The Amateur Science of Love (15 page)

The treatment was simple: lie flat on my back, legs uncovered because the sheets weighed a tonne. Tilda brought cups of tea, soup and finger toast because my appetite withered the bigger my legs grew.
I
was the elephant now. Philpott prescribed a white lotion to cool the pain but its application was sadism: tongue depressors are the gentlest of implements; they could have been broadswords when used to smear my legs.

The worst discomfort was toilet time. I could drag myself there, keeping the legs flat and free of pain. I didn’t need Tilda for this section of the ordeal. The journey was merely thirty seconds long. It was the toilet bowl I needed Tilda for. For lifting me onto the seat and holding my legs up while I directed my penis downward and pissed. The fire throbbed less if my legs were held level with my waist. She held them at bath time too. Her seeing me splash my privates clean didn’t faze me in the slightest. It was all part of what happens when you’re a couple and one is offering the other helpfulness.

Where I drew the line was bowel movements. Bowel movements are our
own
business, given the smell and fart noise, the brown sight of what we store in us. She could turn her head away and close her eyes but not her nostrils and hearing. I made her leave the bathroom so I could get on with it alone.

I was able to hold my bowels in for two days. Not the third. By the third I was packed hard and needed releasing. Tilda supported me with her good arm until I was throned in position, then I made her scamper out the door while I exploded, leaning sideways, legs splayed upward like doing sit-ups. I had to empty out fast before my legs gave way and crashed down. If that happened I needed Tilda to come and pick them up in the presence of smell. I practised my toilet sit-ups in bed. I could last thirty seconds if I gripped the cistern with one hand for balance. I wiped myself by lurching left and twisting side-on and using the toilet roll holder for purchase.

It took four weeks for the ballooning to reach its peak. By then my shin skin had turned to dry scabs. The redness had darkened to suntan bronze and itched and could not be scratched or else it brought on worse pain. My ankles were bruise-blue and would not flex. My feet lost their nails and were weeks off being ready to fit a shoe. Leprosy, I named my lower half. Tilda liked that: leprosy to match her mummification. The president-servant balance had swung more even. We had equality of deformities.

‘Two crocks together,’ she said, dabbing Philpott’s pain-paint on me. Her tongue protruded from her mouth corner with the effort of nursing. ‘We’re in the same boat.’ If she hit a raw section she gasped ‘Sorry, sweetie’ and kissed my forehead like a brave infant’s.

When the job was done she prompted me, ‘It’s your turn now,’ and wedged two pillows behind my back. She unclipped her overalls and crouched on the floor at a height suitable for my left palm to stroke her arm the hundred times without causing my legs to twist and suffer.

You would have thought my imagination would settle down but my squirming stomach still got to me: I still had that notion of Tilda’s disease trying to transfer into my system. My condition did at least provide an excuse to stop stroking before a hundred. I had physical weakness to thank for fading at fifty. ‘I’m buggered,’ I said, and slumped. Tilda had no option but to forgive me. She held my good hands in her fat hand and lay her good legs beside my leprosy legs and contentedly fell asleep.

I practised taking a blanket over my legs. I would have to withstand one eventually—winter nights would freeze me otherwise. But the reason for wanting to cover them was to stop Tilda looking. She took too much heart from our ugly equality for my liking.

‘Your legs are not ugly.’

‘They are.’

‘They aren’t.’

‘They are ugly leper legs.’

‘They are not ugly leper legs any more than my arm is ugly. Are you saying my arm is ugly?’

‘We’ve been through all that. No, I don’t think your arm is ugly.’ The old lie.

‘There you go, then. Nor do I find your legs ugly.’ Surely she was lying too.

Yet, maybe not. She liked to wiggle her good hand into my underpants and test me for servicing. ‘What have we got down here?’ she said, and rubbed and handled. As much as I clenched against getting excited, as much as I gripped her wrist and told her to behave, she persisted and wanted me to kiss her. She suggested I feel into her clothing for her good breast and see if it appealed to my touch. It did. Off came her gauntlet and her sleeve. Up and over her head went her shirt, her bra and prosthetic body part. She straddled me and said in shivery whispers, ‘Tell me if I’m hurting you, sweetheart. Is this okay? Your legs aren’t stinging?’ She didn’t want servicing, she was after true congressing, the real McCoy of loving intimacy.

Here’s the Swahili of all Swahilis: so did I. My distaste for the idea was gone. In its place was not desire so much as me wanting the
home
of someone. I wanted the homeness of Tilda. We must surely have been marked out for each other, fated. Cursed in body, the better for being blessed in soul. I said so to her during the gentlest of straddlings. I said, ‘We must be cursed but we are cursed together.’

‘Yeth. We are blethed in that way,’ she whispered.

Something enfeared me that I had never experienced when I was well. ‘What are you thinking?’ I asked her. ‘Right this exact second. Tell me your thoughts?’

‘Wha?’

‘This very second. Be honest.’

‘I thinken nothing. I feel you move roun inthide me.’

‘Nothing else?’

No, she promised. Nothing else. I couldn’t let up, however. It was jealousy, you see. Jealousy, and all the desperate hallucinations it causes. I kept thinking: What if she’s straddling me but in the privacy of her mind wishes she was straddling her equivalent of a Holly or Donna? I closed my eyes and searched the town for a selection of threatening possibilities. Gavin, the gardener at the duck pond park? Christ no—he has teeth missing and talks simpleton-slow. Joshua, Scintilla’s liquor store attendant? Has body odour and looks over fifty around his eyes.

What about Michael Farrelly, LLB? He has Scintilla’s goldest shingle. Its only shingle, in fact: Attorney at Law, like Americans on TV. He wears suits, cufflinks, ties, so he wouldn’t be interested in Tilda. It reassured me and insulted me that he was out of her league.

What about Vigourman? He left a get-well cake for me at the back door, and a batch of Mrs Vigourman’s Anzac biscuits.
You’re in the wars, you two
,
it said on his card.
We look forward to having you back on board soon. My wife is always saying, ‘There can never be enough Colin in the
Gazette.
’

I disliked his name intensely. I couldn’t even congress with vigour given my state. I was a passive pommel horse for Tilda to trot on. I also envied him his money. On my bedside table were official government forms for my filling out and signing. I now qualified for a sickness handout. What slightest appeal could I have left for anybody? Yet Tilda must have valued something. There I was beneath her, not a Joshua, attorney or Vigourman. I advised myself that this could well be as good as things ever got for me. This might be the height a man such as me can reach. It’s like sinking to the bottom of your own life, thinking such thoughts. You are weightless, released. You don’t want to surface; you no longer want to breathe. Which makes you panic suddenly. I came up gasping for air, grateful for Tilda in her moaning reverie upon me.

That’s when I asked her to marry me. I spluttered it into her dangling hair.

She gripped my ears to steer my eyes to look into hers. ‘Really?’

‘Would you want to?’

‘What a beautiful quethion.’

‘So, yes?’

‘Yeth. Pleathe. Yeth.’

Marry me
is the very opposite of bad language. A bout of bad language and I crave chain-smoking. I get so thick in the neck veins—anger is blood-borne and clogs them—I need smoking and cold vodka to treat it. Then I need sleep to silence my banging brain.
Marry me
was calming to utter. More like soap and water than two old-fashioned words. I expected my blood was being cleansed of red and was now a clear colour.

Tilda was the same, though she took it one step further. What I called soap and water she called pure and holy. She said no wonder churches are the common wedding preference: even if you don’t believe in God, what other place is worthy? You can do it in your living room but that insults the feeling. She set her mind on the little white place at Mallock Mallock. It hadn’t been used in years but was so dignified, so simple in the Presbyterian manner. Oh, it would need sprucing up but leave it to her; she’d fix it. She skip-ran down the stairs for a pen to list arrangements. Weatherboards would need re-nailing. She had once sketched the church, made watercolours of its windy ambiance—a bare paddock and padlocked gate, ragged gum trees like sentries. She noticed two stained-glass windows were broken but not too badly. She spied through the cracks and saw cobwebs—they’d need sweeping. There were bat droppings and bat stench, the abandoned nests of sparrows or starlings. She would clean it all, scrubbing one-handed. ‘My pet project,’ she decreed. I was off the hook with my legs being their way.

As for a celebrant, Tilda would make a few inquiries. A minister was all we needed. There would be no catering or grandiose expense—this was
our
marriage, hers and mine, no family present. Other people get married to show themselves off, a stage production with bridesmaids and flowing veils, Rolls-Royces driving in convoy. We had nothing to show off except rotten health. Nobody was going to watch us become each other’s spouse, weeping how touching it was and feeling sorry for us. We’d exchange vows in the tiny chapel in the presence of the god you have when you don’t believe in any—Nature. The wheat-field winds, the sea-blue sky; tree limbs creaking around us in their own crippled dramas.

‘I get the sense that chapel has been waiting years,’ she said. ‘Doing nothing but wait for the sole purpose of having us in it.’

She bought a catalogue from the newsagent—
Wedding Bells
. She wanted to wear white like the chapel’s whiteness. Fawns, blues, greens would not do for a wedding, our wedding. They’re for ordinary dos and balls. It was $500, though, for a dress with the merest satin. Instead she ordered a roll of material and pretty lace lengths and a silken bustle, part of an intricate effort to measure herself and cut and pin and stitch the fabric. She taped thimbles to her finger ends and bound up her bad hand, keeping the binding loose enough to let her bend and grasp while ensuring security against needle injury. She sat on the lounge floor and threaded her wedding artwork. I wasn’t allowed to enter and glimpse it. My eyes would have to wait for the ceremony, which is the custom. The dress took a month to complete. She called it her masterpiece. It’s still here somewhere, folded in two garbage bags against silverfish. I think it’s under her side of the bed but I don’t want to see.

I wore a suit, a hired one from a phone number in the catalogue. Tilda measured me for it during my experimenting with standing. Three months after the leprosy set in the pain was dulling enough for relearning to walk. Up the hallway I’d go, then back to bed and a pillow under my heels for draining away pangs. I practised walking twice a day in preparation for the aisle, for waiting at the altar and saying vows and escorting Tilda on my arm out of the church and into married life.

The arrangement was that Reverend Giles Hugg from Scintilla’s All Faiths Congregation would do the honours for a $40 gratuity and keep it hush-hush so there’d be no sightseers. The
Gazette
would want to be there with a photo for its social page if word got out. Tilda didn’t want people nattering about how lovely she looked for someone with a mastectomy. I certainly didn’t want the attention. I was managing to walk again, yes, but only with a walking stick in each hand. Tilda bought me black wooden ones from the Salvos—less medical than the steel kind from Philpott but walking sticks nonetheless, like an old codger. I had put on belly weight too, from being bedridden and having my appetite return. I had, in other words, aged. I found seven grey hairs in the mirror: three on my left temple; four on my right. There were signs of sagging below my eye sockets.

My responsibility was getting a ring for her. I didn’t need one—rings are optional on males and we had to be sensible and scrimp on spending. The symbol of a wedding ring was essential on women, Tilda believed. ‘It’s like saying,
Colin is my husband.
It’s saying,
World out there, I’m the love of his life
.’

She gave me her finger size—her good hand’s finger, a finger she would display like a normal wife: 13 millimetres diameter, which turned out to be size C in jewellers’ language. Not that we had a jeweller in Scintilla. We had O’Connor’s Manchester, which sold everything for the home and human, including orthopaedic footwear. And down the very back, in a knee-high locker, cheap watches, necklaces, bracelets and ear studs. In a locker inside the locker, accessed by brassy key, was a felt container which opened out into rows of rings of gold and silver. Wedding rings, engagement, eternity.

Of the three that fitted Tilda’s measurements there was a plain gold band, price $75, which came in a little domed presentation box and included a tag saying nine carats. Me and my sticks hobbled down Main Street twice before I finally decided on the nine carats over a thicker band with a speck of diamond in it but not as much reflective shine.

It was probably the O’Connor girl who informed the town—Shona or Sheena or whatever her name is. The one with powder so densely applied it makes her face look dirty. ‘When’s the happy day?’ she asked.

‘We’re keeping it very quiet.’

‘Oh, do tell.’

Never confide in country people.

The ceremony would start at 11am. Tilda was having her hair done at Tracy’s Salon before breakfast, which would give me time alone in the bathroom to make myself presentable. I was able to bathe on my own now—my legs tolerated water and floated painlessly under the surface provided the temperature was cool. I could step out and onto the bath towel without help, and bend and rinse dead skin from the enamel without losing my balance or feeling leg blood scalding me.

I was to dress by nine and wait at the back gate for Reverend Hugg, who had kindly offered transport. He and I would go to his house for morning tea while Tilda dressed in her masterpiece, put on her face and picked a dewy posy of flowers from our backyard for her aisle walk: lavender sprigs were in the purple of health after spring rains; oleander bloomed pink; bottle-brush was scarlet and bristling. She’d make her own way to the chapel by van so I wouldn’t see her bridal look until vow time.

Reverend Hugg was worried about the van part of proceedings. What if the rickety wreck broke down? What if we stood there at the altar, he and I, and there was no Tilda? He’d put fresh batteries in his cassette player and said it would be a shame if only flies and magpies got to hear the wedding march. Also, he was booked to umpire junior cricket in the afternoon—any dallying would cause him inconvenience.

He needn’t have worried. The van did its bit. We heard it pull in through the church gate with a salute of backfires. The reverend stood to attention and nodded his relief to me. He touched a knuckle to his nose to wipe away bat odour. He lit two candles and smoothed the cloth he’d brought to cover the bat-stained altar table. He didn’t care whether we were believers or not, if we were going to get married in a house of God there had to be a Bible and crucifix present or we could get someone else. His cross and Bible were between the candles. He nudged them together as if aligning sensitive instruments. He was the fidgety type, short in stature, big on baritone speaking. His head was a pincushion of hair transplants still healing, pubic-like strands slicked across his skull as if he thought no one would notice. He pressed play
for the organ music and immediately had to turn it down because of echoing in the empty pews.

There she was, the long white stem of her. Her arms were webbed in lace, with oversized lace cuffs in a glove effect to conceal her sleeve and gauntlet. She stood in the narrow door arch holding her posy above her waist like a nervous offering. She smiled but it was a flinching, embarrassed kind. I could see the problem. There were people behind her, half a dozen elderly women. I couldn’t name them but I knew them by sight. ‘Biddies’, they were called behind their backs in Scintilla. ‘Ladies’ to their faces, but ‘biddies and busy-bodies’ behind. They tugged and pinched their cardigans over their bosoms, patted their candy-floss perms because Holly was there too, camera over her shoulder, blinking heavenward for the best lighting, positioning the camera tripod used for steadier social-page portraits.

The biddies clumped themselves together to be photographed, granny-stepping through the door after Tilda. She took a deep breath and proceeded towards me. The nuisance of impostors would have to be ignored. Reverend Hugg directed me to extend my arm and invite her to be at my side. He stood on his toes and pointed for everyone else to settle in the rear pews and be quiet. He put his finger to his mouth and gave the order:
Quiet.

I put both walking sticks into my left hand and bid Tilda
come
embrace my right elbow.
I felt compelled to touch wood that she would look just as fragilely beautiful up close as she did slow-stepping from the door; that she would not become tearful from all the smiling and worry about tears melting makeup. I touched wood that I would not appear unlovely suddenly to her with my hunched reliance on walking sticks. That there would be no scene of second thoughts for the biddies and Holly to dine out on for months. Wooden walking sticks at least mean you’ve always got the touchings close at hand.

There was no need for touchings. Tilda held me tightly, her head bowed to display jasmine flowers braided there. She was shy and wanted my approval.

‘Beautiful.’

The reverend lifted his arms like surrender. ‘Heavenly father, we beseech you to be with us on this most auspicious day.’

I never knew humility was not demeaning. I never knew it made you kneel and made you tall.