Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  For the first time in a long while I had the feeling that my work might contribute to some larger social outcome that, years later, my daughter could tell her children about and say, ‘Your grandfather was partly responsible for that.’ My wife, however, showed no interest in it. It was not that I needed to bore her with tales of effluent, particle extractors, scrubbing towers or ion exchange but the social goals of the report were, in a way, concrete examples of the very things she said had so wrongly been abandoned.

  That I had taken over the desk was not even discussed. The desk, like our bed, where she periodically hid from the world and then, increasingly, from me, was just a piece of furniture, old and not intrinsically attractive in itself. But like the bed, the desk that had for so long supported her PhD thesis acquired its meaning, for her and for me, through our subjective responses and not through anything built into it. It was a product of someone’s simple design, of sanded wood and nails and of our perception of it. I had not meant to take it over and Tanya had not meant to abandon it.

  I put off telling her that I knew about her job until I had finished drafting my report in its entirety. I put off everything until then, promising myself that after it was in, I would write to my mother, speak to Kirsten about one of us somehow getting up there to see them and get to the bottom of my father’s stoic and silent unravelling. I put off trying to contact Kate and I put off considering how Tanya would find work, whether any work was better than no work, whether she could continue her thesis while working part-time in a job she would find demeaning and how we would live without debts on one income. I knew I could always find the time to rank our debts, each one snapping at our heels, competing for attention, like small terriers.

  I could not put off waiting for Abby’s next convulsion. At Tanya’s desk I waited. In the office at work I revisited the unforgettable dance and at night in bed, as the paint told of its disaffection with the ceiling, I waited too.

  CHAPTER 25

  In a sense the completion of the report was the return to the paper cuts, itches and inexplicable sprains and bruises of normality from which we long to escape but cannot for very long. This is why orgasms are exalted and idealism is so comforting. But the ordinary is persistent and tyrannical. On the first Saturday after the report was finished, I rose early and crept out to do the shopping while Abby and Tanya were still asleep. Abby almost always woke before we did so the fact that she was asleep when I left meant that she had already woken, played a bit and then gone back to bed.

  Not more than two hours later when I returned she was sitting in her dressing gown cross-legged in front of the television watching a series of rock clips and trying to sing along with the commercials between them.

  ‘Hi, Dad.’

  ‘Hi, sweetie.’

  ‘Have you been shopping?’

  ‘Sure have.’

  ‘D’ja get anything for me?’

  ‘Are you kidding? A rotten kid like you!’

  ‘Dad!’ she squealed.

  ‘Everything in here’s for you. Let’s see what we’ve got here. There’s some bathroom tile cleaner for you. Toilet Duck, that’s especially for you.’

  ‘But I’ve been good. I’ve got my dressing gown on.’

  ‘What about your slippers?’

  She looked down at her bare feet and answered coyly. ‘No slippers actually. That was a close one.’

  ‘A close one?’

  ‘Yeah, I nearly put them on.’

  ‘Where’s Mum?’

  ‘Still in bed.’

  ‘Any stirring sounds, signs of life, that sort of thing?’

  ‘She went to the toilet during the cartoons but that was ages ago. It was wee. I listened. D’ja want to carry me to my slippers? I know where they are.’

  ‘That’s about what I most want to do in the world. Let me just put these bags down in the kitchen. For days I’ve been wanting to carry you to your slippers but I thought you were just too busy.’

  ‘I have been busy, haven’t I?’

  At that I picked her up, hugging her to my chest as she squealed and cycled her feet in the air.

  ‘Shh! You’ll wake Mum.’ We made our way through the hall to her bedroom.

  ‘It’s time for her to wake up now anyway. We’re awake. I feel like chicken tonight. I feel like chicken tonight,’ she sang with a sudden burst of enthusiasm.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘No, it’s just a song. I’d like some toast.’

  I left her putting her slippers on. Tanya stood in the kitchen with ‘Tess’s’ dressing gown fastened tightly around her waist going through the plastic shopping bags. I went to kiss her as she emptied the bags item by item placing everything in its proper place.

  ‘I’ve done the shopping.’

  ‘Yes, I can see.’

  I watched her unpacking and she looked up to find me watching her.

  ‘I’m sorry, Eddie. Thank you for getting up early and doing the shopping.’

  ‘That’s okay. Did you get some more sleep?’

  ‘Yes, on and off, sort of fitful.’

  We looked at each other following her choice of words, just as Abby came into the kitchen now in her dressing gown and slippers.

  ‘Any treats? Hey, Mum’s not wearing any slippers, Dad.’

  ‘Not even one?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then it’s no Toilet Duck for her.’

  ‘Eddie, could you go into the lounge room and turn the television off if no one is watching it?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘The noise … it’s so inane. I don’t want to live in one of those houses where the television is always left on as if it were the refrigerator.’

  ‘Where are those houses, Mum?’

  Just as my finger hit the off button I heard her call my name with a mixture of disgust, contempt and outrage from the kitchen doorway.

  ‘What?’ I called back cautiously and defensively.

  ‘Edam!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You bought Dutch Edam!’

  ‘So? I like Dutch Edam. You like Dutch Edam. Everybody does.’

  ‘Do I?’ Abby asked from behind her mother, her voice gently filling one of the plastic bags.

  ‘It’s too expensive, Eddie.’

  ‘We can afford it once in a while.’

  ‘No, we can’t. Anyway, it’s imported. We should be supporting local producers.’

  ‘That’s the principle but Edam tastes better.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t. Australia makes some of the finest cheeses in the world,’ she continued, now in the lounge room.

  ‘Yes, but that’s not the crap we buy. We buy yellow soap that’s labelled “cheese”. It bears no other relationship to cheese. It’s a complex blend of many organic compounds but none of them is cheese. Its active ingredient is not even cheese but a type of sodium dodecylbenzeasulfonate. We don’t like eating it which is why it sits in the fridge maturing, waiting for a disease it can cure to justify its cheesey existence. Granted, its moisturising and conditioning agents make it gentle enough for the whole family but—and this is an important qualification for a cheese—it is not cheese.’

  ‘It’s no use.’

  ‘It has a use. I’m sure it has use, just not as a cheese.’

  ‘Why do you have to turn everything into a fucking joke?’

  Why did I? How quickly it became obvious that it was no joke. There wasn’t a joke to be found. Suddenly it seemed they had all been harvested and none replanted. Jokes were packaged for export or else saved for the tourist market and no one was visiting us.

  ‘Tanya, it’s okay. It’s not important, we’re talking about cheese. It’s only cheese, more or less.’

  ‘It’s money. I’m always trying to save it, to cut back, and then you have to shop like a complete idiot. She needs clothes, Eddie, and you’re buying imported fucking cheese—when we can’t afford to buy her a new coat. She’ll freeze if she keeps wearing the one she’s got. She’ll bloody freeze and get t
he flu again. You know what I mean, don’t you? How about some imported milk next time, from Belgium perhaps?’

  ‘We’ll get her a new coat. If she needs a coat we’ll get her one.’

  ‘With what? Shall we barter the cheese? We’re rich in cheese. Actually, you don’t even get much for what they charge you. Bloody EC.’

  ‘Tanya, there’s no point buying cheese we don’t eat and, anyway, the difference in the cost of local cheese and the cost of Edam isn’t going to make the difference between a new coat and no coat.’

  Why couldn’t I shut up?

  ‘It all adds up. The interest on the credit cards, the phone, gas, electricity; they all add up but never the income. The car is dead. We don’t have a car. We have a car-shaped shrine to mobility, physical and social. It’s going to cost us to have it moved. What are you thinking of doing about it? ’Cause you’re going to have to do something for once in your fucking life besides relying on me.’

  ‘Tanya, it’s not that bad.’

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘No it’s not. We’ll be okay. We’ll be fine.’

  ‘Stop saying that. You don’t know the half of it. We will not be fine. Already I’m not fine. I am not fine.’

  ‘Overcast?’

  ‘Downcast. Each Saturday I go down to the supermarket, the place I’m destined to return to and … I wait.’ She swallowed.

  ‘Wait?’

  ‘Wait. At the end of each Saturday, standing there by the meat counter, pretending to look at the different cuts. But they know. How long can someone stare at raw meat? They know why I’m there and I know that they know so I can’t look at them. I wait till the first of them starts rinsing the drip trays.’

  ‘Tanya,’ I said quietly, ‘what do you wait for?’

  ‘In the afternoons, Saturday afternoons, they drop the price of whatever cuts are left over. That is what I wait for and it’s going to get worse.’

  ‘Tanya!’

  ‘Eddie, don’t Tanya! me, you dear sweet useless bastard. Go back to Spensers fucking Gulf because this is the real world and you can’t save it. How do you think we can afford to eat meat at all? I buy what the bankers, consultants, systems analysts, news readers and chief executive officers’ families won’t touch and then I put it in a big pot with a lot of water, tomatoes and pepper and we eat stew.’

  ‘Casserole.’

  ‘It’s stew, Eddie. It’s fucking stew. We’re in the bog and it’s stew. And I can’t see any way out of it. My biggest challenge is to disguise the meat once I’ve cut off the parts they’ve camouflaged with packaging. If I had a big enough pot …’

  ‘Tanya,’ I went over to her, ‘please stop it.’

  She turned away from me. ‘Why? What are you going to do? What do you ever do? I don’t think you realise we’re in big trouble. I’ve tried but … I’m out of options.’

  ‘You’ll finish it.’ I closed my eyes. Her voice cut through me.

  ‘No, I won’t ever finish it. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of everything.’ Then something caught her attention in the kitchen.

  ‘What the hell is she doing? Abby!’ She rushed into the kitchen and I ran after her. Abby was sitting at the kitchen table with a knife in her hand cutting up the cheese into shapes. The unpacked shopping formed a semi-circular wall on the table around her but she had limited the sphere of her activity to an imposition of her will on the cheese at knife-point.

  There are moments when you see something happening so slowly it still has not really happened before you have finished seeing it and yet you are completely unable to alter it, or are unable to intervene. In the same way and with the same grace that clouds drift across the two-dimensional reduction in television weather reports of the places in which we live, Tanya flew at Abby, knocking the knife out of her hand and striking her with the hard side of a not quite open palm. The terror in Abby’s eyes as she saw her mother coming toward her prefaced the return to normal transmission at life’s usual speed. The first thing we heard was Abby’s scream, high-pitched and composed in equal parts of pain, shock and humiliation. The knife hit the floor and bounced once on the linoleum. We heard it even though we were too close to see it.

  Abby cried in horror.

  ‘Mum.’

  There was genuine and distilled disbelief in her voice. An unknown dam behind her eyes burst on the contact with her mother’s hand and she ran out of the room leaving the cheese figures on the table alone with her parents. I took Tanya not in my arms but, for the first time ever, in my hands, one hand on each arm just below the shoulder, and I shook her in an instinctive tribute to all this refined pain. Is it ridiculous to say that the cut-up cheese on the table made me love my daughter more? The sight of it made me angrier with Tanya.

  ‘Leave her alone. Are you mad? What the hell did you hit her for?’

  ‘I didn’t hit her. That knife is very sharp. She could’ve cut herself. It’s the sharp knife.’

  ‘Maybe she just wanted some cheese?’

  ‘She could ask. It’s dangerous for her to use that knife. Will you let go of me?’

  ‘Tanya, you can’t take it out on her.’

  ‘She was making a mess … and destroying the cheese.’

  Tanya listened to her words and surveyed the kitchen in its brand new disarray with the knife lying accusingly, bizarrely on the floor. She tried but seemed unable to process what she saw and how quickly it had all happened. Then she began to cry and I took her from my hands into my arms.

  ‘Oh God, Eddie. I’ve seen this happening in other people’s lives.’

  ‘Sweetheart, she’s innocent.’

  ‘I know. I can’t believe what I did. I’m not innocent. She is. I … can’t believe this is happening.’

  ‘We are all innocent. It’ll be okay. We’ll get through it. It’s not so bad.’

  ‘Eddie, you don’t know the half of it.’

  ‘I do. I know everything.’

  She looked up. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I know everything. The only thing I don’t know is why you couldn’t tell me.’

  Now she cried seriously, rhythmically, the cavity inside her chest collapsing and expanding as if from oxygen depletion.

  ‘How did you know?’ she asked between staccato breaths.

  ‘I saw the letter. You left it on the desk. Why didn’t you tell me they weren’t renewing your contract?’

  ‘Why didn’t you say something if you knew?’

  ‘I was going to but Abby … got sick and then I had to go away again. Why didn’t you tell me? Tanya, you can never be ashamed in front of me. You know that.’

  ‘You’re wrong. I can.’

  She did not look at me. Now I held her up, her body having gradually given up the need to remain vertical, no longer wishing to aid and abet the chronicling of her despair. Even with our daughter crying on her little girl’s bed, part of the smallness of her still warm from her mother’s hand, there was no sadder person than my wife. On noticing Abby looking in at us from half in and half out of the room Tanya began to cry with renewed fervour.

  ‘Come in, little one,’ I entreated. ‘Mum’s just a bit upset.’

  Abby took the smallest steps towards us.

  ‘I am so sorry I hurt you. I got a shock to see you with that knife. You know you should ask someone if you want a piece of cheese,’ Tanya said apologetically.

  ‘But I was making something for you.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘Yes, a surprise.’

  Tanya picked her up and lifted her to her chest, the two of them looking like different-sized, tear-stained versions of the other.

  ‘I’m so sorry, sweetie. Really sorry. Show me what you were making.’

  ‘Tigers,’ Abby said pointing to the table.

  ‘Tigers? Out of cheese?’

  ‘Your tigers. The ones you like.’

  ‘My tigers?’

  ‘Tamil tigers … of Edam.’

  I picked the knife up from the floor and took i
t to the sink to wash it.

  Abby had no better friend and no softer touch than Tanya that day. Pink and blue ice-cream dripped down several cones in several parks and sticky hands were wiped off nonchalantly with a flick of the wrist. Ribbons, tiger picture books, jacks and petals encased in transparent rubber balls were bought with money Dutch dairy farmers could have used to visit us. Abby got to stay up late that night and watch ‘The Bill’. Nothing more was said about the blow but in the middle of the night I turned to find I had our bed all to myself. Tanya was sitting in Abby’s room watching her sleep, waiting for another seizure.

  CHAPTER 26

  At work I waited to hear the fate of my report. The longer I waited the more it seemed to matter to me. While its implementation might displease Amanda’s father I did not think anything in it would disconcert the Department. The Minister could trumpet it as a tribute to his commitment to environmental responsibility. He could make political mileage out of it without having to spend an extra cent. It was, after all, ‘revenue neutral’ which was the most important quality any government initiative could have. Each time I came back from Spensers Gulf I noticed small changes, small absences around the office. A biscuit tin, a water cooler, soap and paper towels in the men’s room, a secretary, and timid colleague after colleague; they were quietly disappearing.

  One day Gerard called me into his office to tell me that the secretary of the department wanted to see me. He could have communicated this over the telephone but that would not have necessitated my walk down the corridor, the brief knock on his door and the inquiry exquisite to his ears, ‘You wanted to see me?’ which enabled him to answer, ‘Yes, Harnovey. Come in and close the door behind you.’

  He often addressed me by my surname even though we had been in the same year at university. It was not simply that he had appropriated one of the devices that had been used to dehumanise him at boarding school. I had married someone for whom he had felt as deeply as it was possible for him to feel. Despite his inability to register even the unsubtleties of his life and of the world which had spewed him up and out like mud at a New Zealand tourist attraction, he had nonetheless grasped the magnitude of his loss when Tanya became the one that got away.