The Tax Inspector

by Peter Carey

  ‘This isn’t what you want,’ she said. ‘You don’t do this to someone you like.’

  ‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘You don’t even know what I’m going to do to you.’

  ‘This isn’t what you want,’ she repeated.

  ‘Shut up,’ he screamed. ‘I’m the one in charge.’

  Her eyes just seemed to narrow. When he saw her go like this, he knew he would have to make her cry.

  ‘Don’t tell me what I want,’ he said. ‘I know what I want.’

  He would have to make her soft.

  She said it again: ‘This isn’t what you want.’

  ‘You don’t get it,’ he said. ‘I visualized what is happening now. I committed. With a witness. Everything I commit to, I do. This is why I am a success.’

  ‘You committed? You made an affirmation, is that what you mean? You sent away for the tape?’ She stepped towards him. He pushed back at her with the gun. ‘You paid five hundred dollars?’ she said.

  ‘You think I can’t afford it?’

  Oh dear God, I am part of Benny Catchprice’s affirmation.

  ‘Benny, am I your objective?’

  ‘Mind your own business. How do you know about this stuff?’

  ‘What was your Desire?’

  ‘You bitch. Don’t you do this. Don’t you steal my stuff.’

  ‘I was your Desire?’

  ‘I am an angel. I’m a fucking angel now.’ He was standing and shouting. She had all her clothes on. He was almost fucking starkers. ‘I am an angel.’ He screamed at her. It was his mad act. He was a demon. He made himself dribble. ‘Ask me what angel I am.’

  He had the gun up, pointed at her head.

  Maria Takis knew she would have to die. Another contraction was here already, so soon. She felt the pain coming into the dark cloud of her present terror.

  Benny Catchprice was still yelling: ‘Ask me! Ask me!’

  She managed to say: ‘What angel are you?’

  ‘Angel of lust,’ he said. He licked his lips. ‘Angel of fire.’

  ‘You’re going to have to kill me,’ she said. ‘You know that. If you think you’re going to put me on that thing, you’re going to have to kill me. That means you’ll kill my baby too.’

  ‘No.’ He exploded. He was a spider, a lethal creature with his long shapely hairless legs protruding from a black silk carapace. He shoved his gun forward at her face. She screwed up her face against the darkness of the barrel, but then she saw him change his mind. He lowered the gun, and slapped her face. Her head jolted sideways and she felt a searing pain down her side. He did it again, so lights exploded against the screen of her retina. She stumbled and fell. ‘Don’t you ever, don’t you ever even think of it.’

  On the floor, she scraped her arm across a board and found her hand in tepid water. It touched something – a bar, a rod. She grasped it. He took a step back and she clambered to her feet, holding out her weapon: a tyre lever, slimy with rust. She hardly recognized the voice that came from her throat. ‘You come near me,’ she shouted, ‘I’ll break your arm.’

  She was breathing hard. The pain came again. It was a tight hard pain, so hard she could not have talked if she had wanted to.

  ‘You don’t like me,’ he said. ‘I like you but you don’t like me. What’s the matter? What’s the matter?’

  The matter was the pain. ‘Shut up.’

  ‘I am my word,’ Benny said. ‘You’ve got to understand that – I committed.’

  Behind her she heard the door handle rattle, a light tap on the cellar door.

  Thank God. Dear God please save me.

  ‘It’s me, Vish,’ a voice said. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Piss off.’

  ‘Benny, you got to get out.’

  ‘I’m not getting out.’

  Maria screamed through the middle of her contraction. Benny lifted the gun towards her and she swung the bar hard at him. She missed.

  ‘You got to get out. This place is going to go sky-high.’

  Maria screamed again. ‘Help me!’

  Benny waved the sawn-off gun at Maria Takis while he shouted at the door. ‘I don’t need you, you fucking sell-out, you Jesus creep.’

  ‘I’m coming in,’ said Vish.

  There was no warning: the shot gun exploded and blew a splintered hole in the wooden door. Shot rattled and ricocheted around the cellar. Maria felt a hot stinging in her upper arm, her waist, her thigh, her calf.

  She looked at Benny Catchprice as he walked towards the door, bleeding from the cheek. He opened the door, but there was no one there. He turned back to her.

  ‘What do you think I am?’ he said.

  She did not understand the question.

  ‘I don’t want to hurt the baby,’ he said.

  ‘Shut up.’ She panted. She did not want to pant. She did not want to let him know what was happening to her. But now the pain was so bad she had no choice but to pant through it. She had the iron bar. He took the gun into his right hand, but then he put it down.

  ‘You think I’m an animal, because I live here. I wouldn’t hurt your baby.’

  The pain was going.

  ‘You’re doing it now,’ she said. She saw it frightened him. ‘You’re hurting the baby right now, this minute. You’re killing it.’

  ‘No,’ he shouted.

  ‘I’m having the baby now,’ she said. ‘It’s coming.’

  She saw his face. He was a child again, undecided. His mouth opened.

  ‘This is very serious,’ she said.

  ‘Shut up, I know.’

  Maria lowered the iron bar. ‘You get me out of here right now,’ she said. ‘You can save this baby if you want to.’

  Thursday

  58

  Vish’s arm was like a run-over cat. It did not hurt. He could see pieces of white among the red. He thought: bone. The red ran through the yellow robe like paint on unsized canvas. He felt the blood drip on to his foot. It felt warm, oddly pleasant.

  He walked up the steps from Benny’s cellar, crossed the old lube bay and went straight on up the stairs to Cathy’s flat. He banged on the door and walked right on in. He was hollering even going across the kitchen. ‘Get out,’ he said. ‘She’s going to do it.’

  He turned on the lights in their bedroom. They had no air-conditioning on account of Howie’s asthma. They were lying on top of the sheets. Howie was bright purple across his chest. He had a fat ugly penis with a ragged uncircumcised foreskin. Cathy was wearing an outsize T-shirt with ‘Cotton Country’ written on it.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’ He meant there was blood dripping on their shag pile carpet.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Howie asked. He was fishing in the drawer for his underpants. His back was white. He had no arse to talk of.

  ‘Hurry,’ Vish said.

  He shepherded them through their kitchen. There were big splashes from his arm across the floor. ‘She’s crazy. She’s blowing us all up.’

  ‘What did she do to you?’ Cathy said. She was looking at his arm. She thought Gran had hurt his arm. She wanted to tie a bandage but he pushed her away with his good arm.

  ‘Run,’ he said. ‘The fuses are burning.’

  This was not true.

  Howie had underpants on. Cathy’s shirt came to her knees. They came down the stairs to the lube bay and hippety hopped across the bright-lit gravel like people walking barefoot from their car to a beach.

  Granny was at the bottom of her fire escape still holding the roll of safety fuse.

  ‘There she is,’ he shouted.

  He shouted not for them, but for her. He was trying to signal Granny Catchprice that the plan had got to change now. Howie and Cathy ran towards her. Then Howie was holding Gran. He was taking the safety fuse from her. Cathy and Howie had already stepped over a two-metre length of it at the bottom of their stairs without noticing. It was bright red and white and striped like a barber’s pole but they did not see it. There were other pieces, one, two, three metres,
sticking out from the air vents at the base of the workshop and the showroom walls. Each one ran into the cobwebbed underfloor, where it was crimped tight inside a detonator. Each detonator, in turn, was jammed into a clammy half stick of gelignite. The gelignite was wedged in among the crumbling brick piers which supported the building.

  While Cathy and Howie shouted at Granny Catchprice, Vish stooped to light a fuse. He had not been able to get gelignite below the ground at the old lube bay. There was no sub-floor – only cellar. He had to pack it into the drainpipes which ran beneath the concrete slab. He lit the fuse the way his Grandma had taught him, holding the match tight against the fuse and scraping the box across it. He chanted as he scraped. Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna. The fuse did not sparkle like a fuse in a cartoon. You could hardly see a flame at all. The fire slipped down into the tunnel of fuse casing. It made an occasional spark, a fart of blue smoke, a tiny heat bubble. It sneaked off like a spy, travelling 30 centimeters every ten seconds.

  Vish thought he might die. He thought about God. Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, running through this gravel-floored hell of bright painted things.

  Howie and Cathy were pushing Granny back towards the fire escape. He hollered to them, ‘No, she lit them off already,’ and then he remembered he was not thinking of God, he must think of God, that all that was necessary was to think of God.

  He prayed Benny would be safe. He was in the cellar with some woman. He did not know he would be safe. How could he know?

  Cathy and Howie were now walking towards him. They had left Granny Catchprice standing alone at the bottom of the fire escape. Cathy had seen the plume of blue smoke coming from a fuse. She was pointing at it, stamping at it.

  ‘It was her,’ he pointed back at Granny Catchprice. Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna. ‘She’s crazy.’

  Behind Cathy and Howie’s shouting faces he could see his grandmother in her severe black suit. She had walked across the car yard to the workshop wall. She was working her way along the side of the wall, stooping, like a gardener weeding. She was lighting fuses. She had damp matches from her kitchen. Sometimes, he could see, these slowed her down.

  Howie was panting and shouting at him. It was a moment before he saw what he wanted – the matches.

  He pointed across the yard at Granny Catchprice. ‘It’s her,’ he said. He handed Howie the matches. ‘I took them off her, the crazy bitch. There she goes again.’

  Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna. Not die. Not go to jail.

  ‘Where’s Benny?’ Cathy yelled.

  ‘You can’t go down there,’ he said. ‘You’ll get blown up.’

  She tried to. She ran for the steps.

  Howie grabbed Cathy. She had no underpants. He picked her up and carried her bare-arsed across the yard. She struggled and hit his head.

  ‘Mort,’ she called. ‘What about Mort?’

  ‘He’s O.K.,’ Vish said. He did not know he was O.K. He had fucked it up. He had changed the plan. It was Benny’s fault. He had tried to murder him. It was Krishna who came to punish the people who hurt the followers of Krishna.

  Vish walked slowly across the yard. He felt heat like a furnace in his wounded arm. He did not hurry. The Lord would decide when it ignited.

  He had reached the front gate when the first explosion came. It spat out bricks and showered them over the cars. They rained down, bang, bang, bang.

  He turned and saw a hole, like a tunnel, in the wall of Spare Parts. Nothing more. Granny Catchprice was fumbling with her matches at the Front Office. Then the next one went. It made a deeper ‘crump’ you could feel in your feet, in the earth. When Vish turned to look, he found the wall of the workshop was missing. The yard lights shone into the dusty rafters. A brush-tailed possum stood on the great iron beam above Mort’s desk. Its eyes shone bright yellow through the mortar dust.

  Then many things happened at once. Vish lay down on the ground and felt it move beneath him. He put his head under the Audi radiator. There was some fire, flame. He felt the heat in his bare legs and saw the orange light across the gravel. There was a ‘Whoomf’ noise.

  It was then he thought about the petrol tanks beneath the cracked concrete at the front of the front office.

  He stood up and started running towards the street.

  59

  Howie raised himself from the ground beside his wife. The yard was filled with lime dust and petrol fumes. The lights stood on their tall poles, sloping, twisted on their stems like Iceland poppies. Granny Catchprice, dressed in a tattered black, white and red clown’s suit, moved into their beam, dust still swirling all round her.

  The old chook could walk through hell.

  As she turned, she looked as though she came from hell: she had put on a mask, like a witch with long, carved, wooden teeth. She stopped to pick a lump of brick from the bonnet of the Commodore. It was too heavy for her. She pushed it off, scraped it across the duco, down the slope of the bonnet and on to the ground.

  Cathy was sitting on the gravel beside him. She said: ‘I got no pants.’

  Howie helped her to her feet. She tugged down on her T-shirt, more worried about her arse than everything around her. He put his arm round her shoulders and felt she was shaking like a leaf.

  ‘Come on, honey,’ he said. ‘Come on baby, it’s O.K.’ He walked her towards the street, towards Granny Catchprice who was now pushing at a clump of bricks which had fallen on the Audi’s sleek black hood.

  ‘I need a dress,’ Cathy said. ‘Where are my shoes?’

  ‘I’ll get the truck out,’ he said. ‘All the gear is in the truck. Once we get the truck out we’re O.K.’

  It was then he saw the flowers on the gravel, a line of them from the crumpled Spare Parts Department wall to the buckled Cyclone gates, splashes the size of carnations. They fell from Granny Catchprice’s face – fat drops of bright blood.

  There was a noise like a calf bellowing. Howie turned to see a black track-suited figure running over the rubble of what had been their apartment. The noise was Mort. A figure in yellow robes was also stumbling towards them. The noise was Vish. They were both the noise, coming towards Granny Catchprice. She recognized the noise and turned. It was then Howie saw how badly hurt she was – the gelignite had ripped her face back to the bone, up from the gums and teeth to the nose. In the middle of this destruction, her eyes looked out like frightened things buried beneath a muddy field.

  ‘He touched her breasts,’ she said.

  Howie put his hand around beneath her ribs to steady her. There was nothing to her – rag and bone. As he lay her down upon the gravel, she trembled and whimpered. It seemed too cruel to lay her head upon the gravel. He placed his hand beneath her for a pillow and squatted down beside her.

  ‘It’s O.K., Frieda,’ he said.

  ‘Rot!’ she said.

  Howie felt himself pushed aside. It was Cathy, Mort, Vish – the Catchprices. They pushed him out like foreign matter. Cathy took her mother’s head and cradled it. Mort held her hand. They made a clump, a mass, they clung to her, like piglets at an old sow.

  ‘Come on, honey,’ he pulled at his wife’s shoulder. ‘Come on.’ But they made a heap of bodies which left no room for him.

  Howie walked back to the Big Mack truck alone. The engine was new and tight, but it started first off. He threw the long stick back into reverse, and edged the truck back until he felt resistance. Then he squeezed it forward, manoeuvring between the dust silver Statesman with black leather upholstery and the Commodore S.S. with the alloy wheels. It was a tight fit. He edged slowly past the red Barina Benny nearly sold to Gino Massaro.

  But when he came to the Audi, he knew there was no longer room. He felt the resistance as the truck tray caught the Audi’s right-hand rear guard, nothing definite, but soft, like a sweater snagged in a barbed wire fence. He increased the pressure on the accelerator just a little. There was a drag, a soft ripping sensation. He knew he was cutting it like a can opener.

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ he said. It felt as good
as shitting.

  It only made a small noise, a screee. The diff caught momentarily on a pile of bricks but the old Dodge lifted, lurched and rolled on like a tank, out across the crumpled Cyclone fence and arrived, its front tyre hissing, out on to the street.

  60

  There was this noise in the dark: huh-huh-huh. It came and went. She would do it for a minute. She would stop for a minute. Huh-huh-huh. Benny had Cacka’s hurricane lamp. He had that almost from the moment the lights went, but the problem was the matches. He found cigarettes but no matches and he had spent half an hour standing on tip-toe slowly working his way up and down the low rafters of the ceiling looking for the book of porno matches Mort had brought from the bar in Bangkok.

  When he came close she struck out at him with the iron bar. It was pitch black. She could have killed him. He never found the porno matches. They were probably in her corner. He found instead an old box of Redheads still above the door frame. He struck the match, raised the sooty glass, and lit the wick. Maria Takis was standing by the work bench, her hands pushed against the wall making a noise like a dog.

  ‘Vishna-fucking-barnu,’ he said. ‘The fucking turd.’

  She stared at him. She made this noise: Huh-huh-huh-huh.

  ‘Don’t think you’re getting out of this,’ he said. ‘This alters nothing.’

  He came towards her. She held up the iron bar. She had muscled legs like a tennis player. She had them tensed, apart, her back against the wall. Her face was red, veins standing out. She looked so ugly he could not believe it was the same person. Huh-huh-huh, she said. A witch.

  Then she stopped making the noise. She stood straighter and tried to lick her lips. ‘Get me something clean,’ she said.

  ‘There’s nothing clean,’ he said. ‘This is where I live.’

  ‘That.’

  First he thought she meant him. She wanted him. She had her hand out towards his cock, his belly. He stepped back. She was pointing at his shirt. He could not believe it. He could not fucking believe it.

  ‘Get fucked,’ he said.