I thought it would be easy to write about mushrooms – the first love of my life, the obsession of all my obsessions – and yet the more I try the more unwieldy the become. It’s a well-known fact that fungi are tricksy little bastards to study, forage, identify, eat; why then did I assume they would be easy to write about?
Like a humble worker ant invaded by ophiocordyceps unilateralis, there was a mushroom in my brain. Or rather, there were two mushrooms – the fantastical toadstools which flourished in the sticky, oft-turned pages of my Shirley Barber and Pixie O’Harris books, and the other, far more thrilling possibility: the empirical fungus. The former crafted my fantasy, the latter fuelled my desire. I knew that, unlike a crush on a hottie fleetingly observed at a concert merch desk, finding a real mushroom would provide long-lasting satsifacion. I remember exactly what mushroom that was. Cortinarius archeri, an endemic fungus found under eucalypts in autumn. Small, slimy, shockingly purple: my spark bird. I’m quite sure I fell to my knees, enchanted by my reality, inoculated by its parasitic gaze.
Mushrooms became my thing. Family bushwalks became stop-start affairs controlled by cries of “fungi!”. My circular compact mirror went everywhere with me, ready to be thrust under any unsuspecting gills. I was a hardened mistress of self-perception, demanding the mushroom peer into my looking glass and announce itself in perfect Latin. I was gifted a subscription to Fungimap, and monthly I pored over the newly discovered fungi and supposed I could come up with cleverer, chic-er, funnier names.
For a while I grew mushrooms myself. Fed up with the powerless pursuit of chance, I decided to become a tiny god, armed with nursery growing kit and plastic spritz gun. Each morning I’d whisper-foot my way down the cold steps to the garage and check in on my spongy growths. They would grow and grow, but not quick enough. Like an addict I desired a quick fix, gorging myself on YouTube time lapse videos. Again, again, again! (it is no wonder A Zed and Two Noughts is one of my favourite films). This allowed me to be patient, clinical. I would let my mushrooms bloat far past the point of edibility, but just before the inevitable shrivelling. Look, friends, family, unwitting strangers, at the monsters I have created! My mycelium Frankenstein <3
Saucy, gaudy, lipstick red, oh how I wanted to see a toadstool. Amanita Muscaria are of course quite common in Australia, introduced alongside the conifer plantations which cradle them. When I did finally see toadstools, I was unnerved by their unreality, pop art simulacra sprouting uneasily from the Oberon forest floor. The Exotic and the Known had hazily coalesced, and I delighted in my connection to the field mice families of Brambly Hedge. I even forgot the dampness in my orange converse from where I had weed on them, crouching nervously next to the car. Yet those pine needles and fairy rings feed the May Gibbs flutter of innocent white babes in the woods, colonisation worming right down to the substratum.
Nowadays I welcome the capitulation of the self to the mushroom in my brain. Not a tiny god at all, rather a tiny speck in an alchemical cobweb of growth and decay and rotting life.
I am at a house party, healing my inner child by wearing diamantes on my face and drinking lychee martinis. Already on my fourth - sloppy, sparkly mixologist upending the kitchen for a can-opener - I chew wizened earthy rubber shaken auspiciously into my palm, lick the dregs up like a cat. I find a boy whose nose I like and talk at him for two hours, dragging up endless translucent lychees from the depths of my cup with caterpillar fingers as I chatter. I kiss him, not well, but I say he is a good kisser because I am a Liar and a Flirt. Play Sister Sledge on the speaker but no one else wants to dance. am talked at by a girl who loves Jackass but is sad because no other girls like Jackass, and that the great barrier reef is really dying it is so sad. i am invited on a ski trip, that’s nice. I must look dazed – she turns to me very hurt – you think I’m a bad feminist for liking Johnny Knoxville! – no, no, i’ve never seen it, more interested in that palm leaf to your left and the fact you’re wearing a very shiny dollar shop kimono. she steps back and topples ceremoniously onto a turquoise plastic shell pool. Out of the house party and into the foam.
The mushroom doesn’t care whether I think about it or not. I’m just a corpse to sprout from.
A shroomy playlist 4 u…it’s quite a good one I think.
Until next time,
Niamh
P.S
If you were wondering, I did find my menstrual cup after all.
