The Tax Inspector

by Peter Carey

  ‘Please.’

  ‘It’s my shirt.’

  ‘It’s clean.’

  ‘You shouldn’t get me mad,’ he said. ‘Not now. You understand?’ he shouted at her. ‘You see what has happened? The jealous cunt blew up my career. He didn’t want it, so he killed it for me.’

  She reached out her hand to grab at the shirt. He grabbed at her wrist but she brought the iron bar down with her other hand. The bar crashed down on to the work bench.

  He saw then that she was crazy. Her eyes were so hard and dark, he could not look at them.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘This is my shirt.’

  ‘Huh-huh-huh.’ Her face was going red again. Tendons stretched down her neck. She started hunching up her shoulder and putting her arm inside her dress, and then she stayed there: ‘Huh-huh-huh.’

  He went back to the doorway and looked at the rubble. He pulled out a brick, but it was hopeless. There was concrete and steel reinforcing rod twisted in together. When he turned back he saw she had stepped out of the dress, and lifted it up high as if it might get soiled just touching anything that belonged here. She had an industrial strength bra with white straps. He was shocked by how her stomach stretched, by the ragged brown line down her middle, by the size of everything, the muscles in her legs, the redness of her face. She had buckshot wounds in her arms and thighs. She was trying to spread her dress across his couch with one hand, but the dress was too small and would not stay still. She held it out to him.

  ‘Cut it,’ she said.

  ‘Fuck you,’ he said.

  ‘Just do it,’ she screamed. ‘Cut the fucking dress down the side.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ he said, ‘I’m not your servant.’

  ‘You want this baby to die,’ she said. ‘You want to kill this baby too.’

  She knew he could not stand her saying that. ‘Don’t you say that,’ he said. ‘You don’t know a thing about me. You think I’m some creep because I live down here.’

  ‘If you’re not a creep, what are you?’

  ‘Angel,’ he yelled. ‘I told you.’

  She stared at him, her eyes wide.

  ‘I am a fucking angel.’

  They were looking at each other, a metre apart. She had the iron bar in her hand, dressed in pale blue knickers and a white bra.

  ‘Huh-huh-huh.’ She hunkered down. She held the bar up. There was a vein on her forehead like a great blue worm.

  ‘This baby needs a hospital, and doctors,’ she gasped. ‘If we keep it here it’ll choke on its cord. It’ll be your fault.’

  ‘Why would I kill a baby? I am an angel.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  ‘I changed myself,’ he said. ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘See,’ she said. She looked him in the eye. ‘Now you’re going to shoot it.’

  ‘Don’t say that, I’m warning you. Don’t say that.’

  ‘Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh.’ She held the bar in both hands. She stepped back, leaned against the wall. ‘Huh-huh-huh.’

  Water and blood gushed out from between her legs, passed through her blue knickers as if they were not even there.

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  ‘Huh-huh-huh.’

  He went to the door again, but it was useless. He dirtied his shirt. Behind him, the Tax Inspector was hollering.

  ‘Huh-huh-huh.’

  Up in the street he thought he could hear sirens, he was not sure.

  ‘Huh-huh-huh.’

  She was backed against the wall, all her pants soaked with blood and water, dripping.

  He turned back to the bricks. You could see pale daylight but the stairs were jammed with a mass of masonry and steel. They would have to wait for the emergency rescue squad to free them.

  ‘I didn’t do this,’ he said. ‘This is not my fault. All it was: I liked you. You never listened to me. I never wanted to do nothing wrong.’

  Then she started hollering again. He could not bear it. She was shrieking like he was murdering her.

  ‘What do I do?’ he said. ‘I’ll help you. Tell me what to do.’

  She did not talk. Her eyes were so wide in her head he thought they were going to pop out. Then she calmed down.

  ‘Cut up my dress. We need a clean surface.’ He had razor blades in the old coke stash. He had gaffer tape on the bench. He sliced open her dress and stuck it to the couch with gaffer tape.

  ‘Now – your shirt.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We don’t need to cut it.’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘It’s coming. It’s too soon. It’s coming. Help me down.’

  He helped her. He put his arm around her. It was the second time he touched her, ever. She was dead heavy, a sack of spuds. He helped her towards the couch.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ she said, ‘oh fuck, oh shit, oh Christ, oh no.’

  ‘Are you O.K.?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she screamed. ‘Oh noooo …’

  This time he knew she was dying. It was terrible. It was worse than anything he could imagine.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘It’s O.K.’ He took off his coat. He put it under her. It was terrible there, in her private parts. He was frightened to look at the hole. It was like an animal. It was opening. Something was pushing.

  ‘I won’t hurt you,’ he said. ‘I never meant to hurt you.’

  ‘Shut up,’ she screamed again. ‘No.’

  He could see the actual head, the actual baby’s head. It was black and matted, pushing out from between her legs. He did not know what to do. From the noises that came out of her throat he knew she was going to die. You could see in her face she was going to die. He knelt beside her to stop her rolling off the couch.

  She screamed.

  He looked. The head was out. Oh Christ. It looked like it would break off, or snap. It turned.

  ‘Cord.’

  He did not know what she meant. He was kneeling on rough bricks on his bare knees. It hurt.

  She said, ‘See the cord.’

  He could not see anything.

  ‘The umbilical cord,’ she said, her hands scrabbling down in the bloody, slippery mess between her legs. ‘Christ, check my baby’s neck?’

  Then he saw it. There was a white slippery thing, the cord, felt like warm squid. He touched it. It was alive. He pulled it gingerly, frightened he would rip it out or break it. He could feel a life in it, like the life in a fresh caught fish, but warm, hot even, like a piece of rabbit gut. He looped it back over the baby’s head. Then, it was as if he had untied a string – just as the cord went back, the child came out, covered in white cheese, splashed with blood. Its face squashed up like a little boxer’s. It was ugly and alone. Its legs were up to its stomach and its face was screwed up. Then it cried: something so thin, such a metallic wail it cut right through to Benny’s heart.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ he said.

  He took off his cotton shirt. He threw his bloodied suit jacket on the floor and wrapped up the frightened baby in the shirt.

  ‘Give him to me,’ Maria said. ‘Give me my baby.’

  ‘Little Benny,’ he whispered to it.

  ‘Give me my baby.’

  She was shouting now, but there had been so much shouting in his life. He knew how not to hear her. Tears were streaming down Benny’s face. He did not know where they were coming from. ‘He’s mine,’ he said.

  He closed his heart against the noise. He hunched down over the baby.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s going to hurt you.’

  61

  Maria felt already that she knew every part of her tormentor intimately: his thin wrists, his lumpy-knuckled fingers, his long, straight-sided, pearl-pink nails, his shiny hair with its iridescent, spiky, platinum points, his peculiar opal eyes, his red lips, real red, too red, like a boy-thief caught with plums.

  He sat on the edge of the sofa, by her hip. He had one bare leg up, one out on the floor, not easily, or comfortably, but with his foot arched, like a dancer’s almost, so th
at it was just the ball of the foot that made contact with the floor, not the floor exactly, but with a house brick balancing on the floor. He hunched his bare torso around the child and talked to it.

  ‘Give me my baby,’ Maria said again.

  ‘Benny,’ he said. ‘Little Benny.’

  He talked to the child, intently, tenderly, with his pretty red lips making wry knowing smiles which might, in almost any other circumstances, have been charming. He cupped and curved himself so much around her baby that she could barely see him – a crumpled blood-stained shirt, an arm, blue and cheesey, and small perfect fingers clenching. She would do anything to hold him.

  She asked him once more: ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Give him to me. He’s getting cold now. He needs me.’

  But it was she who felt the coldness, the cold hurting emptiness. She stretched her arms out towards him. In the yellow smoke-streaked light of the hurricane lamp, Benny Catchprice’s naked skin was the colour of old paper. When her fingers touched him, he flinched, and moved so far down the sofa that the umbilical cord stretched up tight towards him.

  ‘Please. He’s cold. Give him to me.’

  But he was like a man deaf to women, a sorcerer laying spells. He was murmuring to the baby.

  ‘Give him to me,’ she said. ‘I’ll do what you want.’

  He looked up at her and grinned. It was then, as he twisted slightly in his seat, Maria finally saw her baby’s face. She thought: of course. There were her mother’s eyes, bright, dark, curious, undisappointed.

  ‘My baby.’ She sobbed, just once, something from the stomach. She held out her empty, cold arms towards the little olive-skinned boy.

  Her captor turned away and the baby’s bright round face was hidden once again. She could not bear it. She reached out and touched Benny’s forearm. ‘You want to do it to me, do it to me.’

  ‘Come on,’ he said incredulously.

  He pulled away. It hurt her.

  ‘Please,’ she said. The tug on the cord either triggered or coincided with a contraction. She knew the placenta would be delivered and soon, any minute, there would be nothing to join her to the child.

  ‘They lose body heat so fast, Benny, please.’ That caught him. He actually looked at her. ‘Give him to me.’ She held out her arms. ‘I’ll find you a really nice place to live. Would you like that? I’ll get you out of here.’

  He began to smile, a bully’s smile she thought.

  ‘Just give him to me, I’ll pay you,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you money.’ She felt close to panic. She must not panic. She must be clear. She tried to think what she might offer him.

  ‘Two thousand dollars,’ she said.

  ‘Shush,’ he said. ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘Don’t shush me,’ she snapped.

  He laughed, and kept on laughing until there were tears in his eyes. She had no idea that he was as near as he had ever been to love. She saw only some pretty, blond-haired, Aussie surfer boy. ‘Oh, shush.’

  On the floor beside his foot, next to his shoes, she could see the shot gun. He had placed it on a garbage bag on top of a plank. It was only as she thought how she might edge towards the ugly thing that she realized she still had the rusty iron bar beside her on the couch, had had it there all the time.

  ‘Shushy shush,’ he said to the baby. ‘Oh shush-shush-shush.’ All her baby’s brain was filled with Benny Catchprice’s face.

  Maria lifted the iron bar like a tennis racket above her head. She saw herself do this from a distance, from somewhere among the cobweb rafters. She saw her ringless hands, the rusty bar.

  ‘Give him to me,’ she said. Her voice, scratchy with fear, was almost unrecognizable.

  Benny looked up at her and smiled and shook his head.

  How could this be me?

  She brought down the bar towards his shoulder blade. She brought it down strong enough to break it, but he ducked. He ducked in under and she got him full across the front of the skull. It was a dull soft sound it made. The force jolted him forward. All she felt was still, be still, and yet when he turned to look at her, nothing seemed different afterwards from before.

  I have to hit him again.

  Benny held the baby on his left side, against his hip. He did not have the head held properly. He lifted his right hand up to his own head and when he brought it away it was marked with a small red spot of blood. He actually smiled at her.

  ‘Abortion!’ He shook his head. His eyes wandered for a moment, then regained their focus. ‘You’re such a bullshitter, Maria.’

  Maria’s legs were trembling uncontrollably. ‘I’ll kill you,’ she said. She picked up the iron bar high again. Her arms were like jelly.

  ‘You’re the real thing,’ he said. ‘I knew that when I saw you.’ A dribble of bright blood ran from his hairline down on to his nose. He nodded his head with emphasis. Then slowly, like a boy clowning at a swimming pool, he began to tilt forward. His eyes rolled backwards in his head. He held out the child towards her.

  ‘Take,’ he said.

  As Benny Catchprice fell, the child was passed between them – Maria slid her arms in under the slippery little body and brought it to her, pressing it against her, shuddering. Benny hit the floor. He made a noise like timber falling in a stack. Maria put her hand behind the damp warm head. She could feel lips sucking at her neck. She brought her arms, her bones, her skin, between her baby and her victim.

  It was then, as Benny lay amid the planks and bricks with his bare arm half submerged in puddled seepage, she saw his tattooed back for the first time. At first she thought it was a serpent – red, blue, green, scales, something creepy living in a broken bottle or underneath a rock. Then she saw it was not a serpent but an angel, or half an angel – a single wing tattooed on his smooth, boy’s skin – it was long and delicate and it ran from his shoulder to his buttock – an angel wing. It was red, blue, green, luminous, trembling, like a dragon fly, like something smashed against the windscreen of a speeding car.

  She took her little boy, warm, squirming, still slippery as a fish, and unfastened her bra, and tucked him in against her skin.

  Peter Carey is the author of eleven novels and has twice received the Booker Prize. His other honors include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Born in Australia, he has lived in New York City for twenty years.

  www.petercareybooks.com

  BOOKS BY PETER CAREY

  PARROT AND OLIVER IN AMERICA

  HIS ILLEGAL SELF

  THEFT

  WRONG ABOUT JAPAN

  MY LIFE AS A FAKE

  30 DAYS IN SYDNEY: A WILDLY DISTORTED ACCOUNT

  TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG

  JACK MAGGS

  THE UNUSUAL LIFE OF TRISTAN SMITH

  THE BIG BAZOOHLEY

  THE TAX INSPECTOR

  OSCAR AND LUCINDA

  BLISS

  ILLYWHACKER

  THE FAT MAN IN HISTORY

  ALSO BY PETER CAREY

  BLISS

  For thirty-nine years Harry Joy has been the quintessential good guy. But one morning Harry has a heart attack on his suburban front lawn, and, for the space of nine minutes, he becomes a dead guy. And although he is resuscitated, he will never be the same. For, as Peter Carey makes abundantly clear in this darkly funny novel, death is sometimes a necessary prelude to real life. Part The Wizard of Oz, part Dante’s Inferno, and part Australian Book of the Dead, Bliss is a triumph of uninhibited storytelling from a writer of extravagant gifts.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76719-0

  HIS ILLEGAL SELF

  Seven-year-old Che Selkirk was raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother. The son of radical student activists at Harvard in the late sixties, Che has grown up with the hope that one day his parents will come back for him. So when a woman arrives at his front door and whisks him away to the jungles of Queensland, he is confronted with the most important questions of his life: Who is his real mother? Did he
know his real father? And if all he suspects is true, what should he do? In this artful tale of a young boy’s journey, His Illegal Self lifts your spirit in the most unexpected way.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-27649-0

  ILLYWHACKER

  In Australian slang, an illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey’s uproarious novel, may be the king of them all. As Carey follows this charming scoundrel across a continent and a century, he creates a crazy quilt of outlandish encounters. Boldly inventive, irresistibly odd, Illywhacker is further proof that Peter Carey is one of the most enchanting writers at work in any hemisphere.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76790-9

  JACK MAGGS

  The year is 1837 and a stranger is prowling London. He is Jack Maggs, an illegal returnee from the prison island of Australia. He has the demeanor of a savage and the skills of a hardened criminal, and he is risking his life on seeking vengeance and reconciliation. Installing himself within the household of the genteel grocer Percy Buckle, Maggs soon attracts the attention of a cross section of London society. But Maggs is obsessed with a plan of his own. And as these schemes converge, Maggs rises to the center, a dark looming figure, at once frightening, mysterious, and compelling.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76037-5

  MY LIFE AS A FAKE

  Fiendishly devious and addictively readable, Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake is a moral labyrinth constructed around the uneasy relationship between literature and lying. In steamy, fetid Kuala Lumpur in 1972, Sarah Wode-Douglass, the editor of a London poetry journal, meets a mysterious Australian named Christopher Chubb. Chubb is a despised literary hoaxer, carting around a manuscript likely filled with deceit. But in this dubious piece of literature Sarah recognizes a work of real genius. But whose genius? As Sarah tries to secure the manuscript, Chubb draws her into a fantastic story of imposture, murder, kidnapping, and exile—a story that couldn’t be true unless its teller were mad. My Life as a Fake is Carey at his most audacious and entertaining.

  Fiction/978-1-4000-3088-0