Craig Sherborne - The Amateur Science of Love

She was seated on a common room armchair, leg over leg, talking in smoke clouds to a man with thick, hairy forearms. Spanish, going by his seedy sound. He flung his arms about and was old—at least forty. Tilda’s grey breath licked up from her top lip to her nostrils. She raised her chin as if to drain each smoke puff like a drink. It gave the impression of keeping the world out and also inviting it in.

Since the RADA fiasco I had been sexless in myself, too dead in spirit to feel desire for anyone. I could not imagine anyone feeling desire for me. But a month had passed. I could feel my blood reheating. Blood or hormones or whatever they are. They squirted once again in the sudden way they do, down my back, prickling in my groin and anus. Queasiness bubbled in my stomach as if semen was produced there high up in the intestines, poisoning me sweetly with its gases, forcing its way down the penis in the hope of being expelled. Tilda with her smoking, her one leg spread in a triangle over her knee, brought the queasiness on more strongly. When she reached forward to flick ash from her cigarette her biceps were woman-thin but strung with lean muscle. A vein ran down each arm like an off-centre spine. She was a woman, yes, but with a bit of male in those arms mixed in. The monotone of her Australian speaking had a scratchy grain, the kind of voice that’s called husky.

She was telling the Spaniard she had ‘done’ New York. From her baggy thigh pockets she presented two black books and opened them on a coffee table. I swaggered closer, changing a dirty ashtray for a clean one in order to peek. I wiped stickiness from the table.

‘That’s Brooklyn Bridge,’ she informed the Spaniard, thumbing pages of ink drawings. ‘This is in Central Park. These are some wonderful brownstones.’ Her pen had photographed them with spidery blots and watery smears.

‘They’re very good,’ I blurted. ‘Very good.’ And they were. It wasn’t just the queasiness talking.

Tilda jerked her head up to take the compliment from me. Her plait bucked across her stuck-out ears. Her smile caused a pretty crease at each side of her mouth, and above her eyebrows too, like an extra brow of skin. At that instant I was sure there must be a smell called Welcome: for all the nicotine about her, a cinnamon hello lifted to me from her hair.

But there!—a wedding ring. A skinny band of shineless silver. Easy to miss among the state of her fingers, ink-stained as if her habit was blue cigarettes. Was she travelling with someone, or was the ring just for show? I admit there was an extra squirt of excitement through me in memory of the sophisticated sin with Caroline.

If we put on a swagger we can appear smarter than we are. We can turn a good phrase if we’re swaggering. I swaggered and said, ‘I don’t know what I like but I know that’s art.’ Tilda laughed and I sensed it was a good time to walk off, part of the x-ray basics I learned from Caroline. If we turn our backs we can read what someone thinks of us. It may sound unlikely but it’s the truth. If we glimpse over our shoulder and catch them looking and they avert their eyes—that’s an x-ray taken. They have an attraction to us.

I did it to Tilda and she averted on cue, I was certain of it. She resumed flipping through her personal New York, noisy flips of ink-stiff pages; she smiled in that closed mouth way we do when we’ve been caught out. She shut her book and stood, put her chair in like a good girl and was marching off in the direction of the female wing. Her plait kept time, ear to ear, with her striding.

I did the sensible thing and checked her admission card. She was travelling alone. Duration of visit, three nights. I set myself up in the common room with coffee, near the door where I could see all comings and goings. When Tilda passed by I would take another x-ray and if successful move to the next stage where I swaggered more and perhaps tried some Shakespeare.

Two hours I lingered, reading newspapers with one eye. No sunflowers or plums appeared. Only a scraggy not-Tilda, a girl-woman with short hair and scabbed pimples. She waved her hands and babbled French—Je m’appelle Yvonne and s’il vous plait—and tried to take my hands in hers. Her touch was cold and greasy. I pulled my hands away but she persisted with her s’il vous plaits.

‘What’s the problem?’ I said. There was obviously a problem. ‘Speak English. You speak English?’

She said she spoke a little English and started off with her name, Yvonne. ‘I need money, sir. My money stole.’ She made a pick-pocketing motion with her fingers and sniffled snot back up into her nose. ‘Please help. I need home. Boat. France.’ Her hands sailed a hilly ocean. A thick coughing crackled inside her. ‘My brother, he sick. I need go home.’

She doubled up at my feet and I patted her shoulder and said it was dreadful her situation but she should call the police.

‘No,’ she grunted. ‘Money. Please.’ Her hair smelled of not being washed of its oils. There was dandruff in the skin of its parting. Her maroon jacket had absorbed a layer of damp grime.

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.