Three Dollars

  No one has ever sliced eggplant so thinly.

  CHAPTER 14

  It is well known that things tend to fall. And when they fall there is something in some of us which makes us say that they have fallen into place, almost wherever they land. This is less known. Hospitals often have corridors of misunderstood quiet around pockets of shouting and, in maternity wards, of celebration. I took her there and did not shout myself although there had been no better time to shout that I could remember. We shout at traffic jams and at sudden changes we cannot control or foresee. There was never a more appropriate time to shout than when Tanya went into labour, the punch-the-air shout, the things now beyond our control shout.

  I had still had questions, so many of them, all useless because any answers to them would not be enough to make me feel ready, really ready to be a father. The contractions were beyond her control, let alone mine, and I held her hand and dabbed at her forehead just as I had seen good men do in the movies. Perhaps there was still time to learn something before I had to know everything.

  How had I managed to get this far and was it true that the success or failure of my life up till then would be revealed at any moment in the health or otherwise of this child? Nothing else mattered. It was the only thing I knew, had ever known. Wet and crying. There we were, now three of us, wet and crying and struggling to breathe. We knew that no one else had ever done this before but the medical staff were kind to pretend otherwise.

  When she came she was Abigail and gypsy-dark like her mother. I had known her forever. Cleaned and wrapped and entered in a register, Abby shunned the lights and begged to be alone for just a little while longer. But everything was alright, first cut and then dried as the obstetrician had promised. I still had all those questions but it did not matter anymore that I didn’t know anything. When I held her I gained the simple strength of an overwhelming love, an irrepressible euphoria. Tanya was exhausted. She looked up at us and smiled. Everything had fallen into place.

  From two thousand kilometres away there was no mistaking my parents’ delight as they kept apologising for not being there. I told them we were lucky I was there. My trips away were becoming more frequent. I chose to take this as a vote of confidence from those above although perhaps it was just that I was easy to push around. Now that I had a child I had moved up another rung on the persons-unlikely-to-be-asked-to-leave-town scale. In theory single men were asked first, then married men and then married men with children. I was now at the tertiary stage of domesticity, the ideal person for a tax break, a re-financed mortgage and slippers on Fathers’ Day.

  But the kind of money spent on mining and mineral exploration and the size of the balance of trade ramifications if anything paid off, led the department to whistle to the companies’ tune. So child or not, I had to go. On the other hand, the environmental lobby had already swung one election and the government needed to be seen to be policing the transnational mining companies. That was my job, to ensure that the public interest was being safeguarded. I could hear about her initial weeks of parenting over the phone. She will be fine.

  There had been talk around the office of a particularly big and sensitive project, possibly involving direct advice to the Minister. In the face of the challenge and without inhibition or quickened pulse, I took to leaving work as early as I could to see Tanya and Abby. Whatever it said about me, there was no competition between Abby and the Minister. I did not give it a second thought. Paul might have said that I was letting the country down in the face of competition from the Asian ‘tigers’ but I was sure the best of them left work early to be with their cubs. The worst of them came here on trade delegations and bought golf courses and stuffed marsupials.

  Paul would never come at the idea that, if we all agreed through ASEAN, APEC, NAFTA, the EC, GATT and the IMF to knock off work early and be with our children, no one in the world would have a competitive advantage. He said there was no way of policing it (an objection easily overcome if parents were compelled to clock in as soon as they reached the nursery) and, anyway, he was all in favour of competitive advantages. So he stayed a little longer at the office each night. Kate was usually at our place with Abby when he got home.

  I could never understand parents’ slack-jawed obsession with their newborn babies when they had known since they themselves were children that they would one day have their own children, that it was a if not the purpose of their union; when they had watched the proof grow daily to the mother’s discomfort for the best part of a year; and when the newborn child, through no fault of its own, could do nothing to compete for interest with nocturnal tree possums out for a night on the town. But Abby was not a baby, or was only technically so. Her hair was dark and thick. I liked to watch her breathe. I found myself always talking to her. If she was asleep, I just spoke more quietly. And she grew. She understood everything. She would grow to be understanding. Tanya would have hated the focused outpouring of attention I lavished on Abby if she had not been in love with her too. We took it in turns to breast-feed her in the middle of the night. Sometimes we got up together and sometimes I let Tanya feed her alone.

  Kate was teaching English in a high school on the other side of town and between her end of the day visits to Abby and Tanya to share between them chocolate hedgehogs, coffee and a breast, and Tanya’s mother’s morning sojourns there was no gulf of carpet-staring adultless hair-tearing solitude for Tanya to endure. We had been worried that, as much as she would love the person that turned out to be Abby, Tanya might crash in the period immediately following the birth. She did not, and even managed to make some progress with her reading for The Death of Political Economics.

  One warm Sunday afternoon in Kate and Paul’s back garden Paul asked Tanya the title of her thesis. Abby was asleep under an umbrella in a transparent womb of mosquito netting. We sat beside her on their teak garden furniture eating grapes, Dutch cheese and drinking one of the dry whites Paul always had chilled, the smooth lubricant that helped him slough off opinions that conflicted with his.

  ‘What are you saying in your title?’ Paul asked. ‘In what sense is political economics dead?’

  ‘The political and social conventions, traditions, laws, practices, mores that developed in the nineteenth century and flowered briefly in the civilisation of the twentieth century, albeit with periodic relapses into barbarism, are in the process of being abandoned,’ Tanya explained.

  ‘What was that civilisation? How do you characterise it?’

  ‘Okay. I’m talking about Western civilisation—’

  ‘Of course,’ he interjected.

  ‘Not “of course” Paul, but she is,’ Kate volunteered.

  Tanya continued. ‘The economies were capitalist, the legal systems were essentially liberal and the states either republics or constitutional monarchies. Most of them invoked the separation of powers between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. Science, education and increasing material prosperity were all accepted as universal goals for each nation-state and sometimes even for their colonies. True, there was a relapse. The period from the outbreak of the First World War to the end of the Second World War was a recidivation which culminated in the first tidal wave of fascism, the abrogation of fundamental civil liberties and finally the death camps.’

  Tanya’s passionate delivery could be mistaken for anger if you did not know her.

  ‘People’s fear of change and their despair at the lack of certainty in any area of their lives, particularly where the social and the personal meet, that is with respect to their jobs and their income, if it lasts long enough, will lead them to abandon reason, to be suspicious of it and to look for scapegoats and simplistic solutions. The wisdom or correctness of a government’s decision will scarcely be discussed but instead attention will be focused on the strength with which the decision was made, the apparent certainty, the conviction with which it was implemented.

  ‘People will long to have someone remove the uncertainty. They will admire the wa
y the government summarily dismisses any opposition to the decision. A climate will develop wherein critical and analytical thinking, unpractised arts already, will be seen at best as irrelevant and, at worst, as treasonous, threatening the certainty for which they have traded everything else. It will be the fall of the Weimar Republic revisited.’

  There were times when Tanya was irrepressible. Admiration is not love but it can be part of the equation.

  ‘And you’re saying all of this happened in the thirties and forties and will happen again?’

  ‘I’m saying it is happening now.’

  Paul leaned back and smiled. ‘You’ll find it hard to convince anyone looking down at us here on this beautiful summer day, your daughter sleeping peacefully, all of us working professionals sipping the fruits of our labour in a quiet which is disturbed only by the rumble of distant lawnmowers, that there is anything faintly resembling a crisis here. Your reading public, if you publish your thesis, will not believe you, although there will always be some academics who will.’

  Kate got up, turning her back to the conversation, and went over to watch Abby sleeping. Paul continued, unaware or unaffected by his wife’s relocation.

  ‘Really, Tanya, I can understand the need to make a splash with your thesis and I hope more than anyone that it’s a huge success for you. Certainly I’ll be able to claim a PhD among my closest friends. But aren’t you just taking the clapped-out quasi-Marxists’ alarmism of our undergraduate days and seeking to transform it into something both academically respectable and marketably chic? There is, I’ll admit, probably a fortune to be made by the people who write these searing warnings of the next global catastrophe; the hole in the ozone layer, over-population, de-forestation. But it’s so … tiresome.’

  Paul opened another bottle and refilled our glasses.

  ‘Paul, everything you’ve just listed is a genuine problem,’ Tanya replied, ‘and none of them are diminished in their seriousness by the fact that they first entered your consciousness as an undergraduate and have departed your consciousness since you graduated and started providing economic advice to a bank. But they’re not really what I’m writing about.’

  ‘Yes. I know you’ve chosen fascism. And you might be right in terms of the market.’

  ‘Paul, are you only pretending to be Genghis Khan?’ I asked.

  ‘I hate to disappoint you two but I meant only that Tanya’s thesis might be the first to tap the “fear of fascism market”, though you’ll have to do more than just frighten the minority who listen to the ABC.’

  ‘I’m not concerned with the marketing of the thesis, Paul. I don’t know what makes you say these things. Are you taking this at all seriously?’

  ‘He is,’ Kate called. ‘He doesn’t mean to be insulting.’

  ‘Not only do I not mean to be insulting, I’m not being insulting. Tanya, I think you’re one of the most intelligent people I know and I really believe you’ve got an angle.’

  ‘Paul, this is not an angle. I’m talking, writing about the abandonment of government intervention in the economy, the deregulation of just about everything, the removal of protection from competition from third world quasi-slave labour—and complete and absolute reliance on the morality of the market, which is the morality of the jungle.’

  Kate returned to the table. She looked less uncomfortable but more absent.

  ‘I’m writing about an unprecedented confrontation between the ever-increasing number of disenfranchised, not just politically or socially but with respect to jobs and accommodation, about a confrontation between a growing underclass who inherit joblessness from their parents, and the tiny never-wealthier elite who, like you, will see everything in terms of market share, the cult of the MBA, and managerial theory, and the supreme majesty of Adam Smith’s misunderstood invisible hand—until one dark night some other invisible hand drags you by the throat down the stairs and out the door into the reality you’ve been ignoring. But it will be too late then because there’ll be no one to help you. All the instrumentalities of the state will have been sold off or run down. It will be everyone for themselves and then you’ll really get the feel of a truly free market.’

  ‘God, you are a Marxist!’ Paul exclaimed. ‘This is going to be one hell of a thesis cum book. Bugger the ABC. If you can perform like this they’ll get you on one of the commercial networks. But you’re going to have to have an answer. You’ll have to offer a solution. Hope is the grabber. What’s the tonic?’

  This was the question I had hoped would not be reached. We had talked about it privately many times, long into the night between feeds and it distressed Tanya that she did not have an answer. I tried to comfort her, suggesting that a ruthlessly well-written delineation of the problems of the world, and how we got there, really should be enough, maybe not to save the world, but for a PhD thesis. She had been only momentarily comforted. I did not know whether she had anything to say in response, but she did and she said it slowly and with a quiet certainty.

  ‘If we are to avoid the laissez-faire chaos we are rushing headlong into, the polarisation into the very wealthy and the very poor, the risk of complete social breakdown and the possible emergence from that wreckage of an oppressive and brutal neo-fascist regime … oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t smirk, Paul, it can happen here too. It’s happened before and in a more cultured place than this … if we are to avoid all this, government policies need to be driven by a compassionate concern for the well-being of all the people. By a genuine concern for their well-being now, not by a bogus concern for it in some mythic ideologically posited but empirically untenable long-run when we are all dead and our children wish they were too.’

  ‘So what policies are you advocating specifically?’

  Kate was staring at her hands, playing with her ring.

  ‘Well, the restoration of full employment by protection of manufacturing industry from low wage imports and the restoration of pre-Reaganite, pre-Thatcherite, pre-economic rationalist levels of funding for public health, education, welfare and public infra-structure works.’

  ‘Ah, and where would the money for all this beneficence come from?’ Paul interrupted.

  ‘It would come from the decreased cost of unemployment benefits and from the increased taxation revenue that the bigger income earning base would contribute. And I’m not a Marxist, Paul. All I’m advocating really is a return to the Keynesian economics of the forties, fifties and sixties.’

  Kate looked up and then at me. We smiled. My wife, her friend, was trying to save the world.

  This was the eloquence and the intolerance of unfairness I wanted Abby to inherit. But what did I have to transmit to her but the solution of differential equations and an insight into which trains went via the city loop and why. On my death bed and with my last breath, all I could offer her would be: ‘Abby, my darling daughter, remember this: no matter where you are or what time of day it is—avoid Punt Road.’

  I had to offer her more than this. But there was no guarantee she would imbibe even this let alone any of Tanya’s clear-sighted reformist zeal. Perhaps she would rebel and grow up to become the manager of a commodities trading house. She would earn a fortune, buy up all of her old neighbourhood in a fit of nostalgic extravagance and evict her parents. I could not really see this happening but it was getting harder to predict anything, much less control it. And if this was true in respect of our daughter, how much more so was it true in respect of economic policy.

  CHAPTER 15

  Abby was already walking by the time of the next crash. How early children can pick up on these things is not known with precision. Some say it is as early as the womb. I have no difficulty believing she was never unable to distinguish solemnity from cheerfulness, laughter from grieving or her grandmother’s arms from those of her mother. When I came home one early evening from yet another interstate trip and the house was darker than it usually was at that time, I knew immediately that someone was fighting a thing darker than any room.
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br />   Tanya’s mother was sitting in the half-light of the television with the sound turned down rocking Abby to sleep. I dropped my suitcase and the thud it made reminded Abby that she probably ought to cry again.

  ‘What’s wrong? Where’s Tanya?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong. Nothing. Nothing new. She’s in the bedroom. Everything’s alright. Isn’t it, Abby? You show your dad that everything’s alright.’

  I went over and picked her up, rocked her and cooed to her, more for myself than for her. She was dry and clean. She had been fed and when I could finally put her down to sleep Tanya’s mother told me that Tanya was in a bad way and had gone to bed. The need to stay in bed, the inability to leave it, I had seen it before. Tanya’s mother and I sat alone in the lounge room and she spoke in a quiet voice.

  ‘I know this is nothing new to you, Eddie.’

  ‘She gets lonely and frustrated when I’m away.’

  ‘She gets depressed.’

  ‘It’s not uncommon in new mothers.’

  ‘It’s not uncommon in Tanya.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I know you do, Eddie, and I know how much you love her. But there are some things you don’t know, some things you couldn’t know.’

  I had never heard her voice sound so tired, so tinged with resignation, so old. She too was exhausted and for the first time, I knew that I loved her too, not just out of some sense of duty, but in a way that rendered me incapable of helping her. She continued.

  ‘You couldn’t know, Eddie, because she doesn’t know what I’m about to tell you. It’s about her father.’

  At this stage I got up and went to the kitchen to pour us both a drink. We had only Scotch and vodka in the house so I poured us both one of each.