Peter Carey - The Tax Inspector

‘I got stuck with him,’ Maria said, ‘at that barbecue at Sally Ho’s place. He complained to me about all the terrible problems of running a department. You know, the way they changed his access code each week and he could never remember it. You know what he does? He writes it down. He writes his access number in his day book, back to front or something.’

Maria flipped on the computer terminal and punched the numbers into it.

The terminal stayed closed.

‘Well,’ Gia said, ‘I guess that’s it.’

‘You go,’ Maria said. ‘I’ll get it. It’ll be these digits plus one, or the entire sequence back to front.’

Gia could see the reflection of the screen on the polished wall behind Maria’s back. She could see the flashing panel on the screen which read Access Denied .

‘It can’t be too hard,’ Maria said. ‘He’s so dull.’

‘Dull but exceptionally secretive. Come on, please. Don’t do this to me, Maria. We can go to jail for this. You don’t even care who these Catchprices are. I mean, what’s the principle? I don’t get it.’

‘We’d both be a lot happier if you went back to doing what you believed in. I’m subtracting 1 from each digit.’

‘Maria, damn you, don’t torture me – I’m your friend.’

‘I’m subtracting 2.’

‘Don’t do a poker machine on me,’ wailed Gia. ‘I’ll never forgive you for that club in Gosford. Two hours with the creep breathing over your shoulder.’

‘We’re in.’

Maria rose from the keyboard with her hands held high above her head. ‘See! See! Access Records. Add New Records. Edit Records . We’re in. We can edit.’

Maria was the worst typist in the world. This was why Gia made herself walk into the office. She only sat at the keyboard because she wanted to get out quickly. She called up Edit Records . ‘How do you spell it?’

‘C-a-t-c-h-p-r-i-c-e.’

‘File number?’

‘Left it in the car. Call them all up. There. That one. Catchprice Motors.’

The last two entries were a record of Mrs Catchprice’s call alerting the department to irregularities and a File Active designation dated for this morning when Maria had left to begin her audit in Franklin.

Gia went through the file deletion procedure. She took it to the penultimate step where the screen was flashing Delete Record Y/N .

‘They’ll see the broken door,’ Gia said.

‘If there’s no file, there’s no job. Hit it.’

Maria leaned across Gia and hit the Y key herself. The screen lost all its type. It turned solid green. A single cursor began to flash and the terminal began to emit a loud, high-pitched buzz.

‘Run,’ said Gia.

Maria did not argue. She ran as well as she could run with the weight of her pregnancy. The air was dull and hot and the corridors were heavy with a dull, plastic smell like the inside of a new electrical appliance. Gia tried to go down the stairs. (‘They’ll get us. Jam the elevator.’) Maria pulled her into the lift. ‘I don’t want to use my key,’ said Gia, her little chin set hard and her eyes wide.

‘Use it,’ said Maria, panting. ‘The keys can’t be coded.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course not.’

The lift doors opened. The foyer was empty. Gia walked briskly from the building with her head down. Maria waddled just behind her, red in the face and out of breath. Did they imagine themselves being filmed? Yes, they did. They walked up the hill in Hunter Street to the car. They did not say a word. They drove back to the Brasserie and parked behind Gia’s car.

‘We’re in a lot of trouble,’ Gia said.

‘No we’re not,’ Maria insisted. ‘We’re not in any trouble at all.’

‘You’re going to tell me why, aren’t you?’ Gia blew her nose.

‘Yes,’ Maria grinned. ‘I am.’

It was midnight. It was summer. The windows were down. You could smell jasmine among the exhaust fumes of the Darlinghurst bus. Maria wondered what she was going to say next.

27

Maria’s father was angry at the street she lived in. He spat at it and scuffed at its paspalum weeds with his half-laced boots. He hit the stone retaining wall outside Elizabeth Hindmath’s with his aluminium stick and lost the rubber stopper off the end. The rubber stopper rolled down the street, bouncing off the cobblestones, and finally lost itself in the morning-glory tangle opposite Maria’s cottage.

‘See, see,’ George Takis cried triumphantly, pointing his stick. ‘See.’

He meant the street was too steep for a woman with a baby.

‘Forty-five degrees,’ he said, ‘at least.’

It was nothing like forty-five degrees, but she did not contradict him. She did not point out that the streets of Letkos were far steeper and rougher than this one where she now lived in Sydney, that she herself had been pushed in an ancient German pram up streets steeper and rougher than the one that caused her father this upset – it was not the street he was upset with – it was the pregnancy. If he had articulated his anger honestly, he would have lost her. He was newly widowed and already had one daughter who would not speak to him, so he was angry with the street instead. It was too narrow, too steep. The drainage was bad and the cobbles were slippery. If she needed an ambulance they could never get it down there.

‘You live here, you need good brakes. What sort of brakes it got?’ He meant the pram. He wiped some dry white spittle from the corner of his lips and looked at her accusingly, his dark eyebrows pressed down hard upon his black eyes.

‘I don’t have one,’ she said. She did not want to think about the pram. She did not want to think about what life was going to be like.

He sighed.

‘I work,’ she said. ‘Remember.’

‘You’re not going to know what’s hit you, you know that? You don’t know what will happen to you. You get in trouble, you just stay in trouble. Always. Forever.’

‘Shut up, Ba-ba.’

‘You come home from the hospital, how are you going to buy a pram then? You need to have everything bought beforehand.’

‘Who told you that? Mrs Hellos?’

‘No one,’ he said, hitting at the Williamsons’ overgrown jasmine with his stick. ‘I talk to no one.’ He paused. ‘I was reading the magazines at the barber’s.’

‘About babies, Ba-Ba? In a barber’s shop magazine?’

‘I bought it,’ he said, fiddling with the button on his braces.

‘Ba-Ba, this doesn’t help me. Really. I know I must seem terrible to you, but it doesn’t help.’

‘Maria, come with me, I’ll buy you a nice one. Come on. I’ll buy it for you.’ She could not really be angry with him. She did not need to be told how her pregnancy hurt him and excited him, how he struggled with it, how he loved her. They went shopping for a pram at Leichhardt Market Town and he got angry about prices instead, and afterwards she cooked him the noodles and keftethes which his wife had made for him three times a week for forty years, and afterwards, when it was dark, Maria drove him home to his house in Newtown, slipping into Greek territory like a spy in a midget submarine.

At midnight on the night she had failed to delete the Catchprice file from the computer, Maria felt George Takis’s anger at the street might have some basis outside of his own shame. She parked her car up on Darling Street and then began the long walk down the steep lane.

She was tired already. She was heavy and sore and this was a street for a single woman with a flat stomach and healthy back. It was a street you walked down arm in arm with a lover, stumbling, laughing after too much wine, your vagina moist and warm and your legs smooth from waxing. This was so unsexy, and difficult. So endless.