Stop it, I said to myself. There have been no behind-my-back episodes—it was just the fretting talking. It was advising me to go home to New Zealand and leave Tilda to cope with pregnancy alone.
At the same time, I was dazzled by the notion there could be part of me in that woman. How grand to imagine the round form of her abdomen. To be a father, an elder at twenty-two, a protector of new human life. To be able to say ‘This is my son’ or ‘This is my daughter.’ No matter who you are, how poor or stupid or ugly, that is surely the ultimate status.
I ended up back at the old jailhouse in that latter mood. Tilda was waiting in elm shade, sitting chin on knee. She said, ‘It says I am. You’ve potted me.’ She looked at me, searching for leadership. Fear, hope, trust, pride—all these were contained in that look. But the main one was pride. She gleamed with it. My own breathing quickened with it; I swelled up at the shoulders. I had that famous feeling but it had multiplied: I would be famous not just to one person now but two in nine months’ time.
There is no intimacy like it. Not ever have I felt that way again. No matter how deep a kiss or tender the congressing, the simple act of walking along hand in hand with Tilda that afternoon could never be matched for delirium. We paraded more than walked around Scintilla. When Ken Clinch swerved his jeep to the kerb to confirm our offer had been accepted—‘Congratulations. Thirty-day settlement suit you?’—Tilda quipped, ‘It’s quite a day for news.’ We let Clinch be confused by our in-joke chuckling.
We ate at the Scintilla Arms—T-bone steak to keep Tilda’s blood full of iron. She drank lemon squash and warned me off smoking around her because smoke was not healthy to breathe in her condition. We discussed baby names. What a purifying activity, baby names! A boy could be Richard because Richard is dignified. A girl could be Alice or Elizabeth or Clare.
The bank’s rooms would be cold in winter. The building had fireplaces—we would have to keep them alight to make the child toasty; have to de-mould the walls, patch plaster so the air wasn’t dusty.
We didn’t congress that night because, in the purity vein, it felt dirty to have me prodding and expelling with a Richard or Alice inside her.
Next day, Tilda signed the sale contract. ‘Initial here. Sign here,’ said Clinch, tapping his finger on the pages. Tilda’s stomach, her flat, pregnant stomach, pressed against his office counter as she followed his instructions. I stepped away from the counter. I did not wish to be involved in the signing. I did not want to join in her excitement. I equated that signing as a signing-up of me. I tried clinging to the delirium but it was slipping from me. Purity had emptied from my heart. The dark planning was recurring, darker than earlier, much darker.
By law she had three days to change her mind, a cooling-off period in which she could render the contract non-binding. I set myself the task of unbinding it and thereby unbinding myself. I felt entirely justified. Yes, I loved Tilda but not in forever terms, the kitchen table kind of love I’ve mentioned. As she bent over that contract a beam of sun put a microscope to her face. It homed in through the open door, right in on her cheeks and magnified what normal light doesn’t show—the creases and crumples that are only going to worsen. I didn’t have markings like those.
In five years I would be twenty-seven and she thirty-seven. That was old, even sounded old to say—thirty-seven. When I was thirty-seven she would be old as aunties. When I was fifty…on and on it went. The microscope discovered three grey strands in her eyebrows that needed urgent plucking. There was dandelion fur along her jaw—it would only get longer and thicker as she aged ahead of me. If she were twenty-two then at least we’d be even.
I began the unbinding as Tilda drove us back to Melbourne. She was fussing, ‘There is so much to do.’ The logistics of packing; getting professional advice on floor repairs. I sat on the passenger side with my dark planning. For just as love has its more stage, getting out of love has the opposite: there is a ratcheting-down to do. There is dismantling to inflict, breaking of heart and faith. I was new to this as I had been to falling in love. But I was a natural. I must have been to summon the ruthlessness so well. There was no intricate strategy involved. I knew instinctively to start out meekly, even if I appeared pathetic. ‘I feel a bit dizzy,’ I lied, pressing my fingers into my eyes. I shook and feigned fainting.
We were about 60ks east of Scintilla. I gripped my chest as if blood had stopped working in it. I put on such a show of face-clenching pain Tilda reached over for the orange-acrid water and splashed it on me, made me gargle and spit like a sportsman recovering. She stroked my hair and called me darling. The darling caused me to complain that her stroking wasn’t helping. I shrugged her hand from me with genuine irritation. When you are trying to be ruthless you don’t want darling to soften the momentum.
‘I am not ready to be a father,’ I said. ‘I am not ready for fatherhood or being a family man or anything like that.’ I said it not as gently as I’d hoped, but there, it was said. My legs were shaking from the electrocution nerve being activated. I needed to gallop my sentences out before they jumbled like a fit. ‘For Christ’s sake, I’ve got no money, no prospects. I’m only twenty-two and it’s not time for me yet.’
I didn’t see Tilda’s reaction. I couldn’t look at her; I wasn’t that brave. Her voice went strained, almost shrill. ‘What’s happened? How can you be like this? You were happy about it. Why have you changed your mind? What have I done? Have I done something? Did something happen?’
‘I’m sorry, but it’s how I feel.’
‘You should have thought about that before you stuck your dick in me.’
That shut me down for a few seconds, the viciousness of tone. Such a crude image—‘stuck your dick in me’.
‘Charming thing to say,’ I said with a disapproving shake of my head. ‘Whatever happened to congressing?’
‘Please don’t do this to me.’ She hunched over the steering wheel.
‘Concentrate on your driving.’ I was fearful of the cars coming our way.
‘I don’t care.’
‘Well, I do care.’
‘If you are old enough to get me pregnant, you are old enough to do the right thing.’
‘I am doing the right thing. I do not feel ready to be a father and therefore it is the right thing to tell you so.’
‘I feel ready. It’s the right time for me.’
‘You’ve fucking well lured me into this, haven’t you?’
She yanked on the wheel. The van swerved left sharply onto the road verge and slid to a stop. A horn mooed, a truck behind us blaring because Tilda hadn’t indicated. She thumped her hand on the dashboard. ‘Why are you doing this to me, Colin? I never lured you or trapped you. Don’t do this to me, please. Don’t take something beautiful like us having a baby and turn it on me.’
I shoved the passenger door open with my shoulder. It was sticking but I wanted the aggression of the barging action to scare her into silent submission. It didn’t. She shimmied across the seat after me. ‘I’ll do anything,’ she pleaded. ‘I will get a job until it’s born. What a time we’ll have doing up the place. Okay, you’re young, you’re overwhelmed at the moment. But that’s just temporary.’
Nature thought us a comedy. Parrots on the bleachers of dead branches, crows on the other tiers, all laughing with mechanical croaky jeering. I had bare feet and tilt-walked over painful stones towards some grassier cushioning. Tilda followed. I cursed ‘piss off’ to the jumping-bean flies on my face but the curse was really meant for her. I tiptoed between ants, stomped on the smaller ones and rucked dust at the bull ants which were more like infant fingers fidgeting around than insects.