Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘You’re doing everything you can, you know,’ I told him.

  ‘You think so?’ he asked, not cynically but as if starving for redemption.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I answered. ‘Are you okay?’ He was silent for a moment.

  ‘It’s just that I can’t take him home, you know. Can you take him?’

  I looked briefly at the stray brown dog. ‘No,’ I said with a firmness which surprised me. ‘No, I just can’t. But I’m sure someone will if you can just hold on till daytime.’

  ‘People shouldn’t be allowed to do these things. I’d take him but I’ve already got this one and it’s not fair on my mother. I’m staying with her, with my parents, for the time being. It’s hard enough on her having one dog.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked. He looked in shock and his eyes, red and moist, stopped darting around for the first time and fixed on me before he answered.

  ‘Nick.’

  Slowly I put out my hand. ‘Nick, I’m Eddie.’

  As I extended my arm he could see in my eyes my realisation that I was going to be taking his cut hand in mine.

  ‘It’s alright,’ he said. ‘I don’t have AIDS or anything. You can shake my hand.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Nick,’ I said coming closer and taking his cut hand in mine and adding quietly to both of us, ‘It’s alright. Is there anything you would like me to do for you, Nick? What would you like me to do?’

  At this he started to cry uncontrollably. The tears were those of a child. Embarrassed, he awkwardly took out his wallet with his free hand and placed it in mine. As I held it he reached in with his fingers and took out a torn and crumpled photograph of three children and pointed to them.

  ‘They’re mine. Two of them for sure. But they’re with their mother now. That’s her,’ and he pointed at a woman’s body that ended where the photograph had been torn.

  ‘I’m an alcoholic. You can probably smell it on me. I’m no good to them, no good to anyone. I was on the wagon, clean for almost a year and half, loading crates at a pub in Richmond, and I was still clean. But I got laid off without a word of warning. She took it bad. The kids started crying when she started going out. You know what I mean, Eddie? That’s right, Eddie, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So I started drinking and then … I don’t know myself. I’ve hit her. I’ll tell you that. She was screwing around, thought I didn’t know and then she didn’t care after a while. Now I’m living with my mum. She only lives up there a bit, Eddie, and she can’t take two dogs. It’s bad enough as it is, man. It’s killing her.’

  ‘Is there anything you’d like me to do, Nick, anyone I can call?’

  ‘Why’re you being like this? Why’re you doing this?’

  ‘What? I’m not doing anything. I was just on my way to pick up some curries from there and I saw you. You seemed like a good guy. I thought maybe there was something I could do.’

  ‘But why?’ He cried harder. ‘Why would you want to do something for me?’

  ‘I don’t know, Nick. You know the way it is. You seem like a good guy. Maybe you’d do something for me one day if I needed a hand. We’re neighbours, practically neighbours. You’d help someone out, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you, Nick?’

  ‘I don’t believe this. You’re like a dream. Why are you doing this?’

  ‘I’m not doing anything. Just talking. You seem like a good guy.’

  ‘Why? Why do I seem like a good guy?’

  ‘I don’t know. You care about both of the dogs, the one that’s yours and the one that isn’t. You don’t want to hurt your mother and you miss your kids. I know all of this already and it’s more than enough.’

  I could see that it was the first time in a long time that he’d been shown a kindness and he couldn’t believe it.

  ‘You’re incredible, man. I don’t believe this.’

  ‘I’m just a guy, Nick, just a guy on his way to pick up some curries, a guy like you. And we talk to each other. It’s no big deal, Nick. It’s what distinguishes humans from other animals. We don’t do it enough but we’ll get there. It’s still early in the day.’ Nick looked up at the street-light. Insects fought each other under it. ‘Early in the evolutionary day, Nick. You know what I mean? I think you’re okay now. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Let me get you something. I only live up there.’

  ‘Nick, it’s okay. I don’t want you to give me anything. Take care of those dogs for just one more day. You’ll be doing the neighbourhood some good. I can’t take either of them. It’s a real help. Lucky you’re around.’

  ‘This is incredible, just meeting you like this. Two weeks ago I was on my way to an AA meeting in Oakleigh and three guys jumped me, carved a swastika in my chest with a screwdriver, I’m serious. Look!’

  He lifted up the top of his t-shirt to show raw flesh disfigured in the shape he had promised, just above the white dog’s head.

  ‘Let me get you something, Eddie. It’s only up the road.’

  ‘Thanks, Nick, but I’ve got to get my curries. Really. They’ll be cold.’ I started to walk on and we called to each other.

  ‘Shit, man! I won’t forget you, Eddie, wherever you’re from.’

  ‘Take care of yourself, Nick. You’ll be fine.’

  He walked up the side street occasionally turning back to face my direction, still holding the white dog. Its larger brown friend with the white between its ears followed them both back to Nick’s mother’s place. I was exhausted from the encounter and from trying to make him believe in something neither of us could see, from trying to steer a fine line between unintended condescension, credibility, hope and an unwanted dog.

  Abby was going to bed with Tanya’s assistance when I returned. She had reluctantly eaten about a fifth of a hastily prepared dinner of eggs, toast, and junket. Having complained of feeling hot she had to be begged, bribed and coerced into eating the little she finally ate. The bribe involved the next instalment of a story Tanya was making up each night as she went along, a story about a beautiful and sensitive mouse that lived in the woods and was having trouble finishing its thesis.

  Kate was with Thomas Hardy or his successor in what used to be the lounge room and I stood in the kitchen thinking of Nick and the two dogs, the three children and his headless wife, and the three men that jumped him in Oakleigh leaving a swastika on his chest. Absent-mindedly, I snapped the lid off the plastic containers of curry and tasted each dish.

  Was the worst part of the encounter his incredulity that I would stop, ask his name, shake his hand, talk to him and offer assistance or was it the fact that I had really provided none? Would he wake tomorrow hungover, missing his two or three children, seeing his mother pained at what she saw when she looked at him, and he still with one more dog than he required? Had he been cheated, misled, conned by a smokescreen of liberalism? I had left him with only the two dogs with which he had started; anything else would evaporate quickly. From Oakleigh he took away something he would never forget, something which will be under every t-shirt he would ever wear, sober or not, something they will, sooner or later, bury him with. The anaesthetic I had provided was cheap and unreliable. It goes like the warmth of a winter sun. Intangible anodynes, the words run out of steam—the steam that won’t come with you from the bathroom and out into the street. And no one else would offer him even this. That was the worst part.

  I should have taken the dog, the taller brown one with the white paw-print marking on its head. This is what I was thinking when I surprised Tanya, who looked at me quizzically as I stood motionless at the table, with my coat on, silent with watery eyes and a fork in one hand.

  ‘What kept you? Hey, are you alright?’

  Some other time. I would tell her some other time, or never. Was I alright? I would be. I would be fine.

  ‘The curry … it’s really hot. Never been like this.’ She looked at me in silence. The fluorescent light was gently strobing, humming, flickering like an eyelid o
ver pepper.

  ‘Tanya … it’s never been like this.’

  CHAPTER 21

  Two days later Abby’s non-specific ‘hotness’ had ripened into a flu. Tanya had to be convinced that she was not being a bad mother not to cancel her late tutorials and to stay back later for a seminar delivered by a visiting overseas expert in international relations, a big time mega-luminary of the circuit who had managed the cross-over from academia to late-night television panels where he had critically informed us for years via satellite, with only one earplug, about everything; a big man, the Elvis of international political economy.

  Kate had at that time taken to picking Abby up from Tanya’s mother whose job it was to pick her up from kindergarten, in superb displays of tag-team parenting, the parenting of the 1990s which permitted the biological parents to simulate world’s best income-earning activity without the child ever suspecting that non-charitable childcare was beyond the means of most definitions of the average family. But with Abby ill, feverish and aching, I came home at lunchtime, enabling Tanya’s mother to explore with an appropriately qualified young man why she was retaining fluid in her legs.

  Abby slept fitfully. I had read her stories but she fell asleep before each denouement. I kept her temperature down with analgesics but I could not interest her in food at all. At half-past three she was asleep and I was sitting on Kate’s bed in the lounge room when the mail was delivered. It still arrived by bicycle but the whistle was not blown anymore. Was there no one who had a breath left in them to spare? Perhaps they had lost faith in what they were delivering or in themselves? It is more likely that whistles were being phased out. Recipients of tangible mail would no longer learn, Pavlovian-style, what time the mail arrived.

  I went out to the letter box just when the postman arrived, as though I had structured my day around his arrival. It was a big day for us judging by the quantity of mail. I began opening it before I had even reached the house again, an impatience left over from childhood when the mere existence of a letter addressed to me was good news irrespective of its contents.

  Envelopes with windows were the most strongly represented. The bank issued a periodic reminder that, as things currently stood, Tanya and I would own the house outright by the time Abby was thirty unless interest rates increased or unless we defaulted one fortnight by having less in our account than the bank automatically deducted to service the loan. If this happened the bank was entitled to sell our home forthwith, without providing advance notice of the sale in writing. This is called a mortgagee sale and we had agreed to it at the time we took the home loan. Unlike many other customers, I read the small print. The bank had not wanted me to, which is why it made the print so small, but I took the document to work and had it enlarged on the photocopier. Everything was as it was meant to be. The smaller the print the greater the liberty that was turned into license upon our signing.

  What else? There were several accounts from the then recently privatised statutory authorities. At the time these authorities were privatised much was made of the Government assurances that the newly privately-owned bodies would remain subject to the strictest principles of accountability. And they had. Under the new corporate logo and colour-coordinated company banner of the power supply company was the full and frank disclosure that we had been charged zero point seven per cent more than for the same period the previous year. There was no breach of accountability in this and the print, or at least some of it, was much bigger. Disconnection would follow if this account remained unsatisfied after twenty-eight days.

  I unwrapped an unsolicited newspaper that had been slipped inside our letter box between our sanitised debts and felt at once disconnected. In white lettering through a purple mast the New Citizen, a publication of the US far right conspiracy-peddling LaRouche movement, had made its way into my home and no doubt into the homes of my neighbours. A black-and-white photograph showed its founder, Lyndon H. LaRouche, behind a podium with his right arm unbent and outstretched, reminiscent of another time no longer so long ago. I wondered which of my neighbours were as chilled as I was to find such hard-core scapegoating conspiracy theories dressed up as salvation infiltrating their homes without any warning bells having been sounded, attempting to catch our fears and uncertainty like a wooden splinter against the flesh of a finger. And once the splinter is caught, it is more painful to dislodge it than to leave it there. Many leave it there.

  I wondered what Nick would say to the New Citizen. He was a man as much as anyone in need of someone to blame. But because of the strange freedom which we champion at all costs, the freedom to intimidate, to promote fear and pre-existing mistrust, there would be nothing to stop him taking to the street at night with fear and pain and with whisky on his breath, nothing then to stop him setting fire to someone’s bed. Then the helicopters would go looking for him and when they found him his mother would be left forever with two dogs, a small white one with tight curls that looked like her son and another larger brown hybrid with a white paw-print marking on its head. I had seen Nick’s eyes, smelt his breath, touched his bloodied hand. There would be nothing to stop him if the time came, nothing to stop him but him.

  Finally there was one letter with my name and address written diagonally, in a familiar hand. Thank God for her. My mother had written to me from Queensland. I missed her a great deal and her handwriting reminded me that I did. It was embarrassed handwriting. Its strokes were unconfident, first taught so long ago. Although much practised, it suggested that she would not have been surprised if the style were now so archaic it would be looked down on. It had taken her some time to get used to calling long-distance. She’d had a lifetime of not calling long-distance before moving up north. It was only Abby, and Kirsten’s children, that forced her to call at least weekly. They could not afford to fly down very often and neither they nor their car would survive the drive down to Melbourne, so she gradually got used to the telephone calls down one half of the eastern coast. Why was she writing?

  Dear Eddie, it began, the tentative downward strokes already apologising …

  I am sorry to be bothering you but I didn’t want to speak to you about this in front of your father. The fact is that he hasn’t been feeling quite himself, a little flat and a little tired. Although neither of us are getting any younger, your father seems to have stopped getting younger with a new and unparalleled vigour.

  For the best part of a month now I have tried to get him to see a doctor, but you know your father, he refuses to acknowledge that anything is wrong or even that anything might be wrong. I was hoping, if it was not too much trouble, that you could fly up and see us. I know it would do him the world of good just to see you, even if you were also unable to persuade him to see a doctor. A few days might be just the ticket, two, if that’s all you could spare.

  And speaking of tickets, if I could pay for it, you know I would, dear. I had actually started putting a little aside for just this purpose but I’m afraid I’m just not progressing with it at the rate your father is, well, unravelling. I don’t mean to alarm you, Eddie, but I have been rather concerned about him and I didn’t want to worry your sister, what with the children and everything.

  Of course if you are unable to visit us I will understand perfectly. I hope everything is well with you and that your job continues to be satisfying without being too stressful. How are those wonderful girls? Give them both my love. I know you share everything with Tanya and you know I think that’s wonderful but I would appreciate it if you didn’t say anything to her about your father, or to your sister. I am aware that it is possible that I am being perfectly silly about this. Please come up if you can and tell me that I’m just being silly.

  As always,

  Your loving mother.

  P.S. Tell Abby I’ve found a picture of Elvis Presley in one of the magazines and I’ve cut it out for her. Does she still like Bananas in Pyjamas? Give her a big squeeze from me and one for yourself while you’re at it.

  Mum

&
nbsp; The children and everything. What did this mean? It meant my sister had more than one child and, reading between the lines, that my mother found Kirsten’s marriage to be shaky, of the kind where one needs to hang on. Kate would not hang on. Perhaps my mother knew more than she was saying, about my sister and my father, about everyone but me, Tanya and me.

  We had one child and we did not permit long-distance reading between the lines. On the phone we bombarded them with questions about the weather and what they’d been doing. We described every one of Abby’s steps, her words, her thoughts, her every observation. There were sometimes as many as five separate people living through Abby. We blurred the lines. How was my marriage going? I felt in no position to tell at the time, not really the best person to say, a bit close to it. And anyway, with what frequency should the question be asked? We were fine three weeks ago, three days ago, I think. But yesterday? How are we today? How was my marriage this morning?

  I walked to the study with the letter after rereading it. Tanya’s regional conflicts, spread out on the desk, waited for her return the next day. I sat at her desk and wanted to tell her immediately, not to whisper it either, but to shout it in the child’s panic that comes from nobody knows where. My father was sick. With a wink and a nod he had moved north and started taking instruction from Old Man Williamson. But she was not coming home that night. She was going to stay over at her mother’s place after the late seminar by the mega-luminary. Her mother had a doctor’s appointment the next morning and Tanya wanted to go with her.

  On the desk, barely conspicuous, jutting out of some papers on the history, tactics and ideology of the Tamil Tigers of Elam, was a letter to Tanya from the head of the Politics Department. So she had been keeping secrets too. I was not prying when I read it. I was hiding from my own dark thoughts when I came upon her dread captured so plainly under the university’s logo in its standard font and in the standard language used for these now standard things. The laser printer treats regret just as it would treat love.