Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘Vince was in the meat trade, slaughterhouses … sorry, abattoirs. He was very attentive, at first anyway, made great money but … I just got bored. He was a big man’s man, you know?… Much closer to my age than George had been and I was … you know … lonely … I suppose, after George. But pretty soon it became clear, as he put more and more time into expanding his business, that we were never going to get any more to talk about. I was just some kind of … what do they call it?… trophy wife. Well, I’ll admit it’s flattering to be a trophy for a while but … Pretty soon there’s not much difference in the way you feel ’tween being put on a pedestal or being driven up the wall to be stuffed and mounted! You know what I mean?

  ‘I thought that maybe if I could get more involved in what he was interested in it might sort of save things. So I started dropping into his office … you know … visiting the abattoir. I mean I really do have quite a head for business.’

  ‘And he didn’t appreciate that?’

  ‘No, he did not. First he said I was in the way. Then, ’cause I suppose I did get some attention from the meatworkers, he started accusing me of a million different things, wild suspicions … million different things, most of which, you know, were absolutely crazy. Once he even hit me, right there in front of everyone. It was awful. He was screaming obscenities at me and I was crying right there among the carcasses and the offal and whatever. He was just a trumped-up butcher with tickets on himself. And he wasn’t gentle, you know? That’s one thing you can say about George. He was always gentle. A lot like your dad as I remember, in that regard. How is your dad?’

  ‘He’s fine, the same. Hasn’t changed, I don’t think.’

  ‘George was crazy about him. You know? It was really sweet to see two men, brothers, love each other like that. George was a very sweet man, larger than life in many ways. Lot of love to give.’

  ‘What happened, Peggy?’

  ‘With George?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I don’t know, Eddie. He was a gambler, you know? I mean he gambled in business, in everything. Even I was a gamble for him. Well, he felt that way.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, you know, a much younger woman. He was always afraid he’d lose me. He’d tell me this. And nothing I could ever say would reassure him. The thing was, as much as he was afraid of losing me, he did everything he could short of moving state to send me looking.’

  ‘Looking?’

  ‘Looking for something … or someone.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  She thought for a few moments.

  ‘Look, I lost my mother in childbirth and my father when I was five so I was effectively an orphan. I was put in a Catholic orphanage for girls in Ballarat. Everything there was run on fear. You know? You learned not to pee your bed at night ’cause of the beating you got in the morning. Jesus might’ve loved me but sure as hell no one else did. Imagine a six-year-old girl lying in the dormitory in the dark freezing in the middle of a Ballarat winter, shivering in her own piss, waiting, frozen, for the morning when you know you were going to get a beating. Even if you hadn’t done anything wrong the nuns, or some of them, could still scare the Christ out of you. Get up to go to the toilet in the middle of the night and you run into a bald old woman with green teeth. You’d pee yourself where you stood.

  ‘As I got older they seemed to pick on me because … I don’t know … ’cause of my hair … ’cause I was pretty, I suppose. I stood out. I was nineteen when I met George. He was flattering but not in that sleazy way. He was older and gentle. I thought he was God. You know? He was funny. I would’ve done anything for him. I used to … used to cut his hair and take care of his nails. He was kind and so … positive. He was going to lasso the moon for me, like Jimmy Stewart in … er … er … you know that movie?’

  ‘It’s A Wonderful Life.’

  ‘Yeah, It’s A Wonderful Life. I love that movie.’

  ‘Did you stop loving him?’

  ‘No, Eddie, I still love him. But he never understood that. He could never take it for granted. He felt that he had to keep showing me new things, taking me to new places. Well, I won’t lie. I am that kind, in a way.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘I do like new things, fancy places and all that. I like them but I don’t need them, not like I needed him, his attention. We already had a beautiful house and everything. But he became more and more obsessed with making money. He was hardly ever home, always looking at this property or that, meeting with some agent or other. And when he was home he was always on the phone. I couldn’t tell after a while if it was legitimate business or gambling or even other women. He said it was all for me, anyway. I couldn’t believe that ’cause I didn’t need it all that badly. I was missing him. But still he was happy, y’know positive, going to lasso the moon for me and all that. Then he started losing his money. I didn’t know the details till the end but he just started throwing good money after bad, throwing away everything we had, like an idiot. I was young, Eddie. I probably did start to lose respect for him.’

  Why had she come to my parents’ home? Was she looking for those who had once shown kindness to her? Whatever they might have said privately all those years ago about the age difference, my parents had welcomed her to our family. And Peggy had not been around to see their bitterness, particularly my mother’s, towards her after George’s death. But she had expressed relief to find me the only one home. She could not have been as certain of my parents’ fidelity as my parents had been uncertain of hers. She sat with her cocktail of tea, gin and tonic, still provocative with a beauty that was depreciating by the minute and a sadness that she fought against unsuccessfully. She did not have these problems in the long summers of my childhood. I sat there thinking of the folly of avoiding candour in a marriage.

  Why had she come to my parents’ home? How do you ask that sort of thing? All that I needed was patience. George had said she could have been an actress. Which actress could she have been?

  ‘Don’s been encouraging me to sing. That’s how I met him.’

  ‘Is Don your …?’

  ‘We’re not married but it’s … fairly serious … on my part. He’s in the entertainment industry. That’s how I met him. I was managing a jazz club in town. Great little place. Do you like jazz?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Well, you must come in some time. Only, I’m not there anymore. See, Don’s gone to America. He’s got business there. He thinks I’ve got a bit of a voice. George always said so. He left some money for me to get a ticket to join him there but since he left, the price of the tickets has gone up and I can’t reach him. I’ve got an itinerary for him but it must have changed or something. I don’t know what’s happened exactly. He must’ve had to change plans. You know the entertainment industry! But if I can get to Los Angeles on time he’ll be there to pick me up. However if he’s waiting and I’m not there … well, he might think I’ve pulled out on him and that’s not right at all. I’ve never been to the United States and this could be the start of a new life for me. You know?’

  ‘Did you come to ask my parents for—’

  ‘Not for money,’ she cut me off, ‘for advice. See, I quit my job at the club and I’ve got to get to the US or else …’

  ‘How much do you need?’

  ‘Four hundred and sixty-five dollars. That’s departure tax and everything.’

  Had he been there and heard everything that I heard, perhaps my father would have given her the money, if he had it. I did not know the details of my parents’ savings except that things had always been tight. Had he been there and given her the money my mother would have killed him. And she would have been right. How long had she gone without and made do in silence just to have Peggy glide into our consciousness long enough to remind us of George’s failings, and while she was at it pick up a lump sum ex gratia payment after ten years? My mother was due to return at any moment from a day of helping people less fortunate than her. George
would have given it to her.

  I had managed to save four hundred dollars. I’d had various part-time jobs and had earmarked the money for a holiday with Tanya somewhere in the country after our exams. Since that was no longer going to happen it did not seem such a big sacrifice to walk down the passage to my room, find my cheque book and send Peggy to the United States. Four hundred dollars was not a momentous sum for me and perhaps it could change her life.

  ‘It’s all I’ve got,’ I said handing her the cheque.

  ‘You’re an angel, Eddie, an absolute angel. You know I’ll pay you back as soon as I team up with Don.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said as I walked her out to our front gate.

  ‘Do you think you’ll come back?’ I asked her.

  ‘Maybe one day. Sure. For a visit. Not really that much here for me, ’cept you of course,’ and she turned to face me, put her hands to my temples and kissed me flush on the mouth for a very long time. We stood there embarrassed, she still with the cheque in her hand. I felt the stare of the neighbours, the same ones who had watched George carried out into the ambulance on a stretcher with a sheet over him.

  It was hard to get back to my desk and harder to concentrate once I was there. I kept thinking of George and of my childhood memories, of Peggy’s story and even of her questions.

  ‘What about you? You must have a girlfriend, Eddie?’

  I had to agree. What would I tell my parents? Would I tell just my father, all of it, then, never? Had I done something wrong, something stupid? I was just sitting at my desk trying to study. The last person to knock on the door rather than use the doorbell had been Dr Byard. But it could not have been him. The Byards were moving away. My mother had told us this one evening after returning from the supermarket. She had heard it by chance that day directly from his widow.

  CHAPTER 6

  That it had been Amanda in the wheatgerm queue was confirmed early the following year when she made further by then unmistakable appearances in the same queue. For eighteen summers she had kept her skin out of the sun so it had the same softness then that it had when I first knew her some half of her life earlier. I could see this at a distance. Having pictured Amanda in my mind during various and increasing gaps in my sleep since Tanya and I had formally agreed that she would leave me, there was an anticipatory edge to the new year. It wrestled with the melancholy Tanya had left with me for safekeeping along with the tender inscriptions in books bought for me, handwritten notes secreted about my bedroom and her scent on certain once-favoured items of knitwear.

  What had become of Amanda? What was she like now? I put off confronting her for a while, not so much out of regard for Tanya but out of regard for all that Amanda might conceivably come to mean to me. I applied myself to my education with the naive and futile vigour of the chronically immature, simulating interest at every turn.

  Coming to know her lunchtime habits, I transcended myopia to examine her from a distance before I was driven, as I knew I soon would be, by residual curiosity, lust and suppressed loneliness, to confront her in a disciplined and virtuoso performance of ‘the casual me’. Her hair, being still that of a model in a shampoo commercial, long, strong and with a gleam enough to reflect whatever an admirer might want to see in it, had not changed from childhood. Her eyes, round and perfectly defined, had not changed and nor had her skin, since the day her mother had forbidden her to know me.

  But the shape of her body was now womanly. Have I been conditioned to notice the synclines and anticlines of a woman’s body or is it innate? I never judge women on the basis of their surface geometry, though neither can I pretend a lack of interest in it. But it is not the puerile interest of erotically disenfranchised men overly attached to their raincoats, sad and dangerous men who learned certain limited things in their deprived schoolboy salad-dressing days and never anything more.

  Unfortunately for all that it says about me, Amanda Claremont’s breasts, or the thought of them, have always been a comfort to me. To say anything else would be less than honest. I do not look women up and down when I talk to them. I do not mentally undress them. I do not want them given nor denied opportunities in any sphere of human endeavour on the basis of their appearance. But Amanda’s breasts, their firmness, strength of character, their proportion; I cannot be indifferent to them.

  Because I had already seen her on a few occasions in the wheatgerm queue and because, height, curves and breasts aside, she seemed identical to my little playfriend of primary school, it did not seem entirely unreasonable for me to come up behind her, place my hands over her eyes and say ‘Guess who?’ But it was sufficiently unreasonable, foolish and unworthy of the portent with which I wished the moment to be impregnated for me to jettison the idea, storing it instead for a second or third meeting with any children of her brothers at one of the, no doubt, many occasions to which I would be welcomed, finally and after all, another chemical engineer (almost), like Mr Claremont, the patriarch with the perfectly starched white shirts.

  ‘Hadn’t I grown into a fine young man,’ her mother would surely remark as though I was not there. Amanda would blush a little and gently rebuke her mother for speaking about me rather than to me but I would, with full magnanimity, reassure her that I was not in the least offended.

  ‘Will it be Scotch?’ Mr Claremont would beam from across the room before shaking my hand firmly. ‘Although I don’t remember it being your drink when we last saw you.’ Everyone would laugh heartily at this and one of Amanda’s brothers would be dispatched to the bar to pour me a Chivas Regal from a bottle the size of a small car. I would remark on the bottle with a quiet understanding of spirits, double and single malts, retail versus duty free prices, and Mr Claremont would explain, via a humorous anecdote involving the Ministers for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Mining and the Arts and Communications, how it was he came by the ostentatiously large bottle.

  This would trigger recollection of an article I would have read concerning recent changes in the direction of government policy on joint ventures in off-shore mining operations and the extent to which approval is to be required from the Foreign Investment Review Board. Amanda, sensing the topic turning to politics, would attempt to pre-empt anything controversial being discussed by suggesting her father and I agree to disagree.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Mr Claremont would cry good-naturedly, his voice filling the room, adding that it would seem he and I were in perfect agreement and that she should not give me the impression that he was an uncompromising old so-and-so. In any event, he would be more than happy to hear my views on a range of related topics. Her mother would call out from the kitchen that we had better finish talking ‘shop’ because she would like us all to come to the table.

  After dinner, between coffee and port, Amanda’s nieces and nephews would ask me to play Twister, Monopoly and Go Fish with them. Amanda’s brothers and sisters-in-law would tell the children to play quietly on their own and leave me in peace but I would join in with the children just for a while and hear Amanda’s mother say confidentially to Amanda from the kitchen that I seemed very good with children.

  At the end of the evening, one of Amanda’s nieces would ask me in front of everyone whether I was going to marry Amanda. I would answer that I might have to if the little girl herself was unable to marry me. Everyone would laugh again and Mrs Claremont would say that it looked as though the little girl already had eyes for me.

  That night in bed Amanda would tell me that her family adored me, each for different reasons which she would then outline. She would start once again to ask questions about Tanya and seek reassurance that Tanya never meant very much to me. I would tell her that she really would not want me to be the type of person who spoke ill of past lovers and that it was the present with which we should be concerned. This would not fully placate her but she would fall asleep in my arms nonetheless. The scent of her hair would slowly carry me off to sleep and I would have difficulty remembering the time before we
were lovers.

  On the day I chose to speak to her the wheatgerm queue was long, perhaps the longest it had been since the university was founded. Although I was then in third year, I had never myself been in this queue before. Just thirty feet from where I had been buying my lunch for two years, I felt quite out of place. I knew that I had to be in front of Amanda in the queue or she would buy her lunch and leave, for wherever it was that she went to eat, before we had a chance to speak. The plan was to wait for her to arrive and join the queue. I would beg someone to let me in some distance ahead of her. From there I would procrastinate, check the chalk menu for as long as it took, go through my pockets for change and let others behind me go ahead of me in the queue until she was directly behind me, next in line. At that point it would just be a matter of a chance sighting and, ‘No, it couldn’t be … Amanda?… Amanda Claremont?’

  The young man who I asked to let me into the queue in front of him wanted to discuss it with me. Was I really so hungry that I would be willing to pay someone for the opportunity to eat alfalfa a little sooner? It was not a question of money but he wasn’t prepared to believe that there was not a story to my urgent need to get in ahead of him. Was it a competitive thing? How much money would I be willing to part with in order to get ahead of him? Was it a part of a bet? He said that he would be prepared to leave the line altogether or even start at the back again if I would tell him the real story behind my desire to be in his place. No one had ever wanted to be in his place before.

  Without identifying Amanda, by name, description or by the school to which we had gone, I indicated why it was I wanted his place and how I wanted to engineer a re-meeting. He pressed me on the socio-economic differences between my family and Amanda’s that would lead Mrs Claremont to terminate our friendship at such a young age.