Read The Amateur Science of Love for Free Online

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.
    There was another page of her longhand with its lean tadpole Fs and refined seahorse Ss, as if the lines were living and shining:
    Sweetheart—four weeks of not seeing you and yet it feels so natural to call you sweetheart. Please forgive me for racing off on you the way I did. I had to. I had to cool off. I don’t know what more to say except I want to see you again.
    I was going to fly home from Frankfurt, but maybe I could go through London instead. Can I stay with you? I will ring you in a few days. Will it be easy to have you come to the phone? If it’s not I will leave a number and hope you feel like calling.
    Do take care. Speak soon.
    Love, Tilda XX
    I wouldn’t put it past the future to have ears. Massive ears so it can listen in on phone calls and assess if two people are matching up. The measurement for success I bet is giggly standardised language: plenty of How have you been? and I wish you were here and I miss you . If the future was listening to Tilda and me it would have thought we were coming along nicely. From the first phone call we used sweetheart instead of our names. There were numerous pauses for sighing. We hadn’t even finished the call and we were