The Amateur Science of Love (9 page)

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.

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.

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.

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 large 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?’

‘No.’

His face unfrowned.

‘But I’d like to be.’

He frowned again. ‘There are two things I would say about that. Firstly, a pregnancy could very likely speed your cancer on. It would also make treatment more limited.’

‘So you’re saying I can’t have children, ever?’

‘I would advise against it, ever,’ he said firmly, then tried to soften the blow. ‘The other issue is the social implication. There are certain social issues, which I’m sure you can imagine.’

Ever
was too much of a cobweb word for her to continue the conversation. She waved it from her face and convulsed into a hunchback of tears. Becky and I scrummed her shoulders and uttered useless comforting. ‘It’s all right. It’s okay.’ We kept it up for several minutes, language empty of truth or reason.

Becky began crying. I was not, which made me feel I was misbehaving. Crying is a measure of emotion, or else why do it? It was a measure of love for Tilda given her circumstances, but I could not cry. The miserable wonder of her suffering had me frozen, overawed. To touch her sobbing shoulderblades was to touch death close-up. I knew cancer was not contagious but I wanted to take my hand from her body and stand alone, at a safe distance. Then maybe I would cry.

To compensate I became practical. Roff had caught my attention with a slow nod of his head. He said there were certain questions he would like to ask Tilda and obviously this wasn’t the time. He folded a sheet of paper—a questionnaire—into an envelope for my safekeeping. The questionnaire covered many of his queries, he said. Queries relevant to research, of establishing ‘links and causes’ and ‘correlating patient history’.

I was relieved to have a helpful role. He passed me pamphlets on preparing for a mastectomy; the side effects of the operation, physical and mental. Emotional side effects, the sense of womanhood being challenged. If I could make sure Tilda read them he would appreciate it. ‘Keep her spirits up,’ he said. ‘The next few weeks will test her spirits beyond the ordinary.’

‘Social issues,’ Tilda said with a contemptuous snort. ‘What have social issues got to do with me?’ This was back at her parents’ place. They were out grocery shopping or getting their crying done in their car without upsetting Tilda.

But Tilda was not upset. She was whistling and laughing. She had turned the TV on and flicked channels for a distracting program. She was fine, she said. Fine. She just wished she knew what exactly was meant by
social issues
. She stared at me for answers. I tried some
I don’t knows
to avoid the subject. She was no fool. She had worked out what Roff meant. She was looking for an argument, not answers.

‘He means, if I die, I would leave a motherless child behind, doesn’t he? He means I’m definitely going to die, doesn’t he? He means there is no hope, doesn’t he? My death would be like abandoning a baby. I would be guilty of abandonment. It is so fucking cruel, Colin. Why is this happening to me? I do not deserve this happening to me.’

She paced the lounge room, yelling and pointing at east, south, west, north. At all the women in the world in all directions. ‘Why not
that
woman or
that
woman or
that
woman instead of me? Thousands of useless, ugly bitches breeding like farm pigs to ten different men. Why not them or women in prisons? Give them cancer. They deserve it. Give it to them and take it from me.’

She knelt in a corner of the couch. She wept herself silent. Then wept herself angrier: those vile, revolting tits of hers, they were to blame. She always hated them. Now one was being taken from her. ‘Good fucking riddance to it,’ she punched a couch cushion. ‘Men are lucky. Men don’t have tits.’ She laughed that soon she would be part man. She laughed that she might as well start practising: could I get her a beer, please? Wine is much too feminine for men. She slapped her thigh as if making a manly decision, spoke with her voice forced down an octave: she was going to stop wearing makeup and not wear bangles or shave her legs.

‘My hair will probably fall out from the drugs, won’t it? I’ll be very masculine, very bald.’ She put her hands on her head like a finger cap to tuck her fringe away. ‘What do you think? Will it suit me?’

She got off the couch and came up close to me, peered into my face, my eyes. She let her finger cap go. Her fringe sprang out and pounced at my cheek she was so close. ‘Why don’t you cry? Not so much as a single tear. Everyone else has, but not you. Not a drop.’

I thought it part of her funny male performance. ‘Men don’t cry,’ I smiled.

It was no performance. Her nostrils flexed open and closed with snotty breathing. ‘I know very well why you’re not crying. You’re not crying because you don’t really love me.’

‘Not true.’ I leant sideways to escape her gaze. I may be six foot three but her questioning was intimidating. Plus, if someone has cancer they have privileges over you. You can’t just tell them to settle down or shut up or be reasonable. They have a licence to glower and rage.

Tilda touched my cheekbones. I couldn’t lean sideways any further. ‘Not a hint of wet,’ she said quietly, with an offended gaping of her mouth. ‘Not a single hint of wet.’

‘There’s been so much to take in. I’ve been holding back crying.’

‘Cry now. Go on. Do it now.’

‘I can’t cry on demand.’

‘All I am to you is servicing, aren’t I?’

‘No.’

‘Not love, just servicing.’

‘No.’

‘Say you love me, then.’

‘I love you.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I do.’ It was true enough—remember my alterations. I repeated three
I love yous
. Tilda refused to hear them. She shook them from her ears.

‘Do you want me dead?’

‘Dead? Of course not.’

‘Is that why you don’t cry? You want me dead so you don’t have to bother with this?’

‘No.’ The only words she would believe were her own. I could have pledged
no, no, no
a thousand times but as far as she was concerned I was a liar.

‘I’m damaged goods now, aren’t I? What man wants a one-titted woman?’

I touched her shoulder to rub it, pat it. She slid away from me.

I had the idea of putting water on my face. If my not crying was troubling Tilda then rubbing tap tears on might placate her. I said I needed to go to the toilet. She said, ‘Do what the hell you like.’

She flicked TV channels again. A
Hogan’s Heroes
rerun came on with a burst of canned laughter, which Tilda took personally. She switched the set off. ‘Why are they so fucking happy?’

I closed the bathroom door and leant against it a few seconds, grateful for the peace. I dug water into my eye sockets, creating a damp, bloodshot appearance. Not so damp that water would stream falsely down, but damp enough to look like raw feeling. I tilted my head back to look as if I was trying to stop tears from welling. I stepped into the lounge.

Tilda was sitting cross-legged in front of the TV. She had turned it on again and was watching a newsbreak. She held her hand up. ‘Shsh.’ She pointed to the screen to a girl in jodhpurs mounting a pony. I sniffed and cleared my throat to keep my acting going but got the shush treatment. Three years ago the girl had been given two months to live, and look at her now—happy and healthy; her cancer, to the amazement of doctors, was gone.

‘Gone,’ cheered Tilda. ‘Gone.’ She leapt to her feet, skipped a few strides and flung her arms around my neck. She kissed me with such butting suddenness my top lip was squashed. She had never been so exhilarated in her life, she cheered. All this talk of Roff’s, this cancer talk, his social-issues jabber, the gloom and fear and panic of it all, and there was a little girl who was expected to die and instead was riding her pony to Sydney for charity. ‘Don’t you think it’s exciting?’

The water was drying tightly around my eyes. My performance was past its peak. Tilda skipped and laughed as if all her woes had vanished and her lumps had gone into remission by television. ‘Don’t you think it’s wonderful? What’s wrong with your eyes?’

‘It’s the emotion. It’s all coming out.’

‘Don’t be like that. Don’t spoil this moment. How can you be upset when there’s such hope from that little girl? It’s like her story is my story, or will be. You should be happy for me.’

‘I am. I am.’ I switched to smiling. Tilda held her arms out for me to lift her and dance a triumphant jig.