The Tax Inspector

by Peter Carey

  She descended the blue staircase (its treads shimmering like oil on water, its bannisters clear, clean, stainless steel).

  At the bottom of the blue staircase she found the yellow staircase.

  At the bottom of the yellow staircase, the pink.

  At the bottom of the pink, the ebony.

  And the end of the ebony, the Golden Door.

  Beyond the Golden Door was the Circular Room of Black Marble.

  In the centre of the Circular Room of Black Marble, she visualized a Sony Trinitron.

  She had found a picture of the Sony. She could visualize it exactly, right down to the three small dots beneath the screen: one red, one blue, one yellow.

  She imagined turning on the Sony Trinitron. She imagined the picture emerging: Maria and her baby, sitting up in bed. She had done this almost every night for three months now, but still she could not get the mental picture clear. It was a little girl she tried to visualize. She made her pink. This was corny, but achievable. She could visualize the colour but not her face. The face shifted, dissolved, shivered, like an image on a bed of mercury. She held the shawl against her. She held it to her breast. She pressed her eyes tight, trying to stop thinking about Jack Catchprice. The picture of her baby would not come clearly. It never would. The baby cried and pushed at her. She could feel anxiety and impatience, but not the things she wanted to. Love was not visual. It did not work.

  At twenty-past eleven, Cathy McPherson was still celebrating with the band. It was her last night inside the enclosure at Catchprice Motors. She poured a Resch’s Pilsener for Mickey Wright. On stage he would wear the glittery black shirt Cathy had chosen for him, but now he was his own man and he wore blue stubby shorts. a ‘Rip Curl’ T-shirt, and rubber thongs. He had sturdy white legs and heavy muscled forearms. As she poured the beer he tapped the glass with a ballpoint pen. He was a drummer. He couldn’t stop drumming. As the beer rose, the pitch changed. It was not a joke, not an anything. He could not help himself. With his right hand he paddled a table tennis bat upon his knee. He was the drummer. Drrrrrrrrrr. He was the one who had to take the drummer jokes. Q: What do you call someone who hangs around with a band? A: A drummer. Q: Why should Mickey go to the Baltic States? A: He might get independence too.

  The truth was: Mickey was the best musician of the lot of them, and as for independence (the ability to keep different rhythms going simultaneously) he had it in bags. There were drummers making records, famous drummers on hit records, who could barely keep two patterns going. Buddy Rich could do two. Mickey could do four.

  He was the ambitious one. The others would settle for a living, but Mickey was always pushing towards places it was bad luck even to dream about.

  ‘I’ll tell you what you want to do, Cathy, you want to get “Drunk as a Lord” to Emmylou Harris. No, no, not her agent.’ He had a squashed-up Irish face, a boxer’s nose. His whole manner was dry, dead-pan. ‘Not her agent. Agents never know. You get it to her, direct.’

  ‘The truth is,’ said Howie, who was playing poker with Stevie Putzel, ‘Emmylou Harris wouldn’t do it half as well, you want to know the truth.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Mickey. He made a paradiddle with the tennis ball against the table: drrrrrrrrr. ‘We’d all get rich listening to her fuck it up.’ He looked up at Howie, blank-faced. Who could say if he would be trouble or not.

  Howie was playing poker with Steve Putzel. The two of them were standing up, using the ping-pong table for the deck. Howie was watching Cathy more than his cards and was losing badly because of it. Cathy was mad at Mickey for calling in the lawyers.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ Steve said to Howie. ‘You chucking out or what?’

  ‘We’re going to make it, Cath,’ said Mickey. He drummed the bat, table, knee: Drrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Mickey could talk about success like other guys could talk about sex. He was never sick of it.

  Cathy smiled. The apartment did not feel like a home any more, but like a clean-up room in a country motel. There were peanut husks and empty beer cans on the floor. It had never looked so good to her.

  ‘This time, no shit,’ Mickey said. Drrrrrrrrr. ‘We’re the right age for it. You read your history books. We’re the right age to make the break, believe me.’

  ‘You’re a fucking megalomaniac,’ said Johnno Renvoise.

  The lead guitarist was stretched out to his entire six foot three inches beneath the ping-pong table with his hand-tooled boots folded underneath his head.

  ‘You know what a gentleman is, Johnno?’ Mickey asked.

  ‘Ha-ha.’

  ‘A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion and doesn’t.’

  ‘Ha-ha,’ Johnno Renvoise was happy. He kept saying he was happy. Everyone knew he had lost his wife and kids but he was happy because Big Mack were on the road. He held out his empty beer glass with one hand; with the other he threw crackers against the bottom of the table top and tried to catch the fragments in his mouth.

  ‘Christ, Howie,’ said Steve, ‘you’re so fucking impulsive.’

  ‘Never rush,’ Howie smiled and lowered his heavy lids.

  Howie laid down his hand on the table where he had filled in the PA forms for each and every one of Cathy’s songs and copyrighted them at $10 U.S. a time with the Library of Congress. He had made her use Albert’s for her demos. Sometimes they paid two thousand bucks just for a demo. It was investment. He did not want to count the dollars. Now she had ‘Drunk as a Lord’ on the Country charts but even now – while everyone celebrated – he knew he would have to deal with some new tactic from Frieda. She would not let her daughter go so easily.

  Mort Catchprice walked round the edge of the Big Mack truck feeling its chalky duco. It was a shitty vehicle for a Catchprice to have, an offence to anyone who cared about how a car yard should be laid out – its wheels were crooked, it dropped oil on the gravel, its front tyres were half scrubbed, and it was parked bang smack beneath the rear spotlight.

  Mort’s shoulders were rounded and his hands hung by his sides. He walked round the side of the old lube into the dark alleyway which led to his empty house.

  Sarkis Alaverdian lay on his back in his bedroom with his arm flung out and an open copy of Guide to Vehicle Sales at Auction This Week on his broad bare chest. His mother tried to remove the book but he began to wake. She turned off the overhead light and knelt at the foot of the bed. Dalida Alaverdian prayed that Zorig might still be alive. She prayed that she would get a job. She prayed for Mrs Catchprice and the prosperity of Catchprice Motors.

  A little after midnight Vish let himself into the Spare Parts Department, cut off the burglar alarm, and walked through the tall racks of spare parts through the car yard and up the stairs to his grandmother’s apartment. She was waiting for him in the annexe, dressed formally in the suit she had worn to her husband’s funeral.

  ‘Are you game?’ she asked him.

  ‘I’m game,’ he said, but he was frightened, by the suit, by the manner, but more by the realization that she had probably been standing alone in the dark here for an hour or more.

  ‘I don’t want your life ruined by this,’ she said. He did not ask what ‘this’ was. He followed her across the creaking floors to her bedroom. ‘You can go back on the milk train when it’s done.’

  In the half-dark bedroom she knelt in front of her old mirrored armoire.

  ‘Gran what are we doing?’ he said.

  From the armoire floor she produced shoes, slippers and a pair of men’s pyjamas.

  ‘Do I have to explain it to you?’ Granny Catchprice asked. Her mood was odd, more hostile than her words suggested. She threw the slippers and pyjamas into the corner. She pulled out a roll of something like electrical wire, striped red and white.

  ‘Well yes,’ he said, ‘I think you do.’

  The dog took the slippers and brought them back. It jumped up on Vish’s back. He slapped its snout. The dog snarled and then retreated under the bed with the striped pyjamas. When Vish looked up he found his G
ranny looking at him. Her mouth was sort of slack.

  ‘It’s Vish,’ he said.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ she said. ‘I do know who you are.’

  ‘You said you were closing down the business if I came.’

  ‘I know I’m just a stupid old woman, but why don’t you look in front of your nose.’ She nodded her head towards the open armoire door. Vish could smell camphor but all he could see inside the armoire was some item of pink underwear. ‘It’s at the end of your nose,’ she said. She gave him an odd triumphant smirk that did not sit well with her cloudy eyes. It was the first time he ever thought her senile.

  She winked at him. It felt lewd, somehow related to the ancient underwear which she now – smiling at him all the time – lifted. Underneath was a beautiful wooden crate with dovetail joints.

  ‘I’m just a silly old woman,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  If he had been able to pretend he did not know what he was up to, that time had passed. The word was on the box: Nobel.

  ‘Well,’ she grunted and stood, indicating that he should lift it out.

  Vish had always imagined gelignite would be heavy, but when he picked up the box its lightness took him by surprise. Sawdust leaked from it like sand and gathered in the folds of his kurta.

  They opened the box on Granny Catchprice’s unmade bed. Its contents smelt like over-ripe papaya.

  At half-past two Maria, who had dozed off in the middle of her Visualizations exercise, opened her eyes and saw Benny Catchprice standing at the foot of her bed.

  At two-thirty-three, Vishnabarnu and Granny Catchprice began to lay the first charges in the structural walls of the showroom beneath her apartment. They had the main overhead lights turned off, but the lights in the yard cast a bright blue glow over their work. Granny Catchprice was on her knees at the east wall. She had a chisel and a hammer and she was looking for the place where the electrician had brought through the power cable thirty years before. Later there was a rat hole there – she remembered it.

  ‘How are we going to get them out?’ Vish said. ‘I don’t want to murder anyone.’

  ‘There’ll be no trouble getting them out. By jove,’ she laughed. ‘You’ll see them running. Here give me that stick.’

  The rat hole had been plugged with mortar and paper. A bodgey job, but now it made a perfect place to pack the gelly.

  ‘You’ll get the blame,’ he said. ‘They’ll know it’s you.’

  Of course – he looked like Cacka. She always knew that. It struck her in a different way tonight – when he repeated back to her things she had already told him. That was Cacka all over.

  ‘Blame me,’ she said. She cleared the mess from the hole with the chisel and jammed the gelignite without any concern for the ancient material’s stability. ‘Blame me. It’s mine, that’s what they forget. It was my idea. It’s mine to do with what I like.’

  ‘Gran, I think you sold your shares.’

  ‘One thing I learnt in life, you’ll always find people to tell you you can’t do what you want to do.’ She wiped her sticky hands on her suit jacket. ‘Help me up. My knees hurt.’

  She found another hole against the skirting board but it was not substantial. The gelly would have done nothing more than blow the skirting board off.

  ‘You’re going to have to go down under the floor,’ she told him. He had that square head and those lips. ‘The bricks are old handmade ones, so they’re soft,’ she said.

  ‘Gran, do you really mean to be this drastic?’

  ‘It’s not hard, you can knock a brick out with a hammer. What you’ve got to do is pack it tight.’

  ‘How do you know they won’t get hurt?’

  ‘They won’t be there,’ his Gran said. ‘We’ll tell them and they’ll leave.’

  ‘They’ll call the police,’ Vish said.

  ‘Police!’ she said, and clipped him around the ears.

  She was thinking of Cacka.

  ‘Please, no,’ Vish said. ‘Maybe this is not such a great idea.’

  ‘You coward,’ she said, hitting him again. She shocked herself with the strength of her blow, the pleasure of it. She pulled up the trap door beside the salesman’s office. She gave him the flashlight. ‘You leave the police to me. I never have a problem with police,’ she said. ‘You get down there, filth. I want a stick every three feet, and when you’ve done that you come back to me and I’ll teach you how to use the crimping pliers.’

  She sat down then in the swivel chair behind the Commodore brochures. She lit a Salem and drew a long rasping line of smoke down deep into her lungs. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth and let the smoke just waft away. The dragon lady. She grinned. Perhaps she was too angry to be actually happy and yet a certain amount of anger or irritation had never been incompatible with Frieda McClusky’s happiness. Revenge, retribution – these were pepper, curry. She smoked her Salem in long deep drafts and enjoyed the slow abrasive feeling. I’m not dead yet. She had been duped, yes, but she was alive and he was dead. She had a plan. She was always the one with the plan.

  I know I’m just a stupid old lady …

  To call it a ‘plan’ was to diminish it. Once she would have done that. I’m just a silly woman. This was not a plan. It was a vision, the same one, the only one – a flower farm on the site of Catchprice Motors. Do you think that it’s impractical? Irises, roses, petunias, long rows running parallel to the railway line and right across to Loftus Street. Propane trucks and concrete trucks bounced beside them, but in the centre of the farm there was just the smell of humus, of roses and the rich over-ripe smell of blood and bone.

  In this garden Cacka did not exist. Her children had not been born.

  57

  As Maria Takis entered the cellar, Benny Catchprice remained behind her with his shot gun pushing into the base of her spine. He had already cut her cheek with it, and it did not even occur to her to plead with him.

  It was like a subway tunnel in here. She could smell her death in the stink of the water. Even while she had fought to stop his grandmother being committed, all this – the innards of Catchprice Motors – had been here, underneath her feet. She did not see her name written on the wall, but in any case she did not understand the parts or what they did – the snakes in bottles, the cords tied with plastic, the writing on the wall, the ugly white fibreglass board with its straps and buckles. How could you ever understand it? It was like some creature run over on the road. The rough-sawn barrel grabbed and tore at her dress.

  Benny saw the thing he had made: belts, buckles, trusses. He knew already that it was wrong. He had built it for her but he had not thought of how she was. He said he was going to fuck her. He did not want to fuck her, not at all. On the other hand: this was his course. He had visualized it, committed to it. He was going down this road at 200Ks. No way could he turn around.

  Maria felt the beginning of another period pain. It was only now she realized these must be contractions. They were coming every five minutes or so. The pain tightened in her gut – this one made it hard to breathe. Through the pain she heard Benny Catchprice: This is where I come from,’ he said. ‘This is where I live.’ He was whining. When he whined, he seemed softer, blond and pink-cheeked, baby-skinned, but he was not softer. The whining was joined to the anger, the anger was joined to the gas-jet eyes that threatened her and tore at her with the barbed steel of the shot gun barrel. ‘I know you wouldn’t ask a human being to live here. But you just walked away and left me here.’

  The pain in her womb was like a great fist clenching. If it had been within her power she would have squashed him like a cockroach.

  As the pain began to leave her, he moved round her and sat in front of her on the sofa. He balanced the gun on his knee while he began to take his shoes off.

  ‘I like you,’ Benny said, looking up from unlacing. He was taking one step at a time. He should tell her get her clothes off, but he did not want to. He did not have a fucking hard-on yet. He took his shoes off slowl
y, as slowly as he could manage it. ‘You tried to run away from me, but I still like you.’

  Maria thought he had pretty, slippery lips and dangerous, sentimental eyes. She saw a teenage boy beset with lust and shyness – they were squashed in together like buckshot into chewing gum. He probably did not even know himself what cruelty he was capable of.

  ‘I won’t run away,’ she said.

  ‘Bullshit,’ he shouted. He liked to shout. He liked to feel his voice fill up the room. He scared himself at the thought of what crazy thing he might next do. When he shouted at Cathy she always, finally, collapsed before him. Her face would turn from hard to sorry.

  Maria flinched when he shouted, but then the face just hardened. You could see it set into place. He saw her eyes becoming dark and hostile. He could not let her stay like this.

  ‘You don’t like me,’ he said. He wanted to be friends with her. He wanted her to stroke his hair, maybe, kiss him on his eyes, that sort of thing. Not fuck, not unless she made him. Most of all he wanted her to smile at him. He was trying to find a way back to the place where that might just be possible.

  She watched him pout. She watched in chilly fascination as he pulled off his thin black socks, and rolled them up one-handed.

  ‘It’s dirty here,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry about that part of it.’ She noticed that his hands were trembling. He rubbed his heels and soles with his hands. He gave the impression of being fine and pretty, but his feet were big, netted with the red chain-mail imprint of his socks. ‘I didn’t want it to be dirty.’

  Her mouth was dry. She thought of all the ‘useful tips’ in birth class, how you should take a spray pack of Evian water and a sponge to suck.

  ‘I wanted it to be clean.’

  Now he was removing the trousers, with one hand, holding the shot gun with the other. He had shiny hairless legs like a girl.