Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘Nick, do you ever wonder if …’ I tried to stop him with my stare. ‘Is the fault in ourselves or in our stars?’

  ‘What fault? What do you mean?’

  Helen came toward us suddenly in small bounds from the sheltered plaza of the AGC building. Nick caught her in his arms from one last paw’s kiss of the pavement as though she were a basketball bouncing naturally from the ground to his chest. Out came her small pink tongue as she licked his face and he responded with a quiet tender reassurance of his strong feelings for her. I turned my head away with instinctive embarrassment waiting for a lull in the reunion. Passersby ignored them.

  ‘Tiny must be around the corner,’ he said when calm returned. ‘He comes here a bit.’

  I did not know where the here was to which Tiny came. This was a street like all the rest. We turned the corner into the street from which Helen had come after she had presumably heard Nick’s voice. There was Tiny sitting hunched up with his back against the automatic teller machine, a blanket over his knees and another around his head and the back of his neck.

  ‘It’s sheltered and they give off a fair heat, those machines,’ Nick explained matter-of-factly as we moved toward Tiny. If you looked closely at him you could see he was a big man but at almost ninety degrees to the world, his bigness was not what hit you but his darkness and his need to be covered. People did not look closely at Tiny.

  ‘Good on the kidneys, eh, Tiny?’ said Nick, to which Tiny nodded almost not at all. ‘Thanks for looking after her. Eddie’s finished with your coat now.’

  ‘Yes, thank you very much,’ I said taking it off, putting down my bag of barbecued chickens and rolling up the coat to the shape it had when it was first offered.

  How do we know when we are on our way to seeking warmth for our kidneys from automatic teller machines? Should it already be clear when we find ourselves still standing at them but with only three dollars? I picked up the bag of barbecued chickens and realised that the signs were probably there before that. Whether they were there at birth I was not prepared to say. Perhaps it will one day be possible to isolate the ‘three dollar’ gene. But even without that, perhaps the tell-tale signs were discernible to an ordinary person with ordinary observational and analytical faculties. When the consumption of food in your routine is no longer a kind of entertainment, then it is not impossible that one day you will seek out automatic teller machines only for warmth. Food as entertainment means it is not yet over for you. It was not yet over for me the night I had first met Nick. Tanya and I were helping Kate and this and the curry entertained us. Helping someone is also an entertainment. If I went home would Tanya find me entertaining?

  Nick escorted me back to the station. It was the evening rush-hour. Only the buskers and the evangelists were not going anywhere. With office workers, insurance assessors, systems analysts, clerks, lawyers, shop assistants, receptionists, work-experience students, table-top dancers, short-order cooks, construction workers, cleaners, tea-ladies, dental hygienists and trainees from accounts all streaming past us on their way home, he proffered the hand that was not full with Helen.

  ‘Good luck, Eddie. It’s been good to see you. Tell her the truth. You know where I’ll be if you need me. But you’ll be fine.’

  With that he turned abruptly and started walking the other way with the firm resolve of someone ripping off a band-aid. I watched him head back towards LaTrobe Street and, in the jostling crowd under an unnaturally dark sky ready to burst, with two chickens in a plastic bag and a blind busking violinist knocking into me, I lost him. He had walked away slowly, as if waiting for the credits to roll over his back. A few people stopped in front of me (thank God for the buffs!) but they were not waiting for any credits nor were they even watching Nick. They were looking at the sky and the blackest cloud they had ever seen.

  Soon people to each side of me were looking at it, a cloud so much darker than the rest of the already too dark sky. Within minutes, everyone around me had slowed down to look at it, even if it meant missing their train. Traffic screeched to a stop when the lights turned red because at least half of the drivers were looking at the cloud. Had it ever happened before that a cloud had stopped people at the end of the day on their way home, uniting them, even if only momentarily, in speculation? They had never seen anything like it before. But I had.

  I had seen it before. Or rather, I had seriously envisaged it. I had that advantage over the pedestrians, the drivers, the passengers and the holders of the weekly travel cards and zone two passes stopping all stations via the City Loop for Pakenham, Dandenong, Frankston and Glen Waverley. It was the expertise which had left me with three dollars that had me knowing. The others, burdened by more than three dollars, did not know that it was smoke blowing in from the bay. There was a fire at the chemical storage facility there. This was the fire I had warned them about in another report they had requested and then ignored.

  Most people knew, within minutes of noticing it, that this was not a normal cloud, not the kind that was ‘good for the farmers’, but they were unable to explain it, its darkness, its suddenness. Almost none of them knew that there was a chemical storage facility on an island in the bay so close to them, waiting to burn, every day of their working lives. Someone, who knew what was best, forgot to tell them. Someone who could not reach them at this late hour, forgot to ask them if they minded. Soon it would be presented on the television news as our very own Bhopal disaster, coming up after this. The Minister would be unavailable for comment and reporters would go looking for someone fitting my former job description but, like the Minister, I too would not be contactable. I was last seen in William Street outside Flagstaff Station in my shirt-sleeves holding two barbecued chickens, watching my fellow citizens looking a little apprehensively at the sky.

  The arrival of mobile television broadcast units would shortly enable the significance of our very own wind-assisted toxic chemical event to be grasped not only by them but by the good folk on the grassy knoll or in a book depository in Texas, or by someone in Tiananmen Square or the World Trade Centre or Srebrenica. The beauty of the global village was that, if my wife could make it to the television, I might just be able to buy another twelve hours and not have to tell her about my day, the part that was just mine and had not yet been syndicated.

  I would have paid more attention to the group of skinheads that had emerged from the bowels of the station had I not been thinking of my father and wishing that he were there with me at that moment. I wanted to show him the cloud blowing from the chemical fire my report had warned them about. I had done all my homework and gotten it all right. I wanted him to see that it was right and then to tell me why it was they were not putting me up into the next grade.

  A fine spray started to fall. It was then that I became aware of a commotion some little way behind me down William Street, towards Little Lonsdale Street. I turned around and saw the skinheads that had come out of the station milling around the automatic teller machine outside the AGC building, shouting and pounding at something. Were they trying to destroy the automatic teller machine? They were bashing someone.

  Once this dawned on me I had to get closer to see whether I was right. The rain was getting heavier and the shouting louder. I hoped I was wrong. What was I going to do about it if I wasn’t, with my two barbecued chickens.

  There were five of them. Two of them had baseball bats which they swung at a solitary figure in a greatcoat, his arms covering his head for protection. The other three kicked at the man who kept turning around to evade the blows but was slowed down by the parachute effect of his greatcoat in the wind. It was Tiny spinning in the middle of them with his hands over his head.

  I called to them to stop. My voice came out soft and high-pitched like a child’s. It was as though I had not called out at all.

  ‘Fuckin’ nigger,’ one of them yelled as another leapt at Tiny and knocked him to the ground. Tiny tried to make himself small.

  ‘Help! These guys are bashing h
im,’ I finally managed. ‘He’s being bashed. They’ll kill him!’

  A few people turned their heads to look but nobody stopped. They were going home and did not want to know.

  ‘Hey, cut it out,’ I called, and in the few seconds it took one of the skinheads to turn, in genuine surprise to see who would make so futile a request, Tiny got up, grabbed the baseball bat from him and started swinging it wildly. From his eyes down, Tiny’s face was covered by a sheet of blood with billowing sails and bubbles where he breathed. His lips were torn and swollen. He gritted his teeth and his eyes were wide, I had never seen anybody’s eyes so wide, as he swung. The disarmed baseballer fell to the ground.

  Tiny kept swinging but there were five of them. I rushed at the one with the other baseball bat but I was not quick enough. I felt a crack in my side. Spaces opened within bones. I was unable to breathe, unable to make a sound. The pain was worse than anything I had ever imagined possible. I clutched at my ribs as my legs gave way and I sank to the ground. I felt the moist air touch a part of my eyes that had never been exposed before. Another blow, this time to my head, brought a spreading numbness.

  The rain was easing up. I let my face soak up the footpath. My head throbbed violently, brutally, and the pain in my chest was sharp and stabbing when I breathed. The attack seemed to have stopped. I could discern legs running away and other legs running towards us. I heard a man’s voice, distressed, filtering through the noise of the traffic as more people gathered around.

  ‘Leave him alone, officer! He went to check on the other guy. Just went to help the other guy.’

  It was the second time I had witnessed Nick crying.

  ‘Where’s Tiny?’ I faltered, but nobody heard me. Without moving I looked along the ground through the gaps in the forest of legs. Not far away two legs protruded horizontally from an old army surplus greatcoat.

  I felt Nick’s breath on my ear.

  ‘Don’t move, Eddie. You just stay there,’ he whispered above the noise. He lifted my shoulders and put something soft and warm under my head.

  ‘I’m his friend, alright. Just lay off,’ he shouted at someone behind me. ‘I’m his friend.’

  Then he whispered, ‘I’ll come back, Eddie.’

  Something warm and wet licked my ear and for the briefest moment took my mind off my ribs. It was raining softly. I remembered singing, as a child, ‘… long to rain over us’ whenever it rained during outdoor assemblies at school. I blacked out on William Street with two barbecued chickens beside me in a plastic bag.

  As you fade to black your life becomes a badly edited retrospective of unconnected and meaningless ten-second visual bites in which you play only a bit part, and unconvincingly at that. You have not even read the script. It’s a huge ensemble piece and you workshop it repeatedly. Every now and then you are rained on in a foetal position, in the middle of a street coated with greasy dirt and you are clutching your ribs, fading in and out of focus.

  CHAPTER 35

  ‘It’s alright, constable, I know him—a client … and a friend, an old friend.’

  I looked up at her through slowly opening eyes, hoping she wouldn’t see me. She cradled my head in her lap. The first time I met her I had touched only her knee. It seemed nothing about her had changed. Still dressed pristinely and still unafraid of getting dirty, still smelling like ripe strawberries, she hovered just above me.

  ‘Hey, Eddie,’ she whispered, ‘don’t fade out on me. Stay with me. Just breathe slowly. That’s right. There’s an ambulance coming soon. We’ll take you to a hospital, okay. Your friend’s trying to contact your wife. When did you get married, you sly old dog? You never tell me anything. Thought you could sneak out on me. You were my eleven-forty weren’t you, handsome? Thought you could get away. Thought you could … now what is it?… Be elusive but don’t walk far. Remember? Eddie? Eddie. Remember, Eddie?’

  I was examined, x-rayed and sedated at the same hospital Abby had been taken to, and after a few hours Tanya drove me home in her mother’s car. That they met I would learn later. I had slept through it. Maybe even Nick was there. He had not known my surname, and not wanting to move me to get at my wallet, had obtained it from Amanda’s office with the help of the card I had taken from her reception and placed in the breast pocket of my shirt. He had promised the night I first met him, the night of the two dogs, that he would never forget me.

  Tanya sat me on the couch while she changed the sheets. Then she put me to bed. I dozed on and off but each time I opened my eyes she was sitting there, in the chair she had brought in from the study, watching me. I had missed her for so long. At around nine o’clock she brought me in a bowl of her mother’s barley soup and fed it to me. Abby watched from the foot of the bed in total silence. Then, at Tanya’s suggestion, she kissed me on the forehead and went to bed. Tanya took the bowl to the kitchen and went to kiss Abby goodnight. I heard her. Then she was back.

  ‘How’re you feeling?’ she whispered. People addressed me in whispers now. It was her turn.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I called you today.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘At work.’

  ‘Why?’ I whispered.

  ‘I saw all the boxes, Eddie. I kept calling and when you didn’t answer I called the switchboard. They said you didn’t work there anymore. I called Kate. I was scared … and guilty … so very, very guilty. Sweetheart, why didn’t you say something?’

  ‘I was going to.’ My voice logged in and out. Some words went missing.

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh … my poor Eddie.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She had my hand in hers and, even sedated, I could smell the soothing scent of the Lancôme moisturiser Kate had left behind.

  ‘I was going to tell you, really … when I had something else.’

  ‘You know we’re going to be okay,’ she told me.

  ‘Yes. Are we?’

  ‘We’ll be fine, Paul said—’

  ‘You spoke to him?’

  ‘He called. Kate called him at work.’

  ‘Does he know … everything?’

  ‘Yes. He does. It’s okay. He wants to try to get you a job at the bank. He said it’s the least he can do given how we looked after Kate.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about banking.’

  ‘I told him you’d say that. He said you could work in personnel, “Human Resources” he called it.’

  ‘I’m a chemical engineer. I don’t know anything about personnel.’

  ‘I told him you’d say that too. He said he’d try to get them to start you off somewhere high. You wouldn’t have to know anything.’

  ‘But it’s too late, I already know things.’

  She undressed for bed as quietly as she could and held me gently, avoiding the bandage on my ribs, till I was almost asleep. Then she started to whisper again.

  ‘Eddie?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I answered sleepily with my eyes closed.

  ‘That woman … was very helpful.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘She said she was a friend of yours … Eddie?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Is she a friend of yours?… Eddie?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Is she a friend of yours?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Meet her through work?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You didn’t?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘You didn’t meet her through work?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Eddie?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘How often do you see her?’

  ‘Amanda?’

  ‘Yes, Eddie.’

  ‘Every … nine and a half years … I see Amanda.’

  ‘You know who her father is?… Eddie?… Did you hear what I said?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Who’s her father then?’

  ‘He’s … he’s actually … he’s a cross betw
een Fred MacMurray in ‘My Three Sons’ and Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity.’

  Tanya turned off the light and we both fell asleep. I dreamed I was flicking through the records at Old Man Williamson’s. Each album cover showed a still from my life and my whole life was there under ‘T’, ‘T’ for these things that happen. But at about five o’clock the painkillers had worn off and I crept out of bed, put on ‘Tess’s’ dressing gown and turned on the TV in the lounge room, just quietly. The hospital show had been replaced by ‘Heartbreak High’. Progress comes in the form of repeats.

  Within a few minutes Abby was beside me in her dressing gown and slippers.

  ‘Hi, Dad,’ she said. She sat down quietly and took hold of my hand. Then, just as quietly, Tanya came in. We sat together watching television, the three of us in the dark, none of us saying anything. Neither Tanya nor I tried to make Abby go back to bed nor did we ask her why she was up. Part-way through the cartoons that were on by then I could see the first tentative rays of light through a gap in the curtains. Maybe I would go back to sleep later. Outside a dog barked.

  Praise for The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming

  ‘Stunning … by turns hilarious and heartbreaking.’

  —The Baltimore Sun

  ‘Invigorating stories … enlivened by Perlman’s intelligence, verbal energy, and mischievous wit.’

  —Entertainment Weekly

  ‘Unashamedly various without being feeble, a series of exercises in voice, perspective and style, it deals in violence, exile and much else besides … Deftly switching perspectives is his most impressive technique … yet Perlman’s work isn’t all juggling tricks: at times, he manages to pack whole lives into a few paragraphs … Perlman’s plots seem effortless, which makes his surprises all the more affecting.’