The Amateur Science of Love by Craig Sherborne Page B

have to start thinking sensibly.’
    ‘When you say you’ve loved it, you mean it in the past tense? I’ve come all this way to Australia and you’re regretting it?’
    ‘No. That’s not what I said.’
    ‘You implied it, then.’
    Her voice went up a key to a pleading tone. ‘My parents, for instance. They will ask, “What do you do, Colin?” I wouldn’t want you just shrugging.’
    This led straight into the second event. Tilda had garaged her Escort van at her parents’ while she was overseas. It was a dented, rattly thing, she said, but reliable enough to tackle the trip west. We’d sleep in the back—much cheaper than hotels, given it could take weeks to find a home.
    She wanted to pick the van up that afternoon and thought it best if I didn’t accompany her. We would hardly project an image of practicality at the present time, would we? They might think I was botting off her, and she’d saddled herself with a no-hoper. Which was so far from the truth, she knew, but it’s all about image.
    ‘I embarrass you?’
    ‘I never said that. Come on, it won’t do us any harm to have a breather from each other for a few hours.’

Chapter 23
    I thought I knew everything at twenty-two. Twenty-two is a know-all number of years. Back then it never caused me cringing but I am thirty now and can see the fallacy. There were things not normal about Tilda and me that were starting to show but I didn’t pick them.
    It is normal for two people to think no one has ever loved so powerfully as they have: theirs is a true and blessed union. All those I love yous have built up resistance to doubt. But love is not simply sensations of the skin. More is demanded of you than sensations. I must have expected food and drink would fall out of the sky without me working for them; thin air would create money.
    As we drove west I sat in the passenger side and pondered plans. I feigned napping to come up with a plan to keep Tilda happy. I nagged myself to conjure an idea, but nothing came. Not a one. The van’s radio commanded me to get down to Dimmeys for sensational bargains on towels and bedding, and I told it shut up and went back to the sleepy chore of plans.
    I blamed Tilda for pressuring me. I didn’t say a word but that’s what I thought. Plans get blocked if there’s someone pressuring you. I blamed the drugging motion of travel, the van’s rotor-blade rockabye. I blamed the heat, the sun’s oven-blast on full through the window, the miraging waters of the tarseal up ahead. Two days, three days, four. Six days and still idealess.
    Tilda and I didn’t speak about the matter. We didn’t speak much at all, which at first I took as normal: we’d got used to each other and so had less to say. But our conversations would have confused the future if it was listening: are those two a cosy couple or soured lovers about to end? Their conversation amounts to little more than aimless chit-chat.
    Chit-chat about weather and cloud formations. ‘There’s a cloud exactly in a cello shape, Colin.’ We still used sweetheart but reverted to using given names as well.
    ‘Those trees are very black, Tilda.’
    ‘Bushfires. Aren’t these old towns quaint? Most were gold towns at one stage.’
    ‘Really,’ I yawned in open-eyed sleep as we drove past shanty, lean-to places with boarded-up shop windows and cottages wrinkled with peeling weatherboard. They had drought-dead lawns and black swans cut from car tyres for landscaping. Some had wild roses trained over the porch where men in grey singlets sat on sofas and smoked, and women with hair in scarves watched us drive past as if driving past was a strange occurrence.
    Larger towns had real estate sections in the Elders Farm Supplies window. There were always plenty of shanties for sale, and most second-hand cars would be dearer than they were, but they weren’t close to what Tilda had as ideal.
    Talbot, Dunolly, Bealiba, Ouyen, Wycheproof, Sea Lake, Speed. To chant town names had a