Developers.

Garvin Bibbow stood on the edge of the clearing watching Mr Hobbs
throw chunks of fungus on the bonfire. They were deep in Newton woods
at the end of a long puddly track. Garvin had set his heart on this
plot of land for his bungalow.

Mr Hobbs brushed his hands on his coat and walked towards Garvin, his
boots crunching on the fungi.

"Handsome," he said.

"About this leasehold thing," Garvin said.

"I told you, my hands is tied."

"But why?"

"Tis all leasehold up here. Goes back to olden times, I suppose. But
dun'ee worry, Mr Bibbow. We build your house here, tis yours till it
fall down."

"Right,"

"And you'll fall down before an Hobbs house fall down, I'm telling
you." Mr Hobbs spat on his hand and held it out. "So, tis a
deal?"

"A deal," Garvin said.

Worth a bit of spit to get the land this cheap. Garvin almost felt he
was robbing Mr Hobbs.

"Cash in hand, mind," Mr Hobbs said.

He uprooted his sign. "Building plot. C. Hobbs, St Breward." He flung
it in the back of his Land Rover with a clatter.

"Should have house up by autumn," he said.

Garvin felt like dancing. He couldn't wait to tell his wife and
daughter.

*

The Bibbows moved into the bungalow that September. Garvin, Rona, and
fifteen-year-old Bridge. It was what Garvin had always wanted,
somewhere peaceful, remote from the world. Among the dark trees all he
could hear was the crowing of the rooks and the bubbling of the peaty
brown brook.

*

After they'd lived there five weeks, Bridge met a boy in the woods.
Well, he was more like a man, this boy she met in the woods. He was
lying on a shelf of velvet fungus under a tree. She'd been picking
puffballs in a patch of bracken.

"Hello," she said, stepping towards him.

Up close, his skin was pale and his cheeks were hollow, but his bone
structure, that was to die for. Bridge fell under his spell. He shifted
his body, leaned his head on his hand, and gazed at her with harsh
black eyes.

"You woke me up," he said.

"What you doing here?"

"You people don't own the whole wood."

"I never said we did," Bridge said. "I just, you're the first person I
seen up here."

She noticed a rusty motorbike lying under the fungus. It was dotted
with slugs, and a tongue fern poked out of a tufted hole in its
saddle.

"You had a crash?" she said.

He rolled on to his feet. He was no taller than Bridge.

"No."

"Oh."

"I live here."

"Here?"

"Here."

Bridge looked around.

"What do you mean, here?"

"Are you stupid?"

"Where's your house?"

"Don't have a house."

"You live wild?"

"Any more questions?"

"Want to come for tea?"

*

Bridge was nervous her parents wouldn't like him, but they did like
him. They liked him so much, she was jealous. He was the first boy
she'd brought home in her life, and they fussed all over him like the
prodigal son. Rona did a fry up, followed by cream cakes out of
boxes.

His name was Pearus, Pearus Pern. He was quiet at first, and scowled.
But after he'd scoffed himself with gammon, chips, and cakes, he
glowed. Garvin told him about the septic tank he was digging. Bridge
yawned. Pearus seemed interested and went out with Garvin to inspect
the trench by the moonlight.

Bridge followed, and stood nearby.

"It looks like someone's grave," she said.

*

Later, Bridge showed Pearus her bedroom, which was on the side of the
bungalow overlooking the stream.

"Oh, no, there's more already," she said.

"More what?" Pearus said.

"Toadstools, Pearus. They keeps sprouting in my room. I swept them away
this morning, and now, look, a bunch more of em's springed up."

She pointed to a line of toadstools growing in the gap between the
purple carpet and the the skirting board. Pearus kicked them over with
his boot.

"Won't do no harm," he said. "Fact, do you good. You can eat they
buggers."

"Oh no, I'd never eat a toadstool."

"Why not?"

"You know why. Cos they're poisonous."

"Get away. All right then, watch this."

Pearus picked up the biggest of the toadstools, snapped the fruitbody
off, pushed it into his mouth like a burger, and chewed it, making
slurping sounds on purpose.

"You're being disgusting," Bridge said, impressed.

"Am I dead?" Pearus said.

"It takes time."

"What do?"

"Dying."

Garvin and Rona came into the room.

"We wondered, Pearus," Garvin said, "if you'd like to stay."

"To stay," Rona said.

"Being as you an't got a place of your own."

"Oh, cool," Bridge said.

Pearus gulped the toadstool down, tilted his head, and screwed up his
nose.

"Wun't be able to pay you no rent, if that's what you're after."

Garvin and Rona looked at each other.

"No rent wanted," Garvin said. "You can help me with jobs."

"Like what?"

"Like digging the tank, and all them fungus to clear. It's more work
than I thought, isn't it, Rona? Soon as I cuts one lot back the next
lot fills up the spot."

"You'd never believe it," Rona said.

"I would believe it," Pearus said.

"I could do with a hand, anyway," Garvin said.

Pearus picked a shred of toadstool from his long front teeth and
flicked it on to Bridge's bed.

"Oh, well, put it like that," he said.

"You can go in spare bedroom," Rona said. "We're not having no more
children."

"What's that got to do with it?" Garvin said.

"I was enough for them," Bridge said.

"And we never have guests," Rona said.

"We don't want guests," Garvin said. "Pearus won't be a guest."

"He'll be a son," Rona said.

"Like a son," Garvin said.

"Just so," Pearus said.

*

And that's how it worked out. Pearus moved in. With the good food, he
put on weight, and colour flowed into his cheeks. After a week, he even
stopped smelling of rotten wood.

He helped Garvin in the garden and with building jobs in the house, and
in his spare time he tinkered with his motorbike under a fungus that
had grown out of the back wall of the house like an awning.

"Better than timber, a good bit of fungus," he told Garvin.

Rona did treat him as a son. And for Bridge it was like having a
brother. Pearus was so handsome and muscular, she wished she could show
him off in town and pretend he was her boyfriend, but he wouldn't go
near the town or even St Breward. He said he preferred the woods.

Bridge was used to that sort of thinking. Her dad was the same, and she
was a bit like it herself. She hated the way the town air stank.

*

One day, just like that, Bridge's eyes went funny. A shadow fell over
everything she saw. She went out into the garden, where Garvin and
Pearus were working on the septic tank, and she brought the subject
up.

"I can't see properly," she said.

"Let's have a look," Pearus said.

He hooked a dirty thumbnail under her right eyelid and pushed it up
over her eyeball.

"You been eating toadstools?" he said.

His breath smelled of paraffin.

"No."

She said no because her dad was there. She'd eaten six.

"Mushrooms, I eaten," she pretended.

"Mushrooms is all right," Pearus said, letting her eyelid flick down.
"Anyone can eat they."

"Best mushrooms in Cornwall here," Garvin said. "Big as dustbin
lids."

"You got beautiful eyes," Pearus said to Bridge.

"Have I?"

"Today, you have. Tell you what, lie down."

"I'll get wet on this ground."

"Not here, you dippy maid. In your room."

"It's like I can partly see you and partly not," Bridge said.

"Go and lie down in your room."

"You been on that computer too long," Garvin said.

"Ooh, don't talk to me about the computer," Bridge said. "Conked out,
the blasted thing did. Conked out this afternoon."

"Shall we call the doctor?" Garvin said.

"What's he know about computers?" Bridge said.

"For you, love," Garvin said.

"She'll be all right." Pearus winked at Bridge and then at a
wheelbarrow heaped with soil and fungi. "When I've dumped this lot,
I'll bring ee something to drink."

Bridge went back into the house. When she closed her eyes, she forgot
they'd gone wrong. Pearus had said they were beautiful.

*

It wasn't till Rona opened the curtains in Bridge's room the following
morning that she realised Bridge wasn't in bed. She could hear Pearus
buzzing on his bike in the woods, so she thought Bridge must be with
him. But when Pearus drove back through the gate at midday, he had a
girl who wasn't Bridge on the back seat, a small black-haired girl with
a big mouth.

"Have you seen Bridge?" Rona asked.

"This is my sister, Esme," Pearus said.

"Pleased to meet you," Rona said.

"I'm Esme," said Esme.

"I said that," Pearus said. "Let me do the talking."

Up close, Esme was older than she'd looked on the bike. Closer to
thirty than twenty.

"She's here to help around the house," Pearus said.

Esme shook leaves off her tatty brown dress.

"I can do washing and cleaning," she said, "and washing up. All bits
like that. And cleaning."

"Shut it," Pearus said. "You're showing yourself up."

Garvin was standing in the doorway.

"Can she cook?" he said.

"Can I coco?" Esme said.

"Mustard cook, she is," Pearus said.

"Rona is finding it a bit hard lately," Garvin said. "Aren't you,
love?"

"Eh?" Rona said.

"Hard. You're finding it hard. Been under the weather."

"Nothing," Rona said.

"She's been under the weather," Garvin said to Esme, who coughed.

"I don't want no pay, Mr Bibbow," Esme said.

"You're very kind. We'll be glad to have you."

"She can sleep in the greenhouse," Pearus said. "Now, what's this about
Bridge?"

"Oh yes." Rona had almost forgotten. "She's missing."

"Thought you had her, Pearus," Garvin said.

"First things first, then," Pearus said. "Check the obvious."

He led Garvin, Rona, and Esme round the back of the bungalow, through
the toadstool patch to the edge of the septic tank.

Bridge's white legs were sticking up out of the pit. Her head was face
down in the six inches of water at the bottom, her hair floating out
like weed.

"Just so," Pearus said

*

Burying Bridge in the garden was Pearus's idea. And Garvin agreed,
because he didn't want officials poking their noses in, making him sign
papers, and all that grief. For three days he sat in his armchair
crying for Bridge. Rona took to her bed and stayed there, listening as
Pearus banged up the coffin outside her window.

"I don't know what we'd have done without you both," Garvin said to
Esme and Pearus.

"I've picked some snowdrops," Esme said.

Rona didn't attend the funeral, which was held in pouring rain on the
Saturday. Pearus mumbled a speech. Esme threw the flowers on the
coffin, and then a feather. Pearus shovelled muddy soil over them. When
the hole was full, he patted the earth down flat with the back of his
spade, and wrote the name "Bridge" on the top with dead worms.

*

"It's a fungal disease, mum," Esme said to Rona. "That's what you got.
But dun't fret, I'm an expert on funguses. I'll make ee up a
cream."

It was a browny pink colour, the cream she made up, and it seemed to do
the job, because in three days Rona's skin was clear as a peeled nut.
Esme came into her room six times a day. She banned Garvin from seeing
Rona, to stop him catching anything himself.

"Contagious, Mr Bibbow," she said.

"But what about you?"

"Oh, I'm immune. So's Pearus. Born up here, see."

Every so often she told Garvin how Rona was doing. At least, she did at
first. Later, he had to seek her out to ask. Later still, he gave up
asking, because she was always so busy covering the walls and the
ceilings with fungicide, or whatever that brown liquid was in her
bucket.

*

One morning Garvin saw Pearus and Esme kissing in the greenhouse.

"You was kissing," he said when they came out.

"No we wasn't," Pearus said.

"So what if we was," Esme said.

"But we wasn't."

"You're brother and sister," Garvin says. "You should be
ashamed."

"Silly old gubber," Esme said, walking off.

*

Garvin gave up the fight against the fungi in the garden. He felt so
tired. And he was getting nowhere with the second septic tank, which
Pearus wanted twice as big as the first.

Pearus came up behind him one morning, smoking a leaf.

"You shouldn't force yourself, dad," he said.

Garvin leaned on his spade, breathing heavily.

"I want to do this," he said. "I want to do this. But I, I keeps
feeling faint."

"You leave it to me," Pearus said, patting him on the shoulder. "What
am I here for, eh? Go and take one of your naps."

Garvin let his spade fall to the ground, and staggered across the
fungus slabs to the back door.

In the kitchen, two young boys were eating biscuits from a pile on the
table.

"Who are you?" he said.

They jabbered at him in a foreign language.

"What are you doing in my house?"

They laughed, and spat mouthfuls of biscuit at each other and chased
each other round and round him, pulling at his corduroy trousers.

Esme walked into the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, yapped at
the boys in their own strange tongue, and then picked up a brush and
swiped them round the heads with it.

"Sorry about that, Mr Bibbow," she said.

"Are they yours?"

"Mine and Pearus's."

"Pardon?"

"You going deaf as well?"

"But you're his sister."

"Wife."

"I didn't know that."

"Well, there you are. You dun't know everything."

The children ran out of the kitchen screeching at each other.

"Dun't mind them, do ee?" Esme said. "Come to help me, they have, what
with me doing everything round here."

"You could, you could have asked."

"Ask? I did ask."

"You did?"

"I asked Mrs Bibbow."

Esme took a biscuit from the pile and shoved it sideways into her large
mouth. And then she sucked it.

*

One day Garvin defied Esme's ban and took Rona a cup of tea. It was the
first time he'd visited her room since Bridge's funeral. The walls were
shelved with fungi now, and covered with tiny silver spiders and slugs.
White caterpillars writhed on the carpet. Silver moths crawled slowly
over the duvet. The air smelled of mice and dry rot.

Rona was so weak she could hardly hold the cup and saucer in her
hands.

"This isn't tea," she said, after a sip. "Who are you?"

*

There were so many children in the house by now that Garvin couldn't
count them. He just sat in front of the television all day, chewing the
grey pies Esme brought him, while her offspring screamed around him.
The television had been on the blink for the last week, but Garvin
liked watching it glow. He did try phoning the menders once, but the
phones didn't work. Nothing worked anymore.

Pearus didn't. Garvin could see him in the garden playing football with
his kids, or riding his bike round the obstacle course he'd made, or
just lying on fungi smoking fat rolls of leaf.

Garvin didn't go to bed any more. Esme told him to sleep in the living
room to save her making up the bed, so that's what he did. He spent
most of the time sleeping. Day and night were much the same.

*

Several weeks passed before he visited Rona again. He'd been worrying
about her. He didn't bring her tea this time, not after she'd spat the
last lot out. Anyway, the electricity had packed up.

He had a job forcing the bedroom door open over the rucked carpet. When
he did get in, a smell like concentrated silage hit his nostrils, and
made his stomach heave up to his throat.

The room was in darkness. He fumbled in his pocket for his pipe lighter
and flicked on the flame. He reached to open the curtains, but the bats
hanging from the rail put him off, so he left the curtains closed. He
didn't want bats fluttering about, with Rona in this state.

"Rona? Rona, love."

The grey-and-silver duvet was pulled up over Rona's face, but Garvin
could see her hair fanned out on the pillow and the shape of her body
along the middle of the bed. He walked forward and touched her leg
through the duvet. Three mice ran out on to the pillow, and across
Rona's hair.

Garvin inched slowly along the side of the bed, holding the flame ahead
of him, breathing through his mouth. He drew the top of the duvet back.
Rona's right eye was open, staring at the ceiling. Out of her left
eye-socket a toadstool was growing, a hard-stalked toadstool with a
fringe like eyelashes.

Garvin touched Rona's cheek. It felt feathery, like perished silk. He
pressed it, and his finger broke through her skin into empty space.
When he pulled it out, her mouth lolled open. Where her tongue should
have been, squirmed a fat white grub the size of a boiled egg.

Garvin peeled the duvet down further. A dark brown fungus enclosed her
whole body, like a sleeping bag.

*

The next morning the garden was full of people. Garvin couldn't see
them properly, because of the blind spots in his eyes, but he could
hear them shrieking and laughing and banging instruments. The children
were chanting rhymes.

He felt his way along the living-room wall, through the kitchen, and
out into the garden. He smelled wood smoke and roast chestnuts. He
pushed his way through the jabbering crowds, slithering on the sheets
of fungus.

"This is my garden," he said to a woman. "You have no right."

She pushed a puffball into his mouth.

"I have birthright," she said. "I'm Pearus's sister."

Then Garvin spotted Pearus. He was sitting with men throwing dice from
a horn, at a mushroom table placed over Bridge's grave.

"You should be indoors, old pappa," Pearus said.

Garvin gulped the puffball down his throat.

"Don't tell me what to do," he said. "Don't tell me what to do in my
own, my own home."

"My home," Pearus said. "You're my guest."

He stood up and walked towards Garvin and prodded him in the chest with
a hard pointed fingernail. Garvin felt as if a needle had been stuck
into him. Pearus prodded him again. Garvin fell flat on his back. The
men at the dice table laughed. Pearus kicked Garvin in the side of the
head. Someone banged a drum.

Garvin tried to get up, but he couldn't. His arms and legs had turned
prickly numb.

"Rona," he said.

"Never mind Rona," Pearus said. "OK, pack up the dice, boys. Might as
well get started. What you're here for, isn't it?"

A few minutes later they carried Rona out and laid her on the ground
alongside Garvin, in three crumbly pieces on three mushroom cushions.
Garvin tried to close his eyes. But someone had wedged them open with
blackthorn twigs, so he saw everything that happened.

The mob pulled the bungalow down all day. They smashed holes in it with
sledges and clubs and then ripped the rest down with their bare hands.
Hobbs's bungalow came apart more like some rotten old cowshed than a
new-built home.

Pearus and his mates lowered Garvin and Rona into the septic tank and
packed them with chunks of dried fungus. Then they threw planks and
bungalow debris on top, and stacked up a pyramid twenty feet high. The
last sounds Garvin heard were the cackling of laughter and the
crackling of fire.

*

The fire was still burning when Mr Hobbs arrived in his Land Rover the
next morning.

"My, how you've grown," he said to one of Pearus's boys.

He counted banknotes into Pearus's bag. Then he fixed his sign in the
ground.

"Building Plot. C.Hobbs. St Breward."

Pearus and his family gathered to wave Mr Hobbs goodbye. He climbed
into his Land Rover.

"Same again next time?" he said.

*