49. Mould
He remembers the first week in the house. Each night he dreamt of a dark figure standing in the doorway, looking down at him, watching him sleep.
In the second week, he and Cass woke up to find the front door open. Stumbling in the night before, in an attempt to be quiet, she hadn’t closed it properly. He remembers being able to hear how thick the house had become with night air. He couldn’t go back to sleep after that, unable to shake the feeling that the figure had followed her inside.
It was a two-bedroom, two-storey, modern townhouse. He and Cass chose the downstairs room as their bedroom. It was just by the front door, with a big window that looked onto the street. In the morning, his feet stuck to the floor like ice as he got up to turn on the heater, which they had to run all day. It was the fifth or sixth building he had been a tenant of since leaving home. He couldn’t make the inspection, but Cass had assured him of how great it was. Good location, close to the city, surprisingly affordable.
In the third week, he swapped their bedroom and the office, hoping it might help him sleep. He did this while Cass was at work, and when she got home, she said nothing about it. As though it had always been that way.
During the fourth week, he yelled at her for leaving a dirty dish in the sink. Again, she said nothing, nor did she for the rest of that night.
They had been dating for three years, the longest relationship for both of them. Cass knew his history of moving too fast and she had never lived with a partner. It took those three years for him to wear her down. Her lease was coming to an end, it made sense, they were in love.
The house, being a recent build, was clean in the beginning. The walls were teeth-white and the countertops had the image of marble. The stairwell featured a thin glass panel that stretched up nervously through each floor and wobbled if you bumped it. The amenities felt extravagant, but after a month, things began to come apart.
As the fifth and sixth weeks went by, the house transformed into an amalgamation of concessions and compromises. Paintings he didn’t want to look at were stuck to the walls, ugly knick-knacks sat about in no particular order, and cheap furniture that didn’t match filled the rooms.
He conceded on cleanliness, developing a mode that allowed him to blindly navigate the house, ignoring any dishes Cass left out. Any weird smell. Any crumb or coffee splatter. Like an intelligent scotoma.
After work he’d come home and float to the bedroom, a fatigued spectre, and remain there until he needed to cook or clean. He knew Cass sensed his annoyance no matter how much he tried to tell her he was fine.
Whenever he tried to talk to her about it, the mould of words left unsaid secreted out of him and turned his message sarcastic, patronising and foul. So he said nothing. Living with Cass wasn’t an issue so much as it was a chore. He thought endlessly about her needs, her happiness – did she eat enough, drink enough, take her antidepressants? He needed to make sure she was happy so that she wouldn’t leave him.
One afternoon, they found themselves sitting in the car outside the house. It was November and it wasn’t supposed to be raining. As the water licked at the windshield, she told him she had become dependent on him and that it terrified her.
The cleaning had started in the previous house, the one he lived in before Cass. He had needed a change and found a place with strangers he’d met online, in a suburb closer to the city.
Two people, Stan and Lily, who had lived there for years and were close friends. They had a small extra bedroom they used as an office but were looking to cheapen the rent. When he got home after work, he would walk past Lily’s room and glimpse Stan sitting on the floor, talking to her as she did something, idly listening to his discontent with his relationships and studies.
Lying in his bed, the muffled sound of the conversation coming through the wall would make him ache.
He quickly learned that he would need to meet Stan’s cleanliness standards, which Stan was not afraid to share. He figured that if he made an effort, they would let him into their life.
Lying in his newly assembled room, he imagined the three of them together, drinking red wine on cold nights while playing card games or sniffing white dust off keys while dancing to house music.
So he cleaned.
He wiped down the kitchen benches to remove food stains and prevent the stone countertops from staining. He used hot water with just a squirt of dishwashing liquid to clean the windows with a sponge, then pulled the water off with a squeegee. Paper towels aren’t good for cleaning glass because they’re expensive and leave streaks, so use newspaper instead because there’s plenty of it, but don’t use the same bit for too long; otherwise it’ll disintegrate and leave wet bits on everything. And never clean windows on hot days, because the water will dry too quickly and leave marks. Don’t forget to wipe the skirting board because that’s where dust accumulates the most. The vacuum is expensive, so please look after it and empty the dust bin after every use. Don’t forget to wipe down the condenser coils behind the fridge to prevent it from overheating, soak the stovetop fan filters to loosen the oil before you wipe them down, dust the plants with cinnamon to prevent them from getting gnats, bag up the dead autumn leaves to keep the yard presentable, replace the sponges, beach the toilet, boil lemons when guests are coming over.
Through Stan’s tutelage, he came to understand that dust was everywhere. It was a mist of skin decay that settled on everything and couldn’t be escaped, just wiped and scrubbed and pushed into a bin. When he went outside, he could sense people’s dust as they walked towards him, flaking off their hands and necks.
Though for a time he was rewarded with red wine and house music, eventually, inevitably, he slept with Lily and it destroyed the house dynamic. When she moved out with other friends and conversation with Stan had been distilled to one part small talk and two parts cooking their respective dinners, he just kept cleaning. He couldn’t stop.
By this stage his room was always immaculate. He often spent his free days lying on fresh sheets, a candle filling the room with lavender or sandalwood, watching tiny motes of dust dance across the rays of light that shone into the room.
He wasn’t always clean. When he first moved out of home, it was with his best friend Paul, who’d once threatened to move out because of how untidy he was. He was poor at the time, working a rotation of cafe jobs as he studied, living off the free lunches and leftover food. When he ordered takeout with money he didn’t have, the unrecyclable plastic would pile in the trash bin and leave the kitchen smelling of Pad Thai, so bad that the plates of toast crumbs and bowls of Mi Goreng sauce stood like Jenga towers in the sink.
The area wasn’t great, but the rent was cheap, and it didn’t take long to get to university by tram. When he commuted into the city for class, the buildings stared down at him like great lighthouses. His armpits leaked, his smell wafting up through the neck of his t-shirt. Mixed with the violent odour of the city emerged something like burning plastic.
It was louder than the country town they’d grown up in together. At night the trams dinged as they ferried passengers in and out of the city, and people laughed and yelled as they walked in the street. When he finally fell asleep, he’d dream he was running across a football field, a ball falling from the sky and landing in his hands. Looking back, he sees a faceless boy he recognises from school, sprinting towards him with teeth bared in a threatening smile. He turns away and runs, waiting to be tackled. Instead of mud or pain or anything, he feels his skin floating in the dark of his room, impossibly still, his bladder pressing against his waist. He’d wait there till the fear subsided before stumbling towards the bathroom.
After the lease had completed its twelve-month lifespan, Paul told him he didn’t want to renew and that he was moving in with his girlfriend. Over a beer at their local pub, they celebrated their last night together. They sat in their usual spot, at a bench near the entrance with the door that swung as people entered, sometimes hitting him in the back. But they liked it there because they could people-watch. They sipped their pints, their white t-shirts sweaty from a day of lifting furniture to Paul’s new place.
Halfway through the second pint, he asked if he’d done something wrong. Was it because of the mess? But Paul said that wasn’t it. He trusted Paul and didn’t think about it after that.
He often thinks of Paul and wonders how he’s doing. They’d met when he was fourteen, when his parents had decided to move to the country. It was safer there, they’d told him.
His mother had tried to convince him of the country lifestyle and how wonderful it would be. She told him stories of where she had grown up – the fields where her father had taught her how to ride a motorbike and a living room large enough for a piano. She and her sisters performed silly dances for guests who came to eat and drink with nice cutlery and glasses.
In the early days, he explored the dead streets on his bike to get away from his mother, who was always at him about something he had or hadn’t done. One day he rode past Paul playing in his front yard and suddenly they were friends.
He preferred to be at Paul’s house because Paul’s Mum was a better cook and didn’t mind cleaning up after them. Paul also had more video games. Together, they stayed up late playing them, eating pizza, and drinking soft drinks.
He loved seeing how long they could stay awake for. It became a contest he always won. He found that if he stayed up late enough, he didn’t have to try to fall asleep; it would just happen. He hated lying still in the darkness, waiting for his mind to stop, aware of nothing but his bladder and his mind replaying scenes of boys rushing towards him with bared teeth.
It was hard when Paul told him he couldn’t come over as often. He remembers his hollow house with its high-pitched, cathedral-like ceilings and a spine that ran along the centre. The kitchen, dining, and living room were open-plan, creating one large space where everyone could see you. Tall windows looked south, towards a backyard enclosed by trees with long branches that curved low to the ground like dark caves. But instead of playing cricket with his dad or teaching his brother to ride a bike, as his parents had dreamed for him, he stayed in his room.
Leaving the main area of the house, a hallway that stretched towards the west, with doors to each bedroom placed along it like the teeth of a key. His room was at the end of the hallway, the smallest in the house and the only one with low ceilings that, by the time he moved out, he could reach up and touch. A window looked not onto the garden, but at a fence they shared with the neighbours.
If he could lock his door he would have. When his siblings came into his room, he just screamed at them to leave, a solution that eventually worked. He liked his nest of dirty clothes, books, and discarded toys his mother had given up trying to clean.
The fights with his mother were bad and his father stayed out of it. All she did was remind him of how hard her life was and how hard she had worked for him to have this. Raising four children while working had made her life relentless, so the least he could do was help her around the house. But he couldn’t. His mind would boil over and his muscles ached at the idea. Doors slammed, voices shouted, and the dishes stacked up in the sink. When he moved out at eighteen it was a relief for everyone.
It was the first house that he loved. The one he was born in before they moved to the country. Before Paul and Cass and all of it. It was a five-minute walk from the primary school, where he had plenty of friends and all the teachers loved him. He didn’t realise these were things that you could lose.
The house was a castle, but once his siblings came along, his parents told him they’d outgrown it. He hadn’t understood this, because there was all the room in the world for him and Mum and Dad, the smell of burnt toast and orange juice, bedtime stories and hugs goodnight.
He sees it now: a single tree in the front yard, sunlight slipping through cracks in the leaves as he looks up from itchy grass and into a weave of green and orange that seems to never end.
It’s late and he is lying naked with Cass on clean sheets, the scent of bergamot in the room. He’s resting his head on her chest as she pulls her fingers through his hair. It is just like their first night together. He’ll realise tomorrow, when he watches her drive off, that it will also be their last. The light turns off. His skin lets go and joins hers, swirling in this great absence of feeling. As she tells him goodnight, her warm breath flows up through her throat, past white teeth, screaming light through his closed eyes.
Jack Sinclair is a writer, game designer and teacher working in Melbourne on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung land.