The Amateur Science of Love

by Craig Sherborne

  Vows. You can’t take back vows. You can’t revise them later. You can’t say, ‘Sweetheart, you know that bit about till death do us part? It’s a beautiful sentiment, but how do we keep the words going?’

  Six months after taking them I resented Tilda. I got well, you see. My legs shrank back to normal. It took most of the six months but my ankle shapes returned. My shins and toes returned. So many layers of skin had been shed but fresh skin took its place, sparsely hairy. There was a tickling like loose socks when I strode, a phantom sense of baggy flesh falling. Dr Philpott said this was common and temporary. He said an outbreak like mine, so savage in one still young, might protect me against extreme recurrences in future, or so goes the research wisdom. He pronounced me fit to lead life as usual, even to begin running again. Fit to go off welfare and be in the workforce.

  Hector Vigourman was delighted. He had expanded the Gazette—it was now The Gazette Group, with two sister publications: the Watercook Tribune and the Wimmera Wheatman. The Wheatman was a trade rag bought from city investors who didn’t know farmers. ‘Ear to the ground,’ Vigourman theorised. ‘Farmers want local people writing about their industry, not city nobodies. They want reporters from their own backyard, not cubs up from Melbourne to cut their journo teeth.’

  Holly had quit Scintilla for a TV pipedream. ‘The position is yours,’ Vigourman said to me. ‘Grains writer. The Wimmera Wheatman’s wheat man.’

  I knew nothing about cropping but Vigourman reckoned ignorance would benefit me. He wanted human stories, not just the science of low-tillage grain-growing or dissertations on whether single-desk marketing delivers the best price at harvesting. I would have my own workstation at Gazette HQ and the Commodore at my disposal when I needed it, as if it was my Commodore. One day that new cellular phone technology would come to Scintilla, he said. One day they’ll build a big dish for it here, meaning out with the CB and up with the Joneses. And my pay? I would be paid as actual staff. Not per story but per week, like a valued citizen—$200, which sounded a fortune. I know it’s chicken feed if you’re a qualified something—a plumber or vet with certificates saying so—but it was my chicken feed. No more twenty-four hours a day in this house, which was less a house than a hospital.

  Tilda bounced with such glee at the news that her body part shook out of its bra cup and she had to catch it. No more cheap-brand bread and margarine, she cheered. No more vegetables on special because they’re spotty with rot. We could buy new sheets—the old ones smelt convalescent. So did the pillows. She could afford a supply of chemist cosmetics: anti-ageing creams instead of useless Pond’s from the supermarket. She bought me a sporty watch to help meet deadlines. It cost nearly a whole week’s pay, which was why I didn’t say thanks more than once when she presented it. She considered this ingratitude and began to cry. Cry! Cry as if it was her money, she had earned it, she was the one working eight-hour days and not me.

  A ritual similar to our past one set in. It took a few months but Tilda began experiencing those two minds again. I would arrive home from Wheatman duties and she either greeted me with a cheek-kiss or an argument. If it was a cheek-kiss she handed me a Crown lager with the top already off for my immediate sipping. ‘Look what I’ve done today,’ she said, taking my hand, leading me to her studio. ‘I’m on to something here. Vincent would be proud of me. Wouldn’t you, Vincent?’ The envelope with the flake inside was stapled to the wall as a talisman. A square of masonite or canvas five feet or so by five leant beside it, splashed and stippled with her rendering of the plains or a molten-looking sun glistening because the paint had yet to harden. Sometimes she put a picture outside to dry and gnats stuck to it like insect-birds. I admired the realism but she picked the creatures off. She said if insects weren’t intended by her then the painting was just an accident. ‘Did Van Gogh do accidents? Van Gogh did not do accidents.’

  She liked me to sit with her and think up names for her creations: Lava Sunset; Wheat Flung; Emanations; Weather World. I had a knack for it and enjoyed drinking my beer and approaching the task as if solving a problem. I could think on them for hours and have the peace of trivial conversation: ‘What do you reckon, Tilda? Cloud Quill? What about Sky Halidom?’ I admit I got out the dictionary sometimes.

  If the greeting was an argument-greeting it was a one-sided argument—it didn’t include me at all. It took place behind her closed studio door and was with Vincent. I would knock. We would exchange hellos, then I left her to her quarrelling: ‘Your paintings were fucking magnificent, Vincent. Pure fucking marvels. Mine are pure fucking shit. Totally fucked pieces of shit.’

  I’d put my ear to the door and she’d be kicking over a chair to emphasise her exasperation. Paint cans would fly. They sound like glass smashing when all up-ended. Pallet knives make no noise when hitting canvas, but clatter if booted across floorboards. I touched balustrade wood that she would keep on at Vincent long enough for me to tiptoe upstairs, change from my good clothes into running rags and slip out the back door for two hours of pounding the forest path.

  Three paths, actually. The first took me uphill past the sundial at Ringo Point. I always got a laugh there: the graffiti was mostly Tyler 4 Zoe and Cory fux fags, but someone had defaced the sundial with texta—north and south had been changed around. Beside it someone had scratched I’M LOST. Santa.

  I ran across Ringo Point to an outcrop of flat rock handy for a minute of push-ups. The sky is pulled down so low to the horizon there it sweeps over your head, over your eyes like a hat brim. A third track bends east of the ridge and cuts through thick scrub and ironbarks. Even if rain blows through, the ground still crunches with dryness. The only colour not grey or black is when lemony wattles bloom in October. This is the hurdle track. This is where you can’t blink in summer or you’ll jog onto a snake. They curl like long turds in a sun-drugged state. Up go their heads once they sense you. It’s either hurdle or get a bite on your ankle. There are little ones called flicks but little or not it’s best to hurdle them, just in case.

  Two hours on my running route and I wanted to applaud myself for having a heart that can keep going that long. When I arrived through the back gate I celebrated by stripping to my underwear and turning the hose on. I champagned water over me like a podium victory, which Tilda hated. It was the sight of me grinning and gulping and spitting. It was the pleasure I was taking in snorting spray and moaning as the coolness covered me.

  ‘Do you have to do that?’ she complained.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Show yourself off.’

  ‘I’m not showing myself off.’

  ‘What do you call it then? You’re saying, “Look at my athletic physique.”’

  ‘I look athletic?’ I patted my stomach to check. Yes, there were muscular corrugations. Yes, I was athletic, firm across the chest, no loose meat on my thighs. On sunny nights, nights of long dusk, my trim reflection lit up on the kitchen window glass. I turned and twisted to admire myself in the rays. I walked around the house with no shirt on, hoping for a stray breeze.

  ‘Put a shirt on.’ Tilda covered her eyes as if I was unsightly. ‘You trying to rub my nose in it?’

  ‘I’m not rubbing your nose in anything.’

  ‘You look very striking. There, I’ve complimented you. Now, please, a shirt.’

  Be guilty about being healthy—this was the undertone; if you can’t be sick with me then at least keep your health and your fitness concealed. I liked feeling well on the inside and out. Of all the things to be guilty about, to be ashamed of!

  Yet I obliged and put on a shirt. I changed my running time from after work to during. I parked the Commodore at whatever farm the Wheatman took me to and I ran once I’d interviewed my subject. ‘Jack,’ I’d say—or Wayne or Neville. ‘I’m going to stretch my legs. Running helps me compose an article better.’

  ‘Is that so?’ they’d say, scratching the hatband rash on their foreheads.
‘Wouldn’t know m’self. Never wrote more than a cheque.’

  I kept it up for one winter. Winter meant only light sweating mostly confined to my underarms. Wimmera winters last barely two months, though. By August the full sun is back. Car air-conditioning will dry your shirt if on high fan but the smell of heavy sweating stays with you and pongs the interior. I couldn’t walk in to the office and reek. No one likes those sort of people, the office stinker. So I resumed my forest route, resumed my hosing, my snorting. If I wanted to take my shirt off I would take my shirt off. What life have you got if you can’t take your shirt off in your home, your own private premises? I rehearsed those very words in preparation for Tilda: ‘In my own house I should be free to do as I want.’ There was nothing more obvious than this truth to me.

  It was not an obvious truth to Tilda. ‘If that’s the way you feel then do as you want, leave your shirt off.’ She said it quietly and meekly, as if I was bullying her. It’s a clever way to trump you, meekness. It makes you back off a fraction, as if you’ve overstepped the mark.

  ‘All I’m saying is, in my own home I should be able to go shirtless, that’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘It’s my home, remember. My money bought it.’

  I backed off another fraction, then did some trumping myself: ‘Well, technically, if you want to get technical, yes, it’s your home. If I want to get technical I could say it’s my job that brings in most of our income.’

  ‘I have no desire to get technical. We are married and we share things. I was just hoping you would wear a shirt to consider me.’

  I put a shirt on. But I made sure I played a sarcastic game of ‘Please, Madam Tilda’ when about to take a hot bath. ‘Please, Madam Tilda, may I remove my shirt? May I remove my pants too, so I can wash properly?’

  From this point on we didn’t congress again, ever. We serviced each other, never kissing with tongues. It was quick servicing and I used old girlfriends like Caroline summoned to memory to arouse me and get it done. In bed I was allowed to take my shirt off—bed meant the night dark blotted me out. Our genitals touched but not much more of us. She hardly laid her hands on my back. She must have found the feel of it intimidating—its new drum skin and sinew span. Perhaps she used old boyfriends to pique her mood. I didn’t care. I was finished with jealousy.

  Chapter 60

  Tilda’s jealousy was just getting into full swing. I liked it at first. I came to fear it—felt condemned by it, imprisoned.

  I had begun treating Tilda like a fan: I was the important one and her job was simply to adore me. This went to my head. I started running with my shirt off for any eyes that were interested. (You can tell when curtains are being spied through—the parting flicks shut when you wave.) I kept thinking what a waste it was: Scintilla was my audience, windows with only biddies looking. When I panted in through the back gate Tilda stomped up the gravel path to have her say. ‘Are you trying to provoke me? Are you trying to advertise yourself like some half-naked ape?’

  I never answered, just panted ‘leave me alone’ and ‘Hitler of the backyard.’ One day I trumped her with this: ‘Why don’t you take your top off and come running with me?’ I said it with a snigger.

  ‘All right then, I will.’ She unlatched her overalls, unbuttoned her shirt down to her navel.

  For a moment I was sure she was going to do it. I glanced for any sign of parted curtains. I said, ‘Jesus, Tilda, do your buttons up. Jesus.’

  That gave her a victory. She had out-bluffed me. She raised her chin and smiled her satisfaction.

  I trumped, ‘Take your top off then. Go on, give the town an eyeful.’ I headed for the hose for a champagning.

  Tilda yelled that I was cruel. How else could she describe a husband who told her to go naked in public?

  I didn’t see her unbutton everything. I was snorting water from my face and moaning like a lowing cow. When I peeped through the spray her top was off, her overalls were already at her ankles. She wore black knickers and asked if she should take them off as well.

  I leapt out of the water and covered her with a bear hug. I picked her up and marched into the kitchen. She laughed all the way, kicked her legs like paddling. When I let her down she put her fists on her hips to signal another victory, another out-bluffing. She said it felt so wonderful to at last go, ‘Here I am, world. This is me, one tit and all.’

  ‘I have a responsible job in this town. You want people saying I have a missus who runs around starkers?’

  ‘Oh, Mr Responsible. Grains writer for the Wimmera Wheatman hardly makes you Prime Minister.’ She gave a slow, mocking shake of her head.

  Then, whether by accident or instinct, I produced the ultimate trumping. ‘Fuck it, I’m leaving. No more of this shit. I’m having no more.’ I put my hands out in front of me and waved: ‘No more. I’m leaving.’ I strode up the hall, gripped the balustrade knob and swung onto the stairs, bounding up three at a time.

  In the bedroom I stomped when I walked, cursed: ‘I’m off. I’ve had a gutful.’ I opened and closed drawers with as much bang and crash as I could. I emptied my sock and underwear drawer onto the bed, same for my wardrobe shirts and trousers from the ironing pile. Razor and toothbrush from the bathroom cabinet. I was leaving. Or at least that’s what I wanted to show. I had instinct enough to know this trumping needed an aggressive display of packing; not just saying ‘I’ve had a gutful’ but actually shoving possessions in a backpack.

  Tilda arrived at the bedroom still topless but with one arm across herself for modesty. I snapped at her, ‘Where’s my blue polo neck?’

  ‘In the futon room on the clothes horse. What are you doing packing?’ There was no mocking from her now. There was shallow breathing, quick little gasps: ‘What do you mean, leaving? Please, sweetheart. No. Don’t leave. No. Don’t go.’

  I kept packing but slowed down my jamming the backpack full. If I finished too soon and had to fasten the straps shut there wouldn’t be time for Tilda to plead more.

  ‘Baby, please, where would you go? Sweetheart, don’t.’

  ‘I’ll get a hotel room until I find my own place.’

  ‘Darling, no. I’m sorry, darling. I’m sorry. Don’t leave, please. Please.’ She held my arm to prevent me hoisting the backpack to my shoulder. She embraced my neck, pressed her face into it. Her voice smelt sweetly and sourly of tea and a tooth on the turn needing drilling.

  Chapter 61

  If I had my life over again I would not have my life over again. Not from this point on in the story, anyway. I would have thought more decent thoughts. Thoughts have consequences though they never leave your brain. They do damage if the bad ones get too prominent. Thinking darkly rots your decency. Among us small people—people in small towns with pipedreams over—the staleness of disappointment makes you mean. Add in dark thinking and you’re history.

  Two months after my trumping win Tilda was admitted to hospital. There was blackish blood on her toilet paper. A tumour in her woman’s parts was her amateur diagnosis. Her cancer must be on the march.

  It turned out to be a benign ovarian cyst easily dealt with, scalpelled out and forgotten.

  ‘Get plenty of rest,’ Roff advised.

  ‘Rest is the best medicine,’ Philpott agreed.

  Rest, I scoffed in my thoughts to their faces. Rest is her main occupation these days. Art is too hard for her so she has a long lie down. If you spend your life resting what are you resting towards?

  She had stopped her complaints about my parading without a shirt—I’d trumped those out of her. In their place, however, came rest and the silent treatment. That’s what I called her new polite distance. Silence, I was convinced of it, was her latest trumping strategy. It never occurred to me she might be acting in good faith, trying to help me love her by letting me breathe a little. I was too busy letting my thoughts run away: I felt let down by the black blood not being cancer. I expe
cted it would be. I expected Tilda would die soon. I would nurse her. I would grieve. I would get sympathy. I would live in this big home a widower. I was still a young man: one day I’d remarry. Till then I would play the field—one-night stands in Melbourne; a week in Surfers or Byron. I would buy a David Jones suit and act a man of means. I would wait a year or so, a respectable period, then clean out Tilda’s clothes, her studio. This building would go on the market and I would exit Scintilla, make a beginning from an end.

  Then Tilda broke her silence with this declaration: she wanted to embrace life with fresh resolve. She blessed the cyst as a reprieve, a reminder that life is temporary and we must make our mark before perishing—any mark, something to say we were born into this world and have lived a life that’s worthwhile. She wanted me to be proud of her again, not think of her as a patient or a nuisance. She wanted me to relish her presence and not feel trapped by petty put-a-shirt-on demands. Jealousy drives the person you love away, she realised that now: ‘It’s a very unattractive quality. It’s like you don’t trust the very person who has vowed themselves to you.’

  At night I faked sleeping, my back turned against her.

  ‘Please, sweetheart, don’t fall asleep yet. Talk to me. Talk to me.’

  I kept my eyes closed tight.

  Chapter 62

  It was her idea to ring the Wilkins household. It was her decision to attempt the Archibald Prize, nothing to do with me. I supplied the phone number, yes, but at her request. I didn’t think anything would come of it.