The Tax Inspector

by Peter Carey

  For a while Sarkis sat at the kitchen table and cut out more fabric for ties. The fabric he was cutting was 100 per cent French silk. It was dark green with hard-edge motifs in silver and black. He concentrated hard on the cutting because the fabric was beautiful, because it had been expensive, and because he was angry and did not want to see what was happening on the other side of the servery door where the taxi-driver was adjusting his pants. It made him ill to think of that thing being put inside his mother.

  The taxi-driver smelled of unwashed sweat. His mother did not know shit about men. She took the taxi-driver to show him her wedding pictures. They were in the bedroom. He could hear her light young voice – she was still only thirty-six – as it named the members of the wedding party. The names were of Armenians who had once lived in the suburbs of Teheran. She talked about them as if they were certainly alive.

  Tomorrow she would tell Sarkis all the good things she had found out about the taxi-driver – he was kind, he supported his sick father or he was a bad dancer but had read her palm ‘sensitively’. She would not learn that the taxi-driver cruised the Franklin streets which were named after jewels putting his dick wherever there was isolation and desperation. He could have AIDS. His mother did not even think of this possibility. Instead she opened up her miniatures. She showed him wedding pictures. She pointed out Sarkis’s father to the taxi-driver. She said how handsome he was, like Paul McCartney.

  Earlier, in the living-room, she told the taxi-driver he looked like George Harrison. This made the taxi-driver smile. It was extraordinary to see. It was impossible to know why he smiled, whether from pleasure or because he could see how ridiculous it was.

  Sarkis put down his scissors and folded the fabric. Then he went out to sit on the back steps which were farthest from the bedroom and where the noise of the trucks on the Sydney road drowned out the various noises of the night. Sarkis was normally optimistic. He could lose three jobs and not be beaten. He could be angry and irritable, but he always had a way forward. He was a member of a race which could not be destroyed. He had energy, intelligence, resilience, enthusiasm.

  But tonight he was oppressed by his circumstances: he could not get a job, a girl friend or even a sewing machine. He could not even telephone his friends in Chatswood.

  It was in this mental state that he saw Mrs Catchprice standing at the bottom of the yard. He thought it might be someone from the Commonwealth Employment Service come to take his dole away because they were already paying benefits to his mother.

  ‘Hey,’ he said.

  The figure waved, a tinkly little wave from the wrist. Did not look like the C.E.S.

  ‘Who’s that?’ He picked up a Sidchrome spanner for protection.

  ‘I’m a ghost.’

  Sarkis felt prickly on the neck. Then a match flared and he saw an old woman with a cigarette stuck to her pouting lower lip. She had a big black leather handbag in the crook of her arm, a pink floral dress and a transparent plastic raincoat. ‘We had a poultry farm for twenty years,’ she said. He could smell the meat-fat smell then, from that far away, the Aussie smell, as distinctive as their back yard clothes-lines with their frivolous flags of T-shirts, board shorts and frilly underwear, so different from Armenian washing which was big and practical – sheets, rugs, blankets, grey work trousers and cotton twill shirts.

  ‘You’re not a very good ghost,’ he told her. He stood, and stepped down into the yard.

  ‘I’m damned near old enough,’ said Mrs Catchprice, dropping the lit match on to the sodden ground where it sizzled and went out. ‘I’ll be eighty-six in March. You might find it hard to imagine, but we had two thousand birds and this was just the bottom of the property. There was a little natural pond here and a stand of Gymea lilies. I was going to have a flower farm, but there was better money in poultry then, so it ended up being poultry. You had some here yourself, I think … last week?’

  ‘The Health Department made us kill them.’

  ‘You’re better off without them. There is nothing nice about poultry. The smell of plucked feathers makes me nauseous now. Who washed the chook-poo off the eggs? Your mother I suppose. I always washed the eggs. I sat at the kitchen table with a bucket and a bowl. You never forget the smell of it on your fingers.’

  ‘I’ve found your cigarettes here,’ said Sarkis. ‘You smoke Salem. You just take a few drags and throw them away. Do you come from the nursing home?’

  ‘I’m Mrs Catchprice.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Are you local?’ asked Mrs Catchprice, coming forward to peer at the good-looking young man by the light of the kitchen window. ‘You must know Catchprice Motors.’

  He did. He had bought a fuel pump there once from a woman in a cowgirl suit. ‘And that’s where you live?’

  ‘And where needs be I must wearily return,’ said Mrs Catchprice, throwing her Salem in among the Hydrangeas. ‘Don’t you find the nights are sad?’

  ‘I’ll walk you to your car,’ said Sarkis.

  ‘Car!’ said Mrs Catchprice, straightening her back and tilting her chin. ‘Car. I have no car. I walk.’

  Walk? Sarkis was young and strong, but he would never walk at night alone in Franklin. There were homeless kids wandering around with beer cans full of petrol. They saw fiery worms and faces spewing blood. They did not know what they were doing.

  ‘I think I’ll walk with you a bit of the way,’ Sarkis said.

  ‘How lovely,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘I didn’t catch your name?’

  ‘Sarkis Alaverdian.’ He was scared. He slipped the Sidchrome spanner into his back pocket. He thought: her family should be ashamed.

  17

  Mrs Catchprice did not stand in Sarkis’s back yard in order to employ him. Yet if she had set out that night with no other purpose than to rescue a life from the asbestos sheet houses in the real estate development she had once planned, this would have been consistent with her character.

  In the days when Catchprice Motors had sold combine harvesters and baling twine, she had taken boys from the Armvale Homes, girls in trouble with the police. She had given them positions of trust, placed a shoplifter in charge of petty cash, for instance. She was erratic – loud in her trust on the one hand but vigilant and even suspicious on the other. She was ready to ascribe to her protégés schemes and deceptions too complex and Machiavellian for anyone but her to conceive of, and yet she could manage, in the same breath, to think of them as ‘good kids’. She was sentimental and often patronizing (she spoke loudly of her beneficiaries in their presence) and what is amazing is not that a few of them never forgave her for it, but that most of them were so grateful for her patronage that they did not even notice.

  Mrs Catchprice was their lucky break. Some of them even loved her. And Howie, who had been one, could – despite the complications of his Catchprice-weary heart – still say, ‘You old chook,’ and smile. The first time he ever saw a T-bone steak was at Mrs Catchprice’s table. The first time he took a shit where you could lock the door was in that apartment which was now his home. He was an orphan from Armvale Boys’ Farm. He was given Mort’s Hornby ‘OO’ train set when Mrs Catchprice decided Mort had grown out of it. That was her style. She gave away Cathy’s teddy bear without asking her, not to Howie, to someone else.

  Even now, when she no longer had either an executive position or a majority shareholding, it did not take a lot to tip Frieda Catchprice into charity, and when she stood in Sarkis’s backyard on that red loam earth which should have been her flower farm but which had supported instead two thousand laying hens in twenty-three separate electrically heated sheds, charity was the emollient she automatically applied to the sadness she felt. She reached for it, almost without thinking, much as she always pecked at her honey and Saltata crackers in the hope that one more smear of Leatherwood honey might finally remove that metallic taste in her stomach which she secretly and wrongly believed was caused by cancer.

  She was a ghost. She told him she was a
ghost as a joke, but she meant all her jokes. This is how it was with ghosts – you stood in one life, but you could see another. You were in one world, but not part of it. You visited your past mistakes and tried to undo them. You held your babies to your breasts and suckled them. You sponged them through their fevered nights. You petted them and wept, knowing you were doing something wrong that would result in them growing up without properly loving you.

  Sarkis’s backyard was a corner of the second piece of land she had wanted to grow flowers on. It had been within her grasp but what had she done? First she had turned it into a poultry farm, and then she had turned it into a housing development. These things had made her ‘Mrs Catchprice’ but she had wanted neither of them. It was Cacka who wanted them. He aspired to poultry farming like other people dreamed of a beach house or an imported Chevrolet Bel-aire. No one aspired to poultry farms. It was something poor battlers did in the rough scrub outside town, a desperate part-time occupation. It was never clear how the passion for it entered Cacka’s head, but if you went to live at his family’s orange-primed bungalow out at Donvale and listened to the never-ending argument, you would get an education in egg marketing, and one of the first things Frieda learned (after discovering which was Old Mrs Catchprice’s seat) was that the Egg Marketing Board were a pack of little Hitlers who wanted you to pay them fourpence a dozen and wouldn’t let you sell direct to shops without a special permit.

  She also learned, pretty damn smart, that Cacka’s mother had no time for chooks.

  ‘I hope you ain’t an Oprey singer,’ she said to Frieda. ‘I told him already, we won’t have Oprey or the chooks.’

  Her boys thought this was very funny, everyone except for Cacka who sat beside his fiancée at the kitchen table, blushing bright red.

  Poultry was one of the few species of livestock Old Mrs Catchprice had no time for, and even at sixty-five she was plotting new ways to make a living from her fifty acres and her three strong boys. She had Romney Marsh, some Border Cross, ten Jerseys with some odd scars where you might expect a brand to be, poll Herefords, and half-a-dozen sows she thought Frieda might like to take an interest in. She had the resprayed Ferguson tractor Hughie brought home one night without explaining. She had Cacka and the youngest brother, Billie, advertised in the Gazette as fencing contractors. Also, the family had a few acres given over to wheat and had traded cases of apples with de Kok’s grocery until there were complaints about their codlin-moth infestation.

  The Catchprices were in the habit of listening to the Country Hour each day at lunch. They came in across the treeless, car-littered Home Paddock to the bungalow and sat around the electric-blue Laminex table brushing the flies off their serious faces, drinking black tea – they had no midday meal – and listening to the market prices delivered in a proper English accent.

  It didn’t matter what the prices were – they were always broke. That was Cacka’s point to them, and he never let up no matter how they spoke to him. He was not thick-skinned, but he was persistent. When he wanted something he talked about it in that ‘cooing’ way, talk and talk, on and on, rubbing his big dirt-dry hands together and smiling sadly and looking at you with his brown eyes, talking on and on until you would give him anything he wanted. He sat at the table in that depressing bright-orange weatherboard bungalow propped on its ‘temporary’ concrete blocks in the middle of the barren paddock and he folded his arms across his big chest and tilted back on a battered chrome chair and talked on and on about the future in a way that would have seemed almost insane were it not for the fact that he had been smart enough to have Frieda McClusky there to listen to him.

  And while it is true that Frieda did not want chooks any more than the old lady did, she loved him, and loved him in a more tender and protective way than she would have imagined possible. She could not bear to see him want a thing like that and just not have it. All her instinct warned her about poultry, even then, before she heard of battery farming. But she had needs even stronger than her instincts and she pressed her little breasts against his big back each night and put her arms around him and squeezed her thigh up in around his furry backside and knew that it was up to her to get him his chook farm.

  She would spend all her life going over these events, thinking of how it might have been otherwise. She thought it self-deceiving to give herself too much credit for love. What she remembered was how much she had wanted to escape that musty confinement of one more family, that sour, closed smell like a mouse nest in a bush-hut wall. She gave this prominence in her memory, and it was true, of course, but she was wrong to discount the effects of love.

  Also, she wanted Cacka to admire her, and sometimes she made this need for admiration the only reason she had sacrificed the perfect flower farm to wire netting and chook shit and the Egg Marketing Board of New South Wales.

  Also: there was gelignite. She had a passion to let it off with her mother-in-law watching. She wanted to split wood and shatter earth and frighten her and make her go away.

  Also: to hurt herself, to fill herself brimful of blame and rage. She wanted to make the damned earth bleed. See. See. See what you made me go and do.

  It was old Huey Dawson who showed her the land – eight o’clock in the morning and all the dew so heavy they were drenched just walking through it: grass, Watsonias, wild roses drifted there from God knows where, stands of spotted gums with pale, pale green trunks so slippery they would make you cry. It was five acres cut off from the bottom of old Doctor Andes’s property and it had never seen a cow on it. There were tiny bush orchids and native grasses with seeds like yellow tear drops – it had probably been that way for ever. It was lot 5, folio 14534 being parcel 54 of the parish of Franklin. It had vendor finance of 5 per cent and no deposit and she had to take Cacka to it (along the straight, soft, sandy road where the overgrown acacias brushed the edges of the ute and made him anxious about the powdery duco) and when he resisted because he was actually frightened of the financial commitment and was ready to run back to the bungalow and listen to stock prices on the radio, she showed him how he could make a good business on this piece of land: three acres for chooks, one acre for the lucerne, maize and oats. She had the idea – it was original, she read it nowhere – of building the brick building where they cooled down the hens in heat waves. She did not mean to insist that she was smarter than he was, but when she saw his scheme about to flounder, she panicked. It must happen, it had to happen, she would not let him fail.

  It was the beginning of a pattern – every time she helped him get something he wanted, a poultry farm, a car dealership, she drove him further from her. She was the one who talked him into that damn poultry farm when it was the last thing on earth she wanted.

  This was the site of Catchprice Poultry – Cacka and Frieda Catchprice were to be the first ones west of Sydney with battery farming. And although she entered into the business as a full partner with her husband she had no idea what battery farming was and had not appreciated the consequences.

  Now she knew. Men can do this sort of thing and not think about it. They can cut the chickens’ beaks, and amputate their legs if necessary. They can walk out into the shed every day for ten years and see and smell those rows of caged birds and not think about it any more than how nicely the eggs roll into the conveyor belt and how clean they are. Nothing wrong with this – Frieda did not feel censorious about men’s ability to disconnect their feelings. She thought it useful. God had planned it so one half of humanity could kill the food, the other half could nurture the young.

  But what she was too young to know, what she learned later, was that it was damned silly for a woman to do men’s work, by which she meant work that entailed a denial of female feelings – killing people in war, working in slaughter houses, putting chooks in rows in cages. This was something men can do and it will have no harmful effects for them.

  But it sends a woman’s chemicals into conflict. This was how she got breast cancer – that poultry farm. She never told any
one this, but shocked Cacka and the doctor on the eve of her mastectomy by saying, ‘Take them both off.’

  She could see the idiots thought she was unnatural, that she had got so used to ordering Cacka around that she now wanted to be a man. Did they think she wanted to lose breasts? To spend the rest of her life with these huge scars like plastic sandwich wrapper?

  Cacka could be weepy and sentimental about her breasts, but Frieda Catchprice was an animal caught in a trap, eating through its own limbs. She was poisoned and wanted to be free from the parts that would kill her. And sure enough, there was a second mastectomy – the one they so confidently told her she didn’t need to have – another five years later.

  When Frieda Catchprice stood in Sarkis Alaverdian’s back yard, she ran over and over all these events, looking for a crack in the story, a place where she might have acted differently and have come to a different place. She worked up and down the events, like a fly trying to find its way through glass to air.

  The trucks thundered over the Sydney Road overpass above the 60 × 120-ft blocks which had been sold thirty years before as Catchprice Heights. The streets were named Albert, Frieda, Cathleen, Mortimer, Jack. It was the Catchprice Estate that Sarkis Alaverdian was now a prisoner of. And it was now Mrs Catchprice, walking with him back to Catchprice Motors, who determined to set him free.

  ‘Do you have a suit?’ she asked.

  18

  It was only after they had escaped from Vernon Street (where the twelve-year-olds were ripping the insignia off a Saab Turbo) that Mrs Catchprice offered Sarkis a job as a salesman. Sarkis had seen the twelve-year-olds too late to avoid them and he did not wish to turn round or even cross the street because it was like running, like blood in the water, and he had no choice but to continue walking. Three of them were sitting on a white-railed garden fence. Two were perched on the Saab’s hood. The space they left to walk through was bordered by the bright white stones of their naked kneecaps.