The Tax Inspector (24 page)

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 office 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.

He should also have spoken clearly about what had happened. He should have said, ‘I was captured and tortured.’ So she would know, immediately.

Instead he said, ‘I’m not going back there.’

She began sobbing.

He tried to tell her what had happened to him, but he had said things in the wrong order and she could no longer hear anything. He tried to embrace her. She slapped his face.

He behaved like a child, he saw that later. He was not like a man, he was a baby, full of his own hurt, his own rights, his own needs. And when she slapped his face he was full of self-righteousness and anger.

He shouted at her. He said he would go away and leave her to be a whore for taxi-drivers.

The neighbours complained about the shouting as they complained about her Beatles records – by throwing potatoes on the roof. Who they were to waste food like this, who could say – they were Italians. The potatoes rolled down the tiles and bounced off the guttering.

In response she fetched a plastic basin and gave it to him.

‘Here,’ she said. Her eyes were loveless. ‘Get food.’

He saw that she meant pick up the potatoes—that they should eat them.

‘Mum. Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘You’re embarrassed!’

‘I am not embarrassed.’

‘You coward,’ she said. ‘All you care about is your suit and your hair. You coward, you leave me starving. Zorig, Zorig.’ Tears began running down her face. She had never cried for her husband like this. Sarkis had watched her comforting weeping neighbours who hardly knew Zorig Alaverdian, but she herself had not wept for him.

Sarkis could not bear it. ‘Don’t, please.’

He followed her to the back porch where she began struggling with her gum boots. ‘If he was here we would not have to pick up potatoes,’ she said. ‘We would be eating beef, lamb, whatever I wrote on the shopping list I would buy. Fish, a whole Schnapper, anything I wanted … where is the flashlight?’

‘We don’t need to pick up potatoes. Never. Mum, I promise, you won’t go hungry.’

‘Promise!’ she said. She found the flashlight. He struggled to take it from her. ‘You promised me a job,’ she said.

He took the basin and followed her out into the rain with the flashlight and umbrella. He said nothing about the wound in his leg. He helped her pick up potatoes.

Then she sat at the table under the portrait of Mesrop Mushdotz. He helped her clean up the damaged potatoes. They peeled them, cut out the gashes, and sliced them thin to be cooked in milk.

‘What is the matter with this job, Sar?’ she said, more gently, but with her eyes still removed from him. ‘What is not perfect?’

‘It is not a question of “perfect” …’

‘What do you think – a man to come home to his wife with no food because the job was not perfect. You think it was ever perfect for any of us? You think it is perfect for your father, right now?’

Sarkis Alaverdian left for work at ten past eight next morning. He could not bring himself to arrive at Catchprice Motors at the hour Benny had instructed him to. He walked up Frieda Crescent, Mortimer Street, Cathleen Drive. It was not until half-past ten that he finally carried the blue umbrella across the gravel car yard towards Benny Catchprice.

Even as he walked towards him he was not certain of what he would do. The smallest trace of triumph on Benny’s pretty face would probably have set him off, but there was none. In fact, when Benny put out his hand to shake he seemed shy. His hand was delicate, something you could snap with thumb and finger.

‘Hey,’ the blond boy said, ‘relax.’

Sarkis could only nod.

There was a young apprentice fitting a car radio to a Bedford van. He was squatting on the wet gravel, frowning over the instruction sheet. Benny and Sarkis stood side by side and stared at him.

Then Benny said, ‘You were a hairdresser.’

Sarkis thought: he saw me on television.

‘My Gran says you were a hairdresser,’ Benny said.

‘You got a problem with that?’

‘No,’ Benny said, ‘no problem.’ He took a few steps towards the fire escape and then turned back. ‘You coming or what?’

‘Depends where it is.’ When he saw how Benny’s gaze slid away from his, Sarkis wondered if he might actually be ashamed of what he’d done.

‘Look,’ Benny said, ‘all that stuff is over. It’s O.K.’ He nodded to the fire escape. ‘It’s my Gran’s apartment.’

‘I’m not cutting your hair,’ Sarkis said, ‘if that’s what you think.’

‘No, no,’ Benny said. ‘My Gran wants to see you, that’s all. O.K.?’

‘O.K.’ Sarkis put his hand into his jacket pocket and clasped the Swiss army knife and transferred it, hidden in his fist, to his trouser pocket.