A mushroom appears in an instant, overnight. Not tentative like a seedling, but boldly asserting its presence. You smell it before you see it, a whiff of sour humidity in the air.
I was on a date with a forester. Or, well – an ecology and biodiversity consultant. And, to be honest, I wasn’t sure if it even was a date, but we were walking in the forest in the Utrechtse Heuvelrug nature reserve. I didn’t know much about mushrooms yet – all of that came later. This whole being-out-in-nature, forest-bathing thing – I didn’t do any of that, I have quite enough nature inside my own body: the spasms of my colon, the blood that drains away from my fingertips when I’m on my bike in the rain. She gestured towards a clump of spindly greyish specimens along the path. I remember she told me they were edible yet impossible to prepare: within several hours of being picked they wilted like poppies. As she was talking she put on a schoolteacher’s voice – not necessarily any higher in pitch, but clearer in tone. So precise, so mellifluous. I wanted to put my hand on her neck and pull her towards me. Later I looked it up again: shaggy ink caps, that’s what they were.
‘Mushrooms aren’t plants or miniature trees – they are fruitbodies. They rise from the earth as the smallest tips of a fungal network – the mycelium – in order to scatter the seeds, the spores, over the land, to let them be borne on the wind.’ I nodded, my hands in the front pocket of my anorak. I dug my nails into the tip of my thumb.
It was 4 p.m. and already getting dark. The narrow forest path we were walking on was carpeted with pine needles that were tinged pinkish-red in the low sunlight, almost luminous, like the yellow brick road leading to Emerald City. I imagined myself lying at the end of it, waiting for her like a landscape in need of charting. Mushrooms. Slow worms. Liverwort. Mud. I’d be damp, slimy almost, yet cool to the touch.
When I think about these kinds of things, I feel my breasts leaning against my torso; I feel my heart thudding between my legs. My body is nature.
I like to be on my back. Not because I’m lazy, it’s not a princess-and-the-pea thing – although pillows help: that soft sinking feeling and the urge to rip them open, let the feathers settle on my naked body – but that’s not the whole story. Comfort is superficial. I’m talking about pure necessity.
As soon as I’m on my hands and knees, I’m actor and director, I’m narrating the scene in my head: ‘And now you go from stroking to slipping inside, gentle but determined, and now you fold your lips over it as if you don’t have a tongue or teeth, an infinite warmth, a saltwater pool to float in…’
That sounds hot, I’m realising that too as I’m writing it down, but it’s not, because I don’t feel it when I’m narrating it to myself. Someone like me can only feel when she’s on her back, her legs wide, knees slightly bent, head back, eyes closed. It’s feeling or doing, being the mushroom or eating it. When I pick it, if you understand what I’m saying, I really go for it. The numb wrist, the shooting pain in my knees, I don’t even notice them until the hips arch up, until there’s screaming, moaning, until I feel fingernails slicing into my shoulders.
A mushroom knows when it’s time to rise up from the moist, grey, mouldy earth. It spreads out, not upward but close to the ground. It lies there, waiting for you to take a bite. To see whether you lose your mind, whether you like it, whether you wind up poisoned.
I held her hand. I didn’t get any further than that. A few seconds later she spotted a tree she needed to highlight. She told me the Latin name and instructed me to look at the needles up close. If they were clumped together that meant it was a certain variety. With a different type of pine tree the needles grew separately on the branch. I pretended I couldn’t see properly, brought my face closer to hers. ‘Wait,’ she said, ‘look, you can see it more clearly on the fallen twigs.’
Evidently this wasn’t a date.
Don’t get the hierarchy mixed up. Words lie and body language speaks in dialect. It’s like with cats: being on your back, belly exposed to the other, paws up in the air, isn’t an act of surrender but an act of provocation. If the other cat decides to pounce, they’ll be pinned down, get an ear bitten, back legs rabbit-kicking at them furiously. To kick the guts out of the prey, I once read. Those too are warm, wet, soft, slippery. You wouldn’t even know the difference in the dark.
I was the cat that rolls over onto her back, belly wide open, paws arched invitingly in the air. And she looked on from a little distance, uninterested, and then slowly sauntered away. Careless and devastating.
‘This was fun,’ she said. ‘We should do this more often.’ She kissed me on the mouth, so dry and brief it could have been a handshake.
There was something restless about that evening which had everything to do with that heartbeat in my abdomen, nipples that were still at the ready. I pulled the warm, buzzing laptop closer, hit pause on the show I was watching. Timelapse mushroom, I typed in the search bar. It took me a while to find the right mushroom, but once I’d figured it out, it didn’t take long. A creamy white ball with a slit in the middle, a slit that grows wider and wider, the two enclosing lips that swell and fold open until the inside is revealed. A perfect round breast with a charmingly dented nipple, the kind that’s begging to have a tongue flicked against it, tickling, teasing, as it grows harder and bigger.
When I looked up I saw that the lips had split into the arms of stars, were touching the ground; what had been a bosom seconds earlier exploded into a cubist conflagration. I clicked Next. The mushroom she’d pointed out, the shaggy ink cap: white with a little black clit on top. It grows and grows, doubling in size, stretching tall and becoming engorged, the cap expands, contracts, until it’s almost invisible and it all comes tumbling down. All that remains is the soft sap trickling down the stem.
I clicked, and clicked, and clicked.