The Tax Inspector

by Peter Carey

  ‘I love it, but I listen to it like an animal,’ he said. ‘If you want to picture how I listen, think of the dog on the HMV label. Intelligent, attentive, and ultimately-puzzled.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Oh dear, exactly. No matter how many times I listen to that Wagner, I never know what’s going to happen next. Every second is a surprise to me.’

  ‘Well I guess we’re all the product of little tragedies,’ Maria said. ‘This wine is amazing. I have never tasted wine like this in my life.’

  ‘Mort and Cathy have really very good voices,’ he said. ‘Our father loved music, so he loved them. He had them up in the middle of the night to sing, not rubbish – opera. He had them singing Mozart to drunken farmers. He couldn’t help himself. He’d come into the room and shake them and shake them until they were awake. He was like me though – he couldn’t sing. No one ever knew this, but I found him once, in the back paddock, trying to sing. I watched him for an hour. He had sheet music. It was really terrible. One of the worst things I ever saw, like an animal trying to talk. You could not believe all the effort in the face and the terrible noise.’

  ‘The poor man.’

  ‘Well it’s worse than what I’m saying, obviously.’

  ‘I hear lots of bad things,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll tell me your bad things, too?’

  She thought: surely he doesn’t want to go to bed with me. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘if you want.’

  He cut a piece of perfect white potato and joined it to a piece of duck which he had already neatly dissected. ‘He messed around with them,’ he said.

  ‘Oh.’

  He tore his bread and mopped up a little gravy.

  She drank from her water glass. ‘How horrible.’

  ‘He was always at them in the night. I don’t really know what happened. Sometimes I think I invented it, or dreamed it. I stood beside Mort in church last Christmas and he was miming the words. He wouldn’t sing out loud.’

  ‘He told me your father was a wonderful man.’

  Jack shrugged.

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘Who would have any idea what goes on in that head? Who would guess what she knew or understood? But it was definitely my father who decided there was no room for me in the business. I was very hurt, at the time. Can you believe it – I cried. I really wept. All the things I’m lucky about, they hurt me at the time.’ He hid his eyes in the depths of his wine glass. ‘Your turn.’

  ‘I sort of lived with a man for a long time and he had a wife and I wanted a baby and I made a choice and this is it.’

  ‘You were happy with him?’

  ‘Yes,’ Maria said, then: ‘No.’ She smiled. ‘I think I was rather depressed for rather a long time. I’m just noticing it. I think I must have got used to it.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Well, yes, now.’

  ‘Now you’re what?’

  ‘I’m not depressed right now,’ she laughed, and then looked down, unable to hold his eyes, aware of the movement of his knee an inch or two away from hers.

  ‘Do you know who Daniel Makeveitch is?’ she asked.

  ‘A painter sitting two tables to your right.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘You mustn’t seem so surprised,’ he said. ‘I know I’m a property developer and I even used to be a second-hand car salesman …’

  He was smiling, but his eyes were hurt and Maria was embarrassed at what she had said.

  ‘I’m sorry. I thought you would have mentioned it.’ She put out her hand and touched his sleeve. ‘When we sat down.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I used to spend a lot of time being offended, but I’m not any more.’ None the less his face had closed over and showed, in the candlelight, a waxy sort of imperviousness. ‘When I was a car salesman in the Paramatta Road – I worked for Janus Binder and I started buying paintings because he collected them. People were always amazed – gallery owners, people who should have known better. It was as if there was something ludicrous about car dealers having any sensitivity or feeling. But once I was a property developer, no one was surprised at all. They expect it of me. There’s a great relief, socially, in not being a car dealer.’

  ‘Like being a Tax Officer.’

  ‘You don’t even half-believe that, Maria.’

  She blushed. ‘In its social isolation, I meant.’

  He paused and looked at her and she felt herself seen as dishonest. She blushed.

  ‘Do you like Daniel Makeveitch’s work?’

  He allowed enough space to register the change of subject, but when he spoke his eyes were soft again and his manner as charming as before. ‘Would I seem too nouveau to you if I said I owned one?’

  ‘Oh please, Jack, do I really seem that bad? Which one?’

  ‘“Daisy’s Place”,’ he said.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ she said.

  His lower lip made an almost prim little ‘v’ as he tried not to smile. ‘It’s only tiny.’

  ‘What I hate,’ she told him, ‘is how impressed I am.’ She laughed and shook her head in a way she knew, had known, since she was sixteen, made her curling black hair look wonderful. ‘I hate being happy here with all these people.’

  ‘With me too?’ he smiled.

  ‘With you too,’ she said and allowed him to hold her hand a moment before she reached towards her glass of water.

  44

  At half-past ten on Tuesday night, Maria Takis left Chez Oz to see the Daniel Makeveitch painting at Jack Catchprice’s beach house.

  As Chez Oz was on Craigend Street, and as the Brahmachari ashram was around the corner, it was not astonishing that they should, in hurrying out into the night, bump into Vishnabarnu on the pavement, but Maria was astonished none the less.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, with an exuberance and a familiarity totally new in her relationship with Vish. ‘Small world.’

  ‘Not really,’ said Vish, and nodded at Jack.

  He was with another Hare Krishna, a soft, olive-skinned man of forty or so who had noticeably crooked teeth and a scholarly stoop.

  ‘The ashram is here,’ Vishnabarnu pointed to the grey stucco block of flats. ‘The temple is round the corner from the fire station. I walk past here six times a day.’

  ‘That’s an ashram?’ Maria smiled. She was excited and happy. ‘I always imagined something more exotic.’

  The other Hare Krishna took a step away and stared off into the night.

  ‘I could have given you a lift to town,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?’

  Vishnabarnu looked at his friend. Something passed between them. When Vish looked back to Maria he was almost laughing.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  The older Hare Krishna began to walk towards the ashram.

  ‘This is goodbye.’ Vish shook Maria’s hand. ‘Excuse me.’

  And then, without saying a word to his uncle, he followed his friend, who was already in the dark, arched doorway of the grey stuccoed building.

  ‘He thinks I’m the devil,’ Jack said as he let her into the Jaguar.

  ‘I don’t like them generally,’ Maria said. ‘The way they treat their women …’

  ‘It’s about what you’d expect from people trying to duplicate life in a sixteenth-century Indian village …’

  ‘But they do feed the street kids in the Cross and also when your sister was trying to have your mother committed. Yes, that happened on Monday. He was very good then. You get the feeling he’s capable of doing what’s needed.’

  ‘What was needed?’

  ‘Well not much as it turned out. But you get the feeling from him that he is timid but that he would go to the wall with you. That’s a very impressive quality.’ She paused. ‘Even if he does think you’re the devil.’

  They drove down past the lighted car showrooms in William Street with their back-lit, bunny-suited, teenage prostitutes and the long, slow line of cr
uising traffic in the kerbside lane. They turned right down into Woolloomooloo beneath the Eastern Suburbs railway bridge and up beside the art gallery and on to the Cahill Expressway which cut like a prison wall across the tiny mouth of Port Jackson.

  ‘If you look at the Cahill Expressway,’ Jack said, ‘you can understand almost all of this city. I had an investor here from Strasbourg last week. It was his observation. That you can see how corrupt the city is from looking at it.’

  ‘Because of the Expressway?’

  ‘Things like the Expressway.’

  ‘Was this a good thing or a bad thing, from an investor’s point of view?’

  He looked at her, bristling a little. ‘A disappointing thing,’ he said at last. He was silent for a minute as they came up the rock cutting and on to Sydney Harbour Bridge, but then he went on more softly. ‘You can read a city. You can see who’s winning and who’s losing. In this city,’ he said, ‘the angels are not winning.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Did I sound offensive?’

  ‘No,’ he said, but she was sure he was sulking and she had, as they drove beneath the high, bright windows of insurance companies and advertising agencies in North Sydney, one of those brief periods of estrangement that marked her feelings for Jack Catchprice.

  ‘It’s true I go to work in the swamp each day,’ he said, ‘but I do try to wipe my boots when I come into decent people’s homes.’

  ‘Oh relax,’ Maria said. ‘Please.’

  ‘I am relaxed,’ he smiled. ‘Well, no, I’m not relaxed. I probably want you to like me too much.’

  ‘I like you,’ she said uneasily.

  At the top of the hill above The Spit, he took the long, lonely road which cuts across the back of French’s Forest.

  ‘I never came this way,’ she said.

  ‘You normally go through Dee. Why? This is much nicer.’

  Maria did not like the countryside particularly. She did not like the lonely gravel roads she saw disappearing into the bush on either side of the road. The signposts to places like Oxford Falls did not sound romantic to her, but reminded her how foolish she was being taking this drive with a single man who kept special pillows for pregnant women’s legs.

  He was a Catchprice, for Chrissakes. He came from a disturbed and difficult home. Anything could have happened to him. It was stupid to place herself in this situation to see a painting she had already seen in the Makeveitch retrospective at the art gallery of New South Wales.

  He began to play Miles Davis, ‘Kind of Blue’. She imagined his father holding his sheet music, roaring like a beast in a fairy tale. She loved this music, but now she knew he was tone deaf it suggested a sort of inauthenticity and forced an unfavourable comparison with Alistair, who was musically gifted and whom she saw, in the soft green glow of the Jaguar’s instrument lights, Jack Catchprice rather resembled.

  ‘It’s farther than I remembered,’ she said, a little later as they emerged from the bush into the brightly lit coastal strip at Narrabeen.

  ‘Are you tired?’

  ‘A little, I guess.’

  ‘You could sleep there if you wanted. There’s a guest room.’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said.

  ‘Or I could take you back.’

  ‘I’ll just stay a moment and look at the painting.’

  But it was not the painting but the house that captivated her, and when she was standing there at last, she could not fear a man who lived in a house whose main living-room had an arched roof which opened like an eyelid to the night sky, whose side walls were of pleated canvas, a house whose strong, rammed-earth back wall promised all the solidity of a castle but whose substance then evaporated before her eyes as Jack, clambering first on to the roof, and then round the walls, opened the house to the cabbage tree palms which filled the garden and in whose rustling hearts one could hear brush-tailed possums.

  It was a night of clouds and moon, of dark and light, and as Maria sat in a rocking-chair in the middle of the teak-floored living-room she felt as she had previously felt one late summer afternoon in the Duomo in Milan, a feeling of such serendipitous peace that she felt she could, if she would let herself, just weep. She sat there rocking gently, looking up at the moon-edged clouds scudding across the belt of Orion and all the dense bright dust of the Milky Way while Jack Catchprice made camomile in a small raku teapot.

  ‘You should develop Sydney like this,’ she said when he came back, kneeling beside her in a sarong and bare feet. She rocked back and forth. ‘I didn’t know that places like this even existed on the earth.’ A moment later she asked: ‘Is the architect famous?’

  ‘Only with architects. Watch the tea. I’m putting it just here. When you’ve finished it, we can look at the painting.’

  He was standing at the back of the rocking-chair and she stood, to be able to talk to him properly.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘there goes the possum family.’

  She turned. Along the top of the wall, at the place where the eyelid of roof opened to the sky, she could make out a brush-tailed possum.

  ‘See,’ he said, ‘the baby is on her back.’

  He was standing behind her, with his two hands holding her swollen belly and nuzzling her neck. ‘It’s very beautiful,’ he said.

  In another situation the sentimentality of this observation might have made her hostile, but now it actually touched her. She began to do exactly what she had planned she would not do and as she, now, turned and kissed him, she felt not the weight of her pregnancy but the quite overwhelming ache of desire.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you a surprise.’

  He had a very beautiful mouth. Up close he smelt of apples. She kissed him hungrily but insistently, hanging on his neck and feeling him take her whole weight in his shoulders and in his arms. She was not willing to be parted, made a small humming sound of pleasure in the back of her throat while mosquitoes drew blood from her shoulder and the back of his hands.

  He noticed first. He held up his thumb and forefinger to show her a crumpled wing and bent proboscis, a smear of blood.

  ‘Normally I light coils,’ he said, ‘but I think they may be too toxic … for this fellow.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. He made her feel negligent.

  ‘I have mosquito netting,’ he said. And before she understood what he meant he had led her along the galley-like kitchen and down into a bedroom which was hung with a cobalt blue silk net.

  ‘Hey, hey,’ she said when she realized his intention. ‘Whoa, Jack, stop now.’

  But he was already inside the net. He sat cross-legged, smiling at her.

  ‘There are no mosquitoes in here.’

  ‘I’m not going in there,’ she said.

  ‘Just a cuddle,’ he said.

  She laughed. There were mosquitoes in the air around her hair. She could feel them more than hear them.

  He grinned. He flicked on a switch at the bed head. A light illuminated the cabbage tree palms in the garden. Then he lit three fat yellow candles above the bed head. Their flames were reflected in the pool immediately outside the bedroom window.

  ‘Jack, I’m too old for this bachelor pad stuff.’

  ‘I never bring strangers here,’ he said.

  ‘I bet,’ she said, but then she thought, what the hell. She got in under the net but now she was there the spell was broken. She had been so happy kissing him but now she was inside the net she was lumpy and graceless. She was too big. There was nowhere to put her feet.

  ‘Look, Jack,’ she said. ‘Look at me.’ She snapped at the support stockings which had hitherto been hidden under her long dress. ‘Do you really wish to seduce this? You’re a nice man. Why don’t we wait a few months?’

  ‘You look beautiful.’

  ‘My back hurts. I can’t even see my feet when I stand up. Even while I’m kissing you I’ve got this thing inside me kicking and nudging me for attention. I can’t concentrate.’

  ‘We could try. We could just lie here.’r />
  ‘I don’t know you.’ She put her arm around him, but she felt the wrong shape to kiss sitting down. ‘You don’t know me. It’s not smart for people to just jump into bed any more.’

  ‘Is this a discussion about the Unmentionable?’

  ‘I don’t want to offend you.’

  ‘You don’t offend me at all. We could play it safe.’

  ‘Safer, not actually safe,’ she smiled. While still involved in her monogamous adulterous relationship with Alistair, she had complacently pitied those who must go through this. She had never thought that the tone of the conversation might be quite so tender.

  He touched her on the forehead between her eyes and ran his finger down the line of her nose. ‘I’ll make love to you 100 per cent safe.’

  She had never imagined you could say these words and still feel tender, but now she was lying on her side and he was lying on his and he had those clear blue Catchprice eyes and such sweet crease marks around his eyes. She touched them. These were what women called ‘crow’s feet’. They were beautiful.

  ‘Is there 100 per cent?’ she asked.

  ‘Is this safe?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Does this feel safe?’

  ‘Jack, don’t.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll keep my word. Is this safe?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She let him undress her and caress her swollen body. God, she thought – this is how people die.

  ‘Is this beautiful to you?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘You glisten.’

  He cradled her stomach in his hands and kissed her back and then he turned her and kissed her stomach, not once but slowly, as if he was following the points on a star map that only he could see.

  Maria unbuttoned his shirt.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you’re very beautiful.’ He had a tanned chest covered with tight curled golden hairs. He was already releasing his sarong. She began to kiss him, to kiss his chest, to nuzzle her face among the soft apple-sweet hairs, discovering as she did so a hunger for the scents and textures of male skin.

  ‘Get the condom,’ she heard herself say.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘I’ve got it.’

  ‘I’m crazy,’ she said.