When the job was done she prompted me, ‘It’s your turn now,’ and wedged two pillows behind my back. She unclipped her overalls and crouched on the floor at a height suitable for my left palm to stroke her arm the hundred times without causing my legs to twist and suffer.
You would have thought my imagination would settle down but my squirming stomach still got to me: I still had that notion of Tilda’s disease trying to transfer into my system. My condition did at least provide an excuse to stop stroking before a hundred. I had physical weakness to thank for fading at fifty. ‘I’m buggered,’ I said, and slumped. Tilda had no option but to forgive me. She held my good hands in her fat hand and lay her good legs beside my leprosy legs and contentedly fell asleep.
I practised taking a blanket over my legs. I would have to withstand one eventually—winter nights would freeze me otherwise. But the reason for wanting to cover them was to stop Tilda looking. She took too much heart from our ugly equality for my liking.
‘Your legs are not ugly.’
‘They are.’
‘They aren’t.’
‘They are ugly leper legs.’
‘They are not ugly leper legs any more than my arm is ugly. Are you saying my arm is ugly?’
‘We’ve been through all that. No, I don’t think your arm is ugly.’ The old lie.
‘There you go, then. Nor do I find your legs ugly.’ Surely she was lying too.
Yet, maybe not. She liked to wiggle her good hand into my underpants and test me for servicing. ‘What have we got down here?’ she said, and rubbed and handled. As much as I clenched against getting excited, as much as I gripped her wrist and told her to behave, she persisted and wanted me to kiss her. She suggested I feel into her clothing for her good breast and see if it appealed to my touch. It did. Off came her gauntlet and her sleeve. Up and over her head went her shirt, her bra and prosthetic body part. She straddled me and said in shivery whispers, ‘Tell me if I’m hurting you, sweetheart. Is this okay? Your legs aren’t stinging?’ She didn’t want servicing, she was after true congressing, the real McCoy of loving intimacy.
Here’s the Swahili of all Swahilis: so did I. My distaste for the idea was gone. In its place was not desire so much as me wanting the home of someone. I wanted the homeness of Tilda. We must surely have been marked out for each other, fated. Cursed in body, the better for being blessed in soul. I said so to her during the gentlest of straddlings. I said, ‘We must be cursed but we are cursed together.’
‘Yeth. We are blethed in that way,’ she whispered.
Something enfeared me that I had never experienced when I was well. ‘What are you thinking?’ I asked her. ‘Right this exact second. Tell me your thoughts?’
‘Wha?’
‘This very second. Be honest.’
‘I thinken nothing. I feel you move roun inthide me.’
‘Nothing else?’
No, she promised. Nothing else. I couldn’t let up, however. It was jealousy, you see. Jealousy, and all the desperate hallucinations it causes. I kept thinking: What if she’s straddling me but in the privacy of her mind wishes she was straddling her equivalent of a Holly or Donna? I closed my eyes and searched the town for a selection of threatening possibilities. Gavin, the gardener at the duck pond park? Christ no—he has teeth missing and talks simpleton-slow. Joshua, Scintilla’s liquor store attendant? Has body odour and looks over fifty around his eyes.
What about Michael Farrelly, LLB? He has Scintilla’s goldest shingle. Its only shingle, in fact: Attorney at Law, like Americans on TV. He wears suits, cufflinks, ties, so he wouldn’t be interested in Tilda. It reassured me and insulted me that he was out of her league.
What about Vigourman? He left a get-well cake for me at the back door, and a batch of Mrs Vigourman’s Anzac biscuits. You’re in the wars, you two, it said on his card. We look forward to having you back on board soon. My wife is always saying, ‘There can never be enough Colin in the Gazette.’
I disliked his name intensely. I couldn’t even congress with vigour given my state. I was a passive pommel horse for Tilda to trot on. I also envied him his money. On my bedside table were official government forms for my filling out and signing. I now qualified for a sickness handout. What slightest appeal could I have left for anybody? Yet Tilda must have valued something. There I was beneath her, not a Joshua, attorney or Vigourman. I advised myself that this could well be as good as things ever got for me. This might be the height a man such as me can reach. It’s like sinking to the bottom of your own life, thinking such thoughts. You are weightless, released. You don’t want to surface; you no longer want to breathe. Which makes you panic suddenly. I came up gasping for air, grateful for Tilda in her moaning reverie upon me.
That’s when I asked her to marry me. I spluttered it into her dangling hair.
She gripped my ears to steer my eyes to look into hers. ‘Really?’
‘Would you want to?’
‘What a beautiful quethion.’
‘So, yes?’
‘Yeth. Pleathe. Yeth.’
Chapter 56
Marry me is the very opposite of bad language. A bout of bad language and I crave chain-smoking. I get so thick in the neck veins—anger is blood-borne and clogs them—I need smoking and cold vodka to treat it. Then I need sleep to silence my banging brain. Marry me was calming to utter. More like soap and water than two old-fashioned words. I expected my blood was being cleansed of red and was now a clear colour.
Tilda was the same, though she took it one step further. What I called soap and water she called pure and holy. She said no wonder churches are the common wedding preference: even if you don’t believe in God, what other place is worthy? You can do it in your living room but that insults the feeling. She set her mind on the little white place at Mallock Mallock. It hadn’t been used in years but was so dignified, so simple in the Presbyterian manner. Oh, it would need sprucing up but leave it to her; she’d fix it. She skip-ran down the stairs for a pen to list arrangements. Weatherboards would need re-nailing. She had once sketched the church, made watercolours of its windy ambiance—a bare paddock and padlocked gate, ragged gum trees like sentries. She noticed two stained-glass windows were broken but not too badly. She spied through the cracks and saw cobwebs—they’d need sweeping. There were bat droppings and bat stench, the abandoned nests of sparrows or starlings. She would clean it all, scrubbing one-handed. ‘My pet project,’ she decreed. I was off the hook with my legs being their way.
As for a celebrant, Tilda would make a few inquiries. A minister was all we needed. There would be no catering or grandiose expense—this was our marriage, hers and mine, no family present. Other people get married to show themselves off, a stage production with bridesmaids and flowing veils, Rolls-Royces driving in convoy. We had nothing to show off except rotten health. Nobody was going to watch us become each other’s spouse, weeping how touching it was and feeling sorry for us. We’d exchange vows in the tiny chapel in the presence of the god you have when you don’t believe in any—Nature. The wheat-field winds, the sea-blue sky; tree limbs creaking around us in their own crippled dramas.
‘I get the sense that chapel has been waiting years,’ she said. ‘Doing nothing but wait for the sole purpose of having us in it.’
She bought a catalogue from the newsagent—Wedding Bells. She wanted to wear white like the chapel’s whiteness. Fawns, blues, greens would not do for a wedding, our wedding. They’re for ordinary dos and balls. It was $500, though, for a dress with the merest satin. Instead she ordered a roll of material and pretty lace lengths and a silken bustle, part of an intricate effort to measure herself and cut and pin and stitch the fabric. She taped thimbles to her finger ends and bound up her bad hand, keeping the binding loose enough to let her bend and grasp while ensuring security against needle injury. She sat on the lounge floor and threaded her wedding artwork. I wasn’t allowed to enter and glimpse it. My eyes would have to wait for the ceremony, which is the custom. The dress took a month to complete. She called it her masterpiece. It’s still here somewhere, folded in two garbage bags against silverfish. I think it’s under her side of the bed but I don’t want to see.