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.
Chapter 20
Being in love is a kind of being famous. Famous on a small scale to just one person. You are looked up to by them even if you’re really just a child-man. Love is having power over someone. You are the president of them and you are also their servant, and the person you’re in love with is president and servant back to you.
Nothing mattered outside that pension room the week we spent there. We opened the window for oxygen but sent the housemaid from the door when she knocked for cleaning. At night we crept down for food and cigarettes and whisky. As we descended the corkscrew stairs we imagined all Amsterdam was saying, ‘Oh yes, there they are, the couple in room number 12. They’ve been at it for days. They’ll waste away if they’re not careful.’
When you are president and servant you only have one need: to spend every second with your opposite president; except the toilet, when you can at last let your bowels open, avoiding too much splatter and stench.
‘I’m tempted to make a confession,’ Tilda said quietly. She was pillowed on my chest, giving my solar plexus hair a pinch. ‘I’m almost scared to say it but I’ll say it anyway: this is like nothing I’ve felt for someone else before.’
‘Why are you scared of saying that?’
She went silent, just her breeze-breath rippling my nipple hairs and tickling. I realised this silence was to give me time to match her confession with my own. To say, ‘It’s the same for me’ and therefore demonstrate we had equal feelings for each other, no imbalance. I was about to say it, because it was true, but Tilda prompted me. ‘And you?’
‘Same for me,’ I said.
‘Truly?’
‘It’s not like anything before.’
‘What have you got to compare it with?’
I had no love to compare it with.
‘So this is your first time, in love?’
‘Yes.’ I did not want her to think I was inexperienced so I reminded her about Caroline, which wasn’t love but was experience nonetheless.
‘Shsh.’ A soft rebuking. ‘The point is—and this is miraculous to feel—it’s not my first time, yet I feel like it is my first time. Like I am beginning with a clean slate.’
Love’s favourite word is more. It always wants more I love yous. It wants you to say it over and over. ‘Say it,’ Tilda kissed of me. And I kissed the same of her. ‘Say it again. Say it once more.’
Just as sex was too crude a word and congressing was better, even the act of congressing seemed inadequate to express how obsessed we were becoming, how exquisitely ill. We reminded ourselves it was barely a month since the start and yet here we were panting ‘I love you’ in time with each thrust and each expelling, ‘I love you’ in the aftermath, curled groin to buttock in a foetal lull position.
Soon that was not enough. ‘I want to be with you forever’ and ‘Never leave me’ needed to be added. Her saying it, and me saying it in return. ‘If I can’t be with you I couldn’t live. I’d be better off dead.’
That was not enough either. ‘Can I tell you something?’ said Tilda. ‘I am about to be very serious.’
‘Say it.’
‘First say you love me.’
I said it and she said it right back, with a tender tap on my chin.
‘Okay. The thing I want to say is, I would even want to make a baby with you. I’ve never felt that, ever.’
I was really famous now. I had been selected from the world’s millions of males to join my self to hers and create posterity through our genes. I was too flattered to reply.
‘Have I said too much?’
‘No.’ I was the most important man in the world at that moment. I wanted to savour it.
‘Please say something.’
‘I would be honoured to do that with you. I would be honoured to be its father.’
Tilda said thank you. She put her chin on her cupped hands upon my shoulder. She said it was a beautiful sensation to congress with me and have my sperm inside her. It was like being joined even when we physically weren’t. ‘We should start thinking about how we’re going to live.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘How we are going to make money.’
I big-noted we shouldn’t worry about that. I’m a clever fellow, am I not?
We didn’t need to panic, Tilda said. She had $40,000 due from her half of her marital assets. But where were we going to live? London was so very far from anywhere she was used to. She was used to sunshine and clean air. If she had a child she would want the baby to enjoy those benefits too, not be closed in by snow and dark
ness and fog. ‘But I’ll go wherever you are.’
‘I’ll go wherever you are.’
‘Don’t you have prospects in London?’
‘Of course. But not if you won’t be happy.’
Chapter 21
That’s how I got here—Scintilla.
Say Australia to me and I still can’t tell you much. It has a ground beneath your feet like any other place. The sky has a fiercer, whiter sun. I wasn’t here for those things. I was here for Tilda. She was Australia to me. We were citizens of us. I know it is not a healthy way to live, but it is how we ended up living. If I want nature there are Tilda’s landscapes decorating the walls, stripes and splashes of what she calls Abstract Passionism. If I want something to read there are Tilda’s medical records to remind me of life and death. If I want sport I can jog for an hour in the forest. I can play jump-the-snake in summer on the forest track.
Straight off the plane from Amsterdam—it was late January—we thought we might settle in Melbourne. It had old joined-up houses like dingy London streets, frilly iron-lace edges and brick of reddish brown. ‘Good ole Melbourne,’ Tilda called it, like a fond putdown. But she preferred the flat plains two hours’ drive to the west. There, if you ignored the barbed-wire fences, it was like beholding fields of wild dusty desert and not just farms. She wanted to strike out in that direction. We’d sleep off the jetlag and then head westward into the summer heat.
We camped in her studio in Fitzroy, a suburb with the dingiest London look of all. Her rent was paid up till mid-February, so that gave us planning time.
By ‘studio’ I mean a partitioned floor shared by four artists above a lighting shop. The rules stated no lodging was allowed—the property was for art work only, not bedding down in. But there was too much smell from turps pots and soaking brushes to give away the funk of our congressing and sleeping. We bought a futon and had it folded up long before anybody arrived. One artist, called Sebastian, who had a waxed antennae moustache like Dali and wore a three-piece suit and white spats, was particular about the rules. He was painting a portrait of someone famous. He didn’t want to bring someone famous into a doss house.
Our planning time only produced one idea: Tilda wanted to live as a modern Van Gogh somewhere on the dusty plains. A region called the Wimmera-Mallee had, she said, Van Gogh wheat fields. He would have drooled to see how vast they were, sun-bleached and blazing bronze. Her $40,000 would surely get us a house of fair proportions. She planned to paint, eventually have an agent in Melbourne and make money that way. ‘The perfect life,’ she said.
There is no such thing, of course.
Chapter 22
What was I going to do? This was the question which marred our setting out for home-hunting. ‘How will you make a living?’ Tilda asked. I big-noted in my usual way—‘I’ll think of something’—and let the sentence trail off. But two events put me in my place.
The first was my birthday, February 10. I was twenty-two. It meant nothing to me; there was no big to-do; I felt no different. Even the mirror thought so. I had no extra year of face lines, no thinning hair, no belly bulge appearing. My eye-whites still woke up bright and clear despite the night before’s two bottles of cheap cleanskin wine. No matter how much I drank I never got headaches.
Tilda was another story. Wine made her skull throb; she became argumentative with it. She moaned and coughed under the futon’s blanket, wishing I wouldn’t gloat about how I felt so fit and in my prime. It was like an accusation, she said, that she was getting over the hill. ‘You may not mean it to be but that’s how I read it. Could you stop parading, please?’
‘I’m not parading. I feel no different from last year, or being sixteen, that’s all.’
‘You’ll know what I mean one day.’ She rubbed her bloodshot eyes and pushed her burst plait into a bit more order. She fingered around in her toilet bag and took out a mascara pencil, a pocket mirror. She turned her back to me but I could still see her face cameoed in the glass, her eyes rolled upward for dragging black pencil lines around her eyelids. ‘Anyway,’ she yawned. ‘I have something you don’t. I have plans. Some direction. A purpose.’
Being talked down to like that made me argumentative. ‘Fuck purpose.’
‘Hardly a mature attitude.’ She pulled off the T-shirt she used for a nightie and began dressing, keeping her back to me for privacy. ‘We’ve been together a few months now. We can’t keep doing nothing but congressing all our lives. What will you do for a living?’
Was this the point where love’s more ended? I had a flattening-out of feeling in me, an unspecified disappointment where blind excitement had been.
We began turning on each other in a scratchy, squabbling way. I sat on her studio table and lit a cigarette to show I was so fit and young I could enjoy a cigarette first thing in the morning. Tilda needed till noon to clear her lungs for it. She jigged her jeans on, sucked in a breath for the effort of the tight zipper. She waved that the smoke was making her feel sick. I blew louder and further into her breathing zone.
She suggested I consider her for a moment. She didn’t mean the smoke; she meant the money issue, the issue she called ‘the pragmatics’. When she introduced me to people they were going to ask, ‘So tell me, Colin. What do you do?’
‘What are you going to say?’ she asked.
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know yet.’
‘What am I going to say? “Oh, Colin just moons about being cuntstruck, and expects me to moon about being cockstruck.”’
‘What people?’
Tilda closed her eyes, exasperated. ‘Listen. I love you. This has been such fun and so wild, you and me. I’ve loved it. But if we want a perfect life we have to start thinking sensibly.’
‘When you say you’ve loved it, you mean it in the past tense? I’ve come all this way to Australia and you’re regretting it?’
‘No. That’s not what I said.’
‘You implied it, then.’
Her voice went up a key to a pleading tone. ‘My parents, for instance. They will ask, “What do you do, Colin?” I wouldn’t want you just shrugging.’
This led straight into the second event. Tilda had garaged her Escort van at her parents’ while she was overseas. It was a dented, rattly thing, she said, but reliable enough to tackle the trip west. We’d sleep in the back—much cheaper than hotels, given it could take weeks to find a home.
She wanted to pick the van up that afternoon and thought it best if I didn’t accompany her. We would hardly project an image of practicality at the present time, would we? They might think I was botting off her, and she’d saddled herself with a no-hoper. Which was so far from the truth, she knew, but it’s all about image.
‘I embarrass you?’
‘I never said that. Come on, it won’t do us any harm to have a breather from each other for a few hours.’
Chapter 23
I thought I knew everything at twenty-two. Twenty-two is a know-all number of years. Back then it never caused me cringing but I am thirty now and can see the fallacy. There were things not normal about Tilda and me that were starting to show but I didn’t pick them.
It is normal for two people to think no one has ever loved so powerfully as they have: theirs is a true and blessed union. All those I love yous have built up resistance to doubt. But love is not simply sensations of the skin. More is demanded of you than sensations. I must have expected food and drink would fall out of the sky without me working for them; thin air would create money.
As we drove west I sat in the passenger side and pondered plans. I feigned napping to come up with a plan to keep Tilda happy. I nagged myself to conjure an idea, but nothing came. Not a one. The van’s radio commanded me to get down to Dimmeys for sensational bargains on towels and bedding, and I told it shut up and went back to the sleepy chore of plans.
I blamed Tilda for pressuring me. I didn’t say a word but tha
t’s what I thought. Plans get blocked if there’s someone pressuring you. I blamed the drugging motion of travel, the van’s rotor-blade rockabye. I blamed the heat, the sun’s oven-blast on full through the window, the miraging waters of the tarseal up ahead. Two days, three days, four. Six days and still idealess.
Tilda and I didn’t speak about the matter. We didn’t speak much at all, which at first I took as normal: we’d got used to each other and so had less to say. But our conversations would have confused the future if it was listening: are those two a cosy couple or soured lovers about to end? Their conversation amounts to little more than aimless chit-chat.
Chit-chat about weather and cloud formations. ‘There’s a cloud exactly in a cello shape, Colin.’ We still used sweetheart but reverted to using given names as well.
‘Those trees are very black, Tilda.’
‘Bushfires. Aren’t these old towns quaint? Most were gold towns at one stage.’
‘Really,’ I yawned in open-eyed sleep as we drove past shanty, lean-to places with boarded-up shop windows and cottages wrinkled with peeling weatherboard. They had drought-dead lawns and black swans cut from car tyres for landscaping. Some had wild roses trained over the porch where men in grey singlets sat on sofas and smoked, and women with hair in scarves watched us drive past as if driving past was a strange occurrence.
Larger towns had real estate sections in the Elders Farm Supplies window. There were always plenty of shanties for sale, and most second-hand cars would be dearer than they were, but they weren’t close to what Tilda had as ideal.
Talbot, Dunolly, Bealiba, Ouyen, Wycheproof, Sea Lake, Speed. To chant town names had a nursery-rhyme rhythm. Tiny three-house, one-pub Speed being my favourite, just for the irony.
Our congressing habits changed. Tilda suggested we shouldn’t do it without condoms, just in case: let’s face it, we were living in a van like the poor. It might be best to get settled before any baby.
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