Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  It should have been the summer indelibly marked by the arrival of my first dog, an eight-week-old Golden Retriever, or at least the summer Kirsten began to entertain at home with her door closed, the summer she began to play spin the bottle with old friends I could not recognise from their latency period, the summer she began to kiss, audibly, a fearless hero at her school named Joe Geraghty. At the very least it should have been the summer someone explained to me why Amanda was going to go to a school for ‘young ladies’, as her mother had put it, and why people everywhere seemed not to need me. There was summer enough for all these things and yet it became known to all of us, solemnly thereafter, as the time George had stayed, the summer with George.

  As the days progressed after his arrival the furnace at the end of the hall that was my bedroom became a confined place of whispers and drawn curtains, discarded singlets and half-eaten meals left on trays propped up on a worn leather suitcase beside his bed. George slept, or at least stayed in bed, most of the time. I learned that the stubble on a man’s face can measure the change in his circumstances, and that his circumstances can change until he no longer recognises himself.

  The cheerlessness of my own circumstances hit my mother one bright afternoon when she came to my room to replace an old meal with a new one. George was asleep and I was on the floor with a scattering of balsa-wood, some ice-cream sticks and glue, trying to read the instructions to one or other model aeroplane by torchlight. I whispered my concern that the glue might dry if I took it outside under the sun. It was a day or two after that my mother came home with an eight-week-old Golden Retriever from the Lady Nell ‘Seeing Eye’ Dog School. She told me the dog was mine but only for a year.

  My father told Kirsten and me that George was not well. When he told me this his voice took on a solemnity which clarified nothing for me, nothing except that I had to be understanding of an ailment which he was not going to explain or even define. He showed very little interest in my dog or in the circumstances of Amanda’s disappearance. He was so distracted by his brother that Kirsten, without the least subterfuge, was able to transform her bedroom from a Laura Ashley Garden of Eden, a haven for soft toys and meetings of a girls’ only Friends of Narnia society, into a junior secondary school version of a cat-house. It was only the likelihood that George would be disturbed by the immoderate laughter emanating from the entertainment across the hall that led to a dramatic scaling down of Kirsten’s late night socialising. But I could have told my parents that George did not sleep at night. He just lay there and, for much of the time, I watched him.

  Once my father had discovered this for himself he and George began having regular whispered bedside conversations into the small hours of the night. Presumably they thought that they wouldn’t wake me, or, if they did, that I wouldn’t understand them. It was during those hot whispered nights that I heard how George had borrowed against some properties to pay for a parcel of speculative shares; minerals, gold. I heard how good it had looked. When the price began to fall George thought he would wait for the market to ‘come to its senses’. And it was still going to, he begged my father to believe, but the bank would not wait and the shares kept falling. He was unable to pay the interest. It was then, without telling Peggy, that to buy more time he mortgaged their house as well. When he wouldn’t answer the bank’s correspondence or return their telephone calls the bank sent a representative over to the house to inquire personally. But George was out trying to raise another loan and the bank representative, a young man named Fitzspiers, ended up telling Peggy much more than she could tell him.

  Peggy said nothing of Fitzspiers’ visit to George but began calling at the bank to find out exactly what her husband had done with his money. The house was in George’s name, the properties had been owned by his business. The usual legal niceties of confidentiality were dispensed with by Fitzspiers who must have been ahead of his time in taking the position that the debtor’s young wife had a moral claim to a full disclosure of her husband’s debts. Still she said nothing to George and he, frantically arranging meetings with all sorts of people at odd hours, said nothing to her.

  A man cannot lose when his gain is tied to the loss of a man who cannot win. Fitzspiers could wait. A bank takes stock of its assets in units of time greater than an hour but when a man owes more than he has, he knows it by the minute, every minute. It would have been trespass had Peggy not invited him in. Fitzspiers drank Scotch, Peggy gin and tonic. They waited for George to pull up in his Zephyr sedan. Fitzspiers’ superiors regarded his patience as a sign of his dedication to the recovery of a bad or doubtful debt. Peggy regarded it differently.

  She knew how to please men. George’s voice endowed the word ‘please’ with a significance I did not quite understand. He had heard this before he had even met her, about her knowing how to please men, but as he explained to my father, when you love someone you choose not to see what you don’t want to see. He asked my father if he understood what he meant. I did not hear my father’s response.

  ‘You see, she’s not … really,’ he whispered, ‘… she’s not … a whore.’ George sat up. ‘It was greed,’ he whispered.

  ‘Your greed?’

  ‘Hers. I didn’t want that much. You’re my brother. We’ve never needed that much … I didn’t … only her. I needed her. Things had to keep getting better for me to keep her.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  He explained with conviction that a man is, both to the world and to his wife, the sum of his material effects, his house, his furniture, his car, his business, his clothes, and that no one could be fairly blamed for seeing it that way. Certainly not Peggy.

  ‘You know her hair wasn’t really blonde. She didn’t bleach it but it was actually more like … gold. Really … it was … like wheat, the colour of wheat in the afternoon. It hung down as far as her coccyx so that sometimes when she was naked you still couldn’t see all of her. She’d wanted to be an actress. Really … like wheat. Her skin was so smooth. In bed I would rub my nose along the small of her back. I died inside her. Part of me never came out, never left her. So sometimes … I really thought that whatever she did … was alright … because I was … still with her. Isn’t that … pathetic.’

  Lying still as a corpse, I listened to every word George whispered and could see it all for myself. I could hear the music, Sergio Mendez, blanketing out the sound of his car. I felt the weight of the car door as it closed shut. Then I could hear Peggy’s laughter as it turned into moans. She knew how to be pleased too.

  From that time on, I have remembered it as though I had been there. My father must have been certain I was asleep or else he would not have let his brother continue. But only the crickets interrupted his brother’s whisper. Perhaps he was watching it happen as every word took the air, just as I was. I could see it all. I imagined the night hot and still as the night I was hearing it.

  George had missed Fitzspiers’ car but I had seen it. I wanted to warn him not to go any further, as though had he seen it, it would not have happened. I liked Peggy very much.

  Her hair hung down her back. Her shoulders were bare, her back to the window. From the street the man from the bank could not be seen. Nor could he be seen from the front lawn. But we knew he was there, George, my father and me. George knew it but he kept coming closer, drawn further in horror but without anger. He could not be angry because it was his own doing, he reasoned. He had brought it on himself. Moths and mosquitoes fought each other for prime position around the porch light. With real estate, position is everything. We knew Fitzspiers was there, facing us, on his knees, his head below the window with her seated on a dining chair between him and us and the flickering insects. George could not talk. Breath left him and he stopped where he was. Having seen enough, he stayed there watching more. You could see the world from his verandah.

  This was the way he told it and the way I saw it. He drank before this but he used to sleep then as well. My father
was watching his brother simply shift along an old continuum. The bank did sell the house. There were papers to prove it, documents recording a ‘mortgagee sale’, as it was called. All that was left for him, he felt, was to make an ageing nuisance of himself at bingo or else wander the night streets in the hope of being granted permission to weep an old man’s regret into the silicon breasts of a bewildered transsexual prostitute. Having lost his house he came to the house of his younger brother and there on a makeshift bed in my room he wept for Peggy. And I, separated from him by the width of a single bed and almost forty years, had no choice but to breathe in as much of his grief as I could stand and to store the rest for a rainy day.

  Kirsten was sounding so much older than she had before she took up with Joe Geraghty just a few weeks earlier. If she was not with him she was attached to the telephone in an approximation of the alternative. My mother was having trouble disguising her displeasure at the relationship. Was it the intensity, the suddenness, Kirsten’s youth or her sudden need to address both our parents by their first names that so bothered my mother? Or was it Joe?

  Joe was at our place the evening George walked into the dining room for dinner. It would have been the first time George had eaten with us since he arrived. From the way he looked it could have been the first time he had eaten at all. His face was gaunt and the skin around his substantial beard was pale and veined the colour of an onion. The sun had started to set.

  If he could have drawn from the well of empathy for him in that room he might just have been able to stay. Instead, overwhelmed by the shame that was the fruit of his former vanity, and with his face wet from tears, he turned and fled back to bed.

  ‘George,’ my father went after him. He emerged alone some fifteen minutes later, and as we ate in silence, he called Dr Byard.

  ‘I can’t do any more for him,’ he said to my mother in despair. ‘All that’s happened … I mean … it’s not that bad. He shouldn’t be …’

  My mother rose to steady my father to his seat at the table. From the kitchen she brought out a plate of food she had kept hot for him in the oven.

  It was not that bad but it did not need to be. Peggy’s leaving, her infidelity, the loss of his house and his business, as bad as these were, these were simply the inevitable way-stations to a place I would one day learn about.

  O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

  Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

  May who ne’er hung there.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins knew all about it but my father did not. He kept searching for the reasons his advice and his patience were of no use to his brother.

  Dr Neville Byard was somewhere between my father’s age and George’s age. He was our family doctor and had been since Kirsten was born. His hands were always smooth and cool so that it seemed that just by touching a fevered forehead he could reduce your temperature to normal within seconds. Periodically we waited in our sickbeds for his laying on of hands. He had immaculately manicured fingernails, even better than my father’s fingernails which occasionally attracted a speck of grey under them after he had been repairing something for us. His hair was shiny but trimmed so short it looked to be painted on. He had made the taming of nasal hair into an art-form. But more than his personal grooming, my parents relied on his thus far unfailing capacity to alleviate their anxieties over any itinerant ailment that dared to trespass upon their children’s anatomy. He had assured my mother that baby Kirsten’s apparent inhabitation by wolves was more accurately described as croup and would be gone within three days. (Her asthma was to prove more stubborn.) He had put a stitch in my chin after a collision with a renegade swing.

  But by the summer of 1970, Neville Byard was no longer the smiling but phlegmatic doctor my parents had always appealed to when we were ill. He had changed in those last few months between my outbreak of chicken pox and Kirsten’s subsequent springtime asthma attack, something my parents, who did not see him socially, had no way of knowing when my father picked up the telephone to call him about George.

  My Golden Retriever barked her small dog’s bark even before the two knocks at the door. Dr Byard never rang the doorbell, as though there was something apocalyptic and maybe even therapeutic in the sound of a hand against wood. He could better control the sound which announced his arrival this way than by trusting a doorbell of some third party’s design and installation. After instructing me to put the dog out, my father took the good doctor into the kitchen. Kirsten and Joe had long since retired to her bedroom where Kirsten could all the better discuss how she really felt.

  Neville Byard was a more reserved man than the one my father had expected to be confiding to about his brother. I noticed it immediately. He barely looked at me, whereas usually, even when it was Kirsten he had come to see, he would always say hello to me and ruffle my hair with his wrist, never with his fingers. He had always made things better. I watched him through the kitchen door as my father gave his account of all that had happened to George and its effect on him. Before they were finished I took my pup to her basket where she curled up with me beside her, both under my bed.

  Then the door opened briefly letting in both a thin shaft of light and Dr Byard with his black satchel. He came in alone and sat down quietly on the edge of my bed, on top of me and the dog and opposite George.

  ‘George, I’m Neville Byard, your brother’s GP.’

  George said nothing.

  ‘I think we’ve met … once or twice before … It was a few years ago. Perhaps you don’t remember. Things were different for you then, I understand, for me too … actually very different. Your brother suggested that we might have a chat. He thinks you might be suffering some form of depression. He thought I might be able to help you … Actually I don’t think he realises … quite how much … I know about it ….Last year Russell, my eldest, turned twenty. Like so many of the young lads today, I suppose, he didn’t possess any burning ambition to do anything in particular on leaving school. He’d had various jobs, part time, but nothing … nothing you could call a career. Although he had talked about … well, it was more than just talk … taking up engineering at RMIT. But …’

  Dr Byard paused for a few moments.

  ‘He got the letter, George, soon after his twentieth birthday. He was to report to the CES for a medical. He’d been conscripted. I wasn’t there when the letter came. I was at the surgery but my wife got the mail and there was the letter from the Government addressed to Russell. He was in his room playing the guitar. Not really my kind of music but … you know how it is, he liked it … always played it, right from the time … pretty good at it really, I suppose. So I’m told.

  ‘He had talked about enrolling not long before … in engineering, I mean … but he … well, he had just finished with his girlfriend. Russell had been mad about this girl, Louise, lovely girl and … anyway she ended it … I don’t know why but he was heart-broken. You can imagine, George, it had been … what had it been?… well since before he’d finished school so … that makes it over two years and then all of a sudden … well I don’t really know how sudden it was. I don’t blame her. She was a lovely girl. But when they broke up he just … he didn’t seem to have much enthusiasm for a while and he didn’t mention engineering … I don’t think … not after Louise. Then he was twenty and before we knew it we were getting his letters from Puckapunyal.

  ‘Ten weeks’ basic training at Puckapunyal. I would imagine it’s the same for everyone. “Fit or dead” one of the drill instructors told him. Ten-mile runs, twenty-mile marches in full pack, constant pressure, weapons training, physical training, the whole bit. Russell said some of them would just whimper at night till they fell asleep, and if they woke in the middle of the night, once they realised where they were, they would start to whimper again. That’s what Russell said.

  ‘The drill instructors apparently got them in groups to watch each of them fire directly into forty-four-gallon drums filled with water. Then they’d t
ake the recruits around to the other side of the drums just to show them the gaping holes where the bullets had passed through and the water was gushing out. Told them this was what they’d look like if they got hit. It served no didactic purpose, George. Prepared them for nothing but fear.’

  George knew about fear.

  ‘We saw him for the week between Puckapunyal and the infantry training centre in New South Wales. Having no skills, George, they put him in the infantry. If he had any engineering he wouldn’t have gone there. If he’d had any engineering, even if he hadn’t finished his course, he could have got out of the whole thing. But … he spent his week at home staying in his room, playing his guitar and crying. Broke his mother’s heart. Well, there was nothing I could do by this stage. Nothing.

  ‘He spent about a month and a half in New South Wales. I can’t remember the name of the place. Was it Ingleburn? Anyway, after that his letters started coming from Queensland, the land warfare centre at … er … Canungra. Each time they moved him he left the people he’d met for a place where he didn’t know anyone. After three weeks at Canungra he had a week of what they call “pre-embarkation” leave. He came home.

  ‘Well, his mother took one look at him and burst into tears. He had lost so much weight. He looked quite different physically. Again he spent every day and every night of that week’s leave at home. Except the last night. He went over to visit Louise. She’d been seeing some other fellow by all accounts. Shouldn’t have gone. My wife tried to tell him that.

  ‘From Melbourne to Richmond air base and from there they flew him out in a Hercules transport to a place called Thanh Son Nui near Saigon. I can’t see my skinny son Russell in a Hercules transport but that’s how he got there. From there to Nui Dat where he joined a battalion, 3RAR. He didn’t know a bloody soul there, George, not a soul.’

  Dr Byard ran his palm slowly over the outside of his leather satchel. I could hear him do it. From under the bed I could see the heels of his shoes, always black, and the grey socks growing out of them to beyond the inside hem of his trousers. The dog beside me sighed in her sleep. She seemed to find his tone soporific.