If I was practising with Caroline, I was practising for Tilda.
They say we’re ninety per cent water. But that’s only our bodies. It’s the other ten per cent that causes bother. If we could x-ray inside there we might see a person’s thinking, spy out the bits of feeling in them that apply to us.
If I learned anything from Caroline it was the basics of taking x-rays.
I learned a blouse is not just a piece of clothing, it is a signal of information. If it Vs open to halfway then it’s for my sake. Between hoovering and brushing the loo she reapplied makeup: my sake. Her rump of jeans was filled tight but not too fatly. When she kicked off her shoes she had glisten-gold toenails. Her skin was many colours, from mottled pink on her ankles to oak-leaf brown on her arms. I didn’t desire girls the same age as me. They wanted to get pregnant and call me husband. Caroline had done all that. She wanted lust with me, not a family. I learned I had a thing for older women. Pleasure with no responsibility.
When she got sweaty from scrubbing she stripped to a bra-less frilly top—my sake. She cooled off at the clothesline hanging washing. Always my clothes first—was she giving them extra handling? Her nipples showed out like two permissions. At least, they read that way to me.
I recited my audition for RADA for her—all that clever-sounding schoolboy Shakespeare: the
put money in thy purse
speech; the
why should a rat have life?
She called them heavy and a little over her head. ‘You must be so smart to remember such old words.’ Smart. When had I ever been called smart! It’s like being looked up to, and having the right to look down your nose.
Whatever stewy part of our ten per cent works out the rights and wrongs of our actions it didn’t qualm us from starting kissing. She had the use of me, and left her wedding ring on, and twenty-one’s too young to have morals.
I had never felt so…so…sophisticated. Movies, TV and books and I were now related. The sins in their stories had become my own. ‘As long as my kids don’t find out.’ That was Caroline’s only worry. That’s the rule, that’s the small-town code.
That’s how I got there, in short: London, 1985. In short, and yet it’s perfect—my life shrunk down to this written form. Here I am in my home on Main Street in Scintilla, Australia. It is 1993. I am sitting at my little wood desk, upstairs in a nook beside the bathroom. I may be in Scintilla but right this minute I am in London in my mind. I am about to fall in love all over again in sentences. Fall in love, fall in pity, fall in anger, hate, fear, pain. I bet Shakespeare that’s all writing is: you live life out a second time, make sense of it to clear your conscience, square your soul.
To start with, the thrilling part, the love part. I swoon just thinking about it.
London was a bitter place in October 1985. I don’t just mean the cold. Unemployment queues, a miners’ strike—there was no Empire any longer if you took notice of the news. Me,
I
had a job. I had initiative. I had thirty pounds a week, with a room and food included. If the English didn’t want to work I would do it. I would clean a youth hostel, and that is exactly what I did. I wasn’t so proud I couldn’t sweep corridors. Cow and horse stink prepared me well for toilets.
I was promoted to cutting the lunch ham. You had to hold it very softly to the mechanical slicer. If you squeezed it would slime away, you could lose a finger in the blade.
I had no idea Tilda existed. She was in New York, going to galleries like churches. She had pipedreams of her own, of being a Pollock or Rothko. The other matter, RADA—even now I squirm to think of it. I jump on one leg and hit ‘Get out!’ to my temples to be rid of those four letters trapped like swim-water in my head.
At the time I convinced myself my failure was a blessing. It was bitter fate doing me a favour: I should be happy it happened, the shorting-foot-nerve problem. Such a violent attack I almost fainted. It rattled my leg bones and sent my nerves into such a spasm all my words got tangled: I recited, ‘Put rats in thy purse.’ It was humiliating.
Even if I had been accepted I would have turned them down. Or so I said at the time to my vanity. What kind of building was called Royal Academy and yet was shabby as an old town hall, flaked plaster and peeling paint? Where was the spruced, grand glamour?
And as for the two who sat and judged my shake-tangle show. I had dressed in good shoes and white shirt. I wore a duffle coat for the outside chill, but only for the outside. I carried it serviette-style like a gentleman when in.
They
wore jeans rubbed out at the knees. Jumpers moth-holed and letting through elbows.
I had combed my hair down, parted it at the side for a dash of drawing room elegance. They had matted mops, and beards with patches of baldness showing, the way beards are when you’re young. They must have been under thirty and yet were magistrates of me. And no proper speaking either. They had cockney vowels. I was expecting Sir-someones with impeccable language. I was taller than they were but they looked down at me and smirked. I was thankful that at least they didn’t laugh in my face.
I could not get out of the place quick enough. My legs were awobble with nerve-water but I swayed down the hall and barged through the front doors onto the street before my legs gave way and I slipped on fish batter and rain spit.
It occurred to me to do myself in. Just a thought-sip of suicide, nothing more.
My room was tiny; I nicknamed it The Box. Four strides by three with a camp bed in the corner. I had to sleep with one shoulder hanging over to fit the rest of me. The hostel clientele were Italians, Germans, Australians. A hundred of them a night stacked in rickety bunks. Girls in the north wing; boys the south. My shift began at 6.30 each morning, serving breakfast with Polish Lily and Dirk from Rotterdam. At 10 we did the cleaning. The main rule was, if we slept with guests they still had to pay the bunk fee.
I hadn’t slept with more than my passport under my pillow, but that was about to change: Tilda was coming. She was bringing my future with her. It had hatched in her hair, was growing down her limbs and about to make contact with me. She had arrived at Heathrow. Her purple haversack was hitting the carousel,
Tilda Robson
printed across it in gold texta. Flat 4, 14 Lyndon Street, St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia.
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.
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.