Peter Carey - The Tax Inspector

‘Ms Takis,’ said Maria, who had determined that Mrs Catchprice would not be committed, not today at least. ‘Perhaps you did not hear where I am from.’

‘You are a little Hitler from the Tax Department.’

‘Then you are a Jew,’ said Maria.

‘I am a what?’ said the doctor, rising from his seat, so affronted that Maria burst out laughing. The Hare Krishna had begun chanting softly.

‘Oh dear,’ she laughed. ‘Oh dear, I really have offended you.’

The doctor’s face was now burning. Freckles showed in the red.

‘What exactly do you mean by that?’

‘I meant no offence to Jews.’

‘But I am not a Jew, obviously.’

‘Oh, obviously,’ she smiled.

‘Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna.’

‘Shush darling,’ said Mrs Catchprice, who was straining towards the doctor so that she might miss none of this.

‘I meant that if I were a doctor with a good practice I would be very careful of attracting the attention of the Taxation Officer.’

‘Hell and Tommy,’ exclaimed Mrs Catchprice and blew her nose loudly.

‘I have an accountant.’

Mrs Catchprice snorted.

‘I bet you do,’ said Maria. ‘Do you know how many accountants were investigated by the Taxation Office last year?’

‘Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna.’

‘I’ll report you for this,’ said Cathy McPherson to Maria Takis.

‘And what will you “report” me for?’

‘For interfering in our family, for threatening our doctor.’

‘Mrs McPherson …’

‘Ms,’ hissed Cathy McPherson.

Maria shrugged. ‘Report me,’ she said. If Sally Ho ever heard what Maria had just done, she would be not just reprimanded – she would be drummed out. ‘They’ll be pleased to talk to you, believe me.’

The doctor was packing his bag. He slowly put away his papers and clipped his case shut.

‘I’ll phone you later, Mrs McPherson.’

‘Would you like one of my dolls?’ Mrs Catchprice asked Maria. ‘Choose any one you like.’

‘No, no,’ Maria said. ‘I couldn’t break up the collection …’

‘Jonathon,’ said Mrs Catchprice imperiously, ‘Jonathon, fetch this young lady a doll.’

‘Could I have a word with you?’ Cathy McPherson said.

‘Of course,’ said Maria, but Mrs Catchprice’s nails were suddenly digging into her arm again.

Cathy McPherson obviously wished to talk to her away from her mother, and Maria would have liked to have complied with her wishes but Mrs Catchprice’s nails made it impossible.

Maria did not feel comfortable with what she had just done. She did not think it right that she should interfere in another family’s life. She had been a bully, had misused her power. The child in her belly was made with a man whose great and simple vision it was that tax should be an agent for equity and care, and if this man was imperfect in many respects, even if he was a shit, that was not the issue, merely a source of pain.

Cathy McPherson stood before her with her damaged cream complexion and her cowboy boots. Maria would have liked to speak to her, but Mrs Catchprice had her by the arm.

‘Not here,’ said Cathy McPherson.

Mrs Catchprice’s nails released their pressure. Jonathon had placed a Japanese doll on her lap.

‘It’s a doll bride,’ said Mrs Catchprice, ‘Bernie Phillips brought it back from Japan. Do you know Bernie Phillips?’

‘This is my mother,’ said Cathy McPherson, her eyes welling up with tears. ‘Do you have the time to look after her? Are you going to come back and wash her sheets and cook her meals?’

‘No one needs to look after me,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘You are the one who needs looking after, Cathleen, and you’ve never been any different.’

‘Mother, I am forty-five years old. The cars I sell pay for everything you spend.’

‘I don’t eat any more,’ Mrs Catchprice said to Maria. ‘I just pick at things. I like party pies. Do you like party pies?’

‘I’ve got a whole band about to walk out on me and steal my name because I’m trying to care for you,’ Cathy said. ‘You want me to go on the road? You really want me to leave you to starve?’

‘Bernie Phillips brought it back from Japan,’ said Mrs Catchprice, placing the doll in Maria’s hand. ‘Now isn’t that something.’

‘Fuck you,’ screamed Cathy McPherson. ‘I hope you die.’

There was silence in the room for a moment. The noise came from outside – the rain on the tin roof, Cathy McPherson running down the fire escape in her white cowboy boots.

6

When she was twenty, after she had run away from both her marriage and her mother, Maria Takis went back to the island of Letkos to the house she was born in and stayed for six weeks with her mother’s uncle, Petros, a stern-looking old man who bicycled ten miles along the dirt road to Agios Constantinos for no other reason than to buy his great-niece an expensive tin of Nescafe which he believed would please her more than the gritty little thimblefuls of metries kafe he made on his single gas burner.

Petros was the worldly one. He had worked on ships to New York and Shanghai, Cape Town and Rio and to have questioned or refused the Nescafé would have been somehow to undercut who he was. Maria had not come all this way to make her life fit the expectations of others, but just the same she could no more tell him she hated Nescafe than she could confess that she was already married and separated.

Instead she said, ‘It is too hot today,’ and held the handles of his bicycle as if this might prevent him buying it.

‘It is always hot,’ he said. He had to wrench the bicycle away from her and his dark eyebrows pressed down on eyes that suddenly revealed a glittering temper.

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘It is hotter than it used to be.’

That made him laugh. He mounted his bicycle and rattled down the chalky road towards the square still laughing out loud and when her parents’ friends and relations came to meet her he would tell them, ‘When Maria lived here the summers used to be cooler.’

Everyone in Letkos found this very funny and Maria found them very irritating.

‘I didn’t remember the heat,’ Maria said, too many times. ‘Only the air. We left in the autumn and arrived in Sydney in the summer.’ She told them about how hot it had been walking the streets of Newtown looking for work with her mother – like hell, like a heat so hot and poisonous you could not breathe – but she could see their eyes glaze over as they stopped listening to her. It was not their way of thinking about Australia and they did not want to hear. Australians were all rich, all drank Nescafe. That was why Nikkos refused to apologize for the state of her parents’ house. He was meant to look after it but he had stolen the furniture and let the goats eat the pomegranate tree and he could not see that this would matter to Maria or her family. But she had grown up mourning for this beautiful little house which Nikkos had filled with goat shit. It was the place her mother meant when she said, ‘Let’s go home,’ whispering to her husband in bed in a shared house in Sydney where you could hear the people in the next room doing everything.

On the ground floor of the house in Letkos her mother had cooked preserves, fried eggplant, keftethes – the room was always sweet with spices and oil. In the house which Nikkos had wrecked they kept almonds and walnuts and dry rustling bundles of beans. Maria had sat on the wooden doorstep in a great parallelogram of sunshine, eating pomegranate from the tree in the garden.

The first house in Sydney was a painful contrast. They rented a room from a friend of an uncle in Agios Constantinos. His name was Dimitri Papandreou. He smelt of sweat and old rags and was stingy. He used newspaper instead of toilet paper. He turned off the hot water when he left the house each morning. He had a secret tap no one else could find, not even Helen, who was smaller than Maria, and who was sent climbing under the floor boards to search for it. Dimitri Papandreou’s wife worked at Glo-weave. The family therefore expected Maria’s mother to look after all of the Papandreous. Dimitri Papandreou would cook lentils or beans and keep them in an aluminium pot in the fridge for weeks. It was his way of criticizing Maria’s mother.