The Amateur Science of Love (7 page)

It was grand, all right. Tilda called it decadent. Decayed was more accurate, with its wall plaster falling out, floorboards rotten in places—your foot went through if you trod heavily. The ceilings bulged down from windstorm sand in the roof space. Doors were broken off and dust fuzzed every surface like thriving bacteria.

Tilda loved it at first sight. Her heart was set on it. She took my hand and led me around, excitedly decreeing her studio would be in the front room where teller drawers still lined one wall. ‘My own studio. My own, very own studio all to myself.’

‘Not so loud,’ I advised her. The estate agent was behind us up the hall. ‘He’ll think he’s got two live ones here and be able to hold the line on price.’

She looked at me with one eye arched to mean
What do you know about buying property?

I whispered, ‘I have learned a thing or two from watching my father.’

That got rid of her arch. I could hear Norm’s voice in my ear. I could see him give me a wink and a nod: ‘You’ve got to screw ’em down, Colin. Smile but never give an inch.’ I hooked my thumb in my belt in Norm’s manner and winked at Tilda: ‘Make out you’re not interested.’

The agent stood in the door frame and bent over to hitch his cream walk-socks tighter under his knob-knees. ‘So, what do you
do
?’ he asked me. He had a plump grey moustache tarnished by nicotine. It curled into his mouth when he breathed.

‘Do?’ My hooked thumb and Norm manner must have fooled him that I was a man of means. ‘I
plan
,’ I said with an airy sweep of the hand.

‘What, an engineer or something?’

I didn’t answer. I turned to Tilda. ‘This place needs work. Lots of work.’

The agent kept on with his questions. ‘And the lady, does she do anything?’

‘I’m an artist.’

There was a chesty guffaw from the man. The hairs in his mouth blew out and got sucked back in. ‘Artist. Bullshit artist?’ He reprimanded himself for laughing, waved his hand to make his laughing go away. ‘I shouldn’t make jokes like that, should I? Couldn’t resist it. Artist. Bullshit artist. No, I shouldn’t say that sort of thing. Love a joke, though, don’t you? If you can’t have a laugh, what’s left in life?’

‘Her name is Tilda Robson,’ I said with a toff-vowelled flick of my fringe. ‘She is an artist.
Not
a bullshit artist.’

‘Shit, I mean, goodness, is she famous then, the lady? Are you a famous artist, lady?’

She was measuring out the room in her mind, dreaming about her studio. I answered for her, ‘She is highly respected.’

The agent put his hands in his pockets. ‘So, you interested in the place?’

‘Like most things, Mr…I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.’

‘Clinch. Ken Clinch.’

‘Like most things, it comes down to price. What’s the best you can do?’

A Norm favourite after that question was to shake his head even before the answer, and say, ‘Actually, come to think of it, I might pass on this one today.’

I nodded to Tilda that I knew what I was doing. I did not look Clinch in the eye. All part of the next Norm stage: ‘I tell you what. What’s the asking price again?’

‘Forty-two and a half.’

I gave a grunt and a headshake and launched in to the ambit-claim phase. ‘Tell you what—thirty-two and a half. Tell your client take it or leave it.’

‘I reckon they’ll take it,’ Clinch said, extending his hand to shake on the deal.

‘They will?’

‘Bloody oath.’

‘Oh. It’s…it’s Tilda’s money, so I better check with her.’

There was no need for checking. She was suppressing squeals and leaps. She was joyful and proud: her perfect life now had a home.

And she was proud of me. If I had to list my finest moments—there have not been many—I would select that day, however sham was my businessman’s bluff. Clinch probably shouted the bar that night: ‘Thirty-two and a half. Vendor can’t believe his fucking luck.’

Tilda and I congressed for the first time in three days, parked on a gravel stretch south of Scintilla cemetery. She dubbed me Rockefeller: ‘You’ve been hiding your light under a bushel.’ I was carried away enough to believe it and advise her that she could make a decent dollar if she turned that old building into a viable concern. What was the one thing the Wimmera-Mallee lacked, as stated in the road guide? Good accommodation. There wasn’t even a bed-and-breakfast within an hour of Scintilla. ‘You can do one just for artists. Call it The Artists’ Colony. Get the local council to pitch in for renovations. Advertise in the city newspapers—
Paint the wheat fields just like Van Gogh did.
Frame the Vincent flake, use it as an attraction.’

‘Would you help me with all this?’

‘Of course.’

She said she was sorry for ever doubting me, for harping on about me and no plans.

I was so deluded I wanted to phone Norm and boast that his son was involved in an investment in Australia; he’s a doer not a pipedreamer. I slept deep and stirless that night despite the usual disturbances: heat, stars and moonlight so bright they could be suns; moon moths butting my skin as if wanting to be let in. I might well have rung if not for what happened next morning.

Tilda woke belching bits of food brown. She caught them in her T-shirt and managed to lean free of the van before vomiting more. She knelt naked in silvery grass and retched herself empty. I attempted to drape a shirt on her in case traffic came past but she ordered me away. She walked on her knees a few stub-strides to block the sight of her puddle.

When the retching was gone she stood pale and sweaty and asked for water to rinse her sicky mouth. She hated when our water got warm and bitter from being kept in an orange-juice bottle, but this time she rinsed and drank it like nectar. It was 8am and already the sun was high, poaching the blue sky white, yet Tilda’s sweat had turned icy on her. She shivered her way into the van, into our body-damp bed—two chequer sheets, two folded eiderdowns for a mattress. ‘My period’s late,’ she shivered.

I may have furrowed my brow in reaction, but little more. I hadn’t clicked to the significance. I was still full of myself over my big-business antics. I wanted to congress if possible, if Tilda was better now.

She crooked her arm over her eyes. No, she was not better. ‘I’m two going on three weeks late.’ She wiggled her fingers, counting on them. ‘Two’s not unusual for me, I’ve never been clockwork, especially if things are emotional.’ She belched and coughed weakly. ‘But I feel very strange today. Like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I feel inhabited. I feel pregnant.’

I sat on the van’s passenger-side seat. Tilda adjusted her arm to observe me eye to eye. I acted a smile, more close-lipped grimace than anything happy. I blinked myself free of her gaze, bowed my head as if the piece of gum leaf blown in from the road and sticking to my shin was more urgent an issue to deal with.

‘Probably just a false alarm,’ she said.

I drove us to Scintilla. The chemist would be open by 9; they’d have a test we could buy, which, Tilda explained, might not be perfect but a pretty good sign. She rode reclined in the back until the puttering and lurching of travel got to her and she climbed into the front to get air. She let window wind beat on her fringe.

I asked, ‘What are the odds?’

‘We’ve been flying without a net. What do you think about it if I am?’

‘What do I think? It’s amazing.’ But my true thinking was: It’s terrifying; I am not ready to raise children; I am still raising myself.

‘In what way amazing?’

‘Amazing as in me having the power to do that.’ This part was true to my thinking. What I didn’t say was: I’ll be trapped for the next however many years. Yes, I loved Tilda, as best as I knew to call a feeling love. What if love had several levels? What if our level was just lust-love, just temporary, not love fit for breeding, sitting at the kitchen table budgeting for school expenses, other childhood bills?

‘All the drinking I’ve been doing, the smoking and shit food, any baby I had would be a mutant with two heads and six arms. I’d have a miscarriage, probably.’

‘That’s a terrible image.’ I had a reprimanding tone but I was hoping she was right. Is a miscarriage dangerous? I knew it to be dangerous in horses. Cows just go on eating, lick the dead calf and leave it. ‘Sensible people, I suppose, plan having babies well ahead,’ I said.

‘I thought we did plan.’ Tilda’s eyes contained a flash of fury. I couldn’t see it—I was concentrating on driving—but the side of my face had a sense.

‘We talked about it. In a carried-away sort of way.’

‘I’ll tell you what you’re doing. You’re changing your tune.’

I told her it was not a good time to argue with me behind the wheel. She repeated, ‘Changing your tune,’ and went quiet.

Scintilla had park toilets of such bluestone distinction they were included in the road guide: ‘Former gaol cells, now public conveniences.’ Tilda tested herself there. She told me to walk off while she did it. I can’t remember how long I walked, an hour, two hours, fretting on fatherhood. I did laps of the main street. I was starting to make up some plans, though they were a dark variety. I hoped God, if there was one, had turned his face away.

I wanted more proof than just a toilet testing. I wanted doctors and written evidence. How could I even be sure I was the father? Who knew what Tilda had been up to behind my back?

Stop it
, I said to myself. There have been no behind-my-back episodes—it was just the fretting talking. It was advising me to go home to New Zealand and leave Tilda to cope with pregnancy alone.

At the same time, I was dazzled by the notion there could be part of me in that woman. How grand to imagine the round form of her abdomen. To be a father, an elder at twenty-two, a protector of new human life. To be able to say ‘This is my son’ or ‘This is my daughter.’ No matter who you are, how poor or stupid or ugly, that is surely the ultimate status.

I ended up back at the old jailhouse in that latter mood. Tilda was waiting in elm shade, sitting chin on knee. She said, ‘It says I am. You’ve potted me.’ She looked at me, searching for leadership. Fear, hope, trust, pride—all these were contained in that look. But the main one was pride. She gleamed with it. My own breathing quickened with it; I swelled up at the shoulders. I had that
famous
feeling but it had multiplied: I would be famous not just to one person now but two in nine months’ time.

There is no intimacy like it. Not ever have I felt that way again. No matter how deep a kiss or tender the congressing, the simple act of walking along hand in hand with Tilda that afternoon could never be matched for delirium. We paraded more than walked around Scintilla. When Ken Clinch swerved his jeep to the kerb to confirm our offer had been accepted—‘Congratulations. Thirty-day settlement suit you?’—Tilda quipped, ‘It’s quite a day for news.’ We let Clinch be confused by our in-joke chuckling.

We ate at the Scintilla Arms—T-bone steak to keep Tilda’s blood full of iron. She drank lemon squash and warned me off smoking around her because smoke was not healthy to breathe in her condition. We discussed baby names. What a purifying activity, baby names! A boy could be Richard because Richard is dignified. A girl could be Alice or Elizabeth or Clare.

The bank’s rooms would be cold in winter. The building had fireplaces—we would have to keep them alight to make the child toasty; have to de-mould the walls, patch plaster so the air wasn’t dusty.

We didn’t congress that night because, in the purity vein, it felt dirty to have me prodding and expelling with a Richard or Alice inside her.

Next day, Tilda signed the sale contract. ‘Initial here. Sign here,’ said Clinch, tapping his finger on the pages. Tilda’s stomach, her flat, pregnant stomach, pressed against his office counter as she followed his instructions. I stepped away from the counter. I did not wish to be involved in the signing. I did not want to join in her excitement. I equated that signing as a signing-up of me. I tried clinging to the delirium but it was slipping from me. Purity had emptied from my heart. The dark planning was recurring, darker than earlier, much darker.

By law she had three days to change her mind, a cooling-off period in which she could render the contract non-binding. I set myself the task of unbinding it and thereby unbinding myself. I felt entirely justified. Yes, I loved Tilda but not in forever terms, the kitchen table kind of love I’ve mentioned. As she bent over that contract a beam of sun put a microscope to her face. It homed in through the open door, right in on her cheeks and magnified what normal light doesn’t show—the creases and crumples that are only going to worsen. I didn’t have markings like those.

In five years I would be twenty-seven and she thirty-seven. That was old, even sounded old to say—thirty-seven. When I was thirty-seven she would be old as aunties. When I was fifty…on and on it went. The microscope discovered three grey strands in her eyebrows that needed urgent plucking. There was dandelion fur along her jaw—it would only get longer and thicker as she aged ahead of me. If she were twenty-two then at least we’d be even.

I began the unbinding as Tilda drove us back to Melbourne. She was fussing, ‘There is so much to do.’ The logistics of packing; getting professional advice on floor repairs. I sat on the passenger side with my dark planning. For just as love has its
more
stage, getting out of love has the opposite: there is a ratcheting-down to do. There is dismantling to inflict, breaking of heart and faith. I was new to this as I had been to falling in love. But I was a natural. I must have been to summon the ruthlessness so well. There was no intricate strategy involved. I knew instinctively to start out meekly, even if I appeared pathetic. ‘I feel a bit dizzy,’ I lied, pressing my fingers into my eyes. I shook and feigned fainting.

We were about 60ks east of Scintilla. I gripped my chest as if blood had stopped working in it. I put on such a show of face-clenching pain Tilda reached over for the orange-acrid water and splashed it on me, made me gargle and spit like a sportsman recovering. She stroked my hair and called me darling. The
darling
caused me to complain that her stroking wasn’t helping. I shrugged her hand from me with genuine irritation. When you are trying to be ruthless you don’t want
darling
to soften the momentum.

‘I am not ready to be a father,’ I said. ‘I am not ready for fatherhood or being a family man or anything like that.’ I said it not as gently as I’d hoped, but there, it was said. My legs were shaking from the electrocution nerve being activated. I needed to gallop my sentences out before they jumbled like a fit. ‘For Christ’s sake, I’ve got no money, no prospects. I’m only twenty-two and it’s not time for me yet.’

I didn’t see Tilda’s reaction. I couldn’t look at her; I wasn’t that brave. Her voice went strained, almost shrill. ‘What’s happened? How can you be like this? You were happy about it. Why have you changed your mind? What have I done? Have I done something? Did something happen?’

‘I’m sorry, but it’s how I feel.’

‘You should have thought about that before you stuck your dick in me.’

That shut me down for a few seconds, the viciousness of tone. Such a crude image—‘stuck your dick in me’.

‘Charming thing to say,’ I said with a disapproving shake of my head. ‘Whatever happened to
congressing
?’

‘Please don’t do this to me.’ She hunched over the steering wheel.

‘Concentrate on your driving.’ I was fearful of the cars coming our way.

‘I don’t care.’

‘Well, I do care.’

‘If you are old enough to get me pregnant, you are old enough to do the right thing.’

‘I
am
doing the right thing. I do not feel ready to be a father and therefore it is the right thing to tell you so.’

‘I feel ready. It’s the right time for me.’

‘You’ve fucking well lured me into this, haven’t you?’

She yanked on the wheel. The van swerved left sharply onto the road verge and slid to a stop. A horn mooed, a truck behind us blaring because Tilda hadn’t indicated. She thumped her hand on the dashboard. ‘Why are you doing this to me, Colin? I never lured you or trapped you. Don’t do this to me, please. Don’t take something beautiful like us having a baby and turn it on me.’

I shoved the passenger door open with my shoulder. It was sticking but I wanted the aggression of the barging action to scare her into silent submission. It didn’t. She shimmied across the seat after me. ‘I’ll do anything,’ she pleaded. ‘I will get a job until it’s born. What a time we’ll have doing up the place. Okay, you’re young, you’re overwhelmed at the moment. But that’s just temporary.’

Nature thought us a comedy. Parrots on the bleachers of dead branches, crows on the other tiers, all laughing with mechanical croaky jeering. I had bare feet and tilt-walked over painful stones towards some grassier cushioning. Tilda followed. I cursed ‘piss off’ to the jumping-bean flies on my face but the curse was really meant for her. I tiptoed between ants, stomped on the smaller ones and rucked dust at the bull ants which were more like infant fingers fidgeting around than insects.

‘Do you want me to get rid of it? Is that what you’re saying?’

I acted dim, as if not understanding the question.

‘Do you want me to have an abortion?’

‘I never said that.’ Never said it, but was thinking it.

‘You do, don’t you?’

There was such a thinning of her lips and eyes it occurred to me she might hop in the van and drive off, leaving me there, stranded. I returned to the vehicle, just in case.

She said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you something. I’m going to live in Scintilla and have my Richard or Alice with me. And I’ll say, “Your father? He was the man who wanted you dead before you were born. No better than a murderer, that’s your father. We’re better off without the bastard.”’

This hit the mark, of course. I sat there on the heap of our bedding, shamed. No sun, no heat from the van’s metal frame could sweat that out of me. The only thing which would work was my saying, ‘Abort the baby? I’d never dream of it, sweetheart.’ But I wasn’t going to say that. As bad as shame feels I knew a secret word that was worse: inheritance. Into the honesty box it drops with a thud.

For all my pipedreaming I always knew it was there. A backstop if I failed—a thousand acres waiting for its heir, for Norm’s wayward prodigal to return from overseas. But a divorced and ageing Australian artist? No farming father would want that for his son, would he? ‘She’s just using you, you fool,’ I predicted him saying. ‘If she has your child, boy, she has dibs on half the property.’ Disputes of this nature are regular farm scandal.

So I said nothing to Tilda. I took the shame into me and sweated on it and said nothing. I let her slump and weep and weep.