The Tax Inspector

changed, although into what is by no means certain. It could not be grief, it was something drier and harder than grief, a knot, a lump. They lay all day, cocooned in their beds in their own rooms, like grubs locked out of metamorphosis. They read second-hand romances and detective novels – three, sometimes four a day – while the ring-barked trees outside slowly died and grew white and were left to crash and fall around the house in storms.

Frieda worked cheerfully around her parents, cooking, cleaning, dusting, as if she could, by the sheer force of her goodwill, effect their recovery. She carried the vision for them. Not a guest-house any more. She pared it down to the thing she had been promised – the flowers. She would have a flower farm. For three years – an impossible time in retrospect – she ran to and fro, trying to make them cheerful again. She paid for the Horticulturalist from housekeeping. She began a correspondence with the Horticultural Society. She grew flowers – Gerberas particularly – and exhibited them at local shows.

Only in the midst of the violent storms of summer did she express her anger. With giant trees crashing in the night, she hated her parents for putting her in terror of her life. In the clear white flash of lightning, she said things so extreme that their remembrance, at morning, was shameful to her.

But when the giant red cedar finally hit the house it was afternoon, and there was no sleep to take the edge off her rage or make her forget the extremity of her terror.

The cedar wiped out the south-west corner of the veranda and pushed its way into the kitchen. The noise was so great that her parents actually rose from their beds, both at the same time.

The sky to the east was still black. But the sun came from the west and as they came out on to the shattered veranda it shone upon them. They stood staring at the receding storm and squinted as the unexpected sunlight took them from the side. In the light of the sun they looked spoiled and sickly, like things left too long in the bath. Frieda saw the toes sticking from the slippers, the string where the dressing cord should be, the yellow, dog-eared pages of a musty Carter Brown in her father’s hand, and felt all her unpermitted anger well up in her. She opened her mouth to release some word bigger than a pumpkin. She could do nothing but hold her hands apart and shake her head. They put their hands across their brows to shade their eyes from glare.

She fetched her mother’s tonic and poured it away in front of her.

She took the bread and butter pudding from the oven and threw it off the edge of the veranda.

‘Maggots,’ she said. ‘You nearly killed me.’

No one said anything, but by the time she reached the front gate her mother was on the phone to the police.

Percy Donaldson was the Sergeant. He was half-shickered when he got the call and he dropped the car keys down between the slats on the veranda and had to take his son’s bicycle to get Frieda back. Mrs McClusky, who had seen her daughter walk up towards the Ebor Road, hadn’t troubled to tell him that the runaway had a stick of AN 60 and a bag of detonators in a little lilac whats-oh hanging round her neck.

He found her up at the beginning of the gravel road where the town’s macadam stopped. It was dark by then, although not pitch black. She waved the gelly at him: ‘You grab me and you’re minced meat.’ He could see her pale face in the light of his bicycle lantern. ‘I’ve got the detonators,’ she said in a trembling voice. ‘I know what todo with them.’

‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘Easy girl.’ He peered into the poor, pale yellow nimbus of light which was all the flat battery was able to bring to bear on the girl. She sure was pretty.

‘It’s real,’ she said. ‘I’m Stan McClusky’s daughter.’

‘I know who you are, Frieda.’

‘Good,’ she said.

She did not even have the detonators wrapped up. They clinked next to each other in their little bag next to her breast.

‘You want to wrap them things up,’ he said. ‘They’ll blow your little titties off.’

It was because of that remark she refused to speak to him all night. And it was all night they were to spend together – because she would not return with him, and he would not leave her alone, and so they walked together over the pot-holed road – Percy hearing those damned detonators clinking round her neck while they walked for ten hours with their stomachs rumbling – neither of them had eaten before they left – until at piccaninny dawn they were on the outskirts of Wollombi. Fifty-two miles. Ten hours. Over five miles an hour!

As they walked on to the mile-long stretch of macadam which was Wollombi, Frieda burst into tears. Her face was caked with dust and the tears made smudgy mud and she bowed her head and howled. Percy felt sorry for her. He lent her his handkerchief and watched helplessly as her pretty little shoulders shook. The milkman was stopped a little up the road. He was ladling milk from his bucket, but staring at the policeman and the crying girl.

‘You’ve got guts,’ Percy said, motioning the milkman to piss off. ‘I’ll say that for you.’

He guessed she was frightened of what trouble she had got herself into, which was true, but he had no idea how empowered she was. Under the mud of her despair and misery ran this hard bedrock of certainty – the fact that gelignite was as light as a feather. Until that day she had thought it was a thing for men.

She and Percy got a lift with a fellow who was a traveller in Manchester and Millinery. His car was filled with samples but they wrapped the bicycle in hessian bags and strapped it to the roof with twine. They travelled home together in the dickey seat, silently, but companionably, like soldiers who have fought beside each other in the same trench. The only charges ever laid were against her father for not keeping his gelignite locked up.

Everyone in Dorrigo heard the story, of course, Freddy Sparks the butcher knew it, told it to people who had already heard it. But he never did connect it with the sweet cloying smell that rose from Frieda Catchprice’s handbag when she opened it to pay the bill. The source of the smell was nothing to look at – like a cheap sausage, or some cold porridge wrapped in brown paper. It was a stick of AN 60 gelignite.

This was the year Frieda did her mines exams and got a permit herself. No one wanted to let her have it – her parents least of all – but she wanted to make a flower farm and they were too frightened to say no.

11

She was carrying gelignite in her white leather clutch-bag when she first danced with ‘Cacka’ Catchprice. He arrived in August as official scorer for the touring Franklin ‘Magpies’.

All that time I was pretty and did not know it.

This thought could still make her rheumy eyes water – she had been brought up to think herself so goddam plain, such a collection of faults – wide mouth, small bosom, thin legs – which would all be clear for all the world to snicker at if she did not listen to her mother’s advice about her shoes, her skirt, her lipstick colour.

I could have married anyone I damn well pleased.

When she walked into town in gum boots, holding gelignite in her clutch-bag, her dancing shoes in a paper bag, she had decided to get married, to anyone, she did not care – anything would be better than staying in that house another year – but when she opened the wire gate in the fence around the C.W.A. rooms, she almost lost her resolve and her legs went weak and rubbery and she really thought she was going to faint.

She saw men in blazers leaning against the ugly concrete veranda posts. There was a string of coloured lights in a necklace underneath the veranda guttering. Under the wash of blue and red there were girls she recognized, people she had ‘dealt with’ in the shops who were now powerful and pretty in scallops of peach organza. They did not try to speak to her. The smell of beer came out to meet her, as alien as sweat, hair oil, pipe tobacco. She had to make herself continue up the path in her gum boots.

Inside it was no better. She sat beneath the crepe paper streamers, on a chair in a corner by the tea urn, and removed her muddy gum boots. She kept her head down, convinced that everyone was looking at her. When she saw that the gum boots were too big to fit in her paper bag, she did not know what to do with them.

If it had not been for the gum boots Cacka might never have spoken to her. If she had come in with shiny black high heels, he would almost certainly have found her beyond his reach. But he came from a red clay farm where you had to wear gum boots to go to take a shit at night. His mother wore gum boots to get from the back door to the hire car which took them to their father’s funeral.

‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’m going to put these out the back. You tell me when you want them. I’ll get them for you.’

‘You’re most kind,’ she said.