by Peter Carey
‘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.’
28
Cathy was in this ridiculous position because she had done what Benny had said. She could not stand being told what to do by anyone, and she was here because Benny told her to be there – little frightened, crying Benny whom she used to take into bed and soothe to sleep – Benny who ground his teeth – Benny who wet his bed – Benny who did so badly at school she had to take him to Special Needs to have his I.Q. tested.
Now the alcohol had worn off and she was following the Tax Inspector into her house holding her guitar. She knew right away this woman had no personal connection with Benny. He had dreamed it. He had manufactured it inside his head.
Benny came behind her carrying his cassette player. He was smiling, not at anything or for anything, but smiling like an evangelist on television. He had been like this already when he had appeared in front of her. That was at ten o’clock and she had had a row with Howie about all the songs he had copyrighted ‘Big Mack’, and she had been sitting up drinking Scotch and Coke by herself because she was upset – about her mother, about the tax audit, about the ownership of songs she had written but now might not own, about the shambles she had made of her life – and Benny crept up the stairs – she had The Judds’ version of ‘Mr Pain’ playing really loud – and gave her such a fright. He just appeared in the kitchen in front of her and spoke. She nearly shat herself.
He said, ‘What are you doing to control your destiny?’
As if he read her mind.
He stood before her in his fancy suit and folded his hands in front of his crotch. The hands were even more amazing than the suit. She could not help staring at them – so white and clean like they had been peeled of history.
His hair shone like polyester in the neon light and when he spoke, it was in a language not his own – his mother’s perhaps (although who could remember after all this time how Sophie spoke?). In any case, it was not the language of a problem child, not someone whose I.Q. you worry about.
He said: ‘I can take you to talk to the Tax Inspector.’
Normally she would have poured him a drink and tried to talk him out of it, whatever the latest ‘it’ was. But she was dazzled, no other word for the experience. She turned off The Judds.
He said: ‘Her name is Takis. There are only three in the phone book and I’ve ruled out the other two. She’s not back yet because I’ve been ringing her every twenty minutes to check.’ He wiped some perspiration from his lip with a handkerchief with a small gold brand-name still stuck in the corner.
She had sipped some more of her Scotch. Howie always said the Coke killed the Scotch but she could taste it. ‘Ben, what’s happened to you?’
‘Getting fired was the best thing ever happened to me,’ he said. She started to say sorry – and she was sorry – it was the worst thing she’d ever had to do – but he held up his hand to stop her. ‘I’ve come to repay the favour,’ he said.
She pushed out a chair for him but he would not sit. He grasped the back of the chair with his hands and rocked it back and forth.
‘You can see I’ve changed?’
‘You could have been your Mum,’ she said.
He nodded his head and smiled at her. His eyes held hers. They were as clear as things washed in river water. ‘We all possess great power,’ he said. Jesus Christ – he gave her goose-bumps.
‘Get your guitar,’ he said. Not ‘please’ or ‘would you mind’, just ‘get your guitar’.
Later she told Howie: ‘It was like your dog stood up and talked to you. If the dog said get your guitar, you would. Just to see what happened next.’ She lied about dog. She did not think dog at all. What she was thinking of was that holy picture where the angel appears to Mary. Only later she said dog.
She sneaked into the bedroom where Howie was asleep, straight up and down on his back – taught himself to do it in a narrow bed. She got down the Gibson. She brought it back into the kitchen and he was trying to unplug the ghetto blaster from over the sink. He had all the power cords tangled – toaster, kettle, blender.
‘Benny, I don’t know this is smart,’ she said.
‘What’s smart? Waiting here so you get busted?’ He pulled the ghetto blaster cord clear of the mess and wound it round his wrist. ‘Spending the rest of your life stuck here paying off the tax bill? You want to stay here till you die?’
She saw it. She felt it. Some tight band clamped around her stomach.
‘The Tax Inspector likes me,’ he said. ‘That’s the key to everything.’
‘You talked to her?’
‘It’s personal. We’re going to call on her in a personal capacity. Come on Cathy – she’s kind. She’s a very kind person.’
‘She sure doesn’t feel kind about me.’
‘You have the power,’ Benny insisted. ‘I’ll introduce
you properly. She is going to see who you are. We are going to show her your life.’
‘My life?’
‘Our lives have power,’ he said. ‘You’re an artist. What was it Ernest Tubb wrote to you?’
‘Oh, Ernest Tubb …’
‘You have the talent to … ?
‘The ability to change the rhythms of the human heart.’
‘Right. Ability. Plus: she’s pregnant. She’s full of milk.’
‘Benny,’ Cathy smiled, ‘there’s no milk till there’s a baby.’
‘O.K.,’ Benny said impatiently. ‘Forget that bit. Once she understands the consequences of her actions, she’ll go easy on you. Sing her a song. Show her who you are. You’ve got to sell her. You’ve got to demonstrate what’s at stake here. Come with me,’ he said.
And she did.
But now the alcohol had worn off and she felt sour and dehydrated and she just wanted to apologize. She stood on one side of the Tax Inspector’s neat white kitchen, filled with shame. Maria Takis was holding a shining metal kettle. Cathy admired ‘nice things’ although she did not own many and the obvious quality of the kettle, its good taste, its refinement, the sort of shop it must have come from, all this somehow made the intrusion worse. Cathy felt coarse and vulgar. She had not even washed her hair before she left.
‘Ms Takis,’ she said, although she hated to hear herself say ‘Ms’. ‘I think I’ve made a big mistake. I’m sorry. But I was really horrible to you this morning and it’s been on my mind and I just wanted to say how sorry I was. I know you’ve got your job to do.’
She said she was sorry. She made herself small. But there was no relief. All it did was make the woman look at her as if she was a frigging ant.
29
Cathy McPherson came back from the bathroom smelling of Elizabeth Arden and whisky. She wore her chamois leather cowgirl suit with high-heeled boots with spurs. Her waistcoat cut into her big fleshy arms. She stood in the kitchen doorway with her huge guitar and her little white hands and sent confusing signals with her eyes.
