The Amateur Science of Love (5 page)

There should be a town called Comeuppance. There probably is, where others like me go. My Comeuppance town ended up being Scintilla. We’ll get there soon, but first there’s Amsterdam.

And before Amsterdam there were five more
sweetheart
and sighing phone calls. Whispery
darlings
were added, and kiss-sounds when we said goodbye. I’d run out of big-noting—I was too busy thinking about Tilda to scour London for a job more prestigious. Those phone calls with her were the central focus of my days.

‘You need a break, darling. Why not come here and be with me,’ she said. She had a pension room all to herself near the Van Gogh Museum. She had ‘an appetite’, which is love talk for mad lust. I had it too, so strong an urging it could only be permanent.

I can’t sit calmly at my nook desk if I’m to commit Amsterdam to the page. I have to stand up and walk around between lines. There I am: I have just landed, am about to be queued and stamped through the airport doors.

My blood is sprinting in-out of my heart. I am a few seconds from seeing Tilda. Even now, these eight years later, after all that has come to pass, my blood sprints in anticipation. I push my chair out and bounce on my toes. I wave as if seeing her among the hugging and handshaken greetings of others. I pace the elation out, one circuit around my nook. But I do it softly or else the floorboards creak and Tilda calls out complaints from her studio. My floor is her ceiling. It disturbs her concentration, my creaking. To paint is to need silence to order your thoughts and summon inspiration. Could I please pay her the courtesy of silence, for she has lost so much time? There is so much time to make up.

Floorboards are my enemy. But not the rickety stairs. The old wood there is friends with me should Tilda suddenly appear. The slightest footstep and my friend sets off his creak-alarm, my warning to hide these pages immediately and quickly wind other paper into my typewriter.

My short-notice hiding place is under the desk’s tablecloth. I keep a pile of books handy to stack on top. From there I transfer them, once Tilda is gone, to places in the walls around me. The architraves are loose and skew-whiff enough to tuck pages behind and tap the wood shut like a secret compartment. I don’t trust Tilda not to go through my things. Hiding places have become essential.

So I walk softly. And although my heart may be sprinting I sit down and close my eyes. I puff my cheeks out to get my breath back. I light a cigarette and jerk the window open to blow the smoke out the slit.

Tilda had hired someone to take us to her pension by car. ‘Look at that.’ She pointed to the night’s colours in canals, street lamps dancing pinkly in water. I couldn’t have cared less about Amsterdam’s canals. I wanted my hands all over her, starting just above the knee and working up, but she wriggled and pushed me off. ‘The driver,’ she smiled and frowned. She shrugged my lips from her neck skin. She glanced at the rear-vision mirror to shoo the driver’s eyes from our play.

I slumped along the back seat in mock rejection. Pressed my knees against her thigh to cork it gently in punishment. I sprang up and kissed her ear deep into its wax bitters.

‘Don’t.’ Her protesting was not about the driver anymore. She put her palm on my chest, held it there, a fence of fingers. ‘I’m sorry if I’m standoffish, but I’m shy. It’s natural. I haven’t seen you in weeks, and I think: Is it going to be the same between us?’

‘You’re confusing me. Have you got cold feet?’

‘No. No. Let’s wait till we get to our room. There’s something that might dampen your enthusiasm.’ She moved the fence to my mouth. She re-pointed to the canal colours. ‘Aren’t they gorgeous?’

I replied yes, sarcastically. Yes, the moon is very…moony. Yes, the water is…watery.

After a squabble with the pension manager we climbed the steep spiral to number 12. He wanted my passport for safekeeping. His safekeeping, not mine. ‘You young people don’t pay and one morning—
phut
! You are gone.’ I gave him my passport to speed up getting onto those stairs.

The room had a low double bed covered by a black eiderdown with windmill embroidery. Window glass was the headrest. Through the glass was a ledge with red and green flowers in a planter box.

‘Look at that,’ Tilda said, kneeling on the bed. ‘Across the street. You wonder how the whole façade keeps standing.’ She was referring to a row of bulging buildings, cracked from the ages and kept from toppling by telegraph poles propped against them.

‘Yes, it’s fascinating,’ I said. I knelt beside her, positioning myself to catch her lips with my lips when she turned. Sweet poison dripped through me. She turned and, lip to lip, we spoke into each other’s mouths.

‘Wait,’ she said.

‘For what?’ I fingered under her jumper, arms wedging open the wool. I fingered a layer of cotton singlet to ungoggle the bra wire from her breasts. She bit my bottom lip with her kiss. Her man arms were quivering. The taut skins of her ribs and drum belly were quivering. I was quivering too. She had hardly touched me with more than her mouth but that was enough to pluck my nervous system like a thumb.

The ungoggling went smoothly; so too unbuckling her belt—one of those seatbelt arrangements that snapped together instead of a spur and hole. But when I slid my flattened hand down her fly-front she jackknifed away just as I reached the saliva parting. My wrist was locked between her legs—I had to shimmy after her as she jumped off the bed or risk a dislocation. She held my wrist in her hands as if I needed controlling. ‘That’s the thing I needed to tell you. My period has arrived. I hoped it might start tapering off by now. It’s tomato soup down there.’

‘So?’

‘So it’s a mess.’

‘So?’

‘So it’s not attractive.’

‘I’m used to blood.’

‘Ay?’

‘Calves and lambs. What farm boy ever baulked at blood?’

‘In my experience this kind of blood puts men off.’

‘I have no idea.’

‘You haven’t done it with blood?’

‘No.’

‘It doesn’t bother you?’

Even if it had I was quivering so much I’d have gone ahead whether blood or acid.

‘Sweet boy.’ She cradled my face. ‘The good thing is, I can’t get potted with it.’ She kissed me, a peck on the mouth. Another peck. Each kiss got longer until it was one long kiss that kept going while she slipped her tampon out and scrunched a pocket tissue around it for my non-viewing.

The plastic bag from the rubbish bin made an undersheet beneath Tilda. Period blood smells the same as any other kind: rust, soil and briny water.

Art smells like turpentine. Like garages and machinery sheds. It dries into pictures, but turpentine, that’s what art is to me. Old baked-bean and tuna-fish cans filled with the stuff. It keeps the painter’s brush clean and makes the paint go further.

The smell fumes up through the nook’s floorboard cracks, burns my eyes, makes my nose run like winter. My pacing circuit may creak and disturb Tilda’s concentration but my pages—my testimony, for want of a better word—get wrinkled in spots from my turpentine tears. Not real tears—I am the opposite of miserable. The testimony is liberating. There’s a jaunt in me, a skip in my mental stride. The swagger I once had is getting another life. It’s the perfect state to be in to write about our high spirits the next morning in Amsterdam.

Sex, a café breakfast, then more sex—that was the plan. ‘Congressing’ was what Tilda preferred to call it. Sex was too impersonal a word for our activities. Making love was too ordinary, a term everybody used. Whereas congressing made us sound like a two-person nation. A parliament of us, all to ourselves.

Our congressing left us with some cleaning to do. The plastic bag had ripped, Tilda’s muddy red had streaked through. Expellings are not just something men have. Tilda began having what she called ‘explosions’; sets of them ten seconds apart, not my ten minutes or half an hour. A clear fluid bubbled and frothed as if I had popped something inside her. It became runny and mixed with her bleeding.

We scrubbed the sheet with wet toilet paper but the mattress was left brown through the middle. There were other stains on it, older stains from other people, but ours was a size we thought too large to leave; we’d be forced to pay for new bedding. Half the morning we dowsed it with bleach bought from a supermarket around the corner. It paled the evidence but took all of Tilda’s perfume to spray away the ammonia stink. I found a shower curtain at the same supermarket that would do for plastic for our next session. We left the window open a fraction to help drying and stepped out into the midday rain.

Tilda wanted to take me to church. The Rijksmuseum, that is. St Rembrandt. St Vermeer. She jigged along the footpath so excited to be my guide she knocked into people, or danced around them. Once in through the church doors she went into worship mode, closing her eyes sometimes, as if prayerful. ‘This is
The Night Watch
,’ she said. ‘You bear witness to
The Night Watch
. You don’t simply look at it.’

I swaggered that I admired Vermeer’s
Milkmaid
for the cloudy perfection of the woman’s skin. Rembrandt was still decoration to me, so I kept quiet on him. I walked ahead of Tilda, bored and mischievous. I ambled past pictures without taking any notice, or went up close to read the label with the painter’s birth and death dates on it. Sometimes I read them out loud, which irritated her. She shushed me and told me to stand back and witness. Witness and behave like a good boy. I wouldn’t call it a tiff exactly. She was embarrassed by me, yes, but I sensed she was amused by my hide. ‘The paint is all cracked in these pictures,’ I said to tease.

‘Don’t be gauche. The paint’s cracked because it’s old.’

Pictures just hang there. They do not change or move. Why would I watch them when she, Tilda Robson, was on display? I could put my hand down the back pockets of her jeans and feel the real thing. Art had nothing I could touch.

I am not a thief, I am not a vandal, I am not a murderer, though Tilda has at various times accused me of each. The thief-and-vandal part I will deal with first. These two were never really serious claims, but in the spirit of the honesty box I do have this admission: somewhere in this house there is thief-and-vandal evidence. I don’t know where exactly—it has been ages since I cared. For all I know Tilda keeps it souvenired in her own private architrave, a treasured speck of art history.

I have no guilt whatsoever: the speck was obtained by accident. It happened while we were in the Van Gogh Museum the next day.

Ah, Van Gogh! Even I saw there was a clever mind behind the childishness of his stuff—the blunt black outlines that made the paint seem colouring-in; four flicks of black and there you had an amateur-looking crow; dabs of puckered yellow making a fat cliché sun. Each worth a fortune these days but back then, nothing. Just the visual rantings of a no-count man.

Tilda got goose bumps staring at them. I felt jealous, which was ridiculous: who can feel jealousy over something not living? Besides, they gave me goose bumps too. Here were the world’s most famous sunflowers. Here were the wheat fields I had seen in books since a kid. They called me forward like the priest of all paintings to worship their surfaces. The paint was so thick in places I wondered how it held together and didn’t fall off in chunks from gravity. Van Gogh had once stood before them as I was now doing, his hand reaching to the canvas churning paint into something buttery. I was like another him, my eyes beholding what he beheld; my own fingers just an arm span away from joining me to him through the time warp of paint.

And suddenly I was touching it. I shut my eyes and my hands roamed over the rough skin of a picture.

‘Don’t,’ Tilda panicked. She pulled my shirttail but I wasn’t listening. I was with Van Gogh. I
was
Van Gogh. ‘Watch out. Watch out.’

A tubby bald man in a green official jacket ordered me not to touch. ‘No touching. No touching. Get away.’ He waved his arm stiffly against his side to signal me back to an appropriate distance. I did as he said, but somewhere in the time warp a piece of paint got caught in my finger webbing. Not a big piece. More a flake, a dot. I could feel it wedged there but the guard was lecturing me on the etiquette of not handling paintings and I couldn’t try to stick it back with him watching. He emphasised the words ‘forbidden to touch’ with a heavy stomp of his shoe.

I felt the flake digging into my flesh but was too scared to offer it up with an apology. I just moved along to the next painting. I expected any second the guard, having seen the damage, would yell
halt!
Damage being too strong a word: if he squinted he might see a tiny bare patch. I moved along nodding and mumbling my admiration for the museum’s collection.

Tilda had tucked her head down and with that metronome plait of hers going quick-time ducked and shouldered past other patrons to get clear of me. I could see her peeping from behind a hedge of tourists, her face straining against letting out laughter. I puckered my mouth in a whistleless whistle and strolled in the direction of the gallery exit.

The best course of action, the right and proper thing to do, was to go to the front desk and say, ‘I found this.’ Then I could walk out free of blame. I’m sure the museum had scientists who dealt with paint flakes. If it wasn’t for the guard I might have done that. But he kept watching me. I was afraid of being arrested. How long would I get in jail for art defacing? I’d be sued for millions of dollars—the family farm would have to be sold for lawyers. So I kept walking, my pucker directing the air from my silent whistle up over the ridge of my nose, onto my brow and hairline where fear-sweat was beading.

The guard followed me out of the exit and stood at attention to see me off down the street like so much riffraff. I didn’t rush my departure in case I looked guilty. I gave a performance of casual strolling that must have been convincing despite my leg-nerve problem flaring up and giving me a drunkard’s gait. I turned left at the corner and strolled out of the guard’s sight.

Tilda caught up. She was doubled over in glee that I had the gall to do it—to touch a Van Gogh, actually touch it instead of minding my manners and respecting rules. ‘It must be like touching history,’ she said, grabbing my arm and squeezing it as if a Van Gogh volt might transfer through her.

I showed her the flake in my palm. ‘It’s like touching this,’ I said. ‘It
is
this.’

At first she didn’t twig. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. Her voice petered out. Her eyes went so wide her forehead concertinaed into her hair. She muttered
fuck
, and
fuck
again. That’s when she made her vandal-and-thief accusation. ‘It’s destruction of a masterpiece. You’re a vandal. A vandal and a thief of a piece of history.’ She spoke in a trance, her mouth agape in the shape of an O. She stared at the flake in horror and wonder and awe. She touched it lightly, like brittle treasure that might shatter to dust if she pressed too hard. ‘We have to do something. We have to reattach it.’

I swore it wasn’t deliberate vandalism but Tilda wasn’t listening. ‘We can mail it to them,’ she said. ‘We can send it anony-mously.’ It came down to duty as far as she was concerned. It came down to doing the right thing by Van Gogh and not defiling the very art she honoured and adored. She held out her hand for me to deliver the flake into her keeping. I carefully swept it to her with my fingertip.

Once it was in her hold she clenched her fist loosely, like trapping a butterfly and feeling the flutter of vulnerable wings. She clasped the fist-cage against her throat. ‘You’re safe with me,’ she whispered.

So much for mailing the thing back. She called it her Vincent flake. Far from dishing out more blame, she thanked me for doing it—my vandal crime of paint. She sat on our pension bed and there it was in her palm with all its time-warping magic. She put it in an envelope for hiding in her luggage, though she couldn’t leave it there more than five minutes before needing to take it out and have another look. ‘Hello, Vincent,’ she would say.

Among her drawing paraphernalia was a pen whose gold nib she knew to be exactly one inch long. She measured Vincent as a third of that in length and width. ‘Thank you,’ she said, kissing and pushing me down onto the bed. She yanked my hair and bit my ear. ‘Thank you, you vandal. My darling vandal boy.’

Her eyes were closed, her teeth were gritted ecstatically. I couldn’t tell if it was me she congressed with or a vision of dead Van Gogh.