I was washing cups and saucers, scraping plates free of butter foils and marmalade plops. Cracking coins into the dining room till. What was love doing picking out me? I who smoked fifteen cigarettes a day now to burn away failure, to put up a screen to the outside world. I who pretended to swagger when I walked, for false confidence. A little skip in each stride as if swinging a dandy-man’s cane. I who combined this with keeping my fringe over my eyes, a face curtain for aloofness.
Tilda was only ten minutes away. A train had set her down at Blackfriars Station for the uphill trek to the hostel. The sky was dripping greyly as always. It was Sunday. You could hear St Paul’s bells practising their scales. She was mounting the laneway steps, the hostel sign in view. I should have kept my face curtain down for both our sakes.
But it was too late. There she was. Here she is once again in my mind, such a tall woman, her black boots adding at least an inch of heel. She is yellow—her clothes, I mean. Blink-bright yellow. A blouse of flower patterns—sunflowers and green and red tropical petals. Who wears a blouse those colours in London, city of drab? Tilda did. She was short-sleeved despite the goose-flesh rain.
The yellow continued up past her shoulders and became hair. Paler yellow than her clothing and pulled into a three-strand plait. An orange band bound the stump of it. Her ears stuck out more obviously from the tightness of the plaiting, like two little cupped hands. It was on purpose. A way of stylishly spoiling the beautiful rest of her.
Others stared, not just me. She was used to such staring. She pouted like a sour kiss to the air around her, rejecting the attention. Her lips were red by nature, not by lipstick.
She was in the age gap of my ultimate preference—ten or so years my elder. I was not intending love. I was playing. I was thinking how a woman like her would, for me, be aiming higher than usual. If I even got a kiss from her it would be an achievement. I enjoyed the idea, then let it fade. I went back to drying dishes.
Tilda finished admission. She dwelt on the spot a second, read the directions to her bunk room on the brochure you got with your locker key. Off she went. For all I knew that was the end of it. My rightful place was dishes. My face curtain returned to its down position.
Chapter 5
My father would think I had my tail between my legs—that’s why I hadn’t rung him. It was time I did, though I knew what he’d do. He’d say, ‘You’ve had your little adventure, son. Be responsible, come to your senses. Fly home and settle down to a good productive life.’ There had been talk the Mullers planned to leave town to save their marriage. Perhaps they’d already done it, clearing the way for my return.
My conversation with the old boy was a masterpiece of lying. ‘Norm,’ I said. It sounded more confident than Dad. ‘Norm, I did it. I was accepted into RADA. That’s right, accepted. I was quite impressive. My practising paid off.’
He yelled out for my mother, ‘Marg. Marg. He was accepted. I’ll be blowed.’
She made a tearful speech about being vindicated before I had the chance to calm her down.
‘But I am not going to accept their acceptance,’ I told her. ‘I know, I know, but you have to understand something. It disappointed me, Marg, the place itself, the people. I have other opportunities I want to take up and explore.’ I didn’t say what other opportunities. I let the conversation fizzle. Norm offered to wire me money to top up my funds. I politely resisted before relenting.
I was using the hostel payphone by the stairs. Exactly timed on my relenting, Tilda appeared. Down the stairs she came, skipping off the last step. She spun left, heading for the common room. Her yellow blouse had been replaced by a long green shirt with fruit drawings on it. Green apples, coppery peaches and red plums. She paid me no attention, just swept on by. My mother had to ask, ‘Are you still there, Colin?’
The next stage came ten minutes later and involved cigarettes. A cigarette implies risk and cheapness in a person; it says they are bold and vulnerable in one. Tilda was smoking. It seemed at odds with the look of her. You wouldn’t think she’d want a smokescreen across her attractiveness.
She was seated on a common room armchair, leg over leg, talking in smoke clouds to a man with thick, hairy forearms. Spanish, going by his seedy sound. He flung his arms about and was old—at least forty. Tilda’s grey breath licked up from her top lip to her nostrils. She raised her chin as if to drain each smoke puff like a drink. It gave the impression of keeping the world out and also inviting it in.
Since the RADA fiasco I had been sexless in myself, too dead in spirit to feel desire for anyone. I could not imagine anyone feeling desire for me. But a month had passed. I could feel my blood reheating. Blood or hormones or whatever they are. They squirted once again in the sudden way they do, down my back, prickling in my groin and anus. Queasiness bubbled in my stomach as if semen was produced there high up in the intestines, poisoning me sweetly with its gases, forcing its way down the penis in the hope of being expelled. Tilda with her smoking, her one leg spread in a triangle over her knee, brought the queasiness on more strongly. When she reached forward to flick ash from her cigarette her biceps were woman-thin but strung with lean muscle. A vein ran down each arm like an off-centre spine. She was a woman, yes, but with a bit of male in those arms mixed in. The monotone of her Australian speaking had a scratchy grain, the kind of voice that’s called husky.
She was telling the Spaniard she had ‘done’ New York. From her baggy thigh pockets she presented two black books and opened them on a coffee table. I swaggered closer, changing a dirty ashtray for a clean one in order to peek. I wiped stickiness from the table.
‘That’s Brooklyn Bridge,’ she informed the Spaniard, thumbing pages of ink drawings. ‘This is in Central Park. These are some wonderful brownstones.’ Her pen had photographed them with spidery blots and watery smears.
‘They’re very good,’ I blurted. ‘Very good.’ And they were. It wasn’t just the queasiness talking.
Tilda jerked her head up to take the compliment from me. Her plait bucked across her stuck-out ears. Her smile caused a pretty crease at each side of her mouth, and above her eyebrows too, like an extra brow of skin. At that instant I was sure there must be a smell called Welcome: for all the nicotine about her, a cinnamon hello lifted to me from her hair.
But there!—a wedding ring. A skinny band of shineless silver. Easy to miss among the state of her fingers, ink-stained as if her habit was blue cigarettes. Was she travelling with someone, or was the ring just for show? I admit there was an extra squirt of excitement through me in memory of the sophisticated sin with Caroline.
If we put on a swagger we can appear smarter than we are. We can turn a good phrase if we’re swaggering. I swaggered and said, ‘I don’t know what I like but I know that’s art.’ Tilda laughed and I sensed it was a good time to walk off, part of the x-ray basics I learned from Caroline. If we turn our backs we can read what someone thinks of us. It may sound unlikely but it’s the truth. If we glimpse over our shoulder and catch them looking and they avert their eyes—that’s an x-ray taken. They have an attraction to us.
I did it to Tilda and she averted on cue, I was certain of it. She resumed flipping through her personal New York, noisy flips of ink-stiff pages; she smiled in that closed mouth way we do when we’ve been caught out. She shut her book and stood, put her chair in like a good girl and was marching off in the direction of the female wing. Her plait kept time, ear to ear, with her striding.