She held up her fist like a defensive boxing position and let out a burst of howling, a cursing howl at the world, head thrown back, the M of her throat visible. A sound so lonely it belonged to animals and darkness. It always made me jump up from my chair to shush her with hugs and patting. I learned to do it warily, approach her slowly as if we’d only just met, not been two years together. There was danger in it, that sound. If I laid hands on Tilda too suddenly she felt trapped, not hugged. She would howl more and I’d have to back off and wait and have another try. Once the shushing was accepted and hugging allowed we would rock side to side, embracing. I could feel her heart thudding through our clothes.
The first time we rocked I cried. Cried for real. Cried for Tilda, out of care for her, and love and sadness. It welled up and spluttered from me. Then she began to expect it every time we rocked. I still cried for real sometimes but it became more a crying for myself, especially when Tilda took her howling one step further. A step where she sobbed and said if I truly loved her I would help bring about her death. She saw no enjoyment in going on with life, so why not embrace death instead of fighting it? Why not buy a rifle or the strongest weedkiller and help her? I shushed no, no, no because I thought saying that displayed more true love than rifles ever could. I suspected she was testing me with the rifle and weedkiller carry-on, checking that I wanted her to live by having me shushing her and telling her I loved her. Yet how was I to read the next step?
‘You would want to come with me, wouldn’t you?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘If you bought a rifle or weedkiller and helped me go, you’d do the same to you, wouldn’t you? You’d turn the rifle on yourself so you could follow me straightaway?’
‘Sweetheart, please, that’s crazy stuff.’
‘You wouldn’t?’
‘Wouldn’t what?’
‘Want to follow me? Be with me always?’
‘Of course I would.’
‘Truly?’
‘Of course.’ I found this the best strategy. I’d say ‘of course’ with a kiss on her forehead. Matter closed, until next time.
Chapter 43
The sign for mind number one, for popping her head around my door then going to bed, was hesitation. She would pause on the landing outside our bedroom door. She flicked her sneakers off and made the eleven-step journey up the hall towards me.
The sign for number two started out almost the same—there were flicked shoes and the eleven steps. The difference was she flicked the shoes as she walked the eleven steps. She flung them at the walls. By the time she got to my nook she was running, not walking. In between hearing her mount the stairs and reach the landing I would think: Touch wood she hesitates. She hasn’t started running yet, touch wood. This must be a number-one day.
Even when it was a number-two day I touched wood in the hope she would not talk rifles and weedkiller. I shushed and rocked her in such a way that my fingers could reach the door frame behind her. It was painted cream but chipped in places, which gave me access to exposed wood. ‘She hasn’t mentioned rifles and weedkiller so far—touch wood.’
I started the sets-of-three ritual when only one touch didn’t work. There’s no logic in it, I know. Still, that’s the way the touchings grip you: three touches of wood may have three times the power. When three didn’t work I went to six sets of three, then nine sets, ten, twelve…
I got it into my head they would ward off troubles: Tilda would get well in body and soul; I would never get diseased; Hector Vigourman would keep hiring me. If I stopped the touchings I was convinced the repercussions would be dire. Unspeakable horrors—a car accident, our house burning down—would befall us. If I failed to do the touchings then wood itself would get even with me for my neglect of it.
I should have sought help, an anti-touchings group or a prescription for medicine. Truth was, I never saw pills put Tilda in a state of peace, so why would they me? I know she took them as scripted at first. I used to count them out on her palm—uppers, downers, ones to make her sleep. I never twigged she’d started hiding them under her tongue. I wasn’t the pill police. I didn’t say ‘open wide’ and go peering. I took it for granted she wanted relief from fear. Turned out she fretted that pills were unwholesome. She needed healthy food to clean her out from the chemo—celery, carrots, oatmeal, fruit—not pills from American laboratories.
Roff assigned her a psychologist from the start but Tilda lied, lied, lied. She boasted to me how she spun them a stoic line: ‘I’m coping very well, thank you. I’m faced with a huge challenge but am in a positive frame of mind. I don’t think I need another appointment, thank you.’
Tilda was worried for her art: psychology and pills might steal it away from her, dull her talent as their side effect. They might alter her personality, turn her into someone bland and passionless. She would rather go crazy like Van Gogh than suffer such a fate. What’s the point of living if your very nature is compromised? ‘Don’t let them ever do that to me, will you, Colin?’
I was probably competing with her. I’m not certain of it, but was it coincidence that my touchings tripled in frequency when Tilda took to counting her hair?
She was convinced she was balding from the treatment. Forget Roff claiming it was highly unlikely. His chemical concoction may have been mild but she was one of those few who would go bald from it, of that she was adamant.
‘Look here!’ she would call me out of my nook. ‘Look, look, look!’
There she’d be kneeling naked in our bathtub shower, dragging a dripping fingerful of hairs from the plughole. ‘Two, three, eight, nine,’ she counted, parting them with tweezers.
I told her it was not a large collection of hairs. ‘You probably always lost that amount. You just didn’t notice it and now you do.’
‘Bullshit. You think I don’t know my own hair? I would have thought by now you would know my hair.’
I said I didn’t notice any difference in the thickness of her hair.
She took that as insulting, as me being too bound up in work to give a damn about her. No sooner had she said it than she apologised and conceded I was probably right. ‘I’m just panicking about losing my looks. You have a breast taken off, you can cover it up. But baldness.’ She smiled about how her lovely yellow hair had always turned heads, including mine. Losing it would be the cruellest humiliation. ‘Just to make me happy, would you count them for me? Please, baby. Double-check my counting.’ She handed me the dripping hair and tweezers.
Every second day—the times she washed her hair—she knelt and counted and jotted the figure on a page torn from her sketchbook. There were seldom more than forty hairs. I told her forty hairs is the normal number shed in showering. I told her I’d read it in newspapers, which was a lie but a good one—it satisfied her.
When her hair count came in at thirty or thirty-seven she would beam all day and I could head off to work confident that when I got home there’d be no histrionics. Work was still freelance but was getting interesting in its small-town way. I had freedom out on the road, the Gazette car radio blaring Cold Chisel and the Rolling Stones. I had interviews to go to: Old Meryl Furner and her cactus collection; for two decades she’d won best in wax plants at the Royal Melbourne Show. Mrs Doris Mitchell of Borebore Road turning one hundred and being awarded life membership of the Presbyterian Association of Crop Farmers’ Wives. I was even called upon now and then to sell classified ads door-to-door to farmers. I wrote my own copy: Lucerne round bales x20, good qual. $ neg.
And there were puma sightings. Every month you’d get them—pumas running wild in Scintilla forest. Millionaires up north had bred them for pets then let them go. Always some farmer claimed he’d had sheep eaten.