Winter solstice part 3

 

They drove through the night to Ellis Creek Road. Jayden looked over to Matt as he was driving. They turned into an orange gravel road. It was jarrah forest, deep and funky with fungi. He could smell the damp settling in for the night after a day’s meagre sunlight. ‘Close now, yeah?’ He asked Matt. The forest was crowding them now. Jayden could feel it closing around the car. Forget Matt’s bikie family, the trees were enough. They stopped the car at the pine plantation growing in the middle of the jarrah forest.

‘This is the spot,’ said Matt.

‘Hey, we’ve got these,’ Jayden handed Matt an MDMA tab. ‘Special occasion. Let’s go picking.’ The two young men stuffed some beers, rollie papers, water and plastic bags into their backpacks. Jayden locked his car and they walked into the pine forest.

The moon was fully over the trees now and making shadows of them. Their boots trod quiet upon the pine needles. Snuffling of roosting cockatoos and the scampering of critters up trees. A bird flew overhead and screeched at four points of the compass. ‘Owlet nightjar,’ said Jayden. ‘How do you know that shit?’ Said Matt. Jayden couldn’t explain that. Too many references to his Mum’s knowledge would be getting weird now.

‘Do you think anyone’s out here?’ said Matt. ‘… oh hey hey here we go, Jay!’ Matt’s whole dank demeanour changed into a capering Catweasle. In the groove of the trees, he shone his phone torch on a grove of tiny mushrooms. They poked out of the pine needles like tiny fists, all yellowy and nippled in their centres.

As they both stared at the psilocybin mushrooms, Jayden felt his trip coming on. It was almost as though by looking at them, they communicated their properties to him. He bent down to one of them and tapped its cap to loosen the spores into the earth before he picked it. His back teeth began thrumming as the MDMA kicked in. He closed his fingers around the stem of the mushroom. He could feel the muscles in his crouch and the moon’s benevolence. He knew the owlet nightjar was watching him. His balls were tingling and the forest was saying, ‘Best leave now, son!’ The mushroom screamed as he broke it.

Jayden picked just one magic mushroom. The noise of his plastic bag in the moonlight, as he dragged it out of his backpack and put the mushroom inside, felt deafening. Matt was running between channels of pine trees and shouting in a kind of whisper. ‘Oh my God, Jay, Jay! There’s fucking heaps of them.’

Then Jayden saw lights and he wasn’t sure if the lights were behind his own eyes or in front of them. But then Matt was running towards him, his backpack jogging on his back and a white plastic shopping bag swinging to one side. ‘Turn off your light man,’ he said. ‘Got plenty anyway. Turn off your light.’

Matt was on his own trip, Jayden realised. But turning off their phone torches was probably a good idea. They walked together up a slope in the pine plantation until they got to a peak where they could see down to a water reservoir.

Jayden tried. ‘You know Matt, we’ve been mates since like forever.’

The full moon lit up the water.

‘What the fuck,’ Matt said. ‘Dad killed someone. He’s going to jail, Jay. He killed someone.’ Matt began to weep.

Jayden put his arm around his friend’s shoulders. ‘Mum will really like these shrooms too,’ he said and then remembered that night out poaching, when he felt scared and small and cold and his Mum was ranting about poetry or something and about the end of the world.