Three Dollars - Hardcover

Elliot Perlman was born in 1964. His work has appeared in various publications including Picador New Writing 3 and Faber First Fictions. In 1994 he won The Age Short Story Competition for The Reasons I Won't Be Coming. He lives in Melbourne, Australia where he works as a barrister.

When I got home, Tanya was out. I deposited my luggage in the bedroom, threw the laundry in the washing machine and went to check the mail. There was a letter from the bank. Tanya was right. Interest rates had gone up to seventeen and a half percent. It was not just talk. There it was in black and white signed by a machine impersonating the signature of a highly placed bank official we had never met. They had actually started charging us the higher rate ten days earlier but there had been a delay in getting the letters out and the bank apologised unreservedly. The cost of the letter would doubtless be absorbed by the increase. Underneath the signature the bank had decided to place a message of encouragement:

By depositing your savings in a loan trimmer plan account you have reduced your loan interest by $1.71.

The mail contained advertisements: for a new gym specialising in fitness for men and women, home-delivered pizza from Cyprus, the Good News Bible, an encyclopaedia of entomology and a letter from our local member of parliament with a range of handy hints that would have Tanya fuming and vowing to put him in a home before the next election. Although he had misspelt our names, I had no reason to doubt the genuineness of everything he said. It was his belief that Tanya and I, as a household, could save up to a hundred and sixty dollars a year in energy by sealing gaps around doors and windows, using heavy curtains and maintaining our heaters regularly. We had only one heater so perhaps we would have to revise down this estimate but it was, nonetheless, a salutary reminder of the economic advantages of maintaining our heater.

He also recommended Tanya and I undertake regular fire drills replete with an escape plan that has been followed blindfold by everyone in the family at least once prior to the time of an actual fire. There was no mention of the government's slashing of funding for education but he did remind us that he could arrange messages and telegrams for residents in the electorate celebrating a special occasion such as a fiftieth wedding anniversary, or, for those celebrating one hundredth birthdays, a message from the Queen and Governor-General. Without an escape plan or blindfold we decided to try to have children.

Paul and Kate got married completely unexpectedly. His family had decided that the great virtue in denying him thus far his share of their not inconsiderable assets would soon ripen and then rot into a collective clannish shame. He had reached in their eyes the stage of life where the state of his furniture and the age of his car was a reflection on them. The first sprinkling of their largesse, in the form of Paul and Kate's wedding, was a public tribute to the purity of their sound business sense and sternly gentle cash-register-side manner over two generations of pharmaceutical service to the good people of Hawthorn, Camberwell and Mont Albert. With the assistance of the family's long-standing and now fragile vicar, and allusions to ideologies I was confident Paul had always rejected, they were married in the presence of two hundred and fifty people at a particularly fashionable bend in the Yarra River.

Paul had two brothers and so, although I could not escape the bridal party altogether, I was not required to make a speech that steered that fine line between deference to the vicar and deference to the macho success with women de rigueur for the groom, a success Paul had not known. In truth, he was lucky to be marrying Kate. As much as I liked him, she was better. Tanya knew this too but was kind enough never to make me have to hear it. Despite her fondness for him, I think Tanya always suspected something about him, something not wholly admirable. She was asked to be Kate's matron of honour and we were hoping that by the time of their wedding Tanya's belly would be swollen with child and we could insinuate an inelegance into the proceedings. But having spent so many months trying unsuccessfully, Tanya seemed about as likely to get pregnant as win the Eurovision song contest. So both of us looked on by the river, barren and speechless, as Paul and Kate with the stroke of a platitude and an injection of pharmaceutical funds, lapped us in one go and flowed with ease and prosperity into the hardening arteries of middle-class matrimony.