Mushroom.Man Page 2

  I’ve often thought that prey in plenty means no one appreciates it. If mackerel were rare they’d be prized alongside swordfish. When I was a kid, before batteries were common, chicken was a treat. Now it’s a staple. In the city guild archives there’s a document saying that apprentices can be fed salmon no more than three times a week. Salmon must have been as common as mackerel then.

  I take the path home with my haul. From the garden gate I watch thrushes pulling lumps out of my thatched roof looking for food. Like hens on a dung heap they scratch and eat, scratch and eat. More leaks for me. I’ll have to deal with that soon.

  © mushroom.man. May 1996.

  This was the first piece that I’d found by the mushroom.man. I’d been exploring the i-way and I’d found it by accident at http://www.eol.com/alt.stories/mushroom.tale. There was no address, it was just a piece of prose posted onto an electronic bulletin board; a bit-stream, waiting there for anyone to read.

  I had recently discovered a passion for mushrooms, more by accident than by design. During long, lonely walks through the woods and fields I’d begun picking up the odd specimen and identifying it later from a book. After a while I’d begun to recognize the commoner edible species and even learnt how to cook them reasonably well. At first I thought of the net simply as a research tool, and I used it to find out all I could about mycology. There’s a lot of people out there passionate about mushrooms, a vast selection of books and literature both scientific and mythological, as well as some very bizarre theories. The mushroom piece caught my interest. Whoever had written it knew about mushrooms. I found myself as interested in the author as in the piece, so I decided to make contact. I left a message on the bulletin board titled ‘mushroom.seeker’ leaving a brief hello and my address, gbarmstrong@iow.uni.

  Three days later I got a reply – polite and brief. Thanks for the message and the compliments. It finished with NRN, no reply necessary, and I wondered if it had a subtext of ‘don’t bother me again’. I was new to the Internet, and was still learning its manners and customs.

  Having made contact I became even more curious. I read the piece that I’d found again, looking for clues about the writer. On the net gender is often the first disguise, but I felt sure this was a man. I tried to guess where the mushroom.man lived – what state, what country. Was this some old drug-crazed hippie? Sounded like it. Male, definitely. I put my reservations aside and decided to post another message.

  Amanita muscaria. The Fly Agaric.

  Large, conspicuous mushroom. Cap to 8 inches diameter.

  Bright red cap with white warts.

  Especially under birch and beech. Early to late autumn.

  Strong hallucinogen. Used as such throughout history by many cultures.

  two

  Attn. mushroom.man.

  Subject: NRN

  20 May.

  Mushroom.seeker thanks mushroom.man for the e-mail. I know what NRN means, but curiosity has the better of me. I feel that I’m only beginning to discover the joy of mushrooms. They are obviously something you care about. Please tell me more, even if it’s only something about yourself.

  It was brief, I thought, and to the point. I knew that many net users were unhappy about having their mailboxes filled with unsolicited mail, but my message seemed polite enough, and, after all, it could always be ignored. After I’d sent it I checked my mailbox every day, sometimes more than once. I was reminded of a time when I was twelve and I had a pen-pal in Chile. We wrote interminable letters to one another, confiding our innermost thoughts, writing things about friends and parents that would otherwise have remained unvoiced. Like any essentially artificial arrangement it just sort of petered out.

  Maybe the net is the same. People stumble upon one another electronically, your persona can be what you will. You become only what you say you are; there are no other cues available for another’s assessment. Names, too, become a shelter. Like mushroom.man or mushroom.seeker – you are only that part of you that you choose to divulge. A stream of bits connects you to other bit-streams, a two-way electronic dance in a reality beyond the daily. It’s almost like choosing a character in an adventure game; you move your character around an artificial world, exploring, looking, interacting with what you find.

  In the vastness and the anonymity of the net I suppose I hoped that I’d found a friend – or if not a friend, at least someone with whom I could correspond on a subject that we both found stimulating. I felt a little foolish, checking my mailbox so frequently; like a child waiting for a special offer. Still, my urge to make at least one friend overcame my reserve. I didn’t have to wait long.

  A week later I got a reply. This time there was a slightly longer message from the mushroom.man explaining that if he was going to send me anything in the future it would be sporadic: he had no desire to make a commitment. He’d appended a piece which, he said, would tell me a little more about himself.

  Before I moved to the river and this house, someone took the corrugated iron off the roof and put on thatch instead. Probably someone from the city who thought that it looked rustic. Stupid bastards. Tin roofs don’t leak, thatch does. It’s home to more rodents than the rubbish pit at the end of the kitchen garden. The warmth I suppose. You can hear them at night rustling around in the attic and in the straw. Sometimes they’re so noisy you’d think they were moving wardrobes about. Some nights I sit with my rifle and shoot into the roof at them. They go quiet for a bit, then the noise begins again. I tried poison. They die all right, but you never know where. The smell of putrefaction makes you look everywhere; behind things, on top of things, underneath things. And when you do find the rotting carcass you have to move it and it always smells worse when you disturb it. I’m used to it now. At least if you shoot one you know where it’s died.

  I found a rat in a kitchen cupboard once, trying to eat my sugar. I fetched an old fencing foil with a pointed tip. I cornered the rat and it faced me hissing. I skewered it with the foil. As I pulled the foil out of the cupboard I lifted the point. The rat slid slowly down the blade toward my hand squealing like a stuck pig, wriggling, squirming and bleeding. There’s no easy way to kill them.

  Thatch is a philanthropist’s roof. It gives pleasure to the passers-by, not the inhabitants. Tourists stop here in the summer and photograph it, bus-loads of them. It’s no surprise that at the turn of the last century when slates got cheaper people pulled off the thatch and put on slates, because slates work. Mind you, a new thatch works as well, but it’s not new after a year. It starts to leak again; first around the chimney, then along the ridge, then runs begin to form there, then the thrushes come and then it leaks all over. Thatchers aren’t easy to get and they’re not cheap. You have to patch and thatch yourself. The straw’s a problem. Nowadays there is no long straw. It’s sprayed to stunt its growth so it’ll be easier to combine and less likely to flatten in winds and rain. It’s the only straw you can get and it doesn’t last pissing time on a roof. It’s a continuous job – I leave the ladder propped against the gable, ready. Go up the ladder and look along the eaves, you can see the rat holes. The grease from their fur builds up on the straw at the openings. You can see it. They should never have taken the corrugated iron off. And there’s rat shit in the straw. I’ve heard of people who’ve died of Weill’s disease – you get it from rat’s piss. You can’t see it in the straw but it must be there. Where there’s shit there’s piss. One of these days I’m going to put the corrugated roof back on.

  I’ll tell you something else you get in rotting straw: mushrooms. They grow on the roof as well. They turn half-rotted straw into compost – the mycelium runs in thick, white clumps through the wet thatch. Insuring a thatched house is expensive; they say it’s a fire risk. I defy anyone armed with a gallon of petrol to set fire to mine. You might as well try to burn a sodden bog.

  As well as mushrooms in the roof I’ve got them in the house. They grow out of the skirting board in the bathroom. Huge pink ears of fungal growth. Occasionally I cut
them off with a sharp knife, but they keep coming back.

  There was a spectacular one in the kitchen. It’s gone now, died when I fixed a leak above the kitchen ceiling. All that’s left is a dark stain where it was. It’s moist and humid in the house – it’s old and has no damp course. What doesn’t come in from the roof comes up from the ground. When I walk in I can smell the fungal spores. They’re in the air, on the walls, in the cupboards. I can smell them on the clothes in my bedroom wardrobe.

  It’s a dark house with small windows. Even in the brighter days of summer the sun hardly ever gets in. I keep the range burning all year round. A moist, humid house. Good for fungi of all sorts. Even yeasts. Bread goes mouldy fast, green spots grow through a loaf in days. Sometimes I eat it anyway, it can’t be any worse for you than penicillin. I’m aware of the fungi in the house, outside the house, in the air I breathe. Spores surrounding me like a bath, on my skin, in my lungs.

  You can’t get away from shit outside the city. It’s in the fields lying in pats; rabbits shit everywhere, so do deer. I can even see fly shit on the bare light-bulb in the kitchen. The dog uses the garden as a lavatory, uses it broadly, never in the same place twice. The cats do it everywhere. In short, it’s hard to avoid. You have to adapt, lose your city sensibilities, realize that it’s part of the environment. When I first came here I’d never seen a septic tank. Didn’t know what it was, didn’t know how it worked. I do now. I’ve rodded it, emptied it, replaced broken pipes leading to it: I’ve got to know shit well over the years.

  It was hard at first. I wasn’t equipped physically or mentally for life outside the city. I missed the night-life the most. At eleven o’clock at night I would get itchy, a gnawing sensation of boredom combined with the pent-up frustration of having nowhere to go. I was living with Jane then. She moved down with me, both of us looking for the good life beyond the city limits. At first she settled better than me, looking after the garden, planting herbs, picking wild flowers, bottling fruit. I was the edgy one, fidgeting and fretting, uncomfortable with myself. Back then I didn’t know why; I just felt cramped and stifled. After a couple of years I began to feel more comfortable with myself, while Jane became less and less content. Everything began to annoy her; the rain, the mud, the rats, the leaks. The end came the day of a particularly heavy downpour. The rain came through the roof into the hot-press, soaking all the dry, ironed clothes with smelly, thatch-brown water. Jane freaked. Her white party frock that she had kept as a talisman from our old life was ruined. I remember she held the wet frock and cried, clutching it in her hands and rocking gently, silently, on a kitchen chair. I noticed her fingers had become thin and bony, like an old woman’s. It was still raining heavily, the kitchen window was steamed up, all I could hear were the steady drips of the rain falling into a pot in the corner. She looked at me steadily through her tear-filled brown eyes: it wasn’t hate that I saw, I saw a woman who felt let down. In her eyes I had failed her.

  That night, after the rain had stopped, I made supper for us. I opened a bottle of wine, put on some music. I tried. Jane was silent, uncommunicative. Suddenly she spoke.

  ‘I’m leaving tomorrow.’

  ‘Leaving for where?’

  ‘Leaving for good.’

  I said nothing. Couldn’t think of anything intelligent. We ate in silence. I couldn’t stop looking at her; her face, her hair, a mole on her neck. I could smell her. I kept thinking that if she was serious, then these were sensations I was experiencing for the last time. I couldn’t come to terms with her not being there, I didn’t want to believe it, half convinced that even if she did go, she’d come back. She went to bed before me; I busied myself clearing up – giving her time to get undressed alone. It was dark in the room when I got into bed; she lay with her back to me and I put an arm around her, squeezed her breasts, lay against her back smelling her hair, made love to her. The last thing she said before she went to sleep was I’m still leaving.’ I lay in the dark trying to make sense of it. Maybe I thought that making love to her would somehow set back the clock, make her change her mind.

  I’ve thought about that night many times since. I wondered how she could have shared my bed, even shared an orgasm, knowing she was going. A last fuck. Looking back, she was probably right. Why not? What difference was one more fuck going to make to our lives one way or the other? The next morning I woke up to an empty bed. Jane was in the kitchen, her bags beside her, a coffee on the table. She was combing her long, black hair slowly. She asked if I would drive her into the city. I refused. I said I wasn’t going to help her to leave my life. She got up, picked up the two bags and said she was taking the bus. I watched her shut the door. I poured a cup of the coffee she had made and sat down. I looked about me at the damp, peeling walls and my eyes stung with tears. I wanted to run after her and shout, ‘You’re right. I’ll change. Just come back to me.’ But I didn’t. I just sat there for hours. I tried to remember things that we’d shared, moments of closeness, the times when things seemed right, but I just couldn’t seem to picture any of it. It was as though none of my memories were visual, just recollections of feelings and sensations. I tried to picture her face, her clothes, tried to recall the smell of her, but it wouldn’t come. It occurred to me that perhaps I’d never really known her, never really understood her needs and wants, never really considered her feelings, never really paid her enough attention. I felt ashamed that my memories were so inadequate.

  I didn’t see her for years. I heard she’d got married and was living in London with three kids. Married to an advertising executive. You can’t get further away from here than that. When I first heard the news I thought she was trying to tell me something and then I realized she wasn’t thinking of me at all – she was just getting on with living her life.

  Since Jane there’s been no one steady in my life. Women have passed into it, through it, and then out of it. I never really went looking; most of them found me – some moved their goods and chattels into the cottage. I like the way women make nests, keep things together, clean, bring in flowers. All things that I like, but low on my own list of priorities. I like the way women smell, I like the sound of their voices, their feel. I enjoy their company.

  The only pub in the area is a weekend haunt for ramblers, bikers, hikers and families out for a Sunday drive. That’s where I meet them. I have my place at the end of the counter, next to the snug. Sometimes I wonder what makes them talk to me. Maybe boredom. When I look in the mirror I find it hard to assess what my appearance says about me: other people’s perceptions seem so arbitrary.

  My problem is that the worlds I inhabit are becoming less separate, less discrete. The boundaries that keep them apart are dissolving; I seem to move almost at will between them, sometimes involuntarily. Sometimes I have no control. That in itself doesn’t worry me. I like abandon: losing my consciousness in orgasm or drugs. But both of these have time limits built in to them. You lose control for a few blissful moments and then you get it back. You don’t mind abandoning yourself for a moment, because you know, you believe, you’ll get control back. Lose that certainty and you’re looking at a journey with no signposts, no end in sight and no way back.

  It’s a question you have to ask yourself. Are you prepared to travel when there’s a chance that you’ll never return, never come home? It’s a real possibility when you travel into the unknown. You can get lost there. If that’s something that frightens you, then you should stay where you’re comfortable.

  I remember the day I met the mushroom god. It turned my life around – my priorities changed, my world view was shattered, my ideas of self lost all certainty. I used to come to these hills at the weekends and eat my mushrooms. At first I tried to find myself; that is, tried to find the point of awareness that I called ‘me’. I soon learned it was a hopeless task. There is no vantage point, no place from which you can observe that cannot be observed itself. All that changes is the viewing point. I thought of these points as islands, floating in a limitless un
iverse. I would sit on one and observe the others, then on another, where I would have not only a different perspective, but could also see where I had just been. Perhaps that’s what mystics mean when they say all is flux. There really is no hard centre from which awareness emanates.

  It took a long time to get to where I am now. The day-to-day world kept on impinging, forcing me to forage for food, meet people, make a living. Most of my time was taken up with the simple exigencies of life, no time to think, to explore. At night I was tired, the best I could do was get stoned and listen to music. The business of living left little room for anything else.

  Even here I need money, but not as much, not as often. When I need money now I take people stalking or on walks in the hills. I show them the burrows and sets, point out the plants and the trees, give the names of the mountains and lakes. Some of the city people seem to have lost all their physical abilities. A fence is a major obstacle, a ditch an Olympic hurdle. They remind me of the battery hens that I buy when they’re past their laying prime. They take forever to come to terms with their freedom, they still behave as though they’re battery-bound. I was once given a peahen that had spent its life in a cage. I carried the cage to the back garden and took the bird out. For a week she walked around in a tiny square, four foot by two, the size of the cage. Couldn’t deal with the fact that the cage had gone. You have to get used to freedom, make your accommodations with it. Getting your horizons suddenly enlarged can be scary. The universe is a bigger place than you imagine – than you can imagine. And that’s a problem. The short glimpses that I’ve had of its size are terrifying.