The Amateur Science of Love by Craig Sherborne Page A

don’t knows and Don’t worrys . Where I am concerned they use talk that avoids talking: ‘What footy team do you barrack for?’
    There is suspicion if can’t answer that question in Melbourne. If you can’t say the Dons or Magpies or Demons it’s as if you’re a threat, an alien. I said the Dons just to keep everyone happy.
    In reality they were inside Tilda’s bed screen but I have decided to keep things to just her and me or else I will get shuffled back from the bed at this point, as I was that day. They stopped short of saying, ‘Can you step outside please, mate?’ but I sniffed the sentiment. She had been theirs all her life; I had been on the scene five minutes. I was an impostor. When she clutched my hand I could x-ray jealousy, especially in her parents. I’m not retaliating here but they are now my impostors. I decide who gains admission to this testimony. They were not Tilda’s lover. Nobody but we two could understand the intimacy to come. I want to get it on the record, that intimacy, because it’s a finest-hour entry in my otherwise lopsided list.

Chapter 36
    Mr outranks Dr in the medical world, an anti-title they give to their royalty. Mr gave Edwin Roff’s words added authority; he was surgeon law. His hair was white as prophets’, his cheeks gaunt from the great burden of informing patients of what pathologists saw in their petri dishes. In Tilda’s case they saw a large malignant tumour, a most aggressive, dangerous form. They saw two secondaries from the same breast. The lymph nodes in her armpit had cancer in them as well.
    Roff said he was going to speak quickly and directly to get it all said—the facts, the course of action. If I, Colin, would be alert in case Tilda could not take it all in. Becky too please, her sister, sitting the other side of her at Roff’s wide dark-wood desk. There were two schools of thought on such diseases. His was the school that advocated radical action—removal of the full breast. The other school preferred removal of lumps only. ‘I take the view,’ he said quietly, ‘that the radical option is better. Removal of the affected breast, the lymph nodes stripped away: an aggressive attack to match an aggressive cancer. We will follow that up with chemotherapy.’
    It was a game of numbers, he explained. Of percentages, of odds. If Tilda’s cancer returned within twelve months then the chances of survival…(he paused to select the right word) fell. If in twelve months it had not returned, well, then there was a fifty-fifty chance it might not return the following year. The odds extend more favourably as years go by.
    He permitted his lips to bend into a professional smile of hope and goodwill. Tilda did not return the smile. Roff reached across his desk and spread his long pink fingers in front of us as if to display his wares—his expert tongs for the removal of deadliness. Tilda bowed her head. He patted her forearm and leant back into his black leather chair, his fingertips testing his bow tie’s straightness.
    Tilda lifted her head. ‘What about a baby?’
    Roff’s smile bent into reverse, into a frown. He jerked forward to look in Tilda’s file. ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’
    ‘No.’
    His face unfrowned.
    ‘But I’d like to be.’
    He frowned again. ‘There are two things I would say about that. Firstly, a pregnancy could very likely speed your cancer on. It would also make treatment more limited.’
    ‘So you’re saying I can’t have children, ever?’
    ‘I would advise against it, ever,’ he said firmly, then tried to soften the blow. ‘The other issue is the social implication. There are certain social issues, which I’m sure you can imagine.’
    Ever was too much of a cobweb word for her to continue the conversation. She waved it from her face and convulsed into a hunchback of tears. Becky and I scrummed her shoulders and uttered useless comforting. ‘It’s all right. It’s okay.’ We kept it up for several minutes,