The undergrad psychology major repeated her question about upgrading the car. Her voice was measured as she went through the options for me again, slowly, all her training thus far enabling her to gently massage my growing inability to answer her questions or deal with the concomitant realisations. She should not have been asking these questions, not of strangers. We were no one’s target market. There was nothing to be learned from my answers, no valid extrapolation to be made. If an election had been held the next day, Abby would still have wanted the other eleven glow-in-the-dark space monsters and Tanya would still not have finished her PhD thesis.
Bathroom tiles were lifting in the shower recess. For days I had valiantly ignored them but Tanya had seen them too and now we had to face and even discuss the lifting of the bathroom tiles in the shower recess. I didn’t know what had caused them to lift, the category of person that corrects the effect nor the identity of a suitable person within that category. As both a man and an engineer I should have known more about this than I did, should in the sense of everybody’s expectations, perhaps Tanya’s expectations. But I didn’t. I would’ve called my father but he was in Queensland, Tanya’s father had died a long time ago, and anyway, in our thirties we were meant to be omnipotent, at least in matters of grout and seepage, insurance and financial planning. But I had no doubt that if I ever did determine the appropriate category of tradesperson to fix the bathroom tiles problem, I would not be able to afford their services. The psychology major looked at her printed material and then at me with slight horror as if to say: You can be impotent but you cannot be indigent.
Out of necessity, we would get somebody to fix it and pay for it, like other essentials, with an already laden credit card. I would never be able to pay off the credit card. Not ever. My salary had not increased for four years. I just flirted with the debt, servicing it, like a prostitute, never leaving it fully satisfied, simultaneously contemptuous and in fear of what it might do. In the meantime my daughter would be growing up and we would try to shelter her from the debt for as long as we could. This was my plan.
And there was no time, not six months, two years, five years or ten years when, according to the plan, we would be ready to upgrade the car. This was true whether the car manufacturers named the new models Galaxies, Meteors, Novas, Supernovas or Blackholes. I myself was a professional male in my mid to late thirties with no prospect of appealing to the market. The market and I just never met and the greater the primacy of the former the more marginal I would become. Every alternate week the bank automatically deducted sixty-two per cent of the previous fortnight’s pay packet for the mortgage.
So I looked down at the kitchen floor with a tightness in my throat and the young woman, this potential psychologist who must have wished she had never knocked on my door, absorbed my silence. I wanted to tell her to go away but none of this was her fault. If she had given it any thought though she would have realised that she too had a pretty good chance of ending up in a kitchen in her mid to late thirties looking down at the floor for glow-in-the-dark space monsters without a prayer of a hope for a new car in the time allotted for that purpose by her current employers. But it was Saturday morning and she probably had a date that night which she thought might just make everything alright. They were going clubbing. They would trip till not only was there no tomorrow, but till there was considerable doubt about today. She was going to forget that we ever met, and having failed to get a response to the question, ‘Are you alright?’ she would creep out of my home thinking how weird some people are.
CHAPTER 17
On the night of my return from my fifth visit to Spensers Gulf, Tanya had fallen asleep by ten o’clock. She had set the dining table for two and left my dinner in the microwave oven but when my plane was delayed she gave in to sleep. It was Abby’s swimming lesson day and Abby had complained that Tanya’s mother had been taking and picking her up too often and that she drove ‘funny’. She had asked why Tanya couldn’t pick her up if she really loved her more than work. When Tanya’s explanations incorporated the proposition that she was only human, Abby responded that this was good because she was a human too. I heard all this over the phone but by the time I had closed the front door behind me the show was over and the central protagonists were fast asleep. There was a note on my pillow. Welcome home, my dear one. Wake me if you like. Love Tanya.
But she was sleeping so soundly I did not have the heart to wake her. I took off my shoes and went to look in on Abby. Fortunately she was going through the stage of needing to sleep with a night-light on or I would have tripped on a wide-eyed wooden bug whose lashes fluttered when its wheels moved. Abby had named it Alexander. Tanya had bought it for her even without Abby needing it. (Abby had recently replaced want with need in her vocabulary.) It, that is to say, Alexander, had been made by members of one or other oppressed minority.
Tanya was a sucker for goods that were marketed as the products of a cottage industry staffed by people whose problems made her feel guilty for worrying about her own concerns. It seemed that these people could see her coming because we kept accumulating variants of Alexander which generally found their way into Abby’s imaginative world and from there onto her bedroom floor.
All that was required was for the oppressed manufacturers of Alexander and his friends to realise how far they could go in provoking Tanya’s guilt. If they made her feel too guilty she would have to turn her back on them, their problems and their products. She might even feel a little angry at them for so brazenly invoking perspective to trivialise her problems. There were, no doubt, schools of commerce that propagated the law of diminishing marginal guilt, a law that holds that, after some point, further increases in the quantity of guilt induced yield smaller and smaller sales.
‘Dad, are you home now?’ Abby whispered from beneath a horizontal wall of soft toys. ‘Mum said she’d wake me up when you got home.’
‘She’s asleep too, sweetie.’
‘Shall we play, just us then?’
‘Sure. As soon as you wake up.’
‘But I’m already awake,’ she yawned.
‘Then I’m too late. I’ve missed you waking up. You’ll have to go back to sleep so that you can wake up when I’m home.’
‘Dad, after swimming today, we went to the beach.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes and I’ve started a rock collection. Do you want to see it?’
‘Yes I do. As soon as you wake up.’
Abby’s growing body, swathed in flannel, soon yielded to the call of the hour but it was a different proposition for me in our bedroom. Tanya slept as if made for a tomb while I lay beside her, tired but not sleepy, alternating my focus between the ceiling and the digits of the clock radio, the same one that had alarmed Tanya first thing that morning so many years earlier when it had broadcast the fluctuations in the all-ordinaries index for the first time.
I knew well one of the possible causes of her need for sleep on these early nights. Her thesis seemed as far from its conclusion as ever and her need for it to be finished, and successfully so, was pressing down on her. She took to talking about her horror at the prospect of not finishing the thesis, not turning it into a book, not retaining her position at the university and ultimately waking up to one morning after another, each with nothing but its own afternoon. But the more she worried about it the further its completed form retreated from reality and the further it invaded her imagination.
There was a financial aspect to it as well. When budgeting for Abby’s ever-increasing needs and the maintenance of the mortgage, Tanya’s income had always been factored in. I couldn’t do it alone. We had discussed this and Tanya had, depending on her mood, immediately characterised our situation as hopeless, or else offered an as yet unpromised advance from an unknown publisher for immediate banking. The latter would follow a good day’s work or a positive meeting with her supervisor.
‘He thinks it’s going well and so do I. I know it will be something publishers wil
l be interested in,’ she would tell me over the phone when I would call at night from Amanda’s father’s heavy metal rich gulf. When she asked me about my work I would resist telling her all of my concerns just as I resisted exposing her optimistic plans for publication of her thesis to the hard cold light of reality. But it was becoming inescapably clear to me that Mr Claremont’s smelter project could not go ahead as planned without causing extensive degradation of the environment and killing off certain types of fish, birds and plant life.
Why should this have affected me? Surely once I had reported my findings, and perhaps attempted to steer the legislation accordingly, my stake in Spensers Gulf, Spensers Island and Claremont’s lead smelter, zinc smelter and sulphuric acid plant would revert to that of any other member of the public? My job was to make recommendations based on my research. Whatever my social or moral concerns, my professional interest stopped at the recommendations. If they wanted someone to write the kind of report they were looking for, irrespective of the findings, it would not have been difficult to choose someone else for the job, someone whose scientific integrity stopped short of personal courage.
Ageing quietly beside the sleeping Tanya that night in our historiography-laden bed, watching the clock impart the neutrality of time as only a clock can, it occurred to me that it was not ridiculous to contemplate the predication of courage, or of its absence, with respect to somebody in the circumstances in which I found myself. Whatever the clock might say to the occupants of the bed between one event and the next during the term of our tacit agreement to sample these two particular versions of a life together, these were not neutral times.
Public servants, of which I was one, had become servants of hidden and private fiefdoms, publicly funded till the next economic ‘reform’ by the government and the eventual onset of rigormortis in the body politic. In this instance, I worked for Gerard and he worked, at least in part, to settle an old score with Amanda’s father. It had been rumoured that his contract of employment specified that any increases in the department’s productivity, which meant any reduction in its operating costs for the financial year, were to go directly to him as a bonus. If my recommendations were looked on with disfavour by the Head of the department or even by the Minister himself, there was nothing to stop me being dismissed and the consequent reduction in the Department’s operating costs going as a bonus, in several senses, to Gerard. Then one or other colleague of mine would be asked to try again, being free, of course, to draw on my earlier work and the knowledge of my experience.
If I did not write a report that was favourable to the smelter project, in whose interests would it be to keep me around? And if I were dismissed, who in the hierarchical pyramid would find this sort of blatant interference with public service objectivity and outright intimidation of a servant of the State so improper, so grossly offensive that he would have to speak up? Would it be the Minister or the Head of the Department? Would it be Mr Claremont or Gerard?
At night the helicopters moved above our home. I listened to them churning up the sky. What were they looking for? Could it not wait until the morning? This never used to happen. I didn’t remember helicopters in the night skies of my youth. Tanya and Abby stayed sleeping and if I was to join them I had to make peace with the helicopters. There was no sense in fighting them. Turning my back on the clock, I repeated to myself, slowly, all that I knew.
At night the helicopters moved.
I woke the next morning to intermittent sunlight sneaking up on me from under the blinds of our bedroom. Tanya was up already. My half-emptied suitcase lay at the foot of the bed. The intermittence of the light was not due to any fault in the sun but rather to the jagged horizon I collided with when I moved from my supine position in bed. Whichever way I turned, the pillow had become hard and coarse and smelling as of the earth’s beginnings. I hoped I was not fully awake and that this was only what you faced when your subconscious kow-tows to the helicopters in the bargaining for a few short hours of sleep that no one else is using.
But this was real and only made explicable and bearable by the studious creeping about of my daughter, wrapped in her dressing gown and wearing her rabbit slippers. She was carrying the rocks of her new collection and delicately arranging them in a circumference around my head.
‘Hi, Dad,’ she whispered. ‘These are my rocks, the ones I told you about. Are you awake?’
I picked her up from the side of the bed and held her tightly to me with my eyes closed, tempted to believe in God just to have someone to thank for her.
‘Dad. You’re squishing me! Why are you crying? Are you crying?’
‘No, sweetie. It’s just lovely to see you. Are these your rocks?’
‘Yep. The ones I told you about. You said you’d see them when we woke up.’
‘And I have.’
‘Do you like them?’
‘Abby, I love them.’
Tanya had squeezed fresh orange juice for all of us. We had breakfast and then it was agreed that I would take Abby out shopping and let Tanya have the morning to work. It was not the time to discuss the things that had kept me tilting at helicopters in the hours I had borrowed from another day. I looked at them both sitting at the kitchen table in the morning dishevelment and thought how far I had come.
I took Abby to the old neighbourhood by the beach where Tanya and I had spent our money and our youth together almost half our lives ago. For a moment Abby had thought that I meant that she would see us there as we were at seventeen. It was not a flaw in her understanding but a flaw in my expression coupled with her almost tangible desire to see us in the olden days. She was disappointed that the supermarket where I had met her mother looked just like today’s supermarkets and she wanted to see the exact aisle where we had first spoken. (She had heard the story of our meeting many times and loved hearing it, so much so that she could tell it to us, and she would correct us if we got something wrong.)
I explained that everything was much faster these days. Groceries were scanned, bar codes were read and prices were totalled instantly by computers. If this technology had been around back then Tanya and I might never have met and she might never have been born. The thought horrified her and didn’t do much good for me either. It had been hard enough meeting Tanya then. It would be impossible now. Everything happens too quickly to be understood while it is happening. Analysis is impossible until the event is over. Nobody seems to mind this. It is never commented on, except in a manner of speaking, by Abby.
With all the rhythmic shifts in one’s pulse that accompanies a second order emotion like nostalgia, I took Abby into Old Man Williamson’s Cards and Music. It had changed in ways Abby could not imagine. By the corner opposite the counter there stood a forlorn display case half-filled with second-hand LP records, the very gold of my youth when pocket money was measured in inches of vinyl. Abby picked one of them up and examined it.
‘What’s this, Dad?’
‘That’s Elvis, sweetie, on record, vinyl.’
She seemed excited by this. ‘Really?’ she asked.
‘Uh-huh. From his Las Vegas period, by the look of it.’
‘It’s really old isn’t it, Dad,’ she said looking at it with new reverence.
A very young man, fashionably close to bald was manically slapping plastic CD covers along the wall from A to Z to keep them from leaning forward. I had never done anything that fast and I was not likely to.
‘Excuse me,’ I said to him, having just then, in that instant, acquired my parents’ displacement from his part of the century. ‘Excuse me, is Mr Williamson around?’
‘Who?’
‘Mr Williamson. I thought I’d say hello. Is he around here somewhere?’
He looked at me blankly but not with the blankness of someone failing to understand. This was the blankness of a young man with a cold head, who had spent too many hours preventing CDs from inclining uncommercially head-first toward oblivion and who wanted nothing more from a career.
; ‘The owner, Mr Williamson,’ I repeated.
‘Oh right. He’s dead.’
‘Dead!’
‘Yeah. Been dead for years.’
‘Like Elvis, Dad,’ said Abby, at my leg beneath the counter with a vinyl recording of the King under her arm.
There was no reason why Old Man Williamson should not have been dead. If he were ‘Old Man Williamson’ almost twenty years earlier it was likely, even proper for him to have died. It was just that in calling him ‘old man’ Williamson we had not meant to imply then that he was old, just that he was older then we were and unable to distinguish aurally between Joy Division and The Clash (which is why he filed all New Wave records under ‘T’).
But I was not ready to stop thinking of him as ‘Old Man Williamson’ because if I did my father would be next in line to be the old man that some seventeen-year-old factors vaguely into the outskirts of his consciousness as the personification of what used to be but no longer is. And this would mean that I would soon be forty which, of course, I could not be. I was still seventeen, or perhaps eighteen, and had just stayed that way for twenty years.
The bald young man struck up a conversation with Abby without any trouble. Perhaps it was easier for them to talk because they both knew that he’d had trouble talking to me. When we left Williamson’s Cards and Music I was still acclimatising myself to Old Man Williamson’s death, remembering his not unfriendly gruffness, particularly in the summer I had met Tanya. I held Abby’s hand as we made our way back into the street. Her other hand had Elvis in Las Vegas. The young fast bald man had given her the album on the condition she let him know if she saw Elvis appearing anywhere in her travels.
Three Dollars Page 15
