Peter Carey - The Tax Inspector

‘You can’t afford a car, sorry …’

‘You know as much as the directors of this business.’ Benny could see Cathy standing at the top of Grandma Catchprice’s landing. She was waving her arms around and waving at Benny and Sarkis. ‘You want to sell a car, you’ve got to understand finance, O.K. Listen to me,’ Benny said, ‘not her. You’ve got a hundred bucks, you want a nice car. I say to you, see that old F.J. Holden over there. I’ll sell you that for a hundred bucks.’

‘You call that a nice car?’

‘No, I don’t. Just be patient. O.K. You buy it from me for a hundred. O.K.?’

‘O.K.’ said Sarkis.

‘O.K., now I buy it back from you at five hundred. Car hasn’t even moved. What’s happened?’

‘You’ve lost money.’

‘No, now you have five hundred bucks – you can afford to do business with me. You’ve got enough money for a deposit on a $3,500 car. I can finance it to you. I’ll make good money on the sale, I’ll keep on making money on the F&I. You understand me?’

‘I think so,’ said Sarkis.

‘It takes time, don’t worry,’ Benny said. ‘They think I’m dumb round here, I’ll tell you now.’ He could see Cathy lurching awkwardly down the stairs. ‘But none of them appreciates this. You’re getting it faster than they are. You can make two hundred grand a year in this dump, really. You believe me.’

‘You want to know? I think it’s a great opportunity.’

‘You get this F&I under your belt, we can set this town on fire.’ He turned to face Cathy who was weaving towards them. ‘Just ignore this,’ he told Sarkis. ‘This doesn’t count.’

31

Sarkis watched the chunky blonde woman in the gingham dress walk down the staircase. Her eyes were on him, he knew, and he was optimistic about the effect her presence would have on the conversation she was so obviously about to enter. At a certain distance – from the top of the fire escape to the bottom, and a metre or two onwards from there – she gave an impression of a bright blonde Kellogg’s kind of normality and he hoped that she might, somehow, save him from this sleaze. But then she passed the point where there could be conjecture and he saw, even before he smelt her, that her face was puffy and her mascara was running. The smell was not the smell, as subtle as the aroma of Holy Communion, you get from a drink or two, but the deep, sour aura that comes from a long night of drinking, and it explained more readily than her high-heeled knee-high boots, the careful way she walked across the gravel.

‘Who are you?’ she asked Sarkis. She looked both hurt and hostile and Sarkis’s strongest desire was to turn away from all this poison and walk to the sane, cloves-sweet environment of his home.

Instead he said something he had promised never to say again: ‘Hi, I’m Sam Alaverdian.’

The ‘Sam’ did not make her like him any better. She sighed, and put her finger on the small crease at the top of her nose. ‘So you’re the latest candidate,’ she said. ‘Tell me, honey, what experience do you have?’

‘He’s Armenian.’

‘What’s that got to do with it, Benny?’

‘They’re the best salesmen in the world.’

‘Oh shit, Benny, spare us, please. Tell me … what’s an Armenian? Where’s Armenia? You tell me.’

Obviously, Benny did not know. He stared at her as if he could vaporize her. His eyes got narrower and narrower and she stared right back at him. Sarkis did not want to work for either of them. They both stared at each other for a long time until finally, the woman shifted her ground. You could see her surrender in her shoulders before she spoke.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She put out her little white hand towards him and he stepped away from it.

‘Don’t give me shit about this,’ he said. ‘I’m saving you.’

The woman’s face screwed up. She wiped her eyes and made a big black horizontal streak that went from the corner of her eye into her permed curly hair.

‘I’m saving you,’ Benny said again. He put out his hand to her and she took it and held it, and began to stroke the back of it. Sarkis was embarrassed but they were oblivious to him. ‘I’m making it possible.’

‘Honey, it was a nice try, but we can’t stop the Tax Office. She’s back.’

‘I know she’s back,’ Benny said defensively. ‘I saw . Maybe she just came to get her things … you won’t know until you talk to her.’

‘Forget it, Ben.’

‘Try being positive, just for once.’

Cathy smiled and shook her head. ‘Honey, you’re sixteen.’

Sarkis did not want to interrupt. He waited until whatever process they were engaged in – Benny stroking her hand, she touching Benny’s cheek – was completed. But when they brought their attention back to Sarkis, he said: ‘I can sell.’

The Catchprices took their hands back from each other.

‘What can you sell, Sam?’

‘F&I,’ Sarkis told her. From the corner of his eye he saw Benny smile. ‘I’m an F&I man,’ he said.

She frowned and scratched her hair. The hair was good and thick but dry and brittle from home perming. She took a Lifesaver packet from the pocket of her gingham dress, and bit off the top one.

‘Please,’ Benny said. ‘I can use him.’

She squinted at Sarkis and frowned. ‘We can’t afford an F&I man.’

‘You can’t afford not to have one,’ said Sarkis, wanting to be definite but having no idea how to be really definite, rushing her towards the idea of an F&I man while, at the same time, he dragged his own heels, anxious lest he be forced to talk any more about the alien subject.

‘I’m very sorry, Sam, but my mother had no authority to hire you.’

‘Don’t worry about him. He’s mine.’

‘She made a verbal contract with me,’ said Sarkis, remembering his father’s argument with a builder when they first arrived in Northwood.

This made the woman stare at him very hard.

‘Did she get the chance to tell you about her gelignite?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t want to get involved with us, Sam.’

‘I need a job.’

‘How long you been living in Franklin?’

‘Six months.’

‘You better just forget it, Sam. You don’t want this work. Please go away.’

‘You’re the one who should go away,’ Benny said, very gently. ‘You’ve got a reason to go away. We’ve got a reason to stay here.’

The woman looked at Benny and clenched her smudged eyes shut and opened her mouth and suffered a small convulsion or a shiver as if she might be about to weep. Then she turned and walked away across the gravel, holding out her hand to steady herself among the cars as she passed them.

32

In the gauzy rain-streaked light of Tuesday morning, Mort Catchprice became aware that there was an angel standing beside his bed. It had its back to him. It had broad shoulders and a narrow waist and on the cool white canvas of its back were wings of ball-point blue and crimson which seemed to lie like luminous silk across the skin.

In his dream he had been a river. It had been a rare and wonderful dream, to be water, to watch the light reflecting off his skin and so he came from sleep to meet the angel feeling unusually tranquil, and in the minute or so it took before he was really properly awake, he studied the wings and saw how they followed the form of the body, incorporating the collar bone, for instance, into what was clearly a tattooist’s trompe l’œil , one which gave perfect attention to each individual feather, dissolving sensuously from crimson into blue, always quite clear, not at all ambiguous until the upper reaches of the marble-white buttocks where the feathers became very small and might be read as scales.