Three Dollars

  ‘Mum. Is there an Elvis?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s a boy at kinder, Ricky Thurston, who said Ricky isn’t his real name. He said Ricky is his knicked name and that his real name is Elvis. He said he was named after the real Elvis. What’s my real name?’

  ‘Abigail.’

  ‘Is Abby my knicked name?’

  ‘It’s nickname, but you don’t have a nickname, sweetie.’

  ‘Why do you call me Abby?’

  ‘We just call you Abby ’cause we love you. It’s not a nickname.’

  ‘What about “sweetie”, is that a nickname?’

  ‘Nope, sorry. That’s another name we call you just ’cause we love you.’

  Abby thought for a moment. ‘So nicknames go to people … without love.’

  ‘Good try but wrong. All we really know is that “Abby” and “sweetie” go to people with lots of love.’

  This seemed to satisfy her for a while. I took off my tie in the other room still listening and still undetected. There were only washing sounds, water interacting with soap and sponge, for a while. Then Abby spoke again.

  ‘Mum, do you believe in Elvis?’ Tanya took in and then let out a deep breath. I could almost see it. ‘Do you, Mum?’

  ‘You know how every night Dad or I read you a story?’

  ‘Sometimes in the day too.’

  ‘Yes, sometimes in the day. And the stories are always about something, a boy or a girl or a dog or a cat—’

  ‘Or talking fruit.’

  ‘Or talking fruit. And in these stories something always happens to the characters, the boy or the girl, the dog or the cat—’

  ‘Or the talking fruit …’

  ‘Yes, and sometimes what happens in the story is more important than any one person in the story?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cause it’s the story itself that makes us feel happy or sad or makes us think and then it doesn’t really matter so much whether the story is true or the persons in it are real.’

  ‘But do you believe in Elvis, Mum?’

  ‘There probably was someone called Elvis who was born a long, long time ago and who sang songs and danced in a new way. I’ll show you how he danced later when Kate gets here, but now the whole story of Elvis has become much bigger than the real Elvis. You’ll have to make up your own mind about what you think of Elvis as you grow up.’

  ‘Mum, did he shoot TVs?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Again there was another silence, possibly another moment for my daughter to grapple with existential questions in the bath. With the renaissance of Gerard I had forgotten that tonight was the night to light the candles in the centre of the table, turn out the lights and have Kate and Paul over to dinner. There was no doubt about us, we were a functioning family unit.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘What, sweetie?’

  ‘Do you believe in God?’

  ‘No, Abby, I don’t.’

  ‘Can I?’

  I waited to hear Tanya’s reply. This was something we had never discussed vis-à-vis Abby.

  ‘You probably can for a while but sooner or later it might get too hard and you might have to stop. If you do have to stop it’ll be okay because Dad and I will still be here. But if it doesn’t get too hard and you don’t stop, that’s okay too.’

  We sat down all five of us at the table, Tanya and me, Kate, Paul and Gerard. No one except me could see Gerard sitting there. He sat between Kate and Paul and opposite Tanya. I drifted in and out of their conversation, occasionally hearing but seldom participating, in order not to let him out of my sight. Here we all were, approaching the resigned years of our thirties when hope is consigned to your backlist, a time when we had already had most of the conversations we were going to have, a time when future conversations would just be reworked versions of past ones. We had already cooked all the meals we were going to cook. I had made conventional meals, roasts with garlic and rosemary was about as far into the art as I was going to get. Tanya had exhausted her more exotic repertoire and the culinary semioticists could have told our guests then and there that they ought not to have come if they did not like eggplant and that if they had ever liked eggplant we were going to give it to them until they did not.

  I already knew that Kate was intrinsically more interesting than Paul. I already knew that she was brighter than him, disappointed in him, that she wanted children with someone and that she was showing signs of advanced teacher burnout. I knew this from everything Tanya had told me. I only saw Kate at variants of these candle-lit eggplant soirées and Paul was always with her. And at these she was only a shadow of her former self. Usually I watched her flicker on the wall, remembering her from university, imagining that young woman screaming in horror at the absence of exhilaration in her mid-thirties self. It was too simple and therefore inaccurate to say that she cared nothing for Paul’s money and recently exalted status in a world so desperate for high priests that it rewarded the neo-classical librettists of macro self-interest with nouveau mandarin status. For if she cared so little for it why didn’t she leave? Maybe it was upon all of this that she pondered while her husband wrestled yet again with my wife over her PhD thesis.

  ‘No, of course not,’ I heard Tanya answer.

  ‘Then you should be completely in favour of unrestricted international trade. It would enable the poorer countries to catch up to the wealthier countries or at least to come closer to them.’

  ‘Paul, you know that doesn’t happen.’

  ‘Yes it does. How can you ignore those third world miracles of deregulation, all of them industrialised via successful export-driven economies?’

  ‘Now, let me guess. You mean Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They represent less than two per cent of the third world population. They’re repeatedly trotted out by people with no real concern for the small people who have to live there and who have no voice, no rights and no money, by people with an ideological commitment to deregulation that no empirical data can shake.’

  ‘That’s not right,’ he shook his head in lieu of a counter proposition.

  ‘Well, if empirical evidence could oust the dogma, why do you ignore the absence of benefits to India, Pakistan, Burma, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines?’

  ‘Each of those countries has their own special set of circumstances, they’re separate cases. Some, like China, are at the early stages of liberalisation and haven’t yet reaped the rewards of the trickle-down effect.’

  ‘The trickle-down effect! Cut it out, Paul, the only thing that ever really trickles down is sewage. Look, when we get rid of protection here, we send business off shore, increase our indebtedness overseas and export jobs. The people who get those jobs are usually women and children who work till four in the morning for a hundredth of the wage remembered so fondly by our new permanently unemployed. The employers of these overseas workers certainly get rich but the workers themselves remain abjectly poor. And the swelling ranks of our unemployed become ever more vulnerable with the attacks on the health system and on social welfare, not to mention the privatisation of public utilities. Every time an aged pensioner wants to make a cup of tea some crony of the party that offered the biggest tax cuts makes a handsome profit. In the meantime, real wages fall because there is now a reserve of desperate unemployed waiting to take the jobs of the employed if the latter dare ask for a rise to keep up with the cost of living. Everyone is disillusioned and afraid of what’s coming next. They know in their hearts that the government hates them.’

  ‘That’s a bit strong. What evidence have you got for that bit of hyperbole?’

  ‘This government is suing the fire-fighters. The ambulance drivers have been forced to strike.’

  ‘Nobody is forced to strike.’

  ‘Paul, you cannot accept that it is possible to so reduce the conditions, safety, wages and the self-respect of ordinary people that they have
no choice but to do the only thing they can do, withdraw their labour.’

  Both Tanya and Paul knew that they would never change the other’s opinions but they went on regardless. She always rose to the bait and he always seemed to get an excitement out of her vehemence which I found distasteful to contemplate. This should have been the time for me to sit next to the flickering Kate as she toyed with extinguishment and be her friend as she had been mine. But I didn’t because I was too busy watching Gerard. He also enjoyed Tanya in full flight and remembered it from other times. I could see in his face his memories of her, which he could summon at will. What spark had he ever carried that showed him, even briefly, in a good light?

  I will never know precisely what combination it was of Gerard’s intervention and my earlier interview with the gentlemen from the Ministry that led me to be chosen to work on that special project which had, over almost four years of rumour and speculation, attained the proportions of the Manhattan Project. I will probably never know this just as I will never know why it was first mooted four years earlier only to be periodically shelved and revived and shelved again until I was assigned to it.

  When he called me into his office it was just as a headmaster summonses a student, except, of course, that he had slept with my wife. That she was not my wife then made no difference to me because I had known then that she would be and she should have known too. In this way, without too much effort, I could be cuckolded retrospectively. In any case he was, when I thought about it, the last man she had slept with before me—and the last man she should have slept with. And I did think about it, on the train, in the tea-room, lying next to her at night breathing in that mixture of her natural scent and that supplied by moisturiser manufacturers intent on convincing her that she could, with their help, stay the age she was when she had slept with Gerard. And I thought of it as he asked me to sit down in his office.

  He had new furniture, leather. No one else in the building had new furniture, let alone leather. No one even had new pencils. I sank deeply into the leather armchair, gravity coming down firmly on top of me. His office had ducted gravity. Perhaps he did not know that I had married his ex-girlfriend, that Tanya was my wife?

  ‘Eddie, we’re offering you a great opportunity,’ he told me with a smile that was denied by his eyes. He knew. I could see that he knew. It was not an offer, which is something one can accept or reject. It was not even a challenge. It was malice but it was dressed up hastily, awkwardly, coming undone at the back, and enough of it was exposed to shatter any illusions.

  There was a project, he told me, for which I had been specially chosen. He did not divulge who had chosen me but I was to prepare and submit a report directly to the Minister and, in consultation with him and the Head of the Department, to advise on the drafting of appropriate legislation. The matter was highly controversial and so all my work was to be strictly confidential.

  The government was considering entering into an agreement with the owner of some coastal land it had sold off a few years earlier at a controversially low price. The land had been sold within a few weeks of an election and guarantees had been given to the public that, although the land was being sold to a private concern, it was a condition of sale that no new or expanded mining activities could take place there without an environmental impact statement being obtained which would then be incorporated into regulatory legislation. Now, four years later, the owner wanted to put the land to the use for which it was bought, to massively expand an existing smelting facility for heavy metals. This was where I came in. I was to determine the environmental impact of the expansion and recommend necessary controls and safeguards with respect to marine and atmospheric pollution in particular.

  ‘Where is this place?’

  ‘It’s been in the news, or at least the owner has, in fact I used to have a personal connection with the owner’s family myself.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘South-east Australia.’

  ‘Could you be less specific? What’s it called?’

  ‘Spensers Gulf. He bought the island too, Spenser Island. He owns the whole area. Claremont. Perhaps you’ve heard of him?’

  Perhaps I had heard of him? Facetiousness became Gerard. Eczema would have too. I already knew of him when Amanda and I were still small secret wardrobe sitters and I was, unwittingly but quite clearly in Mrs Claremont’s view, posing an enormous threat to the future cultural, social and possible psycho-sexual wellbeing of Amanda. I must have known of him not that long after he had first turned his mind to lead, zinc and gold and their more base equivalents. And I had always found it difficult to imagine, as I lay on my bed in the years ten through seventeen, that Mr Claremont, a man whose first name was, I thought, Mister, would have himself been the engineer of my banishment from the realm of his daughter. There were several grounds for thinking this. Firstly, we had barely met. Secondly, I was not so bad and I felt that a chemical engineer would have known this, a man of that calling being possessed of in-built Geiger counters which measured other people’s intrinsic worth objectively, without regard to the creases in the shirts of their fathers.

  I had laid our enforced estrangement all at the feet of the mother out of whose mouth came hairpins, sit-still admonishments and the most elegant cruelty a child could hope never to hear. And if I had not entered the father’s consciousness then, I would certainly not have entered it in the subsequent years of accumulation during which he so successfully jettisoned his engineering career for more public mercantile pursuits, years that began with the rejection of the ten-year-old me by her mother and concluded with the rejection of her mother and her father by the adult Amanda.

  But if Mr Claremont had hardly registered my prepubescent existence he would certainly have registered the existence of the splendidly redoubtable Gerard, management’s gift to God. After all, it was Gerard with whom Amanda had lived during those troubled and searching years of the middle period somewhere between Achy Breaky Heart and the completion of the Uruguay round of GATT talks. Mr Claremont would not have liked Gerard. He would have mistrusted both his aesthetically motivated athleticism (naturally-occurring testosterone should have been enough) and his New Age attempts to be open-minded, which meant, in practice, rejecting nothing. If Amanda was, before the fall of Gerard, impersonating the black sheep of the family, then any partner of whom her father disapproved should have been all the more favoured by her, all the more desirable, given the realpolitik of filial rebellion and the alliances made with one’s enemies’ enemies. But obviously something had gone awry because it seemed that Amanda and Gerard were no longer together.

  I could not imagine Gerard blaming himself for their parting or accepting it with equanimity. Nor could I imagine him not being acutely aware that Mr Claremont disliked him. I thought I could see why he had picked me for the job. He blamed Amanda’s father, at least in part, for their separation and he wanted to wound him where he was most sensitive, right in the smelter. And I had the reputation in the department of being obsessive about the control of industrial pollution. At best I could stop the project going ahead, with a long list of objections and uneconomic pre-conditions (assuming the Minister listened to me) and, if not, at least he would have exercised arbitrary power over me, shifting me back and forth around the country to the dismay of Tanya and his successor with respect to her, me. He was risking nothing. This was obviously what was meant by a win/win situation. He wins twice. He was clearly worthy of his MBA.

  ‘Why did they have to choose you?’ Tanya asked. I still had not told her the name of the manager of our unit in the department. She was feeling besieged enough as it was. By the time I had returned from my fourth trip to Spensers Gulf there were only eight months to go before her contract with the university expired. The thesis was not going to be finished in eight months and she was concerned about her position. Soon Abby would be starting school. On hot days the car begged to be put out of its misery and on cold days it behaved as if it had been. Tanya said i
t had entered its autumn years, the years in which it could only be relied upon to move in autumn. It was my first and our only car. We’d had sex (front and back seats) and eaten Nepalese food in that car, sometimes in reverse order.

  One Saturday morning while Tanya and Abby were out shopping, a woman who was surveying people in the area for a polling company knocked on our door. She asked if I would mind answering a few questions. It wouldn’t take long. It was hot so I invited her in and offered her a cold drink. She started asking the listed questions. How many people lived here? Was there a biological family here? If an election were held tomorrow who would I vote for? Which of the following issues was more likely to determine my vote: law and order, unemployment, health, foreign policy, interest rates or the personalities of the party leaders? It didn’t take long for her to agree that the way the questions were framed made the answers to them close to useless in terms of their predictive capacity. She was an undergraduate psychology major trying to earn a little money on the side. I could see a wave of distress splash across her face when she learned how educated my wife and I were and that we were still thinking of trying to earn a little money on the side. Was education a waste of time? Was that what I was saying? ‘No, of course not,’ I said, leaving us both unconvinced.

  We returned to the questionnaire. Where did we go for our last holiday? How far was it from where we were living at the time? How did we get there? How long ago was our last holiday? What proportion of our income did we spend on accommodation (in rent or mortgage repayments)? How often did we buy clothes? What proportion of our income went on food, on insurance, gas, electricity, on entertainment? When would we be upgrading our car, within weeks, six months, two years, five years?

  I was looking at the kitchen floor. Abby had lost a glow-in-the-dark space monster. It had a name. She knew it. I didn’t. It came from the cereal pack. She had only needed eleven more to have the set when this one went missing. Now here it was at my feet under the kitchen table. I had found it for her. She should want for nothing. Nobody ever wants for nothing.