Peter Carey - The Tax Inspector

‘God, it’s so creepy. It’s as though you had to talk to something with scales. It’s like some slimy thing you think is mythical. You think it doesn’t really exist and then there it is and you’re touching it. You talked to him about your execution while he was just sitting in his car. It makes me hate this city.’

‘Don’t hate Sydney, Maria. It makes me really anxious when you hate Sydney.’

‘It’s Sydney I hate, not you.’

‘All cities are like this. Where could you go that would be different?’

‘This city is really special.’

‘When you say that I think you’re going to go away. But where could you go that would be any different?’

‘This is the only big city in the world that was established by convicts on the one side and bent soldiers on the other. I’m sorry. I’ll shut up. You must be feeling terrible.’

Gia’s straw made a loud sucking noise at the bottom of her glass.

‘Only when you talk like that.’

‘I’ve stopped. I didn’t know it made you anxious.’

Gia picked the maraschino cherry from her drink and ate it. ‘Maria, I feel great. I’m alive and no one wants to kill me. I’m going to take a week off and just go to the theatre and the art galleries and have lunch with my friends.’ She picked up the orange-slice umbrella and ate the flesh from it. She looked around for a waiter but they were all – Peter too – eating. ‘You saved my life,’ she said.

Maria shook her head: ‘No.’

‘But you did.’

‘They weren’t really going to kill you,’ Maria said.

Gia narrowed her eyes.

‘Oh Gia, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.’

‘I know that’s what you think.’ Gia drained her glass for the second time and waved her hand.

‘I think it’s horrible. I think it’s really frightening.’ Maria said. She held her friend’s forearm and stroked its pale soft underside. ‘Who can ever know if they would have or not?’

‘I’m sure you would have behaved quite differently.’

‘No. I think you were amazing. I wouldn’t have known what to do. You were very brave.’

‘What’s your fellow’s name?’

Maria Takis bit her lip and raised her eyebrow and coloured. She dabbed her wide mouth with a paper napkin. ‘Which fellow?’

‘Maria!’

‘What?’

‘Stop blushing.’

‘Jack Catchprice? He’s actually a classic investigation target.’

‘Is he nice looking?’

Maria smiled, a tight pleased smile that made her cheekbones look even more remarkable.

‘Is he married?’

Maria looked up and saw Jack Catchprice walk into the Brasserie. He was ten minutes early. Jack was talking to Peter. Peter was pointing out towards the garden. Maria shook her head at Gia.

‘Is this what I think it is? Maria what have you been doing?’

‘Shush. Don’t look. I’ve been trying to tell you. Don’t look, but he’s here.’

It was not a good idea to say ‘Don’t look’ to Gia. She turned immediately, and looked straight back, grinning.

‘Maria,’ she said in that same whisper that had started the trouble with Wally Fischer, ‘he’s a doll.’

42

Jack had asked her out while they stood in the kitchen of his mother’s apartment. Rain fell from the overhang above the rusting little steel-framed window behind the sink. The rain was loud and heavy. It fell from the corrugated roof like strings of glass beads. Water trickled through the plaster-sheeted ceiling and fell in fat discoloured drops on to a bed of soggy toast and dirty dishes. A red setter tried to mount Jack’s leg.

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I can’t go out with clients.’

‘I’m not your client.’

‘But you have an interest, you know.’

‘I have no interest, I swear.’ He looked around and screwed his face up. ‘I got out of this family a long, long time ago. Their problems are their problems.’

‘Really?’

‘Really,’ he said. ‘Cross my heart. Check the share register.’

‘Well,’ she said, but the truth was that she had already clearly communicated, through a series of well-placed ‘I’s’, her single status, and she would like to be taken out to dinner more than anything else she could think of. ‘I leave Franklin at three. It’s a little too early for dinner.’

‘God, no, not Franklin. I didn’t mean Franklin.’

‘I have drinks with a friend at the Blue Moon Brasserie at six.’ She did not say it was the attractive friend Jack had already talked to.

‘The Blue Moon Brasserie?’ he asked. ‘In Macleay Street? I could meet you there. We could eat there. Or we could walk over to Chez Oz. I was thinking of Chez Oz. It’s round the corner.’ And when she hesitated, ‘It doesn’t matter. We can decide later.’

‘Oh, I can’t …’ Maria’s face betrayed herself – she would dearly love to be taken to Chez Oz.

‘Jack,’ Mrs Catchprice was calling him from the other room. ‘I hope you’re behaving yourself.’

‘I have to drop in on my father at half-past seven. He’s certainly not round the corner. Nowhere near Chez Oz.’

‘Then I can meet you at the Brasserie and we could have a drink and then I could drive you to your father’s. You like Wagner? You could put your feet up. I could play you some nice Wagner. It doesn’t have to be Wagner. I have the Brahms Double Concerto that is very appropriate to this weather. I have a nice car. I would wait for you while you visited your father. I won’t be bored.’

She did not prickle at the ‘nice car’ although she knew he had a Jaguar from John Sewell’s. She had sat in John Sewell’s herself, two years before, copying down the names of Jaguar owners as starting points for tax investigations.

‘I’ll be driving my own car to the Brasserie.’

‘I’ll drive you back to it after dinner.’

‘My father lives in Newtown.’

‘That’s O.K., I can find Newtown.’

‘I mean it’s not a very exciting place to sit in a parked car for half an hour.’

‘Oh,’ he smiled. His whole face crinkled. She liked the way he did that. He had nice lines around his mouth and eyes and his face, tilted a little, had a very intent, listening sort of quality which she found immensely attractive. ‘I think I can manage half an hour in Newtown.’

She was in the middle of an investigation of his family business. She might be the one who made his mother homeless, but he was flirting with her, more than flirting and she was reciprocating. He was the first man to treat her as a sexual being since she began to ‘show’.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘It is an odd situation in Newtown. I have to sneak into Newtown sort of incognito. I might have to ask you not to park outside the house.’

He pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows comically.

‘It’s ridiculous,’ she said, ‘I know.’

‘I used to go out with a Jewish woman called Layla. She was twenty-four and I was nearly thirty but I could never take her home. I had to sit outside in the car.’

‘Yes, but you’re not “going out” with me,’ Maria smiled.

‘No, of course not.’ He coloured.

What was weird was that this embarrassment was pleasing. Indeed, the prospect of this ‘date’ gave everything that happened for the rest of the day – including her second serious chat with Mrs Catchprice about the company books, and her unpleasant phone conversation with her section leader where she requested one more day on the job – a pleasant secret corner, this thing to look forward to.

She had never planned to introduce him to her father, or have him sit in that little kitchen drinking brandy. That only happened because they were a little late and because, even after two circuits, the only parking spot in Ann Street was right in front of George Takis’s house where he was – in spite of all the rain – hosing down the green concrete of his small front garden. It was the mark of his widowed state – it was the woman who normally hosed the concrete.