Counter Culture
Freya Turnbull
We called it ‘Preacher House’. Though the preacher that once lived there didn’t do much preaching within the curdled beige walls, preferring instead to commit sex crimes against his congregation. Or so the story goes.
Preacher House was, this threadbare winter, rattling with Newtown hipsters, who drank oat milk and shaved their eyebrows clean off. Without them, they looked foetal and pallid: amoeba fermenting in a draughty womb, holier-than-thou vegans preaching polyamory. Where once sermons rang, the tinny drone of online lectures and oh god prayer of Tinder hookups reigned.
It was to Preacher House I took the 18 bus, simmering like a hummingbird heart in the yellow ribcage of Metlink’s making. It was to Preacher House that Newtown blurred into one grey-green avenue of thrumming, brown-tooth black-lung life. I loved it; the cult gatherings in coffee shops and Moon Bar, a pulsating smoker’s area on each corner, the culture of it. Every flat had a fucking DJ, SSRIs sold like hotcakes to girls who listened to Fiona Apple, piercings studded wrinkled bogan lips like the night sky.
It had been a long day of looking tastefully bored and feeling each cell in my body cringe away from the sleet-grey spittle of the Wellington sky. Preacher House was a blank slate of weatherboard against the bitter weather. I thought about God. I thought about him as a scientist, prodding my empty body around a petri dish. I thought about the preacher, and whether he’d be disgusted by the casual sin that festered in his house, or whether he’d be turned on by it.
I collapsed with great vigour on my bed. Blank walls, peeling paint, a single crucifix. My own private nunnery. Preacher House was only meant to be a stopgap, but I had been sleeping nose-to-wall in this box for a year now. Which is how I noticed the smell so quickly.
Earthy and rot, musty and meat. There was something erotic and petrichor about it. Not the usual incense stench. I opened my eyes.
A fine rash of black mould, like freckles over God’s own nose, inches from mine.
I recoiled like He’d slapped me. Wellington. Honestly.
Half-baked notions of bleach and vinegar swam through my mind, but the day had drained me like a bird bone. I rolled over.
When I woke up, the rash had bloomed. Up the walls in a lurid black-green pattern like particularly ugly wallpaper, congealing in the skirting like the swollen gutters outside Preacher House when it rained. I lurched to my feet.
The next hours drained away, spent drinking bad vodka and scrubbing. Bleach and vinegar, Exit Mould. Sharp as a scalpel. That ache got in my muscles and spread, throbbing and hot and angry as desire. The dishwater turned rank and malevolent. But by the end of it, I was clean. Or too drunk to see anything more.
Satisfied, I slept. My dreams bloomed and congealed into confusing mud. The preacher whispered through the walls. God freckled my grey matter.
The next morning, it returned.
Spirals and curlicues like raw-rusted iron. The kind of thing a Newtown hipster would call gritty and like, real, you know? It had sprung back in the shadowy wet dark of my room, licked its way past my body, and spat a fuzzy blue mass on my boots, left idle by the door.
—Why is everything in this house fucking mouldy? I slammed the kitchen cupboard shut.
One of the amoeba raised what would have been an eyebrow. I couldn’t remember whether this one had named themselves after a crystal, an animal, or an object.
—Have you tried ventilating it? Like, doors and windows open?
—Am I an idiot?
The ache hadn’t left my muscles yet, but it braided itself into the sinew further as I scrubbed. I muttered prayers or curses or absolutions. The preacher would have been proud.
That night, the preacher trailed a finger down my spine. God raised his absent eyebrow. The walls showed their off-white teeth and the mould slithered in. And when morning spat its hospital-white lights over the walls, I could see it, a 3-D mass that shifted and twisted.
My hands turned to leather with bleach.
I had to catch it. If it was the preacher or God sneaking in while I slept I had to see it. I wanted to see the shapes. The blue and green. Shifting pigment like a bruise.
I stayed awake and watched the moon bite its fingernails. The mould danced in the half-light, and I couldn’t see God but I thought He was dancing too. My skin itched to the rhythm. A low, sensual hum. It pulsed in the walls like gospel. I could see the curve of the preacher’s cheekbone outlined in livid black marks. God Loves You, he said. God Wants You To Grow Big And Strong.
There was a new ache in the morning, a spreading, hollowed-out thing that thinned out my marrow and made my heart pound. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been hungry. I emerged from my room like a new growth and slimed into the kitchen. The lone bag of spinach in my fridge was wilted into liquid. Slam. Toast it was.
I put the bread on the counter and blue fuzz erupted into continents. Angry white blisters had climbed up the cupboards and skated along the countertop. I poured bleach on all of it.
—Dude, what the fuck? One of the hipsters was chopping mushrooms. I saw them grow up the knife. I just cleaned.
I didn’t need food, I decided. The preacher called me a saint for it, holy fast and famine. It all went off anyway. The mould nourished the ache.
I took the 18 bus and the seats writhed. Fluffy and blue. Campus mould was oozy as brains. Lambton Quay mould was sterile and white. It lacked the lasciviousness of Preacher House, a thin snowstorm. Aro Valley was all colour, a painter’s palette of lapis and emerald, tiny dots springing up as I walked by. My breath was a rusty knife being drawn from my gut, my skin danced, my pupils congealed as I breathed it all in, the petri dish of my city. All that life.
—
Freya Turnbull is a poet, student, and aspiring spectre from Pōneke. She has been featured in a number of publications, most recently Turbine | Kapohau, the forthcoming edition of the New Zealand Poetry Society anthology, and more. She owns a lot of weird dolls, and takes fashion cues from them as well. @_cultclassic
