Craig Sherborne - The Amateur Science of Love

‘Why?’

‘We don’t have condoms.’

‘You’re not on the pill?’

‘I stopped it.’

‘I’ll pull out.’

‘No.’

‘I promise.’

‘Too much risk. I might be ovulating.’

‘Just for a second.’

‘The AIDS thing too.’

‘I don’t have that shit.’

‘Keep outside.’ Her blue fingers fiddled the ends of her plait as if her hair too could be aroused. ‘No,’ she bossed me when I wanted to change positions. I followed her directions, excited by her ordering and my failure to bob and budge between her legs. She folded her arm under her breasts. Just one arm, her left, and sat up straight upon me.

There is nothing that can be done about a first expelling. Tricks never worked for me to stop it happening too fast. It is not like clenching your bladder against urine. They say use mathematics, complex algebra puzzles, but puzzles were never a distraction in my case. I was no good at maths, it only ever delayed me one or two heartbeats. There is nothing to do but let the first one go, a process lasting sixty wonderful paralysing pulses. Simply give over to the mosquito-bite sensation it gives, the icy itch in an unscratchable place inside the testes.

In five minutes I was ready for more. With Caroline I once had four in fifty minutes. By three there was no need for trying mathematics. With Tilda that night I didn’t go further than two because of the effort to stay outside. Tilda didn’t have for herself the female equivalent. Didn’t get close by my reckoning. She let me out from under her and lay there with that one arm still crossed over her front like some quirk or protective barrier of displeasure.

I kissed her nipples and asked, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing’s wrong.’

‘Do you do that crossing-arm routine with everyone?’

‘Now I’m really self-conscious.’

‘About what?’

She sucked in a breath and let it out, saying, ‘Well, you…you are…younger than what I’m used to.’

‘So?’

‘Parts of me look older than I’d like.’

Her breasts, she meant. She hated her breasts. Ten years ago they bulged in all the right places, but now they dripped off to the side whenever she lay on her back. She used her arm to try and hoist them higher. She had no children to blame for their state. ‘It’s just from being thirty-one now, not nineteen anymore.’

I assured her they were beautiful breasts. I nuzzled my way past her arms, said her nipples were a lovely peach colour and kissed them. Peach with pretty crinkled freckles. I kept kissing them and eventually her arm retreated to her side. We were two people having pleasure for the night, I said. Let’s not have breasts distract us.

But one night became two. We did not want to end on just one, not without fully consummating our friendship.

So, the next night we did consummate it. It was good but a notch or two less than great. I had never used a condom before, but Tilda insisted and bought the pack herself to make the point that having sex with her was on her terms. Condoms let the warmth from inside Tilda in but kept any true feeling out. It did not feel like we had joined our skins.

As well, Tilda’s arm went back up to its barrier position. One night together had not troubled her so much where breasts were concerned—she did not expect ever to see me again. Two nights were different. Two nights meant she wanted to look her best for those moments when we talked barely above a whisper, our faces so close we were breath to breath. She perched statuesquely across my lap, sucked her stomach in and held the pose while I teetered between mathematics and letting go. I could tell she was performing pleasure rather than truly feeling it. She could not fully give herself over. Not bodily anyway. Not yet. In talk she could, but not the rest of her.

In talk she gave over more freely than I liked. ‘I felt I was sacrificing my life,’ she said, propping herself on her elbow. ‘Was I supposed to sacrifice my life?’

It was not a real question, it was a plea for me to understand her plight: to be married as she had been at only twenty; to be a gorgeous twenty and courted by a man who himself was little more than a teenager; to say let’s spend our life together when it’s just puppy love—it’s expecting too much. Didn’t I reckon so?

‘Yes,’ I said without even thinking. I was warm in the huddle of our breathing.

She wanted me to know that her husband, Lionel, was a kind and decent fellow. An architect. He came from the same mould as her St Mark’s Church parents. But what is art to Melbourne suburbia? It is for hobbies in the holidays. It is for old ladies’ lounge rooms, pleasant watercolours at Rotary fetes. ‘Put your talent into your garden beds and cooking, dear. Get a lovely home in Camberwell and please spare us the whingeing about wanting more.’ She put a finger, pistol-like, to her forehead, pulled the trigger and slumped down. ‘I must seem really stupid to you. At twenty-one that was my life, and here you are at that age and you’re picking and choosing about RADA. I was supposed to make my husband a father. But you, you’re out in the world. You’re living. Well, I took the pill no matter what my husband said.’

She stretched and smiled that life had become a banquet: to be lying on a London floor naked with a young man, how delicious. She propped back onto her elbow. ‘I want you to know one thing, though: I’m not a slut or anything.’

‘I didn’t think you were.’

‘I mean, I was a virgin when I married. Don’t think I never had innocence is all I’m saying. In the whole time Lionel and I were together, a decade together, we would have had sex not more than twenty, thirty times. Seriously, maybe forty, that’s all. And I can’t recall ever coming. No orgasm with him in all those years.’

I was about to ask if she’d got close to it with me but decided she would have said if she had. I worried I was just another Lionel. Or was I to take the lead more? Get her going with my tongue perhaps, like an experienced animal-man?

She put her head on my chest. ‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘That’s my excuse for the wilder stuff I’ve done.’

‘What wilder stuff is that?’

‘Experimenting. With men.’

She made it sound scientific, as if test tubes and white coats were involved. She had slept with an electrician who fixed the lights in her kitchen; and an art lecturer who reckoned sex with him would ‘radicalise her to extrapolations of linear impulse’. Whatever that meant.

‘Enough,’ I said. I put my hand gently over her mouth. I didn’t want to hear about her wilder stuff, her fleeting lovers. It brought on more nausea.

They say we fall in love. But really we fall in sickness. I lost appetite for food when I was with Tilda. We spent a third night together and my stomach was sunken in its wishbone cavity. Me, I was never sick, but I was sick now, the strangest sickness that made my eyes gleam green with excellent health. They had shiny white edges. My cheeks were glossed in a fresh oil of pink. My brow skin was cleansed suddenly of its pimple dots and squeezings like a miraculous washing from within.

The thought of other men with her angered me. They had no right to have touched her, their butting cocks and loose belly hairs sticking to her. I could have murdered them in my imagination. If they no longer existed on this earth then Tilda’s past would die with them. So goes the sickness.

I thought a cure might be found in countering her past by laying out mine. Not just details about Caroline, but the local farm girls—‘they let me go inside them and I would time pulling out to perfection.’

Tilda moaned. ‘Don’t tell me all that.’ She covered one ear with her palm and blocked the other by leaning harder into my armpit. It was happening to her too, the sickness.

She turned onto her back. She tapped my waist to urge me onto her, into her. ‘Go inside, then,’ she whispered.

‘No condom?’

‘I trust you.’

‘Seriously?’

We consummated us. Properly. Flesh to flesh.

I did pull out, though for a paralysing instant the bliss was almost too much fever to resist.

Tilda got paralysis too: she lost control of her Ss in the reverie. She whispered, ‘Tho good.’

‘What?’

‘I juth had one.’

‘Had what?’

‘Came.’

‘You did?’

‘Yeth. A quiet one.’

Dawn next morning she was packing when I woke, buttoning her orchard shirt so hurriedly she missed holes. ‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘Sorry, but it’s best.’ She flicked her messy hair through her fists—in, over, in, over, plaiting, two elastic bands in her teeth.

I stomped away blankets. The off-smell of our sleeping bodies hung in the stuffy air. ‘Why do you have to go?’

‘I have to go, and that’s that.’

She broke a band in her haste and mumbled a series of contradictions: no, there was nothing wrong. Yes, of course there was something wrong. These have been the most superb few days for her. They have also been disastrous. ‘This is an art trip. Art is not this.’

My wishbone sent a burp into my mouth. I wanted to sweeten my breath with toothpaste before holding her and kissing her to please stay, but there wasn’t time. ‘Let me bring you breakfast. Let’s have breakfast here in bed,’ I said.

She stroked my chin with the inside of her fingertips, then the knuckle side. I kissed her fingers, their faint ink odour. Forever ink is her scent to me, the personal perfume of her skin. She said, ‘You’re a beautiful boy. But you are just a boy.’

‘I’m twenty-one. I am not a boy.’ I did not feel a boy. I did not feel a man. I was me. I did not feel any age.

Tilda stroked some more. I flinched from her touch. ‘Three days ago I was free,’ she said. ‘I was free and open to life. Now I just want to stay in this room with you and make love and never see or speak to the outside world. I need to get out of here. Now. I have Venice and Florence waiting for me. I have Madrid and Amsterdam. Goodbye, my lovely, lovely boy.’

I shook my face curtain down. She unzipped her black books from her bag, opened one, the one smeared with pages of crinkly me. She tore out two pages for my keepsake. ‘Please take them. Remember me with them.’ She closed the book. ‘The rest I will keep.’

She unzipped her yellow flower shirt, another keepsake. ‘Try it on.’ She attempted another stroke of my chin. I let her. She helped me dress in the shirt. It was too tight a fit, but that wasn’t the point. It was hers. She took a step backwards to watch me button up.

I stepped forward. It was me who did the stroking then. She fended me off with a soft push. ‘No,’ she said, and swung her bag on. She kissed her fingers in my direction and without looking me in the eye she uttered goodbye and left at a walking sprint down the corridor.

My nausea was a different kind now. It came with cramps. Cramps as I put out the butter and croissants. I wanted to fold up in bed but there was my shift to do. Cramps as I brewed coffee in the vat. The smell of it was enough to make me retch. My innards needed food but I couldn’t take food.

I folded the ink mes into my wallet. I vowed to rip them up for the garbage, deface them and thereby erase Tilda from my mind. But I put them in my wallet. I thought of wearing her yellow shirt as an apron, of doing the dishes in it until it was crusty from wiping my hands. Instead I washed the thing on gentle cycle. I ironed it for hanging on the hook on my door.

How long would they last, these cramps and retching? I had no previous experience to go on. Would a nasty bout give me immunity? Good riddance to her, I told myself. Who wants a woman with ‘little experiments’ in her history!

A week went by and still I had the sickness. I became desperate for an antidote. The obvious one was to go out on the town, go searching for a Tilda replacement. I felt more attractive than I ever had in my life. I had been physically transformed—a peculiar quirk of what ailed me. My face had lighter shading, like naturally occurring makeup. My skin was tight and polished-looking. My eye-whites gleamed regardless of poor sleeping. I was ill and super-well at the same time.

I believed I had developed a new power. I called it ‘being in season’, the livestock term for when an animal puts out mating odour. What else could explain the interest female patrons of the hostel showed in me? I had not drunk any special potion.