The Tax Inspector

by Peter Carey

  The guitar was a big instrument – too big to take visiting, but presumably too valuable to leave in a parked car. Cathy McPherson leaned against the doorway, on the hallway side, fiddling with the little mother-of-pearl guitar picks which were wedged in beside the tuning pegs like ticks on a cattle dog’s ear.

  If this had been an investigation Maria had wanted to pursue, this would have been the turning point. Someone was about to divulge some information or to try to cut a deal, but Maria did not want more information about the Catchprices. She wanted them out of her house, out of her life and if this was a confession, she did not want to hear it.

  She said: ‘You didn’t need to drive all this way to say sorry.’

  ‘But we didn’t come to say we were sorry.’ It was the boy again, back from wherever he had been in her house. He slid around the edge of the guitar and stood with his back to the refrigerator. His hair looked as hard and white as spun polymer.

  ‘Would you mind staying right here?’ she said. She shifted her kettle on to the hottest and fastest of her gas jets. When she looked up, his eyes were on hers.

  ‘Mrs McPherson is going to sing to you,’ he said.

  Maria looked at the woman.

  ‘I’m really a singer,’ she said. Her face was burning red.

  The boy came into the kitchen and plugged the ghetto blaster into the power point next to the kettle.

  ‘We’re people, not numbers,’ he said. He would not take his eyes off her eyes. She thought: this is the sort of thing that happens in Muslim countries – these dangerous doe-eyed boys with their heads filled with images of western whores in negligees. She looked away from him to his aunt.

  ‘So you would like to sing to me in the hope it will affect your tax assessment?’

  Cathy McPherson had the good grace to look embarrassed, but her nephew buttoned the jacket of his suit without taking his eyes away from Maria’s. ‘We think you’re human,’ he said in that nasal accent as sharp and cold as metal. He moistened his lips and smiled. For Chrissakes – he was coming on to her. ‘We want to talk to you like humans.’

  ‘O.K.,’ said Maria. ‘I’m going to make one cup of tea, then you’re going to sing, and then you’re going to get out of here because I’ve really had enough for one day.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘We’re going to present two songs.’

  ‘You can have one.’

  ‘One is fine,’ Benny unbuttoned his suit coat. ‘You can have recorded or live.’

  ‘I don’t care what it is. Just do it.’

  ‘You’d like live?’

  ‘Sure, live.’

  ‘O.K., that will be live, then.’

  He was one of those people whose personal space was too large, who could be too close to you when you were a metre from them.

  She waited for the kettle to boil, staring at it like she might have stared at the floor numbers in an elevator. When the kettle boiled she gave them tea bags of English Breakfast tea but, for herself, an infuser filled with the foul-tasting Raspberry Leaf which Gia’s naturopath said would strengthen the uterine muscles and promote a quick labour.

  The Catchprices jiggled their tea bags in silence and dropped them into the kitchen tidy she held open for them and then she shepherded them into the living-room.

  Maria sat down on the rocking chair her father had bought for her and put her feet up on the foot stool. She began to see the comic aspect of her ‘information’ and began to observe details of the Catchprices’ dress in order to tell the story properly to Gia.

  ‘Is this going to be too loud?’ she asked.

  ‘If you’re worried about noise,’ Benny said, ‘we can play you the demo tape.’

  ‘It’s just acoustic’ Cathy was trying to fit her bottom on the window-ledge opposite. She strummed a few chords, stopped, started again, and then stood up. ‘Ms Takis,’ she said, ‘it would be more polite if I sang sitting down, but I’m damned if I can get myself comfortable.’

  ‘Fine,’ Maria said.

  ‘Thank you.’ Cathy tapped her boot three times. The floor shook. It was an old wooden Balmain cottage which was badly built even in 1849.

  ‘You were a married man I know,’ she sang. The voice got Maria in the belly. It was raw, almost croaky, and way too loud for this street, this time of the morning.

  I shouldn’t have begun.

  Cathy McPherson changed physically. She became taller, straighter. The athletic armature of her body revealed itself and she rocked and rolled and showed a sexual confidence which was previously unimaginable. There was something happening in those belligerent little eyes which made her as soft as a cat rubbing itself against your leg.

  You told me you’d always love your wife

  I shouldn’t have begun.

  Thirty seconds ago she was big and blowzy like a farmer’s wife, or someone with fat burns on their sallow skin, working in a fish ’n’ chip shop at two o’clock in the morning. Her arms were still plump. Her belly still pressed against her leather skirt, but now you could not look at her without believing that this was someone who made love passionately – she was a sexual animal.

  But it was late at night and I was lonely

  I didn’t know I’d fall in love

  and now you’ve gone and left me baby

  with a freeway through my heart.

  She occupied Maria’s living-room like a compressor unit or some yellow-cased engine so loud and powerful that it demanded you accommodate yourself to it. This was what Maria did not like about it – she felt bullied on the one hand and seduced on the other. Also: the subject matter was discomforting. It seemed too close for coincidence.

  Trucks are running

  through the freeway in my heart

  Twisting sheets

  All this noise and pain

  Ten retreads hissing

  through the driving rain.

  Just as the second verse was about to start, the singer saw Maria’s face and stopped.

  Maria said: ‘Thank you.’

  Cathy shrugged.

  Maria said: ‘How do you think this could affect my work?’

  Cathy opened her mouth, then shut it, frowned, rubbed her bedraggled hair. ‘This doesn’t make a pinch of difference to anything does it?’

  ‘No, it can’t.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘What the hell could I do?’ said Maria, angrily. ‘What sort of corrupt person do you want me to be? Are you going to try to bribe me now?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ And Cathy was sorry; at the same time she was angry. She was sorry she had placed herself in such a foolish position.

  ‘If I cared more for Country music I could say something intelligent about your song.’

  ‘You don’t like Country music?’

  ‘Not a lot, no.’

  ‘I think you do,’ Cathy said. ‘But you’re like your sort of person.’

  Maria did not ask what her sort of person was.

  ‘You are moved by it. Allow me to know that. Allow me to judge what an audience is feeling. I saw you: you were moved by it. What did you tell yourself about it? Oh I mustn’t be moved. This is masochistic? Women like you always say “masochistic” when they feel things.’

  ‘O.K., I was moved.’

  ‘You’re saying that but what you’re trying to tell me is that you weren’t moved at all.’ Cathy said, sitting down. She sat on the edge of the sofa where Alistair and Maria used to make love. He used to kneel on the carpet there and she put her legs around his neck and opened up to him full of juice – she would get so wet all her thighs would be shining in the firelight and now there was a damn Catchprice sitting there holding a Gibson by the neck and another one watching and they were like burglars in her life.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Cathy said. ‘I’m a real banana to be here but I’ll tell you something for your future reference – Country music is about those places people like you drive past and patronize. You come to Franklin and you’ve decided, before you even get of
f the F4, that we are all retards and losers – unemployed, unemployable. Then you find we have an art gallery and some of us actually read books and you are very impressed. What you’ve just been listening to is poetry, but all you could hear was, oh, Country & Western. What I like about Country music is that it never patronizes anyone, not even single mothers.’

  ‘We’re not numbers,’ Benny said.

  Cathy looked up at Benny as if she had forgotten he was there. She sighed, but said nothing. She needed something stronger than a cup of tea.

  ‘We’re people,’ said Benny.

  Cathy looked at him again. He was not wilted or defeated. He was standing upright in the corner. Good for you, she thought. ‘You go ahead with this audit of yours,’ she told the Tax Inspector, ‘and I’ll be stuck in that shit-heap for the rest of my damn life just keeping them all alive. You go ahead, I’ll never get to sing except in pubs within a 100-kilometre radius. I should have just walked out when I had the business healthy. “Guilt-free”. That’s a song I wrote. “Guilt-free,” but if we get in strife with the tax, then I’m lumbered with the responsibility of a mother who hates me and a brother who refuses to sell a motor car because he wants to punish his Daddy for being a creep.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Maria said. ‘It doesn’t help.’

  ‘I’m going to lose my band and my damn name,’ said Cathy, her lower lip quivering.

  Maria stood up. She hoped the woman would not cry. ‘Catchprice Motors is in the computer with an “active” designation,’ she said gently. ‘Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t take it out.’

  ‘I believe you,’ Cathy stood up. ‘Come on, Benny. Enough’s enough.’

  Now they were really going, Maria let herself look at the boy again. He caught her eye and did up his suit jacket and smiled. He did have an extraordinary face. If you saw it in a magazine you would pause to admire it – its mixture of innocence and decadence was very sexy – in a magazine.

  ‘I’ll see you around,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll see her in the morning,’ said his aunt. ‘Which is now.’

  ‘Yes, which is now,’ Maria stood.

  She shepherded the singer along the corridor to the front door. In a moment they would be gone. The boy was behind her. Maria was so convinced that he was about to put a guiding hand on the small of her back that she put her own hand there to push it off.

  At the front door, Cathy McPherson turned, and stopped. She was solid, immovable. She looked at Maria with her little blue eyes which somehow connected to the heart that had written the words of that song. Not ‘small’ eyes or ‘mean’ eyes, but certainly demanding and needful of something she could not have expressed. Her breath smelt of alcohol. She said: ‘When I was thirty-two I was ready to go out on the road. I mean, I wasn’t a baby any more. Then my father died, and my mother sort of made it impossible for me to leave.’

  Maria could feel the boy behind. She could feel him like a shadow that lay across her back. She was too tired to listen to this confession but the eyes demanded that she must. They monitored her response.

  ‘I can’t tell you how my mother did it, but she made me stay. I was the one who was going to save the business. And I did save it and then my mother decided I was getting too big for my boots and she turned on me, and I would have gone then, except I could not walk away and see it crash. I’m a real fool, Ms Takis, a prize number one specimen fool. If you fine us, I’ll be stuck there. I won’t be able to leave them.’

  It would have seemed false to be her comforter and her tormentor as well. So even when she began to cry all Maria did was offer her a Kleenex and pat her alien shoulder. She wanted her to leave the house. She took the guitar from her and together the three of them walked up Datchett Street.

  At Darling Street she shook hands first with Cathy McPherson and then she turned to the boy. He said: ‘You can’t just abandon us, you know.’

  Cathy said: ‘Come on, Benny.’

  ‘No, she understands me. She’s got a heart. She understands what I’m saying.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Cathy McPherson said. She grabbed his arm, and pulled him up the street. Maria could hear them hissing at each other as she walked back to her front door.

  Tuesday

  30

  At Catchprice Motors they called a potential customer a ‘Prospect’, and as the big black cumulus clouds rolled in from the west and the first thunder of the day made itself heard above the pot-hole thump of the Fast-Mix Concrete trucks heading north towards the F4, Benny hooked a live one. It was a Tuesday, the second day of Benny’s new life.

  He found the Prospect there at eight-thirty, crunching around in the gravel beside the Audi Quattro. Benny made no sudden movements, but when the Prospect found the Quattro’s door was locked, Benny was able to come forward and unlock it for him.

  ‘Thank you,’ the Prospect said.

  ‘No worries,’ Benny said, holding the black-trimmed door open and releasing a heady perfume of paint and leather. The driver’s seat made a small expensive squeak as it took the Prospect’s weight. The white paper carpet-protector rumpled beneath grey slip-ons whose little gold chains made Benny take them for Guccis. The guy folded his hands in his lap and asked to be given ‘the selling points’. Benny had not slept all night – he had been working on one more angle in his campaign to seduce the Tax Inspector – but now all of his gritty-eyed tiredness went away and the fibreglass splinters in his arms stopped itching and he squatted on the gravel beside the open door and talked about the Quattro for five minutes without lying once. He watched the Prospect as he spoke. He waited for signs of boredom, some indication that he should shift the venue, alter the approach, but the guy was treating this like information he just had to have. After twenty minutes, Benny’s knees were hurting and he had run out of stuff to say.

  Then the Prospect got out of the Quattro. Then he and Benny stood side by side and looked at it together. The Prospect was five foot six, maybe five foot seven – shorter than Benny, but broader in the shoulders. He played sport, you could see it in the way he balanced on the balls of his feet. He had a broad nose, almost like a boxer’s, but you could not call him ugly. He was good-looking, in fact. He had a dark velvet suit and a small tuft of black hair – you could not call it a beard – sitting underneath his lower lip. He was twenty-two, maybe twenty-five years old, and he had Guccis on his feet and he was looking up at Benny – what a wood duck!

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘When do we do the test drive?’

  ‘Hey,’ said Benny, ‘don’t panic.’ The truth was: he was unlicensed. They would kill him if they saw him demo this unit. He was going to do it none the less, but gentlee gentlee catchee monkey – he had to wait for Mort who was sitting in a Commodore by the front office. He was hunched over in the seat reading out the engine functions on the computerized diagnostic device – the Compu-tech.

  ‘The thing you’ve got to appreciate about an Audi,’ Benny said, ‘is nothing is rushed. They rush to make all this G.M. shit, but not an Audi.’

  ‘I have something for you,’ the Prospect said.

  Benny did not notice what he had. He was watching Mort unplug the Tech II and put it in his back pocket.

  The Prospect was occupied with a separate matter – withdrawing a sleek silver envelope from his inside jacket pocket.

  ‘Here,’ he said.

  He held it out to Benny.

  Benny took the envelope. What do you want?

  The Prospect smiled. Benny was spooked by his black eyes.

  ‘You have good taste in ties,’ the Prospect said. ‘I’m sure you will like this one.’

  The envelope held a black and silver and green tie.

  Benny felt a tingling at the back of his neck.

  ‘Silk,’ said Sarkis.

  Benny looked up at the eyes and then down at the tie.

  ‘I’ll buy it,’ he said. He had a boner. He did not want a boner. He did not want a gift or come in his mouth, but the man’s eyes were like a sore tooth he cou
ld not keep from touching.

  ‘No, it’s a sample,’ said Sarkis. ‘I made it.’

  Benny smiled at the Prospect. He wet his lips and smiled.

  ‘You make ties?’ he asked.

  ‘There are no good ties in Australia,’ said Sarkis, who was as impressed with Benny’s haircut as Benny had been with Sarkis’s shoes. You needed to be making big money to maintain a cut like that. ‘There’s a big market waiting for these ties. What I need is the capital to do it in a bigger way. Here … have it … It’s a gift.’

  The man held the packet out with one hand. The other hand he kept behind his back. He flexed his knees and looked out at the street trees with their pretty red-dotted lichen-encrusted leaves and their hairy, mossy trunks. They were side by side. Benny could feel the space between them.

  ‘A present? Just for nothing?’

  ‘For good luck,’ said Sarkis, ‘on my first day here.’

  ‘First day?’

  ‘I’m sorry …’ Sarkis said, suddenly confused.

  ‘First day? Come on, what are you saying to me. What are you proposing?’

  ‘Working here,’ said Sarkis. ‘I’m sorry. I was hired to work here. She said someone would come and fill me in.’

  ‘Got it,’ said Benny. He felt a pain in his stomach. He watched his father nurse the Commodore slowly out along the brown-puddled service road. All the fibreglass splinters in his arms began to itch. ‘Who hired you? Mrs McPherson?’

  ‘The owner hired me,’ said Sarkis. ‘The old lady.’

  This was exactly how Howie got into Catchprice Motors and it made Benny get a freezing feeling behind his eyes. ‘Oh shit,’ he laughed. ‘You got hired by Grandma.’ He tapped his forehead and rolled his eyes.

  ‘She’s got the keys,’ Sarkis said. ‘I saw her.’

  ‘She’s got the keys because she’s got the keys – she doesn’t own the business.’