The Amateur Science of Love (13 page)

It’s customary in Australia to abbreviate a person’s name and add an affectionate O or Y, a gesture between people symbolising friendship: Vigourman to Vigo, that sort of thing.

No one abbreviated Tilda and me in Scintilla. We had the usual
good morning
and
gidday
and other pleasantries but we didn’t socialise much, didn’t seek out friendship. Nor did friendship exactly rush to invite us in. We wore a covering, I suppose. The prickly shell of loners. More Tilda than me, because of her worry about gawking. She kept sensing gawkers in the street. Not in cold weather so much, with her bulky oilskin jacket on. More the heat, when tops come off and we go around in loose singlets. She didn’t mind her arms exposed—those veiny vines were her trophies—but for the rest of her it was always a shirt and denim overalls, baggy-fronted like camouflage. Even then she suspected a gawker could peek in at the edges.

On the subject of peeking, she wondered what my eyes did when in public. I glimpsed her watching me on occasions if I was talking to women of a certain age—anywhere between fourteen and sixty. She had tape-measure eyes able to calculate my line of vision. Any hint the line was intersecting with a bosom would get her fuming. ‘Don’t deny you were perving,’ she accused. ‘How fucking dare you perv. And in my presence.’

I swore to God I wasn’t perving. And it was often true. I crossed my heart and hoped to die and said, ‘This is Scintilla, for Christ’s sake. Name one beauty who’d turn my head. Just one.’

Tilda couldn’t, which left her satisfied she was the town’s queen of good looks and my eyes were just for her.

In holiday season, when city Scintillans came home to the family farm, there was more competition—there was slinky fashion to leer through. If I wore sunglasses Tilda had me remove them on the grounds that it was rude to talk to people when they couldn’t see you properly. I said, ‘Harsh sunlight gives us cataracts.’

‘So what! Cataracts are not cancer.’

I should have touched wood more on Tilda’s behalf. I don’t believe superstitions work but we’re all nagged by an inkling there may be something out there. If there was it channelled its worst powers into the fluids of Tilda’s right arm. It happened just as her two-year examination by Roff was getting close. The twelve-month milestone had been one thing—twelve months clear of tumours tipped the odds a little in her favour. A little was enough to warrant champagne, proper French stuff that cost the same as a fortnight’s groceries. The two-year test tipped the odds in a bigger way—she might end up having a decent lifespan. She walked around the house with her fingers crossed, chanting, ‘Two years. Please, please, let me be clear.’

The night after I filed my final plague-related story—500 words on how demand was hiking seed prices, cruelling efforts to replant crops—Tilda asked me to come into the bathroom. She wanted the full glare of my shaving bulb angled on her. ‘Do you notice any difference?’ she asked.

Tricky question, I thought. Be careful. She hasn’t changed her hairstyle. She hasn’t changed a thing. Best wait for her to prompt me. A towel was tucked around her. Her arms were at her side. She urged me to keep looking.

‘You’ve got me, I’m afraid. I don’t see anything obvious.’

‘Good,’ she exhaled. ‘Must be in my head.’

‘What’s in your head?’

‘Look at my right arm.’

‘I am looking.’

‘See any difference?’

‘Nope.’

‘Good.’

‘What am I meant to be noticing?’

‘Nothing.’ She shrugged that it was just her overactive imagination.

But next day I was called in again and told to look harder this time. Concentrate on her arms. Was her right arm larger than her left, in terms of width, in terms of puffiness?

‘No.’

No wasn’t adequate for her. No didn’t reflect reality, she reprimanded. ‘How can you not see any difference? Look at my fingers. They’re larger. My wrist is larger. Look at how the veins run down my arms. My left vein sticks out like normal, but my right doesn’t.’ She pressed her thumb to her skin and told me to watch: ‘Indentations.’

There did appear to be a fuller outline to her right arm. Her fingers were fuller, redder, as if blood was trapped. I did not want to speak and cause panic over a smidgeon of swelling. In fact, the more I looked the more I was convinced there wasn’t any.

On the toilet seat Tilda had laid out a length of string, a ruler, piece of paper and pen. By a pinching process she used the string to take the size of her biceps. She looped it around like a tourniquet, pinched the ends together and in the same action made a fingernail dent where the string crossed. Holding the string taut along the ruler allowed her to read the measurement: 24 centimetres, upper arm; 20 centimetres, forearm; 15 centimetres, wrist. Each finger, each thumb, down to the 4.5 centimetres of her pinkie. She said she did this yesterday, not once but four times, and her right arm was now larger by 2 centimetres at the biceps. Bigger all the way down the limb. ‘
You
take the sizes,’ she ordered. The string was twitching in her grip as she held it out.

I tourniqueted and pinched according to her example.

‘That’s too loose,’ she complained.

‘Is that better?’

‘Now it’s too tight. Concentrate. Concentrate.’

‘I am concentrating.’ I was impatient at her impatience. I sighed a sick and tired sigh of resentment at being spoken to like that. I said, ‘Your right bicep is not 24 centimetres. It’s 22.’

‘Take it again.’ She raised her voice. ‘I said, take it again.’

‘Not if you speak like I’m a servant.’

She bowed her head and apologised. ‘Could you please take it again? Please.’

I did. It was 22.

For a second this appeased Tilda. The 22 measurement might mean the arm
had
been swollen but was now thinning back to normal. Or another explanation could be my faulty string tension when I stretched it to the ruler. My tension produced 22. Her tension, the correct tension, produced 24. ‘We’ll have a break, a rest from it, then take a new round of measurements. In the meantime, where are the brochures?’

The brochures Roff gave me to safekeep. We’d put them away somewhere, as if away somewhere
would keep the cancer at bay because hiding discouraged cancer. Tilda recalled there was something in those brochures about arms and swelling. Something revolting to do with ‘worst-case scenarios’. First they were kept in a drawer with her medical scans. Then transferred to a suitcase in the wardrobe. Then an even further-off spot under the staircase with the broken venetians.

Would I get them out, please? Would I read what they say on the subject of arms? There were photographs, if Tilda remembered rightly. Ugly photos designed no doubt to scare the wits out of patients, bad taste examples of doctor humour. She didn’t want to see photos of that kind. She asked me to read out what the brochures said and see if anything related to her.

Lymphoedema. When lymph nodes are removed, as they had been in Tilda’s right armpit, impurities could not be flushed from the affected arm. The swelling was elephantiasis—lymphoedema. There was a corresponding photo for the word. I tilted the page away so Tilda couldn’t see it but she was too upset now not to be shown. She snatched the brochure from me and groaned at the sight of a woman’s arm fat with fluid, an elephant-human, fingernails like toenails on buckled finger-toes. A leg-arm that belonged on an obese person’s hip, not attached to an ordinary-sized shoulder.

I pulled the photo from her. She didn’t resist. ‘That won’t be you,’ I said.

‘How do you know? Are you a doctor?’

‘I’m just saying let’s be confident it won’t be you. Look, here, what it advises. It says there are procedures you can follow. You must put your arm over your head and massage. And you’ve got to keep hygienic with your hand-health. You can’t get cuts or pricks or the like.’

‘Pricks.’ She squinted and repeated the word a few times. ‘When I had the operation, wasn’t there a fuss over a needle in my hand? It was in my right side and should have been my left? Remember?’

I remembered. ‘But they said it was a minor fuss.’

‘I’ll sue them. They’ve made me into an elephant-woman. I’ll sue them for every fucking cent they have.’

For two hours she directed vengeance at the medical profession, cursed doctors and nurses as negligent and heartless; they should be bankrupted for her arm. Then she ran out of logic to support the blame. Her life had been saved, she conceded. That was the important thing. The medical profession had done its best by her in that regard. If her arm was worse off for a hospital prick, so be it. Besides, the swelling was probably her own fault.

‘It’s not about fault.’ I patted her red hand for extra weight of rationality. Her skin was hot as fever but I didn’t dare say. I patted and smiled, careful not to seem too casual. Too casual might be mistaken for not showing sufficient concern.

‘Paints. That’s what I’m talking about.
Paints
.’ She wiped my hand away. ‘The filth of paints. The lead and cadmium. The turpentine, the dust, the dirtiness of the whole pointless art activity. I will never paint again. Ever.’

‘But you haven’t been painting.’ I said it not too sarcastically.

‘I
have
been. Well, not painting so much as thinking about it. I might as well give up and have clean hands and not risk swelling from it.’

I suggested she try a dishwashing glove.

She guffawed. ‘Too sterile. Imagine Van Gogh with pink rubber gloves! You either give your all, hands-on, not caring about cleanliness or swelling, or you give the game away and leave it to others.’ She wished she knew someone to bequeath the Vincent flake to. She wanted to pass it on to a
real
artist. She was not worthy of its ownership.

I re-patted her hand. ‘In my opinion, you need more ideas, that’s all.’

‘I haven’t got any.’

‘Maybe I can help you.’ My saying that was not premeditated. I had no help prepared. My bold mouth simply opened and out dropped an epiphany. ‘Why not paint a portrait? Enough of landscapes. What’s the name of that prize for portraits I’ve read about, the big prize for painting famous people?’

Tilda wrinkled her brow. ‘The Archibald?’

‘That’s the one. Paint a portrait and enter it.’

‘I don’t know any famous people.’

Again my mouth opened. ‘You would have heard of Cameron Wilkins?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, he’s very high up in the writing field. He’d be a perfect subject.’

‘The Archibald.’

Open went my mouth but this time it went one word too far. I mentioned Wilkins’s cancer. I meant it as inspirational: he with his trials of it; her with her own. ‘Like a bond you’d have,’ I said. ‘A talking point. A common interest.’

Tilda’s lips tasted the lemon-sourness of my sentence and she grimaced. ‘That’s all I’d need. What a depressing talking point! Jesus. I want to forget about cancer, not give it paint-life.’

Understood, I nodded. Understood. I chided myself to keep my mouth good and closed. Besides, it was tempting trouble, her embarking on a Wilkins project. Imagine her meeting Donna. One look at her splendid mother-to-be glow and it could have stirred up Richard and Alice memories: ‘Cameron Wilkins gets cancer and there’s no harm in
him
breeding,’ she was bound to say. ‘Where’s the justice in that? There is none.’

As well as brochures the staircase possie contained the Roff questionnaire. In the panic of diagnosis Tilda never completed it. Probably too late to be of use to him now but she filled in the spaces anyway, just in case:

Do you smoke?
No.
Have you ever?
Yes.

How often do you drink? Do you exercise? Do you have a family history of illness?

Page three got intimate to the point of asking about VD
. Have you ever contracted it? If so, what variety?
She ticked
No
with an offended flourish.

Have you ever terminated a pregnancy? If so, how long ago?
She swotted at the question with the back of her hand, disgusted. ‘Why do they want to know that? What relevance does it have to anything?’

‘I guess it’s a standard question.’

‘But why?’

I gave one of my shrugged
don’t knows
. I said it probably wasn’t important.

It
was
important. In theory at least. Perhaps more than theory. There was certain evidence, there were studies, statistics—what Roff called
possible links
. He told Tilda this during her two-year check up. I was out in the waiting room chewing my nails for good news and wondering how it was that anyone facing dying would want to waste what life they had left reading
Women’s Weekly
and
New Idea.
Yet copies were stacked there on the magazine table for flipping through. Liza Minnelli’s Latest Battle with the Bulge. Ryan O’Neal: Booze and Brawling—Ex-lover Tells.

It took an hour but Tilda walked out a free woman. She was sore around the ribs from Roff’s prodding examination but she was clear, she was free. She clasped her hands under her chin to restrain them from wildly applauding. She waited to be out of the clinic door before letting off a hoot of jubilation. She skipped onto a fence, a low brick border for weeds and flax bush. She star-jumped to the footpath with victorious fists, squealing, ‘I’ve done it. I’ve made it. Two years!’

I barracked: ‘Brilliant’ and ‘You’ve done it. Fantastic. Good girl.’ I ran up to hug her but she pushed me sideways, lurched from my hold and skipped back onto the bricks for a dance. She was too free for human holding, I presumed. Free of death-fear for now, and that needs dancing not constriction. I leapt up to dance with her. She star-jumped straight down and strode off and skipped some more, her plait swinging with flicky pendulum energy.

When we got to the van she told me to wait before I turned on the ignition. She was breathing heavily, not from skipping and dancing, from anger. ‘Do you know why all this happened?’ She pulled her plait to her mouth for biting. ‘Have you any idea?’

I thought she was attempting a philosophical statement. I expected her to continue with ‘It has happened to help me grow as a person’—like people do on TV chat shows. But she meant the questionnaire question about abortion.

‘Do you know there are possible links? Do you know that you not wanting our baby could have so fucked up my hormones it brought cancer down on me?’

When someone says such a thing to your face you can only answer no firmly and be silent. I was no doctor; I had no grounds for arguing science. My only defence was a puny ‘It was your decision too.’ I did have the wits to follow up with, ‘Why rake up that shit? You want to spoil your two-year milestone? You want to spend it having a fight on what are deemed
possible links
?’

‘You really do owe me. You will always owe me. I own you because of this.’

‘What do you mean,
own
? Nobody owns anybody.’

‘I own you.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘I will never be free because of this cancer. And therefore you can never be free. That’s your punishment.’

‘Who decided I have to be punished?’

‘I did.’

‘We can’t own people.’

She nibbled a crunch of flesh inside her bottom lip. Her face skewed into a fighterly sneer as she bit deeper. I dreaded a rifle or weedkiller moment was imminent. It seemed a logical leap to there from this human-ownership rubbish. Not that it was rubbish in Tilda’s mind. It was justice to her.

I don’t see justice in ownership of people—I didn’t then; I don’t now. If she mentioned rifles and weedkiller I promised myself to let her have it. I would serve up a new strategy: I’d say, ‘
You
go buy a fucking rifle, go on.
You
buy weedkiller. You drink it or shoot yourself or whatever you want to do. Don’t drag me into it. You’re on your own.’

This would be Swahili to sensible people. I don’t fully understand some of it myself. I don’t understand how she could talk punishment of me one minute and start laughing the next. That’s what she did. She laughed like it was April Fools’. Laughed as if her ownership statement was just her quirky humour. She apologised for going too far. ‘I don’t expect to own you,’ she said. ‘You’re so easy to wind up sometimes.’

Maybe I am, but it did feel scary. I wanted to bolt there and then. Maybe not forever. Maybe only an hour, to prove I was still a free man.

She could well have been fishing, trying to work out how far she could push me before I left her. No one abandons a person who is facing dying—it’s a low act; most people are too decent or guilt-ridden. But Tilda wasn’t dying any longer, not in the near future. It made sense she would want to test my commitment by using a bully-bluff technique like the ownership argument: if I stayed after that, I must love her. A strange way to ascertain love? With our Swahili everything was possible.