Peter Carey - The Tax Inspector

Maybe she said other things and he missed it. He was worrying about her bones, the buskers.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Well, you’d better come to the garage at eight-thirty tomorrow morning and we’ll see how we go.’ Sarkis was thinking how could he tell her to shut up, not to talk so loud. The piss-smelling pipes might hide Nasties, people without a human heart. They might beat you because they thought you had money, or a job, or a handsome face you did not deserve.

She held out her hand. He shook it. Just a little thing – a Chinese dish – bones and rice paper.

‘It’s a deal?’ she asked.

What?

‘Yes,’ he said.

They passed the concrete pipes and no one tried to hurt them, although Sarkis muddied his slip-ons and his socks. Did we shake hands about what I thought we shook hands about?

They came out on to Loftus Street. Sarkis saw the Esso sign illuminated in the sky above Catchprice Motors. Am I employed?

‘Do you walk at night very often?’ he said, but his mind was trying to figure out a way to check on what had happened to him.

‘Always,’ said Mrs Catchprice.

‘Actually,’ said Sarkis, ‘it’s very dangerous.’ They had come to a bench which the Franklin Council had bolted to a concrete block beneath the collapsing veranda of an old store. Mrs Catchprice sat down on the seat and began looking for a cigarette in her handbag.

‘Really very dangerous,’ Sarkis said. He sat beside her, with his arms resting on his knees. He peered across the road, through the trees, at Catchprice Motors.

‘You don’t want your new employer bumped off, eh?’ said Mrs Catchprice, and flashed her big white teeth at him.

He could have kissed her wrinkled-up old face.

‘If these louts give me trouble,’ she said, ‘I’ll blow them up.’ She opened her handbag wide and held up what Sarkis thought at first was a piece of salami. He took it from her. It was about fifteen centimetres long and very sticky.

‘Gelignite. You know what that is? Smell your fingers.’

Sarkis sniffed. It was musty and aromatic, like amyl nitrate.

‘Nitroglycerine,’ she said.

The street lights were an orange-yellow and made everything look like a colour negative. You had to think about the most ordinary things to work out what they really were and even when they had been pigeon-holed and labelled, read and understood, they kept some of their spooky double-self. So when Mrs Catchprice said, ‘I’m a lot more dangerous than they are,’ she had orange lips and a yellow face and copper hair, and she was very scary looking.

‘You know how to let it off?’

‘Oh yes,’ Mrs Catchprice said. ‘I know how to “let it off” just fine.’ Her teeth were huge and gold in her orange mouth. She was standing in Loftus Street, but she was walking through the grass, trees and wild roses while the Catchprice boys were standing with their hands on their hips and their great dusty legs were sticking out of their little blue shorts. She walked from stump to stump in her straw hat and summer dress with her crimping pliers and her gelly in an old Gladstone bag. She used a torch battery to do the detonators. She beefed up the gelly with some ‘Nitron’ fertilizer which sure did lift the stumps out of the soil and made Cacka wince and squinch up his face and push his great dusty hands across his battered ears.

Broken earth was like any fresh killed thing – a rabbit, a fish – alive with colour. When you fractured it, the smell poured out, like from a peeled orange, and the hedgerows were made from long pale blue trunks and giant yellow flowers with the bees still feeding off them.

Mrs Catchprice held up the handbag by her forefinger and let it swing there. ‘You know how old this gelignite is?’ she asked Sarkis. ‘You can see it’s old by how it sweats. When it’s like this you can let it off just by throwing it.’

Sarkis’s previous employer had pierced nipples with metal rings in them. He showed Sarkis the photo. He had a metal stud which went through the end of his penis. Sarkis did not ask what the metal rings were for. He smiled and nodded. Likewise with this gelignite – smile. Later he would tell her that the twelve-year-olds were too stupid and doped-up to even understand what a stick of gelignite was. Now he would get her home. He would make her a cup of tea. After work one day he would even cut her frail, old, over-treated hair. It had lost its elasticity but you could still do something with hair like that. He could give her oil with hot towels. She would enjoy that. It was more personal than a steaming machine.

‘So,’ she said, taking back her stick of gelignite and putting it in her handbag where Sarkis could see a great number of crumpled twenty-dollar bills. ‘You were out of work, and now you have a chance again.’

‘Thank you,’ Sarkis said.

‘This is lovely,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘This is what I always liked best about having a business. I liked giving young people a chance.’

‘I won’t disappoint you,’ Sarkis said. ‘You won’t be sorry.’

‘This is lovely,’ Mrs Catchprice said. ‘This is such a nice town, even now.’

‘I’m Armenian,’ said Sarkis. ‘We are famous for being salesmen.’

‘Armenian?’ said Mrs Catchprice brightly. ‘How fascinating. Have you lived in Franklin long?’

‘Six months.’

It was this answer that seemed to make Mrs Catchprice step out on to the road, straight in front of an on-coming car. Sarkis grabbed for her but she was gone. She was bright pink and silver in the car’s headlights and it was only when it stopped that Sarkis realized it was a taxi and she had hailed it. She did not seem capable. She seemed too old and frail to be capable of making sudden movements and yet that was what particularly distinguished her – she leaped, jolted, slammed, and – right now, she jumped into the taxi and banged the door hard behind her.

‘Come on,’ she called as she wound down the window. ‘Don’t dawdle.’

When Sarkis entered the back seat of the cab, Mrs Catchprice was telling the driver: ‘You cannot call yourself a taxi-driver and not know about the Wool Wash. You wait,’ she said to Sarkis. ‘You’ll like this.’

Sarkis recognized the driver – whatever he had done with his mother had not taken very long. The driver sat there with his meter on, staring into the rear vision mirror. He did nothing to acknowledge that he knew who Sarkis was. Mrs Catchprice continued to talk about the Wool Wash. Sarkis could not listen. He looked at the back of the man’s little shoulders and pink shell ears. He looked at the fleck of dandruff sticking to the stringy hair below his bald spot.

‘If you don’t know where the Wool Wash is,’ Mrs Catchprice said loudly, tapping the driver on the shoulder, ‘it might be polite to turn off your meter while you find out.’

The taxi-driver flinched from the touch and spoke into the mirror. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘In my taxi, control your mouth.’

‘It is my eyes you should worry about, not my mouth,’ said Mrs Catchprice, fiddling with her handbag. ‘I have a cataract on one eye,’ she said, producing a crumpled pack of Salems, ‘but I can still see your name is Pavlovic and you are plying for trade out of area.’

Pavlovic’s shoulders stiffened. Then he turned the meter off. ‘Wullwas?’ he asked.

‘W-o-o-l W-a-s-h.’

When the driver could not find the Wool Wash in his street directory, Mrs Catchprice took it from him.

‘Everyone knows the Wool Wash,’ she told her new employee. ‘It is the most lovely part of Franklin.’ But it was not listed in the driver’s street directory. Mrs Catchprice stared at the map page, looking at the bend in the river where she thought the Wool Wash was.