Graham Tugwell is a writer and performer of Irish distraction. The recipient of the College Green Literary Prize 2010, his work has appeared in over thirty journals, including Anobium, The Quotable, Pyrta, THIS Literary Magazine and L’Allure Des Mots. He has lived his whole life in the village where his stories take place. He loves it with a very special kind of hate. His website is grahamtugwell.com.

Love, Wrong Love, (But Love Nonetheless)

“Love,” she says.

“Wrong love, wrong love.”

“(But love nonetheless)”

. . .

Home is the house in the lee of the hills.

So long has it mouldered in their shadow that the seam between brick and earth has melted to nothing, the level cleanness of edge and surface abandoned for the grimy slant and bulge of nature.

Here is home, for now at least—

Shrugging down into shoulders of soil like a beaten head, folds of hedge and evergreen gorse rise in rims of neck and chin and swamp the toothless darkness of doors. Dull either side of the snub portico snout windows blackened by the brightness of cold autumn sun lean together in blind confusion. Underneath; whitewashed cheeks stucco-spotted, admonished by a slap of muck, above; a fringe of ill-tended thatch greened by age, browned with damp. Poking from this musty weave— twin chimneys, crow-haunted and ivy-riddled; gable-ended elf ears.

How small it seems to me now, a thin shell not worthy of the memories that loom in my mind. Taken by the hand along these cracked stones so long ago, I remember the windows being as black and the cawing of crows as loud, but in my memories that swollen bulk of building filled my entire field of vision, a knotted back of patched and crumbling whiteness shrugging to touch the base of ever-threatening clouds.

An inescapable thing, and I, dragged inexorably towards it.

. . .

In my mind I see her, the one mother and I had come so far to see, opening the door in a creak of cold unwelcome light, unsmiling as the smell of the place deadened the air, took the colour from the world.

I remember her and her cloud of clinical sourness, her rough brown skin chilling the nape of my neck, the endless boredom that weighed upon her words, her stooped and shaking frame that held nothing bar a wracking cough, but above all I remember the sour judgment colouring her yellow eyes.

Sitting in silence, as the women exchanged terse banalities, I remember the air growing so cold and so thick it choked. Pulling free from my mother’s hand, spurred on by the pallid gaze of the older woman, I run silent through cold dark rooms, feet noiseless upon the floor, through those chambers of a cold dead heart, the walls softly bending, the floors uneven, the chambers shaking, beating with the silent breath of me until something stops me sudden.

I am in her bedroom—there is the narrow frigid bed brown-sheeted, there the table where her teeth lie dusted, there the net curtains limply sickened by the flies they trap in folds.

And there, on walls sunk dreaming into damp, surrounding a portrait of Christ blithely suffering in shades of blood and dirt, there bleeds a frost of softly glowing blue, a frozen waterfall that seems to weep from the wall itself.

Transfixed by the sparkling azure, I hold out my hand, feel the shocking warmth and smoothness of that growing mould, smell the close dampness rolling in waves from the wall; hear... hear something soft on the edge of hearing...

Her hand on my shoulder wrenches me around, anger dispelling her frailty, lending her a strength that stunned me, left me open-mouthed.

And then I hear the first and final word she ever addressed to me: “Leave.”

Silent in the car home I stare at the stain on my fingers.

The blue... It lasted for days.

. . .

Yes, stumbling awkwardly down the uneven path, dragging the suitcase behind me, it all comes back to me.

The cold. The dark. The smell. Filling my nostrils now, leaking from the cold damp stone that sits too sullen to greet me. The smell of decay, the smell of death, the smell of sour memory...

And now my grandmother is cold in the ground, my mother made too sick to travel, and I feel nothing except the guilt at feeling nothing. Now it falls on me to decide what to do with this failing place.

Grinning, the solicitor handed me the key this morning, after the priest’s barren homilies died upon our ears. Now I slot the rusted thing home, shouldering the door open to the fleshy squeak of wet-warped wood, letting in drifts of leaves ahead of me.

I step into the hungry mouth of this place.

. . .

It is the closeness that strikes home first; the roof so low, the walls buckling inwards, hung with paper blotched and bleached, fingers that curl and grasp between the emptiness of shelves, blackdamp spaces bent with the weight of whispering water.

I must hunch to walk within this place, turn so my shoulders do not drag a scum of paint and plaster after me.

Leaving my suitcase in the hallway I reacquaint myself with this dying house.

They found her in her bedroom—found her after lying there so long it seemed she had become one with those rotten sheets—

Now staring into that musty den of grey and brown I hold my breath, fearing that some part of her still hangs there, caught forever in this damp and heavy air. But a breath is forced out of me nonetheless, for the mould—that blue cascade that once I touched, that long since glimmered in my dreams—is gone. Now all I see is a stretch of sloping wall blackened by age.

The portrait of Christ still hangs in blissful agony, eyes raised and uncomplaining.

For a moment my lips work soundlessly. Had I merely dreamt all that terror and wonder?

But then my eyes are dragged down to the bed, and I think I can make out the impression her ancient body made upon the yielding sheets the weeks she lay there.

Sickened, I turn away, putting the absent fall of blue out of my mind.

But not for long.

. . .

Feeling myself gross and monstrous I slump through the house, feeling it shrinking, walls and roof closing in, a second skin of brick and plaster swamping. But it is simply the disjoint between childhood memories and the petty reality of this place.

How long did I run through those endless rooms? Then it felt like forever, but now I see everything there is to see in a single glance—the bedroom, the bathroom, the sitting room, the scullery, the kitchen—wretched spaces surrendering to the melt risen up from the ground.

I can taste the mould, feel it on every surface—an oily grit that gathers beneath fingernails.

And I can hear scrubbling crows in the chimney, rats behind plaster—I imagine the nests of skittering spiders moist in the bulging bowels of wallpaper. Filth moves on the edges of my sight.

In the kitchen I make my decision— pull it down. Pull it all down and drive this place into the dirt, these worthless bricks and mouldered stone.

No loss to anyone.

. . .

And so I spend the creaking coldness of the night in a chair, folded against the groaning of my bones, the small fire defeated by the blocked chimney, my mouth filthy with the taste of smoke. I sit there, perched restless on the edge of dreaming, shook awake again and again by the hollow plunge of dropping, dreams bursting only to coil again in blurred confusion.

In dreams I find the blue again.

Drifting along the bowed and bending hallway I stop beneath the lumber slats that cage the attic underside. Dreaming, my hands reach up and pull the rotten wood away, splintering like ancient ribs, and from the rough gaps they tumble, azure throats of mould— wet and warm and sparkling blue— a dozen acid kisses harsh upon my face.

And the voice of my grandmother drips through them:

“In bed.”

“In bed.”

“Take my place in bed.”

And they move— the necks of mould are blindly groping for my mouth—

Through the choking cloth of dreams, I feel it.

Something is under the ragged quilt with me, I feel it moving along my thighs, pricking the softness there—dreams are flung apart and I am awake, springing from the chair, the scant warmth gathered to me in an instant gone. Unseen, the crawling thing falls away from me, a dull thud in darkness.

The air disturbs with soft noises gathering— sounds of crinkling paper, of nails on wood, of soft feet on brittle carpet. A rattling wheeze rolls down the chimney, blows freezing over my ankles.

I stand in the cold and dark in the dead of night and try to slow my beating heart.

A noise—looove— leaves me tensed for flight— something softly bursts under my heel; a brittle sponge giving with the slightest crack, coating my sole with sticking hotness. Stumbling I step backwards, feel another something burst, feel rounded rubbery shapes smooth against my heels and toes.

Rolls that noise again— loooove—

In a wash of silver light I see them crawling down the walls, across the floor, emerging from skirting boards. Like crabs, like eggs; pale orbs of living plastic, not opaque enough to hide the rushing blue within, their rows of stumpy legs like loose and melted molars—the ones destroyed smeared blue and black across the floor.

Caring not for the things that crack and burst beneath my naked feet, I make it to the back door in three long strides. Reaching for the handle my hand closes not upon metal but upon a yielding bulb of warmth that comes away in a retch of sticky threads.

The door has been lost beneath a tide of sparkling blue— the mould has returned.

Violently thrashing the hand to free myself of the clinging blue, bursting through drifts of crawling plastic things, I turn and stumble into the hallway.

More curtains of mould have dripped from mumbling plaster lips cut jagged in the ceiling, a slow turgid vomit filling the doorways with unforgiving blue, plugging the hallway at its farthest end. No escape that way.

Only one avenue left to me— into her bedroom, into the place where she lay so long.

Falling over the threshold I see the walls breathe inwards, bulging into bellies of blue mould, riven with eczema cracking, splintering into scabs, and I know this house is just a shell, an outer layer, a crust of brick upon some living thing. A thing that seeks to trap me here.

The ceiling over the bed slowly pulls away like lips over teeth, revealing an attic greased and swollen with the weeping blue stuff, a crawling nest of smooth crab creatures flowing down the wall towards me.

The house quivers, floorboards groan: the portrait of Christ tumbles, glass splintering in the shadows behind the headboard. The buckling wall buckles further, splitting, creaking, snapping, pulled to either side as a blue shape softly births itself, forced through creaking wood and masonry, a wet skull framed with the matted mould of ice-blue hair.

And I know who and what dangles on the end of that elongated cobalt tongue long before the pale moon glints upon her sour features, the wrinkled hollowness of her blue mouth opening, whispering:

“I am the home that holds you loving close...”

And it speaks so softly in my grandmother’s voice: the familiar wheeze of lungwet, the clack of tubes too weak to clear, now underscored by the scraping of wood on stone and the sharp cracking of plaster.

And I see her face, forcing itself to flow into an expression she was far too sour to ever make.

“She died, she died,” the looming face whispers “and now this place is dying too.”

My stomach cold and hollow, I take a step backwards; hear that same sickening crunch under my feet.

The flexing face of blue mould flinches.

“Please...”

“Don’t step on my eggs, don’t step on my love.”

“Don’t smash my love to bitter pieces.”

I lift my leg, poised to smash it down again. “I’ll do it,” I say, my voice high and shaking. “I’ll smash ever last one of them. Every last one of them!”

There is silence— the house so silent.

“I’ll do it,” I scream, slipping into manic. “I’ll kick your filthy love to bits!”

Hearing something softly crinkle I turn to see a net of blue mould slowly fill the window frame.

“No—” I spit and bring my heel down violently, smashing an egg, smashing another egg, smashing all the eggs that I can find but nothing halts the creep of blue taking the last light from me.

In the blue-limned dark it feels like I am underwater or metres under ice, drowning in the choking cold and closeness of this place—a sharp egg slashes my sole and I drop upon one knee, panting, shaking, feeling the walls close in, breathing air hot and bitter with motes of mould.

“I’ve been lived inside for long enough,” she says.

“Given myself to life and love.”

“Now let me live inside of you.”

“Take me to live in the world out there.”

Her eggs are crawling over my fingers, struggling up my hunched and heaving back—stump legs bluntly graze my ear— I shake them all away but they tumble together to gather in dark. And I can no longer stand— my strength is leaving me.

I feel the blue head moving on its long tongue of neck, weaving back and forth in the space above me, shedding its sour dust.

“Please,” I gasp, pulling a crab-thing from my shoulders, smashing it into the floor, tearing my fingers on its plastic sharpness.

“Open to me,” the house is whispering.

One of them is on my cheek—crawling on my face—feet in my mouth—I throw it across the room but already two more have taken its place—

“Open to me.”

They’re in my clothes. Oh God, they’re in my clothes.

And the voice, the voice of the house:

“This place will not sustain me. Open to me: be my home.”

I scream; the noise cut short by eggs invading the red softness behind my teeth—I bite, bite as hard as I can and fill my mouth with their cutting sharpness—my cheeks, they’ve punctured my cheeks—

The mounting weight of the crab-things flowing up my back and shoulders presses me down, forcing me to bend so that it feels my spine shall snap. I spit black blood upon the floor and forced to crouch, meet that hotness with my face.

“Just let it happen, let it happen.”

It whispers again and again in my grandmother’s voice.

“Lie still and let it happen.”

And as the fibrous eggs of mould finally swamp me, tearing away the last of my clothing, as they scramble up my legs and arms, probing for softness, probing for the place to enter; the house softly whispers in her voice.

“Love...” she says.

“Wrong love...”

“But love nonetheless.”