The Tax Inspector (15 page)

26

The Australian Tax Office was in Hunter Street. The glassed, marble-columned foyer remained brightly lit and unlocked and, apart from video cameras and an hourly M.S.S. patrol, the security for the building depended on deceptively ordinary blue plastic Security Access Keys which were granted only to ASO 7’
s
and above. This was why Gia now had a key and Maria did not.

In the six months she had had the key, Gia had never used it. It sat in its original envelope in the bottom of her handbag, together with its crumpled instruction sheet. Now, standing before the blank eyes of video cameras which were connected to she knew not what, Gia read the instructions to Maria.

‘O.K. Hold the key firmly between thumb and forefinger. Ensure blade is unobstructed.’

‘We should have read this in the car,’ Maria said. ‘I can’t see where the shitty thing goes.’ She jabbed the key at the button.

‘First you’ve got to step into the elevator, Señora.’ Gia took Maria’s arm. ‘Then you put it in the Security/Air-conditioning slot.’

A red light came on. A buzzer sounded. Maria started.

‘Calm down,’ Gia said. ‘No one’s going to shoot you. All we’re doing is working late.’

The lift ascended and the liquid display panel above the door wished someone called Alex a happy birthday. Maria seemed pale and unhappy. Gia took her arm and squeezed it.

‘Relax,’ she said.

‘You know,’ Maria said, ‘that’s exactly the wrong thing to say to me. If you’re dealing with an agitated person, a maniac, you never say “relax”. Relax means what you feel is not important to me. I read that in the
Sydney Morning Herald
yesterday.’ She took Gia’s hand and held it: ‘You’re very brave to come with me. Thank you.’

‘I think this is going to be very therapeutic,’ Gia said. ‘I only wish Alistair could see you do it.’

‘This is nothing to do with Alistair …’

Gia thought: Sure! It was the first real sign she’d seen that Maria would let herself be angry with him.

The door opened on to the rat-maze partitioned world of the eighteenth floor which now housed the file clerks and section heads and auditors who concerned themselves with returns from small businesses like Catchprice Motors.

When Alistair’s star had been in the ascendant they had all worked here – although not on small businesses. During those years, no one on the eighteenth floor would have wasted their genius on Catchprice Motors.

They went to big-game fishing conventions in Port Stephens and photographed the people with the big boats and then investigated them to see if their income correlated with their assets. They spotted Rolls-Royces on the way to work and, on that chance encounter, began investigations that brought millions into the public purse. It is true that they were occasionally obsessive (Sally Ho started fifteen investigations on people with stone lion statues in their gardens) but mostly they were not vindictive. They investigated major corporations, multi-nationals with transfer pricing arrangements and off-shore tax havens. They went hunting for Slutzkin schemes, Currans, and sham charities. This is the work for which Alistair recruited Maria Takis and her best friend Gia Katalanis.

It had not been a rat-maze then. Alistair had had all the partitioning ripped out. There had been no careful grading of offices and desks but a clamorous paddock of excitable men and women who lived and breathed taxation. They worked long hours and drank too much red wine and smoked too many cigarettes and had affairs or ruined their marriages or did both at the same time. More than half of them came from within the Taxation Office but many – those with new degrees like Gia and Maria – came from outside it, and thereby leap-frogged several positions on the promotion ladder without sensing that the old Taxation Office was a resilient and unforgiving organism. Had they realized what enemies they were making it is unlikely they would have acted any differently – they were not cautious people. They were sometimes intolerant, always impatient, but they were also idealists and all of them were proud of their work and they were not reluctant to identify themselves at dinner parties as Tax Officers.

It was Alistair who created this climate, and for a long time everyone in the Taxation Office – even those who later revealed themselves to be his enemies – must have been grateful to him. It was something to be able to reveal your profession carelessly.

It was Alistair who said, on national television, that being a Tax Officer was the most pleasant work imaginable, like turning a tap to bring water to parched country. It felt wonderful to bring money flowing out of multi-national reservoirs into child-care centres and hospitals and social services. He grinned when he said it and his creased-up handsome face creased up some more and he cupped his hands as if cool river water were flowing over his big, farmer’s fingers and it was hard to watch him and not smile yourself. This was one half of Alistair’s great genius – that he was good on television. He sold taxation as a public good.

The Taxation Office had never had a television star before, so it was not surprising that Alistair would be envied and resented because of it nor – when the political forces against him succeeded – that he would be treated spitefully in defeat. What was less expected was that the bureaucracy would punish his lover almost as severely, more severely in one way, for Alistair’s office, although much smaller and no longer in the power corner, was at least properly carpeted and had all of its shelving and wiring correctly installed.

‘Oh, the
bastards,’
said Gia when she stood at the doorway of Maria’s office. ‘The unmitigated petty little bastards.’

There was still wiring running across the floor from the computer to the black skirting board which was meant to hide it. There were no shelves. There were books and papers stacked on the floor. The only filing cabinet was grey and it was littered with sawdust, aluminium off-cuts, a hammer and a chisel.

‘They fixed the modem,’ Maria said. ‘Gia, I don’t care. I’m never here.’

Gia picked up a tradesman’s dustpan and began to sweep the floor.

‘It’s not the point,’ she said. She picked up metal shavings and a little block of hardwood and dropped them in the pan. ‘What I can’t believe is that anyone would hate you. It’s not as if you were arrogant. It’s not as if you were ever anything but lovely to everyone. Whatever fix Alistair is in, it’s nothing to do with you.’

‘It’s to do with all of us,’ Maria said. ‘We should all be ashamed that he should be treated the way he is.’

Gia did not comment. She thought the great man of principle was a coward and a creep. He spent his days behind his ASO 9 desk in a poky little office across the hall. He now had nothing to do, except administer a division which no longer existed. All he was doing was reading nineteenth-century novels and waiting for his $500,000 superannuation while Maria and her child faced a hostile future you could optimistically call uncertain.

‘Does he talk to you now?’ Gia began to sweep the little coloured pieces of electrician’s cable into the dustpan.

‘He never didn’t talk to me,’ Maria said, ‘and don’t start that.’ She wanted to leave the office and get on with it.

‘Is he nice to you?’ Gia asked, sweeping stubbornly.

‘Gia, I don’t just want to stand here. Let’s just do it, quickly. Please.’

‘You think I want to hang around here?’ Gia emptied the dustpan into the wastebin and started going round the piled-up books wiping the dust off the covers with a Kleenex tissue. ‘Is he paying for anything?’

‘This baby is my mistake, not his. If you want to be mad at someone, be mad at me. Now I need to get into Max Hoskins’s office.’

‘Sure.’

‘You said you could unlock the doors.’

‘Only the front door, only the lift to the floor.’

‘O.K.’

Maria picked up the hammer from the top of the filing cabinet and walked off down the hall. By the time Gia found her she had fitted the claw beneath Max Hoskins’s door and was levering upwards. ‘Kick it,’ she said.

‘No,’ said Gia, out of breath. ‘We can’t do this.’

‘You hold the hammer. Push it down.’

Gia sighed and held the hammer and Maria slammed her shoulder hard against the door.

‘Careful. I don’t want you to go into labour.’

‘Again.’

This time the door ripped open.

‘This is break and entry,’ Gia said, rubbing at the splintered wood at the base of the door. ‘This is not some prank. This is like a violation … If you want to punish Alistair, you should do something to hurt him, not you. You need this job.’

‘This is nothing to do with Alistair
. I’m just damned if I’m going to let the department make me into someone I’m not. Gia … please … I need to get at Max’s terminal and then we’ll go back to the Brasserie and I’ll buy you a glass of champagne. If you want to wait for me there, that’s fine, really.’

‘Just hurry, O.K.’

Gia watched from the doorway as Maria took out Max Hoskins’s day book and flipped it open. He had a standard ASO 7 office with a green-topped desk, a leather-bound desk diary, a view to the north, two visitor’s chairs. Only a tortoiseshell comb left on top of the computer terminal was non-standard and it had an unpleasant personal appearance like something found on the bedside table of someone who had died.

‘I got stuck with him,’ Maria said, ‘at that barbecue at Sally Ho’s place. He complained to me about all the terrible problems of running a department. You know, the way they changed his access code each week and he could never remember it. You know what he does? He writes it down. He writes his access number in his day book, back to front or something.’

Maria flipped on the computer terminal and punched the numbers into it.

The terminal stayed closed.

‘Well,’ Gia said, ‘I guess that’s it.’

‘You go,’ Maria said. ‘I’ll get it. It’ll be these digits plus one, or the entire sequence back to front.’

Gia could see the reflection of the screen on the polished wall behind Maria’s back. She could see the flashing panel on the screen which read
Access Denied
.

‘It can’t be too hard,’ Maria said. ‘He’s so dull.’

‘Dull but
exceptionally
secretive. Come on, please. Don’t do this to me, Maria. We can go to jail for this. You don’t even care who these Catchprices are. I mean, what’s the principle? I don’t get it.’

‘We’d both be a lot happier if you went back to doing what you believed in. I’m subtracting 1 from each digit.’

‘Maria, damn you, don’t torture me – I’m your
friend.’

‘I’m subtracting 2.’

‘Don’t do a poker machine on me,’ wailed Gia. ‘I’ll never forgive you for that club in Gosford. Two hours with the creep breathing over your shoulder.’

‘We’re in.’

Maria rose from the keyboard with her hands held high above her head. ‘See! See!
Access Records. Add New Records. Edit Records
. We’re in. We can edit.’

Maria was the worst typist in the world. This was why Gia made herself walk into the office. She only sat at the keyboard because she wanted to get out quickly. She called up
Edit Records
. ‘How do you spell it?’

‘C-a-t-c-h-p-r-i-c-e.’

‘File number?’

‘Left it in the car. Call them all up. There. That one. Catchprice Motors.’

The last two entries were a record of Mrs Catchprice’s call alerting the department to irregularities and a File Active designation dated for this morning when Maria had left to begin her audit in Franklin.

Gia went through the file deletion procedure. She took it to the penultimate step where the screen was flashing
Delete Record Y/N
.

‘They’ll see the broken door,’ Gia said.

‘If there’s no file, there’s no job. Hit it.’

Maria leaned across Gia and hit the Y key herself. The screen lost all its type. It turned solid green. A single cursor began to flash and the terminal began to emit a loud, high-pitched buzz.

‘Run,’ said Gia.

Maria did not argue. She ran as well as she could run with the weight of her pregnancy. The air was dull and hot and the corridors were heavy with a dull, plastic smell like the inside of a new electrical appliance. Gia tried to go down the stairs. (‘They’ll get us. Jam the elevator.’) Maria pulled her into the lift. ‘I don’t want to use my key,’ said Gia, her little chin set hard and her eyes wide.

‘Use it,’ said Maria, panting. ‘The keys can’t be coded.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course not.’

The lift doors opened. The foyer was empty. Gia walked briskly from the building with her head down. Maria waddled just behind her, red in the face and out of breath. Did they imagine themselves being filmed? Yes, they did. They walked up the hill in Hunter Street to the car. They did not say a word. They drove back to the Brasserie and parked behind Gia’s car.

‘We’re in a lot of trouble,’ Gia said.

‘No we’re not,’ Maria insisted. ‘We’re not in any trouble at all.’

‘You’re going to tell me why, aren’t you?’ Gia blew her nose.

‘Yes,’ Maria grinned. ‘I am.’

It was midnight. It was summer. The windows were down. You could smell jasmine among the exhaust fumes of the Darlinghurst bus. Maria wondered what she was going to say next.

27

Maria’s father was angry at the street she lived in. He spat at it and scuffed at its paspalum weeds with his half-laced boots. He hit the stone retaining wall outside Elizabeth Hindmath’s with his aluminium stick and lost the rubber stopper off the end. The rubber stopper rolled down the street, bouncing off the cobblestones, and finally lost itself in the morning-glory tangle opposite Maria’s cottage.

‘See, see,’ George Takis cried triumphantly, pointing his stick. ‘See.’

He meant the street was too steep for a woman with a baby.

‘Forty-five degrees,’ he said, ‘at least.’

It was nothing like forty-five degrees, but she did not contradict him. She did not point out that the streets of Letkos were far steeper and rougher than this one where she now lived in Sydney, that she herself had been pushed in an ancient German pram up streets steeper and rougher than the one that caused her father this upset – it was not the street he was upset with – it was the pregnancy. If he had articulated his anger honestly, he would have lost her. He was newly widowed and already had one daughter who would not speak to him, so he was angry with the street instead. It was too narrow, too steep. The drainage was bad and the cobbles were slippery. If she needed an ambulance they could never get it down there.

‘You live here, you need good brakes. What sort of brakes it got?’ He meant the pram. He wiped some dry white spittle from the corner of his lips and looked at her accusingly, his dark eyebrows pressed down hard upon his black eyes.

‘I don’t have one,’ she said. She did not want to think about the pram. She did not want to think about what life was going to be like.

He sighed.

‘I work,’ she said. ‘Remember.’

‘You’re not going to know what’s hit you, you know that? You don’t know what will happen to you. You get in trouble, you just stay in trouble. Always. Forever.’

‘Shut up, Ba-ba.’

‘You come home from the hospital, how are you going to buy a pram then? You need to have everything bought beforehand.’

‘Who told you that? Mrs Hellos?’

‘No one,’ he said, hitting at the Williamsons’ overgrown jasmine with his stick. ‘I talk to no one.’ He paused. ‘I was reading the magazines at the barber’s.’

‘About babies, Ba-Ba? In a barber’s shop magazine?’

‘I bought it,’ he said, fiddling with the button on his braces.

‘Ba-Ba, this doesn’t help me. Really. I know I must seem terrible to you, but it doesn’t help.’

‘Maria, come with me, I’ll buy you a nice one. Come on. I’ll buy it for you.’ She could not really be angry with him. She did not need to be told how her pregnancy hurt him and excited him, how he struggled with it, how he loved her. They went shopping for a pram at Leichhardt Market Town and he got angry about prices instead, and afterwards she cooked him the noodles and keftethes which his wife had made for him three times a week for forty years, and afterwards, when it was dark, Maria drove him home to his house in Newtown, slipping into Greek territory like a spy in a midget submarine.

At midnight on the night she had failed to delete the Catchprice file from the computer, Maria felt George Takis’s anger at the street might have some basis outside of his own shame. She parked her car up on Darling Street and then began the long walk down the steep lane.

She was tired already. She was heavy and sore and this was a street for a single woman with a flat stomach and healthy back. It was a street you walked down arm in arm with a lover, stumbling, laughing after too much wine, your vagina moist and warm and your legs smooth from waxing. This was so unsexy, and difficult. So endless.

She walked past the fallen stone wall at Elizabeth Hindmath’s house. The rocks had tumbled out on to the street just as George Takis had said they would. The path was slippery with moss and lichen and Maria stepped very carefully. There was a movement in her womb like a great bubble rising and rolling – but not breaking – and it made her exclaim softly and put her hand on her rising stomach.

Sometimes at night she would lie on her back and watch the baby move around her stomach, watch its ripples, and guess its limbs, and although she would always try to do this fondly, with wonder, she would often end up in tears. She knew her fondness was a fake.

The moon was full and the air was heavy with honeysuckle and jasmine. Someone was playing Country music in a house down the street. There was a smell of oil in the air – at least she thought it was oil – which seemed to come from the container ships at the bottom of the hill.

She did not realize that the Country music was coming from her house until she was right outside it. Then she saw the small red light – the ghetto blaster – in the centre of her own front steps. The hair stood on her neck.

‘Don’t you recognize a tax-payer when you see one?’ a male voice said.

Maria walked straight on.

Every Tax Inspector knows these stories: the mad ‘client’, whose business you have destroyed, who seeks you out and beats you or puts dog shit in your letter box. She kept on walking with her breath held hard in her throat. The cassette player turned off with a heavy thunk.

A woman called: ‘We didn’t think you’d be out so late. Being pregnant.’

Maria stopped a little distance off and stared into the shadow of her own veranda. She could see the axe she had left leaning against the stack of firewood.

‘Are you going to ask us in?’ the woman said. Her voice sounded thin, stretched tight between apology and belligerence.

‘Maybe,’ Maria said, ‘we could all meet for a cup of coffee in the morning.’

There was a light on at number 95, but it was twenty metres away down hill and the lane was so slippery with moss it would be dangerous to run.

‘We’ve got to work tomorrow.’ It was a teenage boy. She could see his hair – shining white as a knife in the night. ‘We’ve got customers to attend to.’

A cowboy boot shifted out of the shadow into the white spill from the street light.

‘Mrs McPherson?’ she asked.

The boy with the blond hair stood and walked down off the concrete steps.

‘Benjamin Catchprice,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘We’ve been waiting two hours.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Woooo,’ said Benny, dancing back, grinning, fanning his hands, ‘language.’

‘You scared me shitless, you little creep,’ Maria said. ‘Who gave you my address? What right do you think you have to come here in the middle of the night?’

‘We’re sorry about that,’ said Cathy McPherson. She was holding a goddam guitar – standing like a giantess blocking the access to the veranda, holding a guitar, wearing a cowgirl suit, her great strong legs apart as if it was her house, not Maria’s. ‘Really, we’re sorry. We really didn’t mean to frighten you. It wasn’t the middle of the night when we got here.’

‘Mrs McPherson,’ said Maria. ‘Don’t you realize how prejudicial it is for you to be here?’

Cathy McPherson stepped down off the step. ‘I’d be obliged,’ she said, ‘if I could use your toilet.’