The Amateur Science of Love (23 page)

Tilda’s lips angled up into a trusting smile at her. Then a smile at me, of the previous triumphant kind. She said, ‘Yes. He’ll be back.’

The nurse guided Tilda into the banana chair. ‘Too true. You’re worth twenty of him. He’ll be back.’

I said, ‘Is that so?’ sarcastically. I said, ‘Goodbye, Tilda,’ with a cock of my head. Bravado lifting me up on my toes.

They were still saying it to each other like a chant—‘He’ll be back. He’ll be back’—as I stomped over the ramp, away.

The bravado lasted all the way out of the hospital, and along the roadside. I strode like a man who knew exactly his destination in life and his reason for being. No pain in my foot anymore, the bravado numbed it. When I reached Main Street I was swinging my shoulders like the town celebrity. I imagined myself the centre of attention, focus of people’s whispers. The swinging said,
Here I am, Scintilla.
A man who has sinned. A man with danger about him. A man who might sin again if given the chance. You better watch out, ladies, or I’ll sin with you.

Putting the key in the back door sapped that attitude from me. I was neither adrift from Tilda anymore, nor did I belong to her. I was between the two. I was nowhere, but I was in our house. I was empty, like being hungry. I wasn’t hungry but even if I had been, did I have the right to eat the food in the cupboards now? Have milk from the fridge or water from the kettle? Perhaps just a little water was permissible. I filled a glass and drank it and in doing so felt like I was stealing.

What was mine? Clothes in the wardrobe, yes. But what more? Only this documenting I’ve done. I climbed into the roof and brought the briefcase down. I took it into my nook and read the pages. I had written up to the part just before the Neutral Motor Inn meetings. I had kissed Donna for the first time and had seen Cameron’s pillows. I parted my lips and kissed her again as I read. Bent forward and kissed as if she was really there. Did it without thinking, until I saw my shadow on the wall and laughed at it and myself. The kind of laughing that takes you to the edge of crying. I didn’t cry. I was alone, therefore my crying would have been genuine, but I didn’t do it. I was full of too much resolve.

Not resolve that was clear yet. More an energy to
do
something, make irreversible change. If Donna could hear that resolve in my voice she would want me with her, wouldn’t she? I went downstairs to the phone to try her. No answer. But it was comforting to know my ringing was making sound in her living room.

I went back to my nook. It was peaceful there, safe, with no worry about Tilda coming up the stairs in two minds. I fed paper into my typewriter and continued these pages. The process was too slow. The tapping put an ache in my ears. I switched to longhand and wrote up to the bath-burning scene. Then I phoned Donna again for some comforting unanswered ringing.

I bought potato cakes from the takeaway for dinner. I had the right to make coffee, I decided. And use Tilda’s milk, or else it would go stale. I took a mug to my nook and wrote up to where I slept in the children’s playground, and in writing that the need for sleep dragged my head down onto my folded arms. I slept half the night in that position, on the pillow of my desk.

When I woke my body ached. I straightened it by stretching out on the floor. I fell asleep that way, and dreamt so deeply and horribly there was no telling it from reality: I was sleeping with Tilda in the Scintilla hospital. ‘Come on. Get up,’ she said, shaking me. ‘Come on. Follow me,’ she said, pulling me by the hand to hurry up and walk with her to the forest. Walk, faster, faster, hurry, run to the forest. To the clearing in the forest.
The
clearing. The bedroom in the forest. We must take off our clothes and lie down among the twigs and insects. I must congress with her. I must not think of the Watercook whore. Tilda was claiming the clearing as hers. I must desecrate the memory of what had happened there. Congress in the forest with her, Tilda, not the whore.

I woke before the act of it. I knelt in the blackened bath and rinsed and scrubbed in cold water. Drying off I heard knocking at the back door. I hurried down the hall to the bedroom window, peeped around the edge of the blind, panicking that it was Tilda knocking.

It was Vigourman. He was looking up at the windows for signs of life. I let the blind fall shut until the knocking finished. I went to my nook.

Honesty box, help me. I must hurry and leave. I’ve got to leave. The future is pulling me. I don’t know where. What’s keeping me? Guilt? A final check of my soul to make sure all love for Tilda has gone?

Does all love ever go, or only the people?

I don’t know.

I once fell in love with a woman named Tilda. Beyond that, I don’t know much about anything.