Craig Sherborne - The Amateur Science of Love

Then we found Scintilla.

Welcome, it said on the outskirts. Every town says that, but Scintilla was different. It had three signs:

Welcome, we are a Tidy Town.

Welcome, our pop: 2,200.

Welcome, our motto is Grow! Grow! Grow!

The third sign included a logo: a wool bale, a gold nugget and cow horns, all wreathed in wheat sheaves.

The main street was one minute long if you drove at 35ks. On each side there was fancy iron lacework on the bigger verandahs; rusty tin roofs on the smaller. The largest verandahs were attached to hotels, six hotels, each open for business though business was slow: I counted only ten cars the whole town long. ‘It’s Tuesday,’ said Tilda. ‘Ten’s probably normal for 11.30 Tuesday morning.’

We bought a fish-and-chip lunch from the takeaway and asked the cook, ‘Is this a nice town?’ He had a foreign accent more like gargling than talking but we understood him to say, ‘In life you make your own nice.’

We ate walking along the town park’s crunchy figure-eight path. Tilda was so taken by the park she wanted to get out her ink and pens and capture it. ‘Don’t you love weeping willows?’ she chewed. ‘What lovely tall gums. This one’s a lemon-scented. There’s a plum tree. Jacarandas too. I love the way they’ve put lilies in the duck pond. It’s a well-kempt town, I’ll say that for it.’

Historic was how the road-guide literature described Scintilla. ‘Settled in 1883 it has much to offer the curious visitor. It has its own little museum with a nineteenth-century parasol collection, primitive Aboriginal tools and native animal skulls.’ We counted only three shops boarded up, which made it a boom town. It even had back streets for housing the down-at-heel, new cement-board homes behind a billboard reading Government Welfare Project.

A ridge of ironbarks and brown-blue bush ringed the town like a wild garden. Beyond it the wheat fields spread for miles without the slightest undulation. Tilda marvelled at the vista. ‘In spring you can just imagine the whole world swaying with wheat to the sky’s edge. And rapeseed too, with such bright yellow flowering.’

She extended her arm, the entire earth now her art gallery.

The Elders window had the usual shed-sized hovels for sale, and three-bedroom ‘older-style’ dumps needing guttering and a good going-over. But it had finer dwellings too. Places called ‘renovated’ and ‘mock-Colonial’ priced above the $50,000 range. That was proper money. This was indeed a prosperous township, just as the road guide said: ‘The hub in a cartwheel of districts blessed with the rich black soil you need for grain growing.’

In the top-left corner of the window, faded from being stuck up so long, was a photo of a grand-looking two-storey building. The Old Australian Rural Bank, Main Street location, $42,500 or nearest offer.

‘We’ve just walked past that place,’ said Tilda, pointing back the way we’d come. ‘It’s very big. It’s cheap for very big.’

It was grand, all right. Tilda called it decadent. Decayed was more accurate, with its wall plaster falling out, floorboards rotten in places—your foot went through if you trod heavily. The ceilings bulged down from windstorm sand in the roof space. Doors were broken off and dust fuzzed every surface like thriving bacteria.

Tilda loved it at first sight. Her heart was set on it. She took my hand and led me around, excitedly decreeing her studio would be in the front room where teller drawers still lined one wall. ‘My own studio. My own, very own studio all to myself.’

‘Not so loud,’ I advised her. The estate agent was behind us up the hall. ‘He’ll think he’s got two live ones here and be able to hold the line on price.’

She looked at me with one eye arched to mean What do you know about buying property?

I whispered, ‘I have learned a thing or two from watching my father.’

That got rid of her arch. I could hear Norm’s voice in my ear. I could see him give me a wink and a nod: ‘You’ve got to screw ’em down, Colin. Smile but never give an inch.’ I hooked my thumb in my belt in Norm’s manner and winked at Tilda: ‘Make out you’re not interested.’

The agent stood in the door frame and bent over to hitch his cream walk-socks tighter under his knob-knees. ‘So, what do you do?’ he asked me. He had a plump grey moustache tarnished by nicotine. It curled into his mouth when he breathed.

‘Do?’ My hooked thumb and Norm manner must have fooled him that I was a man of means. ‘I plan,’ I said with an airy sweep of the hand.

‘What, an engineer or something?’

I didn’t answer. I turned to Tilda. ‘This place needs work. Lots of work.’

The agent kept on with his questions. ‘And the lady, does she do anything?’

‘I’m an artist.’

There was a chesty guffaw from the man. The hairs in his mouth blew out and got sucked back in. ‘Artist. Bullshit artist?’ He reprimanded himself for laughing, waved his hand to make his laughing go away. ‘I shouldn’t make jokes like that, should I? Couldn’t resist it. Artist. Bullshit artist. No, I shouldn’t say that sort of thing. Love a joke, though, don’t you? If you can’t have a laugh, what’s left in life?’

‘Her name is Tilda Robson,’ I said with a toff-vowelled flick of my fringe. ‘She is an artist. Not a bullshit artist.’

‘Shit, I mean, goodness, is she famous then, the lady? Are you a famous artist, lady?’

She was measuring out the room in her mind, dreaming about her studio. I answered for her, ‘She is highly respected.’

The agent put his hands in his pockets. ‘So, you interested in the place?’

‘Like most things, Mr… I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.’

‘Clinch. Ken Clinch.’

‘Like most things, it comes down to price. What’s the best you can do?’

A Norm favourite after that question was to shake his head even before the answer, and say, ‘Actually, come to think of it, I might pass on this one today.’

I nodded to Tilda that I knew what I was doing. I did not look Clinch in the eye. All part of the next Norm stage: ‘I tell you what. What’s the asking price again?’

‘Forty-two and a half.’

I gave a grunt and a headshake and launched in to the ambit-claim phase. ‘Tell you what—thirty-two and a half. Tell your client take it or leave it.’

‘I reckon they’ll take it,’ Clinch said, extending his hand to shake on the deal.

‘They will?’

‘Bloody oath.’

‘Oh. It’s… it’s Tilda’s money, so I better check with her.’

There was no need for checking. She was suppressing squeals and leaps. She was joyful and proud: her perfect life now had a home.

And she was proud of me. If I had to list my finest moments—there have not been many—I would select that day, however sham was my businessman’s bluff. Clinch probably shouted the bar that night: ‘Thirty-two and a half. Vendor can’t believe his fucking luck.’

Tilda and I congressed for the first time in three days, parked on a gravel stretch south of Scintilla cemetery. She dubbed me Rockefeller: ‘You’ve been hiding your light under a bushel.’ I was carried away enough to believe it and advise her that she could make a decent dollar if she turned that old building into a viable concern. What was the one thing the Wimmera-Mallee lacked, as stated in the road guide? Good accommodation. There wasn’t even a bed-and-breakfast within an hour of Scintilla. ‘You can do one just for artists. Call it The Artists’ Colony. Get the local council to pitch in for renovations. Advertise in the city newspapers—Paint the wheat fields just like Van Gogh did. Frame the Vincent flake, use it as an attraction.’

‘Would you help me with all this?’

‘Of course.’

She said she was sorry for ever doubting me, for harping on about me and no plans.

I was so deluded I wanted to phone Norm and boast that his son was involved in an investment in Australia; he’s a doer not a pipedreamer. I slept deep and stirless that night despite the usual disturbances: heat, stars and moonlight so bright they could be suns; moon moths butting my skin as if wanting to be let in. I might well have rung if not for what happened next morning.

Tilda woke belching bits of food brown. She caught them in her T-shirt and managed to lean free of the van before vomiting more. She knelt naked in silvery grass and retched herself empty. I attempted to drape a shirt on her in case traffic came past but she ordered me away. She walked on her knees a few stub-strides to block the sight of her puddle.

When the retching was gone she stood pale and sweaty and asked for water to rinse her sicky mouth. She hated when our water got warm and bitter from being kept in an orange-juice bottle, but this time she rinsed and drank it like nectar. It was 8am and already the sun was high, poaching the blue sky white, yet Tilda’s sweat had turned icy on her. She shivered her way into the van, into our body-damp bed—two chequer sheets, two folded eiderdowns for a mattress. ‘My period’s late,’ she shivered.

I may have furrowed my brow in reaction, but little more. I hadn’t clicked to the significance. I was still full of myself over my big-business antics. I wanted to congress if possible, if Tilda was better now.

She crooked her arm over her eyes. No, she was not better. ‘I’m two going on three weeks late.’ She wiggled her fingers, counting on them. ‘Two’s not unusual for me, I’ve never been clockwork, especially if things are emotional.’ She belched and coughed weakly. ‘But I feel very strange today. Like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I feel inhabited. I feel pregnant.’

I sat on the van’s passenger-side seat. Tilda adjusted her arm to observe me eye to eye. I acted a smile, more close-lipped grimace than anything happy. I blinked myself free of her gaze, bowed my head as if the piece of gum leaf blown in from the road and sticking to my shin was more urgent an issue to deal with.

‘Probably just a false alarm,’ she said.

I drove us to Scintilla. The chemist would be open by 9; they’d have a test we could buy, which, Tilda explained, might not be perfect but a pretty good sign. She rode reclined in the back until the puttering and lurching of travel got to her and she climbed into the front to get air. She let window wind beat on her fringe.

I asked, ‘What are the odds?’

‘We’ve been flying without a net. What do you think about it if I am?’

‘What do I think? It’s amazing.’ But my true thinking was: It’s terrifying; I am not ready to raise children; I am still raising myself.

‘In what way amazing?’

‘Amazing as in me having the power to do that.’ This part was true to my thinking. What I didn’t say was: I’ll be trapped for the next however many years. Yes, I loved Tilda, as best as I knew to call a feeling love. What if love had several levels? What if our level was just lust-love, just temporary, not love fit for breeding, sitting at the kitchen table budgeting for school expenses, other childhood bills?

‘All the drinking I’ve been doing, the smoking and shit food, any baby I had would be a mutant with two heads and six arms. I’d have a miscarriage, probably.’

‘That’s a terrible image.’ I had a reprimanding tone but I was hoping she was right. Is a miscarriage dangerous? I knew it to be dangerous in horses. Cows just go on eating, lick the dead calf and leave it. ‘Sensible people, I suppose, plan having babies well ahead,’ I said.

‘I thought we did plan.’ Tilda’s eyes contained a flash of fury. I couldn’t see it—I was concentrating on driving—but the side of my face had a sense.

‘We talked about it. In a carried-away sort of way.’

‘I’ll tell you what you’re doing. You’re changing your tune.’

I told her it was not a good time to argue with me behind the wheel. She repeated, ‘Changing your tune,’ and went quiet.

Scintilla had park toilets of such bluestone distinction they were included in the road guide: ‘Former gaol cells, now public conveniences.’ Tilda tested herself there. She told me to walk off while she did it. I can’t remember how long I walked, an hour, two hours, fretting on fatherhood. I did laps of the main street. I was starting to make up some plans, though they were a dark variety. I hoped God, if there was one, had turned his face away.