Death Cap

Death Cap

  Copyright © 2015 Cecil Cavender

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Published by Woodford Press

  For C.

  I had recently been stricken with an all-consuming fear of poisonous mushrooms. With this fresh phobia had come sixty-eight pairs of latex gloves, a wide variety of high quality cleaning products, and insomnia. The bathroom became a fortress. I couldn’t go out in case I stepped on one and brought the germs back in on my toes. I couldn’t eat for fear of one slipping unnoticed into my dinner and attacking my liver. I couldn’t talk to anyone in case I offended them and they revenged themselves with a Sickener to my All Bran. I became suspicious of everyone. Not even the milkman escaped my fearful judgement, so convinced was I that he was introducing fatal amatoxins into my diet via fours pints of skimmed on Thursday mornings. Ink Caps appeared in my garden overnight. I felt certain someone had planted them and kept a close eye for evidence of tampering…

  This change in my psyche was mirrored by the change upon my bookshelf. Space once occupied by the classics was now taken by innumerable and endlessly informative books on fungi. Charles Dickens was spurned in favour of Wild About Britain. Jane Austen became Safety in the Woodland: Don’t Fool with Toadstools. Countless articles lectured on the dangers of the Poisonpie, the Fly Agaric, Destroying Angel, and cortinarius gentilis, a fungus so terrible no one had ever got close enough to give it a proper name. I even had a volume on The World’s Prettiest and Glossiest Mushrooms, which includes the charming Parrot Waxcap, uniquely green and fatally listed as ‘edible’ by Mushrooms Monthly, which fails to detail how consumption of over twenty specimens in a single sitting can cause gastrointestinal disorders.

  Of particular concern was the Death Cap. A meeting with one of these terrors would almost certainly result in death; a meeting I was convinced I had endured after an ill-fated detour through the woodland one Sunday afternoon at the onset of my phobia. The Death Cap was responsible for the majority of fatal fungal poisoning cases and almost always annihilated its victims without mercy. There was no antidote and it was evidently so complacent in its status that its name didn’t even attempt to disguise it. But the worst thing was its deceit. After enduring three days of fever, diarrhoea and vomiting, the internet informed me, I would begin to feel better. But I wouldn’t really be better. No. The bastard would be destroying my liver until I reached the sixth day, when I would die in painful and sinister circumstances.

  It had killed the great. Roman Emperor Claudius, Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, Tsaritsa Natalia Naryshkina, Pope Clement VII. Even a pope? If God hadn’t spared him then he certainly wasn’t going to spare me. I pictured him spread out on some ornate concrete slab in the Vatican Morgue. Vanquished by the same substance that can grow between toes. Something about it was inherently wrong.

  As it was, a number of weeks had passed since my encounter with the Death Cap and, despite the appearance of symptoms, I was still alive, something I put down to my stoic nature and frighteningly efficient cleaning regimes.

  But little did I know that whatever measures I put in place, however much I tried to ostracise myself from the dangers of society, I could do little to protect myself from the treachery of those closest to me…

  It must have been just gone noon when the telephone rang. I was in the bathroom with a latex glove and a scouring pad in preparation for some heavy-duty scrubbing. My acute awareness of the presence of toxins was consistently heightened in this room, where the inevitable motions of hand to arse to tap handle left them ample opportunity to creep unnoticed into the body via any number of orifices.

  I attempted to remove the latex glove for fear of germ-transferral, but by the time I had managed to extricate the last of my fingers and unbend my recently acquired housemaid’s knee, the phone had stopped ringing. I gave it a minute to see if it would start back up, but it didn’t and I decided I must return to the glove if I was to finish this gargantuan task before starvation overtook me. But as I immersed my hands in my loyal bowl of suds, it went again, and putting my faith in the suds I seized the phone up in a hand heavy with foam.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  It was my friend, Vivian.

  ‘How are you getting on with your fungal complex?’

  ‘It isn’t complex. It’s really very simple.’

  ‘I’ve had an idea,’ he said. ‘You’re going to get over this. I’m taking you out.’

  Vivian is a writer, but he fancies himself as an amateur psychologist. All his most recent work has centred around the criminal mindset. He’s got pictures of serial killers and their mutilated victims plastered all over the walls of his study. Once, as a joke, I stuck a photo of him at the beach in the middle of them, and although he never mentioned it, I have since noted its removal.

  I didn’t like the sound of his idea.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘Out. To a restaurant.’

  ‘Which restaurant?’

  ‘Any restaurant. It’s part of your treatment. You are going to learn to love mushrooms.’

  ‘I can’t love mushrooms. I’ve explained this.’

  ‘It’s quite irrational, you know. Anyway, I’ve already taken the evening off so you’ll have to come. My treat.’

  I tried to tell him that he was neither a registered psychologist nor affluent enough to be treating anyone to dinner, but he wasn’t having any. He insisted on giving me advice.

  ‘Please, Vivian.’

  ‘Five o’clock?’ he said unmercifully. ‘It’s a date.’

  He put the phone down before I had chance to protest.

  I returned to the bathroom with a terrible sense of foreboding. I rarely liked Vivian’s ideas. As a writer he was imaginative and therefore not to be trusted, and when the idea concerned my own mental well-being I was even less inclined to give it my support. I hadn’t even intended to inform him of my changed stance towards fungi in the first instance, only he had accidentally wheedled it from me one Tuesday afternoon when he invited me round for tea. I hadn’t seen him in a while and so even if I had wanted to enlighten him as to my new psychology, which I didn’t, I hadn’t had a chance. By some stroke of terrible misfortune, he had cooked chanterelles, a particularly frightful type of mushroom that makes its parasitic home on trees, and comes in a dreadful shade of orange. Its flavour is gruesome, and coupled with a peppery aftertaste offset by the putrid stench of apricots, it serves to make one of the most awful of the edible forest-dwellers. Its flesh is meaty. I am of the firm opinion that nothing but meat should be meaty.

  He dished the poison out and seemed perturbed at my lack of enthusiasm. As gifted as he was with a pen, this same talent did not, alas, extend to the kitchen. Though he could usually rely on me to feign appreciation, a man too sensitive of feelings to ever let my great dislike of Elvis see the light of day lest one of the King’s subjects be in the room, this same mask could not be mustered for the mushrooms. He picked up the fork and waved it in front of my face.

  ‘Allons, allons, mon ami,’ he said in an unconvincing French accent, a statement clearly prepared earlier on Google Translate. ‘Manges des champignons. Le chanterelles. Ils sont pleins de nutriments.’

  He put it back down when I started crying.

  ‘What on earth is the matter?’

  ‘The mushrooms,’ I said between sobs. ‘I can’t stand the mushrooms.’

  Soon the whole sorry tale had come spilling out like diarrhoea, and while his smile hinted at a certain lack of sympathy for my plight, he made a little sighing noise lik
e he understood, and patted my hand while promising to help me through this difficult period in my life.

  I should’ve just got out then. Yes I did want help, just not his help, because he was worse than useless and potentially damaging. I was feeling far too fragile to risk anything on him.

  I squeezed the scouring pad for comfort, and was brought a little more by the fact that my housemaid’s knee was throbbing less. I checked my watch. If we were meant to be at the restaurant by five then that gave me at least four hours for scrubbing. With a start, I realised that this acknowledgement meant I had allowed myself to be coerced into leaving the house and entering would could quite probably be the building in which I would die. I cursed myself, and Vivian. Then I got back onto my hands and knees and raised the scouring pad with intent. My housemaid’s knee suddenly flared up again…