even one – because she is so new.

      ‘So are you going to celebrate with Ollie?’

      ‘What?’

      ‘The documentary award nomination.’

      ‘I don’t know. I’ve got my great-aunt’s funeral to go to next Thursday and by the time I’ve recovered from having all my family in one room at once it’ll probably be too late. Anyway, we celebrated the Academy Awards thing, and everything else. I’ve done too much celebrating this year.’ She downs the last of her double espresso. ‘Sorry, that makes me sound like an idiot.’

      ‘Invite me next time. I’ll help you celebrate properly.’

      ‘Yeah, I will. Thanks. But you know, at the moment it would just be great to have some peace and quiet. I mean, it’s been an amazing year with the film doing so well, but I just want to switch it off now. You must understand. You must have had that with Wet, for example?’

      ‘I didn’t almost win an Oscar for it.’

      ‘No, but still.’

      ‘You are happy, though, surely?’

      Clem smiles at Zoe. ‘No, not really.’

      Fleur is sitting on a huge sofa in the drawing room of the Soho Hotel doing an echo breath, which is where you breathe out, hold, and then breathe out some more. It’s supposed to help undo the ego. It hasn’t undone Fleur’s ego but at least it’s got rid of some of the stale crap from her lungs: a few atoms from Marilyn Monroe’s last breath, perhaps, which apparently we all have in our lungs at any given time. Fleur has just had what was supposed to be an hour with Skye Turner, but somehow turned into an hour and a half. Skye’s assistant had originally booked yoga and meditation, but in fact Skye just wanted to vent about her manager and so it became a kind of therapy session. Of course, that’s fine – listening to people vent is also what Fleur does – but she does get frustrated when people don’t follow her advice. It’s worst when she says something amazing that Oleander has said in the past to her – like ‘What does your heart say?’ or ‘What would Love do?’ – and it has no effect, or the other person just says, ‘I don’t know’.

      People always know what their hearts say and what Love would do, even if they don’t want to admit it. Your heart might say ‘I want to fuck my neighbour’, or ‘I want to leave my job’, and you might not like it but it’s always a good idea to get it out, put it on the table and have a proper look at it. Your heart, not your mind, is what connects you to the universe. And maybe you should fuck your neighbour. After all, what you do on the level of form does not matter one little bit. Fleur said something like this to Skye Turner before and Skye suddenly stopped