Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  There had been nine years between her losing her father and finding me and ever since then, with a short break for Gerard and Hamlet, we had not ever really stopped talking. Even in the curtain-drawn days there had been some exchange. There had always been some exchange. Until then. Perhaps the letter from the university made her feel as though her father had died again.

  But why hadn’t she told me? Was she ashamed or was it that the telling of it made it more real? It was real alright. I had read the letter myself. Perhaps that was it? I was meant to find it. Maybe she had let the document tell me what she could not tell me herself? This was not talking, not where we had come from. Whatever my failings, whatever I had been unable to do for her, to bring her, to give her, it had been no small joy to me that since we were seventeen I had tended a small fire in the cavernous station of her solitary existence. Now it was out.

  This was what I was thinking watching her after breakfast as she brushed her hair.

  CHAPTER 24

  Gerard had been patient with me, patient as a cat with a mouse. It was up to me to decide how many field trips I needed to make before I felt confident enough to report on pollution containment at Amanda Claremont’s father’s gulf. Budget cuts had been felt throughout the department. Familiar cleaners had disappeared. There were no presentations of gold watches, no novelty-sized cards signed by all the gang, no two ninety-nine spumante and cream sponge cakes. No one said a word. Staff received memoranda reminding them that retirement seminars had been scheduled at very convenient times. They would keep being scheduled until no time was inconvenient. The supply of pens, pencils and paper dried up but still I was not questioned about any of my trips to Spensers Gulf.

  The way I got there and back changed however. Initially I had been permitted to fly there, then I flew part of the way and had to take a train the rest of the way, and finally it was just train all the way. You took them and they took you. They ran away from suburbs as fast as they could, past the backs of people’s houses, people who once had not known whether it was good or bad to live on a train line and now had no choice but to know, past the farms and pastoral properties to the nothingness between the pastoral properties and other pastoral properties. Children had occasionally been held aloft by smiling adults to wave at the trains. But already in the short time I had been taking the train to Spensers Gulf I had noticed the change. The children were gone and so were their bearers.

  Much of the area rests on crystalline basement rock. To the east there is a zone of instability, the Shatter Belt. Sediments harking back to the Palaeozoic era were folded by movements of the earth that people around there prefer not to dwell on. The fault lines had become active again in later periods and occasional earth tremors are still recorded along them. But even at the desert margins to the north-west, the people take pride in what the land puts them through, in what it does to them. In the north-west it often starves them. But it is theirs, they will tell you unasked. Their faults, but not their minerals.

  In the north-west it gets redder. The shrub is light and sparse and what is there is fully appreciated. I don’t know why I kept wanting to go there. I did not need to. It was not technically part of my brief. There is something attractive about margins. I get seduced by them. But margins require hubs, cores, kernels, nuclei, hearts. Perhaps I am seduced by that area where the heart’s jurisdiction is dubious? By 1870 it seems a snake’s tongue of settlements had sprung up as far as the western plains, these settlements constituting the north-west frontier of the time. Thus the margin.

  The settlements petered out where the mallee became too thick and difficult to clear. I sometimes drove out there in secret—in secret, that is, even to myself—in search of the very last property before the desert proper. And what would I have done had I found it and its inhabitant, an old character from The Petrified Forest, Walter Brennan maybe, subsisting where it was impossible to subsist? Did he know when he arrived that he was never going to be other than marginal? Did he only live this way because he was not yet fully dead? Did I accord him a certain beauty within my own mythology?

  The east and south-east was more hospitable to grazing and crops. Moving eastwards you find wheat, sheep, then dairy cattle and vegetables, even wine. Copper was found thereabouts one hundred and sixty years ago bringing with it ship-loads of money and men to a colony then barely old enough to have earned the crisis it was in. The quarries deepened into cuts until the hunger for copper grew so large there was not a hill to be found that was not sucked dry. The ore was carried south to the sailing barges in the time before the railways arrived and by the time they did the hills were exhausted and one mine after another was closed as a result. The railways were late. In recent times there had been talk of opening up the copper mines again. Amanda’s father was behind it.

  Just before the turn of the century a succession of unusually wet years pushed the wheat frontier further and further north. Perhaps this was the time Walter Brennan’s ancestors got wind of the desert blooming and staked their claim on a sure thing. The drought was four years coming and stayed for six.

  After all the trips I had made the area had become dear to me in a way I would never have expected. Brought up in the suburbs, I was always suspicious of the bush balladeering sentimentality of, say, the Jindyworobaks and its more recent socio-political manifestation, that type of often unyielding, unscientific, dogmatic, and bombastic environmentalism that does for society’s habitat what the followers of Foucault and Derrida did for the promotion of literature as a source of sustainable enjoyment. It takes the people out of the equation and leaves it that much the poorer. But the area around Mr Claremont’s gulf became quite known to me and knowledge of a place often leads to affection for it. How else can we account for the specialness of all the world’s home towns? I collected information about it that went beyond anything that was likely to be important to me professionally.

  The people in the east and south-east would almost boast over a beer about their early use of superphosphate and subterranean clover to boost wheat yields.

  ‘So that was you?’ I returned.

  These were the people you heard about, the people who took perennial droughts, floods and heatwaves in their stride. When you watched them up close you could see they were limping. They had been limping for generations, ever since white settlement. The remains of the former wheat frontier too could be seen in the landscape if you knew what to look for. Sheep grazed among the ruins of stone houses. Crumbling tiny churches and chapels offered themselves for advanced civilisations to restore or at least chronicle, Jesus being for now a captive of the gun lobby. Grand stone railway terminals dwarfed their users’ requirements. They had been planned in the good old years when the unbridled optimism stemming from four consecutive bountiful harvests had given the civic leaders ideas above their stations.

  But it was the lead, silver and zinc mines that put the place on the map and brought more than twenty thousand people there in the last decades of the nineteenth century and it was the smelter that brought me there in the last gasps of the twentieth century. Because I never got to know any of the local inhabitants well, because nobody there knew me in Melbourne and because nobody I knew in Melbourne knew anyone there, my visits to Amanda’s dad’s place constituted a rare opportunity not to be me. It was not that I affected a different personality there, it was just that I was able simply to observe without having to interact with anyone. For a few brief moments I was not responsible, or at least did not feel responsible, to or for anyone but myself.

  Often when I was at the gulf I would imagine taking Tanya and Abby there some time for a holiday but to imagine when and how this might happen would bring me back home faster than any train and faster than I wished. We could not afford to fly there and the car, in its ‘autumn’ years, would never have agreed to a return trip. Accommodation in a hotel or motel or even in one of the more reasonably priced guest houses was out of the question. We found it difficult enough paying the bank for our a
ccommodation in Melbourne. We had no savings, no surplus, nor margin of error. Still I was attracted to the margin, to the error.

  I thought how much they would enjoy the walks in the National Park. I imagined Abby on my shoulders and the three of us making our way along the creek beds beside the old river red gums, sugar gums and white cypress pines, admiring the fringe myrtle with its dense blossom and singing ‘I feel like chicken tonight’ and other television commercials of the day that Abby liked. The list was constantly being revised and updated.

  This was probably the best place to explain to Abby how it was that a certain section of the population came to be singled out for the worst of everything. She could look out across the plains of the former wheat frontier and among the stone ruins where sheep now grazed, and form impressions, imaginings, backdrops to the stories we would tell her, most of which would evaporate with age but some, or at least one, would remain to flesh out a child’s feeling for what had been done to these people. She would not remember the dates. Depending on when I took her there, perhaps I would not even mention the dates. What would the eighteen-forties mean to a little girl? But she would not forget the story of the pink people from Europe whose sheep ate the native plants relied upon for food by the brown people who were already here. She would understand the theft of sheep to feed a family, punishment, servitude, abandonment of home and then death. If she could just see the sheep on the ridges she might never forget the rest. One day, I thought. Tell her about it in the sun on top of an abandoned copper mine but watch out for snakes.

  In clear weather the flat top hills stand out in sharp relief. I wanted to bring Tanya there to show her everything I had noticed, all the small things, so that she might notice everything about me all over again. I wanted to show her the endless variation of plant life with aspect or availability of water, but living in spite of the conditions. Goat turds are slightly longer and more olive-like than sheep turds. I know because I had to investigate what it was the goats and sheep refused to linger in.

  At home Tanya walked between pockets of cold, turning off lights that Abby had felt she needed, between pockets of cold where the heating we could afford stopped dead, tracing thermal maps around us that showed the regard in which we were held by the market. She found that she was warm in bed. If, if I had just had a little money!

  If Amanda’s father had bought all of this land twenty years earlier would I have ever seen it? Probably not. I had guarded the suburb while she had been kidnapped and forced to play French cricket with her brothers at Coff’s Harbour. And when they got back her mother had quickly arranged a cordon sanitaire between the house of the starched and pleated white shirts and the house of the cotton polyester drip-dry variety.

  The men who operated the relatively small-scale smelter already in operation knew me by sight after a while and a few of them would even say hello. But the few who did were admonished by the cold looks of disgust on the faces of their colleagues. I was from the government and not someone warranting civility. My presence there would threaten jobs, or so they seemed to believe. Management, though, had no qualms about me. To them there was a quaintness about me pottering here and there as innocent as a mockingbird. I was taken around and shown everything everywhere and as many times as I liked. ‘Just having another look,’ I would smile. But certain things were clear.

  Lead sulphide and zinc sulphide are separated in these types of operations by means of a flotation process in which air is passed through a mixture of the crushed ore, water and various frothing agents. Nothing wrong with that. Sulphur is removed from the separated lead sulphide by roasting the lead sulphide in the air. When the sulphur combines with the oxygen in the air it produces sulphur dioxide. This is not of itself a problem because the sulphur dioxide can be contained. In fact it is deliberately trapped in many places around the world to produce sulphuric acid for commercial purposes.

  The problems arise when it is not trapped. When sulphur dioxide is dissolved in water, say in clouds, fog, streams, rivers, dams or even the sea, it becomes sulphurous acid which is rapidly oxidised to form sulphuric acid. From here we get acid rain. It is as simple as that. You can see its effect on the vegetation even with an untrained eye. The affected plant at first takes on a grey-green appearance. This is known as a marginal necrosis. Then when the tissue dries out it becomes bleached ivory in colour and lined along its edges in brown or red or sometimes black. Eventually the dead areas fall out giving a ragged misshapen form to the foliage. No one will want to eat it. It will not be possible to sell. No one will even want to touch it.

  At each stage of the lead and zinc refining process particles of lead, zinc and even arsenic are emitted in a spray of dust into the outside air. And while Gerard might not have been aware of the precise inadequacies of the existing regulations with respect to the control of lead pollution in the region, even that steroid-enhanced neuronally-challenged Buddha of organisational psychology must have heard the rumour about the toxicity of arsenic. He would have known that I would have to recommend far more stringent controls and safeguards and a regime of monitoring the entire operation if the smelter were to be massively expanded. To do otherwise would have been grossly negligent of me, a legitimate ground for dismissal and possibly for hanging.

  I boarded the train for the return leg of my final trip to Spensers Gulf prior to the completion of my report wondering if I would ever get to bring Abby and Tanya there to see the small things of this other world, things too small to take home for them but large and strong enough to have affected me. I wondered how it came about that most people have no problem with a state of affairs in which they are as likely to get hit by a meteorite as to accumulate wealth on the scale of that of Amanda’s father. Is it that they do not comprehend the odds or is it that they do but would rather hold on to the one chance in several billion that it will happen to them? They will die for that one chance. They will live for it too, paying their taxes without recourse to avoidance, not parking anti-socially on a dual carriageway, never stealing enough to worry the one in a million guy who owns half of everything and who factors in their petty theft as an operating cost and is not bothered about it or anything else much except social security and taxation, both of which he sees as grossly distortionary.

  But exactly what is being distorted? I certainly could not tell anymore. Even my guesses were no longer educated. From somewhere further along the train I heard raucous laughter, then beyond laughter, sounds far removed from anything recognisably human, as though cattle had been smuggled on board a passenger train and were revelling in their triumph, wishing to make a habit of it, a convention.

  I knew about acid rain. I knew about lead, zinc and arsenic dust. I could see the faces of the people I had met there, the shrewd hoteliers, avuncular publicans, restless barmaids, the itinerant cleaners. I could see the suspicious faces of the men at the smelter, the exhausted faces of the farmers whose children now hid from the trains or else put boulders on the track and then kept an uncivilised distance. Not one of them had been consulted about any of this. I was the closest thing they had to a voice in the councils that determined the future of the place in which they did everything they were supposed to, keeping their side of the social contract without giving it a thought. As the train made its way from there to nowhere and from there to regional shopping centres, to the backs of display houses and then to the real houses with display families, my recommendations began to write themselves.

  When I returned home I took my Capraesque enthusiasm into the study to let the report continue to write itself in there. The room was unused because it had always been Tanya’s domain. She was the scholar, the writer, researcher, compiler. I, on the other hand, almost never brought work home, adhering to the adage that made the Soviet Union what it was to its dying day. They pretend to pay me and I pretend to work.

  In clearing space for myself, I could not help noticing that some notes on the Tamil Tigers of Elam in Sri Lanka—she was looking at the connection
between poverty and social conflict—were still on top of the pile of her notes and journals. Tanya had stopped. The thesis hovered around us but any progress in it was impossible to detect with the naked eye. Why had she been unable to tell me that her contract was not going to be renewed? I understood lead, zinc, arsenic and acid rain but had only a tenuous grasp of my wife.

  She saw me collect her work into several piles, placing it to one side, and said nothing. I worked day and night with unusual but troubled diligence for perhaps two weeks making recommendations, mapping out a process for monitoring the so-many-parts-per-million of toxic dust in the air and watercourses, suggesting the establishment of an independent team of engineers and technicians who would report both to the Environment Protection Authority and, quarterly, directly, via the Minister, to Parliament. The engineers and technicians were to be paid by the government which would levy a charge on the smelter per unit of output to cover the cost. Limits, both to output and discharge, would be set and non-compliance would be subject to proportionate penalties. A percentage of the operation’s pre-tax profit would be held on trust by the government for the payment of wages in the event of closures. This percentage itself would be exempt from tax and interest earned on it would go back to the owners of the smelter.

  In addition to the general recommendations, I drafted specific and detailed procedures for inclusion in the requisite legislation, a precise regime not one elected representative would ever read let alone understand but which would, in my opinion, balance the country’s need to exploit its resources with its need to preserve an environment conducive to the welfare of the local flora, fauna and human inhabitants. Such an environment would include jobs and a small levy for the maintenance of local public works and services.