Peter Carey - The Tax Inspector

I didn’t know I’d fall in love

and now you’ve gone and left me baby

with a freeway through my heart .

She occupied Maria’s living-room like a compressor unit or some yellow-cased engine so loud and powerful that it demanded you accommodate yourself to it. This was what Maria did not like about it – she felt bullied on the one hand and seduced on the other. Also: the subject matter was discomforting. It seemed too close for coincidence.

Trucks are running

through the freeway in my heart

Twisting sheets

All this noise and pain

Ten retreads hissing

through the driving rain .

Just as the second verse was about to start, the singer saw Maria’s face and stopped.

Maria said: ‘Thank you.’

Cathy shrugged.

Maria said: ‘How do you think this could affect my work?’

Cathy opened her mouth, then shut it, frowned, rubbed her bedraggled hair. ‘This doesn’t make a pinch of difference to anything does it?’

‘No, it can’t.’

‘Fine.’

‘What the hell could I do?’ said Maria, angrily. ‘What sort of corrupt person do you want me to be? Are you going to try to bribe me now?’

‘I’m sorry.’ And Cathy was sorry; at the same time she was angry. She was sorry she had placed herself in such a foolish position.

‘If I cared more for Country music I could say something intelligent about your song.’

‘You don’t like Country music?’

‘Not a lot, no.’

‘I think you do,’ Cathy said. ‘But you’re like your sort of person.’

Maria did not ask what her sort of person was.

‘You are moved by it. Allow me to know that. Allow me to judge what an audience is feeling. I saw you: you were moved by it. What did you tell yourself about it? Oh I mustn’t be moved. This is masochistic? Women like you always say “masochistic” when they feel things.’

‘O.K., I was moved.’

‘You’re saying that but what you’re trying to tell me is that you weren’t moved at all.’ Cathy said, sitting down. She sat on the edge of the sofa where Alistair and Maria used to make love. He used to kneel on the carpet there and she put her legs around his neck and opened up to him full of juice – she would get so wet all her thighs would be shining in the firelight and now there was a damn Catchprice sitting there holding a Gibson by the neck and another one watching and they were like burglars in her life.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Cathy said. ‘I’m a real banana to be here but I’ll tell you something for your future reference – Country music is about those places people like you drive past and patronize. You come to Franklin and you’ve decided, before you even get off the F4, that we are all retards and losers – unemployed, unemployable. Then you find we have an art gallery and some of us actually read books and you are very impressed . What you’ve just been listening to is poetry, but all you could hear was, oh, Country & Western. What I like about Country music is that it never patronizes anyone, not even single mothers.’

‘We’re not numbers,’ Benny said.

Cathy looked up at Benny as if she had forgotten he was there. She sighed, but said nothing. She needed something stronger than a cup of tea.

‘We’re people,’ said Benny.

Cathy looked at him again. He was not wilted or defeated. He was standing upright in the corner. Good for you, she thought. ‘You go ahead with this audit of yours,’ she told the Tax Inspector, ‘and I’ll be stuck in that shit-heap for the rest of my damn life just keeping them all alive. You go ahead, I’ll never get to sing except in pubs within a 100-kilometre radius. I should have just walked out when I had the business healthy. “Guilt-free”. That’s a song I wrote. “Guilt-free,” but if we get in strife with the tax, then I’m lumbered with the responsibility of a mother who hates me and a brother who refuses to sell a motor car because he wants to punish his Daddy for being a creep.’

‘Don’t,’ Maria said. ‘It doesn’t help.’

‘I’m going to lose my band and my damn name,’ said Cathy, her lower lip quivering.

Maria stood up. She hoped the woman would not cry. ‘Catchprice Motors is in the computer with an “active” designation,’ she said gently. ‘Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t take it out.’

‘I believe you,’ Cathy stood up. ‘Come on, Benny. Enough’s enough.’

Now they were really going, Maria let herself look at the boy again. He caught her eye and did up his suit jacket and smiled. He did have an extraordinary face. If you saw it in a magazine you would pause to admire it – its mixture of innocence and decadence was very sexy – in a magazine.

‘I’ll see you around,’ he said.

‘You’ll see her in the morning,’ said his aunt. ‘Which is now.’

‘Yes, which is now,’ Maria stood.

She shepherded the singer along the corridor to the front door. In a moment they would be gone. The boy was behind her. Maria was so convinced that he was about to put a guiding hand on the small of her back that she put her own hand there to push it off.

At the front door, Cathy McPherson turned, and stopped. She was solid, immovable. She looked at Maria with her little blue eyes which somehow connected to the heart that had written the words of that song. Not ‘small’ eyes or ‘mean’ eyes, but certainly demanding and needful of something she could not have expressed. Her breath smelt of alcohol. She said: ‘When I was thirty-two I was ready to go out on the road. I mean, I wasn’t a baby any more. Then my father died, and my mother sort of made it impossible for me to leave.’

Maria could feel the boy behind. She could feel him like a shadow that lay across her back. She was too tired to listen to this confession but the eyes demanded that she must. They monitored her response.

‘I can’t tell you how my mother did it, but she made me stay. I was the one who was going to save the business. And I did save it and then my mother decided I was getting too big for my boots and she turned on me, and I would have gone then, except I could not walk away and see it crash. I’m a real fool, Ms Takis, a prize number one specimen fool. If you fine us, I’ll be stuck there. I won’t be able to leave them.’

It would have seemed false to be her comforter and her tormentor as well. So even when she began to cry all Maria did was offer her a Kleenex and pat her alien shoulder. She wanted her to leave the house. She took the guitar from her and together the three of them walked up Datchett Street.

At Darling Street she shook hands first with Cathy McPherson and then she turned to the boy. He said: ‘You can’t just abandon us, you know.’

Cathy said: ‘Come on, Benny.’

‘No, she understands me. She’s got a heart. She understands what I’m saying.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Cathy McPherson said. She grabbed his arm, and pulled him up the street. Maria could hear them hissing at each other as she walked back to her front door.

Tuesday

30

At Catchprice Motors they called a potential customer a ‘Prospect’, and as the big black cumulus clouds rolled in from the west and the first thunder of the day made itself heard above the pot-hole thump of the Fast-Mix Concrete trucks heading north towards the F4, Benny hooked a live one. It was a Tuesday, the second day of Benny’s new life.

He found the Prospect there at eight-thirty, crunching around in the gravel beside the Audi Quattro. Benny made no sudden movements, but when the Prospect found the Quattro’s door was locked, Benny was able to come forward and unlock it for him.