Chapter 23: You Must Have Had It All

Tuesday started with something of a shock. Pauline and Ryan arrived together in her Beamer, and although they tried to pretend nothing out of the ordinary was happening, neither of them was fully able to hide their excitement. Pauline had a new ‘top of the line’ medium weight rod and reel setup, along with a plastic bag with about a dozen rather strange looking mushrooms. Ryan just had a plastic bag with five that looked similar. They didn’t seem in any particular hurry to go to sea, and I was keen to catch up with whatever they had been up to.

We deposited a pottle of miserable looking mushrooms in my fridge and adjourned to my deck for coffee. I was unusually impatient.

“So spill it. You’ve had some adventures.” Ryan was not sure where to start, Pauline began somewhere near the beginning.

“Yesterday we had lunch and went shopping.” She waved in the general direction of her new gear. “One thing led to another, and we went back to my place.” She nodded towards Ryan and giggled. This reprobate was grilling me about tripping and sex, and I showed him the websites I had found.”

“And?” Ryan grinned broadly and took up the tale.

“We went for a walk up in the pines on Maungatutu very early this morning, and I think we got lucky.” Pauline produced her phone and scrolled through some screens.

“I got some good photos. Look!”

She did indeed have some very clear pictures of the strange looking mushrooms growing on pine litter.

“You said you needed to post them on a mushie site so that experts could identify them.”

“Haven’t done that yet. We should take a spore print.”

“Do you know how?”

“Yup, I need a sheet of paper and a glass.” That was easy. Pauline broke the stem off the largest mushroom and laid the cap on the paper, right side up. Then she covered it with the glass. “We need to keep the air out”. Ryan was keen to do the next bit.

“How long do we leave it?’

“Overnight.”

“Can you post the photos on the site in the meantime?”

“Yup. I can do that while you guys get together some kai and load the boat” We did. By the time we were ready to leave, the end of the stem Pauline had broken off was turning distinctly bluish.

Pauline ran the trip, all the way from a pre-launch check at the ramp, right to the end of the expedition and the recovery. It included anchoring up-current of a reef, deploying some berley, and after we had put a couple of nice snapper and a small trevally in the bin, recovering the anchor. It also included an unproductive session jigging for kingfish with Pauline’s new gear, and a little bit of drama as well.

Ryan had decided to strayline an unweighted piece of squid while Pauline was jigging, and a few metres of his unweighted line wound itself around the prop while he was daydreaming about sex and mushrooms. At least that was Pauline’s story. Ryan coloured a little, but didn’t comment. Pauline handled it, included tilting up the motor to the max and leaning a long way out over the stern to untangle the line.

It was my turn to process the fish and clean up the boat, and by the time I came back inside with sashimied trevally and some snapper fillets, Ryan and Pauline were examining the paper they had put under the mushroom cap. During our day at sea, the mushroom had shed zillions of purplish spores and made a nearly perfect ‘photocopy’ print of the cap. Bingo! Pauline was excited.

“Purplish spores are diagnostic!” She turned to Ryan, who was making a much better job of hiding his delight. “Let’s see if the experts have identified our photos.”

Ryan used his phone to open the mushie site, but there was no ‘expert’ identification for Pauline’s photos. His disappointment was palpable.

“How long does it usually take?”

“Dunno. Coupla days maybe.”

“What are we going to do with the ones we have in the meantime?”

“Must be something on the site about preserving them.” There was, and very soon eighteen mushrooms were laid on a paper towel on top of my fridge to start the drying process.

We ate all the trevally and most of the snapper for tea, and Pauline and Ryan departed with the rest. Pauline sought further reassurance that it was ok to share her favours with Ryan, and promised to return and share my bed the following night. I suspected that she was just as interested in checking out the progress of the drying fungi as she was in my body, and Ryan was certainly in that camp. We agreed on another boating trip on the Friday, and both Pauline and Ryan promised to check the mushie site regularly for confirmation that Pauline’s photos in fact showed the ‘real thing’.

I had an early night, but woke horny about 3am, and had a wank for the first time in quite a long while. Pauline and Leslie were both right in there, and my unconscious seemed to have resolved my conflicts and wonderings about where I was with them and what I wanted.

But as I drifted in my post orgasmic haze, I became aware that now I had another problem about what I could say to who. The Vaughans were into mushies, and Stan had admitted as much. They were gathering them up on Charlie Watt’s place (at least). They knew I knew. They knew I had tripped on mushies quite a bit, albeit a very long time ago. They knew I had had no experience in identifying mushies, but now the net was available with lotsa information, so if I turned up at their place with something that looked promising it wouldn’t raise any suspicion and I wouldn’t have to disclose anything about Pauline and Ryan. I could at least get their opinion.

After my usual breakfast eggs, I wrapped a couple of part dried specimens in a paper towel and went along to the Vaughans. Butch was very pleased to see me, and so was Stan. Sarah was head down and bum up on line doing something incomprehensible but clearly very important, so Stan and I drank coffee.

I didn’t do preliminaries, just produced and unwrapped the partially dried mushies.

“Shit! Where did you get those?”

“They’re from the pines on Maungatutu – can you ID them?”

“‘Peesuboriginosir’ I reckon. They’re the only ones I know. There are others, but lotsa mushrooms are poisonous, so we stick to these.”

“So these are the real thing? Trip without getting dead?”

“I know an ED consultant. He says most of the poisonous ones probably won’t kill you, but you’ll have vomiting and diarrhoea and feel pretty awful. But those are Peesuboriginosir. They’re the real deal. I’ll have them if you don’t want them!”

“How many do you take? Do you cook them?”

“We just fry them up in butter with some garlic and salt. Ten that size for the two of us.”

“When I saw you on the beach the other morning you were tripping. How many had you had then?”

“A dozen or so, but many of them were smaller than those ones. We were a couple of hours into the trip.”

“You started very early?”

“Woke at four and I cooked them up for breakfast in bed. We cuddled up for half an hour or so, then got it together and dozed for a while after that before Butch insisted it was time to walk.”

Sarah took a break from her work, and was very interested indeed in ‘my’ mushies. She confirmed Stan’s ID, and made a somewhat cryptic comment about being interested in whether tripping still made me horny. I let it pass.

The Vaughans invited me for brunch, and we enjoyed sweetcorn fritters before Sarah went back to work, Stan continued to clean out the workshop that ‘The Duchess’ had reputedly kept locked since her husband had died twenty years before, and I went home.

Pauline arrived in the late afternoon, bearing a newly purchased dehydrator, the sort intended for fruit and trail food. She was sure it would work for mushies. There was room for lots more than 18, and we plotted a trip to Maungatutu the following morning. In the meantime, she was keen to kill some more fish, and went off in the dinghy an hour before dark, returning with three snapper and a good sized Kahawai. Sashimi Heaven!

But I was stuck again. I had taken mushies to the Vaughans in the hope of an ID, knowing I didn’t have to disclose Pauline’s and Ryan’s involvement. All good. But how was I going to explain the ID to Pauline and Ryan without disclosing the Vaughan’s activities? I parked that problem for another day.

Pauline wanted to talk about love again. I don’t know whether it was guilt about having too good a time with Ryan, confusion about her developing feelings for him, realisation of a change in her feelings about me - or what.

“Can you love more than one person at once?” The hag was struggling for control. I was glad I could be definite.

“Dunno about you – but I can!”

“I’m not very good at this!” The hag was winning. “I feel more for both of you than I have for any other man or men but if this is love, how come it’s for two of you?”

“Did you enjoy being with Ryan?” Pauline nodded. “With Henry?” She blushed a little and nodded again.

“Henry’s sort of different. I enjoyed being with him before you helped me deal with Sister Louise, but since I’ve opened up, the sex was lots better.”