‘What do you think?’ Vigourman whispered. ‘Be honest. I know we’ve got work to do.’
I did enjoy his deferring to my authority. ‘Nervousness is the enemy of the actor, in my experience. They need to relax. You can’t underestimate the nervousness factor.’
I took my chance on that note of wisdom to excuse myself and slip out.
Chapter 33
Review, my arse. I wrote twenty paragraphs with ‘delightful’ in the piece four times, ‘charming’ three, ‘interesting’ and ‘energetic’ twice.
‘Appropriately diplomatic,’ Tilda called it.
‘Cheesy lies, more likely,’ I said. I was embarrassed it bore my name. But Vigourman was chuffed, and he had influence. I was suddenly in demand: could I write some ‘reflections’ on living in Scintilla? If I filled a page my fee would be $25.
I got busy reflecting. I chose the town’s bluestone buildings to wax about. ‘Vertical cobblestone streets’, I dubbed them, prose I thought poetic as sentences go. I described the Scintillan sun as ‘chandelier material’. I said the people of the town were as friendly and as straight-backed and square-jawed as any humans I had encountered in my travels. My one quibble was to do with ‘bending the elbow’, though I never meant it as hard-hitting. You wouldn’t find a boozier, noisier Saturday night on planet Earth, I wrote. The town’s main street has more midnight argy-bargy than a boxing ring. London is like a graveyard in comparison.
‘Exposed at last!’ wrote clergymen in a joint letter to the editor. ‘Are hotels now our places of worship? Why have our youth lost their way?’
In response to which, successive editions published letters dismissing me as a ‘blow-in’ and a ‘snob’ because I had only lived here a handful of months; you need twenty years to know the place; you need to be born here. The controversy sold 106 more copies of the paper than usual. That only ever happened when Scintilla played the Watercook Cannons at football.
My mini-fame, my notoriety, lifted me up in name and spirits. I don’t care what they say about big fish in small ponds, to be lifted up in any-size place is a powerful physic. It puts a drop of self-importance in your system. I remembered the famous feeling of first being in love with Tilda and how her being pregnant with Richard or Alice multiplied it, if only for a few hours. If the two were combined—pregnancy and this new small-pond fame, what a state of grace to be in. That’s what I mean by alterations.
I bought a cash-register-looking typewriter at the Salvos and practised—thwack, thwack, thump—like morse piano until my fingers could produce 600 words in one hour. I rang home to my parents and big-noted, with some truth in the big-noting this time, that I was involved in a promising venture in newspapers.
Norm mumbled, unconvinced: ‘A writing job? Where’s that going to get you?’ I did lie that I was earning $300 a week, which he liked the sound of. My fee was now $30 an article but I could not resist the exaggeration. It drew a ‘You’re back on track, by the looks of things’ from him, which I appreciated.
Tilda appeared younger to me now. That was another alteration. When out in the sun she tanned and glowed. The dandelions became almost invisible along her jaw. Country life was suiting her. It smoothed her skin out and put pretty freckles on her nose. I counted them, twenty tiny freckles, the morning after the egg discovery. She lay beside me, eyelids closed, eyeballs fidgeting beneath them half awake. She looked too healthy for that egg to be of any significance. I should just put it out of my thoughts. Which I did. I had the great drain robbery to go to. I had to shave, shower, help Tilda load the van with paintings without getting marks on my good clothes.
Chapter 34
Her phone call came the day after next. ‘I have a huge lump. A huge fucking lump.’ She hiccupped with tears, her voice blocked with terror-phlegm. ‘There’s a smaller lump near it. And under my arms, where the glands are, more lumps.’ She said her doctor’s face was furrowed when he found them. She’d swear he looked concerned and tried conceal it with ‘Don’t worry’ but Tilda wasn’t blind, she was no fool, she could tell his thinking.
She was phoning from her parents’. She desperately needed to curl up in her childhood bed. She wanted her childness back because there is only living in childhood, there are no lumps or tears too terrible. There are no tests and specialists who will do a biopsy on her in three days’ time. ‘Three days. They think they need to hurry, don’t they?’
‘I don’t know. I couldn’t say.’
‘They think it must be serious, too serious to wait, don’t they? I can’t wait three days. Why do I have to wait three days? Why can’t they do it now?’
‘I don’t know.’
These were not real questions from Tilda, it was the terror talking, for which all answers are stunned I don’t knows.
‘Something bad is in my body. I can feel it.’ She spat the words with such revulsion she might have been spitting at her body. ‘How can I go three days with badness living in me?’
‘I don’t know.’
She could not stand to glimpse any part of herself. She vowed to keep her clothes on for three days and have no shower so she didn’t see or touch her gone-bad body. Her body had turned on her, she wept. Her body was the enemy within.
She instructed me to pack her blue nightie, the one she had never used but saved as if for special sleeping. Bring white knickers too. If none were in the clean pile then buy some. I was to use my initiative and pack anything else I thought she might need. Manners were obsolete to her now. There was no point in please or thank you. They belonged to the past, a kinder place than this new hell of worry. She wanted me to catch the train to Melbourne immediately. She wanted me to hold her through the night. Hold her and be gentle. She wanted to hold me and be mad and have the right to be mad. I’d have to sleep in her parents’ study on a foldout cot because they were old-fashioned and we were not a married couple. But they would have to turn a blind eye and allow me to sneak in to her at night.
Chapter 35
Just as screens are drawn around a patient’s bed, so too a screen is pulled around that time for me.
Inside the screen there are only Tilda and myself. She is waking after whatever they do in biopsies. Her lips are dry and pale. Her eyes are dragged left and right slowly by the drugs. I sit on the bed edge and hold her hand, such a cold hand, from the pretend death of anaesthetic. ‘It’s over,’ I say, smiling. I force myself to kiss her forehead—I should at least kiss her forehead until the medical smells have gone from her mouth. We will be back in Scintilla in a few days, I tell her to cheer her. The results will be negative and we can get out of this sterilised ward and go home; me to write another Gazette masterpiece, her to her canvas equivalents.
Outside the screen is Tilda’s family: a brother, two sisters, her mother, Raewyn, with pearls twisted anxiously through her knuckles below her throat line. Her father, Eric, jiggles change in his pocket and reassures Raewyn that Tilda has pluck and fortitude. They mutter their own I don’t knows and Don’t worrys. Where I am concerned they use talk that avoids talking: ‘What footy team do you barrack for?’
There is suspicion if can’t answer that question in Melbourne. If you can’t say the Dons or Magpies or Demons it’s as if you’re a threat, an alien. I said the Dons just to keep everyone happy.
In reality they were inside Tilda’s bed screen but I have decided to keep things to just her and me or else I will get shuffled back from the bed at this point, as I was that day. They stopped short of saying, ‘Can you step outside please, mate?’ but I sniffed the sentiment. She had been theirs all her life; I had been on the scene five minutes. I was an impostor. When she clutched my hand I could x-ray jealousy, especially in her parents. I’m not retaliating here but they are now my impostors. I decide who gains admission to this testimony. They were not Tilda’s lover. Nobody but we two could understand the intimacy to come. I want to get it on the record, that intimacy, because it’s a finest-hour entry in my otherwise lopsided list.