Craig Sherborne: The Amateur Science of Love

They say men marry their mothers. Me, I fell in love with Tilda Robson.

Same eyes, I admit, but that’s about it: twin blues below tawny moustache-brows.

My Tilda had a masters; my mother had TV guides.

She was an artist; my mother a drunken farm wife.

I was born in New Zealand at twenty-one years old: up till then my life had just been practice. I was supposed to be a farmer, but I never had the heart. I had airs of being famous, of being an actor.

‘Pipedreams,’ my father said. ‘How could a solid man throw such a dreamer!’

I did so-so at school then dropped out of uni, which my father held against me but soon came round: I was home and he had hopes that home meant home forever. What a team we’d make—I was his only child—more blood brothers than mere son and father. ‘All this will be yours one day,’ he’d say, and fling his arm towards the jade-green vastness. The our jade-green, our thousand Waikato acres, our mountains where cloud-surf breaks on the peak and tears open with good steady rains.

He didn’t realise that pipedreams themselves are green; they have mountains of their own where you see forever. He’d never keep me there at the bottom of the world, anonymous for all my future. Only if God himself said the sacrifice would be worth it, and promised to put me in the Bible, the ultimate famous.

My first pipedream was officer in the navy, a commander of men in epaulettes and whites. A warrior hero like the ancients. When the literature arrived I put a line through the notion: it was 1984 and only peacetime. I’d float my years away in the middle of nowhere. No one would ever notice I’d been alive.

The acting pipedream came from staring in the mirror. I was good-looking enough, if not face-perfect. I had my mother’s ears, even though her ears were better. Mine stuck out too much, like capital Cs, the width of thumb and hooked forefinger.

I had my father’s nose, but his was straighter, shorter, thinner. Mine, I was sure of it, was worsening above the nostrils: the bulb there fattened each time I checked it in the mirror. And I checked it in the mirror on the hour.

They, my parents, Norm and Marg, were their true likeness in photos, still handsome in their bickering fifties. I was puffier in pictures. Side-on I had a flabby double-up of jaw skin. The old girl envied that as baby fat, said she would swap it any day for her wrinkles. But I never saw much justice in the compliment. What were photographs to her with the old boy her main audience? Or to him with his public of cows, sheep and horses?

I taped the Cs flat, scrunched up rugby-like at night so sleep would make the ugly things go smaller. As for the bulb, I tried to clothes-peg it narrower. I learned to nod off through the watery pain. I wore a headband chin to crown as if I had toothache, but there was no sign the chin was going to lift. The clothes peg sprung free whenever I turned over. I had to sleep on my back, which made me snore my throat raw.

I had a real name I didn’t exactly spit to say, but I was no Colin any more than common . As for Butcher—it made me sound like sausages. I renamed myself after many tries—first Kirk Mane (too pretentious), Bradley Aurora (the same), Stephen Spire (too effeminate), Carl Tremain (not bad, not great). Then it came to me like a two-word poem: John Adore. John suggesting masculine. The Adore for what I wished for.

I didn’t know for sure if I had any talent. In school plays I always got applause—I could hold a tune, yell loud and get angry. One problem was I’d shake from being so nervous, as if the stage lights were shorting up through my shoes. That’s what I blamed—I blamed stage lights, I blamed incompetent electricians.

My father blamed school for putting ideas in my head. It put ideas in when it should have put in a few clues. For just as he invests in 300 acres, buys out neighbours to build a bigger pie, so a school builds a boy into a viable prospect: puts maths into him so one day he’s good with money. Science so he knows how his house and sheds keep standing. Good English so he won’t miss the fine print in a contract. What else is a private school for!

He blamed my mother for being Mrs Melodrama. Too much ‘If I had my life over again I would have aimed at better than a farmer husband.’ Too much buying me floral shirts and saying, ‘Oh, let him grow his hair.’ Too much swanning about pickled like those TV Americans, saying, ‘You be Snapper, honey. I’ll be Paige’ as if she’s in those idiot soap operas.

When the literature arrived to audition at RADA, my dad blamed her for being too encouraging. Too much rolling her gin-drowsy eyes and Rs: ‘The R-R-Royal Academy of Dr-r-ramatic Art.’ The Peter O’Tooles and Roger Moores in the booklet made her swoon. Alumni, I called them. She called them a bit of all right. ‘My son is following in such distinguished footsteps. Next stop, Hollywood.’

She called my father ‘dense’ and ‘spoilsport’ when he told her to stop going off with the fairies. They were her usual trump words to best his ‘fairies’. He trumped back with his usual work speech: how he can take a broken water pump and make that work. He can run 600 dairy cows, 1.4 of them to the acre, and make that work. He’s bred twenty racehorses for a total of twenty-five wins from 150 starts. They know about work. But his own son? He can’t make him work. He thumped his fist into his hand on work .

I studied the slap-jab of that action and mimicked it in my mind. Same for the slit of his accusing mouth—his lips bitten together between words: ‘I can take a broken water pump (bite) and make that work (bite and thump).’ I memorised how frustration jammed his breathing. He took a deep breath through his nose, held it in, then sighed it loose. His eyes became a pucker of lid skin, the dark bullseye of his pupils set deeper in his head than normal.

Sometimes my mimicking slipped out onto my face and I puckered and bit and breath-jammed back at him. He’d make fists of both hands and warn me not to mock him or so help me. I wasn’t mocking him, just storing for acting what a face does when a man’s in fury.

I tried to tell him as much but he’d stomp off for a few strides. I took a stride after him, storing every tic and motion with my camera-mind. His left fingers hooked on his belt. His right hand lifting off his brown pork-pie, too old and finger-smeared now for race meetings, but still good enough to enclose his paddock-blown hair.

I took three hours to hose the dairy shed when it should have taken one. I didn’t muck out stables, I shirked in them. The definition of shirker, that was me, he bit and breathed. ‘What do you do in those stables all morning?’

Practise, I told him. Practise. How to bow to an audience (to the soaking muck sack). I practised bravos to the stable broom. I kissed my fingertips to the spotlight sun, thanking the experienced god who worked it and shone dust motes on me like confetti. I up-ended the yard rake for my microphone. ‘Thank you. Thank you,’ I bowed and begged. ‘Please, please, no more applause.’ My voice was getting toffier with each morning’s horse-box session as I ticked the days off towards London.

So that’s what I do, I said. Practise. I had perfected a pitchfork as a soldier’s spear (I stood to attention, an invisible pitchfork to my shoulder to demonstrate). I’d have to start out in small roles and develop things from there. The better parts will come one day, the ultimates, the Hamlets.