Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

We secured our supply well ahead of time. It was mescaline I was after. LSD-25 sounded exactly like what it was, something made in a laboratory, lacking any tradition of use, an industrial product originally intended for a different purpose and opportunistically diverted when it turned out to have surprising properties. This hardly corresponded to my sense of the sacred. I wanted a proper rite of passage, dissolving the appearances and inducting me into a higher order of meaning, not some brute of a rocket which would twang me up into the mental sky to find my own way home.

Luckily there was a dealer at the Castle pub in Windsor who supposedly sometimes had mescaline. I didn’t have a sense of wrong-doing, so there was no frisson about being a stone’s throw away from the Queen’s residence. I would have liked her blessing on the enterprise.

The dealer in the pub was rather ratty-looking and couldn’t keep his eyes still. ‘Not here, not here,’ he muttered, and led the way to the lavs. Peter had spoken a lot about the importance of setting for the encounter with hallucinatory reality, but the same rules applied, I felt, more generally. My ingrained sense of the integrity of an event made me sit through all the end-titles of films. Why would it be content with a drug experience that began in furtiveness and indignity? I wanted solemnity, if not priests in robes then some closer approximation to masonic regalia than a greatcoat with some buttons missing.

I had to generate the sense of sacrament more or less single-handed, though Peter was sympathetic from behind the handles of the wheelchair. ‘What do you have for me?’ I asked gravely, but the only answer I got was ‘Two for a pound.’

‘Is this mescaline?’

‘Yeah, yeah, good stuff. How many d’you want? Two for a pound.’

‘Two doses, please.’

‘Is that two or four, then?’

‘Er … two, please. Pay the gentleman, Peter.’ The moment the money had changed hands, our friend grabbed a piece of hard Izal toilet paper from the cubicle and screwed it up round two little pills. Then he shoved the tawdry little packet into Peter’s hand and scarpered. It was all a far cry from the enlightened heyday of the Catholic church in Mexico, the slices of peyote button offered up in all reverence at Communion long ago.

Peripheral swirling

On the day itself I would trust Peter to choose a suitable spot, scenic and not too frequented. He was the one in the family who was best at buying birthday cards — from a young age he had been able to match the image to the person perfectly, and this was really only an extension of that. We had decided that the Tan-Sad was the suitable vehicle. It was better suited than a wheelchair to rough ground, and we were mindful of all the horror stories about people having ‘trips’ who thought they could fly and threw themselves off buildings. Once I was in the Tan-Sad I wasn’t going to throw myself anywhere.

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.