From Who Do You Love?

Francis Gilbert

At the appointed hour, I went down to the Refectory where the poster had said we would meet the audience. To my pleasure and astonishment, the crowd was big, amounting to nearly two hundred. With Arnholm banging on his drum, I led them all out of the campus, up the hill and into the darkening woods. There was already a buzz of excitement even before we reached the clearing and saw the magical lanterns.

     Rob offered me some mushrooms to calm my nerves. Taking the spoon, I ate three or four spoonfuls of the blackened, chopped mushroom honey. It was disgusting, but having swilled it down with some wine, the bad taste was washed away. So I took quite a bit more, followed by more wine. Emboldened by the alcohol but not feeling the effects of the mushrooms, I shouted for some order. While the actors got ready behind their tree stump, drunken chatter and shouts emanated from the audience.

     Arnholm then struck suddenly and decisively on his drums. The rabble fell silent. There was a haunting moment when everyone could hear the noises of the wood, the rustlings, the hoots, the distant howls, and then I spoke.

     ‘Welcome to the Song Of The Falling Trees, my mime play about the devastation of the 1987 hurricane. We are gathered together on this summer solstice to pay homage to Mother Earth and curse all those who would destroy her.’

     There was a huge burst of applause, Arnholm pressed play on the tape machine and the play began. In the flickering lantern light with the flute music rising up out of the fallen trees, Carlo looked very sinister, jumping this way and that through the undergrowth. The ogre was even more horrific; the pink foam was now a lurid, bloody red. The penis looked like it had suppurating sores as the shadows mingled with the bloody red foam. In the context of the darkness, the rape scene lost any sense that it was metaphorical; it seemed like an act of real violence now. Moreover, the death scene at the end, when the spirits were blown over was nasty and bleak too. It felt as if there was no hope for any of us, that the earth was doomed, that we would all die in the end.

     As had happened at lunch-time, the end of the play was greeted with silence. Feeling exhilarated by the Beckettian bleakness of the play and more grog, I walked onto the stage and started expostulating about the true meaning behind the symbolism of the play, explaining that I had written a feminist play which explored how patriarchy was destroying our ecology, that global warming would finish us all off if we didn’t rise up and fight the ogres in our midst. I must have been chuntering on a bit too much because Carlo came onto the stage, wrapped his arms around my paisley shirt, kissed me on the cheek and whispered that I had spoken enough. He then shouted to the crowd that we should all build a fire in the clearing and have a ceremony in which all the costumes, and most particularly the penis hat, were burned.

     This was greeted with a roar of approbation. The crowd invaded the stage space. Kindling and wood were quickly thrown on the centre stage and a fire was lit. Soon it was crackling fiercely and more or less everyone gathered round the flames. Other people rushed back to campus to get provisions, returning with more alcohol and various musical instruments: castanets, maracas, guitars, African drums. Somewhat against the grain of his nature, Arnholm joined in with the jam, playing along as best he could with the chaotic ensemble. Once the fire was high enough, Carlo and Nick cleared a royal pathway to the fire and brought everything to it: their costumes, the trunk and the penis hat. I hung back, feeling dubious about the enterprise: was it right to destroy everything that I had worked so hard for?

     Brian Bates and his friend were most impressed but, even though the play was visible to the naked eye, they were both concerned that the video recorder wouldn’t cope with the darkness. (Sure enough this proved to be the case; the video screen was pitch black when I watched it. Only the jeering noises of the crowd and the distant reedy lisp of the music were reminders of that weird night.) ‘I have a sense we are tapping into way of wyrd here!’ Bates said. I have a recollection of talking to him at length about his book and making wild connections between it and my own play, but in truth the magic mushrooms and the alcohol were really kicking in by then. I wandered back into the crowd, hoping to receive some praise, but none was forthcoming; everyone was absorbed in their own things. Couples were snogging in shadowy nooks, lads were playing cards and games like ‘Toss The Pig’, and the musicians had splintered off into separate groups. Arnholm, Dom and Rob and a couple of others were doing some seriously fast and competitive drumming in a closed circle. Away from the fire, more laid-back dudes were strumming on guitars and singing Tracy Chapman songs.

     I felt left out. Lonely. I didn’t have a girlfriend to snog and grope, and I felt awkward jamming. My mother, who had taught me piano, always said I had a very poor sense of rhythm, and I believed her.

     I wandered into the woods. The mushrooms were really beginning to take hold now. In the darkness between those trees, with the firelight flickering behind me in the distance, I felt as if I was stepping through a door into another world, where the trees were people and the branches were limbs and the leaves had mouths.

     ‘Why are you here?’ I remember asking them. ‘What’s your purpose? What is the fucking point?’

     It was spooky because they answered back. ‘We’re here because of you.’

    ‘What are you talking about?’

    ‘Don’t you know you are the only one!’ they said. ‘There is no one else but you!’

     Oh fuck, I thought. There is only me! That made me feel even lonelier -- but also rather proud. I had created this entire world. Wow! That was kind of cool. Then another voice spiraled through the wood.

     ‘Francis, I need a word with you, sunshine,’ a voice said. The word ‘sunshine’ made my stomach lurch. From being mildly spooked, I felt terrified. ‘Sunshine’ was what my mother and stepfather called me when they were really cross with me when I was a child. The voices went on: ‘You are a very selfish boy, do you know that? In fact, you are quite despicable…What you do truly disgusts me… You are a foul boy who plays with his bits, aren’t you? We know what you do in your bedroom. I have to clean the stains off your underpants. Do you remember that time when you tried to throw your underpants in the rubbish bin and I found you, do you remember that? You can never escape from me, do you know that?’

      I started to run through the wood, to get away. A rising sense of panic invaded my body. My chest was burning and I was sweating all over. I fell over, unable to walk straight.

      Voices echoed through my head, fragmented and inchoate at first but then co-agulating into a clear tune: ‘Pilky and his handbag! Pilky and his handbag!’

      The melted faces of schoolboys pounced out at me, chanting: ‘Pilky and his handbag!’ I tripped over the roots of the trees and discovered they were the straps of the handbag that my mother had forced me to take to school years before.

      Fortunately, I managed to extricate my feet from them, and found sanctuary behind a dark stump, like the bottom of a stair. I thought I was safe. Twigs snapped around me in the blackness like a door was slamming. The voice of a child shouted. ‘Mummy, Mummy! Don’t go! Mummy, Mummy, don’t!’          

     ‘Guy?’ I inquired, wondering if it was my brother, Guy. ‘Guy, are you there?’

My heart was sandwiched between two metal sheets, attached by some fiendishly complicated means to a lever in my groin. In order to get my heart to beat I had to pull on the lever and I had to keep pulling on the lever to keep the metal sheets banging against my heart so that it would continue pumping.

     Then a voice filtered through the pain. ‘Francis, it is OK, you are a bird, you can fly away from it all. Just remember you have wings and can fly away from the pain.’

     Amazingly, an image of a bird came into my mind and I felt myself lifting away from the darkness, up into the night. Soon I was high above my own body; I looked like a disused factory but I could see my heart still there. 

When I woke my head was in someone’s lap and a cup of water was being put to my lips. ‘Are you OK, Francis?’

     It was still dark and I couldn’t see properly, but I could tell it was Ellida by her accent and her scent. My head hurt appallingly, but as I sipped the water I knew I was OK. I vowed I would never take magic mushrooms again.

     My head remained on her lap. I wanted it to stay there. Perhaps I still want it there now.

     Then somehow I was getting up.

     ‘I think I’m OK,’ I said, wobbling on my feet.

     ‘You were bad there,’ Ellida said.

     ‘I was?’ I said, wondering what on earth she had seen or heard. I looked down at my trousers. Thank God, they were still on.

     ‘I found you on the ground, moaning and groaning,’ she said.

     ‘You did?’

     I fell on the ground, hurting my leg. Ellida helped me up and together we hobbled down to her flat, the warmth of her body pressing against me. Fortunately, Mercy didn’t hear us come in. Ellida directed me to her room. My clothes were quite cold and damp from the early dew.

     ‘Take them off,’ she instructed.

     I hesitated.

     ‘You think I haven't seen a man's body before?’ she said.

     She left the room to fetch me a glass of water. I ripped off my clothes and crawled underneath the covers. Sheets had never felt so good. When she returned, I said: ‘It’s not that I’m after anything, you know. It’s just that…’ I croaked.

     ‘Don’t be stupid!’ Ellida said, kicking off her shoes, unstrapping her skirt, taking off her top and unstrapping her bra. I caught a glimpse of her breasts, which were bigger than I thought. Feeling an erection coming on, I curled into a ball against the wall. She put on a T-shirt and climbed into the bed beside me.

     Although I was aware of the oddity of the situation, I was too tired to care.

     ‘You know Francis, I used to think you were nasty, but now I can see you are a victim,’ Ellida said out loud, feeling my back with her fingers. My body tingled. I would have liked to have responded but I wasn't in a condition to. I would have liked to ask more, but I was so exhausted that I fell into a pained, drugged sleep.