The Amateur Science of Love

by Craig Sherborne

  I hadn’t slept with more than my passport under my pillow, but that was about to change: Tilda was coming. She was bringing my future with her. It had hatched in her hair, was growing down her limbs and about to make contact with me. She had arrived at Heathrow. Her purple haversack was hitting the carousel, Tilda Robson printed across it in gold texta. Flat 4, 14 Lyndon Street, St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia.

  I was washing cups and saucers, scraping plates free of butter foils and marmalade plops. Cracking coins into the dining room till. What was love doing picking out me? I who smoked fifteen cigarettes a day now to burn away failure, to put up a screen to the outside world. I who pretended to swagger when I walked, for false confidence. A little skip in each stride as if swinging a dandy-man’s cane. I who combined this with keeping my fringe over my eyes, a face curtain for aloofness.

  Tilda was only ten minutes away. A train had set her down at Blackfriars Station for the uphill trek to the hostel. The sky was dripping greyly as always. It was Sunday. You could hear St Paul’s bells practising their scales. She was mounting the laneway steps, the hostel sign in view. I should have kept my face curtain down for both our sakes.

  But it was too late. There she was. Here she is once again in my mind, such a tall woman, her black boots adding at least an inch of heel. She is yellow—her clothes, I mean. Blink-bright yellow. A blouse of flower patterns—sunflowers and green and red tropical petals. Who wears a blouse those colours in London, city of drab? Tilda did. She was short-sleeved despite the goose-flesh rain.

  The yellow continued up past her shoulders and became hair. Paler yellow than her clothing and pulled into a three-strand plait. An orange band bound the stump of it. Her ears stuck out more obviously from the tightness of the plaiting, like two little cupped hands. It was on purpose. A way of stylishly spoiling the beautiful rest of her.

  Others stared, not just me. She was used to such staring. She pouted like a sour kiss to the air around her, rejecting the attention. Her lips were red by nature, not by lipstick.

  She was in the age gap of my ultimate preference—ten or so years my elder. I was not intending love. I was playing. I was thinking how a woman like her would, for me, be aiming higher than usual. If I even got a kiss from her it would be an achievement. I enjoyed the idea, then let it fade. I went back to drying dishes.

  Tilda finished admission. She dwelt on the spot a second, read the directions to her bunk room on the brochure you got with your locker key. Off she went. For all I knew that was the end of it. My rightful place was dishes. My face curtain returned to its down position.

  Chapter 5

  My father would think I had my tail between my legs—that’s why I hadn’t rung him. It was time I did, though I knew what he’d do. He’d say, ‘You’ve had your little adventure, son. Be responsible, come to your senses. Fly home and settle down to a good productive life.’ There had been talk the Mullers planned to leave town to save their marriage. Perhaps they’d already done it, clearing the way for my return.

  My conversation with the old boy was a masterpiece of lying. ‘Norm,’ I said. It sounded more confident than Dad. ‘Norm, I did it. I was accepted into RADA. That’s right, accepted. I was quite impressive. My practising paid off.’

  He yelled out for my mother, ‘Marg. Marg. He was accepted. I’ll be blowed.’

  She made a tearful speech about being vindicated before I had the chance to calm her down.

  ‘But I am not going to accept their acceptance,’ I told her. ‘I know, I know, but you have to understand something. It disappointed me, Marg, the place itself, the people. I have other opportunities I want to take up and explore.’ I didn’t say what other opportunities. I let the conversation fizzle. Norm offered to wire me money to top up my funds. I politely resisted before relenting.

  I was using the hostel payphone by the stairs. Exactly timed on my relenting, Tilda appeared. Down the stairs she came, skipping off the last step. She spun left, heading for the common room. Her yellow blouse had been replaced by a long green shirt with fruit drawings on it. Green apples, coppery peaches and red plums. She paid me no attention, just swept on by. My mother had to ask, ‘Are you still there, Colin?’

  The next stage came ten minutes later and involved cigarettes. A cigarette implies risk and cheapness in a person; it says they are bold and vulnerable in one. Tilda was smoking. It seemed at odds with the look of her. You wouldn’t think she’d want a smokescreen across her attractiveness.

  She was seated on a common room armchair, leg over leg, talking in smoke clouds to a man with thick, hairy forearms. Spanish, going by his seedy sound. He flung his arms about and was old—at least forty. Tilda’s grey breath licked up from her top lip to her nostrils. She raised her chin as if to drain each smoke puff like a drink. It gave the impression of keeping the world out and also inviting it in.

  Since the RADA fiasco I had been sexless in myself, too dead in spirit to feel desire for anyone. I could not imagine anyone feeling desire for me. But a month had passed. I could feel my blood reheating. Blood or hormones or whatever they are. They squirted once again in the sudden way they do, down my back, prickling in my groin and anus. Queasiness bubbled in my stomach as if semen was produced there high up in the intestines, poisoning me sweetly with its gases, forcing its way down the penis in the hope of being expelled. Tilda with her smoking, her one leg spread in a triangle over her knee, brought the queasiness on more strongly. When she reached forward to flick ash from her cigarette her biceps were woman-thin but strung with lean muscle. A vein ran down each arm like an off-centre spine. She was a woman, yes, but with a bit of male in those arms mixed in. The monotone of her Australian speaking had a scratchy grain, the kind of voice that’s called husky.

  She was telling the Spaniard she had ‘done’ New York. From her baggy thigh pockets she presented two black books and opened them on a coffee table. I swaggered closer, changing a dirty ashtray for a clean one in order to peek. I wiped stickiness from the table.

  ‘That’s Brooklyn Bridge,’ she informed the Spaniard, thumbing pages of ink drawings. ‘This is in Central Park. These are some wonderful brownstones.’ Her pen had photographed them with spidery blots and watery smears.

  ‘They’re very good,’ I blurted. ‘Very good.’ And they were. It wasn’t just the queasiness talking.

  Tilda jerked her head up to take the compliment from me. Her plait bucked across her stuck-out ears. Her smile caused a pretty crease at each side of her mouth, and above her eyebrows too, like an extra brow of skin. At that instant I was sure there must be a smell called Welcome: for all the nicotine about her, a cinnamon hello lifted to me from her hair.

  But there!—a wedding ring. A skinny band of shineless silver. Easy to miss among the state of her fingers, ink-stained as if her habit was blue cigarettes. Was she travelling with someone, or was the ring just for show? I admit there was an extra squirt of excitement through me in memory of the sophisticated sin with Caroline.

  If we put on a swagger we can appear smarter than we are. We can turn a good phrase if we’re swaggering. I swaggered and said, ‘I don’t know what I like but I know that’s art.’ Tilda laughed and I sensed it was a good time to walk off, part of the x-ray basics I learned from Caroline. If we turn our backs we can read what someone thinks of us. It may sound unlikely but it’s the truth. If we glimpse over our shoulder and catch them looking and they avert their eyes—that’s an x-ray taken. They have an attraction to us.

  I did it to Tilda and she averted on cue, I was certain of it. She resumed flipping through her personal New York, noisy flips of ink-stiff pages; she smiled in that closed mouth way we do when we’ve been caught out. She shut her book and stood, put her chair in like a good girl and was marching off in the direction of the female wing. Her plait kept time, ear to ear, with her striding.

  Chapter 6

  I did the sensible thing and checked her admission card. S
he was travelling alone. Duration of visit, three nights. I set myself up in the common room with coffee, near the door where I could see all comings and goings. When Tilda passed by I would take another x-ray and if successful move to the next stage where I swaggered more and perhaps tried some Shakespeare.

  Two hours I lingered, reading newspapers with one eye. No sunflowers or plums appeared. Only a scraggy not-Tilda, a girl-woman with short hair and scabbed pimples. She waved her hands and babbled French—Je m’appelle Yvonne and s’il vous plait—and tried to take my hands in hers. Her touch was cold and greasy. I pulled my hands away but she persisted with her s’il vous plaits.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ I said. There was obviously a problem. ‘Speak English. You speak English?’

  She said she spoke a little English and started off with her name, Yvonne. ‘I need money, sir. My money stole.’ She made a pick-pocketing motion with her fingers and sniffled snot back up into her nose. ‘Please help. I need home. Boat. France.’ Her hands sailed a hilly ocean. A thick coughing crackled inside her. ‘My brother, he sick. I need go home.’

  She doubled up at my feet and I patted her shoulder and said it was dreadful her situation but she should call the police.

  ‘No,’ she grunted. ‘Money. Please.’ Her hair smelled of not being washed of its oils. There was dandruff in the skin of its parting. Her maroon jacket had absorbed a layer of damp grime.

  It was this moment, of all the two hours, that Tilda strolled by to order coffee at the common room counter. My first impulse was to fend Yvonne away—I didn’t want Tilda seeing me associating with beggars. I stood and stepped free of the girl. But she followed me, shuffling along on her knees. I took a handful of change from my pocket and presented it. I said, ‘There you go’ loud enough to make a public display of my charity.

  Yvonne poked the coins. Her nails were eaten down and dirty in the quick. ‘Twenty fucken P,’ she complained. ‘Twenty P.’ Her English wasn’t French-English now, it was Liverpool or Manchester. She got to her feet and called me a tight-arse bastard because twenty P is like handing out nothing. She was so loud Tilda and others in the room stood still to watch us.

  To save face—a childish thing to do over twenty P—I demanded she give the money back. I took her hand to tip the coins into my palm. She made a fist and screamed thief and rape and help. I let go and appealed to the room for witnesses that I was the victim here, not this fake French urchin.

  Yvonne switched her attention immediately to Tilda at the coffee counter. Or rather the wallet in Tilda’s hand. S’il vous plait, she begged, fingers steepled together, using the same routine she’d tried on me. She could not take her eyes off Tilda’s wallet and even reached out to touch it as if it were hers to claim. Tilda protested but Yvonne kept coming, ranting that the wallet was hers and that Tilda was a thief and must be arrested. She then made the mistake of trying to snatch the wallet. Tilda was not going to let it go, she had a two-hand grip on the thing. Yvonne persisted, but she did not have man-arms. Tilda’s veins were popping out along her biceps and she sent Yvonne to the floor with an elbow jolt.

  Yvonne screamed and swore she was being assaulted but Tilda kept wrestling her on the ground and retrieved her wallet with a yank and grunt. Yvonne was furious and tried to get back into character to continue her accusations but by now I had gone over to ask if Tilda was hurt. She had opened the wallet, removed her Australian driver’s licence and said, ‘There, you lying bitch. There’s my ID. How dare you!’

  I stood between them both, my arms out like a referee who favoured Tilda and was acting as her shield.

  Yvonne hit out at my arm. ‘’E tried to touch me,’ she said in her silly accent. ‘’E, how you say, try to rape me?’

  ‘That’s absurd,’ I said. My leg nerve began electrocuting me.

  Tilda was suddenly at my side. She placed her fingertips on my forearm. My bare forearm. Her bare fingertips. Our first skin-to-skin connection. She steered me, such a light touch, back, back, please, taking charge. ‘He no more raped you than you own this wallet. I am his witness. So you go and call the police, because I’ll be delighted to fill them in on your s’il vous plait rubbish.’

  She turned to me. ‘Will you be my witness? She’s a con artist.’

  ‘Of course I’ll be your witness.’

  ‘We can sit down and write out statements.’

  Yvonne started shuffling in a circle, clockwise, a dozen granny-steps then back the other way. She knocked on her head like a door and shouted at the floor for us and everyone else in the world to go away. She granny-stepped out of the room, up the exit stairs and was gone.

  Chapter 7

  Yvonne, you don’t know what part you played in me and Tilda. You were our accidental matchmaker.

  ‘It’s an affront,’ Tilda said, karate chopping the common room table. ‘Your possessions are your possessions. It’s like an invasion of me.’ She shivered invasion like a sudden chill. Her eyes squinted against tears coming. She poked her plait to re-tuck burst hair as if tears were controlled in the knotting. She said she was determined to return to her afternoon plan. She would finish writing her statement, no matter how pointless—surely it was the last we would see of Yvonne—then she was off to any gallery that was open. The National. The Tate—all those Turners. ‘He was abstract before abstract was invented. Have you seen them?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘You don’t like him?’

  I had never heard of Turner. But I remember Mr Lipshut at school used to say, ‘With art, boys, there is no such thing as like. No value judgments or rash generalisations.’ I said as much to Tilda.

  ‘That’s true. Very good,’ she nodded, and with this came the offering of her hand for a formal introduction. She had a man’s grip in keeping with those arms.

  We signed each other’s statements. ‘It’s been quite cathartic actually, writing this,’ she said, taking a deep breath of musty hostel air as if it were a forest fresh with blossom. ‘Just like art. You get something off your chest. You make something clear.’

  I smiled, though I didn’t know what cathartic was. It sounded like arthritic.

  ‘I’ll tell you what is not cathartic: crying.’ She had managed to squint back her tears. ‘When I came on this trip I promised myself two things. Number one: no crying. Do nothing to bring it on. This is a holiday.’

  She buttoned her statement into her pants leg. Her right index finger began tracing out her talk in some table salt-spill, like a doodle. ‘Let me get this out in the open. So there’s no misunderstanding. Because, I sense you are, you know, trying it on. Which flatters me, but my number two for this trip is: no men. No flings. This is an art trip. No men. My marriage has recently ended and I’m enjoying being man-free.’

  Blood blushed and burned in my cheeks from the embarrassment. I let my head hang lower behind my face curtain. ‘You’ve got the wrong end of the stick,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t trying it on.’

  ‘You weren’t?’

  ‘No. You’ve made a mistake.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It was the last thing on my mind.’

  It was her turn for burning cheeks. She tapped a full stop to her doodling. ‘I just presumed. I’m sorry. I just thought you were trying it on.’

  It was me doodling now. I felt mild nausea below my solar plexus, as if I had eaten bad food. A sinking from the heart like a glob of blood gone down the wrong way. I did not know that love enters us like this. It must have slipped through my skin while we were talking. My dry mouth was a symptom. My pulse quicker and irregular in my neck veins.

  I don’t think Tilda had any symptoms. She took my wrong-end-of-the-stick comment as a snub, or so I x-rayed, though I was not confident my x-rays were accurate after all. I could not tell if my being younger appealed to her or not. I suspected not. I suspected she considered me a safe male for uninvolved company and little
more. I was invited to be her gallery partner when my shift finished.

  Chapter 8

  My portrait of Tilda viewing pictures at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square:

  She preferred no talk during the process. She stood well back from a painting. Then five paces closer to it. Then sideways two paces, then back to her original position. She glowered at chit-chattering school children—would they please not block her line of sight!

  She glowered the same at elderly people craning so close to a Picasso they almost nosed it. They passed judgment that ‘the paintwork looks kind of rough to me. I like big signatures on a painting. Where are the Monets, Bert? Can you spot any? Myself, I prefer Constables.’

  Tilda held her hand at arm’s length to block out any realism—a shed or peasant, a donkey and cart. She wanted colours to sing for her and they can’t sing around carts. ‘See how that turquoise sings?’ she said. Her lips were puckered in concentration. Her tongue poked through as if she were suckling.

  ‘Yes, I see.’ I copied her, my arm out the same way.

  ‘Rembrandt’s black is not really black. It’s so dense it’s blue and green and silver all in one.’

  I chimed in with a Mr Lipshut quote. ‘Colour is the suffering of light.’

  ‘I like that. It’s quite erudite.’

  Erudite? I would have to look that up with cathartic.

  From birth we hear so many famous names: Shakespeare, Jesus, Rembrandt, The Beatles, Mozart. Compared with the others Rembrandt was only pictures. He was not even music. He said nothing wise—he was just decoration on a wall, and disappointed me, though I didn’t say so to Tilda. I watched her close an eye and aim down the rifle of her arm at colours.