I stomped away blankets. The off-smell of our sleeping bodies hung in the stuffy air. ‘Why do you have to go?’
‘I have to go, and that’s that.’
She broke a band in her haste and mumbled a series of contradictions: no, there was nothing wrong. Yes, of course there was something wrong. These have been the most superb few days for her. They have also been disastrous. ‘This is an art trip. Art is not this.’
My wishbone sent a burp into my mouth. I wanted to sweeten my breath with toothpaste before holding her and kissing her to please stay, but there wasn’t time. ‘Let me bring you breakfast. Let’s have breakfast here in bed,’ I said.
She stroked my chin with the inside of her fingertips, then the knuckle side. I kissed her fingers, their faint ink odour. Forever ink is her scent to me, the personal perfume of her skin. She said, ‘You’re a beautiful boy. But you are just a boy.’
‘I’m twenty-one. I am not a boy.’ I did not feel a boy. I did not feel a man. I was me. I did not feel any age.
Tilda stroked some more. I flinched from her touch. ‘Three days ago I was free,’ she said. ‘I was free and open to life. Now I just want to stay in this room with you and make love and never see or speak to the outside world. I need to get out of here. Now. I have Venice and Florence waiting for me. I have Madrid and Amsterdam. Goodbye, my lovely, lovely boy.’
I shook my face curtain down. She unzipped her black books from her bag, opened one, the one smeared with pages of crinkly me. She tore out two pages for my keepsake. ‘Please take them. Remember me with them.’ She closed the book. ‘The rest I will keep.’
She unzipped her yellow flower shirt, another keepsake. ‘Try it on.’ She attempted another stroke of my chin. I let her. She helped me dress in the shirt. It was too tight a fit, but that wasn’t the point. It was hers. She took a step backwards to watch me button up.
I stepped forward. It was me who did the stroking then. She fended me off with a soft push. ‘No,’ she said, and swung her bag on. She kissed her fingers in my direction and without looking me in the eye she uttered goodbye and left at a walking sprint down the corridor.
Chapter 14
My nausea was a different kind now. It came with cramps. Cramps as I put out the butter and croissants. I wanted to fold up in bed but there was my shift to do. Cramps as I brewed coffee in the vat. The smell of it was enough to make me retch. My innards needed food but I couldn’t take food.
I folded the ink mes into my wallet. I vowed to rip them up for the garbage, deface them and thereby erase Tilda from my mind. But I put them in my wallet. I thought of wearing her yellow shirt as an apron, of doing the dishes in it until it was crusty from wiping my hands. Instead I washed the thing on gentle cycle. I ironed it for hanging on the hook on my door.
How long would they last, these cramps and retching? I had no previous experience to go on. Would a nasty bout give me immunity? Good riddance to her, I told myself. Who wants a woman with ‘little experiments’ in her history!
A week went by and still I had the sickness. I became desperate for an antidote. The obvious one was to go out on the town, go searching for a Tilda replacement. I felt more attractive than I ever had in my life. I had been physically transformed—a peculiar quirk of what ailed me. My face had lighter shading, like naturally occurring makeup. My skin was tight and polished-looking. My eye-whites gleamed regardless of poor sleeping. I was ill and super-well at the same time.
I believed I had developed a new power. I called it ‘being in season’, the livestock term for when an animal puts out mating odour. What else could explain the interest female patrons of the hostel showed in me? I had not drunk any special potion.
Melissa, for instance. Tilda’s first replacement. I thought Americans would be beyond my reach: they were from the capital of the world; I was from the opposite. But I was in season. And what an antidote Melissa was. Americans are not a curious people. They do not waste breath on talk not centred on them. They have a speech ready for advertising their own existence. Melissa’s began with how her long black hair was from her Shawnee heritage, and ended with how Marlboros kept her thin and the sugar in Coke kept her energetic. Her teeth were a picket fence of whiteness that New Zealanders only got with dentures.
Inga from Hamburg had man traits bigger than Tilda’s: hands you get from manual labour, though Inga had never lifted more than law books. It must have been racial.
The next was from Wales (Moira or Myra—I have forgotten her name). I took each replacement to the National Gallery and held my hand at arm’s length to block out realism. I found art cathartic, I said. I informed them that Turner was abstraction’s pioneer. I took them to Samuel Pepys and explained how his name was mustard because it hinted at hotness. I kissed and fondled them in the amber privacy.
They let me go inside them and there was no pulling out. I promised I would but never bothered. I was impatient to get them out of my room when it was over. I wanted Tilda’s nasally accent in my ear, not theirs. I wanted her sun-speckled shoulders and the speckled front between her collarbones.
Chapter 15
This desk in my little nook is where I go to tell the truth. It’s an honesty box, writing about yourself. I hold it to my ear and it rattles with apologies like these: Sorry, Melissa, wherever you are. You too, Inga and Moira or Myra. I treated you cheaply. Imagine if my sickness had been the AIDS kind and not love. I could have infected you with my expellings. At the very least I might have made you pregnant. Sometimes I fantasise there’ll be a knock on the door and there you’ll stand with a child in my image to claim me as its father, and want some money. You were just fleeting to me, nothing more. And with fleetings there is this sexual rule: complications from a one-night stand are their problem.
After a month I decided to leave the hostel, so any their problems couldn’t find me. Fleetings are addictive but for all the solace they give they can soon bore you and sour you with emptiness. I didn’t know that Tilda had the sickness for me. I had submitted my resignation and on the same day an envelope was poked under my door, her elegant longhand on the front. On the back, on the V-fold, was a drawing of my face.
Dear Colin,
‘Darling Colin,’ I really want to say. I certainly won’t write ‘Sweet boy.’ I know how ‘boy’ riles you.
This is not a letter I expected to be writing. I hate writing. Painters should paint not write, especially when they are overwhelmed by something. If I continue the letter in drawings will the images make sense? I hope they express what I am feeling coherently.
I unfolded four pieces of paper. They had furry edges down one side from being torn from her black book.
Page one had a violent theme. Tilda was seated on a plane or ferry. Her fist was reaching in through her plait, into her brain. Inside her brain was a curled-up me. She was grabbing and pulling to remove me. The drawing was titled ‘Sweet boy, but good riddance.’
Page two had me again. She’d got my nose-bulb down pat. My face curtain was fanned out like a powerful wingspan. I was flying up into her body between her legs. The title of this one was ‘Eagleman. Apologies to Leda and the Swan.’
Page three had Tilda asleep. I was asleep too, but asleep inside her, where her heart and lungs would be. The title: ‘Insomnia. 3 a.m. Colinized.’
Page four was ‘After El Greco.’ Tilda was naked and crucified, though with one arm across herself in that protective way of hers. The other arm was nailed the Jesus way, beneath a crown of thorns which was actually a crown of mes. My head, a dozen of them, twined around hers.