by Peter Carey
Her father always said there was no ambulance.
‘An ambulance,’ her mother said. ‘He couldn’t find anything the matter.’
‘I know.’
‘You can’t remember. Do you remember your father held out the loukoumia to you and you ran to get them. It was a trick to make you walk but if he hadn’t offered you sweets you wouldn’t have walked – you didn’t want to go. We had a house. For what did we come? So I can walk the streets and be a beggar for work? Did you ever see anyone in Agios Constantinos do their wee-wee in the street?’
The newspapers, of course, had their columns of employment ads, but the Letkos women could not read the letters of the alien alphabet. The newspapers were closed to them. They walked. They worked an area – Enmore, Alexandria, Surry Hills – going from factory to factory, following up the rumours their relations brought to the house. It was all piece-work, and her mother hated piece-work. Childhood friends competed against each other to see who would get the bonus, who would get fired.
Once a week they called on Switch-Electrics Pty Ltd in Camperdown. The women would converge on the footpath, swelling out around the Mercedes-Benzes which were never booked for parking on the footpath, pushing towards the door marked OFFICE. They would be there from seven in the morning. At eight o’clock the son would emerge. He had three folds of fat on his neck above his shirt collar. He had thick arms covered in pale hair. He had three pens in his shirt pocket.
He would point his thick finger into the crowd and say, ‘You, you.’
He was like God. He did not have to explain his choices.
‘You and you.’
One time he might choose you and another time he might not.
‘No more. Vamoose.’
The woman would beg in Greek, in Italian, in Spanish, in Catalan. They would do anything – kneel, weep – it was acting, but sincere at the same time.
The man with the pens in his shirt pocket would flap his arms at them as though they were hens.
‘Piss off. Go home.’
Sometimes the man’s mother would come out. She was nearly sixty but she dressed like a film star with tight belts and high heels. She had bright yellow blonde hair and pink arms and red lips and dark glasses. She would come out of a side door carrying a mop bucket filled with water. She would swing it back and then hurl it towards the women, who were already running backwards and tripping over themselves, spilling back through the white Mercedes-Benzes into the path of the timber trucks from the yard next door. As the trucks blasted their horns and as the women screamed, a fat tongue of grey water would splat on to the footpath and the son and daughter would stand in the doorway, laughing.
Maria’s mother lost 85 per cent of her hearing in one ear in a Surry Hills sweat-shop where she made national brand-name shirts. She would say, this machine is deafening me. The owner was Greek, from Salonika. He would say, if you don’t like it, leave.
Later she worked at Polaroid, polishing lenses. Then she got arthritis in her fingers and could not do it any more.
It was not a coincidence that, after the Tax Office began checking the returns of Mercedes-Benz owners, Maria was one of the two auditors who sat in the office of Switch-Electrics Pty Ltd opposite this same man with the fat neck and the three pens in his shirt pocket. He was now sixty years old. When he squeezed behind the wheel of his car, air came out of his nose and mouth like out of a puffball. He was a sad and stupid man, and his business was riddled with corruption and evasions which cost him nearly one million dollars in fines and back taxes.
Maria was not above feelings of revenge on behalf of all those women he had humiliated. She was pleased to get him, pleased to make him pay, and when he wept at the table she felt only a vague, distanced pity for him. She looked at him and thought: I must tell Mama.
Her mother was battling with cancer in the George V Hospital at Missenden Road in Camperdown and Maria brought flowers and Greek magazines and gossip that would cheer her up. It was for this reason – certainly not for her own pleasure – that she finally revealed what she had previously thought she could never reveal – her pregnancy.
The approaching death had changed Maria, had made her softer with her mother, more tolerant, less angry. She sat with her for ten, twelve hours at a stretch. She bathed her to spare her the humiliation of being washed by strangers. She fed her honey and water in a teaspoon. She watched her sleep. Death had changed the rules between them. The love she felt for her mother seemed, at last, without reserve.
As it turned out, the emotions Maria Takis felt were hers, not her mother’s. She had hoped that the idea of a birth might somehow make the death less bleak. She had imagined that they had moved, at last, to a place which was beyond the customs and morality of Agios Constantinos. But death was not making her mother’s centre soft and when Maria said she was going to have a baby, the eyes that looked back at her were made of steely grey stuff, ball-bearings, pips of compressed matter. Her mother was a village woman, standing in a dusty street. She did not lack confidence. Fear had not shifted her.
‘We’ll kill you,’ she said.
It was a hard death and the story of Switch-Electrics Pty Ltd never did get told.
7
‘Yes, but do we have milk?’ Mrs Catchprice used her walking stick to flick a magazine out of her path. ‘It’s very clever,’ she told Maria. She hit the magazine so hard the pages tore. ‘The roof leaks right into the kitchen sink. It washes my dishes for me.’
‘Mrs Catchprice,’ Maria smiled. ‘It’s nearly eleven.’
‘Are you hungry?’
‘I really need to start our meeting.’
‘You sit down,’ Mrs Catchprice said.
‘There are questions I have to ask you, or your accountant.’
‘Vish will get you a glass of milk.’
Mrs Catchprice struck the magazine again. Vish crossed from the kitchen to the plastic and paper confusion of the annexe, holding out a carton of milk at arm’s length. He gently lowered the milk carton into a green plastic bag.
‘You take my chair,’ Mrs Catchprice told Maria. ‘It’s too low for me.’ She pushed the magazine with the rubber tip of her stick and slid it underneath a bookcase.
‘Gran, the milk was off.’
‘Be a dear,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘Go and see Cathy. They’ve got milk in Spare Parts for the staff teas.’
‘I can’t ask Cathy. Cathy won’t give me milk.’
‘You don’t understand Cathy,’ said Mrs Catchprice. She pulled free a dining chair, turned it on one leg so it faced away from the bride dolls, and then sat down on it hard. ‘Ask her for milk,’ she said. ‘She won’t kill you.’
Maria thought: she ‘plonks’ herself down. She is pretty, but not graceful. She is full of sharp, abrupt movements which you can admire for their energy, their decisiveness.
She looked to see what the Hare Krishna was going to do about his orders. He had already gone.
‘Bad milk!’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘I’ve got old.’
‘We all get old,’ Maria said, but really she was being polite. She had an audit to begin. She wanted to make it fast and clean – a one-day job if possible.
‘One minute you’re a young girl falling in love and the next you look at your hand and it’s like this.’ She held it up. It was old and blotched, almost transparent in places.
Maria looked at the hand. It was papery dry. She thought of bits of broken china underneath a house.
‘I can see it like you see it,’ Mrs Catchprice said. ‘I can see an old woman’s hand. It has nothing to do with me. I think I’ll have brandy in my milk. Did he take an umbrella?’
‘I guess so.’
‘I know he looks peculiar but he’s very kind. He looks like such a dreadful bully, don’t you think?’ She leaned forward, frowning.
Maria had worked in the Tax Office twelve years and had never begun an audit in such a homey atmosphere. She opened her briefcase, removed a pad and laid it on her lap. ‘He’s got
a nice smile,’ she said.
‘Yes, he has.’ Mrs Catchprice fitted a Salem into her mouth and lit it without taking her eyes off Maria Takis’s face. ‘The Catchprices all have kissing lips. Actually,’ she said, as if the thought was new to her, ‘he’s the spitting image of my late husband. Did you meet his younger brother, Benny? Vish’s been looking after Benny since he could stand. They told you about their mother?’
‘I haven’t talked to anyone,’ Maria said. ‘I thought my colleague had talked to you to set up this interview. I …’
‘Did you talk to Jack? Jack Catchprice, my youngest son.’ She nodded to a colour photograph hanging on the wall beside the doorway to the kitchen. It was of a good-looking man in an expensive suit shaking hands with the Premier of the State of New South Wales. ‘Jack’s the property developer. He tells everyone about his funny family. He tells people at lunch – Benny’s mother tried to shoot her little boy.’
Maria closed the pad.
‘It’s no secret,’ Mrs Catchprice said. ‘Benny’s mother tried to shoot him. What sort of mother is that? Nice, pretty-looking girl and then, bang, bang, shoots her little boy in the arm. Benny was three years old. I’m not making it up. Shot him, with a rifle.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? God knows. Who would ever know a thing like that?’
‘What was she charged with?’
‘Oh no,’ Mrs Catchprice said. ‘We wouldn’t report it. What would be the point? She went away, that’s what matters. We wouldn’t want the family put through a court case as well. Everyone in Franklin gossips about it anyway. They all know the story – on the Sunday Sophie Catchprice was confirmed an Anglican, on the Monday she did this … thing. Confirmed,’ said Mrs Catchprice, responding to the confusion on Maria’s face. ‘You’re a Christian aren’t you? Your mother still goes to church I bet? Is she a Catholic?’
The Tax Inspector’s mother was dead, but she said, ‘Greek Orthodox.’
‘How fascinating,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘How lovely.’
It was not the last time Maria would wonder if Mrs Catchprice was sincere and yet she could not dismiss this enthusiastic brightness as false. Mrs Catchprice might really find it fascinating – she brought her Salem to her lips, inhaled and released the smoke untidily. ‘I always told them here in Franklin,’ she said, ‘that if they went in with the Presbyterians I’d switch over to the Catholics. We never had a Greek Orthodox. I never thought about Greeks. But now I suppose we have. We have all types here now. The Greek Orthodox is like the Catholic I think, is it not?’
‘The service is very beautiful.’
‘Oh I do like this,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘It’s so lovely you are here. Has Johnny gone for the milk?’
‘Mrs Catchprice, do you know why I’m here?’
‘You mean, am I really ga-ga?’ said Mrs Catchprice, butting her Salem out in an ugly yellow Venetian glass ashtray.
‘No,’ Maria said, ‘I did not mean that at all.’
‘You are a Tax Inspector?’
‘Yes. And I’ll need an office to begin doing my audit.’
‘They’re up to something, all right.’
Maria cocked her head, not understanding.
‘You met her?’ Mrs Catchprice said.
‘Your daughter?’
‘And her husband. I don’t like him but I’ve only got myself to blame for the fact she even met him.’
‘And you feel they are up to something?’
‘There’s something fishy going on there. You’ll see in a moment. They’ll have to give you access to the books. They won’t let me look but they can’t stop you. I think you’ll find the tax all paid,’ said Mrs Catchprice, folding her hands in her lap. ‘We’ve always paid our tax. It’s not the tax I’m worried about.’
Maria felt tired.
‘People always expect car dealers to be crooks, but you try buying a car from a classified ad and you’ll see where the crooks are. When my husband was alive, we always worked in with the law. We always supported the police. We always gave them presents at Christmas. A bottle of sparkling burgundy for the sergeant and beer for the constables. I would wrap up the bottles for him. He’d take them down to the police. They thought he was the ant’s pants.’
‘Mrs Catchprice,’ Maria said, patting the old woman’s hand to ease the sharp point she was making, ‘you weren’t bribing the police?’
‘It was a small town. We always supported the police.’
‘And now you’re supporting the Taxation Office.’
‘I wonder where that boy is with the milk.’
‘Mrs Catchprice. Are you Mrs F. Catchprice?’
‘Frieda,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘I’ve got the same name as the woman who was involved with D. H. Lawrence. She was a nasty piece of work.’
‘There’s no other Mrs F. Catchprice in your family?’
‘One’s enough,’ she laughed. ‘You ask the kids.’
‘So you are the public officer and also the one with the anomalies to report?’
‘Me? Oh no, I don’t think so.’ Mrs Catchprice folded her arms across her chest and shook her head.
‘You didn’t telephone the Taxation Office to say you were worried that your business had filed a false tax return?’
‘You should talk to Cath and Howie. They’re the ones with all the tricks up their sleeves. All this talk about being a professional musician is just bluff. She’s an amateur. She couldn’t make a living at it. No, no – what they want is to set up a motor business of their own, in competition to us. That’s their plan – you mark my words. But when you look at the books, you take my word, you’re going to find some hanky-panky. I won’t lay charges, but they’re going to have to pay it back.’
‘Mrs Catchprice, you do understand – I’m a tax auditor. I’m here to investigate tax, nothing else. You phoned the Taxation Office. Your call is on record.’
Mrs Catchprice looked alarmed.
‘They recorded me? Is that what you say?’
‘They recorded your name.’
Mrs Catchprice was looking at Maria, but it was a moment before Maria saw that there were tears flooding down her ruined cheeks.
‘The terrible thing is,’ said Mrs Catchprice, ‘the terrible thing is that I just can’t remember.’
8
At twelve o’clock Mort Catchprice returned from the coast with a Volvo trade-in and saw Benny standing in front of the Audi Quattro. He did not recognize him. He knew his son intimately, of course, had held his little body, bathed it, cleaned it, cared for it from the year his wife had run away. He had seen his body change like a subject in slow-motion photography, seen its arms thicken and its shoulders broaden, its hooded little penis grow longer and wider, its toenails change texture and thickness, insect bites appear and fade, cuts open like flowers and close up with scabs the colour of dead rose petals. He knew what his son was like – a teenager with pimples, razor rash, pubic hair – someone who treated his skin as if he wished to make himself repulsive – left it smeared with dirt, ingrained with the residue of sumps and gearboxes. He had rank-smelling hair and lurid T-shirts in whose murky painted images his father could see only violence and danger.
What Mort saw as he drove slowly down the lane-way to the workshop, was not his son but a salesman, hired without his knowledge, against his wishes, a slick car salesman like Jack, neater than Jack, someone they could not, in any case, afford to pay.
He was mad already when he drove in beneath the open roller doors into the large grey steel-trussed space that was the workshop. He parked the Volvo on a vacant Tecalemit two-poster hoist.
He moved an oxy gas stand and began to push a battered yellow jack back against the wall when Arthur Dermott came shuffling over from his work bench rubbing his hands with a rag and grinning under his wire-framed spectacles.
‘They tell you?’ he asked, reaching for the crumpled pack of Camels in his back pocket.
Mort felt hot around the neck. He saw the salesman. He kn
ows I’m weak.
‘They tell me what?’
‘Tax office is raiding you,’ Arthur said, lighting the cigarette with satisfaction.
He saw the salesman.
‘What?’
‘Tax Office is raiding you. The way we heard, it was serious. The boys are a bit stirred up, job-security-wise.’
‘Bullshit, Arthur. Who told you that?’
Arthur nodded towards Spare Parts. ‘Howie come and took Jesse off the fuel pumps to carry all the books up to your Mum’s apartment. They’re doing their raid up there.’
‘All right, Arthur, how about the Camira?’
‘A Welsh plug and some coolant.’
‘You road test it?’
‘It’s an R.T., yep.’
‘O.K., now you can pre-delivery the blue Commodore.’
‘I thought I was going to do the brakes on the Big Mack truck?’
‘Forget the fucking Big Mack truck, just do what the fuck I tell you.’
It was true what Granny Catchprice said – the Catchprices had kissy lips. Mort had the best set of all of them. And although he was a wide and burly man, spilling with body hair, and with a rough, wide nose which had been broken twice on the football field, it was the lips which were remarkable not just for their fullness but also – in that bed of blue-black stubble – their delicacy.
Yet had you seen him emerge from under the roller doors of the workshop you would have seen a fighter, not a kisser. He came up the concrete lane-way beside the Spare Parts Department like a front row forward, occupying the centre of the road. He wore a clean white boiler suit, cut short at the arms and open for two or three press studs so the hairy mat of his wide chest was visible. He walked with a roll to his shoulders and his lips had gone thin and his eyes were looking at nothing they could see.
He knew there was no way he could have been told about the Tax Inspector, but he was still mad about not being told. When he passed the fern-filled window of Spare Parts he was giving them a chance to tell him, but they did not tap on the window or come out to tell him.
Also: they had hired a salesman without consultation.