by Peter Carey
‘Five grand for the old one, smoke or no smoke, I don’t care.’
Gino leaned down to undo the hood release – clunk – in order to hide his excitement.
‘What do you say to that, Mr Massaro – from square one, you’re out of trouble. Your credit rating is out of danger. You have an almost new car.’
It was true. He could pay out the loan on the Commodore. He stroked the hood release button, reading its embossed hieroglyphic symbol with the tip of his finger. ‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘So where’s the catch?’
‘We’ve got a big tax bill to pay.’
Gino Massaro looked at the kid and grinned. ‘Come on …’ he said. ‘I wasn’t born yesterday.’ He tried to get himself back into the sort of fellow he was in his shop. ‘Come on,’ he said, and boxed the kid’s arm. ‘Don’t shit me.’
‘Mr Massaro, if I tell you lies I’ll go to hell for it.’ He smiled. ‘They’ll torture me down there. They’ll pull my toenails out for fucking ever.’
The kid made you smile. He could say this, maybe even mocking – who could say – but make you smile.
‘Look over there,’ the kid said.
There was a line of giant camphor laurels, their trunks covered with parasites, their leaves dotted red from lichen. In front of them, by a faded sign reading PARTS/WORKSHOP, a white Mitsubishi Colt with Z plates was parked on a patch of weeds. Gino had been audited. He knew the feeling.
‘There’s the Tax Department car, O.K.? I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ he smiled. ‘I’ll put in a word for you with the Tax Inspector …’
‘Whoa, no get away,’ Gino said. ‘You keep those boys away from me.’
‘But it’s a girl,’ Benny grinned. ‘She’s pretty too. She’s very nice. You’d like her.’
‘Let’s stick to the car, O.K.,’ he said. He got out of the car so he could think responsibly, but the air was muggy and unpleasantly heavy. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. He heard the two doors open and heard the salesmen walk across the gravel towards him. They lined up beside him and then the three of them stood in a line with their hands behind their back and stared at the Barina.
‘Now I’m going to “load” you up,’ Benny smiled pleasantly. ‘Load up your trade in an effort to get your business.’
Gino smiled too, even as he thought he was being mocked. ‘Loading up’ was car dealer slang for whatever it was they were doing to him.
‘I wasn’t born yesterday,’ he said. He punched Benny’s shoulder again. This time the boy didn’t like his suit touched. His brows came down hard against his eyes and he withdrew an inch, looking pointedly at Gino’s hand. Gino took it away.
‘We got to take enough shit from the Tax Department,’ the boy said. ‘We don’t have to take shit from you. Come on Sam …’ He turned to walk away.
‘Christ,’ Gino said. ‘Don’t be so sensitive.’
He looked up and saw the one called Sam shaking his head at him.
The one called Benny turned and said, ‘Look, I’m trying to be straight with you, but this is losing us money and it really gives me the shits, excuse me – it makes me “sensitive” – when I am not believed. This is a family business, we’re in a lot of trouble here and you’re the one who’ll benefit. That’s O.K. with me, but it really pisses me off to be called a liar as well.’
The other salesman looked Gino straight in the eye and slowly shook his head.
‘I didn’t mean to offend you,’ Gino said to the first boy, all the time puzzling about the other one shaking his head.
‘I know you didn’t,’ Benny said. ‘Forget it. It’s over.’
‘I’ve been audited myself. They’re bastards.’
‘You could drive it away,’ Benny Catchprice said. ‘We could do the paperwork in ten minutes and you could be on the road in fifteen. You don’t have to ever touch your old car again.’
It was an attractive thought.
‘So what do you want for this one?’ Gino asked.
Benny said: ‘Eleven. Do we have a deal?’
The second salesman made a cut-throat sign and rolled his eyes.
‘So what do you say, Mr Massaro?’
The blond salesman was smiling at him in a weird kind of way, and Gino was smiling back. It was impossible not to. He had that quality – he was not a man, he was a boy, like an altar boy in Verona.
That was when Sarkis Alaverdian, who knew the car was valued at eight thousand, stood on Benny Catchprice’s foot.
The altar boy’s face changed, its brows contracted, its lips curled. Gino Massaro began to back away.
‘That’s very expensive,’ he said.
‘Don’t go,’ Benny said. ‘I gave you a big trade-in. You only have to finance seven.’
‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,’ Gino Massaro said. ‘I’m going to think about it. I’ll be back on Saturday morning with my wife.’
39
‘I’m sorry,’ Sarkis said. ‘I guess I was nervous.’
Benny sucked in his breath. ‘You arsehole,’ he said. His jaw was drawn tight. His neck was all tendons and sinews. ‘I am in control of my own life. I am in control of you as well.’
‘Hey, come on – what sort of talk is that?’
‘English,’ said Benny, watching Gino Massaro drive away down the service road in a cloud of white smoke – his first damn sale – $3,000 clear profit plus the finance plus the insurance minus a drop of say five hundred on the shitty trade-in. ‘English,’ he said, as the Commodore entered Loftus Street. ‘You better learn it. You better shave that hair off your lip you want to work here tomorrow.’ He was kneeling, tenderly exploring the toe region of his shoe. ‘What sort of fucking nut case are you? For Chrissakes I had him eating out of my fucking hand. I could have dumped the fucking Commodore at the auctions and got seven and a half for it, tomorrow, cash.’
‘Look,’ said Sarkis.
‘Hey, don’t “look” me,’ the pretty boy said. ‘“Look” me and you’re on your arse in the fucking street without a job. I had him. I had his little dago heart in the palm of my fucking hand.’ He held out his hands. Sarkis saw them wet with viscera. He did not need this. He’d rather eat eggplant soup all summer.
‘Goodbye,’ he said. He held out his hand. ‘Nice knowing you.’
The boy took his hand, and held it. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, goodbye.’
Benny kept a hold of his hand, smiling.
A man in a XJ6 Jaguar was pulling up in front. The man had curly blond hair and a tanned face. He wore a beautiful grey silk suit. He walked across in front of Benny and Sarkis. Benny still had Sarkis by the hand.
‘Hi-ya, Jack,’ Benny said to the man.
‘Hi-ya,’ the man said. He walked on up the same fire escape Cathy MacPherson had come down.
‘So,’ Sarkis said, taking his hand back. ‘I’m off.’
‘Calm down, O.K.,’ Benny said.
‘Listen,’ Sarkis said. ‘I get more courtesy at the dole office.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Benny laughed. ‘But the pay is not nearly so good. O.K., O.K., I know, I was excited. I’m sorry. O.K.?’ He smiled. It was actually a nice smile. He touched Sarkis on the back. ‘I was a creep, I’m sorry.’
‘O.K.,’ Sarkis said.
‘It’s my inexperience,’ the boy said. ‘I’m learning too.’
Sarkis thought: it is not fair. A person like this gets property and a business and all these cars and expensive suits and he doesn’t have the first idea how to talk to people decently, and no matter what was old-fashioned and dumb about the Armenian School at Willoughby, at least there was this behind it – that you had some dignity about yourself and you spoke to others decently.
‘Look,’ the boy said. ‘Let’s take a break, O.K. Put our feet up, relax. What d’you say?’
Sarkis’s mother thought he was arrogant and vain and this was why he had lost three jobs in a year. His father would have understood better. His father never bought a newspaper be
cause the Australians he worked with only read the sports pages and gave him the news section. When the horse races were on the radio his father would say: ‘There go the donkeys.’
‘O.K.,’ said Sarkis, ‘let’s take a break.’ He did not want a break. He wanted to sell every one of these cars they walked past. He was an Armenian. It was in his blood. Thousands of years of buying and selling.
He followed his boy-employer into the lube bay instead, and climbed down some metal stairs. In the dark he heard him fiddling with chains and keys and then they walked into something which stank like the inside of a rubbish bin and a laundry basket.
‘Someone lives down here?’ he asked, his voice dead flat.
‘Sort of.’
Not sort of at all. The poor little sucker lived here. He had lived here a long time. He had new food, old food, bad-smelling clothes and oils and chemicals. The cellar would be enough to make you sorry for the boy, to wonder what drove him down here and why he could not live in a place with windows.
They were standing side by side now, shoulder to shoulder. There were cans of epoxy resin on a messy, muddled, low bench on which there were also school books, empty ice-cream containers, scrunched-up paper, ancient hurricane lamps with rusty metal bases, and several snakes, preserved in tea-coloured liquid in tall, wide-mouthed, screw-topped bottles like the ones in which Sarkis’s mother still sometimes preserved lemons.
‘You work with fibreglass?’ he asked, responding partly to his own embarrassment but also to his sense of Benny Catchprice’s prickly pride.
‘My Grand-dad killed them,’ Benny said. ‘It was a different world, eh? Every one of them snakes was killed on a property where my Grand-dad sold a car.’
Sarkis nodded.
‘We used to sell to farmers,’ Benny said. ‘That’s why the business is like it is now. They were brought up to sell to farmers.’ He picked up one of the bottles and handed it to Sarkis, who hefted its weight and gave it back. ‘V. Jenkins,’ Benny read from a small white label with spidery brown writing, ‘F.J. Special sold September 1952.’ He looked up at Sarkis as he put it down. ‘The farmers were all flush with money. They would have all their cheques from the Milk Board … never bothered to even put them in the bank. My Grand-dad would write out the order and they’d count out Milk Board cheques until they had enough to pay for it.’
‘If you’re going to work with fibreglass you should ventilate better.’
‘S&L Unger,’ Benny read from a second jar. ‘Vauxhall Cresta 1956.’
‘Tell me it’s none of my business,’ Sarkis said, ‘but you’ll poison yourself working with fibreglass down here.’
Benny put the bottle down, and Sarkis could see he had offended him.
Sarkis said. ‘When I was your age I wouldn’t have read the can either.’
Benny looked around the room a little, Sarkis too. The walls were covered in mould like orange crushed velvet. Benny pulled a blanket off what Sarkis had taken for a chair.
‘You ever seen one of these?’
What it was was hard to say. It looked like a melted surfboard with buckles. The buckles were a little like the clips of skis. The whole thing was pale and white and a little lumpy. It was ugly, like something from a sex shop.
‘What is it?’
‘What do you think?’
Benny was grinning. He stood in front of Sarkis with his hands in his pockets. He looked excited, conspiratorial, uncertain – he was colouring above his collar.
‘You want to try it out then?’
‘What is it?’
‘Try it out,’ said Benny. He unfolded a sheet and flung it across the melted surfboard and then indicated with his open-palmed hand that the older man should ‘try it out’.
‘Give me your jacket.’
Sarkis was trying to make peace with Benny Catchprice, whose eyes were now bright and whose lower lip had seemed to grow swollen in anticipation. He gave up his jacket. Benny checked the label before he hung it, not on the new wooden hanger, but on a thin wire one. He suspended it from a water pipe above their heads where it partly blocked out the light.
Sarkis sat on the surfboard. It made no sense to him. It had a profile like an ‘n’ but flatter and it was not of even width.
‘Wrong way,’ said Benny. ‘Face down.’
Sarkis hesitated.
‘Come on, what’s going to happen to you?’
What can happen?
Sarkis lay face down on the sheet. To get half comfortable you had to have your head down and your arse in the air.
‘More up,’ said Benny.
Sarkis squirmed upwards. The sheet was rumpled beneath him. He felt Benny adjusting something around his legs and then he felt a snap, and a pain. His legs were held, strapped by metal. His skin was pinched.
‘Hey,’ he said.
Benny got a strap to his right arm before Sarkis realized what was happening. He kept his left hand free but it did him no good. He was pinioned. Benny was giggling. He smelt of peppermint.
‘Let me go,’ said Sarkis Alaverdian. ‘My pants are getting crushed.’
But Benny had him by the left hand, trying to pinion that one too. And all the time – this giggling, this weird luminous excitement on his face.
Benny was smooth and white, a stranger to the sports field and the gym, but he had two arms and he used them to slowly press Sarkis’s stronger arm flat against the rubbery-looking epoxy. He snapped the clip around it with his teeth and chin.
He knelt for a moment, and brought his face close to Sarkis. ‘Don’t think you can walk out on me,’ he said. His expression had changed completely. No smile – just small pink hot spots on his cheeks. His breath was cold and antiseptic.
Sarkis felt a prickle of fear run down his spine. ‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘Very funny.’
Benny stood. ‘Funny?’ he said. ‘You just stole my first sale. You cost me three thousand fucking dollars. Then you think you can walk away from me.’
Sarkis acted as normal as he could be with his backside in the air and his head full of blood. He tried to look his captor in the eye, but could not twist his neck enough. ‘You admitted yourself, Benny,’ (he was talking to the buckle of his belt) ‘it was your fault too.’
‘You don’t get it, do you? Why did I say it was my fault? How could it have been my fault? Why do you think I’d say it was?’
‘You were going to do this to me?’
‘Sure.’
‘You made this thing? What’s it really for?’
‘For this,’ said Benny.
‘O.K.’ It hurt to twist his neck up, it hurt to leave his head down. ‘Now let me go.’
‘Let me go, let me go,’ Benny mocked. He took a step away to a place where Sarkis could not even see his shoes. He was somewhere behind him, near his back. ‘You don’t know what you’re asking – I gave you a family position. Do you appreciate that? I gave you my brother’s position. You are some slime off the street. You are no one. I offer you a ground-floor position. You could make two hundred thou a year. And all you can do is fuck up my sale, and then you try and walk out on me.’
‘Hey relax.’
‘Oh no, you relax, mate. You relax a lot. You should have listened to my aunt,’ Benny said. ‘This is a serious business you have got yourself involved with.’
‘What do you want me to do? Stay or go?’
Sarkis twisted his head sideways and this time, found him – the little spider was arranging a sheet of orange plastic on the sofa.
‘Stay or go?’ Benny laughed through his nose. ‘You’re going to have to be more clever than that.’ He was fussing with the sheet of plastic – wiping it with a rag, smoothing it with his hand – so he could sit down without dirtying his suit. When he sat he made a crumpling noise.
‘Stay or go,’ he said. He arranged himself with his legs crossed and his manicured hands folded in his lap. He smiled at Sarkis just as he had smiled at Gino Massaro.
40
Vish knocked on the cella
r door, not once, but many times. When he opened the door, still uninvited, Benny was sitting on the rumpled orange sheet on the couch and staring at him. He was the only neat thing in the middle of this stinking mess and he had laid himself out, so to speak, with his hands folded on his lap, as pale and perfect as a wax effigy.
He had changed the lighting since last night. He had altered the direction of those little reading lights which had originally been above the beds in the family home. He had rigged them up so they shone on the webs of handwriting on the distempered wall, on the green concrete ceiling, on anything but where you’d want a light to be. The room was criss-crossed with the shadows of electric wires.
Vish stepped forward on to an empty ice-cream container. He stumbled and put his hand down to stop him falling.
He put his hand on to a living thing. His heart whammed in his chest.
‘Shit,’ he said.
It was a human being, he saw that. He got such a fright he could hardly breathe. He had his hand on a man’s buttocks.
The man was lying on his stomach and had to crane his neck so he could grimace up at the yellow-robed figure to whom he looked like a gypsy at a country show. He had a little wisp of beard under his lip and trousers made from some velvety material. He showed a lot of teeth, like someone about to be cut in half on stage.
‘You left it too late,’ Benny said. ‘I found another brother.’
Vish held his kurta close to his chest and peered down at the poor fellow who had been pinioned in position like a butterfly. The man stretched up his head again and rolled his eyes at Vish. He had white dry stuff in a rim around the edges of his lips. Vish observed this and accepted it like he might have accepted the presence of a goat or a policeman.