The Tax Inspector

by Peter Carey

  It was the second night she had stayed up late with members of the Catchprice family.

  45

  ‘Why would you ruin your life?’ Benny said, smiling, holding the sawn-off shot gun an inch or two above his expensively tailored knees.

  Sarkis took down his velvet jacket from the wire coat hanger with arms that trembled and twitched so much he could not fully control them. His legs were not as unreliable, but they hurt more and the pains in the legs were deeper, hotter, more specific – the left ankle would turn out to be gashed like a knife wound.

  He looked at the ugly jagged cut across the barrels of the gun. ‘I don’t care about my life,’ he said.

  He had thought of all the things he would do to this juvenile delinquent for all the time he was held captive on that humiliating board. He had thought it through the terror of the dark, through the drum-beat of his headache. In just eight hours he had turned into someone no decent person could understand. He was the Vietnamese man who had gone crazy with the meat cleaver. He was the Turk who had thrown petrol over the children in the day care centre. He did not care what he did or what happened to him because of it. He looked at the sawn-off end of the gun. It was cut so badly that there was a sliver of metal bent over like a fish hook.

  The pale and pretty Benny took a plastic shopping bag and laid it across his knees so he could rest the oil-slick gun there for a moment. He had pale blue cat’s eyes, as full of odd lights as an opal.

  ‘You’re my F&I man,’ he said.

  ‘I’m going to kill you,’ Sarkis said, rubbing his wrists and opening and closing his hands which were still very white and puffy, like things left too long in water. They did not have the strength to squeeze an orange.

  ‘You’re my F&I man.’

  Benny held the shot gun up with the right hand and pulled something out from under the couch with his left. He threw it out towards Sarkis so that it fell half on the wooden planks and half in the iridescent water beneath them – a bright blue collapsible umbrella. ‘You’ll need your suit dry in the morning.’

  Sarkis stooped and picked up the umbrella. It was cheap and flimsy and was useless as a weapon.

  ‘You’re going to jail, you silly prick.’

  ‘I’m going to jail – you’re going to kill me – make up your mind,’ Benny smiled. If he was afraid or nervous about the consequences of what he had done, the only thing that showed it was his lack of colour, his pale, clammy glow. ‘You’ve got a job,’ he said. ‘You think about that for a moment, Sam. You’re off the street. You’re going to be an F&I man. Do you understand that? Your life has just changed completely.’

  Sarkis bit his pale forefinger to make it feel something. ‘You’re going to have to carry that gun a long time, junior.’

  ‘Oh come on, give it up. It’s over.’

  ‘It’s not over,’ said Sarkis. ‘You don’t understand me. You don’t have the brains to know who I am.’

  ‘Hey …’

  ‘You do this to me, it can’t just be “over”. You think this is “over,” you’re retarded.’

  ‘Hey,’ the boy said and did something with the gun which made it click-clack. ‘My stupid teachers told me I was stupid. My stupid father thinks I’m stupid. But I’ll tell you two things you can rely on. Number one: I’m going to run this business. Number two: you’re going to be my F&I man.’ Maybe he saw what he had done. His voice rose, it changed its tone, although you could not say it was anything as strong as pleading. ‘You’ll be able to drive a car,’ Benny said, ‘eat at restaurants, order any fucking thing you want.’

  Sarkis tried to spit but his mouth was dry and all that came out were a few white bits. ‘I’m going to kill you,’ he said. ‘I won’t need a gun.’

  ‘You’re going to kill two hundred thou a year?’ Benny stood, and smiled. ‘Jesus, Sam, if I’d known you were going to get this upset …’

  ‘You’d what?’ he said.

  Benny frowned. ‘You don’t get it, do you? I’m going to transform your life.’ He looked very young and not very bright. There was perspiration on his upper lip and forehead.

  Sarkis groaned.

  Benny’s brow contracted further: ‘I could have chosen anyone …’

  Sarkis did not bother to remind him it was Mrs Catchprice who had chosen him. The gun was so close. The thought he could grab it and twist it away was very tempting, but also stupid.

  ‘All you need to remember,’ Benny was saying, ‘you just learned – I’m the boss, and you never contradict me on the job.’

  ‘How can you be the boss?’ Sarkis said. ‘How old are you? Sixteen? I bet you don’t even have a driving licence.’

  Benny held the gun out with his right hand while he moved a step towards the wall. Sarkis thought, he’s an actor: if he fires that now he’ll break his wrist. With his left hand (smiling all the time) Benny unscrewed the wide-necked jar where a fat brown king snake lay coiled on itself in a sea of tea-coloured liquid. He took a black plastic cap from an aerosol can and dipped it into the liquid which he then raised to his red, perfect lips, and drank.

  ‘That’s my licence,’ Benny said, ‘I live and breathe it. Comprendo?’

  Sarkis comprendoed nothing. He watched Benny smirk and wipe his lips and walk towards the cellar door, backwards, across the planks, never once seeming to look down. When he was at the door he transferred the gun to both hands and held it hard against his shoulder.

  ‘Say you’re my F&I man,’ he said.

  Sarkis looked at his eyes and saw his brows contract and knew: he’s going to murder me.

  ‘Say it,’ Benny’s chin trembled.

  ‘I’m your F&I man.’

  ‘We start fresh tomorrow. O.K. You understand me? Eight-thirty.’

  ‘I’ll be here,’ Sarkis said. ‘I promise.’

  Benny unlocked the bolts on the rusty metal door and swung it open. Sarkis felt the cool, clear chill of the normal world. He limped up the steps towards the rain, but all the time he felt the dull heat of the gun across his shoulder blades and not until he was finally through the labyrinth of the Spare Parts Department, in the dark lane-way leading to the workshop, did he realize he was too badly hurt to run. He limped slowly home through the orange-lighted rain, ashamed.

  Wednesday

  46

  Jack Catchprice woke with his prize beside him in the bed, her mouth open, her chin a little slack, her leg around the spare pillow he had fetched for her just before dawn. He put his hand out to touch her belly, and then withdrew it.

  He knew then he was going to keep her, and the child too, of course, the child particularly – another man’s child did not create an obstacle – it had almost the opposite effect. She had arrived complete. She was as he would have dreamed her to be – with a child that was not, in any way, a reproduction of himself.

  It was all he could do not to touch her, wake her, talk to her and he slid sideways out of the bed as if fleeing his own selfish happiness. He lifted the veil of mosquito netting and put his feet on the floor.

  The walls were open to the garden and he could almost have touched the cabbage tree palms dripping dry after the night of rain. The new pattern of wet summers had depressed him, but now he found in the rotting smells of his jungle garden such deep calm, such intimations of life and death, of fecundity and purpose that he knew he could, had it been necessary, have extracted happiness from hailstones.

  The sun was shining, at least for now. He could roll back the roof and wear his faded silk Javanese sarong and pad across the teak floor in bare feet and watch the tiny skinks slither across the floor in front of him and see the red-tailed cockatoos and listen to the high chatter of the lorikeets as they pursued their neurotic, fluttering, complaining lives in the higher branches of his neighbour’s eucalyptus.

  He made coffee, he looked at the garden, he let the Tax Inspector sleep past seven, eight, nine o’clock. When it came to nine, he phoned his office.

  The woman’s voice which answered his offic
e phone was deep and rather dry.

  ‘Bea,’ he said, ‘we’re going to have to cancel Lend Lease this morning.’

  A long silence.

  ‘Bea …’

  ‘I hear you,’ she said.

  ‘So could you please tell the others …’

  ‘What do you want me to tell them? That they worked two months for nothing?’

  ‘Sure,’ Jack smiled. ‘That’s perfect. Also, if you could call Michael McGorgan at Lend Lease.’

  ‘I suppose I tell him you’ve fallen in love?’

  Jack’s lips pressed into the same almost prim little ‘v’ they had made last night, when he told her about Makeveitch’s painting. How could he tell Bea – he had been given the impossible thing.

  ‘All I hope,’ Bea said, ‘is this one doesn’t have a PhD.’

  Jack finished his call with his face and eyes creased up from smiling. He walked barefoot through the garden to borrow bacon and eggs from the peevish widow of the famous broadcaster who lived next door.

  When the bacon was almost done and the eggs were sitting, broken, each one in its own white china cup, he went to the Tax Inspector and kissed her on her splendid lips, and wrapped her shining body in a kimono and brought her, half-webbed in sleep, to wait for her breakfast in the garden. She smelled of almond oil and apricots.

  ‘You know what time it is?’ she said as he brought her the bacon and eggs.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I hope you like your eggs like this.’

  ‘You really should have woken me.’

  He sat opposite her and passed her salt and pepper. ‘Pregnant women need their sleep.’

  She looked at him a long time, and he felt himself not necessarily loved, but rather weighed up, as if she knew his secrets and did not care for them.

  ‘Are you sorry?’ he asked her.

  ‘Of course not,’ she said, but drank from her orange juice immediately, and he saw it was all less certain between them than he had hoped or believed and he had a premonition of a loss he felt he could not bear.

  ‘Should I have woken you early?’

  ‘Oh,’ she smiled. ‘Probably not. These are lovely eggs.’

  He watched her eat. ‘Today I’ll get a blood test,’ he said, a little experimentally. ‘I don’t know how long they take but I’ll send the results to you by courier the moment they are in. I don’t want you to worry about last night.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, but her tone was positive. ‘O.K., I’ll do the same for you.’

  ‘You don’t need to. They’ve been running HIV tests on you since you were pregnant.’

  ‘Can they do that?’

  ‘No, but they do.’

  He had no idea if what he said was true or not. He was not worried about HIV. He was concerned only with somehow establishing the presence of those qualities – scrupulousness, integrity – the lack of which he was sure went so much against him.

  She leaned across and rubbed some dried shaving cream from behind his ear. ‘And what else will you do?’

  He took her hand and held it in both of his. ‘What else are you worried by? Let me fix it for you. It’s what I like most about business. Everyone is always brought down by all the obstacles and difficulties, but there’s almost nothing you can’t fix.’

  ‘Not the money?’

  ‘Not the money what?’

  ‘Not the money you like about business. I would have thought that was very attractive?’

  ‘Well money is important of course, in so far as it can provide.’ He used this word carefully, suggesting, he hoped, ever so tangentially, accidentally almost, his credentials as provider. ‘But after a certain stage, it’s not why people work. Do you doubt that?’

  ‘Uh-uh,’ Maria said, her mouth full of bacon. ‘But there’s nothing you can fix for me. I tried to fix mine myself.’

  ‘Maybe I could succeed where you’ve failed.’

  ‘This is very specialized.’

  ‘Just the same …’

  ‘Jack, this is my work.’

  ‘I’m a generalist,’ he smiled. ‘Tell me your problem.’

  He could see her deciding whether to be offended by him or not. She hesitated, frowned.

  ‘Will you tell me the truth if I ask you a direct question?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Did your family call you up to somehow “nobble” me?’

  ‘My mother called me, yes. But I came to calm her down, not to nobble you.’

  ‘Would you believe me if I told you I had already actually tried to stop their audit myself, and that my problem is I couldn’t – can’t?’

  ‘Sure … yes, of course, if you said so.’

  ‘Jack, this is a big secret I’m telling you …’

  ‘I’m very good with secrets.’

  ‘I’m telling you something I could be sent to jail for. I tried to stop it.’

  ‘Why would you do that for Catchprice Motors? I wouldn’t.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with your family. It’s between me and the Tax Office.’

  ‘You don’t seem a very Tax Office sort of person.’

  ‘Well I am,’ Maria reddened. ‘I’m a very Tax Office sort of person. I hate all this criminal wealth. This state is full of it. It makes me sick. I see all these skunks with their car phones and champagne and I see all this homelessness and poverty. Do you know that one child in three in Australia grows up under the poverty line? You know how much tax is evaded every year? You don’t need socialism to fix that, you just need a good Taxation Office and a Treasury with guts. And for a while we had both. For five years. I didn’t join to piddle around rotten inefficient businesses like your family’s. I never did anything so insignificant in my life. I won’t do that sort of work. It fixes nothing. I’m crazy enough to think the world can change, but not like that.’

  Without taking her eyes off him she put three spoons of sugar in her tea and stirred it.

  ‘Maria,’ Jack said, ‘I’m on your side.’

  ‘I’m sorry …’

  ‘I know I have a car phone …’

  ‘I’m sorry … I was offensive …’

  ‘No, no, I know you don’t know me very well, but I would do anything to help you.’

  ‘Jack, you’re very sweet. You were sweet last night.’ She touched his face again, and traced the shape of his lips with her forefinger.

  ‘You need someone to come and pick up your laundry in hospital … do you have someone who will do that for you?’

  ‘Jack,’ she started laughing, ‘please …’

  ‘No, really. Who’s going to do that for you?’

  ‘Jack, you are sweet. You were very sweet last night and today, I’m sorry, I was irritable with you when you didn’t wake me. You wanted me to rest and I read it as a control thing. I was wrong. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Will you have dinner with me again?’ he asked her.

  He could see in her eyes that it was by no means certain. She took his hand and stroked it as if to diminish the pain she was about to cause him.

  ‘It could be early,’ he said, ‘I love to eat early.’

  ‘Jack, I really do need to sleep. I’m thirty-two weeks pregnant.’

  ‘Sure. How about tomorrow night then?’

  She frowned. ‘You really want to see me so soon?’

  ‘I think the world can change too,’ he said, and Maria Takis knew he was in love with her and if she was going to be honest with herself she must admit it: she was relieved to have him present in her life.

  47

  Sarkis could not know that he was limping back and forth across the Catchprice family history. He did not connect the names of the streets he walked along on Wednesday morning – Frieda Crescent, Mortimer Street, Cathleen Drive. He carried Benny’s broken blue umbrella along their footpaths, not to reach anywhere – they did not go anywhere, they were criss-crosses on the map of an old poultry farm – but to save his pride by wasting time.

  He was going back to Catchprice Motors to stop his
mother going crazy, but he was damned if he would get there at eight-thirty. The air was soupy. His fresh shirt was already sticky on his skin. He walked in squares and rectangles. He passed along the line of the hall-way in the old yellow Catchprice house which was bulldozed flat after Frieda and Cacka’s poultry farm was sub-divided. He crossed the fence line where Cathy had set up noose-traps for foxes. He passed over the spot – once the base of a peppercorn tree, now a concrete culvert on Cathleen Drive – where Cacka, following doctor’s orders, first began to stretch the skin of his son’s foreskin.

  He walked diagonally across the floor of the yellow-brick shed where Frieda and Cathy used to cool the sick hens down in heat waves, trod on two of the three graves in the cats’ cemetery, and, at the top of the hill where Mortimer Street met Boundary Road, walked clean through the ghost of the bright silver ten-thousand-gallon water tank in whose shadow Frieda Catchprice let Squadron Leader Everette put his weeping face between her legs.

  Sarkis had pressed his suit trousers three times but they were still damp with last night’s rain. His jacket was pulled very slightly out of shape by the weight of the Swiss army knife.

  His mother had always been smiling, optimistic. Even in the worst of the time when his father disappeared, she never cried or despaired. When she lost her job she did not cry. She began a vegetable garden. Through the summer she fed them on pumpkin, zucchini, eggplant. She triumphed in the face of difficulties. She made friends with the stony-faced clerks in the dole office. When the car was repossessed, she spent twenty dollars on a feast to celebrate the savings they would make because of it. When Sarkis was on television, she pretended she had never seen the programme.

  But on the night he was captured and tortured by Benny Catchprice, she had cooked him a special lamb dinner on the strength of a pay cheque he had no intention of receiving. She had been waiting for him six hours. He came in the door without thinking about her, only of himself – the wound in his leg, his fear, his humiliation and when he spoke, it was – he saw this later – insensitive, unimaginative.

  He should have had room in his heart to imagine the pressure she lived under. It did not even occur to him.