The Amateur Science of Love
Page 8
I flicked my fingers away as you do if suddenly touching a spider. And like a spider the feeling of it remained, tingling. I wiped my fingers on the sheets but the revulsion was too strong. I spasmed with flicking. I shuddered and hid the reason for doing so by groaning as if in the throes of a fierce expelling. Stomach to stomach I lay in the fork of her, my left side lifted up a little so as not to have the egg pressing on me.
A lump like that is just popped muscle, I reasoned in myself. A lump like that just goes away, no need to think of it again. A lump like that is not a growth, as in disease, as in old women’s talk—growths. If it was a growth, wouldn’t it be painful? Look at Tilda smiling, eyes closed, content to go to sleep now. No look of pain in her face, which you’d have if you had a bad lump.
I slid into position beside her. ‘Everything okay?’
‘Yes,’ she yawned. ‘Why?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Night.’
‘Night.’
She turned rump-to-groin to me, wriggled in closer, reached behind herself to take my wrist and cross my arm under her arm to have my palm cup her breast. But it was the spider-egg breast, so I couldn’t cup it. I cupped her hip instead, which was not very comfortable but clear of the cold tingle and crawl. Clear of obligation to have a proper feel, a more medical probe. If I touched it again, if it was not a mind trick but real and pronounced, then I would have to say so. I would have to point and poke, guide Tilda’s fingers, asking, ‘Is that normal, that lump right there?’ We were two people who needed our sleep rather than be up all night worrying about egg lumps.
It was bound to be nothing, I decided. I slipped into sleep. After all, tomorrow I had a job to go to. My sixth freelance job reporting for the Scintilla Gazette Weekly. A dozen culvert pipes had gone missing from the racecourse—concrete and brand new. Someone had used a winch to uncouple a drain and thieve them. The day after tomorrow Tilda was off to Melbourne. Principally to hawk paintings around galleries, but also to tie in a doctor’s appointment for the usual swabs and top-to-toe. Preparations, Tilda called it. Preparations and maintenance for her future pregnancy hopes. No Richard or Alice fiasco this time, but a proper planned making of a loved child. I figured if the egg was still there the doctor could appraise it.
The loved child plan involved an ultimatum to me: if I, Colin, was not prepared to take the step to fatherhood; if I was still the Colin of sixteen months ago and not father material; if I did not feel it in my heart and head, if the urge had not come upon me, then, decreed Tilda, we should say goodbye once and for all. She would find herself a man more committed. Her body would not be in working order forever. It would dry up like a dam eventually and be barren.
She did remind me how I had let her down. ‘Richard or Alice—do you ever think on it? It would be seven months old now.’ She knew it was futile to force me into fatherhood. ‘I could try saying You owe me,’ she said, ‘but what good would that do? If you don’t want a child, deep down in yourself, You owe me is pathetic.’
I was not the same Colin of sixteen months ago. If you could have x-rayed my thinking, if all the wires and locks could be picked away to expose the very spot you’d call true-me, there had been alterations. I was warmer on the pregnancy idea. I had an inkling that I’d found my niche in life in Scintilla. That’s what a bit of steady work will do for you. Not that there was an immediate hurry for pregnancy, surely. I committed myself to the idea, but suggested Tilda keep using a diaphragm until Gazette work became more frequent and lucrative. ‘Let’s get things bedded down,’ I said.
She relented, ‘Okay. As long as it’s not an excuse. Bedding down is not never ever.’ She agreed the Gazette opportunity was an exciting development, one I should not be distracted from at this moment. It gave her a sense of pride to see me march out the door so purposefully of a morning, pad and pen in hand like real tools of trade. My plastering wall cracks gave her a house-proud pleasure, but ‘Look at you!’ she smiled as I put a tie on. ‘Mr Professional. Quite the respectable fellow.’
The Gazette even let me use its vehicle for assignments—a latest model Commodore with a CB radio, like police have. ‘Assignments,’ Tilda quipped. ‘Sounds very James Bond.’ She hated ironing but wouldn’t see me walk out crinkled: crisp and creaseless is how shirts must be when there’s a job to do that you call ‘responsible’.
The work came via a chance conversation of Tilda’s. Because of her art degree she’d been asked to judge the primary school’s prize for collage. At the fairy-bread supper after the award ceremony a mother, stuck for conversational subject matter, asked, ‘And your man friend, Tilda, is he of a creative bent?’
‘Oh yes,’ she replied. ‘Goodness yes. He was accepted into a very exclusive academy for drama in London. He became disillusioned, however. He’s more a business brain, that’s his bent. He has thrown himself into renovating the old building like you wouldn’t believe. He’s a roll up your sleeves and get on with it sort of guy.’
The mother, it turned out, was the daughter of Hector Vigourman, grazier, Gazette owner, former state member of parliament for the district, amateur actor and president of the Scintilla Footlights Community Theatre Company.
Two days later there he was, knocking on our back door, stout and dapper in fawn cashmere cardigan and proper leather shoes—not the elastic-sided boots and flannelette shirt of a normal Scintillan.
He had a proposition for me. Would I be willing, as a favour to the town’s few but passionate amateur thespians, to cast my eye over their new production of Arsenic and Old Lace? If I would perhaps sit in on a rehearsal? If I could perhaps impart some advice—a few tips I had gleaned from my experiences in London? In fact, would I be willing to review the play for the Gazette? As its proprietor he would be honoured to print me.
He described the Gazette as a very modest enterprise, smiling a mix of apology and boasting, and given that his sister was the editor he could assure me prominent placement on, say, page three or five. He would be delighted if I included a paragraph or two about my RADA days. It was bound to pique the interest of locals.
‘I don’t think so. Those days are far behind me.’ I was too busy with my renovating project, I said.
‘Oh please,’ he persisted.
‘I wouldn’t want to be seen as a Scintillan newcomer who is blowing his own trumpet.’
‘Not at all.’
Tilda elbowed encouragement. ‘It’s not blowing your trumpet. It’s community spirit.’
‘Too true.’ Vigourman nudged me. ‘Go on.’
‘Sweetheart, go on. Do it.’
‘All right then,’ I said. ‘A review. A short one.’
‘Excellent.’ Vigourman clapped his hands together. ‘A review that gives us a little pat on the back. After all, we are not RADA material.’
I drew the line on the subject of RADA. I said RADA was a very unhappy time for me. I hated talking about, let alone writing on, the topic.
‘Of course, of course,’ Vigourman said. ‘We don’t want to stir up unpleasant memories.’ We shook hands like two notable men agreeing on terms. ‘The troops will be so excited. They’re getting on in years, you’ll find, but they are always willing to listen and learn.’
Getting on in years—he wasn’t kidding. I sat beside him at the rehearsal worried about them surviving the ordeal of speaking lines: two or three needed to sit between scenes and catch their breath. One fell asleep doing it. All the lines were fluffed—sometimes the stage went silent for twenty seconds while the cast waited for offstage prompts.
‘What do you think?’ Vigourman whispered. ‘Be honest. I know we’ve got work to do.’
I did enjoy his deferring to my authority. ‘Nervousness is the enemy of the actor, in my experience. They need to relax. You can’t underestimate the nervousness factor.’
I took my chance on that note of wisdom to excuse myself and slip out.
Review, my arse. I wrote twenty paragraphs with ‘delightful’ in the piece four times, ‘charming’ three, ‘interesting’ and ‘energetic’ twice.
‘Appropriately diplomatic,’ Tilda called it.
‘Cheesy lies, more likely,’ I said. I was embarrassed it bore my name. But Vigourman was chuffed, and he had influence. I was suddenly in demand: could I write some ‘reflections’ on living in Scintilla? If I filled a page my fee would be $25.
I got busy reflecting. I chose the town’s bluestone buildings to wax about. ‘Vertical cobblestone streets’, I dubbed them, prose I thought poetic as sentences go. I described the Scintillan sun as ‘chandelier material’. I said the people of the town were as friendly and as straight-backed and square-jawed as any humans I had encountered in my travels. My one quibble was to do with ‘bending the elbow’, though I never meant it as hard-hitting. You wouldn’t find a boozier, noisier Saturday night on planet Earth, I wrote. The town’s main street has more midnight argy-bargy than a boxing ring. London is like a graveyard in comparison.
‘Exposed at last!’ wrote clergymen in a joint letter to the editor. ‘Are hotels now our places of worship? Why have our youth lost their way?’
In response to which, successive editions published letters dismissing me as a ‘blow-in’ and a ‘snob’ because I had only lived here a handful of months; you need twenty years to know the place; you need to be born here. The controversy sold 106 more copies of the paper than usual. That only ever happened when Scintilla played the Watercook Cannons at football.
My mini-fame, my notoriety, lifted me up in name and spirits. I don’t care what they say about big fish in small ponds, to be lifted up in any-size place is a powerful physic. It puts a drop of self-importance in your system. I remembered the famous feeling of first being in love with Tilda and how her being pregnant with Richard or Alice multiplied it, if only for a few hours. If the two were combined—pregnancy and this new small-pond fame, what a state of grace to be in. That’s what I mean by alterations.
I bought a cash-register-looking typewriter at the Salvos and practised—thwack, thwack, thump—like morse piano until my fingers could produce 600 words in one hour. I rang home to my parents and big-noted, with some truth in the big-noting this time, that I was involved in a promising venture in newspapers.
Norm mumbled, unconvinced: ‘A writing job? Where’s that going to get you?’ I did lie that I was earning $300 a week, which he liked the sound of. My fee was now $30 an article but I could not resist the exaggeration. It drew a ‘You’re back on track, by the looks of things’ from him, which I appreciated.
Tilda appeared younger to me now. That was another alteration. When out in the sun she tanned and glowed. The dandelions became almost invisible along her jaw. Country life was suiting her. It smoothed her skin out and put pretty freckles on her nose. I counted them, twenty tiny freckles, the morning after the egg discovery. She lay beside me, eyelids closed, eyeballs fidgeting beneath them half awake. She looked too healthy for that egg to be of any significance. I should just put it out of my thoughts. Which I did. I had the great drain robbery to go to. I had to shave, shower, help Tilda load the van with paintings without getting marks on my good clothes.
Chapter 34
Her phone call came the day after next. ‘I have a huge lump. A huge fucking lump.’ She hiccupped with tears, her voice blocked with terror-phlegm. ‘There’s a smaller lump near it. And under my arms, where the glands are, more lumps.’ She said her doctor’s face was furrowed when he found them. She’d swear he looked concerned and tried conceal it with ‘Don’t worry’ but Tilda wasn’t blind, she was no fool, she could tell his thinking.
She was phoning from her parents’. She desperately needed to curl up in her childhood bed. She wanted her childness back because there is only living in childhood, there are no lumps or tears too terrible. There are no tests and specialists who will do a biopsy on her in three days’ time. ‘Three days. They think they need to hurry, don’t they?’
‘I don’t know. I couldn’t say.’
‘They think it must be serious, too serious to wait, don’t they? I can’t wait three days. Why do I have to wait three days? Why can’t they do it now?’
‘I don’t know.’
These were not real questions from Tilda, it was the terror talking, for which all answers are stunned I don’t knows.
‘Something bad is in my body. I can feel it.’ She spat the words with such revulsion she might have been spitting at her body. ‘How can I go three days with badness living in me?’
‘I don’t know.’
She could not stand to glimpse any part of herself. She vowed to keep her clothes on for three days and have no shower so she didn’t see or touch her gone-bad body. Her body had turned on her, she wept. Her body was the enemy within.
She instructed me to pack her blue nightie, the one she had never used but saved as if for special sleeping. Bring white knickers too. If none were in the clean pile then buy some. I was to use my initiative and pack anything else I thought she might need. Manners were obsolete to her now. There was no point in please or thank you. They belonged to the past, a kinder place than this new hell of worry. She wanted me to catch the train to Melbourne immediately. She wanted me to hold her through the night. Hold her and be gentle. She wanted to hold me and be mad and have the right to be mad. I’d have to sleep in her parents’ study on a foldout cot because they were old-fashioned and we were not a married couple. But they would have to turn a blind eye and allow me to sneak in to her at night.
Chapter 35
Just as screens are drawn around a patient’s bed, so too a screen is pulled around that time for me.
Inside the screen there are only Tilda and myself. She is waking after whatever they do in biopsies. Her lips are dry and pale. Her eyes are dragged left and right slowly by the drugs. I sit on the bed edge and hold her hand, such a cold hand, from the pretend death of anaesthetic. ‘It’s over,’ I say, smiling. I force myself to kiss her forehead—I should at least kiss her forehead until the medical smells have gone from her mouth. We will be back in Scintilla in a few days, I tell her to cheer her. The results will be negative and we can get out of this sterilised ward and go home; me to write another Gazette masterpiece, her to her canvas equivalents.
Outside the screen is Tilda’s family: a brother, two sisters, her mother, Raewyn, with pearls twisted anxiously through her knuckles below her throat line. Her father, Eric, jiggles change in his pocket and reassures Raewyn that Tilda has pluck and fortitude. They mutter their own I don’t knows and Don’t worrys. Where I am concerned they use talk that avoids talking: ‘What footy team do you barrack for?’
There is suspicion if can’t answer that question in Melbourne. If you can’t say the Dons or Magpies or Demons it’s as if you’re a threat, an alien. I said the Dons just to keep everyone happy.
In reality they were inside Tilda’s bed screen but I have decided to keep things to just her and me or else I will get shuffled back from the bed at this point, as I was that day. They stopped short of saying, ‘Can you step outside please, mate?’ but I sniffed the sentiment. She had been theirs all her life; I had been on the scene five minutes. I was an impostor. When she clutched my hand I could x-ray jealousy, especially in her parents. I’m not retaliating here but they are now my impostors. I decide who gains admission to this testimony. They were not Tilda’s lover. Nobody but we two could understand the intimacy to come. I want to get it on the record, that intimacy, because it’s a finest-hour entry in my otherwise lopsided list.
Chapter 36
Mr outranks Dr in the medical world, an anti-title they give to their royalty. Mr gave Edwin Roff’s words added authority; he was surgeon law. His hair was white as prophets’, his cheeks gaunt from the great burden of informing patients of what pathologists saw in their petri dishes. In Tilda’s case they saw a l
arge malignant tumour, a most aggressive, dangerous form. They saw two secondaries from the same breast. The lymph nodes in her armpit had cancer in them as well.
Roff said he was going to speak quickly and directly to get it all said—the facts, the course of action. If I, Colin, would be alert in case Tilda could not take it all in. Becky too please, her sister, sitting the other side of her at Roff’s wide dark-wood desk. There were two schools of thought on such diseases. His was the school that advocated radical action—removal of the full breast. The other school preferred removal of lumps only. ‘I take the view,’ he said quietly, ‘that the radical option is better. Removal of the affected breast, the lymph nodes stripped away: an aggressive attack to match an aggressive cancer. We will follow that up with chemotherapy.’
It was a game of numbers, he explained. Of percentages, of odds. If Tilda’s cancer returned within twelve months then the chances of survival…(he paused to select the right word) fell. If in twelve months it had not returned, well, then there was a fifty-fifty chance it might not return the following year. The odds extend more favourably as years go by.
He permitted his lips to bend into a professional smile of hope and goodwill. Tilda did not return the smile. Roff reached across his desk and spread his long pink fingers in front of us as if to display his wares—his expert tongs for the removal of deadliness. Tilda bowed her head. He patted her forearm and leant back into his black leather chair, his fingertips testing his bow tie’s straightness.
Tilda lifted her head. ‘What about a baby?’
Roff’s smile bent into reverse, into a frown. He jerked forward to look in Tilda’s file. ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’