The timetable of the psychedelic event took some working out. We knew the whole experience could last many hours, and we wouldn’t necessarily find it easy, living at home as we were, to hide the signs of my derangement. Since the earlier stages were the most intense, it made sense to spend them away from Trees. The later stages would be less conspicuous. On the other hand, it would be an inefficient way to make use of our time away from home if we waited to be out of the house before starting things off. So it was agreed that I should take the pill after breakfast. Half-pill, rather. We had decided on the basis of my body weight that a half would be plenty. Peter was confident that he would be able to read the signs of the drug taking effect, and would whisk me away before my behaviour made it obvious to the untrained observer.
Peter hustled me into the Tan-Sad and had me out of the house in ten minutes flat. I didn’t know what signals I had given off, and was rather startled. Apparently I had been making the shapes of words but not saying them, even when Mum wasn’t nearby. I wasn’t convinced that there was anything so very odd about this, and Peter himself had noticed that Mum could every now and then (less as we got older) work out exactly what we were thinking.
Still, it did no harm to be careful, and there was some watery sunshine. The place Peter had chosen was next to a pond near a sort of miniature weir, but well away from home and also Mrs Adcock’s. While we were on the move I experienced a certain amount of peripheral swirling, but when I was installed by the pond nothing seemed changed. Of course the picture-postcard prettiness which Bourne End possessed in such large measure is always an unstable quality. There’s always a bit of the postcard that seems to show where a body has been buried with a bone sticking out. After a while I said, ‘That’s a pound down the drain, Peter. I honestly think it was a dud. People are such twisters …’
Peter wasn’t so sure, but he was getting a little bit bored and he wanted to go and buy a bag of sweets from Mr White’s. I said I’d be fine.
The ducks on the pond were very talkative that day. One in particular kept making very meaningful quacks. I quacked back — but then I always do. Seconds later everything had changed and I was in the middle of a distinctly tetchy conversation. I was speaking Duck! An instant later, I was corrected. I was speaking Drake. The languages diverge in the matter of verbs, with females using entirely different forms.
What I was being told was that stale bread was a very poor food for any bird. I was being given instructions for wrapping up worms in leaves and tying them securely with knots of grass. I was trying to explain that this level of preparation was beyond me when a hand came round from behind the Tan-Sad and clamped down on my mouth.
I thought I was being kidnapped. I could almost smell the chloroform. Of course it was only Peter, back from Mr White’s with his sweets, trying to stop me from quacking at the top of my voice.
I calmed down then, and realised that the mescaline had come on very strongly. I made an effort to relax, and waited for the optical effects to die down. There was a sort of shimmer sweeping back and forward, an effect of tessellation as if small units were trying to assemble themselves into bigger ones, and sometimes the sunshine made everything unbearably spangly. Then as I tried to tune in to the deeper patterns of creation the distractions died away.
I tried to focus on Mescalito, the spiritual embodiment of the mescal plant (Lophophora williamsii). I don’t know if it was Mescalito — I assume so — but the god came out of a tree and started saying, ‘If you want to prove yourself, I have some friends here who I can’t do any more for. They need help with some simple things, answers to basic questions. How to carry on. Will you help them?’ I said I would, honoured to be trusted with such a responsibility.
I could communicate with the god’s friends at once, though perhaps not entirely in language. The first one I spoke to was called Sally — but then it turned out that they all were. She was very agitated, but I managed to calm her down. I had to explain about grafting and propagation, and there wasn’t much time. These creatures, whatever they were, needed help to reproduce, though it wasn’t clear that childbirth was involved. I saw four or five generations come into existence, and the elders die. Over time I was venerated for the help I brought and after four hundred years they wove me a crown of wisdom.
My mind received in drips
My awareness changed character when Peter started to push the Tan-Sad again. It was getting cold, and he had covered me up with his windcheater. It was time to go home.
Back at Trees Peter carried out the really clever part of our plan, borrowing a record of Mum’s and putting it on the old player we had in our room (when Audrey didn’t borrow it, that is). I lay there peacefully as the music turned to sculptures of perfume in my head, sifting through the events of the day.
My mind received in drips what would have swamped it at a greater rate of flow. I understood now who the Sallys or Sallies were. There were personifications of the willow, also known as the sallow or salley (I knew a Yeats poem about the Salley Gardens) — in fact the weeping willows round the pond where I had been reclining in porous rapture that day. Salix sepulcralis.
Why those particular willows should have difficulty propagating themselves I didn’t know, since under normal circumstances they take root readily from cuttings and indeed anywhere that broken branches lie on the ground. But there it was. Mescalito had been concerned for them. It suddenly struck me as wonderful that the cactus god should reach out in fellow feeling to the willow, despite the remoteness of their families and the huge disparity of habitat.
I had a sense of the willow as a somehow œcumenical tree, contributing impartially to conventional and alternative medicine. The sap is heavily charged with the salicylic acid which gives us aspirin, grand-daddy of the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory. But why would anyone seek a remedy for colds and fevers in the willow to start with? Because it grew, as was symbolically appropriate, in cool damp places. That was before the two branches of medicine separated, and started to pretend that they didn’t share a root.
Peter had left the record sleeve propped up where I could see it. The photograph showed water in movement over a riverbed of large stones. The music expressed a serene turbulence of its own, if I’m any judge of these things. Moura Lympany playing Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. Nicolai Malko waving his willow wand in front of the Philharmonia Orchestra.
It was our idea that classical music and illegal drugs couldn’t both be present in the same room, at least in Mum’s view of the world, and so that Rachmaninoff would wash all suspicion away. An inspired notion, as long as it didn’t catch on too widely and become discredited. Dear Marje, I’m at my wits’ end about my teenaged son. He’s started listening to Beethoven. Is he taking drugs?
The soloist’s name was a magic spell in its own right, whether I was in my right mind or the righter one brought on by the drug. Moura Lympany. Those syllables struck my mental membranes with the rippled impacts of liquid timpani.
Over time I had to modify my ideas about the drug I had ingested. It was a matter of simple mathematics. It would have needed 500 milligrams or so of the active ingredient of Lophophora williamsii to deliver the organic version of such an experience. It would have been a substantial tablet, and not the little pill I had bought, which must therefore have been LSD. I had a moment of hallucinated insight, connecting the synthesising of salicylic acid in 1897 by Felix Hoffmann with the synthesising of lysergic acid by Albert Hoffmann in 1943. Might not the Hoffmanns be father and son? Well, no they couldn’t, since in reality Albert’s surname has only the one n. I was reluctant to leave the domain of the drug, where everything links up and nothing is superfluous, nothing dangles.