Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  Paul and Kate got married completely expectedly. His family had decided that the great virtue in denying him thus far his share of their not inconsiderable assets would soon ripen and then rot into a collective clannish shame. He had reached in their eyes the stage of life where the state of his furniture and the age of his car was a reflection on them. The first sprinkling of their largesse, in the form of Paul and Kate’s wedding, was a public tribute to the purity of their sound business sense and sternly gentle cash-register-side manner over two generations of pharmaceutical service to the good people of Hawthorn, Camberwell and Mont Albert. With the assistance of the family’s long-standing and now fragile vicar, and allusions to ideologies I was confident Paul had always rejected, they were married in the presence of two hundred and fifty people at a particularly fashionable bend in the Yarra River.

  Paul had two brothers and so, although I could not escape the bridal party altogether, I was not required to make a speech that steered that fine line between deference to the vicar and deference to the macho success with women de rigueur for the groom, a success Paul had not known. In truth, he was lucky to be marrying Kate. As much as I liked him, she was better. Tanya knew this too but was kind enough never to make me have to hear it. Despite her fondness for him, I think Tanya always suspected something about him, something not wholly admirable. She was asked to be Kate’s matron of honour and we were hoping that by the time of their wedding Tanya’s belly would be swollen with child and we could insinuate an inelegance into the proceedings. But having spent so many months trying unsuccessfully, Tanya seemed about as likely to get pregnant as win the Eurovision song contest. So both of us looked on by the river, barren and speechless, as Paul and Kate with the stroke of a platitude and an injection of pharmaceutical funds, lapped us in one go and flowed with ease and prosperity into the hardening arteries of middle-class matrimony.

  There had been rumours among certain of Tanya’s academic colleagues that the university administration was trying to broker a ‘takeover’ of a neighbouring College of Advanced Education. The rumours were consistent with changes to the government’s funding policy with respect to universities and tertiary education across the board. Universities were to be allocated funds solely according to the number of students on their books. In order to secure or increase funding, universities adopted a range of tactics which included the ‘vertical broadening’ of entry requirements and the annexation of any institution south of the Sudetenland that did not move faster than the Earth around the Sun.

  Tanya and many of her colleagues began to fear the effects of any proposed merger on their security. No one was offered tenure anymore and every little tin-pot recreation hall that had been giving classes in pottery, yoga and the bottling of certain fruits added a class in International Relations, Marketing or Supply-side Economics and became an only too willing object for takeover by a predatory university and instant elevation to the status thereof. With the characteristic wisdom, sensitivity and foresight attaching to much of the managerial ethos that began to govern people’s lives just prior to the collapse of Communism, the merger was initially ‘rumoured’, then ‘likely’ and ultimately ‘inevitable and a great opportunity’ for the university to increase the number of road signs that mentioned it in passing. Tanya’s need for a PhD increased exponentially with the arrival of each new instant expert in the departmental tea-room. She started losing sleep with the fall of the Berlin Wall and by the time everyone knew the meaning of ‘collateral damage’ she had mastered the art of waking up five or six times a night having fallen asleep only once.

  ‘I’m going to have to do something big, Eddie,’ she said in bed one night following another of my by then many ill-conceived attempts to help her conceive.

  ‘Just what you usually do would probably be sufficient.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, I just don’t feel like it. I’ve got too much on my mind and I’m exhausted from not sleeping.’

  ‘No, that’s fine, Tanya, really,’ I said, turning to one side.

  ‘I’m going to have to do something big to solidify my position within the department.’

  ‘We could have a child and donate it to the library,’ I suggested.

  ‘I’m going to have to write a book, you know, turn the thesis into an authoritative monograph, a controversial work that I’ll be forced to defend at conferences and on daytime television.’

  ‘You could even submit a funding proposal to the department and at the same time seek an advance from a publisher—two sponsors for the one baby.’

  ‘Hey, that’s not a bad idea.’

  ‘Thanks, Tanya. Who needs to procreate when I can bask in such fulsome praise?’

  ‘But what am I going to do the thesis on?’

  That night signalled a turning point. From then on Tanya began to apply herself furiously to the idea. She buried herself in all the academic journals and monographs she could lay her hands on, historical, political, economic and sociological; she did not restrict herself. She was looking at the twentieth century from all points of view. But she would not tell me the topic until I told her that such intense euphoria could only be explained by the presence of another man in her life. She laughed and threw her arms around me, kissing me. We fell on the bed and she told me I was crazy.

  She explained that her thesis was going to be about the eschewal at the end of the twentieth century of all political economic ideology. I thought it a hugely ambitious undertaking and when I told her so, she was even more delighted. She began to take off my clothes, explaining her central thesis between the kisses.

  ‘The death of political economics, hey, how’s that for a title, with the subtitle “Back to the Jungle”,’ she said, removing her bra.

  ‘Every institution, including and especially the nation-state, and this is a global phenomenon, is now in crisis due to either the profound failure or the wilful abandonment of every previously conceived political economic doctrine, unless you count completely laissez-faire economics with nearly zero government intervention as a doctrine rather than the absence of a doctrine and a return to the jungle.

  ‘What is being peddled in their place are panaceas devoid of all reason and humanity, religious fundamentalisms, be they of the market kind—the market delivers all socially desirable outcomes—or theist varieties.’

  Her breathing was becoming heavier and her voice more stentorian.

  ‘There is currently no policy so absurd that you could be confident that no economist would advocate it. There is no policy so cruel that you could be confident no politician would implement it.’

  ‘My God, you’re so absolutely right. There’s not much hope, is there?’ I asked her as we became one.

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  That night Tanya became pregnant.

  CHAPTER 13

  Once again we shared the same dreams: a child made in our image with the best attributes of each of us and none of the worst from either of us. Felt pictures of the dish running away with the spoon and the cow jumping over the moon started appearing in the house. Sometimes we bought them, sometimes we made them. It seemed to bring us even closer, sharing absurdly far-off plans for the future of the son or daughter we were going to have, sharing everything but the swelling and the vomiting.

  Tanya continued to work on her thesis with an enthusiasm I had never before seen her direct towards her career. Perhaps for the first time she could see what it was she was going to be when she grew up: an author, an academic, a mother and a wife. It delighted her.

  ‘What about names? We haven’t really discussed names.’

  ‘Tanya, we’ve got three and a half months.’

  ‘Yes, but you don’t want it to be a panicked decision, a name hastily chosen because they’re cutting the umbilical cord? You’ll probably have been sent to some remote open-cut mine and be trying to name your baby from a coin-fed telephone in the public bar of the second-best hotel in all of Mt Tom Price.’

  ‘Probab
ly, and if that happens I’ll suggest the name of the barmaid.’

  ‘What if it’s a boy?’

  ‘Then I’ll ask her her husband’s name and if she can’t remember I’ll go for the name of the last man she slept with.’

  ‘No, really, Eddie. Let’s go through this methodically.’

  ‘What do you mean methodically? By starting with our favourite writers and working our way through philosophers, artists, photographers, actors and musicians? What about politicians? Think about it. Politicians are a rich source of distinctive names. Nixon? Disraeli? Menzies? What about August Kubizek?’

  ‘I like the name August. Who’s August Kubizek?’

  ‘He was a boyhood friend of Hitler’s. Eventually they lost touch. I think Mrs Hitler thought he might be a bad influence.’

  ‘Maybe not August then but, all jokes aside, we should go through each letter of the alphabet and compile a list of names for each sex. I’ve actually started my list already.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Well I haven’t got very far and it’s only for girls.’

  ‘What letter are you up to?’

  ‘A,’ she said, unabashed.

  ‘Well, now the pressure is really on me. What names have you come up with?’

  ‘Not many.’

  ‘Well, let’s hear them.’

  ‘Amelia, Anna, Amanda, Aurora.’

  ‘Amanda!’ She couldn’t be serious.

  ‘Wait. I haven’t finished. There’s more.’

  ‘We can’t call our daughter Amanda.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We just can’t. It’s one of those … names.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it? It’s a very pretty name.’

  ‘Oh it’s … plain and yet … suggestive.’

  ‘Suggestive! Suggestive of what?’

  ‘Suggestive of … an insidious … plainness and vulgarity, no class, a completely unmemorable name liable to ruin everything we’ve worked for.’

  ‘Take it easy, Eddie. Relax, I don’t know why you’re so passionately opposed to “Amanda” but it doesn’t matter really. I’m still only on the “A”s. I don’t have any special attachment to “Amanda”.’

  ‘No? Good. Neither do I.’

  With each new sunrise as I counted down the coming bravery of fatherhood, I tried vainly to imagine my father’s thoughts at the approach of my birth. When I asked him he laughed and reminded me that he already had Kirsten by the time I was born. And as he waited for her to be born? It was a long time ago. He did not remember but I would be fine, he assured me. Was this what he had been whispering subliminally to me since birth? ‘You will be fine.’ And do I whisper it to my child from birth despite all the empirical evidence to the contrary in the form of the tortured and tortuous river of humanity which crashes past us with such frightening violence on its way to somewhere none of us can ever see?

  What about him? Had someone whispered it to him? Had he believed them? Was it true? Was he fine? Before the birth, and with great apology because it was before the birth, my mother and father sold the house in which my sister and I had grown up. Having never missed a payment, it was almost all theirs by then. My father had retired from the council. It had been shedding staff and, having discussed it with my mother, he decided to accept a package. By this time a package was already not what it used to be. From the end of the nineteen eighties the word took on a new meaning. A package was no longer a surprise and one accepted it as you would accept a blindfold, reluctantly and inevitably. They were going to take the package, their share of the proceeds of the house and their savings, such as it was, and move to the Gold Coast.

  They told us one evening when Tanya and I went over there for dinner. Tanya was in the kitchen talking to my mother and I found my father in the study. The door, which had been kept open all the time I lived there, was closed. He said he had closed it to keep in the heat and pointed to the small heater by his feet under the desk. The cone of light from the desk lamp reduced the temptation to look at the rain outside. He was studying the options.

  He welcomed me but his eyes were not the smiling eyes they generally were. There were glossy brochures scattered on his desk and he spoke in a language he had never used before. He wanted investment advice. His early termination and superannuation payments were parked in an Approved Deposit Fund. Should he invest it in a fixed term annuity or an allocated pension, and in which one? Whatever the tax advantages offered by any particular option, they could not be relied upon to continue indefinitely. The government was threatening changes but nothing was specific. This was the only money they had. The government was said to be looking for ways to limit early retirees’ access to lump sums in order to reduce their Social Security benefit claims. What if they needed money in an emergency? Should he split his payout fifty/fifty or sixty/forty? What did I think?

  I told him I barely understood what he was talking about but that they had two healthy adult children whom they could depend on in an emergency. Tanya and I were having Kate and Paul over for dinner later that week. Paul was a rising star within the corridors of the largest bank in the country. If he couldn’t advise us himself, he would be able to recommend someone who could. I took my father’s hand as Tanya’s voice came to us from the kitchen inviting us to eat. He stood up slowly and I whispered to him, ‘Don’t worry. You will be fine.’

  It still is not clear to me how it happened and I don’t think it started when Tanya and I got married but some time after that, just a few months after, it was already firmly entrenched; dinner-parties had come upon us stealthily, imperceptibly, like winter and old age. It was not that we were invited to so many. We were not. Occasionally someone from the university would invite us and two or three other couples to sit around, pat their children, admire the staining of their floorboards and listen, even if not with our concurrence, to their views. But dinner parties take hold of you like a virus and before too long you are a pregnant couple admiring vases and crystal decanters in shop windows and discounting the monetary cost of candlesticks because they are so lovely and because no one else will.

  It might start with a vase but it progresses to china dinner services or silver cutlery and soon you are contemplating a personal loan to knock down one of the many walls you are having trouble paying off in order to install a brick fireplace because other people’s lives seem so augmented by having one. No longer did we meet Kate and Paul at the pub for a counter meal. Indeed, it became impossible to eat with them without the combustion of tallow taking place at the centre of the table. We tried to glove our austerity in a kind of political correctness, to pass off our straitened circumstances as environmental friendship or third world interior design. It was never discussed between us, it just came about naturally, possibly because everything we had was cheap and tawdry.

  Paul and Kate owned nice things. They knew out-of-the-way places where you could buy a one-off this or an antique that. We knew places where you could get things slightly damaged but unless you held it up to the light you would never know and whenever people visited us we would turn off the lights and attempt to create an enchanting evening our guests would never forget in the candle-lit semi-darkness of their memories and our junk. But Tanya quite unintentionally broke the candle-lit spell early one evening when she brought up the topic of my father’s forced retirement and what it would do to him.

  ‘I understand you seeing it that way but public utilities have to be responsible to the public just as corporations have to be responsible to their shareholders,’ Paul said.

  ‘Oh, cut it out, Paul. You’re not at work now,’ I said.

  ‘No really, Eddie, I’m serious. The days of public instrumentalities being havens for the inefficient are over. How else are we going to compete with Asia?’ Paul countered. I wanted to put him in a home. Tanya wanted to kill him.

  ‘Eddie’s father worked thirty-five years for the Springvale Council. He doesn’t have to compete with Asia.’

  ‘Look, I’m not
talking specifically about Eddie’s dad, but the principle is the same.’

  ‘What principle?’ we snapped in unison.

  ‘Its need for efficiency. Our nearest trading partners can do things so much more efficiently than we can. We have to free things up. If the service can be provided at a lower cost then the cost must be lowered for the good of the country.’

  ‘But the country is Eddie’s father and over a million like him that have been retrenched. Who is this being done for?’ Tanya asked.

  ‘Paul, how can you say this? People are being thrown on the scrap heap. The costs you speak of lowering are always and only labour costs. Nothing else has to cost less. You’re saying people, people like my father, have to work for less or not work at all,’ I continued.

  ‘No, no. You’re seeing this as all negative. It’s not just labour costs that’ll be lowered. The cost of everything will be lowered if trade is deregulated and countries are free to produce cheaply and on-sell to other less efficient countries.’

  ‘But no one here can buy those cheaper imported goods because they’re all out of work or waiting to be and they don’t have any money because real wages are falling so that we can be more competitive.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a bit of an exaggeration,’ Paul scoffed. He sounded like a younger version of Amanda’s father.

  ‘No it isn’t. Why is it? Only people who don’t make anything or don’t offer any really useful service have money anymore. And they have lots of money to buy all the cheap imports that have taken away everybody else’s jobs, except that they wouldn’t be caught dead buying things that are too cheap lest their dinner-party guests get the wrong impression.’ Tanya was getting a bit too personal. How I loved her when she insulted people. Throughout all of this Kate had said nothing and, in retrospect, it spoke volumes. But that night she just sat there.