Peter Carey - The Tax Inspector

Mrs Gladd got it in her head she had been ‘traumatized’. She got herself on television with Mike Willesee and they took a film crew round to Mr Simon’s one Friday morning at ten o’clock. Sarkis held his coat up so they could not see his face on camera, but the show made him famous anyway and once Mr Simon had fired him live on camera he could not find another salon to employ him, not even as a washer.

That was why he had to stand in the back garden. Everyone he knew was in Chatswood or Willoughby. He no longer had a car to drive there in. When he heard the mattress squeaking, he could not even take a stroll around Franklin – it was not safe at night.

Sarkis knew this taxi-driver did not like women. He made the boys laugh, saying things like, ‘If they didn’t have cunts you wouldn’t talk to them’. His mother did not know this. She was still celebrating her independence from the Armenian community. She was wearing short skirts and smoking in the street. Ready-snap Peas had closed their doors and she had lost her job as well, but it still seemed, to Sarkis, that she was having a good time. She had come all the way to Franklin because she had convinced herself that there were no Armenians here. But the first people they met were Tahleen and Raffi who ran the corner store in Campbell Street. The first thing they did was offer to drive Sarkis and his mother to the Armenian Church on Sundays. Sarkis thought it wouldn’t hurt – if only from the employment point of view. But he could not budge his mother. She said: thank you. She thought: no way, José. From there on she walked an extra mile to buy her ciggies from another shop.

His mother’s feeling about the Armenian community made her judgement bad. She might have hated them, but she was one of them. When she met someone who was not Armenian, she got herself into a drama. No way she was going to serve Gargandak . She was reinventing herself as Australian. But if not Gargandak , what cakes were right? She did not know what to call the people, even. But she was so happy she did not care. The taxi-driver was a Yugoslav. She called him ‘Doll’. She was thawing out the Sara Lee Cherry Cheese Cake. She opened all her miniature bottles of liquor. She called the taxi-driver Doll even though he was lean and balding, with a slight stoop and nicotine stains on his fingers. The only thing like a doll was his eyes, which were very blue. They were doll eyes only in colour. They stared at you. No matter how you might smile, he never smiled back. Even when Sarkis’s mother offered the tiny bottles of Gilbey’s gin and Bond 7 whisky which she had kept from the time they had shared a house in Willoughby with Anna from East-West Airlines, even when she laughed, and showed him how to do the twist, he never once smiled.

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?’