The Amateur Science of Love (16 page)

I was sworn in to Tilda, and she was sworn in to me.

I switched walking sticks to my other hand for a moment to get the ring box from my pocket, spread its stiff jaw and prise out the nine carats.

Reverend Hugg surrendered his arms again. ‘A ring is a symbol of commitment, of pledging love and faithfulness. Marriage is not to be taken lightly. It is our souls we are joining. Let this ring be a constant and lifelong reminder to you, Colin and Tilda, of your blessed union.’

It slid into place on her with a few budges over bones. There. Done. I leant forward and kissed my wife. She leant forward for me to kiss her longer. She whispered, ‘My husband.’

Reverend Hugg announced, ‘Ladies and…ah…ladies, I give you Mr and Mrs Colin and Tilda Butcher.’ He began applauding us. The biddies applauded, called out, ‘Amen. Congratulations. Bless you both. Bless you.’ They pulled handkerchiefs from their cardigan sleeves for effeminate dabbing.

What happened next I thought was just those old girls. There was a crazy screeching like they’d spotted a ghost, or had a turn, one of them, and dropped dead to the floor. The screech was higher up, though, where roof beams criss-crossed. Dust fell to us, and dirty clots of old spider webs. I looked up and dirt stuck in my eyes. The reverend spat fibres from his mouth. ‘Bats,’ he coughed.

Bats don’t have green feathers and flash about in green flight. Green was all I saw—a screeching blur of it, then another louder screech as greenness descended and separated into two birds: two parakeets diving our way, merging and tilting, separating again. They arced around the reverend’s head and screeched directly into mine, collided with mine, a feathery thud on my forehead, tipping me off my sticks. I crumpled over. Tilda told me later they didn’t even try to alter course. It was like they’d lined me up and hit me on purpose. They swerved to miss the biddies and Holly but flew straight into me, then whooshed out the chapel door.

I have to hand it to the biddies: they tried to make me feel better. I was shaky on my sticks after climbing to my feet. My eyebrow had a bleeding scratch on it, like a parakeet sign of foreboding. ‘Oh no, no, no,’ they said. ‘Parakeets are good luck. That’s a good luck sign you’ve got on your head. Isn’t it, Valmai?’

‘Yes it is.’

‘Isn’t it, Ada?’

‘Absolutely, Vera.’

They probably even believed it. I certainly did. I had the weather to help me believe—the softest drizzle had started up. The whole smooth sky was coming down to greet us and give that soap-and-water sensation for our outsides.

I smiled for Holly—for her camera, not her eyes. Her fringe was dyed orange, which suited her. But I had eyes only for Tilda.

Ceremonies are like surgery—they kid you along with their action and elation. The ordinary business of living is then returned to you. Our wedding ceremony lasted two honeymoon days and nights. We didn’t take off anywhere special: the expense would spoil relaxing. A night in Bendigo at The Shamrock, say, was $100 before food and beverages. We appreciated the special history of the building—Dame Nellie Melba stayed there, but that was years before. For $100 we wanted her singing in person and not to feel we were financing bistro renovations.

We set up the stereo in Tilda’s bedroom—I moved back there like a proper spouse. With the blinds kept down our bodies looked normal in the honeymoon dimness. We played Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Tilda’s favourite, over and over. We kissed, we congressed. We whispered ‘sweetheart’ and ‘darling’. We planned the years out, defiant of illness. If welfare was all we were good for, so be it. We resigned ourselves to burdening the government—we deserved being indulged after what we’d been through.

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.