Short story: Small Change By Karl Whitney - - - - He was sitting in the window of the café, a newspaper in front of him. At times he looked out, watching the people passing by, repressing his disapproval of them, as he didn’t want to appear rude, and anyway he’d already been thrown out of two cafés this morning for shouting obscenities. This one was warm, too, and the iciness of the afternoon precluded him from wandering the streets for too long. He disapproved of the passers-by because they all, to him, looked like they weren’t enjoying themselves. To him, this seemed the greatest sin. Years ago he had heard a man on television, in the middle of an important debate about the implications of global warming for the manufacturers of haircare products say: if you don’t show a happy face to the world, why, that to me says you’re not human. Hence his anger at these people, who wore their gloom as one would wear a new coat: highly visibly; proudly, even. He returned to the newspaper, which failed to entertain him. He had given up reading it once he had read for the third time an article about a celebrity couple, Susan and Harry, whose relationship had collapsed as a result of the pressures of stardom, and who, as a final act of affirmation of their belief in the validity of their marriage, were about to release a ‘his and hers’ set of fragrances. “If this doesn’t save our love for each other,” Susan is widely quoted as saying, “I’m not sure what will.” It was old fashioned love, Martin thought, but it was just rephrased in the language of advertising and commerce. It would be easy to be cynical about this couple who, he thought, clearly loved each other and just wanted one more chance. He wasn’t cynical, though. Having said that, he wasn’t about to go out and buy their products. He lacked the necessary moolah, a fair stack of which would have been necessary to procure the scents, the profits from which would go some way towards sustaining these celebrities’ ailing relationship. But he was broke, and ceased musing on the article in order to blacken the o’s and e’s of the newsprint with a Bic biro he had found on the side of the street. He returned his gaze streetward, ready to scowl at the glum shoppers, but found himself staring at his friend Mark through the smudged glass of the window. He had been waiting on Mark for the last two hours. Just after he had been kicked out of the second café, just before arriving here in Sense of Coffee, he had called Mark on the phone and said: “Meet me in the usual place, for I have seen the future and it is going to happen soon. Bring all the money you can, and bring Dave too.” Dave was the hamster Mark had nursed since he (the hamster) had survived a terrible car accident. The hamster’s mother had been killed, and none of his siblings are thought to have survived the accident. The car crash had happened on the road outside Mark’s house. He had heard the crash and rushed to the front door in time to see the newly smoking ruins of what had just been a family car and a roadsweeping machine scrunched up against a lamppost. The hamster must have scurried in at this point, Mark later surmised, as the next day he turned up in the breadbin, and from that point on was a member of the household. For a while Mark went everywhere with the hamster, though that practice had since ceased, hence Martin’s request that Dave the hamster be brought along to the rendezvous in the coffee shop. “What’s all this about?” Mark asked, as he sat in the chair next to Martin. “Oh, nothing,” said Martin. “What? Nothing?” Mark shouted. And suddenly he stood up from the chair and shook his fists in Martin’s face. “I came all the way in here, hamster in my pocket, and you say it’s for nothing?” All around the café, people were staring. One person mumbled to another: “Hamster in his pocket? Is that what he just said?” Martin didn’t want to be kicked out of another café today, so quickly calmed Mark down. “Okay, okay, okay,” he said. “So there is something I want to tell you. Now sit down and have a cup of tea.” And Martin turned to the waitress, who was loitering nearby with a highly suspicious look on her face, and ordered two teas which she reluctantly went to fetch, staring back at the tempestuous duo as she did so. In doing this, she didn’t look where she was going, so perhaps that’s why she tripped over a misaligned chair and hit the tiled floor with a thud that resounded around the chamber in the rear of the café. A wave of interest spread around the diners. They sat and stared, or stood to strain a look at the prostrate waitress on the ground. Ever the professional, she picked herself up and went to get the beverages. “So I have an idea.” This is Martin speaking, a high excitement hinting at some just-made breakthrough at a theoretical level. “Yeah?” countered Mark, a scepticism carefully developed through years of listening to Martin’s ideas apparent in the timbre of his reply. “I was sitting in the café earlier – not this café, the other one. The one I was thrown out of for swearing at people on the street. Anyway, I was sitting here thinking about my financial situation. Thinking about how I go through life spending money on all sorts of whims and fancies, and neglecting the important things. You know: food, water, shelter and the like.” “Like the time you bought that thought-predicting machine?” said Mark, fishing for an example that would demonstrate the somewhat abstract argument Martin was pursuing. “But it couldn’t predict thoughts in English, only in another language we couldn’t understand. Rendering it…” Martin interrupted with a sigh. “Rendering it all but useless to anyone not schooled in the unidentifiable language that scrolled across the high-tech LCD display. Yes, that, indeed, was something of a waste of money, but do you know what they say?” Mark’s face lit up, and he said: “Ah, I know this one: a fool and his money are soon parted.” “No,” said Martin, his flight of excitement shot down suddenly by his friend’s reversion to the most clichéd idiom imaginable at that point. “At the end of the day, it’s a game of two halves?” Mark suggested. “No.” “Neither a borrower nor a lender be?” “You’re definitely getting warmer.” “Too many cooks spoil the broth?” Martin stared out the window and tapped his too-long fingernails on the counter. “Yeah, I’m starting to think that,” said Martin. “Anyway, what I had been thinking about prior to this picayune little conversation is that I need money. And definitely more money than I have right now at this precise moment.” And he checked his watch to record the point in time at which he made the statement, writing the digits on the top corner of the newspaper so the time wouldn’t be forgotten: 2.34pm. “And I thought to myself: how much money does one man need? I mean, I get by on what I have, but it clearly isn’t enough. If I was to live in exactly the way I wanted to, how much would I need, and, more to the point, how would I get it?” “And how much do you need?” asked Mark, scratching his nose with the handle of a fork he had been absent-mindedly toying with for the duration of the conversation, but had only just begun to employ in this capacity. “How much do I need? Don’t you see? The whole question is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how much money I need. What matters is that I actually asked myself the question, and now it’s too late to unask it.” “Huh?” said Mark, dropping the fork to the ground in incomprehension. “You see,” said Martin, as Mark ducked below the counter to pick the cutlery up. “The universe conforms to the strangest rules, qua, a question can be formed to which there is no real answer, in that a certain formulation such as: ‘how much money do I need?’ can be answered just by a rejigging of the sentence structure.” Mark re-emerged from below the counter. Having chased the fork around with his left boot, he pushed it to just next to his arm, which strained to reach it, but finally did. He placed the fork back on the counter as Martin continued talking. “The answer is: ‘as much money as I need.’ Just like gases expand to fill the space available, if I had a huge amount of money I would spend as much as I had and possibly more than I had, considering the heavily indebted society we live in today.” Martin paused for breath. Mark took this as an opportunity to raise a salient point. “But you have no money. Nothing. I don’t know how you’re even going to pay for these teas.” The waitress had just put the two cups of tea on the counter in front of the two philosophers. She waited to be paid, looking on the duo with arched eyebrows. “I’m not going to pay,” he said, staring out the window. “You are.” And here, a casual flick of the hand indicated it was Mark he was talking about. “Okay,” Mark said, reached into his pocket, and counted coins into the waitress’s open palm. “You see,” Martin continued, “I drew out a chart of how much I would spend, say, in the next thirty years, because I fully expect to live that long – and healthily too. I drew out the chart and it consisted mostly of rent I would pay for a decrepit flat, and boxes of teabags I would buy cheap down the supermarket. I didn’t take into account transatlantic travel, or even excursions to Europe, because, as you know, I think Dublin’s good enough for me thank you very much.” Mark nodded enthusiastically in agreement. “I don’t like the sun,” Martin said. “I don’t particularly like scenery, and good weather is not a necessity for me to maintain what I like to refer to as my quality of life. So it’s mostly the tea and the rent, in essence. That’s all, in fact, apart from the odd Cadbury’s Cream Egg whenever they’re in season.” “So how much do you expect to need, then?” asked Mark. “Well, I worked it out, in a series of complex equations, in pencil, while sitting in my room sipping tea, and my conclusion was this: I would need seven thousand, nine hundred and twenty-two of today’s currency in order to survive, in the manner I am accustomed to, on this planet for the next thirty years.” “That sounds a little low,” said Mark. “What?” said Martin. “Low,” said Mark. “It sounds like you may have made a mistake with your calculations.” “No. See,” said Martin – and here he pulled out a sheet of cracked greaseproof paper with a variety of scribbles on it, showing it to Mark and pointing excitedly. Martin tried to point out the main strengths of his argument; Mark pointed out the flaws. Martin drew his attention to the value of such a plan; Mark said something like this was unreliable, and anyway he should have written it out on proper paper, not this stuff for baking cakes on. Or even, better, he should have typed it. And the sums were all wrong. “I can see what you mean. I think the equation where the teabags are multiplied by the sum of the first year’s rent divided by four may be a little…ummmm…experimental.” “Perhaps you’re right,” said Mark sagely, who, as they left the café, openly wondered whether Martin’s finances would stretch to a pint of beer in the pub around the corner. “No,” said Martin, but went anyway. He paid for his own beer, and, in a gesture of generosity, paid for Mark’s beer too, effectively giving up on the financial plan he had spent the whole of the previous night developing. As Martin and Mark sat in the pub, the hamster feasting on some loose dry roasted peanuts strewn on the tabletop, they mused about the nature of society and their place in it, and decided that while an estimate of the amount of money one would need in order to live in the way one wanted to live would be a highly commendable undertaking, they were sure that they were not the men to undertake it. So they left the pub and performed their mime act in the curving, tightly packed streets of the city. Mark would also perform magic tricks for the entertainment of passers-by, not least of which was the one where he would produce the hamster from under his hat, then return it there. When he lifted the hat, the hamster was gone. Mark would then produce the hamster from his left sleeve, occasionally to gasps from onlookers. Martin looked on as Mark performed, with the rolled-up newspaper tucked tightly in his coat pocket, watching the small change thrown by people clink into the flat cap on the pavement. -------- Stories | Home | About This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.