Peter Carey - The Tax Inspector

She saw it. She felt it. Some tight band clamped around her stomach.

‘The Tax Inspector likes me,’ he said. ‘That’s the key to everything.’

‘You talked to her?’

‘It’s personal. We’re going to call on her in a personal capacity. Come on Cathy – she’s kind. She’s a very kind person.’

‘She sure doesn’t feel kind about me.’

‘You have the power,’ Benny insisted. ‘I’ll introduce you properly. She is going to see who you are. We are going to show her your life.’

‘My life?’

‘Our lives have power,’ he said. ‘You’re an artist. What was it Ernest Tubb wrote to you?’

‘Oh, Ernest Tubb …’

‘You have the talent to … ?

‘The ability to change the rhythms of the human heart.’

‘Right. Ability. Plus: she’s pregnant. She’s full of milk.’

‘Benny,’ Cathy smiled, ‘there’s no milk till there’s a baby.’

‘O.K.,’ Benny said impatiently. ‘Forget that bit. Once she understands the consequences of her actions, she’ll go easy on you. Sing her a song. Show her who you are. You’ve got to sell her. You’ve got to demonstrate what’s at stake here. Come with me,’ he said.

And she did.

But now the alcohol had worn off and she felt sour and dehydrated and she just wanted to apologize. She stood on one side of the Tax Inspector’s neat white kitchen, filled with shame. Maria Takis was holding a shining metal kettle. Cathy admired ‘nice things’ although she did not own many and the obvious quality of the kettle, its good taste, its refinement, the sort of shop it must have come from, all this somehow made the intrusion worse. Cathy felt coarse and vulgar. She had not even washed her hair before she left.

‘Ms Takis,’ she said, although she hated to hear herself say ‘Ms’. ‘I think I’ve made a big mistake. I’m sorry. But I was really horrible to you this morning and it’s been on my mind and I just wanted to say how sorry I was. I know you’ve got your job to do.’

She said she was sorry. She made herself small. But there was no relief. All it did was make the woman look at her as if she was a frigging ant.

29

Cathy McPherson came back from the bathroom smelling of Elizabeth Arden and whisky. She wore her chamois leather cowgirl suit with high-heeled boots with spurs. Her waistcoat cut into her big fleshy arms. She stood in the kitchen doorway with her huge guitar and her little white hands and sent confusing signals with her eyes.

The guitar was a big instrument – too big to take visiting, but presumably too valuable to leave in a parked car. Cathy McPherson leaned against the doorway, on the hallway side, fiddling with the little mother-of-pearl guitar picks which were wedged in beside the tuning pegs like ticks on a cattle dog’s ear.

If this had been an investigation Maria had wanted to pursue, this would have been the turning point. Someone was about to divulge some information or to try to cut a deal, but Maria did not want more information about the Catchprices. She wanted them out of her house, out of her life and if this was a confession, she did not want to hear it.

She said: ‘You didn’t need to drive all this way to say sorry.’

‘But we didn’t come to say we were sorry.’ It was the boy again, back from wherever he had been in her house. He slid around the edge of the guitar and stood with his back to the refrigerator. His hair looked as hard and white as spun polymer.

‘Would you mind staying right here?’ she said. She shifted her kettle on to the hottest and fastest of her gas jets. When she looked up, his eyes were on hers.

‘Mrs McPherson is going to sing to you,’ he said.

Maria looked at the woman.

‘I’m really a singer,’ she said. Her face was burning red.

The boy came into the kitchen and plugged the ghetto blaster into the power point next to the kettle.

‘We’re people, not numbers,’ he said. He would not take his eyes off her eyes. She thought: this is the sort of thing that happens in Muslim countries – these dangerous doe-eyed boys with their heads filled with images of western whores in negligees. She looked away from him to his aunt.

‘So you would like to sing to me in the hope it will affect your tax assessment?’

Cathy McPherson had the good grace to look embarrassed, but her nephew buttoned the jacket of his suit without taking his eyes away from Maria’s. ‘We think you’re human,’ he said in that nasal accent as sharp and cold as metal. He moistened his lips and smiled. For Chrissakes – he was coming on to her. ‘We want to talk to you like humans.’

‘O.K.,’ said Maria. ‘I’m going to make one cup of tea, then you’re going to sing, and then you’re going to get out of here because I’ve really had enough for one day.’

‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘We’re going to present two songs.’

‘You can have one.’

‘One is fine,’ Benny unbuttoned his suit coat. ‘You can have recorded or live.’

‘I don’t care what it is. Just do it.’

‘You’d like live?’

‘Sure, live.’

‘O.K., that will be live, then.’

He was one of those people whose personal space was too large, who could be too close to you when you were a metre from them.

She waited for the kettle to boil, staring at it like she might have stared at the floor numbers in an elevator. When the kettle boiled she gave them tea bags of English Breakfast tea but, for herself, an infuser filled with the foul-tasting Raspberry Leaf which Gia’s naturopath said would strengthen the uterine muscles and promote a quick labour.

The Catchprices jiggled their tea bags in silence and dropped them into the kitchen tidy she held open for them and then she shepherded them into the living-room.

Maria sat down on the rocking chair her father had bought for her and put her feet up on the foot stool. She began to see the comic aspect of her ‘information’ and began to observe details of the Catchprices’ dress in order to tell the story properly to Gia.

‘Is this going to be too loud?’ she asked.

‘If you’re worried about noise,’ Benny said, ‘we can play you the demo tape.’

‘It’s just acoustic’ Cathy was trying to fit her bottom on the window-ledge opposite. She strummed a few chords, stopped, started again, and then stood up. ‘Ms Takis,’ she said, ‘it would be more polite if I sang sitting down, but I’m damned if I can get myself comfortable.’

‘Fine,’ Maria said.

‘Thank you.’ Cathy tapped her boot three times. The floor shook. It was an old wooden Balmain cottage which was badly built even in 1849.

‘You were a married man I know,’ she sang. The voice got Maria in the belly. It was raw, almost croaky, and way too loud for this street, this time of the morning.

I shouldn’t have begun .

Cathy McPherson changed physically. She became taller, straighter. The athletic armature of her body revealed itself and she rocked and rolled and showed a sexual confidence which was previously unimaginable. There was something happening in those belligerent little eyes which made her as soft as a cat rubbing itself against your leg.

You told me you’d always love your wife

I shouldn’t have begun .

Thirty seconds ago she was big and blowzy like a farmer’s wife, or someone with fat burns on their sallow skin, working in a fish ’n’ chip shop at two o’clock in the morning. Her arms were still plump. Her belly still pressed against her leather skirt, but now you could not look at her without believing that this was someone who made love passionately – she was a sexual animal.

But it was late at night and I was lonely