Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘Eddie, what are you talking about? Kate is trying. We should support her even if you think it’s … stupid to try. Do you think it’s stupid to try?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To try to … make it work.’

  I looked at the clock again. The room was dark. Tanya had her back to me throughout all of this. There was only the clock smugly marking time, fluorescent neutral, refusing to mix in.

  ‘We’re not talking about … what we’re talking about, are we?’ I asked her.

  The same word will have a cognitive and an emotive meaning to us simultaneously. Perhaps this was why it was funny when Groucho Marx said that words beginning with ‘k’ always get a laugh. It never failed, he said, urging us to consider, for example, ‘chicken’. Not only did I always laugh at this but I’ve never stopped trying to figure out why I always laughed at this.

  ‘Eddie? Eddie … what are you thinking? Say something.’ She turned over. There was the smell of peppermint on her breath.

  ‘I feel like chicken tonight.’

  ‘Eddie, listen, something happened today.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I decided I’m going to try—’

  ‘Yes, you said.’

  ‘I mean it. After Kate left. We’d had a long talk.’

  ‘Shit, this is with a woman who thinks she can save her life by creating another one and inflicting hers on it.’

  ‘I reached the other side … I reached the other side of the bed … the phone, Eddie.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I picked it up … and I called a number she gave me.’

  ‘Who did you call?’

  ‘A doctor. A psychiatrist, a woman Kate recommended. Then she left the house saying she’d be back in ten minutes, after I’d made the call.’

  ‘Did you speak to her, the doctor?’

  ‘No, I spoke to her nurse. Said they couldn’t fit me in till November.’

  ‘November? What did you say?’

  ‘I said they had to. She asked why. I couldn’t talk properly, I got all … like I am now and … I cried …’

  ‘Like you are now?’

  ‘Yes … she asked why and I said that I thought I was … depressed.’

  I held her in my arms and squeezed tightly trying to keep Tanya from seeing my eyes in the light of the clock. Neither of us said anything for a while, letting the clock do its work in silence.

  After a while in the dark your eyes make their own shapes, shapes you cannot understand. They don’t stay still long enough to conform to the contours of any daylight object you can recall. It is pointless to curse them just as it is pointless to regard them in any way as meaningful or as the shapes perhaps of things to come. At night, in the dark, when we are temporarily unashamed of incoherence, when we are robbed of the daylight proportions conferred by our senses, sounds can flesh out, can amplify the shapes. That night in bed as Tanya slept a chemically-induced sleep, I tried to ignore the shapes drifting just above my face. Born out of the lines of cracked paint on the ceiling they had left home early that night to be the things we can only see ourselves. And closer than ever this time, separate but still part of them, like water and its surface tension, came the sound of the helicopters.

  Though she had been having increasing difficulty greeting the day vertically she had no trouble waking up. Indeed we normally took being awake in unspoken shifts. I had trouble falling asleep and later waking up. Tanya had trouble staying asleep and getting up. Throughout almost all of each night there was always one of us fighting something. During the first shift, the one in which she slept and I was harassed by the circular mechanical motion of airborne tadpoles, I took my suit, my only suit, out of the wardrobe in the bedroom and hid it somewhere in another room. If Tanya had seen me dressed for work in my suit she would have questioned me about it and the clock would have given me at least two minutes of lying time. I would not have been able to sustain it that long.

  Why was my only suit blue? The thing about green is you never know when it’s going to really set you off or when it’s going to make you look pallid and sick. It has this in common with brown except that brown can be relied upon with far greater confidence to make you look pallid and sick. Grey is sombre, funereal or intimidating, which really left only blue. My father had a blue suit.

  Everyone on the train that morning looked as though they were dressed for a job interview. One had to impress, to impersonate someone you were not, all for the hope of ill-defined security. For this hope, unspoken of for the most part, older women and their daughters wore short skirts in winter, having been shown how never to menstruate by teenage girls who had fasted their way out of chronically under-funded schools and into glossy magazines.

  The women knew two types of men: the men they were looking for and the men who had left them. Both types were on this train. One could pick the men who had left them. They had left them because on their return home at the end of many frightened and uncertain days at work their partners were still not home from long hours bending over backwards to keep their jobs. When the women finally did get home there was nothing teenage about them but their clothes, and the men, whose mothers had never made their fathers defrost anything, needed more than ever to escape with one of the kids from the magazines. These men, both before and after they abandoned their partners, kept voting for parties strong on traditional family values. They felt in their hearts that no one understood them and that there was nothing wrong with leering over someone’s shoulder on a train to catch a glimpse of a skinny girl-child in a very short dress. After all, their ex-wives used to dress like that.

  It was cold. Men wore coats obscuring all but their shapes. I was not in a coat. In the middle of the night, at the time I had taken advantage of Tanya’s sleeping to steal my suit from the wardrobe in our bedroom, I had not thought to take my coat. In the morning when, shivering, I had remembered, it was already too risky to creep back in for it. Tanya might have been awake and seen me. So I stood exposed on the train between the men in their coats reading newspapers with headlines, Telstra Sale Jobs Go, Magpie Chief Lashes Out, and the women in short skirts reading various magazines all with the same hair care product advertisement on the back, Your hair is as individual as you are. Nobody spoke.

  This was an express train to the City via Richmond and the City loop. I would be early. I wanted to be early. That was good. Early was good. Everyone on the train would be early for my appointment. Our hair was as individual as we were. But we were ninety-eight per cent water. Or was that lettuce? We share ninety-eight per cent of the same genetic material with apes or is it ninety-eight per cent of the same genetic material with each other? Or is it apes and each other? Our brains certainly differed from those of apes. Unlike apes our brains have ten billion nerve cells; even mine. Banks were owned, managed and staffed by people with ten billion nerve cells per brain. I tried to take comfort in this. And yet, of all the people I could see from where I stood on the train as we entered the underground loop tunnel, the men in their coats, the women in their stockings and short skirts, I felt certain that I had the most in common with lettuce.

  I got to Flagstaff Station early. The train was on time. Everyone else hurried off and up the escalators as though the train were late and lateness terrified them. But if they wanted to feel differently why didn’t they catch an earlier train? Had they considered the night before how they would feel in the morning hurling their bodies toward William Street, and then opted for more sleep anyway? Or did they fail to factor-in the fear and instead lived each day like the day before, in the style of the sleepy rats that led a despondent Pavlov to dogs?

  I got to William Street in no hurry, realising that we were just as subject to evolution as were rats and microbes, viruses and the slime behind the bathroom tiles. Although there was still some time before my appointment there was not enough in which to evolve further. I was a slow-walking man in a blue suit and where I had got to had to be enough.

  Between the station
in William Street and the Metropolitan Hotel I found a coffee shop I had overlooked each day for more than ten years. There are at least fifty known neuro-transmitting molecules capable of carrying impulses from one brain cell to another and this was the first time this place had moved any of mine. It was not that I had a choice. The aroma of freshly brewed coffee can so enslave a coatless suited lettuce of a man in winter as to make a mockery of any notion of free will. It was fortunate I had the time because even from the street the coffee provided greater comfort than I was capable of resisting. Come in, sit down, inhale my charred sentiment. Warm yourself, feed yourself. Welcome to this vaporous charity. I was in heaven’s debt.

  There were old magazines by the register and even older suburban newspapers no one had wanted to steal. Having ordered a coffee I picked up one of the latter. Locals not the culprits: Police. Other people were to blame. Beside this article was a small photo of an elderly woman. I took her to be a victim of whatever it was the locals had not done but as the coffee kicked in it became clear that she had a small article to herself. What had this fragile old woman suffered to earn a place on the front page of this inner city newspaper? In black and white she trembled in my hands.

  She had lived and lived and lived. Elizabeth May Amery has done it her way for one hundred and one years and has no regrets, although she does regret her loss of personal dignity. Page two for details. I was not going to turn to page two. Was there someone in a coffee shop on the Gold Coast drinking coffee over a community newspaper with a photograph of my bewildered father on page one? Upstanding retired man opts out. Page two for details.

  Living too brief an hour we seldom make it to the front page. Had she died a long time ago, Elizabeth Mary Amery would only have made the death notices towards the back and even that would have required the assistance of some interested intermediary. But she kept living until there was a small space open for her on the front page. What temptation there must have been to pack it in at any time over the last five decades, during the long years when the exigencies of her life were no match for the lotto results or lost cat notices.

  But was it worth it, Elizabeth? She had done it her way for a hundred and one years with no regrets save for the loss of personal dignity. Is there any greater loss, Elizabeth? Perhaps it would have paid me to see page two for details but the steam from the coffee robbed my eyes of the acuity I was by then decreasingly taking for granted. With little but the steam in sight and the loss of Elizabeth’s personal dignity in mind, I pictured my lovable father retiring, contracting, shrinking, no longer crossing things off his life’s list of things to do, engaged only in lonely contemplation of what to do with the list now that he feels no need for it.

  Was he angry that he could not pin down the days that the rest of the world insisted he had accumulated? I hoped he did not look to me to be the measure of those days. I, who had arrived at a point where nothing would have pleased me more than to fall through the steam and to dissolve, body and mind, in the contents of a polystyrene cup, I tried to remember the last time I had hugged him. Once I had the roof over our heads firmly secured I would make it my business to renew a tactile acquaintance. Still in the grip of the steam I could feel him then, his touch. What were my hands feeling that was so like him when I was in William Street, face down over a steaming coffee for which I was still to pay and he was up in Queensland. Face down, it was my own face I was feeling.

  I might have stayed that way forever had a chair not taken advantage of an elderly woman by failing to deliver on its promise of structural permanence. It crashed to the floor one way and she to the other. Shaken, she lay there momentarily, legs askew, wondering if perhaps she had not died and gone straight to the scuffed linoleum floor of a coffee shop which, unlike her, had not seen its best days. She looked over at the upturned chair as if it might reasonably be expected to explain, if not apologise. She could remember apologies.

  ‘Are you alright?’ I asked her. It made her look up at me and she closed the bent scissors of her legs, one bandaged, the other like a stick of tinned asparagus.

  ‘Are you alright?’ I asked her again, bending down to help her up.

  ‘I think so. I’m … not really sure.’

  ‘Come and sit down. You just had a bit of a fall.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Would you like a drink?’

  ‘Thank you—a cup of tea, please,’ she answered, still in a daze.

  ‘You should have something to eat, you know. Something a little bit sweet maybe. What do you think? How about one of those blueberry muffins with your cup of tea?’

  ‘Well, I have an appointment.’

  ‘Is it far from here?’

  ‘No, not really but …’

  ‘When’s your appointment?’

  ‘Quarter to eleven.’

  ‘Oh, you definitely have time for a muffin. Let me get you a muffin.’

  ‘Thank you, that would be nice. Actually, what I’d really like is some aspirin. Do you have any aspirin?’

  ‘Let me check.’

  I ordered the tea and the muffin but they were out of aspirin. The nearest chemist was a block away in Lonsdale Street between Queen and Elizabeth streets. It was cold so I ran. I don’t know why I ran. I ran, I suppose, for her because she had an appointment, and for myself, because I could and had not for so long. I ran clumsily. The street was crowded, even though it was past rush-hour, people everywhere and I the only one on a mission, for aspirin. The street was wet with rain and everyone around me shunned it hurrying. I turned up the collar of my suit and ran.

  When I had left the coffee shop it was only drizzling but by the time I had paid for the aspirin the rain was angrier and it was not just the passing office workers and shop assistants who fled the wet but construction workers too who found crevices in Lonsdale Street I had never known existed. At least the rain did not bore them. Knocking down the walls of government offices and chipping away at the edges of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute seemed to leave them cold. They lit up cigarettes and watched me try to run past them uphill and into the rain. Why I too did not shelter none of us knew or thought much about but they had nothing to prove and no aspirin to deliver.

  My eyes made their own moisture when faced with the head-on confrontation with the weather. I wondered what they could reasonably expect if I looked only ahead from then on. They could look forward to focusing becoming so difficult that I saw better what was behind me than what was ahead. My skin would become thinner and whatever muscle bulk there was beneath it would become soft. I would stoop. It was coming, Lord. The discs in my spine would wear down and I would shrink, just a little. I would not be able to move as much air through my lungs and less oxygen would get into my blood. My prostate would enlarge and I would have less control over my micturition. As my skin became less elastic my testicles would droop. I would shrink, just a little.

  The rain and the hill slowed me down but did not stop me. I ran. The construction workers sheltering from the rain stood like honour guards and watched surprised. They watched as I slipped and fell, saved from hitting the ground only by some protruding wire fencing that had caught my jacket. It also saved me from thinking of anything but the tear.

  I heard the tear and could think of nothing else all the way back to the coffee shop. How big was it? Did it reach the lining? Could it be seen? Of course it could be seen. All the world could see it, would see it, but I could not look at it. Even under cover back in William Street in the entrance of the coffee shop I could not look at it. But I had heard it, just as I had heard the tile smash on the floor of the shower recess that morning.

  These sounds syncopate the soundtrack of our lives, the soundtracks we bring with us into the world without even knowing. They start off pretty enough, sometimes even beautiful. You hum them to yourself. This is your internal melody, more than a wake-up call, it is a sound which prevents you from ever hearing
nothing. Even when you are alone, when you have woken without realising that you are no longer asleep, the melody is there.

  After a decade or so of this inescapable melody that no one else can hear, you start to tire of it. It bores you, shames you. There is nothing you would not do to be free of this dragging melody but it clings like a sick man’s pyjamas. There seems nothing you can do. But sometime in your late teens or early adulthood you learn to jazz it up. Where, in your early years, it used to swing over a moderately fast four-four beat punctuated even more by the steady bass thump of your birthdays or the end of the annual exams, now you modify it to keep insanity from the orchestra pit of your mind. There you are, improvising your way through sporting teams and early romance, driving tests and alcohol all over the familiar chords but modifying its simple root by adding extra notes here and there. The melody is enriched. The little changes keep you interested.

  But after a while even this won’t do. It too starts to drag. The decisions you have made or failed to make leave you wanting more, needing more. But you only know one tune, the one that never goes away, the one you hate. You hit thirty or thereabouts when you learn, out of necessity, to scat. Bibbidee-be-be-be.. do-wha-… You close your eyes and swivel your head on an axis like windscreen wipers over that tired old melody. Approaching forty you scat with the best of them. You still have a version of your life’s theme and impulsively, unpredictably, you run through it now and see yourself overturning conventions of timing and phrasing. Only you can’t help it. Your every certainty is scattered. Anything goes. You thought you had rhythm to accentuate the positive but you’ve got plenty of nothing. It’s noisy, vague, devoid of meaning. It’s too out there. You try to look back but all you can hear is bibbidee-be-be-be.. do-wha-… You want to rest on the accents, make plans for the coming semi-quavers but it’s too late. The soundtrack of your life has become far too unpredictable and even though you don’t get around much anymore, it no longer means a thing cause it ain’t got that swing.