Peter Carey: The Tax Inspector

He tried to think what could be so bad that Granny Catchprice would actually notice. Probably something not very bad at all. ‘O.K.,’ he said at last. ‘Put him on.’

‘He can’t talk,’ she said. ‘He’s lost his voice. They fired him from Spare Parts.’

The inside world of the temple was calm and beautiful. It had marble floors and eggshell calm. When they said you knew God through chanting his name, they were not being poetic.

‘Did you hear me?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

There was a long silence on the phone while Vishnabarnu felt the cool dry wall against his cheek.

‘I’m not talking to my father, if that’s what you want.’

‘You don’t have to talk to your father.’

Vish shut his eyes and sighed. ‘I’ll try for the 9.35,’ he said at last. ‘I’m going to have to borrow some money.’

He turned to see that Govinda-dasa was holding out ten dollars between thumb and double-jointed finger.

‘Table 7 is in a hurry,’ Vish said.

‘Is this how you serve Krishna?’ Govida-dasa asked, pushing the money at Vishnabarnu like it was a lump of carrion.

One sharp tooth rested on his lower lip and he looked straight into Vish’s eyes until Vish had to look down.

‘You have no reason to feel superior to Janardan,’ Govinda-dasa said.

Vishnabarnu respected Govinda-dasa more than anyone else except his guru, but now he felt impatient and disrespectful. He was shocked to recognize his feelings.

‘If Janardan puts on a wig and smokes grass and talks about sex-pleasure, he’s no more wedded to Maya than you are.’

‘I know, Govinda-dasa.’

‘But you don’t know, or you wouldn’t act like this. What is the greatest fear of any intelligent human being?’

Vishnabarnu closed his eyes. ‘To spend their life as a lower animal.’ He had fifteen minutes to make the train. ‘Govinda-dasa, I have to go.’

‘Will your attachment to your family bring you closer to God?’

This meant that you did not move closer to God by associating with Bad Karma. You associated with God by abandoning attachments, by chanting his name, by eating prasadum . Through good association you became a better person and took on His qualities of Compassion, Cleanliness, Austerity and Truthfulness.

Vish removed the damp note from between Govinda-dasa’s fingers.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He looked briefly into Govinda-dasa’s blazing eyes and then walked out on to the landing and down the stairs towards the street.

In the dark shelter of the doorway he paused. He looked out through the rain at the traffic and the hooker in the red bunny suit standing in the white light of the BMW showroom across the street. He looked back up the white-walled stairway towards the restaurant. He looked out into the dark-bright street. He did not want to go to Catchprice Motors. He did not want to go through this silent anger with his father or walk back into that spongy mess of bad things that was his childhood.

He took the four steps down on to the street and chanted God’s name once each step. And then he ran. He pounded through the rain-puddled streets – Darlinghurst Road, Oxford Street, Taylor Square – splashing his robes. He ran strongly, but without grace. His shaven head rolled from side to side and he bunched his forearms up near his broad chest like parcels he didn’t want to get wet. He came down the dark part of the hill at Campbell Street and emerged on to the bright stage of Elizabeth Street like a bundle of rags and legs. His braided pigtail of remaining hair, his Sikha, glistened with drops of rain like sequins.

He ran against the Don’t Walk sign: a mess of yellow illuminated by three sets of headlights. At the ticket counter he slipped and fell. He grazed his knees.

He burst into the carriage on the 9.35. His heart was banging in his ears. His breath worked his throat like a rat-tail file.

He collapsed in his seat opposite a man in shorts and a woman in a tight red dress. They did not see him. The man’s hairy leg was between the woman’s resisting knees and he was kissing her while he massaged her big backside.

Vish was coming home.

3

Granny Catchprice had her tastes formed up on the Dorrigo Plateau of Central New South Wales – she liked plenty of fat on her lamb chops and she liked them cut thick, two inches was not too much for her. She liked them cooked black on the outside and pink inside and when she grilled them in her narrow galley up above the car yard the fat spurted and flared and ignited in long liquid spills which left a sooty spoor on the glossy walls of her kitchen and a fatty smell which impregnated the bride dolls in the display case and the flock velvet upholstery on the chairs in the room where Vish sat opposite his expressionless brother. He knew whatever had gone wrong with Benny was his fault. This was something which was always understood between them – that Vish had abandoned his little brother too easily.

It was eleven o’clock on Sunday night and the griller was cold and the chop fat lay thick and white as candle wax in the bottom of the grill pan in the kitchen sink. Granny Catchprice was on her knees, her head deep in the kitchen cupboard, trying to find the implements for making cocktails. She was busying herself, just as she had busied herself through Cacka’s emphysema. Then she had run ahead of her feelings with brooms and dusters. Now she was going to make her grandson’s aerated brandy crusters but first she had to find the Semak Vitamiser in among the pressure cooker and the automatic egg poacher and all the aluminium saucepans she had cast aside when Benny told her that aluminium drove you crazy in old age.

People were used to thinking of Granny Catchprice as a tall woman although she was no more than five foot six and now, kneeling on the kitchen floor in a blue Crimplene pant suit which emphasized the slimness of her shoulders and the losses of mastectomy, she looked small and frail, too frail to be kneeling on a hard floor. The bright neon light revealed the eggshell scalp beneath her grey hair. Her lower lip protruded in her concentration and she frowned into the darkness of the cupboard.

‘Drat,’ she said. She pulled saucepans from the cupboard and dropped them on to the torn vinyl floor in order to make her search less complicated. She forgot Vish did not drink alcohol and he was too engrossed in his fearful diagnosis of his brother’s condition to pay any attention to what she was doing.

The word Schizophrenia had come into his mind when he looked into Benny’s ulcerated mouth and now he was wondering how he could find out what Schizophrenia really was. A saucepan clattered. His grandmother’s red setter yelped and skittered across the slippery kitchen floor.

Benny winked at him.

Vish narrowed his eyes.

Benny pursed his lips mischievously and looked over his high bony shoulder towards the kitchen, then back at his older brother.

‘Bah-bah-bah,’ he said. ‘Bah-Barbara-ann.’

Vish did not normally even think profanity. But when this quoted line from their father’s favourite song told him that Benny’s lost voice, his curved spine, his dead eyes, his whole emotional collapse had been an act, he thought fuck . He felt angry enough to break something, but as he watched his grinning brother take a pack of Marlboros from the rolled-up sleeve of his T-shirt, all he actually did was squinch up his eyes a little.

Benny lit a cigarette and placed the pack carefully in front of him on the table. He rolled his T-shirt up high to where you could see the first mark life had made on him – a pale ghost of a scar like a blue-ringed smallpox vaccination. He leaned back and, having checked his Grandma again, put his long legs and combat boots on the table and tilted back on the chair.