Also by Scarlett Thomas
Fiction
Our Tragic Universe
The End of Mr Y
PopCo
Going Out
Bright Young Things
Non-Fiction
Monkeys With Typewriters
Published in Great Britain in 2015 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2015 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Scarlett Thomas, 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 920 8
eISBN 978 1 78211 180 1
Export ISBN 978 1 84767 921 5
Typeset in Perpetua by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
For Sam and Hari
‘Crown yourselves with ivy, grasp the thyrsus and do not be amazed if tigers and panthers lie down fawning at your feet. Now dare to be tragic, for you will be redeemed.’
Friedrich Nietzsche
Ah! sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done;
Where the youth pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves and aspire;
Where my sunflower wishes to go.
William Blake
Contents
Family Tree
Funeral
Imagine a tree that can walk. Yes, actually walk. Think it’s impossible? You’re wrong. It’s called the walking palm. Its thick dreadlocky roots rest on the ground rather than inside it, and when it has had enough of being where it is, it quietly uproots itself, like a long-wronged wife, and walks away, at a speed of just over one metre per year. In the time it takes the walking palm to flounce out, nations will fall, people will die of old age, ancient secrets will be told, and new-born babies will grow into actual people who . . .
Bryony and the children have gone, and Fleur is now listening to her friend Clem Gardener on the radio talking about the walking palm, Socratea exorrhiza, and the challenges of filming its journey. It took over ten years to film it walking just fifteen metres, out of the shadow of a recently erected logging station. On the time-lapse film it staggered along desperately like something that had just been born or was just about to die. But the walking palm certainly knows how to travel. It does not need tickets, or require transfers, or have to fill in visa forms. It does not put so much hand luggage in the overhead compartment that it falls on people. It just goes. Most species in Clem’s Academy Award-nominated documentary Palm find some way of travelling, of course. If they can’t move themselves around, then they produce seeds and get birds to move them, or animals, or us. And some plants have amazing ways of producing seed. The talipot palm, Corypha umbraculifera, which can live to over 100 years old and only flowers once in its life, produces the biggest inflorescence in the world, made of millions of flowers. Now there’s a real commitment to the next generation. Some of the 2,400 species of palms around the world are known to actually flower themselves to death. It’s called hapaxanthy . . .
‘You mean they commit suicide by flowering too much?’ says the presenter.
‘It’s quite common,’ says Clem, in her low, underwatery voice. ‘They put all their energy into flowering – or, in other words, attempting to reproduce – and there’s nothing left for anything else. Their roots wither and die.’
‘So it’s not just because it’s beautiful?’
‘Nothing in nature is “because it’s beautiful”, not really,’ says Clem.
Fleur is finishing her tea. It’s a homemade blend of dried pink rosebuds, passion flower, cinnamon and honey. It’s very soothing. Since Bryony and the children have gone, she has also added some of the opium she grows in the garden. She looks out of the window of the old dowager’s cottage that Oleander gave her on her twenty-first birthday and raises the antique teacup to the robin she has kept alive for the last seven winters. He cocks his head. Fleur is still in the cottage. If she goes out to do some gardening, there might be live worms, or the slugs that she sometimes puts in a saucer for him. But Fleur won’t garden today. He’ll have to make do with the dried fruit she put on his table yesterday.
‘Oleander is dead,’ she tells him through the window. ‘Long live Oleander.’
She drinks deeply from the cup.
The robin understands, and begins to sing his oldest and most sorrowful song.
‘Mummy?’
Bryony barely hears the word any more.
‘Mummy?’
‘Hang on, Holl.’
‘OK. But, Mummy, just quickly?’
‘I’m trying to listen to Clem, Holly. You should listen too. She’s your godmother.’
‘Yeah, I know, and she’s also like my millionth cousin, a thousand times removed.’
‘She’s your second cousin, once removed. My cousin.’
‘We could have stayed at Fleur’s to hear her.’
‘Yes, but I think Fleur wanted to be on her own for a bit. And anyway, we’ve got to get home. Daddy’ll be making dinner. And you’ve got homework to do.’
Bryony turns up the car radio, but Clem has stopped talking. Now there’s a guy who had to be rescued from somewhere, possibly Antarctic Chile, although Holly was Mummying over that bit. The format of this programme is supposed to be a group