The Amateur Science of Love

by Craig Sherborne

  I confessed it was me who let the word out. On the day I rushed to Melbourne to be with her I couldn’t disappear without telling the Gazette; it would make me look unreliable. I took Gail at the office into my confidence. I asked her to pass on my apologies to Hector Vigourman: I couldn’t write more articles for a while. I did mention cancer as the reason but I didn’t say Tilda and I didn’t say breast. I said biopsy and woman’s problems and I suppose Gail guessed the rest. In confidence must mean spread the word in Scintilla.

  Tilda called me stupid and naïve. ‘You really are just a boy, aren’t you? You had no right to say a thing.’

  I apologised with over a dozen sorrys, but sorrys become like tears and smiling: you just do them to have the argument over with.

  I did have an inspiration, though. What’s the best way to deal with a rumour? Put out a counter-rumour. Get tongues wagging in the way you want, I said. Don’t shut the door on the town, don’t hide yourself away—it only feeds gossip. Step out, be bold and stroll down the street like you’re Princess Di, chest out, not hunched up, big grin on your face. Tuck a soft sock or one of my old singlets down your blouse for a substitute mound; it should do until your scar is ready to have a proper prosthetic rub against it.

  ‘Yes’, Tilda said. ‘A counter-rumour. What a brilliant idea!’ But forget socks and singlets. She’s a good carver, not just a drawer and painter of things. If she had some rubber sponge it would be an ideal material—the thick green sponge they use for fragile packing.

  I fetched a dozen bricks of the stuff from Hobbs’ Timber, Tacks and Twine, and Tilda sat down to carve with a Stanley knife and scissors. Three breast moulds as trials until she got the dimensions accurate. The finished article matched up perfectly in the mirror, tucked in her bra. ‘Can you tell the difference?’

  ‘No. It’s like you have two normal breasts.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘Both exactly matching?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And so we stepped out together, promenading like we hadn’t a care in the world. Tilda had tanned herself with a makeup mixture to cover her pallor—her own invention of facial powder and ochres from her studio palette. Turps, ochre, cinnamon, face powder and tea. She looked Indian if you didn’t get close up to spot the fakeness. Her teeth flashed Indian white as we saluted good mornings to cars and pedestrians, shopkeepers through their windows. I wouldn’t have blamed people if they thought us strange; I expect we overdid acting happy. We stopped people we’d never even met and remarked how the sun had a fair kick in it today but we certainly could do with rain.

  The false bonhomie turned real in us. We arrived home laughing and hugging. All problems should be solved like this—a dab of colour on your skin, a few good mornings down the street. It doesn’t last but it’s a holiday for the heart. Tilda admired her carving so much she left her bra on as an experiment and wondered, ‘Can a woman be alluring if she never takes off her bra? What do you think? Am I alluring enough?’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Prove it.’

  We congressed.

  Chapter 41

  I have become more protective of this document. Eventually I had to run out of architrave and that’s what has happened—there is not a skerrick of space left. I’ve tried speeding up getting this thing written, secretly adding to it at work, pretending I’m typing up good rural copy. I smuggle the pages home and past Tilda by stuffing them down the back of my trousers. But I can’t fit any more sheets behind the dry wood areas. There are damp wood areas on one wall where my nook abuts the bathroom but that would turn the paper to mushy mould. I am too far gone now to bother with fixing leaky pipes and sealing bad plaster.

  Fortunately our hot-water system is permanently on the blink. It is a gravity-fed arrangement in the roof cavity, so ancient a system its tank is rusted and the ballcock lever doesn’t shut off properly. Water drips through the ceiling and lands plop on the lino in front of the toilet. Up I go every third day, squeezing through the manhole to bend the ballcock arm down so it trips the water level to stop filling. I empty the tank’s tray of smelly slime by bailing it into a bucket and climb back down, dangling my toe until it reaches the ladder. Normally I would get the plumber in but I have thought up a use for my ballcock routine. Tilda thinks I’m too stingy to pay tradesmen. I am actually hiding pages.

  It is not too dark up there when daylight pours in. The roof holes are like stars, creating an outer-space effect. I can see every cranny. I can lean across beams and misty cobwebs and architrave my testament safely. Tin foil and Gladwrap should keep out the rodents. At the Salvos I found a metal briefcase and slung it through the manhole when Tilda was at the dentist. It should provide extra preservation.

  But preservation for what? For whom? I own nothing of any worth. I have only this story. And in thinking that very sentence I have my answer! This story is my most valuable possession. Nothing is more valuable than squaring your soul.

  Chapter 42

  I bet my soul was responsible for my touching habit. That and Tilda’s proper prosthetic arriving two months after the mastectomy. I wish I could say, ‘Colin, set aside a few minutes in the day when you don’t have the urge to do your touchings.’ But it’s impossible. I cannot escape their tyranny.

  I only touch wood and I touch it in threes. Three touches of wood with the flats of my hands. I rest for a second, do another three touchings. Rest. Another three. Pause. Sometimes the urge to keep going, keep touching, is so strong that many sets of threes are performed in sequence. The worst I’ve done is 600.

  If I’m in someone’s company I sit near wood. A table leg is my favourite position. I can touch wood while in conversation, keeping my hands down out of sight to touch and talk at the same time and not lose the rhythm of the counting. I don’t think I’ve been noticed. If so, no one has said. My explanation would just be Swahili to them.

  At first I enjoyed the ritual, like my own version of a religious tic—crossing yourself and the like. It soon developed into the curse of my waking hours. Even now as I type away I must pause to do my touchings. It takes so much longer to get things done. The legs of my desks at work and at home are smudged from the touchings, and showing wear.

  The new breast came by post. A plain brown box with a body part in it. That’s how real the thing looked, a credit to the designers. It was coloured beige to blend discreetly inside any shade of clothing. It had the weight of the real thing. It felt breasty in the hand. It was silicone but had a muscle-like firmness. Its skin wrinkled like skin does when pinched or handled.

  ‘I’m perfectly balanced upstairs now,’ Tilda said, jogging around the house. ‘I feel more whole.’

  What a relief to see her bouncing and in good cheer. She had been anything but cheerful since our bonhomie occasion. She had been bitter. It was the fear doing it. Fear that she would not be alive very long. The constant, exhausting fear of dying. Fear of living too, because each day there was the fear of dying. There were no pills for that. There were pills to help you sleep and get a break from the fearing. There were pills to pep you up a notch, but nothing to reverse life back to the way it was. And the trouble with sleep was the fear was waiting when you woke. Hating the fear was no good; Tilda tried it many times a day. ‘Fuck life. Fuck life. I hate life. You know what life wants from me? It wants to torture me. It is a sadist, life. It is a fucking sadistic arsehole.’

  Surgery just kids you along. It makes you elated because something is being done on your behalf, action is being taken. The relief it provides is short-lived, however. Tilda discovered there is a never-ending aftermath to it. There is waiting to do. Waiting for the tumours to grow back. Not the same ones, but their spider-egg brothers and sisters filling invisible spaces inside her. To delay that process more action was needed. There was chemotherapy to inject in her ar
m.

  Mr Roff arranged for vials to be sent to Dr Philpott, Scintilla’s GP. He lived a few streets away, had clinical rooms in the front half of his house. Roff thought it might reduce Tilda’s treatment trauma if she just wandered up the road instead of travelling to Melbourne. If she felt sick after the injections she could lie in her own snug bed. Not that she should feel sick—she was on small doses. She might lose a little hair but not much, not baldness. It was rare to lose all your hair with the milder mix of drugs he was giving her.

  Philpott’s place was a walk of two minutes if you crossed over the rail line beside Hastings Road and cut through the Methodist Hall carpark. Tilda preferred to make the journey alone. She enjoyed the idea of being brave, of not needing me to hold her hand. She insisted I go to work and not fuss.

  Her jeans, which a few months ago grabbed her thighs, were now a size too loose. Fear is the most radical of diets: Tilda said it made food taste like sawdust.

  Walking home she wore a swab on the back of her left hand where the chemicals had been trickled into her. She kept that hand hidden in her jeans pocket. Her hair plait was untied for the purpose of blowing across her face to conceal her wincing queasiness. The drugs put an aluminium tang in her mouth. She licked at her lips from the unpleasantness.

  By the time she reached our back door she was in two minds.

  One, to go to bed like a cotton bath to lie in. She would pop her head around the nook door to see if I was home. If I was she would say, ‘How’s your day? I’m going to take a nap now.’

  Two was a very different popping of the head. It was a hang- ing of the head, a banging of it against my door while she cried. ‘My body has tried to kill me. It is going to keep on trying to kill me, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s not going to stop because of chemicals and surgeons. I don’t want any more treatment.’

  She held up her fist like a defensive boxing position and let out a burst of howling, a cursing howl at the world, head thrown back, the M of her throat visible. A sound so lonely it belonged to animals and darkness. It always made me jump up from my chair to shush her with hugs and patting. I learned to do it warily, approach her slowly as if we’d only just met, not been two years together. There was danger in it, that sound. If I laid hands on Tilda too suddenly she felt trapped, not hugged. She would howl more and I’d have to back off and wait and have another try. Once the shushing was accepted and hugging allowed we would rock side to side, embracing. I could feel her heart thudding through our clothes.

  The first time we rocked I cried. Cried for real. Cried for Tilda, out of care for her, and love and sadness. It welled up and spluttered from me. Then she began to expect it every time we rocked. I still cried for real sometimes but it became more a crying for myself, especially when Tilda took her howling one step further. A step where she sobbed and said if I truly loved her I would help bring about her death. She saw no enjoyment in going on with life, so why not embrace death instead of fighting it? Why not buy a rifle or the strongest weedkiller and help her? I shushed no, no, no because I thought saying that displayed more true love than rifles ever could. I suspected she was testing me with the rifle and weedkiller carry-on, checking that I wanted her to live by having me shushing her and telling her I loved her. Yet how was I to read the next step?

  ‘You would want to come with me, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘If you bought a rifle or weedkiller and helped me go, you’d do the same to you, wouldn’t you? You’d turn the rifle on yourself so you could follow me straightaway?’

  ‘Sweetheart, please, that’s crazy stuff.’

  ‘You wouldn’t?’

  ‘Wouldn’t what?’

  ‘Want to follow me? Be with me always?’

  ‘Of course I would.’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘Of course.’ I found this the best strategy. I’d say ‘of course’ with a kiss on her forehead. Matter closed, until next time.

  Chapter 43

  The sign for mind number one, for popping her head around my door then going to bed, was hesitation. She would pause on the landing outside our bedroom door. She flicked her sneakers off and made the eleven-step journey up the hall towards me.

  The sign for number two started out almost the same—there were flicked shoes and the eleven steps. The difference was she flicked the shoes as she walked the eleven steps. She flung them at the walls. By the time she got to my nook she was running, not walking. In between hearing her mount the stairs and reach the landing I would think: Touch wood she hesitates. She hasn’t started running yet, touch wood. This must be a number-one day.

  Even when it was a number-two day I touched wood in the hope she would not talk rifles and weedkiller. I shushed and rocked her in such a way that my fingers could reach the door frame behind her. It was painted cream but chipped in places, which gave me access to exposed wood. ‘She hasn’t mentioned rifles and weedkiller so far—touch wood.’

  I started the sets-of-three ritual when only one touch didn’t work. There’s no logic in it, I know. Still, that’s the way the touchings grip you: three touches of wood may have three times the power. When three didn’t work I went to six sets of three, then nine sets, ten, twelve…

  I got it into my head they would ward off troubles: Tilda would get well in body and soul; I would never get diseased; Hector Vigourman would keep hiring me. If I stopped the touchings I was convinced the repercussions would be dire. Unspeakable horrors—a car accident, our house burning down—would befall us. If I failed to do the touchings then wood itself would get even with me for my neglect of it.

  I should have sought help, an anti-touchings group or a prescription for medicine. Truth was, I never saw pills put Tilda in a state of peace, so why would they me? I know she took them as scripted at first. I used to count them out on her palm—uppers, downers, ones to make her sleep. I never twigged she’d started hiding them under her tongue. I wasn’t the pill police. I didn’t say ‘open wide’ and go peering. I took it for granted she wanted relief from fear. Turned out she fretted that pills were unwholesome. She needed healthy food to clean her out from the chemo—celery, carrots, oatmeal, fruit—not pills from American laboratories.

  Roff assigned her a psychologist from the start but Tilda lied, lied, lied. She boasted to me how she spun them a stoic line: ‘I’m coping very well, thank you. I’m faced with a huge challenge but am in a positive frame of mind. I don’t think I need another appointment, thank you.’

  Tilda was worried for her art: psychology and pills might steal it away from her, dull her talent as their side effect. They might alter her personality, turn her into someone bland and passionless. She would rather go crazy like Van Gogh than suffer such a fate. What’s the point of living if your very nature is compromised? ‘Don’t let them ever do that to me, will you, Colin?’

  I was probably competing with her. I’m not certain of it, but was it coincidence that my touchings tripled in frequency when Tilda took to counting her hair?

  She was convinced she was balding from the treatment. Forget Roff claiming it was highly unlikely. His chemical concoction may have been mild but she was one of those few who would go bald from it, of that she was adamant.

  ‘Look here!’ she would call me out of my nook. ‘Look, look, look!’

  There she’d be kneeling naked in our bathtub shower, dragging a dripping fingerful of hairs from the plughole. ‘Two, three, eight, nine,’ she counted, parting them with tweezers.

  I told her it was not a large collection of hairs. ‘You probably always lost that amount. You just didn’t notice it and now you do.’

  ‘Bullshit. You think I don’t know my own hair? I would have thought by now you would know my hair.’

  I said I didn’t notice any difference in the thickness of her hair.

  She took that as
insulting, as me being too bound up in work to give a damn about her. No sooner had she said it than she apologised and conceded I was probably right. ‘I’m just panicking about losing my looks. You have a breast taken off, you can cover it up. But baldness.’ She smiled about how her lovely yellow hair had always turned heads, including mine. Losing it would be the cruellest humiliation. ‘Just to make me happy, would you count them for me? Please, baby. Double-check my counting.’ She handed me the dripping hair and tweezers.

  Every second day—the times she washed her hair—she knelt and counted and jotted the figure on a page torn from her sketchbook. There were seldom more than forty hairs. I told her forty hairs is the normal number shed in showering. I told her I’d read it in newspapers, which was a lie but a good one—it satisfied her.

  When her hair count came in at thirty or thirty-seven she would beam all day and I could head off to work confident that when I got home there’d be no histrionics. Work was still freelance but was getting interesting in its small-town way. I had freedom out on the road, the Gazette car radio blaring Cold Chisel and the Rolling Stones. I had interviews to go to: Old Meryl Furner and her cactus collection; for two decades she’d won best in wax plants at the Royal Melbourne Show. Mrs Doris Mitchell of Borebore Road turning one hundred and being awarded life membership of the Presbyterian Association of Crop Farmers’ Wives. I was even called upon now and then to sell classified ads door-to-door to farmers. I wrote my own copy: Lucerne round bales x20, good qual. $ neg.

  And there were puma sightings. Every month you’d get them—pumas running wild in Scintilla forest. Millionaires up north had bred them for pets then let them go. Always some farmer claimed he’d had sheep eaten.

  If Tilda’s count was over forty, reporting on flies climbing up a wall was preferable to staying at home with her. She would ask me to do a scalp check. It is not possible to add up every hair on someone’s head. Tilda pleaded for me to do it, and I agreed after reaching a compromise that I would only count the crown. The act itself, picking and poking my fingers about, seemed to pacify her. I always lost count and made up numbers. The very fact that there were hairs to count and no bald patches gave her heart. When she asked, ‘Does it feel thin?’ and I answered, ‘No. Feels like your usual mane,’ she breathed easy and let me stop. I touched wood, grateful there’d been no rifle and weedkiller talk. To put time in on her scalp was worth the effort.