by Peter Carey
‘Tell me.’
‘I said that I didn’t want to do business like Jack. I said we’ve gone off the rails. We shouldn’t be playing tricks with tax. We should be running the business by its original principles …’
‘Mort,’ Howie said. ‘I’m trying to explain that if this audit goes through we are going to need twenty back paddocks to pay the bill.’
‘And I’m trying to tell you, Mr Rock ’n’ Roll,’ said Mort, suddenly shouting and jabbing his finger at Howie, ‘that this business will run itself just fine if we stop listening to crooks and stick to Cacka’s philosophy.’
It was very quiet. Then there was a squeaking noise. The ping-pong table started to move in front of Benny’s nose. It pushed towards him, then withdrew. It was Cathy pushing with her big thighs. She had a bright little smile on her face.
‘Philosophy?’ she said. Her mouth was small in her big face and she had two hot spots on her pale cheeks. ‘What sort of philosophy would that be, Mort? Like Socrates? Like Mussolini? What sort of philosophy did you have in mind exactly?’
Mort said: ‘He was one of the greats.’ Benny looked down at the floor. He thought: don’t, please don’t.
‘Mort,’ Cathy said. ‘Say he was a creep. Admit it. It’s not your fault.’
‘He was human, but he was one of the greats.’
‘Look at us,’ Cathy said. There was a bang as she slammed her glass down on the table. Benedictine spilled. (Howie went to the kitchen to get a Wettex. Benny despised him for doing it.) ‘Look at us,’ Cathy said, watching Howie wipe the table. ‘We don’t know how to be happy. Look out of the window. We’re car dealers. That’s all we do. You cannot be a great car dealer.’
‘You can be a great boot-maker,’ Mort said.
Benny agreed. He took a facelette of Aloe-Vera and wiped the back of his hands. He thought: I will be a great car dealer.
Cathy took the Wettex from Howie and folded it and placed it on the table. Howie picked it up and took it out to the kitchen.
‘You want to talk about great,’ Cathy said. ‘Elvis was great.’
Mort laughed.
‘Hank Williams was great, but Christ, Morty, even if you could be a great car dealer, you could not be great and bankrupt at the same time.’
‘Spend some time with the books, Mort. I’d be happy to take you through them.’
‘Listen,’ Mort said. ‘I don’t like this business. I don’t think you like it either, but we’re stuck with it. If we want to save our arse, we should go back to Cacka’s principles.’
‘And what principles were you thinking of?’ Howie asked.
‘You remember Catchprice Motors, Cathy?’ Mort asked his sister. ‘We didn’t wind our speedos back. We paid our taxes. We told the truth.’
‘Why do you mime the words of the hymns in church?’ Howie asked.
Mort looked at him, his mouth loose.
‘I just meant to ask you,’ Howie said. ‘I wondered why you won’t sing out loud. Barry Peterson asked me why someone with such a good voice wouldn’t sing out loud. I wondered if this had something to do with Cacka’s philosophy.’
‘Shut up, Howie,’ Cathy said.
‘What I’m getting to,’ Mort said, his neck now blazing red above his white overall collar, ‘is Cacka paid his taxes. He’d have shut the doors if he couldn’t pay his taxes.’
‘Mort,’ said Cathy, more gently than before, ‘Franklin has changed.’
‘If it’s changed so much we have to be cheats, I’d rather run some little garage up at Woop-woop. I’d rather be on the dole.’
‘You might get your wish,’ Cathy said.
‘How?’ asked Benny.
They all looked at him. For a moment the only noise came from the rattling air-conditioner.
‘What?’ Cathy said, frowning at him.
‘How will my father get his wish?’
‘What this conversation is about, Benjamin, is that we are being investigated by the Taxation Department.’
‘I know that.’
‘And by the time they have finished with us, we’ll have to sell the business to pay them back.’
‘So, what are you going to do, Cathy?’ Benny asked.
‘Don’t speak to your auntie like that.’
‘No,’ Benny insisted, ‘what are you going to do to protect us? What positive steps can be taken towards realizing our desires?’ He blushed and stood up. They were all staring at him. Not one of them had any idea of who he was and what it was he had quoted to them. Howie was smirking, but none of them had any plan appropriate to their situation. In their shiny suits and frills and oily overalls, they were creatures at the end of an epoch. The climate had changed and they were puzzled to find the familiar crops would no longer grow. He stood up. He was full of light. They saw him, but did not see him, for the best and most vital part of him was already walking down the path towards the actualization of his desires. I am new. I am born now. Even while they stared at him across the bottle-stained emptiness of the ping-pong table, he was descending the staircase, not the one that led to his physical actual cellar – not the metal staircase with its perforated treads, the oil-stained ladder with the banister he must not touch – but the other staircases which are described in seven audio cassettes, Actualizations and Affirmations 1–14.
He was descending the blue staircase (its treads shimmering like oil on water, its banisters clear, clean, stainless steel) and all they could think was that he had no right to wear a suit.
At the bottom of the blue staircase he found the yellow staircase.
At the bottom of the yellow staircase, the pink.
At the bottom of the pink, the ebony.
At 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 he visualized a Sony Trinitron.
Benny turned on the Sony Trinitron and saw there the vivid picture of what it was he desired: all the books and ledgers of Catchprice Motors, wrapped in orange garbage bags and sealed with silver tape.
‘Leave it to me,’ he said out loud.
By then he was already walking across the crushed gravel of the car yard. His father was a yard ahead of him.
‘What?’ he said.
14
Maria’s image of herself was made in all the years before 15 July, the day she finally discovered that she was pregnant. No matter what kicks the baby gave her, no matter how it squirmed and rolled and pushed and made her lumpy and off-centre, no matter how her legs ached, her back hurt, irrespective of the constipation, haemorrhoids and insomnia, the fine webs of spider veins and stretch marks that threatened to make her old and ugly overnight, she could still forget what her body had actually become. She could look in the mirrors as she entered the birth class and be surprised to see a short, big-bellied woman.
There were also other times when she knew exactly what she looked like and then she felt that she had been that way for ever, and then it was almost impossible to remember that it had only been on 15 July last year that she had discovered she was pregnant.
On 15 July she still had beer and wine in her refrigerator, no milk. She made her last cup of strong black coffee, not even bothering to taste it properly, and slipped into her quilted ‘Afghan’ skirt and embroidered black silk blouse not guessing that before five weeks had passed the $220 skirt would be unwearable.
Her period was late, but her period was often late, or early. She stopped in Darling Street, Balmain, and spent $15 on a pregnancy test kit and drove over the Harbour Bridge to Crows Nest where she was auditing a property developer. It wasn’t until after lunch she found the pregnancy test kit in her handbag.
In the property developer’s white bathroom she saw a slender phial of her urine turn a pretty violet colour.
She sat it on the window ledge and shook her head at it. Such was her capacity for denial that she assumed the kit was faulty and at three o’clock she s
pent another $15 on a second kit and got the same result.
She tried to phone her best friend at the Tax Office. Gia Katalanis had an office with a view and an answer machine on her desk. Maria left a message: ‘Extraordinary news.’
As for Alistair, she put it off. She knew where he was, in an office two floors above Gia’s. Even when she phoned him, on his direct line, at five o’clock, she did not know quite what she was going to say.
‘I want to buy you dinner,’ she told him, looking out of the property developer’s spare office to where $80,000 yachts heeled over in the Nor’-easter.
‘I can’t,’ he said.
She understood exactly what he meant – his wife.
‘Oh, yes you can,’ she said. She laughed, but it did not soften the effect – she had already crossed a line. ‘It’s something good,’ she said. ‘Not bad. It’s worth it.’
She knew how false this was even when she said it – that what she was to present him with was something totally unacceptable, something that could not fit into the odd shapes they had made of their lives.
‘I’m going to have to tell such dreadful lies,’ he said.
‘That’s life,’ she said.
But when she hung up she knew that was exactly what she did not want life to be. She dropped her half-finished can of Diet Coke into the rubbish bin. That night when she met Alistair at the Blue Moon Brasserie the first thing he noticed was that she had taken all the silver rings off her hands.
‘What happened?’ he asked as they sat down. It was her hands he was talking about.
But she was already telling him that she was pregnant and she would have the child.
She had rehearsed a more reasoned, gradual, diplomatic speech, but in the end the words came out gracelessly, sounding more angry than she thought she felt. ‘You’re going to have to choose,’ she said. It was amazing. It was just like saying ‘pass the bread’ – only words, gone already, disappeared into that loud river of talk that bounced off the hard tiled floor of the Brasserie.
Alistair nodded as he nodded with men when arguing on television, absorbing their points, holding his counsel, the picture of reasonableness. He was holding her newly naked hand, massaging her wrist, but he suddenly looked very far away and she was frightened by what she had begun.
He was almost fifty. He had a craggy, handsome face and curly grey hair. She had watched that face so closely for so many years she could no more describe him than she could, as a child, have described her mother or father. The shape of his face corresponded to some shape in her mind, a place to lie down and sleep and be safe.
‘I don’t care if we don’t get married,’ she said, although this was different from what she had planned to say. ‘But you’re going to have to choose.’
He sat looking at her, nodding his head. Without his face seeming to change, he began to cry.
She watched the frightening fat drops run down the creases of his tanned and ruined face. They dropped like blobs of jelly and splashed into his Cabernet Sauvignon.
‘You wouldn’t stop me seeing our child?’
‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘You’ll always be its father.’ She saw her whole adult life dissolving as she spoke. She saw what she was embarked on. Alistair could not leave his drunk, unhappy wife. He was not sufficiently strong, or cruel, and she was suddenly, as the Blue Swimmer Crabs were placed in front of her, not at all sure she wanted a child. She was cut through with fear. It pierced her like an iceberg.
Alistair did not see this fear, that she should not have a baby, that she was not suited. She never let anyone but Gia see it, but it was almost always there, and it had been present all that Monday at Catchprice Motors. At the birth class that evening there was no avoiding it. They rubbed her nose in ‘reality’ and would not let her look away.
She sat on a bean bag, surrounded by couples, and watched the videotape called ‘Belinda’s Labour’.
After thirty minutes of film time – thirty hours of real time – the baby’s head emerged. The husband’s mouth was open, staring at it. The midwife’s green-gloved hands delivered the baby. The wife saw the husband’s face and could only have read it as a banner headline shouting GRIEF. The baby was blue. Its head flopped, as if it were broken or rotten. There was a silence as if something unexpectedly, horribly wrong had happened. It was like a home movie of an assassination.
But this videotape had been selected to show the birth class. There could be nothing ‘unexpected’ in this respect. This birth happened over and over, like the hellish mechanical creatures in Disneyland who are condemned to repeat the same action eighty times a day. Someone had planned to show them this record of thirty hours of pain.
In a moment, of course, the class would criticize the husband. He was not supporting his wife. He was looking at the distressed baby. At that second, he thought the child was dead.
But all Maria could think was: I don’t want it.
She was angry and frightened, although none of the women in the room could have guessed these feelings. It was not, as they say, how she ‘presented’, which was strong and confident and often funny.
If Gia had been there, as she normally was, they would have stayed for herbal tea at the end. But Gia was not there, and although she could hardly be angry at Gia for this, it occurred to her now that Gia might, on the very night she went into labour, not be in her own bed when Maria rang for her.
Maria left the birth class without saying goodnight to anyone. The lifts were prone to jamming and there was a hand-written sign advising birth class members to use the stairs. The stairs were like Hong Kong: concrete, sweaty-smelling, guarded by heavy metal fire doors. Maria Takis clattered down them alone, like a victim in a movie.
Who will care for me?
The street was empty of people, lined with parked cars. There was a derelict man peeing in the middle of the vacant block which had once been the Crown Street Maternity Hospital. The destruction of this hospital felt both cruel and personal. She thought: I am becoming neurotic.
Her car was parked round the corner, not her car, the Tax Department’s car. She should not be driving it for private use. Once she would have thought this an important principle. Now she did not give a damn. She looked in the back seat before she unlocked the car, and then she turned on the light and looked again. Mrs Catchprice’s Japanese Bride sat propped up against a Sister Brown Baby Bath.
‘Dear God, please save me.’
15
The Blue Moon Brasserie was loud, full of clatter and shouting. Glasses broke, were swept up. The air was rich with olive oil and garlic. The Tax Inspector threaded her way through the chrome-legged chairs towards her table. She was wearing a red deco blouse and a black skirt with a red bandanna which sat above her bulging stomach. She wore a peasant print scarf around her head and silver bracelets and a necklace. In the privacy of her bedroom mirror, she had thought all of this looked fine, but now she saw how she was stared at, she felt she had made an error of judgement – she was a blimp with bangles.
The grey-aproned waiter was eighteen years old and had nicked himself shaving. He was new that day and had no idea that this pregnant woman’s emotional life was deeply enmeshed with the place he worked at. He sat her in the corner, next to the table where she had told Alistair that she was having a baby. All around her there were couples, lovers, husbands, wives. They touched each other’s sleeves, arms, hands, and were pleased with each other’s company. It was a perfectly ordinary table – square, varnished, wooden, as devoid of obvious history as a hotel bed. Then it had seen the death of an affair. Now it celebrated a birthday. Maria craned her neck towards the blackboard menu but she was really watching that table – a man with a thick neck and pouched, melancholy eyes took a small gold-wrapped box from his wife – whose face Maria could not see – and passed it to his daughter. The daugher was sixteen or so, very pretty with long dark hair.
‘Happy birthday, angel,’ her father said. He gave her a kiss and a crumpled rag of a
smile. He rubbed at the table surface, dragging bread crumbs into his cupped hand.
‘I’ve been flirting with stockbrokers,’ said Gia Katalanis, sitting down opposite Maria.
Gia was crisp and yellow in a linen suit. She dumped her files and briefcase on the floor and papers from the files spilled out towards the wall. She looked down at the papers, wrinkled her nose and shrugged.
‘I’ve been flirting with stockbrokers,’ she said again, leaning forward and taking Maria’s hands. She was small and blonde with a dusting of golden hairs along her slim, tanned arms. She smelt of shampoo and red wine. She had straight hair she always cut in a neat fringe. She had fine features, a fine chin which clearly suggested both frailty and determination. ‘Well they think they are stockbrokers,’ she said, ‘but they are used car dealers in their secret hearts. One of them is from Hale & Hennesey. We hit them for three-forty thou in back taxes, plus the fines, and I think he fell in love with me.’ She laughed. ‘Ask me is he cute.’
‘Is he cute?’
‘He’s cute.’
A champagne cork popped at the next table and they both turned to watch the champagne being poured into the sixteen-year-old’s birthday glass, then laughed at their own Pavlovian response to the cork pop.
‘These days,’ Maria said, ‘when they drink champagne in movies, I always look at the label.’
‘Me too,’ Gia said. ‘Exactly.’ She lit a St Moritz and put lipstick on its gold filter tip. ‘Heidsieck,’ she said. ‘Krug, Taittinger, Bollinger, Moët, Piper-Heidsieck …’
‘Pol Roger …’
‘Veuve Clicquot.’
‘I used to think anything with bubbles was champagne,’ Maria said. ‘When I told my mother I had drunk champagne she said, “Po po anaxyi yineka” – no one will want to marry you now.’
‘Your mother always said that.’
‘She was right, poor Mama. This would kill her if she wasn’t dead, really. Even my father. I visit him at night and I always ring first and say, “Papa I’m going to come over.” I don’t want to shame him with someone …’
