Paper Losses

The line came through on a Wednesday: the portfolio was down more than she'd paid for her car. Mel looked at it on the tram. She looked at it again in the lift. By the time she got to her desk in the Docklands she'd looked at it four more times and the number hadn't got any less red, which she knew was how numbers worked but had been hoping was somehow not. At lunch she rang her mum. "You sound funny," said her mum, who was in the garden in Ballarat and could hear tones of voice down a phone line from two hundred kilometres away. "What's happened." "Nothing. The market's had a bad week." "Ah." "I'm down, Mum. Like, a lot." "Down how? Have you sold anything?" "No." "Then you're not down anything, love. You've just got a number that's smaller than the last number." Mel sat with that. Around her the office was doing its lunchtime thing, people eating at desks, someone microwaving fish. Her mum had been a bookkeeper for forty years for a string of businesses in regional Victoria, the kind where the owner handed you a shoebox in July and hoped. She had a very particular relationship with numbers. They were true, in her view, but they weren't real. Not until something happened. "Remember the pool?" her mum said. "What pool?" "The above-ground one. When you were nine. It leaked and your father wanted to drain it every time it rained because he said the water was going to break the sides. And I said Graham, the water's not going anywhere, it's a pool, the water's supposed to be in it. Just wait for the sun." "Mum, what does that have to do with anything." "You're your father, and this is the pool." Mel laughed despite herself. A guy at the next desk looked over. "It's a paper loss, love. It's only a real loss if you make it real. Are you going to need that money this year?" "No." "Next year?" "No. It's for, like, thirty years." "Then in thirty years you'll look at this week on the chart and it'll be a little tiny wobble and you won't even remember what you were worried about. Your father drained that pool twice, by the way. Twice. Both times it rained the next week."

Mel closed the app. She actually closed it, not just switched away from it. "Thanks, Mum." "Eat something. You sound like you haven't eaten. And come up Sunday, the plums are on." Mel went and got a sandwich. She didn't open the app for the rest of the day, or the next day, or, as it turned out, until the following Thursday, by which point the number was a different number, less red, and she found she didn't care as much either way. She went up Sunday. The plums were on. Her dad was in the backyard looking at the pool, which was full, and which was fine.