Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  We were there together. There was money coming in, not a lot, but more than we had as undergraduates doing shift-work at bottleshops, supermarkets, cafes and convenience stores. We were blue-chip tenants, the ideal unit, a young tertiary-educated childless couple both in employment, one car and no apparent impediments to our potential. We should have been eager to interrogate the future, grabbing at its collar, but at six o’clock in the morning, particularly in winter, as the barely audible radio told us the things somebody must have wanted to know, we would hold onto each other for dear life. Not that either of us had ever been prone to leaping out of bed to greet the coming day, not even Tanya who might have been expected to be a day-greeting leaper by people who did not really know her. But this was something else, something we couldn’t even put into words, not at that time. There was a reservoir of grey which seeped toward the surface in the small hours of the morning. Small dread is grey. Anxiety is brighter. Grey dread seeps. Anxiety is chauffeur-driven to the centre of your consciousness. Perhaps it was a recognition or acknowledgement of the unmitigated indifference of the world, not merely to your well-being, but to your very existence.

  Young people choose each other in the hurry-up years when perfect certainty is matched only by equally perfect disregard of the non-immediate future. They have no idea what they are looking for and no idea that that which they choose some triumphantly stupid night is not it. But just as most of us learn instinctively to negotiate the dynamics of riding a bike in gentle ignorance of the physical laws that make it possible, so without realising it, we seek someone who can foster the now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t self-esteem you picked up for a song on the ground floor of your parents’ lives. Instinctively you feel that someone else’s confidence might mate with yours and that for once your offspring will not be the only beneficiaries of the union. In the first light of a winter morning the union might produce something else; two people might have a better chance of coping with that which is always there but which cannot be named and which usually disappears when the light is on.

  ‘Eddie?’ she whispered.

  ‘Tanya.’

  ‘Eddie, are you awake yet, sweetie?’

  ‘Uh-huh. How did you sleep?’

  ‘Okay. How about you?’

  ‘Sleep?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well. I slept well. How are you … in yourself?—Tanya—Tanya, are you awake?’ I thought she had woken me and then fallen back to sleep but she was considering her answer.

  ‘Ordinary.’

  ‘A bit ordinary?’

  ‘All ordinary.’

  ‘Completely ordinary.’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  I paused before responding.

  ‘You know it won’t last. It’ll go. There’s no basis for it and you know that. You know that already and it’s still half dark. Things are okay.’

  She paused.

  ‘I know they are.’

  We hung onto each other. I knew exactly what ‘all ordinary’ meant because I had felt that way. She knew that I had and rather than smelling it in each other and fleeing for our lives we hung onto each other for them. We had a shorthand, a language other people did not have. Each of us had experienced attacks of the ‘all ordinaries’.

  The truth was that although I knew well the small grey ordinary feeling which lies in ambush some mornings and tries to keep you from getting out of bed, Tanya suffered more frequent bouts of it than I did. I was still partly buoyed by my job, not by the fascination of it (I was reading other people’s on-site or field reports and then summarising them), but by the regularity of it.

  How good it felt being required to turn up somewhere at a specified time to do something, albeit more mundane and less taxing than anything I had done at university, and to be capable of it. To be capable of it, isn’t that what everyone wants? Each day, I would say ‘good morning’ to the same people I said it to the day before. There were ‘in’ jokes about the standard of the coffee, the football tipping competition or somebody’s outrageous tie. Lunch was snatched hurriedly from the place next door, a little cafe where the regulars from the department joked with the proprietor and his staff, small jokes, small business, small change, but these people were immensely important to each other. It might be that none of them was aware of their importance, each to the other, and it took me a little while to realise it myself but with each ‘good morning’ they were reminding each other, just slightly, who they were and that they were there.

  Continuity in the form of running jokes (never really funny) or repeated themes (never really deep) is reassuring even to people who might not know how much they derive from it and who might even deny that they derive anything at all from it. If they who have never been without it really understood its cohesive force, they might willingly pay a little more for locally made goods and ignore the prophets of neo-classical economics who consign us to isolation in our homes, forgotten even by ourselves. Look out, here comes the man with the dangerous ties. Stop expressing your personality through your ties for Christ’s sake. You’ll get locked away. What a relief to find the mundane so rewarding.

  It was nineteen eighty-five, the first year of the second Reagan administration, the sixth year of the Thatcher reign and the second year of what many would later regard as a look-alike Labor government in Australia. Early that year, Tanya had a strange experience first thing one morning as we lay in bed. As usual the radio news woke us. Tanya lay there listening to the reports of bushfires raging up and down the eastern coast, the prime minister’s limited offer of drought relief, the sport and the weather. And then she heard herself being mentioned. It was not by name, but she insisted it was her they were speaking about and in the most personal way. I had missed it, still half asleep, but we caught it again an hour later. It was the first time we had ever heard a report of share movements on the radio and it took a few days and a call to the ABC to realise they were broadcasting international and local stock market movements. The Australian measure was known as the ‘all ordinaries index’, an index of the price of ordinary shares, those without special voting rights or other privileges attached to them.

  ‘So, let me get this straight. They’re telling the public hourly every day, whether overall, on average, the price of the shares in all the publicly listed companies in the country has gone up or down?’ Tanya asked in astonishment.

  ‘Yep. That seems to be it.’

  ‘Eddie, why should the price of shares rise or fall?’

  ‘Confidence.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, if investors believe, for example, that something bad is going to happen to the company in question no one will want the shares in that company and if no one wants the shares then their price will fall.’

  ‘But what if the investors are wrong? What if nothing bad is really about to happen to the company and their belief is based on faulty reasoning or superstition or just the prospect of a lot of other people panicking?’

  ‘The price of the stock will nonetheless plummet. It’s all to do with the investors’ confidence, valid or not. The price of a share will rise or fall depending on whether the majority of investors think the majority of investors think it will rise or fall.’

  ‘And who are the investors?’

  ‘Theoretically, anyone.’

  ‘But, in reality, who are they?’

  ‘Mostly large institutions, banks, insurance companies, wealthy people who want to become wealthier. Or ordinary people with a little money to invest for an uncertain future.’

  ‘How come you know all about this and I don’t? It’s not a science.’

  ‘’Cause I’m a man and even if we’re not interested we’re expected to know these things like we’re expected to know how to play cards, how cars work and how come the moon doesn’t fall out of the sky and crush everyone as they dream in their beds.’

  ‘Why doesn’t the moon fall out of the sky and crush everyone as they dream in their beds?’
r />   ‘Confidence.’

  Tanya predicted that the day would come when people would have difficulty remembering a time that movements in the stock market were not reported more frequently than the road toll or air pollution indices. She was right. The interminable repetition of sharemarket indices thereafter did not leave us unchanged. I would call Tanya at work and get a quotation of her ‘all ordinaries index’. Was she up or down today? ‘Slightly up but coming off a low base,’ she might say.

  CHAPTER 9

  One evening I came home from a full day of saying good morning to people and found Tanya sitting cross-legged and barefoot in the living room watching a children’s cartoon on television with the sound turned down. She had been crying. I threw my briefcase on the floor and fell to the ground to meet her, to hold her as tightly as I could in my nine-to-five sanctioned arms. It was summer and most of the staff in the Politics Department were still on one sort of leave or another. Tanya was a woman of leisure for another two weeks and, in the quiet and colourfully flickering glow of a small mouse’s repeated torment, I could see that everything had gone all wrong. She said that she was sorry she was in the state she was in and I listened in silence as she recounted the triggering event in her day.

  ‘I went over to Kate’s today. Paul had the car so she couldn’t pick me up and I took the bus. I was walking home from the bus stop. It was quite hot this afternoon and I was looking forward to getting home, putting my feet up to Vivaldi or perhaps that new Lloyd Cole and having a glass of iced tea. It was then that I came upon this young woman in a motorised wheelchair. She would have been in her late teens or early twenties. She was just sitting there, stationary at the bottom of that steep rise before Dandenong Road.

  ‘As I approached her she saw me and started to make inarticulate hurt noises like the sounds of a wounded animal. They became louder and louder and more insistent, more exaggerated, a grotesque pantomime of all our private ceaseless sleeve-tugging pain. She clearly wanted me to stop. I could see that. I had to stop.

  ‘With clumsy limited hands and arms which stopped and started violently without her seeming to want them to, as though she always had to work around them, she took what looked like a small calculator the size of a paperback out of a little zipped bag, like one of those chairbags primary school children have at the back of their seats to store things they’ve made. She stopped me, both with the sounds she made and with the message on her little computer. She seemed to want to talk to me, right there in the street in the middle of the afternoon. But I didn’t want to talk to her. I was angry with her, Eddie. Her existence was causing me pain. I didn’t even want to look at her. I told her I had to go.’

  Tanya started to sob. It was difficult to understand all of her words. I told her to take a deep breath and wiped away some of the tears from under her eyes with the smooth of my hands.

  ‘I told her I had to go but she motioned to me in something like a wave that she didn’t want this, that she didn’t want me to go, and she typed again for me to stop. Then she started to type that I should, or rather that she wanted me to help her. She seemed to expect it. It was as though she was angry with me for not having understood and helped her already. She looked so utterly pathetic with that stupid bag attached to both her and the chair like it was part of each of them. I asked her what was wrong. She signalled on the calculator-thing that her name was Rachael. I noticed how long and thick her black hair was. Like mine. Once she had given me her name, in that instant, it became hard to be angry with her. I said hello and told her my name and she repeated it, typed it in.

  ‘She said that the wheelchair was out of power and that she couldn’t make it up the hill. I wondered how she would have made it up the hill even with power. I wondered why she hadn’t thought of this when she left wherever she had come from. I wondered where she had come from, why they’d let her go out into the hot streets so unprepared and helpless; now and always pathetic with her fucking chairbag. I wondered why she’d had to choose me, to pick on me, to target me.

  ‘I asked her what she wanted me to do. Was there anyone that could be called? Yes, her mother. She gave me her mother’s name, Sylvia … something … I can’t remember now. She typed her mother’s name and phone number and I took it down. But I couldn’t just leave her there sweating into the bag so I offered to push her up the hill to Dandenong Road. She let me know she’d be alright from the top of the hill.

  ‘It was hard work pushing her up the hill in the heat. She was so heavy and there was something so unendearing about the way she had asked for assistance, almost demanded it. But I felt guilty for resenting her and, anyway, how was she meant to act? It was hot and she was stuck as she must often be, stranded, alone, humiliated, vulnerable, dependent on the degree of development of the next person’s super-ego just to get from one place to another. Why should she feel like apologising? She should hate all of us who waltz so blithely around the parquetry dance floors of our lives stumbling only every now and then, as she sees it, and over often imagined and trivial exigencies like the state of our skin, or our hair and over our eternally unsatisfied acquisitiveness and our occasional half-remembered loneliness. She should hate us all passionately for the trivial nature of our obsessions, self-obsessions which prevent us not only from helping her but even from mourning over all that she could have been and all that she is not. She should hate us at least as much as I hated her halfway up the hill to Dandenong Road.

  ‘Partly in pique and partly in an attempt not to be patronising, I spoke to her as though she was anyone else, the person she was trying to be, an equal. Ultimately, however, she did want me to acknowledge the inequality of our situations for otherwise I’d have just as much reason to use all my guile to get her to push me up the hill.

  ‘We reached the top and I pressed the button at the traffic lights. When it was green I pushed her all the way across Dandenong Road. It was too hot for reason, for humour, for people, too hot for anything meant to be dry. The road signs were wilting and we didn’t speak until we reached the other side. Then she told me that she was on her way to visit her aunt. She had been on her way to visit her aunt when the battery gave out.

  ‘Think about it, Eddie. I did. I tried to picture her aunt, what she would look like, the cool drink she would have for this girl, Rachael, when she got there. Would she hold it for her, tipping it into her mouth? What would they do? What would they talk about? It would be difficult for the aunt to understand her and when Rachael left to go home again or back to wherever it was she’d come from, the aunt would look around at her porcelain bric-à-brac and feel ashamed of the relief she always has when Rachael leaves. And Rachael, not yet fully down the drive would know this is what the aunt was feeling because when you have lived a couple of decades and people are relieved each time you leave a place, you cannot miss it every time.

  ‘She said her aunt lived “just down there” and that she would be okay. Could I call her mother to explain what had happened and that she was on her way to her aunt’s place? She asked me to get her mother to call Ann.’

  ‘I thought you said her name was Rachael?’

  ‘I know. That’s what she said. Maybe her aunt’s name was Ann. I don’t know. Anyway I got home and rang the number she’d given me. A young woman with an accent, Turkish or Arabic, maybe Israeli, answered the phone. I asked for Rachael’s mother, Sylvia … whatever her surname was … Sylvia Leitch, that’s it, Sylvia Leitch. The young woman said that there was no Mrs Leitch living there, just her and her husband, no older woman. I explained what had happened with Rachael. “Oh,” she said, “that explains it. We’ve been getting these inarticulate calls that we couldn’t understand. It must have been this girl asking for her mother. But we’ve been here for six months or a bit more.”’

  Tanya let out a deep, slow breath against my chest. She cried until the tears were no longer able to meet the demands of her sadness and, in defeat, they nestled together in resignation at the back of her throat.

&nbs
p; ‘Tanya, I understand how touched you are by the … utter wretchedness of this young woman’s—’

  ‘Rachael.’

  ‘—of Rachael’s life. But it doesn’t involve you personally. Why are you crying?’ I asked her gently.

  ‘I know it doesn’t. I don’t know why. It’s … the strangest thing. I just don’t know.’

  My drip-dry shirt, white at the first ‘good morning’ was creased now and wet down my chest. When I looked down I could see the top of Tanya’s head resting against one half of my diaphragm with my tie on her ear and the now damp cotton-polyester cover over the other half of my chest. My skin was pink through the shirt. I ran my fingers through her hair and rocked her slowly without saying a word until her breathing returned to normal. The silent mouse on television was still taking a beating but he never died. Not once.

  ‘Thank God you’re home.’

  ‘Of course I’m home,’ I said quietly in a way that I realised I had always wanted to say something like that. I could feel her eyes follow me as I went to the television to turn up the sound to give the mouse a voice and then into the kitchen where I picked up the telephone.

  ‘Who’re you calling?’ she called but I pretended not to hear.

  ‘Who did you call?’ she asked when I returned after finishing and turned the mouse down again.

  ‘Your mother. I invited her round for dinner and she accepted. I told her I’d pick her up at seven. She wasn’t busy.’

  Tanya put her arms around me and kissed me just below the ear.

  ‘That’s so nice, Eddie.’