Peter Carey: The Tax Inspector

‘I am my word,’ Benny said. ‘You’ve got to understand that – I committed.’

Behind her she heard the door handle rattle, a light tap on the cellar door.

Thank God. Dear God please save me .

‘It’s me, Vish,’ a voice said. ‘Can I come in?’

‘Piss off.’

‘Benny, you got to get out.’

‘I’m not getting out.’

Maria screamed through the middle of her contraction. Benny lifted the gun towards her and she swung the bar hard at him. She missed.

‘You got to get out. This place is going to go sky-high.’

Maria screamed again. ‘Help me!’

Benny waved the sawn-off gun at Maria Takis while he shouted at the door. ‘I don’t need you, you fucking sell-out, you Jesus creep.’

‘I’m coming in,’ said Vish.

There was no warning: the shot gun exploded and blew a splintered hole in the wooden door. Shot rattled and ricocheted around the cellar. Maria felt a hot stinging in her upper arm, her waist, her thigh, her calf.

She looked at Benny Catchprice as he walked towards the door, bleeding from the cheek. He opened the door, but there was no one there. He turned back to her.

‘What do you think I am?’ he said.

She did not understand the question.

‘I don’t want to hurt the baby,’ he said.

‘Shut up.’ She panted. She did not want to pant. She did not want to let him know what was happening to her. But now the pain was so bad she had no choice but to pant through it. She had the iron bar. He took the gun into his right hand, but then he put it down.

‘You think I’m an animal, because I live here. I wouldn’t hurt your baby.’

The pain was going.

‘You’re doing it now,’ she said. She saw it frightened him. ‘You’re hurting the baby right now, this minute. You’re killing it.’

‘No,’ he shouted.

‘I’m having the baby now,’ she said. ‘It’s coming.’

She saw his face. He was a child again, undecided. His mouth opened.

‘This is very serious,’ she said.

‘Shut up, I know.’

Maria lowered the iron bar. ‘You get me out of here right now,’ she said. ‘You can save this baby if you want to.’

Thursday

58

Vish’s arm was like a run-over cat. It did not hurt. He could see pieces of white among the red. He thought: bone. The red ran through the yellow robe like paint on unsized canvas. He felt the blood drip on to his foot. It felt warm, oddly pleasant.

He walked up the steps from Benny’s cellar, crossed the old lube bay and went straight on up the stairs to Cathy’s flat. He banged on the door and walked right on in. He was hollering even going across the kitchen. ‘Get out,’ he said. ‘She’s going to do it.’

He turned on the lights in their bedroom. They had no air-conditioning on account of Howie’s asthma. They were lying on top of the sheets. Howie was bright purple across his chest. He had a fat ugly penis with a ragged uncircumcised foreskin. Cathy was wearing an outsize T-shirt with ‘Cotton Country’ written on it.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’ He meant there was blood dripping on their shag pile carpet.

‘What’s happened?’ Howie asked. He was fishing in the drawer for his underpants. His back was white. He had no arse to talk of.

‘Hurry,’ Vish said.

He shepherded them through their kitchen. There were big splashes from his arm across the floor. ‘She’s crazy. She’s blowing us all up.’

‘What did she do to you?’ Cathy said. She was looking at his arm. She thought Gran had hurt his arm. She wanted to tie a bandage but he pushed her away with his good arm.

‘Run,’ he said. ‘The fuses are burning.’

This was not true.

Howie had underpants on. Cathy’s shirt came to her knees. They came down the stairs to the lube bay and hippety hopped across the bright-lit gravel like people walking barefoot from their car to a beach.

Granny was at the bottom of her fire escape still holding the roll of safety fuse.

‘There she is,’ he shouted.

He shouted not for them, but for her. He was trying to signal Granny Catchprice that the plan had got to change now. Howie and Cathy ran towards her. Then Howie was holding Gran. He was taking the safety fuse from her. Cathy and Howie had already stepped over a two-metre length of it at the bottom of their stairs without noticing. It was bright red and white and striped like a barber’s pole but they did not see it. There were other pieces, one, two, three metres, sticking out from the air vents at the base of the workshop and the showroom walls. Each one ran into the cobwebbed underfloor, where it was crimped tight inside a detonator. Each detonator, in turn, was jammed into a clammy half stick of gelignite. The gelignite was wedged in among the crumbling brick piers which supported the building.

While Cathy and Howie shouted at Granny Catchprice, Vish stooped to light a fuse. He had not been able to get gelignite below the ground at the old lube bay. There was no sub-floor – only cellar. He had to pack it into the drainpipes which ran beneath the concrete slab. He lit the fuse the way his Grandma had taught him, holding the match tight against the fuse and scraping the box across it. He chanted as he scraped. Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna. The fuse did not sparkle like a fuse in a cartoon. You could hardly see a flame at all. The fire slipped down into the tunnel of fuse casing. It made an occasional spark, a fart of blue smoke, a tiny heat bubble. It sneaked off like a spy, travelling 30 centimeters every ten seconds.

Vish thought he might die. He thought about God. Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, running through this gravel-floored hell of bright painted things.

Howie and Cathy were pushing Granny back towards the fire escape. He hollered to them, ‘No, she lit them off already,’ and then he remembered he was not thinking of God, he must think of God, that all that was necessary was to think of God.

He prayed Benny would be safe. He was in the cellar with some woman. He did not know he would be safe. How could he know?

Cathy and Howie were now walking towards him. They had left Granny Catchprice standing alone at the bottom of the fire escape. Cathy had seen the plume of blue smoke coming from a fuse. She was pointing at it, stamping at it.

‘It was her,’ he pointed back at Granny Catchprice. Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna . ‘She’s crazy.’

Behind Cathy and Howie’s shouting faces he could see his grandmother in her severe black suit. She had walked across the car yard to the workshop wall. She was working her way along the side of the wall, stooping, like a gardener weeding. She was lighting fuses. She had damp matches from her kitchen. Sometimes, he could see, these slowed her down.

Howie was panting and shouting at him. It was a moment before he saw what he wanted – the matches.

He pointed across the yard at Granny Catchprice. ‘It’s her,’ he said. He handed Howie the matches. ‘I took them off her, the crazy bitch. There she goes again.’

Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna. Not die. Not go to jail.

‘Where’s Benny?’ Cathy yelled.

‘You can’t go down there,’ he said. ‘You’ll get blown up.’

She tried to. She ran for the steps.

Howie grabbed Cathy. She had no underpants. He picked her up and carried her bare-arsed across the yard. She struggled and hit his head.

‘Mort,’ she called. ‘What about Mort?’

‘He’s O.K.,’ Vish said. He did not know he was O.K. He had fucked it up. He had changed the plan. It was Benny’s fault. He had tried to murder him. It was Krishna who came to punish the people who hurt the followers of Krishna.

Vish walked slowly across the yard. He felt heat like a furnace in his wounded arm. He did not hurry. The Lord would decide when it ignited.