The Amateur Science of Love by Craig Sherborne Page A

sleeping. We bought a futon and had it folded up long before anybody arrived. One artist, called Sebastian, who had a waxed antennae moustache like Dali and wore a three-piece suit and white spats, was particular about the rules. He was painting a portrait of someone famous. He didn’t want to bring someone famous into a doss house.
    Our planning time only produced one idea: Tilda wanted to live as a modern Van Gogh somewhere on the dusty plains. A region called the Wimmera-Mallee had, she said, Van Gogh wheat fields. He would have drooled to see how vast they were, sun-bleached and blazing bronze. Her $40,000 would surely get us a house of fair proportions. She planned to paint, eventually have an agent in Melbourne and make money that way. ‘The perfect life,’ she said.
    There is no such thing, of course.

Chapter 22
    What was I going to do? This was the question which marred our setting out for home-hunting. ‘How will you make a living?’ Tilda asked. I big-noted in my usual way—‘I’ll think of something’—and let the sentence trail off. But two events put me in my place.
    The first was my birthday, February 10. I was twenty-two. It meant nothing to me; there was no big to-do; I felt no different. Even the mirror thought so. I had no extra year of face lines, no thinning hair, no belly bulge appearing. My eye-whites still woke up bright and clear despite the night before’s two bottles of cheap cleanskin wine. No matter how much I drank I never got headaches.
    Tilda was another story. Wine made her skull throb; she became argumentative with it. She moaned and coughed under the futon’s blanket, wishing I wouldn’t gloat about how I felt so fit and in my prime. It was like an accusation, she said, that she was getting over the hill. ‘You may not mean it to be but that’s how I read it. Could you stop parading, please?’
    ‘I’m not parading. I feel no different from last year, or being sixteen, that’s all.’
    ‘You’ll know what I mean one day.’ She rubbed her bloodshot eyes and pushed her burst plait into a bit more order. She fingered around in her toilet bag and took out a mascara pencil, a pocket mirror. She turned her back to me but I could still see her face cameoed in the glass, her eyes rolled upward for dragging black pencil lines around her eyelids. ‘Anyway,’ she yawned. ‘I have something you don’t. I have plans. Some direction. A purpose.’
    Being talked down to like that made me argumentative. ‘Fuck purpose.’
    ‘Hardly a mature attitude.’ She pulled off the T-shirt she used for a nightie and began dressing, keeping her back to me for privacy. ‘We’ve been together a few months now. We can’t keep doing nothing but congressing all our lives. What will you do for a living?’
    Was this the point where love’s more ended? I had a flattening-out of feeling in me, an unspecified disappointment where blind excitement had been.
    We began turning on each other in a scratchy, squabbling way. I sat on her studio table and lit a cigarette to show I was so fit and young I could enjoy a cigarette first thing in the morning. Tilda needed till noon to clear her lungs for it. She jigged her jeans on, sucked in a breath for the effort of the tight zipper. She waved that the smoke was making her feel sick. I blew louder and further into her breathing zone.
    She suggested I consider her for a moment. She didn’t mean the smoke; she meant the money issue, the issue she called ‘the pragmatics’. When she introduced me to people they were going to ask, ‘So tell me, Colin. What do you do?’
    ‘What are you going to say?’ she asked.
    I shrugged. ‘I don’t know yet.’
    ‘What am I going to say? “Oh, Colin just moons about being cuntstruck, and expects me to moon about being cockstruck.”’
    ‘What people?’
    Tilda closed her eyes, exasperated. ‘Listen. I love you. This has been such fun and so wild, you and me. I’ve loved it. But if we want a perfect life we