Three Dollars, Page 24

  Even though Amanda had also yearned for a sunrise in the company of someone other than Gerard, he would never see Amanda as the one that got away. For that she would have had to have left him by the side of the gutter with his head in his hands, waiting for the moon to howl at, with a saxophone far off in the distance. Amanda did not leave him that way. She left mid-morning in a taxi while he was at gym.

  I had been to Head Office only once before, maybe twice, back when I was asked my view of mission statements and of being a team player. It was an office, plusher than some, but just an office all the same, one that housed top people, mostly men, who had served the public so well and for so long that they were rewarded with the market value of my house every three months. They wasted little time getting to the point, which was that all references to heavy metal pollution in my report should be deleted, and, in their opinion, new legislation was unnecessary.

  They praised the report for its thoroughness for which I was to be commended although exactly how and by whom they did not say. None of them looked embarrassed. No tea or coffee was offered, nor any explanation. I crossed my legs as I listened. It seemed the right way to sit listening to them. I examined their faces for a flicker of a smile to indicate that they were joking and that really all reference to heavy metal pollution in my report should not be deleted. No, I had it right the first time. The gentlemen were efficiently untroubled by the passing of this information to me. They wore expensive suits, one a houndstooth, one a pinstripe, one a plain black flannel, and while I myself did not wear a suit, owning merely one and not being required by the daily conventions of my employment to wear one, we all four of us wore ties and so had our top buttons done up. So it was not as if we had nothing in common.

  When I left them and was back in LaTrobe Street I tried to work out the extent to which I had been praised, criticised, admonished or simply informed. There was an element of each and in each an element of equivocation. It was not even clear whether the report was to be shelved, edited or revised till it was something else and, if so, by whom. I had come away understanding only that what I had drafted in its original form would never see the light of day. The gentlemen had their quite serious reasons, obviously, otherwise I would never have been summoned. They would have just put in writing whatever it was they thought they were telling me in person.

  At home the tiles just below the taps in the shower recess continued to lift. I noticed this at least once a day when I took a shower first thing in the morning. I would choose to turn my back on it and look through the window we always left ajar, the window through which the steam escaped and through which I had seen the two dogs doing nothing under the street-light. Both the origin of and the solution to the tile problem were a mystery. I felt confident that water was behind it but from there all confidence deserted me.

  In addition to two of the tiles lifting further and further away from the wall, other adjacent tiles had begun to make a hollow sound when tapped. I resolved to stop tapping them. It was likely that rot and mould were involved. Somewhere around there things were growing, primitive life forms that were prepared to put up with dark, dank conditions which I felt powerless to change. The soap in the soapdish took on the role of a stop-gap protection against imminent infestation. Plastic shampoo containers acquired a slimy film coating making it clear where their allegiances lay. Each morning I glanced at the problem, noticed that the tiles were still at least partially attached to the wall then turned my back on it.

  I was not prepared for war with primeval slime. But did it have to be war? Although close to the most primitive life-form imaginable it was, nonetheless, a life-form and if it could not see reason, if cognition was still a few tiles above it, perhaps it could be tamed. Could it be educated into some sort of a Hobbesian civilised slime with Tanya and me as its teachers? Probably not. One should not put too much faith in Hobbes. After all, he held that sovereigns cannot commit injustice. I knew better. Having made some inquiries I learned of a confidential agreement, brokered between the government and representatives of Amanda’s father, to the effect that no new limits were to be imposed on heavy metal discharges at Spensers Gulf. Given the proposed size of the planned operation this would lead to an environmental disaster.

  Hobbes never denied, as far as I am aware, that sovereigns can be immoral but, and this is where he leaves us all dripping wet and powerless in the shower recess, he did deny that the immorality of sovereigns can be punished. For Hobbes believed that to punish sovereigns for their immoral acts could serve as a catalyst for civil discord. So what do we do with these immoral sovereigns? I wrote directly to the Minister of the Environment and received no reply. I wrote a second letter enclosing a copy of my report, its recommendations and an outline of the confidential agreement between the government and Claremont that I had heard about. He, it appeared, wrote back directly to Gerard.

  Once again, Gerard called me into his office, but not before making me wait outside.

  ‘You’ve been writing to the Minister.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘You’ve gone over my head.’

  ‘I know that too.’

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘To be honest, I didn’t feel comfortable taking up something as big as this, running with it and stopping at your head. Out of concern for you, I felt I had no choice but to take it over your head. I felt better with it over your head.’

  He told me that he appreciated my honesty and asked me why I was so concerned. I explained what would happen to the whole area around Spensers Gulf if the proposed mega-smelter were permitted to operate, to all intents and purposes, unregulated.

  ‘Not unregulated, deregulated,’ he said. ‘There’s a difference.’

  I asked him how he saw the difference.

  ‘Unregulated suggests we haven’t looked into it. Deregulated means that, after detailed analysis, we’ve decided to free everything up.’

  ‘Free it up from what?’

  ‘Regulation. Over-regulation.’

  I asked him whether he saw a difference between regulation and over-regulation and he asked me what I meant.

  ‘Isn’t it possible for something to be under-regulated or regulated to the right extent?’

  ‘Harnovey, these are semantic games and deregulation is the name of the only game in town. We don’t play semantic games here.’

  ‘Where do you play them?’

  ‘It was a figure of speech, Harnovey. I was using words in a colourful way to illustrate my point. You’ve got to understand that writing directly to the Minister is not part of your job and that your work at Spensers Gulf is over.

  ‘I see here from your file that your recommendations concerning the shifting of that chemical storage facility were ignored. You seemed to be able to handle that. The report you co-authored with Chamberlain found that a chemical accident there was highly probable and that such an accident, seven kilometres from the centre of the city, posed a toxic threat to a large part of the metropolitan area. According to your report, the facility housed styrene, propylene oxide, acrylonitrite and … acrylates … what are they?’

  ‘They’re used in paint.’

  ‘Are they? Good. Your views were bypassed and you offered barely any resistance … a few telephone enquiries and a one-paragraph memo to … oh, it was to me … and yet you go directly to the Minister just because your Spensers Gulf report was ignored. Frankly, Harnovey, no one wants to hear any more about it from you. Do you understand that?’

  I explained that there were many levels of understanding. I left his office and wrote a third letter to the Minister. After another two weeks of silence I lost patience and anonymously sent copies of my report and the letters to the newspapers.

  Hobbes wrote that the goodness of actions consists in their furtherance of peace while evil actions were related to discord. But then Hobbes was ultimately an exponent of ethical egoism and I was, with Bentham and Mill, a utilitarian. The tiles kept shifting, slowly and rele
ntlessly, and it did not help anything to suspect with near certainty what was behind it. With the walls crumbling around us and only the most ignoble of life-forms prospering, Tanya was right to suggest that we needed more than that to forestall the threatening deluge.

  Failure rarely announces its own appearance. It creeps into your life unobtrusively as if to say, ‘No, no, don’t get up. Just go about your business. I can wait.’ But like a bullet in flight, it cannot wait. Failure is impatient.

  Not long after my anonymous leaks to the newspapers, we were all informed via individually named computer-generated memoranda that the department was to be restructured. My position was to be restructured out of existence. The memorandum did not mention me by name but showed, diagrammatically, that following the restructure there would be fewer chemical engineers than were currently employed. I sought out Gerard for confirmation of the obvious.

  ‘Who’s going?’

  ‘It’s still being decided,’ he said, tapping the palm of his hand with his letter opener.

  ‘Who’s going?’ I repeated.

  ‘Probably you.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘It’s a gut feeling I have.’

  After lodging a grievance appeal I was told to see a departmental management consultant.

  ‘It’s to determine your future within the Public Service,’ he explained.

  ‘Gerard, I’m a qualified and experienced chemical engineer. Is it to determine where in the Public Service I should work or whether I should work in the Public Service?’

  ‘Yes.’

  CHAPTER 27

  The all ordinaries had dived hitting the ground digging. As I made my way from the station to the front gate beside which rested our late but not yet departed car, now a sanctuary for flora and fauna previously thought to have become extinct, I could see that the bedroom curtains were still drawn. They were either still drawn or already drawn and I knew which like I knew the back of Gerard’s hand. Not content with hitting any rock bottom, Tanya had kept going past the sediments of the Palaeozoic era all the way down to the Archaean rocks she had never known before. This was not the time to discuss the ebbs and flows of my career.

  Abby was with her grandmother. Tanya was alone and still in bed. I walked into the darkened bedroom and placed my briefcase down by the foot of the bed. If she was awake she was too ashamed to speak.

  ‘It’s me,’ I said quietly. ‘Sweetheart, it’s me.’

  I bent down to kiss her and suspected that she had not showered. Withdrawal was both a consequence of her condition and one of its defining characteristics. I took off my shoes and lay down beside her. She had her back to me.

  ‘You don’t have to say anything,’ I said rubbing her back.

  I rubbed and rubbed for warmth, she inside the bed, me, in my clothes, on top of it. The digital clock on my side of the bed said nothing to us, silently doing its job as it would till the day the new owners of the city’s newly privatised power supply decided we were not worth supplying. It had displayed to Tanya every minute the day had on offer but not one of them had recommended itself to her as a fine moment for rising. This was all the clock that had for so long known us so intimately would do, give each minute a minute’s display and then silently move on to the next minute with an efficient neutrality that was, on reflection, a breach of the promise, on its packaging and on the display in the store from which it was purchased, that it would show us a good time.

  There are thoughts that cannot grow in that by then standard darkness, thoughts that are fed by the sun. I needed the sun to rouse the buds of those thoughts planted once by a joke, a piece of music, a film, by her daughter and maybe, albeit some time ago, by me. I persisted even then in thinking that she was not beyond hope, just beneath it. I touched her face with the side of my hand. It was newly wet. She cried when confronted with the outside I had brought in to her, humiliated by the preponderance of those unbanishable thoughts which Wordsworth said do often lie too deep for tears.

  ‘Don’t be afraid, my darling,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll get you out of this.’

  What extraordinary promises one makes.

  I had thought that I knew her affliction and not merely the fact of it. It was no stranger to me. I understood it emotionally, empathetically. But I had only ever touched down at its airport. She was a citizen of its vast interior.

  ‘Why didn’t you call me?’

  ‘The phone is over there,’ she said softly and, without turning over, she pointed behind her toward my side of the bed. I held her through the covers and listened for the involuntary sounds of her breathing. We stayed this way for a period to which not even the clock could affect indifference. My eyes were closed when she began to speak slowly, in a half-whisper.

  ‘If you stay in bed for long enough the sheets and blankets take on your own smell … but not all of it, not the whole of your smell, just the saltiest part. From inside the bed it seems that the air around the bed takes on your saltiness too. After a while it’s hard to know whether the sheets and surrounding air are making you smell that way even more than you’re making them smell that way. I’d never thought you could smell salt but you can when it’s a person’s salt. It’s a strong and intoxicating saltiness.’

  She paused for a while.

  ‘I thought that perhaps a chemical engineer like you could find a way of distilling it, bottling it, making cars and all sorts of machinery run on it. Could you do that? Then it could be sold. It could be useful to people, the saltiness of me. It could be valuable. I figured something out, just today, in bed, about value.’

  ‘What did you figure out?’

  ‘I think that I am not worth my salt.’ She turned more into the pillow.

  ‘Tanya, do you know how much I love you? Maybe you don’t.’

  ‘I do. I think I probably do … but it’s not about that. It’s not your fault but … you’re not getting it. I don’t think you can ever get it.’

  ‘Maybe not. Maybe I’ll never get it completely but you’ve got to help me get it as much as I’m able. I promise I won’t ever stop trying to get it.’

  ‘Okay,’ she sighed, ‘let me try to … even though I’m like this, I’m in it now, it’s still like trying to remember something. Does that sound mad? I’m trying to remember for you … how it is now.

  ‘I can’t stand this. I can’t stand this person I’ve become. I mean it, I am exhausted these days just from loathing myself. It gets so freezing cold inside and out. There is … it’s like a block of ice at the core of me and when I move it rattles inside of me. I can feel it. But it never melts, never goes away. And there is no colour to anything, just grey, and no flavour to anything. Nothing has any taste to it. I know that what started it this time is the job, or more precisely the losing of it, not having my contract renewed. But it’s bigger than that, bigger than the thesis or my career. That was just the catalyst. I feel such a fraud, such an idiot. Maybe it does go all the way back to the death of my father but I don’t think it really matters anymore. I mean I don’t think it matters where it comes from. The fact is—it is.’

  She made herself smaller under the blanket.

  ‘I cannot ignore it by reading or watching television. It doesn’t go away even if I manage to get dressed or make breakfast. It’s many things—I feel anxious, agitated, foggy, unable to concentrate on anything, even when I’ve slept the night before. If I haven’t slept the night before I want to sleep all the next day, as though that would do it, as though everything would be alright if I could just catch up on sleep. But it’s much more than sleep.

  ‘And I blame myself for only being able to face the ceiling and not the walls. I hate myself for not being able to get up and have a shower let alone go out and get another job. I know better than anyone from my work on the thesis that there are no real full-time jobs out there. Everything is contracting, everything is imploding. I know how much we need the money and this only makes me feel worse. I can’t go back to some shitty job
and even they are hard to get. I used to think they were below me but I can’t even make it out of the bedroom so who am I kidding. I admire you so much just for being able to go to work and face the world. And I hear Abby singing her little song …’

  ‘Her song?’

  ‘From television, I feel like chicken tonight. I used to hear her sing it and run to pick her up, to thank her for the joy she gives me with every little song. Now I can’t. I still hear her but … the song infiltrates my consciousness, slowly winding me up like an old watch, and then I’m singing my own altered version, catching it in my head—I feel like nothing tonight…’

  ‘I know that I must be hell for you. I’m so proud of you, of the work you do, the way you love us and keep us all going.’

  ‘I’ve always thought it was you that kept us all going …’ I interrupted.

  ‘No, it’s you. It’s always been you. I see myself getting short with you—and I hate myself for that too ’cause I do love you incredibly. That hasn’t changed. But sometimes, Eddie, I just can’t do anything. I’ve nothing to give and I have no hope or joy in anything. I know that most of the world is far worse off than me but it doesn’t help. I can’t bear it when the phone rings. I hate speaking to my mother or to anyone ’cause I know I’ll have to put on the facade of being … involved in the world. When I stopped working I thought, “Okay then, that’s it, I’m not playing anymore. I’m out of it. World, you’re on your own.” I thought it would be a relief from the facade, from the pretence. Yet I feel so unbearably … alone.’

  I waited for her to go on.

  ‘I feel like I’ve lost the person I used to be and I’ll never get her back. Nothing gets me excited, or happy, or content. Nothing matters anymore. No one can offer me anything to look forward to, even things I’ve always loved: Mahler, Thai soup with coriander, choc-tops with you on a Sunday night at the Astor watching a new print of The Grapes of Wrath or It’s A Wonderful Life, the short stories of Lorrie Moore, Arthur Miller’s plays, “The Singing Detective”, Art Blakey’s “Moanin”.’