Free The Seed Collectors by Scarlett Thomas Page B

doesn’t even acknowledge her until all the other students have left the room. Even then, it can take a few seconds to get his attention. He is often busy rolling a cigarette, or checking his email – or whatever it is he does – on his phone. And then he’s always in such a hurry to get away.
    ‘Of course, next week I won’t be here, so . . .’ she begins.
    Ollie puts his iPhone into the inside pocket of his soft brown leatherbriefcase. The screen of the phone is cracked, and has been since the beginning of term. Sometimes when Ollie gives them some activity to do he sits there looking at things on it with no expression on his face at all. Bryony has wondered why he doesn’t get his screen repaired. Surely he’d have had it insured? Or maybe he likes it like that.
    ‘Do the reading anyway, if you can,’ he says. ‘I think you’ll enjoy it.’
    How can Ollie have any idea of what she enjoys or doesn’t enjoy now? She never says anything in class, and hasn’t taken up her supposedly compulsory tutorial. She and James haven’t socialised – well, not properly – with Clem and Ollie for quite a long time. Everyone’s just so busy. Bryony enjoys – just about – standing in a classroom like this with Ollie, with nothing between her and the door, knowing she can leave at any time. The idea of sitting in a room with him for fifteen minutes? No. What if she blushed? What if she broke his chair? What if she suddenly said something like ‘Can I see your penis?’ instead of what she actually meant to say? Not that she wants to see his penis (again); it is smallish, mushroom-coloured and rather crooked, but . . .
    ‘Will the class still be going ahead?’
    ‘What, without you and your insightful contributions?’
    Bryony blushes. ‘No, of course I didn’t mean . . .’
    ‘Well, I’m not going to the funeral, so . . .’
    ‘Oh. OK. Well . . .’
    He sighs and looks up from his briefcase. ‘I did offer. But Clem doesn’t
need
me to come. Turns out I’m good for buying flowers for Grandmother Beatrix’s Grand Arrival, but not required at the funeral itself.’ He smiles wanly. ‘I never said that, of course. I realise – as I’ve been reminded – that if I had normal reading weeks like everyone else this wouldn’t have been a problem. But then again, reading weeks are supposed to be for reading, not going to funerals.’ At the University of Canterbury, where Ollie works, and the University of Central London, where Clem works, it is usual to have reading weeks in the middle andat the end of the autumn and spring terms. But this term Ollie decided to cancel the one in Week 24 so that his students could discuss eighteenth-century philosophy in the light of Derrida. Bryony isn’t that sorry to be missing it. She has tried to read Derrida before. It’s very interesting, of course, and who doesn’t love Derrida? But it takes her around an hour to read a paragraph and by the time she gets to the end of it she’s forgotten what was at the beginning and sort of wants to go to bed. When Jane Austen says something clever, everyone – or almost everyone – can understand it, even after a few glasses of wine. Why can’t Derrida be more like Jane Austen?
    More pertinently: why is Ollie confiding in Bryony? It frightens her.
He
frightens her, with his slightly cold eyes and the new flashes of silver electrifying his hair and his stubble. He and Clem are both greying stylishly of course. Despite now living in Canterbury, they both still go to their old hairdresser in Shoreditch who gives them jagged, asymmetrical cuts that somehow emphasise their wisdom, rather than their age. Bryony is sure that Clem still books all Ollie’s hair appointments. She probably pays for them too.
    ‘I’d better go,’ she says, looking at her watch.
    ‘I’m off to the bar. Fancy a drink?’
    ‘I can’t. I mean, I’d love to, obviously. But, you know, the kids.’
    ‘Let James put them to bed for a