The Amateur Science of Love (8 page)

Two hours later in Ballarat I was at the wheel when the tyre blew—Tilda was sleep-sobbing in the back. I pulled over quickly enough so the wheel rim wasn’t damaged, but the problem was getting the spare from the roof. Tilda kept it there roped on the rack she used for transporting paintings. She didn’t know knots—hers you had to pick at to untie rather than one tug and the rope slips free. I picked and poked but the tightness wasn’t budging. It needed fingernails longer than mine and a screwdriver to get a good purchase.

‘I’ll do it,’ Tilda said as I climbed down. She elbowed me to get out of her way, gave a jump to catch hold of the rack and scaled the van’s side. The decent thing to say would have been, ‘Be careful, watch yourself in your condition.’ In me, however, some indecent door had opened and in had walked all the wrong crowd.

I watched her pick the knots and swear at the roof for being so scorching with sun. I watched her stand and heave the spare out of its ties. She knelt to roll it from the roof edge. It occurred to me that if she fell now it might bring on a miscarriage. Not a serious fall: I wouldn’t want a serious fall that broke a limb or got anywhere close to maiming her. Just a fall where the bump and shock of it churned her insides. It would be better than an abortion, wouldn’t it? A more natural process. It would spare her something more medical. The strain she was putting into taking the tyre’s weight in one hand and dangling it for passing to me might be enough to do the deed. It was my job to reach up and take the tyre from her. I should have. But I didn’t.

Tilda grunted and wriggled further to the edge. The rack rail must have been jagging into her pelvis but she didn’t make a moan. She held the hanging tyre as if a test of strength, eyes and mouth slitted from the hurt of what she was doing.

She unslit an eye and stared at me. I could see exactly what that eye said. It said:
Are you watching? Are you seeing that I am thinking the same as you?
She let the tyre drop and roll into the ditch.

Her eye did say it; I wasn’t dreaming. She had the miscarriage idea too. She was willing it. How else can the rest of that day’s trip be explained? We didn’t share a word for 100ks. No hostilities either; not a tear or cross word. She drove without one reckless jerk of emotional steering. Her bottom lip was pushed up over her top in concentration.

There was one sentence, Tilda’s, but with no obvious sub-meaning: ‘Cigarette, please. Can you light it?’ There was a ‘ta’ from her once I’d passed it to her mouth. I wasn’t about to ask, ‘What are you thinking?’ It might have been viewed too warmly as trying to bridge the distance between us. I was getting away with breaking her heart too well to risk that.

Or so I thought.

On the futon above the Fitzroy lighting shop that night we congressed. No, we fucked. There was no tender playfulness to warrant
congressed
. We did not kiss as such, more a light grazing of two limp tongues. It was all body, as you’d have with fleetings. I would swear she was willing that baby dead, as if there was something wrong with it now, because there was something wrong with us: we drank two bottles of wine, Tilda going two glasses to my one. She chain-smoked a whole pack of Dunhills. You don’t do that and want good health for your unborn. She said, ‘I have such a desperate need to be entered, hard.’ I did as she wanted. It took place in the dark—we had dark to look into instead of each other’s faces. Not once but three times before finally we turned our backs to each other for sleep. Of all the perversities, I wouldn’t have guessed the lash of wanting a miscarriage was an aphrodisiac. The lash kept us at it all week. But no miscarriage came.

On the seventh night Tilda went to bed with her clothes on, didn’t even let out the belt to loosen her jeans. When my fingers tried to do it, she said, ‘No more entering.’

‘Why not?’ I reached out to the belt again.

‘Don’t touch me.’

‘Why not?’

‘Let me lie still and not be touched. Don’t touch.’

I sat up and kicked the blanket down to my knees. I was naked and expected that if I pushed and rubbed against her she would want touching. She put her elbow into my side to keep me off her.

‘I want this out of me,’ she said. ‘This is not how a child should be born. We are not what it should have. I want it out of me.’

I pulled the blanket back up, as if that was more dignified given what she was saying. I kept silent in case my relief in what she was saying showed in my voice.
It’s her decision
, I told myself.
That frees me from being responsible. Or shares it between us. If I am a murderer (and I know what pious folk say—there’s a God of wrath and a day of judgment on the issue), then Tilda is co-murderer with me.

She said, ‘I’ll make a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. They’ll be looking up me, so no more entering.’ She spoke quietly, no tears. You’d have thought we would have one argument at least. One outburst of pleading—‘Change your mind, Colin. Let’s have this baby.’ Even some ‘stuck your dick in me’ savagery. But there wasn’t.

Not mentioning Richard or Alice was like living a convenient lie. But live that way we did. The abortion was arranged for the following Friday. I sat in a café across the road from where it happened, just around from her studio. The café’s still there; the doctor’s place isn’t.

I kept smelling the sewer under my feet. For all the concrete and tarseal, my mind had wind of it. Richard and Alice would be flushed down there, I expected. I lifted my soles off the ground. As if that would disconnect me! After all, sewers run to the sea. The sea gets turned into oxygen. My lungs would end up breathing it in. There was no escaping.

Ever since, if I go to Melbourne I avoid Fitzroy. I loop right around it.

I have a theory: Tilda adored the idea of motherhood but was relieved we never went through with it. She’d had a lovely, if brief, experience of having life inside her without the reality to deal with. If the episode haunted her she had me, Colin, to blame. She had the upper hand on me. Morally, I mean. She was absolved.

Makes me feel better, this theory. Why else would I have invented it, sitting in that café? It helped rid the sewer smell. It was a comfort once the abortion was done and I drove Tilda to a motel in North Melbourne. She was silent and pale in the passenger seat, head back, eyes closed. Her hand over her stomach as if nurturing it.

The motel wasn’t some cheap dive. It had air-conditioning and a king-sized bed and six pillows for Tilda to treat herself.

‘Treat myself for what?’ she said. ‘You make it sound like I’ve achieved something.’

‘Treat yourself in the convalescing sense. We can afford two nights. I’ll wait on you.’

Doctor’s orders banned her from exerting herself or having baths for three days—baths can bring on haemorrhaging. She had pads between her legs, which made walking uncomfortable. She reclined, legs apart with the blankets over her and looked at the television, more staring at it than watching. She didn’t laugh when the canned laughter prompted us. Or look sad when movie music wanted it.

The only food she felt like was wonton soup. I found a takeaway place and ferried in two lots a day. She craved the salty juice and hardly pecked at the wontons.

I asked, ‘Is there nothing else I can bring you?’

She shook her head, said no
.
There was an irritable sound in the no. My theory put that down to punishment. The more I wanted to do some little thing for her, the more she was determined to deprive me of the pleasure.

It worked too. I had never felt so miserable. I hoped that by telling her this she would converse with me, be finished with punishing. ‘I want you to know I feel terrible,’ I said.

‘How does that help me?’

‘I don’t know.’

On one visit to the toilet her bleeding became heavier.

I panicked. ‘Is it normal? You want me to call someone?’

‘No,’ she said. Still an irritable no, but she repeated it quietly and then said, ‘
I’ll
make a call. I want to call my lawyer.’

Was she intending to sue me? I didn’t know what law I’d broken. ‘Lawyer? About
this
? We can solve this. No need for lawyers.’

‘About Scintilla. I want to speak to him about my place. I want to check something with him.’

‘If you want to get out of the sale, I’m sure they can do that.’

‘Who wants to get out of the sale?’

‘After what’s happened. We, well, we wouldn’t be going ahead.’

‘I am going ahead. I want to speed up the settlement date.’

‘What, go ahead alone?’

‘Not alone. You’re going to lend a hand for a while. I’ve thought up a businesslike arrangement.’

I frowned and shrugged my confusion and sat on the end of the bed while Tilda puffed up pillows behind her shoulders.

She said, ‘You help me move in. I’m moving in to my Van Gogh garret and you must help transport my things in the van. And once I’ve moved in, the next part of the business arrangement can begin.’

‘Are you ordering me?’

‘Let me finish. You can putty the walls, plug the holes in the floors. Replace where the tiles have fallen off in the bathroom. I want to be able to get straight to painting my paintings. You can tart up the place for me. Patch the ceilings where the plaster’s come down. Rehang all the doors. You owe me that, Colin. You bloody well owe me that.’

‘For how long?’

‘A year.’

‘A year? A year of that?’

‘A year of work to clear your Richard or Alice debt. Consider us business partners. We’ll be assigned domestic duties. I will cook. You can plant a vegetable garden for me. I will pay the bills and do my art. You will work on my place and pay off your debt that way. We will be like friends. We will sleep in separate beds, in separate rooms. You futoned on the floor in one room. Me in my bed in another. I’m going to buy myself a nice four-poster one.’

A year. It sounded a long time, though in my heart I was convinced I deserved it. A year, and at the end of it my absolution would be the reward.

A convenience of the arrangement was money. I wouldn’t need any: Tilda was in charge of that. Buying the Van Gogh garret meant there was nearly $8000 left over from her $40,000. She would top that up by painting. In no time her new studio would be wet with canvas paddocks and sunsets. She’d sell pictures to loyal aunties and cousins. Charge them $1000, which I called robbery
given they were relatives.

The arrangement included guidelines for socialising. If either of us met a Scintillan who attracted us for dating, that was perfectly reasonable, part of the arrangement. Reasonable too if we wanted to bring them home for congressing. Or so we said—it was never tested. Scintillans took some getting used to for Tilda. I was accustomed to country people—hairy-eared, bull-sized men who talk rainfall as if rain was life’s measure. Tilda’s type was more…well…a feckless me. Besides, she was back to the Tilda I’d first met in London: art not men in life, that was her decree.

If only we humans didn’t have the sweet poison in us, wouldn’t that be simpler and save us so much misery?

Six weeks after we moved in Tilda made a suggestion. She couched it as a slight amendment to our business agreement. Did so not with coldness or unfeeling calculation; there was fondness for me in her face. At least that was my surmising. Her cheeks were blushed ashine from the cask reds of the evening. But the blush was also a red shyness and boldness blend.

It was late autumn, which still means summer if you’ve stoked the fireplaces. Your skin slicks with sweat after showering. Hot temperatures, I’m sure of it, thin the poison and flood the body with it easier. ‘You can come into my bed tonight if you want,’ Tilda said, her top lip teasingly attached to the wineglass rim.

The poison slushed through me. My breathing wouldn’t behave. ‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously.’

Week after week and only me had touched me.

Tilda put her hand on the kitchen table as if swearing on a Bible. She said, ‘Let’s not call it congressing. Let’s call it servicing. You can service me and I will service you.’

I said, ‘You make us sound like Herefords,’ though it was not a criticism. I was so excited no amount of mathematics was going to prevent me from having to let the first expelling go.

We serviced each other, nightly, then I would go back to my room.

But the servicing got more serious. One night, I did not go back to my room. I fell asleep in Tilda’s arms. Same the next night. Our servicing became more like congressing again. We pushed the business arrangement out a bit, to thirteen months. Then fourteen months, fifteen. Then sixteen.

Month sixteen: that’s when I discovered the egg.

It was lodged deep in her right breast, stuck against the breastbone. For all our congressing I had felt no hint of it before. I must have groped harder this time, her arms reaching over her head in pleasure, arching her frame out. An egg like eggs feel when they’re hard-boiled and peeled and have rubber give in them. Though this egg wasn’t smooth—it had rough portions on it. Three kisses down from the nipple it made the skin bulge.

I flicked my fingers away as you do if suddenly touching a spider. And like a spider the feeling of it remained, tingling. I wiped my fingers on the sheets but the revulsion was too strong. I spasmed with flicking. I shuddered and hid the reason for doing so by groaning as if in the throes of a fierce expelling. Stomach to stomach I lay in the fork of her, my left side lifted up a little so as not to have the egg pressing on me.

A lump like that is just popped muscle, I reasoned in myself. A lump like that just goes away, no need to think of it again. A lump like that is not a growth, as in disease, as in old women’s talk—
growths
. If it was a growth, wouldn’t it be painful? Look at Tilda smiling, eyes closed, content to go to sleep now. No look of pain in her face, which you’d have if you had a bad lump.

I slid into position beside her. ‘Everything okay?’

‘Yes,’ she yawned. ‘Why?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Night.’

‘Night.’

She turned rump-to-groin to me, wriggled in closer, reached behind herself to take my wrist and cross my arm under her arm to have my palm cup her breast. But it was the spider-egg breast, so I couldn’t cup it. I cupped her hip instead, which was not very comfortable but clear of the cold tingle and crawl. Clear of obligation to have a proper feel, a more medical probe. If I touched it again, if it was not a mind trick but real and pronounced, then I would have to say so. I would have to point and poke, guide Tilda’s fingers, asking, ‘Is that normal, that lump right there?’ We were two people who needed our sleep rather than be up all night worrying about egg lumps.

It was bound to be nothing, I decided. I slipped into sleep. After all, tomorrow I had a job to go to. My sixth freelance job reporting for the
Scintilla Gazette Weekly
. A dozen culvert pipes had gone missing from the racecourse—concrete and brand new. Someone had used a winch to uncouple a drain and thieve them. The day after tomorrow Tilda was off to Melbourne. Principally to hawk paintings around galleries, but also to tie in a doctor’s appointment for the usual swabs and top-to-toe. Preparations, Tilda called it. Preparations and maintenance for her future pregnancy hopes. No Richard or Alice fiasco this time, but a proper planned making of a loved child. I figured if the egg was still there the doctor could appraise it.

The loved child plan involved an ultimatum to me: if I, Colin, was not prepared to take the step to fatherhood; if I was still the Colin of sixteen months ago and not father material; if I did not feel it in my heart and head, if the urge had not come upon me, then, decreed Tilda, we should say goodbye once and for all. She would find herself a man more committed. Her body would not be in working order forever. It would dry up like a dam eventually and be barren.

She did remind me how I had let her down. ‘Richard or Alice—do you ever think on it? It would be seven months old now.’ She knew it was futile to force me into fatherhood. ‘I could try saying
You owe me
,’ she said, ‘but what good would that do? If you don’t want a child, deep down in yourself,
You owe me
is pathetic.’

I was not the same Colin of sixteen months ago. If you could have x-rayed my thinking, if all the wires and locks could be picked away to expose the very spot you’d call true-me, there had been alterations. I was warmer on the pregnancy idea. I had an inkling that I’d found my niche in life in Scintilla. That’s what a bit of steady work will do for you. Not that there was an immediate hurry for pregnancy, surely. I committed myself to the idea, but suggested Tilda keep using a diaphragm until
Gazette
work became more frequent and lucrative. ‘Let’s get things bedded down,’ I said.

She relented, ‘Okay. As long as it’s not an excuse.
Bedding down
is not
never ever
.’ She agreed the
Gazette
opportunity was an exciting development, one I should not be distracted from at this moment. It gave her a sense of pride to see me march out the door so purposefully of a morning, pad and pen in hand like real tools of trade. My plastering wall cracks gave her a house-proud pleasure, but ‘Look at you!’ she smiled as I put a tie on. ‘Mr Professional. Quite the respectable fellow.’

The
Gazette
even let me use its vehicle for assignments—a latest model Commodore with a CB radio, like police have. ‘Assignments,’ Tilda quipped. ‘Sounds very James Bond.’ She hated ironing but wouldn’t see me walk out crinkled: crisp and creaseless is how shirts must be when there’s a job to do that you call ‘responsible’.

The work came via a chance conversation of Tilda’s. Because of her art degree she’d been asked to judge the primary school’s prize for collage. At the fairy-bread supper after the award ceremony a mother, stuck for conversational subject matter, asked, ‘And your man friend, Tilda, is he of a creative bent?’

‘Oh yes,’ she replied. ‘Goodness yes. He was accepted into a very exclusive academy for drama in London. He became disillusioned, however. He’s more a business brain, that’s his bent. He has thrown himself into renovating the old building like you wouldn’t believe. He’s a roll up your sleeves and get on with it sort of guy.’

The mother, it turned out, was the daughter of Hector Vigourman, grazier,
Gazette
owner, former state member of parliament for the district, amateur actor and president of the Scintilla Footlights Community Theatre Company.

Two days later there he was, knocking on our back door, stout and dapper in fawn cashmere cardigan and proper leather shoes—not the elastic-sided boots and flannelette shirt of a normal Scintillan.

He had a proposition for me. Would I be willing, as a favour to the town’s few but passionate amateur thespians, to cast my eye over their new production of
Arsenic and Old Lace
? If I would perhaps sit in on a rehearsal? If I could perhaps impart some advice—a few tips I had gleaned from my experiences in London? In fact, would I be willing to review the play for the
Gazette
? As its proprietor he would be honoured to print me.

He described the
Gazette
as a very modest enterprise, smiling a mix of apology and boasting, and given that his sister was the editor he could assure me prominent placement on, say, page three or five. He would be delighted if I included a paragraph or two about my RADA days. It was bound to pique the interest of locals.

‘I don’t think so. Those days are far behind me.’ I was too busy with my renovating project, I said.

‘Oh please,’ he persisted.

‘I wouldn’t want to be seen as a Scintillan newcomer who is blowing his own trumpet.’

‘Not at all.’

Tilda elbowed encouragement. ‘It’s not blowing your trumpet. It’s community spirit.’

‘Too true.’ Vigourman nudged me. ‘Go on.’

‘Sweetheart, go on. Do it.’

‘All right then,’ I said. ‘A review. A short one.’

‘Excellent.’ Vigourman clapped his hands together. ‘A review that gives us a little pat on the back. After all, we are not RADA material.’

I drew the line on the subject of RADA. I said RADA was a very unhappy time for me. I hated talking about, let alone writing on, the topic.

‘Of course, of course,’ Vigourman said. ‘We don’t want to stir up unpleasant memories.’ We shook hands like two notable men agreeing on terms. ‘The troops will be so excited. They’re getting on in years, you’ll find, but they are always willing to listen and learn.’

Getting on in years—he wasn’t kidding. I sat beside him at the rehearsal worried about them surviving the ordeal of speaking lines: two or three needed to sit between scenes and catch their breath. One fell asleep doing it. All the lines were fluffed—sometimes the stage went silent for twenty seconds while the cast waited for offstage prompts.

‘What do you think?’ Vigourman whispered. ‘Be honest. I know we’ve got work to do.’

I did enjoy his deferring to my authority. ‘Nervousness is the enemy of the actor, in my experience. They need to relax. You can’t underestimate the nervousness factor.’

I took my chance on that note of wisdom to excuse myself and slip out.