Craig Sherborne - The Amateur Science of Love

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.

‘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.