Three Dollars

  The elderly woman was sitting where I had left her, still bewildered. She had finished her tea and half the muffin was gone as well.

  ‘Here you are,’ I said handing her the aspirin between breaths.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, oblivious to my panting and drenched appearance.

  When the man to whom I had earlier given both my order and hers saw me with the aspirin he approached us with a glass of water and placed it in front of her.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said to both of us. ‘You don’t work here, do you?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ I smiled. There was an idea. ‘You’d better take the aspirin now. You’ll be late for your appointment.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you didn’t work here. I’m sorry to put you to all this trouble.’

  ‘You didn’t put me to any trouble,’ I lied. She swallowed two aspirin tablets and got up, a little unsteadily hanging onto the back of the chair.

  ‘Let me give you some money for the aspirin before I pay for the tea and muffin.’ She began to reach into her purse and I watched her spotted hands work the clasp before it plunged into the black hole of all the things she thought she needed.

  ‘No, don’t worry about it. Forget it. I’ve already paid them for the tea and muffin and the aspirin … wasn’t expensive so … really …’ My hands fanned away her fake crocodile-skin handbag from where her long-serving wrongly-convicted money had just emerged weaker than it had gone in all that time ago and badly in need of rehabilitation.

  ‘Please take it. I have to go now. Please take it. You’ve been so kind.’

  ‘Thank you but … really … You go to your appointment.’

  She looked at the watch at the end of her spotted left hand and it gave her a start. She turned toward William Street, walked two steps to the door and then turned to come back again.

  ‘Why did you do this?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Why did you do this for me?’

  She had me there. I felt stupid. I had behaved aberrantly, ridiculously. The construction workers knew it. Uncertain what to answer but clear that she would have preferred to be late for her appointment rather than miss my attempt, with a long shame left over from the bottom of my school bag, I opened my mouth like a goldfish.

  ‘My father is sick.’

  I did not know where or with whom her appointment was and could only hope that she ultimately arrived there in time for the advice, the procedure or the news for which she could not be late. It was likely someone at the other end asked her to please take a seat. Hopefully it was just a dental appointment, a check-up which revealed no need for intervention and that all the gleaming sterile instruments of her interrogator could wait untouched for the bent bicuspid of someone’s anxious offspring.

  CHAPTER 31

  The proprietor of the coffee shop who had seen it all from behind the counter was moved to meet me on the other side as I was leaving. He wore the white smock of a dentist and examined the tear in my jacket, thoughtfully, gently, as I stood abjectly still.

  ‘Hmm. There might be something they can do.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘There’s a place down the road. Do you know the AMP building, corner of Bourke and William?’

  ‘That’s the BHP building.’

  ‘No, they were opposite but they moved uptown. Anyway, that was years ago. Have you been away?’

  ‘Uptown?’

  ‘Well, there are these tailors in the AMP building. They specialise in repairs. They might be able to do something for you.’

  ‘Thanks. Should I tell them you sent me?’

  ‘No, they’ve never heard of me.’

  I found the tailor in the cavernous arcade as promised. There was no one at the counter but upstairs were three young Vietnamese women, almost children, hunched over sewing machines. I made those cartoon throat-clearing sounds to attract their attention but they had not been raised on cartoons. I punched a small bell on the counter and still they did not look up. Eventually, a portly middle-aged woman came out of a back room looking slightly peeved. She had been interrupted. I took off my jacket for her to examine, not having surveyed the damage first myself and she said that she needed to examine it closely which seemed to mean taking it backstage whence she had come.

  She left me alone to watch the three girls or peruse the surrounding rolls of fabric. The girls continued working without stopping to look at me or even at each other. The radio news was just finishing. A man in Moscow had been sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for setting his dog onto any passersby who would not give him fifteen thousand roubles which was, the announcer said, equivalent to three dollars.

  When the portly woman returned she still looked irritated. Her expression was of someone in pain from gastric hyperacidity.

  ‘We could do something for you,’ she managed to offer, in a threatening manner.

  ‘Can you repair it?’

  ‘Yes, of course. It’s a question of how.’

  ‘Isn’t that what you do here—in the usual course of your business?’

  ‘There are three possibilities.’

  ‘That’s good, isn’t it? I’ve been lucky to get one lately.’

  She continued as though her words were the last to be spoken. ‘There are three possibilities: hand darning, grafting and weaving.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘They are different methods for achieving the same end, the repair of this … sadly torn jacket.’

  ‘It is sad, isn’t it?’ I said more to myself.

  ‘Without the repair you have no jacket and without the jacket you have no suit.’

  ‘Hand darning, grafting and …’

  ‘Weaving … as I said, different methods for achieving the same end.’

  It occurred to me that perhaps her normal working day was not usually filled with this much portent. She was not handling it well.

  ‘The same end but at a different cost,’ I ventured.

  ‘Precisely. A different cost to both of us,’ she asserted.

  ‘Are you going to pay for this too?’

  ‘They are not equally labour intensive,’ she snapped.

  ‘Weaving … that’s the killer isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s painstaking work but it achieves the best results,’ she said crossly.

  ‘How much will I have to stake this pain?’

  She looked at my sad jacket. The tear smiled at her as she shifted its jagged pure wool lips from inside the lining.

  ‘It’s one hundred and fifty dollars for the weaving.’

  ‘A hundred and fifty?’

  ‘Yes, far less than the cost of a completely new suit, especially one of this quality,’ she said, unable to hide her admiration for my suit.

  ‘Let me see if I understand the situation in all its aspects.’

  She said nothing; having trapped some oxygen somewhere between her neck and her waist she was loath to tamper with her body’s precarious gaseous equilibrium.

  ‘There are three possibilities, hand darning, grafting and weaving. Each method would see the jacket repaired. Weaving would see an exchange between us of one hundred and fifty dollars. Each of hand darning and grafting would require a smaller exchange. Is that right?’

  ‘To be frank, sir—’

  ‘Please, be frank.’

  ‘To be frank, anything less than a weaving would not be worth it.’

  ‘Worth it to whom?’

  ‘To either of us.’

  ‘But there are three possibilities. You said there are three possibilities.’

  ‘There are—in theory.’

  ‘There are three possibilities in theory. Have you ever read The Trial by Franz Kafka?’

  ‘No time for reading. I’ve got a business to run, as you can see,’ she said impatiently.

  ‘I do understand, it’s just that there is a scene in The Trial in which an accused man is told by the Court painter, a man who makes his living from the painting of judges, of his three possibil
ities, three possible outcomes to his trial. There is a definite acquittal, ostensible acquittal and indefinite postponement. Kafka was writing this in the first quarter of the twentieth century and yet … do you see my point?’

  ‘Well, we all have our trials, I’m sure. Anything less than weaving this jacket,’ she said holding it in the air disdainfully with one hand, ‘and your entire suit … would not be worth three dollars.’

  ‘So you advise against hand darning and grafting?’

  ‘Strenuously—but it’s entirely a matter for you.’

  Juggling a checklist of our debts and a request for examples of all three methods, I heard myself say: ‘Weaving it is then. One hundred and fifty dollars, and when will it be ready?’

  ‘Two weeks Thursday,’ she said without hesitation.

  Greeted rudely in my shirt-sleeves by the wind when I got outside, I tried to huddle inside myself. I considered what I had just done and that perhaps I had felt as warm as I would ever feel. I had no money on me. My last coins had gone to pay for the blueberry muffin, the aspirin and what my mother would have called beverages or cups of kindness. I would have to take out some money from the automatic teller machine closest to the employment consultants or else enter their offices on the verge of vagrancy. Touching my ribs through my shirt with vaudevillian panic I realised that my wallet was still in a pocket of the torn jacket.

  This was good. It meant that I had no choice but to go back to the tailor’s to retrieve my wallet. It was warm there. I could postpone the repair on the pretext of the weather and maybe even call Tanya from their telephone just in case she was able to turn over two days in succession and would try to call me at work. I could quite honestly tell her that I just called to see how she was but that I couldn’t talk long. I had a meeting. As long as the Vietnamese girls stayed quiet I would be home and dry.

  The woman with gastric reflux was not pleased to see me. When I told her that I had left my wallet in one of the pockets she looked quickly toward the ceiling and then down again without moving her neck, suggesting, with her eyes, that I was too stupid to live. But I was not yet that stupid. I realised that she was more likely to let me use her phone if she thought I was still a ‘weaving’ customer in a hurry rather than a half-suited procrastinator. I might even have been pleased with myself for this inspired commercial reasoning had I not been so thoroughly sick of being me.

  As she handed back my frayed wallet, heavy as it was with other people’s never-wanted, never-needed business cards, I asked her as if it were an afterthought, ‘Oh, do you mind if I use your phone? I’m running a bit late for an appointment.’

  ‘Local call?’ She eyed me suspiciously. Perhaps it had happened before that a ‘weaving’ client had discussed the three only theoretical possibilities of weaving, grafting and hand darning, then left her establishment only to come back through the door minutes later in order to call Madagascar. Perhaps experience was her teacher and not a mindless penny-pinching meanness she had inherited genetically along with hyperacidity.

  The line was busy. Tanya was talking to someone, a sign of progress. This really was the best of all possible worlds. I looked at my watch to complete the impersonation of someone who was taking a liberty with someone else’s telephone only because of a lack of time. The watch ticked loudly and went along with the whole charade, helping me out in a way that the silent red numerals on the clock radio in our bedroom would never have done. It went along with it so well I realised that I would very soon be late in real life if I did not take steps to prevent it. At the last minute I could not bring myself to ask the woman for my jacket back. The employment consultants’ offices were not far from there and, anyway, how would it look to them if I presented in a torn jacket?

  As I punched my personal identification number into the consciousness of the automatic teller machine, the wind started harassing me again, questioning my judgment. Would I have looked better in a torn jacket than in no jacket at all? Perhaps they would not have seen the tear. And even if they had seen the tear, the gaping parting of the strands in all its prodigality, this was not a job interview. They were not my potential employers. I did not have to impress them. Or did I? They were there to sell me. They existed only to sell people. This was what I wanted from them and they would do it better if I impressed them. The absence of my jacket would not impress them. Was that how it worked? Were they meant to sell me? But I was not a product, was I? Yes, I was a product of many things. I was a lettuce of a man in a shirt and tie being tossed about by the wind.

  The automatic teller machine beeped three times. I looked at the display terminal. A sad clock face appeared above the words Denomination Not Available. Please Try Again. What denomination? What did this mean? The machine made a whirring sound consistent with post-industrial epilepsy and spat out a transaction record. There it was in purple and white. I had three dollars.

  At what stage in their development did certain children realise that they were going to make a career in interior design? When dirt became mud for them and when mud became clay, and that led to finger-painting, why did it not stop there? If parental encouragement is the secret ingredient that makes of their children closet interior designers how do the parents know what to encourage? When all I know to tell Abby is that there is never a good time to take Punt Road unless she wants her car windows cleaned at some critical intersection by stick figures as desperate as her father was when she was still a little girl, how did these parents know that there was so much money to be had from interior design? Why were there never too many of them?

  In Europe between 1980 and the mid-1990s, of the order of ten million jobs were lost in manufacturing alone. What enabled this to happen without massive social unrest, without blood in the streets? It must have been that all these people got jobs in the newly developing industries the neo-classical economists had predicted. And when careers could not be found for them in desktop publishing or marketing, the world of interior design welcomed them with neutral tones and casually draped arms. They became interior designers. Of course, if they were really brilliant they became management consultants.

  The carpet in the waiting area on the twelfth floor beside reception needed a shave. The chairs were matt grey and soft, and quietly and gently inviting. You sank into them without caring whether you ever worked again. You could check your spine in at the door when you entered. There was no call for it in these chairs. The walls were pale lemon and on them hung, alternately, the dot paintings on bark which the first Australians had waited forty thousand years to sell to consultancy firms, and large photographs of starkly rugged, barely hospitable landscapes. I knew this area. It was where the desert and the pasture met deferentially. It was like the edge of the habitable land just in from Spensers Gulf.

  After waiting for a while I got out of my chair just to stretch my legs. There were no magazines visible so I went over to the reception desk where the brochures and corporate cards of the firm of employment consultants lay in two neat piles on top of the granite lip which demarcated the receptionist’s private space from the shaggy carpeted common, the range over which roamed the anxious, perspiring, previously rejected people who had come for reinvention. I leafed through one of the brochures and picked up one of their business cards. Without thinking I put it in the breast pocket of my shirt. It was warm in there. My body was remembering great sleeps of the last thirty-eight years, a sort of involuntary ‘This Is Your Life’ of the unconscious. I stretched out Christ-like, while standing in front of the quietly busy receptionist and it was then and from there, for the first time, that I could see into some of the offices. It was then that I saw Amanda.

  CHAPTER 32

  The fourth time I saw Amanda she was seated behind a large granite-topped desk imported from Italy. At her back was a wall of window overlooking William Street. To one side of her desk was a half-filled drip filter coffee-making device, also from Italy. On the other side of her desk was a computer terminal and printer, intercom, telephone a
nd fax machine. Because she was seated at the time I could not see her fully, but it appeared she was wearing a black pin-striped suit with a white blouse underneath. Her jacket, at least, was black pin-striped. Her long hair had been cut to shoulder length and she was wearing it behind her ears revealing small gold-coloured earrings encasing some polished stone I was too far away to identify.

  Of all the firms of employment consultants in all the cities in all the world, I had to walk into hers. Had I missed something? Had some information, some data come before me during my thirty-eight years, information which to other people would have suggested that she was likely to be there in this capacity and that I, if I were not careful, was likely to be there, so shabbily, in mine? But I had been careful. When had I been anything else? Now she would see what had become of me. I had touched her leg so innocently inside my parents’ wardrobe three-quarters of our lives ago, breathing in the scent of her hair, and yet nothing of her had rubbed off on me. Innocence, now there’s the rub. Had I departed from it, not just with her, but with everyone and often, perhaps I would not have been that supine, crumpled shirt, over ninety-eight per cent water vegetable that was to be her next appointment.

  Standing by the receptionist, an attractive young woman in cashmere who answered telephones without speaking, who should have been accustomed by then to desperate men from both her personal and professional lives, I felt oppressed beyond reason by the heat of the room. I thought of recantation, of withdrawal from all wordly pursuits, anything to avoid a re-encounter with Amanda in such sorry circumstances. Already during the previous hour or so, somewhere between the aspirin and the lecture on weaving über alles, I had become accustomed subconsciously to being and remaining nothing. But it is one thing to wake up one mid-winter morning and be nothing and yet another to be served to Amanda Claremont on a silver platter, an undressed lettuce leaf looking like nothing so much as me, for her delectation.