Chapter Five Not Mushroom in Here #4
For some reason I feel like I should be jumping out of the car and running towards that giant pulsating mushroom, despite how noxious and evil it looks.
I must get to it.
I must touch it.
I must lick it.
I must know it . . .
Every fibre of my being wants me to go over to that mushroom, because something is very, very wrong with it, and I must do something to help.
It should be a bright, shining mushroom. Full of life and vigour. Not the pulsating, cancerous thing it has become. It is sick. It is going to die, if I don’t so something.
I open the car door, which takes four weeks, three days and seventy-eight minutes.
I climb out of the car, which takes six centuries.
I start to walk down the street, and time stretches out in front of me like a path I can never reach the end of. Ice ages are in front of me. Epochs of time I can scarcely comprehend. The formation of the universe lies between me and the mushroom.
But I must help it! I must save it!
I must!
‘Charlie!’ I hear a voice scream.
And suddenly I am returned to what passes for the real world.
But I am still on a road.
The one outside Jack’s house.
With a set of headlights coming right at me.
A car horn blares, and I feel hands roughly pulling me backwards. I stumble, my heels catching on the kerb behind me, and can do nothing to stop myself from falling.
Jack, Leo and I all come crashing down onto the grass verge in front of Jack’s house.
The feel of cold, wet grass up my back and legs goes a long way to pulling me out of my drug-induced state.
Enough to bring me back to the present, anyway.
The memory of that pulsating mushroom is still crystal clear, though. No matter how hard I shake my head.
‘I . . . I . . . I couldn’t do anything to save it!’ I wail at both of my friends, the tears now coursing down my cheeks.
‘Save what?’ Jack asks as he rises from the grass, spitting some out of his mouth as he does so.
I lie there looking at him for a moment in an agony of ignorance. ‘I don’t know!’ I eventually screech. ‘A big mushroom, I think? I don’t know!’
‘Let’s maybe get you inside,’ Jack says, his face a picture of genuine concern. ‘And we’ll lock the door, so you can’t go off on any more almost fatal adventures.’
I rise to my feet, and suddenly feel a bone-cold chill. ‘How long have I been out here?’
Leo glances at his watch. ‘We lost track of you about forty-five minutes ago,’ he says. ‘We were . . . somewhat distracted.’
Jack barks a laugh. ‘That’s putting it mildly. You were trying to bury yourself under the driver’s seat, and I was caressing Gormley’s hot plate.’
‘Are you . . . Are you both feeling better?’ I ask them, very much hoping they are.
Jack nods. ‘I feel a lot straighter than I did an hour ago,’ he tells me, before holding a hand up in front of his face. ‘Everything is a bit blurry, and I feel like I’m walking about on a cloud, but other than that, things have calmed down a lot, yes.’
Leo nods. ‘All I can see now is the streetlights above us leaving tracers across the sky, whenever I look away from them. I also have a very dry mouth.’
I look up, and sort of see what he means. Each street lamp looks like the burning eye of Sauron to me, but other than that, and the cold I feel down my back, the world seems to have returned to something akin to normality. ‘I guess Nautilus was right. The dose was a small one.’
Jack groans. ‘Yes . . . but I was expecting to feel a bit happy and light-headed for a few hours. That’s the kind of small dose I thought it would be. Not one that makes you think your caravan is a dog for twenty minutes before bringing you crashing back to earth.’
‘Let’s get inside, eh?’ I say, shivering. ‘My excursion into the unknown has left me very cold and wet.’
Jack nods, and walks us back up to the house, where he invites us into the lounge, and pumps the central heating up a bit.
He then makes us all a coffee, and when I’ve had a few sips of that, I start to feel a little warmer, and a little more myself. The effects of the mushrooms really are wearing off now – although the memory of what happened to me on them most certainly is not.
‘You want to talk about it?’ Leo asks me.
I look at him blankly. ‘I don’t know. It was horrible. And I don’t understand it.’ I roll my eyes. ‘I thought doing this might help us all understand things a little better, but it’s only made it worse.’
‘That’s just you, I think, champ,’ Jack says. ‘Leo and me know what’s going on with us. We told you that.’
I nod in a resigned fashion. He’s right. I’m the only one who still can’t quite fathom why he’s having such a hard time of it.
When I tell them both about the flashback to the crash and pulsating mushroom, the pair of them think for a second about what the hell they should respond.
‘It meant nothing,’ Jack says, with no small degree of surety. ‘You were high as shit on mushrooms, so no wonder one popped up in your hallucination.’
‘He’s probably right,’ agrees Leo. ‘Don’t spend too much time over-analysing it. You’ll drive yourself mad.’
I heave a sigh. ‘I wanted this to work, damn it.’ I look from one to the other. ‘Did either of you get anything from the experience?’
‘A headache,’ Jack says in a deadpan voice.
‘Not really, Charlie. Sorry,’ Leo adds. ‘If the mushrooms were supposed to relieve some of our anxieties, I think they just managed to do the exact opposite.’ He looks uncomfortable. ‘I never want to feel that kind of dread again.’
I’m not all that sure whether he’s referring to what he felt while tripping, or what he felt when he was whacked by Gandalf.
I am disconsolate at this news.
I did so want this to work.
Jack gets up and comes to sit next to me on the couch. He pops an arm around my shoulder. ‘Look, try not to let it get you down too much,’ he says. ‘We had a go at something that was a long shot anyway, and nobody got hurt.’
‘I was nearly run over.’
‘. . . apart from you nearly getting run over, yes. But let’s gloss over that and just be grateful that none of us suffered some sort of permanent mental breakdown, and are now squatting on my roof naked, throwing their own shit at passers-by.’
I guess this is a good point. If you look at it from a certain angle, and have at least four shots of rum in you.
‘It accomplished nothing, though,’ I argue.
I hate that. I can’t tell you how much I hate that.
‘Hey,’ Jack says, squeezing my shoulder. ‘It’s given you a new, lifelong fear of mushrooms, hasn’t it?’
I give him a look built on foundations of the purest disdain. ‘Thanks for that.’
I’m trying to sound dry and humorous, but there’s a catch to my voice that betrays something far more honest.
I think I am afraid of mushrooms, now. Or at least what mushrooms may represent. That pulsating, nasty thing sat there on the road terrifies me, and I have no idea why.
Aaaargh!
It’s all so frustrating.
‘I think it’s time for me to go home,’ Leo says, rising from the chair he’s sat in. He looks about as exhausted as I feel. Whatever stimulant effect the mushrooms were having has clearly worn off for all three of us.
‘Taxis,’ Jack demands, also rising. ‘There’s no way either of you are driving.’
‘Had no intention to,’ Leo says. ‘Everything is still quite fuzzy, and I keep jumping at shadows. I’ll pick the car up tomorrow.’
‘Me too,’ I agree. ‘Let’s face it, my track record with driving hasn’t been great recently, so best I don’t get behind the wheel right now, eh?’
My poor attempt at humour falls completely flat. Neither of them laughs. In fact, they both look at me with something more akin to pity.
On my way out of the door some ten minutes later, when my taxi arrives to pick me up and after Leo’s has already left, Jack holds me back for a second and says, ‘Please don’t let this get you down, mate.
Just pass it off as another one of our famous group cock-ups and move on.
Just more Shenanigans. You know, like Satan’s Arse? ’
I shudder at the memory.
Around Leo’s birthday every year – which falls a week and a half after mine, and two weeks before Jack’s – the three of us take ourselves off somewhere for a boys’ weekend away.
We’ve done it for the past fifteen years without fail, other than during the pandemic.
We rotate who gets to choose what we do, and one year it was Jack’s turn to arrange the trip.
He found Satan’s Arse, and took us into it.
Satan’s Arse was an Airbnb we rented in France for our weekend away, back when the service was first getting up and running – and the place was so named because everything in it was cursed by the lord of hell himself.
We spent a day and a half there before vacating.
It was a waking nightmare of dirt, broken equipment, trespassers, farmyard animals and at least one World War II-era land mine.
But I would frankly stay there for a whole month, rather than go through what I’m going through at the moment. I might not sleep any better thanks to the chickens, but at least I wouldn’t have the nightmares, and a permanent cloying sense of abstract anxiety.
I also wouldn’t eat the bloody mushrooms.
I’m too tired to point all this out to Jack, who I know is just trying to help. ‘I won’t,’ I tell him. ‘On to the next thing.’
Jack’s expression goes flat. ‘Next thing?’
‘Taxi’s here!’ I tell him, pointing down the driveway – and making off in the direction of it, before he has chance to further question me on what I meant by that.
I’m not giving up.
Not at all.
Okay, psilocybin clearly wasn’t the answer, but there is one out there somewhere. I just have to find the right thing for us to try that will unlock it.
Because I can’t stand to see Leo looking as scared as he does, and Jack’s bravado doesn’t fool me for one moment. Even in my drug-addled state, I could see the fear on his face when he was holding Leo back from running out of the door.
Maybe the mushrooms were more useful than I first thought. They’ve certainly highlighted just how much their experiences have impacted my best friends.
What about you? What did it highlight for you?
I don’t have an answer for that. I’m as in the dark as I ever was. I still don’t understand why the silly bloody car crash is doing what it’s doing to me.
So frustrating!
The conversation I have with Annie when I arrive at her place is not what you’d call a constructive one. She was disappointed with me, as you’d expect. This made me feel like I weighed about a hundred tonnes.
There’s part of me that wishes I’d just gone back to mine, on my own – which is something I hate to admit.
But I went to her flat, and I let her tear a few strips off me, because the whole thing with the mushrooms did end up being a very stupid idea – no matter how much research I’d done about it beforehand.
And I didn’t want to have an argument with her.
Not at all. Keeping things happy between me and Annie is my paramount concern.
But I should have gone home alone. That would have been better . . .
Needless to say, I hardly get any sleep that night, and when I eventually do, I’m woken from it by a very concerned-looking Annie.
‘Wass’up?’ I say, rubbing my eyes.
‘You were moaning about a giant mushroom, Charlie,’ she says. ‘No. More than moaning. Whining. Like a scared dog.’
‘It’s nothing. Honestly,’ I tell her. ‘Just the after-effects of what we did earlier. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.’
Annie closes her eyes briefly and tries very hard not to look annoyed. This just makes her look upset, though, which is worse. ‘Charlie, why are you trying to shut me out?’
I stare at her for a moment. ‘I’m not.’
‘Yes, you are,’ she sighs. ‘And I don’t really know why. We’ve been together over six months now. We should be . . . closer.’
My panic levels rise. ‘We are close,’ I try to reassure her. ‘I’ve never felt closer to anyone, to be honest with you.’
‘It doesn’t feel like it.’ She runs a hand that’s shaking slightly through her hair.
‘You keep telling me everything is fine, but whining about a giant evil mushroom in the middle of the night is not fine. You do need to see a doctor. But you won’t listen.
I wish I knew why you were being like this with me. ’
I’m suddenly aware of the large space that exists between us in the bed.
This should be impossible, as it’s only a small double.
I reach out across the strange gap and take Annie’s hand.
‘I’m sorry you feel like I’m shutting you out, but I’m honestly not.
I’m just going through a few things at the moment.
Temporary things, that I’m sure I’ll come out of . . . that I’m sure I can fix.’
‘How can you be sure?’
I shrug. ‘Because I always have in the past. There’s not been any problem I couldn’t solve. And I don’t see this being any different. I just need a little more time, that’s all.’
Annie looks into my eyes for a moment. ‘Mr Fixit. That’s you.’
I laugh. ‘Probably.’
‘But what if this is something you can’t fix, Charlie?’
I shake my head. ‘No, I don’t believe that. You have to trust me. Just give me time. Please?’
She continues to study me for a few moments. I find it both a wonderful and an uncomfortable feeling in equal measure.
‘You just need time,’ she says.
I nod hard. ‘Yes! That’s right.’
‘I can give you that,’ she eventually says with something of a sigh.
But what she doesn’t say is how much time she’s going to give me.
. . . that’s okay, though. I can work with what I’ve got. I always work with what I’ve got. I will get this problem sorted out. I will. Annie won’t have to worry anymore. She won’t feel like I’m shutting her out, because there will be nothing to shut out. I’ll be fine.
And hey, look at it this way: I know not to try something as stupid as magic mushrooms again, don’t I? That’s useful information to have. That’s progress. I am learning valuable lessons. And that’s a good thing.
‘If it’s okay with you, I’m going to try to go back to sleep now,’ I say to her in a lighter tone of voice. The space between us in the bed feels like it’s a bit smaller now.
‘Alright, but if you start screaming about toadstools, I’m waking you up again.’
I chuckle. ‘Fair enough.’
We’re both trying to sound light and breezy, but I doubt anyone looking in from the outside would believe it for a second.
Annie must have been very tired, because she goes back off to sleep in seconds, but I don’t drift off for another hour or so. I keep thinking about the strange and worrying sense of space I felt between Annie and me just now.
A space that’s probably just about big enough to fit a giant, pulsating mushroom . . .