Peter Carey - The Tax Inspector

Vish put the iron on its end and folded the jeans one more time.

‘You’re a stubborn fucker, aren’t you?’ Benny said.

Vish looked up and smiled.

‘We know the truth though,’ Benny blew a fat and formless cloud of smoke. ‘You’ve got the business and the personal mixed up. The problem is you were always jealous.’

‘Oh really? Of what?’

‘Of me and Him.’

‘Benny, you hated him. You used to cry in your sleep . We were plotting to poison him with heart tablets.’

‘You were jealous of us. That’s why you went crazy. It wasn’t the business. If you want him to retire, we can do that. We can look after him. We can get him out of here.’

‘This is nothing to do with Mort.’

‘You smashed the window. You stabbed him. You have to admit you’ve got a problem with him, not with the business.’

‘I was protecting you.’

‘You want to protect me – be my partner.’

Vish had that red-brown colour in his cheeks. His neck and shoulders were set so tight – if you touched him he would feel like rock.

‘Benny, I’m not coming back. O.K.? Never, ever.’

Benny laughed but he felt the sadness, like snot, running down his throat. He did not say anything. He could not think of anything to say.

Vish folded the jeans and laid them carefully beside the bottled brown snakes Benny had rescued from his Grandpa’s personal effects. He took the AC/DC T-shirt and smoothed it against his broad chest. ‘You should have washed them first,’ he said.

‘I’m never going to wear them again,’ Benny said.

He waited for Vish to ask him why. But Vish was a Catchprice – he was never going to ask. He just kept on ironing, with his big square face all wrinkled up against the steam.

After a while, Benny said: ‘Aren’t you even curious?’

Vish jabbed at the T-shirt with the point of the iron.

Benny asked: ‘Do you think I look like her?’

‘Like who?’

‘Like who?’ Benny mimicked the high scratchy voice. He pulled the photograph out of the silky pocket of his suit and pushed it at his brother. Vish took it and held it up to the light.

‘Oh, yeah.’ He looked up at Benny but made no comment on his dazzling similarity.

Benny took the photo back. He put it in his pocket.

Vish said: ‘Remember the night you saw her?’ He folded the T-shirt arms over so they made a 45° angle with the shoulder, then he pressed them flat. He was grinning.

‘You saw her too,’ Benny smiled as well. ‘Who else would stand like that at the front gate at two in the morning.’

‘It could have been anyone.’ Vish folded the T-shirt so its trunk was exactly in half. When the hot iron hit it, the shirt gave off a smell like Bathurst – oil, maybe some methyl benzine.

‘It must have been her,’ Benny said. ‘Anyone gets shot with an air rifle – if they’re innocent they call the cops.’

Vish smiled.

‘Admit it – you think about her too.’

‘All I try to think about is Krishna.’

‘Bullshit, Johnny. What total bullshit.’ Benny said. ‘You should learn to ask questions, it’s amazing what you find out. Did you know how long it took you to get born? Ask me.’

‘You don’t know.’

‘Ten hours. You know how long it took me? It took me thirty hours. You don’t believe me, ask Cathy. The second baby should be faster but I was lying back to front. They cut our mother open to get me out. It fucked up all her stomach muscles. She got a stomach like an old woman when she was twenty, all wrinkled like a prune.’

‘And that’s why she shot you? Come on, Benny. Give up. Get on with your life.’

‘Hey,’ Benny rose from the couch, his finger pointing. ‘Forget all this shit you tell yourself about me. Forget all the bullshit stories you carry in your head.’ He straightened his trouser legs and ran his palms along his jacket sleeves. ‘What did I tell you?’

‘When?’

‘Any time.’ He held his palms out. The gesture made no sense. ‘Ever. I told you we could do this thing together. I told you I was changed. Angel. Look.’ He walked carefully along the plank to reach his brother. Then he opened his mouth for his brother to look in.

What he meant was: light. I have light pouring out of me.

‘Benny you need help.’

‘You don’t believe me,’ Benny hit his forehead with his palm. ‘You jerk-off – you’re walking away from two hundred thou a year. You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know where you are. Where are you?’ Benny helped him. He pointed. He pointed to the walls, the writing. He invited him to look, to read, to understand all this – the very centre of his life – but all Vish did was shrug and unplug the iron. He stood the iron end up on the bench beside the clothes and the snakes. Right behind him was the fibreglass ‘thing’ in the shape of a flattened ‘n’.

‘Where are you?’ Benny asked. ‘Answer me that.’

‘I’m in your cellar, Benny.’

‘No,’ said Benny. ‘You are inside my fucking head and I have got the key.’

All around Vishnabarnu were the names of angels. They hung over him like a woven web, a net, like a map of the human brain drawn across the walls and ceilings of the world. He knew himself a long way from God.

24

Benny greased the Monaro out of the back paddock with its lights off. He was not licensed, and the car was not meant to be driven on the road, but his father was watching a video in his bedroom and he took the Monaro out on the far side, on to the little gravel lane which ran right beside the railway tracks.

There was a path direct to the Wool Wash, and for a moment he had toyed with the idea of walking there. The path led out through the hole in the paling fence at the back of Mort’s house.

This was the path they had walked with old Cacka down to see the frogmouth owl, the path they walked together each day to go swimming down at the Wool Wash. The path went (more or less) straight across the back paddock, crossed the railway line, curved round the Council depot where a huge Cyclone fence protected nothing more than a pile of blue gravel and two battered yellow forty-four-gallon drums, cut round the edge of the brickworks clay pit and then went straight across those little hills which had once been known as ‘Thistle Paddocks’ but were now a housing estate known as Franklin Heights. The path then ran beside the eroded drive-way to the 105-room house, down into the dry bush gullies, and then out on to the escarpment where a path was hacked into the cliff wall like something in a comic strip. The path led finally to the clear waters of the Wool Wash pool.

The truth was: it was not like that any more. The path was fucked. It was cut like a worm by a garden spade – new yellow fences, subdivisions, prohibitions, walls, new dogs, shitty owners with psychotic ideas about their territorial rights, frightened lonely women who would press the panic button on their Tandy burglar alarms at the sight of a stranger climbing over their fence.

Once it had been the best thing in Benny’s life. Now it was just an imaginary line cutting through suburbia. Once he had been able to sit above the Wool Wash for hours on hot still days in summer doing Buddha grass and feeling the wind bend the trees and show the silver colour in the Casuarinas and watching the old eels making their sand-nest in the river. When everything was so bad he thought he had to die, his mind went there, to the Wool Wash, and when Tape 7 said find a river, there was only one river.

He considered the path but it was not a serious option. When his brother went off to bed, he carried his gift-wrapped clothes and his sawn-off shot gun down to the Monaro. Fifteen minutes later he came down the S’s to the Wool Wash with the tacho needle almost on the red line. He put the nose too close into the corner on the second last bend and he nearly lost it in the fucking gravel. He changed down even as he knew he shouldn’t. The tail kicked out. Fuck it. He flicked the wheels into line and and saved it. He cut a clean line across the next curve and came down into the car park at 150Ks but he was prickling hot with shame. It was such a shitty gear change.