Xanthoria parietina (L.) Th. Fr. Very common everywhere except mountain regions.There was something erototopographic about the opening third of the climb: first a series of damp, ferny clefts, one releasing a spray, almost a mist, of water from some inner cascade; then the mammary swell of an outcrop; but after that it was vertical rock, clean and challenging, something to get his mental teeth into. He came across an orange hawkweed, Hieracium something, sprouting from a grit-choked crack, nodding its vivid little heads in the wind of his breath as his own head came up to it. A month or two from now its seeds would be drifting off from the cliff-face, unconcerned at the height at which they were released, bred to it. Maybe there would be a colony of them here when he came back, seeded into other cracks, peering down at him as he climbed up to them. He climbed past the progenitor, careful not to crush it with one of his boots, and almost at once there was something else in front of his face: a broad vein of darker rock, glossy, almost obsidianal, zig-zagging up from his left and speckled, spangled with crustose lichen almost the same color, colors rather, as the hawkweed: reddy-orange outside, yellow inside.Roger Phillips, Grasses, Ferns, Mosses and Lichens of Great Britain and Ireland (1980).
They were sporing, cracking with reproduction, and the air clouded faintly orange in front of his face as he exhaled over them, spores driven off their surfaces, deflecting off the rock. He thought of the spores entering his lungs, beginning to grow there, slowly cramming his chest with lichen so that, when they were ripe, his breath smoked with their spores. He felt breathless for a moment, nocebo affected, and rested, looking up and down the vein of rock. The lichens were like rafts of foam on a dark river, rotating as they drifted downstream, turning roughly circular. They were rorschach-blottish too, in a way. That one reminded him of a canoe, with the ascocarps like little heads, looking up at the sky. At his face in the sky, like a white sun. He climbed past them, past the vein of rock, getting his clothes and boots dusted with the spores. Nothing interesting appeared on the cliff after that: the rest of the climb was straightforward, no lichens, no hawkweeds, no ferny clefts. When he was at the top, safe on horizontal ground again, he surveyed the valley and the glint of Exmere that just made it past the curve. Cumulonimbus was sliding in from the west and the air was getting cooler. Good timing. He rubbed at his forehead, feeling the crust of sweat there, then noticed that he had the spores all over on his fingers too. His forehead must be smeared with them. Swirls and streaks of them, mixed with his sweat.
Back in the car, ready to return south, he looked at his face in the driving mirror but couldn’t see much. By the time he pulled into a petrol station about ten miles away, it had started to rain. He stuck his head out of the window and turned his face up at the sky, closing his eyes, letting the raindrops strike his skin, washing away the spores and sweat. He bought £10’s worth of petrol, enough to see him through the week and bring him back the following weekend, if he felt like it. The air of his flat, when he got back at about two, seemed stale and stuffy, as though he’d been away for much longer than a day. He didn’t switch on the lights, not straightaway, going instead to open a window and look out over the town. Cool moist air flowed in past him. An artificial cliff, that’s what the flats were like. He looked down the face of the building, half-expecting to see hawkweeds nodding their heads between him and the ground eighty or a hundred feet below. No, no hawkweeds, but the streetlamps along Marsh Lane were blurred orange as though rain was still swirling down there, distorting their colors, making them look a bit like hawkweeds. It was odd to think of the hawkweed and lichens all those miles away on the cliff, minding their own business, quietly growing, not caring if he came back or not, though he might have been the first person to see them.
A car came down a street beside the flats, engine very quiet, so that he could hear its distorted radio playing through an open window, the sound reaching him small but precise through the rain-stilled air. It was “Somethin’ Else”, the original version, the riff sounding more like a car than the car did, unless it was the car, was the engine. He waited for the vocals, but the car stopped, still out of sight, and the radio cut out. Then he heard the car-door closing and then feet walking fast towards Marshall Lane. He stared down, waiting to see what the guy’s head would look like. There, he was in sight, turning left for the entrance of the flats, and yes, as expected he had a hawkweed head, miscolored in the lamplight. He lost sight of him as he climbed the steps to the front entrance of the flats, then after ten seconds or so the intercom on his flat buzzed, bombinated, like a fat bumblebee on a flower. Leaving the window open, he walked to the intercom and pressed the button.
“Yeah?”
A flickering floral scent burst out of the grill, varying in sharpness, sweetness, musk, and he could understand it.
“Okay,” he said back. “I’m on my way down.”
He took the stairs, putting a hand out to both walls as he spiralled down down down like a hawkweed seed falling from a cliff. The cyclamen in the lobby near the lifts was playing something baroque as he went past, its small flowerheads shaking to the notes. He pushed open the heavy door and the guy was waiting for him just outside, sheltering from the drizzle, flower-head drooped forward slightly on the stem of his body, as though he was sleeping.
“Didn’t take the lift,” he said, explaining the delay, and the flower-head lifted as the shoulders shrugged. He followed the guy down the steps, down the street, round the corner to where the car was waiting. It looked as though it had come straight from the dump, with great rents in its rusted metal through which bindweed had twisted, lifting its white trumpets on green leaves. He opened the unlocked passenger door as the guy went round to the driver’s. As he sat down he felt a spring in the seat jabbing his arse and picked an old copy of The Moon off the dashboard to pad it with. When the guy turned the ignition, flower-scent throbbed into the compartment from the engine and the bindweed trumpets began to play “C’mon Everybody”. The guy tossed something light and papery into his lap as he drove off. He picked it up. Two leaf-shaped tickets for the gig, printed light on dark. The streets were quiet, as though the renewed rain had driven everyone inside, but another battered and rent car passed them in the opposite direction as they got near the venue, bindweed trumpets throwing in a few notes of “Three Steps to Heaven”, he thought.
The guy parked and they got out, running for the shelter of the underground entrance. As they started down the steps he looked back and saw two girls with heads like toadflax and periwinkle running towards them and when they reached the bottom of the steps he heard the girls’ shoes begin rattling down after them. The bouncer on the door had the head of a rhododendron, bending over their tickets as they went in. The venue was packed, milling with flower-heads of fifty or sixty different species, their conversations hanging in the air dizzyingly, almost intoxicatingly as he and his mate pushed forward to the stage expectantly, where the amplifiers waited to start pumping out the opening osmo-chords of the group’s biggest hit, “Lilia Putrefacta”.