‘This is my friend Zoey.’
He nods at her.
‘I’ve heard so much about you!’ she tells him. And she sighs, a sound that makes her seem small and helpless. Every boy I ever knew thought Zoey was gorgeous.
‘Is that right?’
‘Oh yes! Tessa talks about you all the time!’
I give her a quick kick to shut her up, but she dodges me and swishes her hair about.
‘Did you get them?’ I ask, wanting to distract him from her.
He reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out a small plastic bag and passes it to me. Inside are small dark mushrooms. They look half formed, secret, not quite ready for the world.
‘Where did you get them?’
‘I picked them.’
Zoey snatches the bag from me and holds it up. ‘How do we know they’re right? They could be toadstools!’
‘They’re not,’ he says. ‘They’re not Death Caps or Destroying Angels either.’
She frowns, passes them back to him. ‘I don’t think we’ll bother. We’re better off with Ecstasy.’
‘Do both,’ he tells her. ‘These now and E another day.’
She turns to me. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think we should take them.’
But then, I’ve got nothing to lose.
Adam grins. ‘Good,’ he says. ‘Come over and I’ll make some tea with them.’
It’s so clean in his kitchen it looks like something from a show home; there’s not even any washing up on the draining board. It’s strange how everything’s the reverse of our house. Not just the mirror-image room, but the tidiness and the quiet.
Adam pulls out a chair for me at the table and I sit down.
‘Is your mum in?’ I ask.
‘She’s sleeping.’
‘Isn’t she well?’
‘She’s fine.’
He goes over to the kettle and switches it on, gets some cups from the cupboard and puts them next to the kettle.
Zoey screws her face up at him behind his back, then grins at me as she takes off her coat.
‘This house is just like yours,’ she says. ‘Except backwards.’
‘Sit down,’ I tell her.
She picks up the mushrooms from the table, opens the bag and sniffs. ‘Yuk! Are you sure these are right?’
Adam takes them from her and carries them over to the teapot. He tips the whole lot in and pours boiling water on them. She follows him and stands watching behind his shoulder.
‘That doesn’t look like enough. Do you actually know what you’re doing?’
‘I’m not having any,’ he tells her. ‘We’ll go somewhere when they kick in. I’ll look after you both.’
Zoey rolls her eyes at me as if that’s the most pathetic thing she’s ever heard.
‘I have done drugs before,’ she tells him. ‘I’m sure we don’t need a babysitter.’
I watch his back as he stirs the pot. The chink of spoon reminds me of bed time, when Dad makes me and Cal cocoa; there’s the same thoroughness in the stirring.
‘You mustn’t laugh at us if we do anything silly,’ I say.
He smiles at me over his shoulder. ‘You’re not going to.’
‘We might,’ Zoey says. ‘You don’t know us. We might go completely crazy. Tessa’s capable of anything now she’s got her list.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Shut up, Zoey!’ I tell her.
She sits back down at the table. ‘Oops,’ she says, though she doesn’t look sorry at all.
Adam brings the cups over and puts them in front of us. They’re wreathed in steam and smell disgusting – of cardboard and wet nettles.
Zoey leans over and sniffs at her cup. ‘It looks like gravy!’
He sits down beside her. ‘It’s fine. Trust me. I put a cinnamon stick in to sweeten it up.’
Which makes her roll her eyes at me again.
She takes a tentative sip, swallows it down with a grimace.
‘All of it,’ Adam says. ‘The sooner you drink it, the sooner you’ll get high.’
I don’t know what will happen next, but there’s something very calm about him, which seems to be contagious. His voice is the one clear thing. Drink it, he says. So we sit in his kitchen and drink brown swill and he watches us. Zoey holds her nose and takes great disgusted gulps. I just swig it down. It doesn’t really matter what I eat or drink, because nothing tastes good any more.
We sit for a bit, talking about rubbish. I can’t really concentrate. I keep waiting for something to happen, for something to alter. Adam explains how you can tell the mushrooms are right by their pointed caps and spindly stems. He says they grow in clumps, but only in late summer and autumn. He tells us they’re legal, that you can buy them dried in certain shops. Then, because nothing is happening yet, he makes us all a normal cup of tea. I don’t really want mine, just wrap my hands round it to keep myself warm. It feels very cold in this kitchen, colder than outside. I think about asking Zoey to go and get my coat from next door, but when I try to speak, my throat constricts, as if little hands are strangling me from inside.
‘Is it supposed to hurt your neck?’
Adam shakes his head.
‘It feels as if my windpipe’s shrinking.’
‘It’ll stop.’ But a flicker of fear crosses his face.
Zoey glares at him. ‘Did you give us too much?’
‘No! It’ll be all right – she just needs some air.’
But doubt has crept into his voice. I bet he’s thinking the same as me – that I’m different, that my body reacts differently, that maybe this was a mistake.
‘Come on, let’s get you outside.’
I stand up and he leads me down the hallway to the front door.
‘Wait on the step – I’ll get you a coat.’
The front of the house is in shadow. I stand on the step, trying to breathe deeply, trying not to panic. At the bottom of the step is a path leading to the front driveway and Adam’s mum’s car. On either side of the path is grass. For some reason the grass seems different today. It’s not just the colour, but the shortness of it, stubbled like a shaved head. As I look, it becomes increasingly obvious that both step and path are safe places to be, but that the grass is malevolent.
I hold onto the doorknocker to make sure I don’t slip down. As I clench it, I notice that the front door has a hole in it that looks like an eye. All the wood in the door leads to this hole in spirals and knots, so it seems as if the door is sliding into itself, gathering and coming back round again. It’s a slow and subtle movement. I watch it for ages. Then I put my eye to the hole, but it’s cloudy in there, so I step back inside the hallway and close the door, and look through the hole from the other direction. The world is very different from in here, the driveway elongated into a thread.
‘How’s your throat?’ Adam asks as he reappears in the hallway and hands me a coat.
‘Have you ever looked through here?’
‘Your pupils are huge!’ he says. ‘We should go out now. Put the coat on.’
It’s a parka with fur round the hood. Adam does the zip up for me. I feel like an Inuit child.
‘Where’s your friend?’
For a minute I don’t know who he’s talking about; then I remember Zoey and my heart floods with warmth.
‘Zoey! Zoey!’ I call. ‘Come and see this.’
She’s smiling as she comes along the hallway, her eyes deep and dark as winter.
‘Your eyes!’ I tell her.
She looks at me in wonder. ‘Yours too!’
We peer at each other until our noses touch.
‘There’s a rug in the kitchen,’ she whispers, ‘that’s got a whole world in it.’
‘It’s the same with the door. Things change shape if you look through it.’
‘Show me.’
‘Excuse me,’ Adam says. ‘I don’t want to spoil the moment, but does anyone fancy a ride?’
He gets car keys from his pocket and shows them to us. They’re amazing.
He brushes Zoey away from the door and we step outside. He points the keys at the car and it beeps in recognition. I tread very cautiously down the step and along the path, warn Zoey to do the same, but she doesn’t hear me. She dances across the grass and seems to be fine, so maybe things are different for her.