Peter Carey - The Tax Inspector

‘Are you sorry?’ he asked her.

‘Of course not,’ she said, but drank from her orange juice immediately, and he saw it was all less certain between them than he had hoped or believed and he had a premonition of a loss he felt he could not bear.

‘Should I have woken you early?’

‘Oh,’ she smiled. ‘Probably not. These are lovely eggs.’

He watched her eat. ‘Today I’ll get a blood test,’ he said, a little experimentally. ‘I don’t know how long they take but I’ll send the results to you by courier the moment they are in. I don’t want you to worry about last night.’

‘Oh,’ she said, but her tone was positive. ‘O.K., I’ll do the same for you.’

‘You don’t need to. They’ve been running HIV tests on you since you were pregnant.’

‘Can they do that?’

‘No, but they do.’

He had no idea if what he said was true or not. He was not worried about HIV. He was concerned only with somehow establishing the presence of those qualities – scrupulousness, integrity – the lack of which he was sure went so much against him.

She leaned across and rubbed some dried shaving cream from behind his ear. ‘And what else will you do?’

He took her hand and held it in both of his. ‘What else are you worried by? Let me fix it for you. It’s what I like most about business. Everyone is always brought down by all the obstacles and difficulties, but there’s almost nothing you can’t fix.’

‘Not the money?’

‘Not the money what?’

‘Not the money you like about business. I would have thought that was very attractive?’

‘Well money is important of course, in so far as it can provide.’ He used this word carefully, suggesting, he hoped, ever so tangentially, accidentally almost, his credentials as provider . ‘But after a certain stage, it’s not why people work. Do you doubt that?’

‘Uh-uh,’ Maria said, her mouth full of bacon. ‘But there’s nothing you can fix for me. I tried to fix mine myself.’

‘Maybe I could succeed where you’ve failed.’

‘This is very specialized.’

‘Just the same …’

‘Jack, this is my work.’

‘I’m a generalist,’ he smiled. ‘Tell me your problem.’

He could see her deciding whether to be offended by him or not. She hesitated, frowned.

‘Will you tell me the truth if I ask you a direct question?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Did your family call you up to somehow “nobble” me?’

‘My mother called me, yes. But I came to calm her down, not to nobble you.’

‘Would you believe me if I told you I had already actually tried to stop their audit myself, and that my problem is I couldn’t – can’t?’

‘Sure … yes, of course, if you said so.’

‘Jack, this is a big secret I’m telling you …’

‘I’m very good with secrets.’

‘I’m telling you something I could be sent to jail for. I tried to stop it.’

‘Why would you do that for Catchprice Motors? I wouldn’t.’

‘It’s nothing to do with your family. It’s between me and the Tax Office.’

‘You don’t seem a very Tax Office sort of person.’

‘Well I am,’ Maria reddened. ‘I’m a very Tax Office sort of person. I hate all this criminal wealth. This state is full of it. It makes me sick. I see all these skunks with their car phones and champagne and I see all this homelessness and poverty. Do you know that one child in three in Australia grows up under the poverty line? You know how much tax is evaded every year? You don’t need socialism to fix that, you just need a good Taxation Office and a Treasury with guts. And for a while we had both. For five years. I didn’t join to piddle around rotten inefficient businesses like your family’s. I never did anything so insignificant in my life. I won’t do that sort of work. It fixes nothing. I’m crazy enough to think the world can change, but not like that.’

Without taking her eyes off him she put three spoons of sugar in her tea and stirred it.

‘Maria,’ Jack said, ‘I’m on your side.’

‘I’m sorry …’

‘I know I have a car phone …’

‘I’m sorry … I was offensive …’

‘No, no, I know you don’t know me very well, but I would do anything to help you.’

‘Jack, you’re very sweet. You were sweet last night.’ She touched his face again, and traced the shape of his lips with her forefinger.

‘You need someone to come and pick up your laundry in hospital … do you have someone who will do that for you?’

‘Jack,’ she started laughing, ‘please …’

‘No, really. Who’s going to do that for you?’

‘Jack, you are sweet. You were very sweet last night and today, I’m sorry, I was irritable with you when you didn’t wake me. You wanted me to rest and I read it as a control thing. I was wrong. I’m sorry.’

‘Will you have dinner with me again?’ he asked her.

He could see in her eyes that it was by no means certain. She took his hand and stroked it as if to diminish the pain she was about to cause him.

‘It could be early,’ he said, ‘I love to eat early.’

‘Jack, I really do need to sleep. I’m thirty-two weeks pregnant.’

‘Sure. How about tomorrow night then?’

She frowned. ‘You really want to see me so soon?’

‘I think the world can change too,’ he said, and Maria Takis knew he was in love with her and if she was going to be honest with herself she must admit it: she was relieved to have him present in her life.

47

Sarkis could not know that he was limping back and forth across the Catchprice family history. He did not connect the names of the streets he walked along on Wednesday morning – Frieda Crescent, Mortimer Street, Cathleen Drive. He carried Benny’s broken blue umbrella along their footpaths, not to reach anywhere – they did not go anywhere, they were criss-crosses on the map of an old poultry farm – but to save his pride by wasting time.

He was going back to Catchprice Motors to stop his mother going crazy, but he was damned if he would get there at eight-thirty. The air was soupy. His fresh shirt was already sticky on his skin. He walked in squares and rectangles. He passed along the line of the hall-way in the old yellow Catchprice house which was bulldozed flat after Frieda and Cacka’s poultry farm was sub-divided. He crossed the fence line where Cathy had set up noose-traps for foxes. He passed over the spot – once the base of a peppercorn tree, now a concrete culvert on Cathleen Drive – where Cacka, following doctor’s orders, first began to stretch the skin of his son’s foreskin.

He walked diagonally across the floor of the yellow-brick shed where Frieda and Cathy used to cool the sick hens down in heat waves, trod on two of the three graves in the cats’ cemetery, and, at the top of the hill where Mortimer Street met Boundary Road, walked clean through the ghost of the bright silver ten-thousand-gallon water tank in whose shadow Frieda Catchprice let Squadron Leader Everette put his weeping face between her legs.

Sarkis had pressed his suit trousers three times but they were still damp with last night’s rain. His jacket was pulled very slightly out of shape by the weight of the Swiss army knife.

His mother had always been smiling, optimistic. Even in the worst of the time when his father disappeared, she never cried or despaired. When she lost her job she did not cry. She began a vegetable garden. Through the summer she fed them on pumpkin, zucchini, eggplant. She triumphed in the face of difficulties. She made friends with the stony-faced clerks in the dole office. When the car was repossessed, she spent twenty dollars on a feast to celebrate the savings they would make because of it. When Sarkis was on television, she pretended she had never seen the programme.