Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘This is a busy time. You know that. There’s nothing wrong with you today.’

  Then the nurse read the woman’s typed response.

  ‘Just call Sylvia? I can’t stop to make telephone calls for you. Look at this ward! It’s happy hour. Anyway, you’d wake her up at this time of night. Who’s Sylvia anyway?’ The woman typed a response and the nurse’s tone changed.

  ‘Your mother?’

  A tall stooped scrawny man, hollow and jaundiced, outdid the grunting woman in the wheelchair. By a surgical strike of invective the nurse’s attention was wrenched from the woman’s computer to all the narcotic-induced problems this man’s physiognomy would soon bequeath to the makers of the beautifully photographed cult movies he would never see. It was his back. He wanted everyone to understand this, not just but especially his back. Pethidine would do it and then he would go away. It was as simple as that. And she was not to mistake his intent.

  Abby was asleep.

  There was a television mounted high on the wall in a corner of the room. A fifteen-year-old hospital drama was coming to a close for the night. It was followed by a string of advertisements. A man resembling one of the television doctors, all teeth, tan and haircut, had come upon the ten points which distinguished successful people from the rest of us. He had managed to get these points down onto six cassette tapes which had already changed the lives of literally millions of people across the United States. Some of those people happened to be near his swimming pool and were willing to testify to the beneficial effect these tapes had had on their lives. Previously they were us but now, after owning these tapes, they were them. The television doctor came back. He said that if we phoned the number at the bottom of the screen with a credit card ready, we would also receive his easily-assembled book based on the actual tapes at no extra charge. Even the limitation period on this offer did not diminish his smile.

  Then a woman in her underwear appeared speaking softly to us from beside another swimming pool. At first it seemed that she was one of the literally millions of people whose lives had been changed by the six cassette tapes and/or the actual book. There was still a phone number at the bottom of the screen but it became apparent she was limiting her invitation to men and was not promising to change our lives unless we were lonely and wanted to talk to her or one of her fungible colleagues. After she had reiterated the point in each of several different attitudes it was time for Beany and Cecil in a Bob Clam-pitt cartoo-oon.

  Tanya looked exhausted. She touched my arm and kissed Abby’s sleeping head. Kate had called her at her mother’s place after the ambulance had left and Tanya had woken from stretching her father’s cardigan once too often to a formless nightmare she could only imagine from the half-heard words of a panicked friend. For most of her life the fears with which she lived were no more than private imaginings; this was an intersubjective nightmare with its own car-park, reception desk, public address system; people caught taxis to this place. People died here. This was the public’s address.

  ‘Oh my God. Is she sleeping?’ she asked running her fingers through Abby’s hair.

  ‘Yes,’ I seemed to whisper. My futile reply was drowned by the television, the persistence of restless trolleys, the high-pitched vehemence of the dark-haired woman’s wheelchair and the shouts of the jaundiced scarecrow convinced of his democratic right to pethidine.

  ‘It’s the back, babe! I’m serious,’ he called to another nurse. ‘You come here and feel it for yourself.’

  Tanya held on to me for support. Her face was white over my shoulder. A small particle of sleep looked out from the corner of her eye. I knew her so well. The particle was new.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She had a fit.’

  ‘What kind of fit? Did you find her? That must’ve been awful.’

  ‘No. Kate saw her first and got me … alerted me. I was in bed, asleep. You can’t imagine, Tanya, it was … horrible … just horrible seeing her like that and not being able to do anything, not even knowing what it was.’

  ‘What is it? What did they say it was?’

  ‘You know as much as I do.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We’re in a queue.’

  ‘Hasn’t anyone seen her?’

  ‘Not properly, not a doctor, just the ambulance guys.’

  ‘Eddie, for God’s sake! How long have you been here? Why didn’t you get someone to look at her? You smell, you reek of alcohol.’ We talked over each other. We looked like the stereotype of a couple under stress.

  ‘I don’t know—half an hour maybe. I couldn’t leave her here by herself. What if she woke up while I was gone?’

  Tanya panned slowly around the ward till she came back to me.

  ‘This is hell, isn’t it,’ she said looking over at the scarecrow who by rotating his head on an axis gave everyone within radius, including the woman without English, a turn at thinking he was shouting at them.

  ‘Feel it, babe! Come on. I can take it. I can take it, you fuckwhipped mongoose tight-arse!’

  ‘Well, okay. I’ll stay with her now and you go and get a doctor. Look at her, Eddie, sleeping through all this.’

  ‘They gave her valium.’

  ‘Really!’

  ‘Yes, they gave it to her rectally.’

  Tanya winced. All over the city millions of people were sleeping, unaware of the subtle changes in an Emergency Ward between five and six in the morning. Firstly there is the light. Around the edges at least, near the windows, nightmare and dawn come to a tacit arrangement on the floor. Coffee competes with antiseptic for your memory and a barely perceptible slowing, like a wind-up toy turning itself in, comes over the players. It is as though they all suspect that the music of the place, the cacophonous soundtrack made by aggregating the misery around each partition and each petitioner, is about to stop abruptly and no one wants to be caught out. They get ready to give in to the day, to catch a break and be sharp for the qualitatively different daytime suffering.

  The public address system did not address the public. It found the static, quarrelled with it and broadcast the whole thing so that as I made my way from Abby who slept and Tanya who watched, past partition after partition looking for a doctor, I knew that someone who knew more about the workings of the place than I did was also looking for doctors. And this person was amplified and could name the people they were after.

  A hand caught my shirt. It belonged to an old man. He lay on a trolley and had the pallor of children covered with talcum powder playing old people in a school play. He had a young man’s grip though, and it took hold of my shirt with determination, just above my waist.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said with a dry mouth and as much dignity as he could prise from the situation. ‘Excuse me, but … Can you help me?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m not a doctor.’

  ‘No, I know you’re not a doctor. My name is Alfred Price,’ he said raising his head slightly from the trolley and releasing his grip to form his half of a handshake. I shook his hand.

  ‘Eddie Harnovey.’

  ‘That’s an unusual name.’

  ‘Well, I’m not usually here.’

  ‘No, neither am I, as it happens.’

  ‘Alfred, I can’t talk to you now. My daughter is unwell over there and I’m trying to find a doctor for her.’

  ‘Oh, I am sorry to hear that. How old is she?’

  ‘Six and a half.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with her?’

  ‘We don’t know. She had a fit.’

  ‘A seizure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Epilepsy?’

  ‘We hope not.’

  ‘I hope not too, Eddie,’ he said gravely and then added, ‘but epilepsy can be controlled with medication nowadays, to a large extent anyway. They used to say prophets were epileptics, or was it epileptics were prophets?’

  ‘Alfred, I have to go.’

  ‘Yes, you do, Eddie. I’m sorry I’ve kept you. I have a son l
ike you. Oh, I’m sure everybody says that. I mean that he is about your age. If I could get up I’d call him. He’s often up this early.

  ‘Eddie, listen. When you have found a doctor and when the doctor has examined your daughter and when you are satisfied that she will be fine, that everything will be alright, please would you be kind enough to return to me and take whatever you find in the contents of this bag? It’s a small bag. I had it with me when I took the fall, my hip you see. I can’t get up for a while. Would you take some money from the bag and buy me something to eat. I cannot seem to get their attention. Everyone is more important than me, your daughter legitimately so. But when you are done, please would you return? In fact, take the money now. Go on. Then you will return. I know you will if you’ve taken the money. They have their hands quite full with that man over there, don’t they. Perhaps he’s dangerous? Take the money for me, Eddie, and fetch me something to eat. I don’t care what you get. Would you hand me the bag please?’

  I did as he asked. Anything just to get away. He rummaged. ‘Even a drink, orange juice, if it’s all you can manage. I’m so hungry. Isn’t it the damnedest thing.’

  Having reached inside the bag he placed some coins in my hand. I walked away before he had a chance to say anything more, not knowing whether or where to buy food there, but counting the coins so, at the very least, I would be able to return the exact amount. I walked looking into my hand avoiding the traffic as best I could. He had given me three dollars.

  CHAPTER 23

  Medical administrators have managed to keep the passing of the Factory Acts from the young men and women in their charge for the biggest part of two hundred years by snaffling up anyone who showed an aptitude for chemistry in the final years of secondary school and a burning desire to rote learn the phone book, putting them in white coats in Emergency Wards and not letting them out until the laws are repealed. Soon to be released, the young man we cross-examined assured us he was a doctor and a doctor he actually was. He looked as though he had not slept for some days which made it easier to coerce him into examining Abby slightly ahead of hell freezing over. Doctors came with acne now. This was not possible when I was a child and remains impossible on television to this day.

  He said that it was too early to tell whether Abby’s convulsion was the onset of epilepsy or what he called a febrile convulsion, a childhood condition of epilepsy-like episodes which they usually grow out of by seven. By too early to tell he meant that he did not know and when this became clear Tanya’s face told me that she thought he should be back in the school for uncertain young doctors who had not yet learned omniscience when confronted with sick children. But the pustuled kid’s uncertainty made sense once we had given him a chance to defend himself. Abby had been fighting a high temperature, a common pre-condition of febrile convulsions. On the other hand, he explained, it is highly unusual for a child to have her first febrile convulsion as late as six and a half. She was fine now, he told us, and we could take her home. He seemed to miss or dismiss attributing causal responsibility to the father.

  We caught a taxi home, our own car still resting on its laurels in the driveway at home, Abby and I having caught an ambulance to get there and Tanya having caught a taxi from her mother’s place. Both her mother and Kate had offered to drive her to the hospital but she had declined their offers. We huddled in the back seat of the taxi, the three of us. It was around six-thirty in the morning and in the pale light our post-traumatic dishevelment made us look like refugees from one of Tanya’s regional conflicts. The taxi cruised, glided silently, hushing the poor and wretched occupants over the wet streets to a sanctuary. Abby was cocooned, still in her pyjamas, between the two of us. She was not unhappy, just a little confused about the adventure in which she was the central protagonist. It all seemed a little unreal to her but she wasn’t afraid, just mildly cross with herself for remembering so little about it. It was Tanya and I who were afraid.

  The instruments on the dashboard quietly registered changes down to a tenth of the units being displayed in large green digits all clearly identifiable from the back seat. We took corners on average at fifteen point one kilometres an hour. Warm air seeped comfortingly into the immaculate cabin sustaining an ambient temperature of nineteen point five degrees Celsius. Even the indicator was muffled in its acknowledgement of our turning. Had it taken us much longer to reach home we would all have been asleep. But Abby was starting to stir. Would she get to go in an ambulance again? She would be sure to be awake next time. The young doctor had told us that we would have to wait to see if she had another seizure when she did not have a fever. If she did she had epilepsy. It was best not to do anything that might mask her condition, at least until she had been examined by a paediatrician. We would have to wait to see if she had epilepsy. Just wait, he had said, watch and wait. In the meantime, I could not let her go.

  Tanya’s mother was waiting for us with freshly squeezed orange juice. She had made everybody’s bed and tidied the lounge room. The couch was no longer a bed and my reading lamp had been returned to my bedside. Kate had gone. All traces of my nocturnal near involvement had disappeared with the vacuum cleaning, dusting and general straightening.

  ‘Where’s Kate?’ Tanya asked her mother.

  ‘She helped me tidy the place and then packed up her things and left. She said she wasn’t going to be in the way anymore, not if Abby was unwell. She’ll call you.’

  ‘She was never in the way, Mum.’

  ‘Her words, not mine,’ her mother defended herself.

  ‘Where’s she gone?’ I asked.

  ‘To her home, to her husband, I suppose. I don’t know. Where else should she go?’

  Tanya’s mother made us breakfast. Relieved that Abby was alright, she was pleased to be so needed again. Neither of us was capable of much. Looking at Abby, watching her pick off the cracked shell from her soft-boiled egg and recount her experiences to her grandmother, it was difficult to believe that she might not be alright. Tanya and I sat lifeless at the table, sipping our tea and letting the steam hit us between the eyes. What was she thinking?

  ‘They put me on a bed and it had wheels on the bottom,’ Abby explained.

  ‘That must’ve felt special?’

  ‘No, everyone had them.’

  Was Tanya thinking of the waiting she had in front of her in all its different hues? She was waiting for her daughter to escape epilepsy altogether or else wear it forever, a blemish on her perfection. Influenza still resonated inside our daughter but it was clearly on the retreat. She was hungry again. But epilepsy came from Tanya’s father. He had left it like a promise. Was this what she was thinking?

  Was she thinking of her thesis, which need not have been more than she could chew, but tasted ridiculous to her now? Intellectually it was not beyond her but, emotionally, defrosting the soup was a touch-and-go proposition. To create something from nothing requires an anchor that Tanya had but kept leaving raised. Was she waiting for the remaining weeks of her current employment to peter out until that one day when she would come home, close the door, unpack her briefcase and never go back to the university again? She could see this day coming, had rehearsed it in her mind as a pilot might rehearse an engine failure, only in each of her imaginings she did nothing to prevent it happening.

  Was she thinking that it was never meant to be—and had not ever been—like this for she who had lost her father at eight and had read Sophocles on her break in the car-park of the supermarket. It never ended like this for the bright students in the BBC dramas she had kept faith with on the Sunday nights of her youth when hope was still warm with cocoa, a blanket and her mother.

  It was not that she loved the university. On the contrary, as time went by she had become increasingly critical of universities, their acceptance, as she put in her more mordant moments, of Departments of Hospitality and Tarantino studies, or Hairdressing, whatever brought in fee-paying students. She railed against the intellectual weakness of the students and the m
oral weakness of the staff. The universities seemed to her at the vanguard of society’s unravelling. But I knew better because I was not there. They were not the first to retreat from what they had once stood for, they were not the first to turn their backs on any notion of the common good and to prostitute themselves, they were not the first to promote a meaningless language designed to preserve their own pseudo-cultural and economic fiefdoms, they were not the first to willingly, enthusiastically and blindly, destroy themselves. But if the universities were not the first neither were they the last. And Tanya was in and of one and so had expected more from them. The last time she was not in a university she was stacking fabric softener on the shelves in a supermarket.

  Was she thinking of me while I was thinking of her thinking? If you have ever loved your parents, if you have ever been able to talk with them, then all you really want from life is someone you can talk to when your parents die. That is the unarticulated goal at the back of your mind when you choose a partner, at least for your first marriage. You might think that you are looking for all those other things, shared interests, values, goals, shared folk memories, sexual compatibility, the same taste in taste. But all of this, if you are lucky enough to have been loved as a child, is just a smokescreen that you put up as you crawl between the trenches of your life, a smokescreen to hide the need to find just one person you can always talk to after your parents have died, one person whom you can tell your employment contract has not been renewed.

  It must have seemed to her a ghastly trick to find us as we were then, because for so long I had been that person for her. Coming up to our twentieth winter together, we had watched each other’s bodies change, we had nourished ourselves on the other’s preoccupations, laughed together at the things we had been expected to remember, sighed at all that everyone else seemed to forget. We had made a little girl and both of us loved her more than we loved ourselves. Coats we had bought for each other had engendered a greater warmth than had ever been dreamt of in the design of the manufacturer. She had crashed before, gone liquid on me without warning and sold herself short in bed for a few days at a time. But I had always managed to get her out of the dark just by talking.