by Peter Carey
‘She told me that she did.’
‘Well she doesn’t. It’s owned by my auntie and my Dad and me. Not even my uncle Jack has got shares. He’s a property developer in town, but he doesn’t work here so he can’t have shares. Even my brother,’ Benny said, ‘could have had a future here …’
Then he saw the Tax Inspector’s Colt making a right-hand turn across the traffic to come into Catchprice Motors.
‘I’ve got to tell you,’ Sarkis said, ‘I never sold cars before.’
Benny groaned.
‘So if you can help me …’ Sarkis rubbed his fingers together, indicating money passing hands.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You help me, I’ll split my commission.’
‘We don’t have commissions,’ Benny said. ‘This is a family business.’ But he was mollified by the offer. ‘This is a fucking minefield,’ he said. ‘It’s a snake-pit. They all hate each other. None of them can sell a car. If you work here, you’d have to work for me.’
‘Sure,’ said Sarkis. ‘Sure, O.K.’
‘We’ve got a lot of stock to move,’ Benny explained. ‘We’ve got a fucking enormous tax bill.’ He looked at Sarkis. ‘What makes you think you can sell cars … what’s your name?’
‘Sarkis.’ He hesitated. ‘They call me Sam,’ he told this kid. He hated how it sounded. The kid must be seven years younger and he was saying, ‘Call me Sam’.
‘Sam? Listen Sam. The first thing you’ve got to know is that the car is not the issue. The car is only the excuse. It’s the F&I you make the money from. No one understands that. The kings of this business are the F&I men. There’s no one in Catchprice Motors knows an F&I man from their arsehole. Someone says to my old man, “I need insurance,” he picks up the fucking phone and dials the fucking insurance company for them and it costs us thirty cents and makes us nothing. You want to work here, you got to go away for five days and learn about F&I …’
‘Sorry … what’s F&I?’
‘I’ve been telling you,’ said Benny. ‘Finance and Insurance. F&I. You stay here now, all this week, but next Monday you get on an F&I course. You learn how to use the computer, how to do the paper work. You don’t need to know shit about cars. You don’t need to know the difference between an Audi Quattro and a washing machine. A week from now you’ll know how to sell them comprehensive insurance, disability cover, extended warranty. If that’s impossible …’
‘I’m Armenian,’ said Sarkis. ‘We’re the best salesmen in the world.’
‘Yeah, well don’t go round giving people silk ties. You get people mad with you. Forget it now. Listen to me – I’ve got a hundred bucks and I want to buy a car from you, how are you going to do it? I mean, I come in here with a blue mohawk and a leopard-skin vest and a ring through my nose and when I’ve finished jerking off all I can get together is a hundred bucks …’
‘You can’t afford a car, sorry …’
‘You know as much as the directors of this business.’ Benny could see Cathy standing at the top of Grandma Catchprice’s landing. She was waving her arms around and waving at Benny and Sarkis. ‘You want to sell a car, you’ve got to understand finance, O.K. Listen to me,’ Benny said, ‘not her. You’ve got a hundred bucks, you want a nice car. I say to you, see that old F.J. Holden over there. I’ll sell you that for a hundred bucks.’
‘You call that a nice car?’
‘No, I don’t. Just be patient. O.K. You buy it from me for a hundred. O.K.?’
‘O.K.’ said Sarkis.
‘O.K., now I buy it back from you at five hundred. Car hasn’t even moved. What’s happened?’
‘You’ve lost money.’
‘No, now you have five hundred bucks – you can afford to do business with me. You’ve got enough money for a deposit on a $3,500 car. I can finance it to you. I’ll make good money on the sale, I’ll keep on making money on the F&I. You understand me?’
‘I think so,’ said Sarkis.
‘It takes time, don’t worry,’ Benny said. ‘They think I’m dumb round here, I’ll tell you now.’ He could see Cathy lurching awkwardly down the stairs. ‘But none of them appreciates this. You’re getting it faster than they are. You can make two hundred grand a year in this dump, really. You believe me.’
‘You want to know? I think it’s a great opportunity.’
‘You get this F&I under your belt, we can set this town on fire.’ He turned to face Cathy who was weaving towards them. ‘Just ignore this,’ he told Sarkis. ‘This doesn’t count.’
31
Sarkis watched the chunky blonde woman in the gingham dress walk down the staircase. Her eyes were on him, he knew, and he was optimistic about the effect her presence would have on the conversation she was so obviously about to enter. At a certain distance – from the top of the fire escape to the bottom, and a metre or two onwards from there – she gave an impression of a bright blonde Kellogg’s kind of normality and he hoped that she might, somehow, save him from this sleaze. But then she passed the point where there could be conjecture and he saw, even before he smelt her, that her face was puffy and her mascara was running. The smell was not the smell, as subtle as the aroma of Holy Communion, you get from a drink or two, but the deep, sour aura that comes from a long night of drinking, and it explained more readily than her high-heeled knee-high boots, the careful way she walked across the gravel.
‘Who are you?’ she asked Sarkis. She looked both hurt and hostile and Sarkis’s strongest desire was to turn away from all this poison and walk to the sane, cloves-sweet environment of his home.
Instead he said something he had promised never to say again: ‘Hi, I’m Sam Alaverdian.’
The ‘Sam’ did not make her like him any better. She sighed, and put her finger on the small crease at the top of her nose. ‘So you’re the latest candidate,’ she said. ‘Tell me, honey, what experience do you have?’
‘He’s Armenian.’
‘What’s that got to do with it, Benny?’
‘They’re the best salesmen in the world.’
‘Oh shit, Benny, spare us, please. Tell me … what’s an Armenian? Where’s Armenia? You tell me.’
Obviously, Benny did not know. He stared at her as if he could vaporize her. His eyes got narrower and narrower and she stared right back at him. Sarkis did not want to work for either of them. They both stared at each other for a long time until finally, the woman shifted her ground. You could see her surrender in her shoulders before she spoke.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She put out her little white hand towards him and he stepped away from it.
‘Don’t give me shit about this,’ he said. ‘I’m saving you.’
The woman’s face screwed up. She wiped her eyes and made a big black horizontal streak that went from the corner of her eye into her permed curly hair.
‘I’m saving you,’ Benny said again. He put out his hand to her and she took it and held it, and began to stroke the back of it. Sarkis was embarrassed but they were oblivious to him. ‘I’m making it possible.’
‘Honey, it was a nice try, but we can’t stop the Tax Office. She’s back.’
‘I know she’s back,’ Benny said defensively. ‘I saw. Maybe she just came to get her things … you won’t know until you talk to her.’
‘Forget it, Ben.’
‘Try being positive, just for once.’
Cathy smiled and shook her head. ‘Honey, you’re sixteen.’
Sarkis did not want to interrupt. He waited until whatever process they were engaged in – Benny stroking her hand, she touching Benny’s cheek – was completed. But when they brought their attention back to Sarkis, he said: ‘I can sell.’
The Catchprices took their hands back from each other.
‘What can you sell, Sam?’
‘F&I,’ Sarkis told her. From the corner of his eye he saw Benny smile. ‘I’m an F&I man,’ he said.
She frowned and scratched her hair. The hair was good and thick but dry and brittle
from home perming. She took a Lifesaver packet from the pocket of her gingham dress, and bit off the top one.
‘Please,’ Benny said. ‘I can use him.’
She squinted at Sarkis and frowned. ‘We can’t afford an F&I man.’
‘You can’t afford not to have one,’ said Sarkis, wanting to be definite but having no idea how to be really definite, rushing her towards the idea of an F&I man while, at the same time, he dragged his own heels, anxious lest he be forced to talk any more about the alien subject.
‘I’m very sorry, Sam, but my mother had no authority to hire you.’
‘Don’t worry about him. He’s mine.’
‘She made a verbal contract with me,’ said Sarkis, remembering his father’s argument with a builder when they first arrived in Northwood.
This made the woman stare at him very hard.
‘Did she get the chance to tell you about her gelignite?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t want to get involved with us, Sam.’
‘I need a job.’
‘How long you been living in Franklin?’
‘Six months.’
‘You better just forget it, Sam. You don’t want this work. Please go away.’
‘You’re the one who should go away,’ Benny said, very gently. ‘You’ve got a reason to go away. We’ve got a reason to stay here.’
The woman looked at Benny and clenched her smudged eyes shut and opened her mouth and suffered a small convulsion or a shiver as if she might be about to weep. Then she turned and walked away across the gravel, holding out her hand to steady herself among the cars as she passed them.
32
In the gauzy rain-streaked light of Tuesday morning, Mort Catchprice became aware that there was an angel standing beside his bed. It had its back to him. It had broad shoulders and a narrow waist and on the cool white canvas of its back were wings of ball-point blue and crimson which seemed to lie like luminous silk across the skin.
In his dream he had been a river. It had been a rare and wonderful dream, to be water, to watch the light reflecting off his skin and so he came from sleep to meet the angel feeling unusually tranquil, and in the minute or so it took before he was really properly awake, he studied the wings and saw how they followed the form of the body, incorporating the collar bone, for instance, into what was clearly a tattooist’s trompe l’œil, one which gave perfect attention to each individual feather, dissolving sensuously from crimson into blue, always quite clear, not at all ambiguous until the upper reaches of the marble-white buttocks where the feathers became very small and might be read as scales.
As he stirred and stretched, the angel turned towards him and was recognized. Then all the heavy weight of the past and present flooded back into his limbs.
He quickly saw that the tattooed wings were not the only thing his son had done to himself – he had also used a depilatory to remove any trace of body hair. His chest, his legs, his penis all had that shiny slippery look of a child just out of the bath.
It was the lack of hair that woke him properly. He understood its intention perfectly and as the blood engorged his own penis, he picked up the blue water jug beside his bed and threw it at the creature. The water spilled yet stayed suspended in mid-air like a great crystal tongue-lick – dripping diamonds suspended above the angel’s dazzling white head.
The angel stepped, slowly, to one side and the jug hit the soft plaster wall and its handle penetrated the plasterboard. It did not bounce or break, but stuck there, like a trophy.
Benny gave his father a rather bruised and blaming smile. ‘You’re so predictable,’ he said.
The crystal transformed itself into water and fell – splat – on to the floor. The alarm clock began to ring.
‘Please,’ Mort said. ‘Please don’t do this.’ But even as he did say, ‘please don’t’, the other cunning part of his brain was saying, please, yes, one more helping.
‘Well sure,’ Benny sat down in the rocking-chair beside the bed and began rubbing his hands along his long shiny thighs. ‘We’ve got some dirty habits.’
His father sat up in bed with the sheet gathered around his hairy midriff. ‘Not any more we don’t.’
‘You know I could have you put in jail,’ Benny said. ‘I wish I’d known that before. Did you see that on ‘Hinch at Seven’ last week? They take you to the Haversham clinic and they put you in a chair and they strap this thing around your dick and show you pictures of men doing it to little boys. You get a hard-on, you’re done. They call you a rock spider and chuck away the key.’
Mort threw the alarm clock. He was not play-acting. It was a heavy silver clock from Bangkok Duty-Free and it hit the boy on the chest so hard it made him rock back in the chair. The confidence left his eyes and was replaced by a baleful, burning look.
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to do something if you hurt me.’
Mort was already sorry, sorry because he had been brutal, sorry because he was now even more vulnerable. He could see a large red half moon showing on the boy’s chest. Anybody could examine it and see what he had done. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Sorry isn’t enough,’ Benny said, rubbing at the mark. ‘You’re always sorry.’
Mort knew he had to get out of there before something bad happened. He slipped out of bed with his back to Benny. He bent down by the muslin curtains looking for his underpants.
‘Christ,’ said Benny. ‘Look at the boner.’
Mort tripped and staggered with his toes caught in his underpants. ‘God help me, shut up.’
Benny was standing, grinning. ‘You can’t say shut up to me now. I’m an angel. You like it?’ He stood and turned and wiggled his butt a little.
‘You’ll never get them off,’ Mort said. He did not ask how much the tattoos cost. ‘Where did you get the money, are you thieving again?’
Benny said: ‘It’s the hair, isn’t it? That’s what you get off on.’
Mort was trying to find the shirt and trousers he had dropped on the floor at bedtime. They were tangled with a towel and dressing-gown.
‘It’s the hair got you stiff again? You stopped liking me when you got that stuff stuck between your teeth.’
Mort sat on the bed. ‘I’m not listening to this shit. We’re beyond all this now. We left it behind.’
‘Oh, I’m a bad boy.’ Benny made his eyes go wide. ‘I made it up. It never happened.’
Mort zipped the trousers and pulled a T-shirt over his head. When his face emerged he felt all his weakness showing. ‘What do you want?’
‘Who was it who made me like this?’
‘It’s finished. We’ve got to get over it.’
‘It’s not over,’ said Benny taking down his shirt from the coat hanger behind the door. ‘It’s never over. I think about it every day.’
‘It’s over for me. Benny, I’ve changed. I swear.’
‘I’ve changed too,’ Benny said. ‘I’m an angel.’
‘I’m not buying you a motor bike, forget it.’
‘You don’t listen. I didn’t say Hell’s Angel. I said, angel!’
‘What the fuck does that mean?’
‘Means I say to one man go and he goeth, say to another man come and he cometh.’
‘That’s the centurion.’
‘I don’t give a fuck what you call it,’ said Benny.
‘Don’t talk to me like that.’
‘I am talking to you like this. I want you to go to the Tax woman and show her your life.’
‘Look,’ said Mort. He sat down on the bed. ‘My father did it to me. His father did it to him. You think I like being like this?’
‘Just listen to me. Listen to what I say. She’s a nice lady. Talk to her. That’s all you’ve got to do. Tell her about Cacka’s philosophy. Just make her responsible for you. She can’t destroy us if she thinks we’re decent people.’
‘Benny, don’t be simple.’
‘Listen, I know who she is.
I’m going out with her.’
‘You’re what?’
‘I’m going out with her. Believe me. She’s a human. She responds.’
He unbuttoned his slippery cool white shirt and returned it to the coat hanger. He hung the hanger behind the door again. He slipped off his underpants and ran his hands down his flawless hairless chest and between his thighs. ‘You can’t help yourself can you, Kissy? You’re responding. You know I think you’re shit, but you don’t care.’
‘I am shit,’ Mort said.
‘You are shit.’ He hooked his finger into the top of Mort’s underpants and tugged at the elastic. ‘I went to her house last night. She’s pregnant. Her tits are full of milk.’ He let the elastic go and lay on the bed on his stomach. ‘When I came back here I took the books off Granny’s desk.’ He rolled on his back, smiling. ‘I wrapped them in a plastic bag and buried them.’
‘You really think that’s smart?’ Mort said, but he had already stopped caring if it was smart or not.
‘You want to argue with me, or you want to have some fun?’
‘Benny, what’s happened to you?’
‘I’m an angel,’ Benny said.
‘What does that mean?’ Mort put out a finger to feel the boy’s smooth thigh.
‘It means I am in control. It means everyone does what I say.’
33
He would ‘show his life’, sure, silly as this was. He would be a monkey for his son. You know what was weird? What was weird was he was finally an inch away from happiness.
Show his life? Bare his arse? Sure, but not like the little blackmailer imagined.
He would talk to her, sure he would. What’s more: he was busting to do it. He had the day’s job sheets spread out across his desk, but he could not concentrate on them. They had finally become irrelevant.
He knew nothing about tax. He could not even read the balance sheets he signed each year, but he knew enough, by Christ he did, to show his life to the Tax Inspector. He would embrace her. He would draw her towards him like a dagger, have her drive some official stake into the business, right into its rubbery, resisting heart.