Craig Sherborne - The Amateur Science of Love

It was this moment, of all the two hours, that Tilda strolled by to order coffee at the common room counter. My first impulse was to fend Yvonne away—I didn’t want Tilda seeing me associating with beggars. I stood and stepped free of the girl. But she followed me, shuffling along on her knees. I took a handful of change from my pocket and presented it. I said, ‘There you go’ loud enough to make a public display of my charity.

Yvonne poked the coins. Her nails were eaten down and dirty in the quick. ‘Twenty fucken P,’ she complained. ‘Twenty P.’ Her English wasn’t French-English now, it was Liverpool or Manchester. She got to her feet and called me a tight-arse bastard because twenty P is like handing out nothing. She was so loud Tilda and others in the room stood still to watch us.

To save face—a childish thing to do over twenty P—I demanded she give the money back. I took her hand to tip the coins into my palm. She made a fist and screamed thief and rape and help. I let go and appealed to the room for witnesses that I was the victim here, not this fake French urchin.

Yvonne switched her attention immediately to Tilda at the coffee counter. Or rather the wallet in Tilda’s hand. S’il vous plait, she begged, fingers steepled together, using the same routine she’d tried on me. She could not take her eyes off Tilda’s wallet and even reached out to touch it as if it were hers to claim. Tilda protested but Yvonne kept coming, ranting that the wallet was hers and that Tilda was a thief and must be arrested. She then made the mistake of trying to snatch the wallet. Tilda was not going to let it go, she had a two-hand grip on the thing. Yvonne persisted, but she did not have man-arms. Tilda’s veins were popping out along her biceps and she sent Yvonne to the floor with an elbow jolt.

Yvonne screamed and swore she was being assaulted but Tilda kept wrestling her on the ground and retrieved her wallet with a yank and grunt. Yvonne was furious and tried to get back into character to continue her accusations but by now I had gone over to ask if Tilda was hurt. She had opened the wallet, removed her Australian driver’s licence and said, ‘There, you lying bitch. There’s my ID. How dare you!’

I stood between them both, my arms out like a referee who favoured Tilda and was acting as her shield.

Yvonne hit out at my arm. ‘’E tried to touch me,’ she said in her silly accent. ‘’E, how you say, try to rape me?’

‘That’s absurd,’ I said. My leg nerve began electrocuting me.

Tilda was suddenly at my side. She placed her fingertips on my forearm. My bare forearm. Her bare fingertips. Our first skin-to-skin connection. She steered me, such a light touch, back, back, please, taking charge. ‘He no more raped you than you own this wallet. I am his witness. So you go and call the police, because I’ll be delighted to fill them in on your s’il vous plait rubbish.’

She turned to me. ‘Will you be my witness? She’s a con artist.’

‘Of course I’ll be your witness.’

‘We can sit down and write out statements.’

Yvonne started shuffling in a circle, clockwise, a dozen granny-steps then back the other way. She knocked on her head like a door and shouted at the floor for us and everyone else in the world to go away. She granny-stepped out of the room, up the exit stairs and was gone.

Yvonne, you don’t know what part you played in me and Tilda. You were our accidental matchmaker.

‘It’s an affront,’ Tilda said, karate chopping the common room table. ‘Your possessions are your possessions. It’s like an invasion of me.’ She shivered invasion like a sudden chill. Her eyes squinted against tears coming. She poked her plait to re-tuck burst hair as if tears were controlled in the knotting. She said she was determined to return to her afternoon plan. She would finish writing her statement, no matter how pointless—surely it was the last we would see of Yvonne—then she was off to any gallery that was open. The National. The Tate—all those Turners. ‘He was abstract before abstract was invented. Have you seen them?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘You don’t like him?’

I had never heard of Turner. But I remember Mr Lipshut at school used to say, ‘With art, boys, there is no such thing as like. No value judgments or rash generalisations.’ I said as much to Tilda.

‘That’s true. Very good,’ she nodded, and with this came the offering of her hand for a formal introduction. She had a man’s grip in keeping with those arms.

We signed each other’s statements. ‘It’s been quite cathartic actually, writing this,’ she said, taking a deep breath of musty hostel air as if it were a forest fresh with blossom. ‘Just like art. You get something off your chest. You make something clear.’

I smiled, though I didn’t know what cathartic was. It sounded like arthritic.

‘I’ll tell you what is not cathartic: crying.’ She had managed to squint back her tears. ‘When I came on this trip I promised myself two things. Number one: no crying. Do nothing to bring it on. This is a holiday.’

She buttoned her statement into her pants leg. Her right index finger began tracing out her talk in some table salt-spill, like a doodle. ‘Let me get this out in the open. So there’s no misunderstanding. Because, I sense you are, you know, trying it on. Which flatters me, but my number two for this trip is: no men. No flings. This is an art trip. No men. My marriage has recently ended and I’m enjoying being man-free.’

Blood blushed and burned in my cheeks from the embarrassment. I let my head hang lower behind my face curtain. ‘You’ve got the wrong end of the stick,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t trying it on.’

‘You weren’t?’

‘No. You’ve made a mistake.’

‘Really?’

‘It was the last thing on my mind.’

It was her turn for burning cheeks. She tapped a full stop to her doodling. ‘I just presumed. I’m sorry. I just thought you were trying it on.’

It was me doodling now. I felt mild nausea below my solar plexus, as if I had eaten bad food. A sinking from the heart like a glob of blood gone down the wrong way. I did not know that love enters us like this. It must have slipped through my skin while we were talking. My dry mouth was a symptom. My pulse quicker and irregular in my neck veins.

I don’t think Tilda had any symptoms. She took my wrong-end-of-the-stick comment as a snub, or so I x-rayed, though I was not confident my x-rays were accurate after all. I could not tell if my being younger appealed to her or not. I suspected not. I suspected she considered me a safe male for uninvolved company and little more. I was invited to be her gallery partner when my shift finished.

My portrait of Tilda viewing pictures at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square:

She preferred no talk during the process. She stood well back from a painting. Then five paces closer to it. Then sideways two paces, then back to her original position. She glowered at chit-chattering school children—would they please not block her line of sight!

She glowered the same at elderly people craning so close to a Picasso they almost nosed it. They passed judgment that ‘the paintwork looks kind of rough to me. I like big signatures on a painting. Where are the Monets, Bert? Can you spot any? Myself, I prefer Constables.’

Tilda held her hand at arm’s length to block out any realism—a shed or peasant, a donkey and cart. She wanted colours to sing for her and they can’t sing around carts. ‘See how that turquoise sings?’ she said. Her lips were puckered in concentration. Her tongue poked through as if she were suckling.

‘Yes, I see.’ I copied her, my arm out the same way.

‘Rembrandt’s black is not really black. It’s so dense it’s blue and green and silver all in one.’

I chimed in with a Mr Lipshut quote. ‘Colour is the suffering of light.’

‘I like that. It’s quite erudite.’

Erudite? I would have to look that up with cathartic.

From birth we hear so many famous names: Shakespeare, Jesus, Rembrandt, The Beatles, Mozart. Compared with the others Rembrandt was only pictures. He was not even music. He said nothing wise—he was just decoration on a wall, and disappointed me, though I didn’t say so to Tilda. I watched her close an eye and aim down the rifle of her arm at colours.

She said they inspired her, pictures. She wanted to draw something right this second, that was how strongly she reacted to pictures. ‘I want us to go out and sit at the feet of those stone lions of Trafalgar and I’m going to draw you,’ she said.

‘Me?’

‘You.’

I liked that, the notion of being a model for art. Recorded in Tilda’s black books where she sketched landmarks. So we sat on a lion ledge in the evening’s street-lamp light and she captured the ghostly haze of my breath-chill forming a halo about me. She took a plastic bag from her shoulder bag and unwrapped from it a mini quiver of pens, a bottle of ink, a vial of water, a small tin. She tipped the blue ink and water together into the tin and smeared and scratched an image of my face onto paper. A splash for my hair, blotty with shadow. My big Cs and double-chin jaw. Making these features deliberately worse with distortion.

‘I think we should stop this now,’ I complained, straining my voice through a smile. ‘I’m getting uglier by the minute.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Tilda. ‘That’s the way of art. It is not good enough simply to reproduce what’s real. We bend and twist, bring out the essence of our subject. It’s all about interpretation.’

Going by those smears and blots she interpreted me as ugly.

‘I don’t think you’re ugly.’ She touched her forefinger to the tip of my nose, delivering a cold dab of ink. I wiped it, my eyes crossed until it was gone. ‘You’re vainer than women,’ she laughed. ‘My ears are big as plates, and so are yours.’

She measured her left ear with the same hooked-fingers technique I used, and placed the hook to my ear like a shell. ‘I would say we are just about equal.’ She turned side on and asked me to describe her profile.

‘Erudite,’ I said.

‘Oh, thank you. That’s an artist’s way of saying it. Erudite rather than good or nice.’

She patted another thank-you on my knee.

And so it was starting. We were starting. Tilda was relaxing her number two. She sketched another page of me and let me pry with a question about her married life.

‘Off the scene’ is how she described her husband. She had left him for what she called a very good reason. A ‘let’s not talk about it’ reason. No lawyers were involved. No children to complicate matters. Sounded all very sophisticated. She was nine years, six months older than I was and she had lived.

I felt unlived. I fixed that by raising my own ‘let’s not talk about it’ matters. ‘I was accepted into RADA, but it wasn’t my thing. Let’s not talk about,’ I said. ‘There was a woman called Caroline in my life. It ended badly. Let’s not talk about it.’

Tilda took the lead. She slipped a chilled hand into the crook of my arm and we walked London’s higgledy cobbles in a hip-to-hip embrace. We leant into each other as if it were the cobbles’ fault. The sweet poison was in me, working its way down my innards. ‘Let’s go to the Samuel Pepys Tavern,’ I suggested. I had been there a few times but this time would be different: I would be drinking under the influence of the sweet poison.

The walls were amber-coloured at Pepys. The dim lights turned us that colour as well, sitting there side by side in a private corner. ‘Pepys,’ Tilda said, putting her thinking fingers to her lips. ‘Mmm. That’s a mustard-coloured name.’

‘Names don’t have colours.’

‘They can in an artist’s brain.’ She said Tilda was red for fire and passion and ambition. I asked what my colour was. She decided on blue for me—‘Blue boy’, like the painting. I was still ‘boy’ to her then.

We drank whisky. Whisky is the hottest drink. It spreads the sweet poison through people quickest, whether a man or woman. Soon enough it helped us kiss. It opened our mouths and we connected with a click of teeth and gave over to the meaty swapping of our tongues.

That night we pulled my narrow mattress to the floor. There was room then for her to spread those veiny arms as she sat astride me. She did not want me inside her. She did not want to lie on her back, her feet stirruped the normal way as if giving birth. She wanted to be astride the scoop and pommel of my groin with no entering allowed. ‘Keep outside,’ she insisted.