Charlotte is a writer of novels and short stories. She writes on female identity, sexuality and relationships between women, through both the realist and magic-realist genres. Having started her career as a translator and editorial writer in the predominantly women-run fashion industry, Charlotte uses the dialogue, semantics and frankly bizarre experiences she has been exposed to as a point of inspiration for her writing practice. 

This extract is from the start of Charlotte’s new novella Fruiting Bodies, exploring the impact of repressed sexuality and class clashes between women forced to live in close quarters.

Email: ccole006@gold.ac.uk

Fruiting Bodies

All is rot. It dwells in trees, and dirt, and pests. It weaves through bodies both living and dead. Where shadows fall, it blooms. Where ghosts will be, it multiplies. It is the web that feeds us, bonds us, and when we fall apart, takes our flesh back to the earth. Good intention, for all it’s worth, goes to seed in the damp and the dark. Faith is swallowed, solid life made immaterial. In the end, the forest floor makes soil of us all.

Chapter 1:

Amy Comer is still alive, but no longer in a way that matters. Her young body lies, losing blood, in a house she knew never to call home. She stares at the ceiling. Flecks of plaster rain down. They settle, like frost, on her bloodied lips.

She barely breathes. Air draws in through laboured gasps. She cannot move with will or intention, but spasms come like tremors. They pulse from her wound, to her hands, to her feet, and back again. A hissing comes from the fissure in her collapsing chest, and a glottal stop rises through the warm blood in her throat. Her remaining minutes of life contract into an ever tightening hand around her neck.

Around her body is our grey house. Old carpet, bare floorboards, damp plaster – they  fade together in ageing magnolia. A meek glow comes from the bathroom light at the end of the hall. It shines a sallow bloom over sketches of great trees on the walls. Line upon line of black ink travels across the plaster in crude strokes. Thick trunks are sketched into every corner, each one branching into thinner and thinner tracks as it expands. Its fingers stretch from the top of the stairs to the walls where Amy’s body has come to rest.

She is not alone. My beloved lies here, with her head resting in my lap. I sit cross-legged against a wall, my sore spine resting a few inches above a patch of black mould, stroking Amy’s hair.  

There’s an open window I think, in the lounge, which looks out over the plane trees on our street. I hear children laughing there. A cat fighting. A car parking. A breeze comes in and travels around the house, carrying the smell of the bin I haven’t taken out in the kitchen downstairs.

The hall is heavy. The winter sun hangs low. It casts narrow beams of light through the dust and spores suspended in the air. A ray hits the wall by my head, a strip of light moving across my reddened eyes. It should be warm, but now it burns. The black mould behind me recoils. 

I bend over, head bowed, face to face with Amy. I rest my hands around her cheeks and try to hold her gaze. I search those eyes for something I know, something to tell me they’re still mine to have and to keep. I look long and close, but all I find is distance. Tears and regret come in pale, heavy drops and join the freckles on Amy’s forehead. I stroke them into her auburn hairline, wiping away flecks of blood and plaster. 

I gather myself. There must be something we can do. I turn my head, eyes streaming, half bloodied, and break the hanging silence. 

“What are we going to do, Belly?”

Annabel kneels a few inches from Amy’s body. We are all so close, yet I cannot reach her. She is transfixed. She stares, wide eyed, holding her gaze on Amy’s body. With hollowed eyes, she stares at her right hand, still clasped around the metal letter opener, lodged in Amy’s chest. Speckles of black mould nestle in her cuticles.

My mouth moves slowly. My neck is growing weak, too weak to hold my heavy head. But I say it again.

“Annabel. Please. What are we going to do?” 

She is barely shaken from her paralysis. Incapable of action, even now, even after.

“Sybil I… I didn’t… I can’t…”

“She needs help. We can undo it… We can undo it…”

“I… Can’t… I didn’t mean…”

“We can undo it. We can undo it.”

“I… I… I…” Annabel is stuck in a loop, eyes skittering back and forth, her breathing desperate and fractured. Useless. Sickening face.

I can’t look at it anymore. I look down. A small tangle of white mycelium netting, no bigger than a stamp, inches up through the carpet fibres by her feet. I watch it grow, cell by cell, into a web, creeping towards her toes. A single, thin finger of lace reaches out and grazes them. It lurches forward and grabs her. Annabel’s eyes lift. Her hand shakes around the letter opener. She looks at me again. I see in her eyes nothing different to any other day I’ve known her – fear, confusion, feebleness. She wants to run.

“Don’t you dare.” I try to fix her gaze. “Don’t you fucking dare. Don’t pull it out. We need to keep it i…”

But she is weak. She gives in. Eyes closed, she yanks out the letter opener with a howl. I hear the dull thud of stuck bone against etched metal. Amy’s body rises with the pull of the blade. She convulses, her sternum cracking under the pressure. A slow, red second goes by, and when it passes, a pool of blood swells at her chest, falls, and floods the hallway carpet. I push my hands against it, trying to stem the tide. I fail. I sink back and stare at it. I won’t let myself look away from it. I have failed her, and now life falls away from her like a train at the end of a track – slowing, slackening, into stillness. The mycelium at Annabel’s feet recedes back into the carpet.

Through the tears and stale air, I say my final, pointless, goodbye. I lean in and brush her lips. They are still warm. I taste every drop of life and love I knew and took from Amy. I whisper pointless words. I’m sorry. I told you. I love you. I’m sorry.

Afternoon shadows stretch long across the walls. I am still, but I see Annabel is on her hands and knees now, beside Amy’s corpse, pawing at the bloodied carpet, praying for hope or forgiveness. Congealing blood sticks and stretches like glue between her knees and the floor. She cries, and black mould reaches over the walls.

I can barely raise my head to catch her gaze again. I cannot see through the descending cloud, the grey spores in the air, the ire behind my eyes. The hall stretches, pushing us further and further apart, Amy’s body a chasm between us. We are parallel beings now, in mirrored souls and entangled fear. We are tethered, but distant. Annabel’s cries fold into long, grieving wails. Splinters grow in floorboards beneath her feet. I can hear them moaning.

Amy’s blood has pooled, jellied in a ring all around us. It is dead blood, but a murmur of vagrant life breathes at its rim. I look across and spot loops of mould from the carpet fix onto it, clawing with thin, sticky fingers, sucking on the bloody fibres. They latch like a bird’s claw around the lifeless body of a shrew. 

Around us, new fungus grows. Its net flies out in radial spheres, exploring where next to swallow. It congregates into a body, billowing out and out. It is an egg-white sack by our feet. It bloats, feeding on old blood and fresh tears, swelling past my waist, then Annabel’s shoulders. It surges past our heads and throws out great webs onto the ceiling. It clasps onto itself, suspended from the lightbulb. A hanging orb. It perforates, and weeps frayed ends of yellow lichen. I hold out my hand to catch the falling fibres.

The wind rises. Some pieces travel far, untethered to their foraging body. They blow in the breeze, far down the hall, and settle at Harriet’s feet. She is outside the circle of blood. She stands, quite still, where the black mould gathers most darkly.

I can see her black eye has started to weep, and the cut across her cheek isn’t showing signs of clotting. My mark is still made on her face. Her eyes are fixed on the open wound in Amy’s chest. When she’s certain she won’t spring back to life, she clears her throat, looks at my face, then Annabel’s. She watches her sob and rock, and rolls her swollen eyes.  

“Come on then Annabel.” she tears her feet from the mycelium creeping up her ankles. “Don’t just sit there sobbing. Get up.”

Annabel does nothing. Harriet snaps again. 

“Get. Up.”

Annabel cries louder, shaking her head and repeating her sorrys and nos over and over again in rhythm with her rocking body.

“Do I need to do everything for you? Fuck’s sake. Get up or I’ll fucking make you.” 

With a bloodied hand, she pulls a pack of tissues from her back pocket. She takes one out, dabs at the grazes on her knuckles, then blows chunks of dried blood and festering rot out of each nostril. She throws the rest of the pack at Annabel’s face. It hits her cheek. She doesn’t flinch.

“Clean yourself up, you’re a fucking disgrace.”

Annabel turns to Harriet and pleads. Pleads her not to make this worse, to make her move, to make her feel. She knows if she moves, it will be real. Harriet points at me. If she moves a single inch towards me I’ll shred her.  

“Leave that one with the body, she’s fucking out of it. You, come with me, I’ll shower you down.”

Harriet moves a foot forward and crushes the web of mycelium now covering the floor. White threads between the fungi retreat, tearing away from one another, rerouting, finding a new path around the broken bodies. She holds out a hand and tells Annabel to take it. She accepts, and is hoisted up. Harriet wipes the tears from her face and kisses her forehead. 

“We had to do it, Belly. And now it’s done. Now we deal with it.”

Harriet slips Annabel’s arm across her shoulder and takes a minute to steady her legs. They move, tearing through layers of reaching fibres, crawling rot and mould. They reach the bathroom at the end of the hall. Annabel sits on the yellowed toilet seat, and Harriet shuts the door. Mould fills the cracks between the door and its frame, in a mass of black sealant. 

We are alone now, Amy and I. My head is so heavy I can’t look down. I must keep it against the wall. I stare at the space opposite our bodies. Mushrooms bloom. They collect themselves and move as one, risen up on legs, trailing dust in their wake. They walk towards me. My legs, I can feel them but they won’t move. They are either side of Amy, buried deep in carpet, slime and bracken. I smell damp moss and trees after the rain. My eyes are unsteady. The harder I try to keep them open, the more my vision blurs. There is a glaze on them and I am far away. 

Where is she? I search for my Amy’s chin with my hand. I find it, soft, cold. I rub a thumb on her cheek, back and forth, back and forth. I don’t want her to be afraid. I breathe in, a deep breath, but I choke on air, thick with spore and dust. It makes me tired. I want to be still, stagnant. Let me be hidden with the body of my beloved.

I feel it. The mycelium. It knits our skin and I let it. My hand on her face, my legs astride her body. They are all one. I let the black mould behind me creep through my hair, sticking to each blonde strand, inching towards my skull. With my one free hand I search for the letter opener on the floor by my side. I feel the cool, metal blade and prise it from the glue of red and brown matted fibres. I lift it. Heavy. I hold it to my neck and drag it against a barely pulsing vein. It is cold, and sharp, and comforting. I know the mould has taken my arm. It is thick, and soft, and strong. I try to say the words I love you one last time, and in an eruption of tendon, spore and flesh, the arm that was once mine propels the dull blade into my neck. 

My breath is pushed outside of my body. The letter opener falls to the carpet. My blood comes now, blackened, infected, pooling into the carpet and feeding the decay that lives there. I hear it swarming. I feel it inside me. I slip in and out of the room. The pull is too great. I want to yield. I want Amy to take me there. I let the blood flow and darkness weave its way into my mind. I wait to find my final breath. I take it, hold it, and set it free. I was right. It does feel like a train at the end of a track.

I am above myself. Lacquered brackets burst from the cracks in the skirting boards. They climb the walls. They fuse into one, forming a shelf above our heads. They expand and contract, then set, calcifying into hard flesh. A thin rain of white spores falls from a trail growing above us. It falls on us like ash, or snow, snow is sweeter. 

The snowfall swells. It comes from a crack in the fractured plaster in the ceiling-rose, and moves in a ring around a singular, unshaded lightbulb. The filament flickers. The bulb fills with spore and sediment. It dims, and surges, and dims, and surges. With a crack, it bursts, sending glass shards to the floor, enveloping our bodies in final, solitary darkness.

Chapter 2:

“There’s water here. Can you feel it?”

The handyman had come. Our landlord’s faithful and obedient right hand. The same man used for all complaints and concerns. A slow draining plug hole – Andrew will be round. The wall in the garden has caved in again – Andrew will be there. Rats have died in the roof and the house smells like rotting flesh – Andrew, somehow, will fix it. And he did always fix it. Poorly, shoddily, with a shelf life shorter than milk, but he did always fix it. 

He was called out after Amy’s battle with the landlord about the damp. It had gotten worse since Autumn had come. Some days you could feel wet air in the hall. Other days you could smell it. Amy had emailed and texted the landlord many times. Each time, she was rebuffed, ignored or laughed at. So, Amy did her research. She found the sections of their contract stating maintenance requirements and Googled her rights. She emailed her findings to the landlord, and received a call within minutes. He was weakened. Amy took it to the edge. She informed him she would be taking this information to their guarantor, as foul a man as he was, to consult with his lawyers and defend the rights of his daughter and her housemates. She couldn’t imagine anything worse than speaking to that arrogant pig of a man, but when faced with yet another arrogant pig, it seemed only fair to play them against each other. 

 She won. He conceded. So Andrew was told to come, and come he did. After half an hour of assessing the situation, he was confused. Another thirty minutes, and his confusion had grown. By the time Amy came out of her room, tea in hand, to check on progress, he was stood with his body pressed against the wall. His head was turned, ear pressed up against the plaster. Amy didn’t have the heart to tell him he was probably pressed against a wall of toxic mould. 

His right hand skimmed the surface, tracing the cracks, seemingly searching for some unseen thing. Amy held onto her cup of tea and stared at him, eyebrow raised. His eye turned to her.

“There’s water here. Can you feel it? Not damp, water. I swear I can hear it. It’s all over. But it’s not everywhere.”

Amy wasn’t sure how she was meant to respond to that.

“… I need to finish my graphics homework. Do you need anything?”

He beckoned her over with his finger and grabbed her hand when she came. Shock and awkwardness prevented her from jumping back and shaking off his grip. He placed her hand on the wall and told her to feel it. She ran her hand up and down, forward and back, and felt nothing. 

“No.” he said. “Slower, and press down hard every now and then.”

She did as she was told. She moved her hand up and pressed. It gave way just an inch. Soft, damp, it yielded under her fingers. She moved her hand down a few centimetres and pressed again. Firm, dry. She repeated the motion across most of the wall, her confusion growing to match Andrew’s. He stepped back and looked at the wall with a wrinkled brow, his mouth slightly agape. 

She put down her tea and pressed her ear to the wall too. Using both hands, she moved backwards and forwards, pushing here and there. She tapped a soft spot and heard a little run of water. She tapped again, and again a few drops could be heard as they fell. She looked up. No damp on the ceiling. No patches of yellow or brown. It hadn’t rained in days; the trees outside were dry and limp. There was no plumbing in the attic, nor was there any obvious leak from the old gravity-fed boiler. 

Andrew and Amy looked at each other. They shook their heads. They discussed the options for what it could be, but came up with nothing they truly believed. So, they got back to work, finding more and more threads of water behind the wall. There seemed to be no pattern to the spread of it all. One patch was different to the next. They began to feel more intensely, more acutely, with the tips of their fingers searching for a shape or connection between the soft spots. 

Between the two of them, they began to move in sync, sweeping their hands in arches across the wall, finding what they now saw were thin veins of water, crossing and weaving over every inch of it.

“It’s just a mess everywhere.” Amy said.

“No.” Andrew murmured. “There are lines. It’s in order… Do you mind?” He pointed at the marker pen in Amy’s back pocket. 

She passed it to him and stood back.

“Can I?” He uncapped the pen and pointed to the wall.

Amy looked hesitant. Why the hell would she allow this man to draw on her landlord’s walls. Then again, if the landlord threw out some anger, Andrew would get the brunt of it. Between the mould, the damp, the flaking plaster and peeling wallpaper, some marker pen wasn’t going to kill anyone anyway. She nodded.

Andrew took the pen and began at the bottom corner of the wall where it was at its worst. He felt an inch, then coloured in where he felt. After a minute or so, the entire corner was black. He paused. 

“Get another pen. This will take a while.”

She recoiled at his tone, but the curiosity of it all proved too great. Amy ran to her room and found another marker. She came back and looked at Andrew for guidance. He pointed across the hall, and she took the other end of the wall. The two of them coloured in the corners, then felt for where to go next. They heard the front door slam. Harriet slowly made her way up the steps, her phone buried between her ear and the crook of her neck. She cast a cursory glance at Amy and Andrew, fake-smiled and continued up to her room. Amy could still hear her through the lazily pulled-to bedroom door.

“…God knows with that one. She’s helping the staff. Perhaps she’s gone feral at last…”

Amy ignored her rage with a deep breath, and threw Harriet out of her mind. Back to work, she thought. They settled into a rhythm of touching the wall, pressing for signs of supple plaster. They sketched over the patches found, checking their work for missed places. From the thick black corners, the damp fractured off into veins, three or four inches wide, which broke off again into further sections, spreading toward the centre of the wall. From the veins, smaller divisions formed. They snaked, splintered, forking further and further, growing thinner and thinner. The black lines they drew became feathered sketches. Eventually, Andrew and Amy, arms tired and heavy, met in the middle where their black lines merged.

They stepped back. They saw trees. Thick trunks at the corners, branching out, throwing out limbs, growing hands, making fingers, knotting at the centre of the wall. Amy spoke first.

“How? Why would it be moving in a pattern? Does damp normally do this?” She got up close to it again and continued her one sided interrogation.

“Something has to be directing it, right? If it was a leak it would just be, like, everywhere, right? It has to be following something, lines of wood or something. Or maybe the plasterboard? And why is it only on this wall? What if…”

“…It’s not.” 

Andrew had turned to the opposite wall, the wall between the hall and Amy’s bedroom. “It’s not just on that wall.” He pressed and prodded along Amy’s doorframe, then outwards. Amy ran her hands through her hair and held them at the nape of her neck.

“What the fuck? Where does it stop?”

Andrew swept his hands over the wall again, pressing where he found more damp. He took the pen, but this time didn’t trace the veins he found. Instead, he drew a line, an arch, about two feet away from Amy’s doorframe. 

“It stops here. It stops at your door.”

Amy’s stomach felt like she had driven over a hill. Adrenaline moved to her hands. They tingled and her body was flooded with a cold heat. She lowered them by her side and moved her fingers to get some feeling back. She looked at Andrew for guidance again. He shook his head.

“I don’t know what’s going on. But find somewhere else to sleep. You’re not safe here.”