The Tax Inspector

philosophy.’

‘Shut up, Howie,’ Cathy said.

‘What I’m getting to,’ Mort said, his neck now blazing red above his white overall collar, ‘is Cacka paid his taxes. He’d have shut the doors if he couldn’t pay his taxes.’

‘Mort,’ said Cathy, more gently than before, ‘Franklin has changed.’

‘If it’s changed so much we have to be cheats, I’d rather run some little garage up at Woop-woop. I’d rather be on the dole.’

‘You might get your wish,’ Cathy said.

‘How?’ asked Benny.

They all looked at him. For a moment the only noise came from the rattling air-conditioner.

‘What?’ Cathy said, frowning at him.

‘How will my father get his wish?’

‘What this conversation is about, Benjamin, is that we are being investigated by the Taxation Department.’

‘I know that.’

‘And by the time they have finished with us, we’ll have to sell the business to pay them back.’

‘So, what are you going to do, Cathy?’ Benny asked.

‘Don’t speak to your auntie like that.’

‘No,’ Benny insisted, ‘what are you going to do to protect us? What positive steps can be taken towards realizing our desires?’ He blushed and stood up. They were all staring at him. Not one of them had any idea of who he was and what it was he had quoted to them. Howie was smirking, but none of them had any plan appropriate to their situation. In their shiny suits and frills and oily overalls, they were creatures at the end of an epoch. The climate had changed and they were puzzled to find the familiar crops would no longer grow. He stood up. He was full of light. They saw him, but did not see him, for the best and most vital part of him was already walking down the path towards the actualization of his desires. I am new. I am born now. Even while they stared at him across the bottle-stained emptiness of the ping-pong table, he was descending the staircase, not the one that led to his physical actual cellar – not the metal staircase with its perforated treads, the oil-stained ladder with the banister he must not touch – but the other staircases which are described in seven audio cassettes, Actualizations and Affirmations 1–14.

He was descending the blue staircase (its treads shimmering like oil on water, its banisters clear, clean, stainless steel) and all they could think was that he had no right to wear a suit.

At the bottom of the blue staircase he found the yellow staircase.

At the bottom of the yellow staircase, the pink.

At the bottom of the pink, the ebony.

At the end of the ebony, the Golden Door.

Beyond the Golden Door was the Circular Room of Black Marble.

In the centre of the Circular Room of Black Marble he visualized a Sony Trinitron.

Benny turned on the Sony Trinitron and saw there the vivid picture of what it was he desired: all the books and ledgers of Catchprice Motors, wrapped in orange garbage bags and sealed with silver tape.

‘Leave it to me,’ he said out loud.

By then he was already walking across the crushed gravel of the car yard. His father was a yard ahead of him.

‘What?’ he said.

14

Maria’s image of herself was made in all the years before 15 July, the day she finally discovered that she was pregnant. No matter what kicks the baby gave her, no matter how it squirmed and rolled and pushed and made her lumpy and off-centre, no matter how her legs ached, her back hurt, irrespective of the constipation, haemorrhoids and insomnia, the fine webs of spider veins and stretch marks that threatened to make her old and ugly overnight, she could still forget what her body had actually become. She could look in the mirrors as she entered the birth class and be surprised to see a short, big-bellied woman.

There were also other times when she knew exactly what she looked like and then she felt that she had been that way for ever, and then it was almost impossible to remember that it had only been on 15 July last year that she had discovered she was pregnant.

On 15 July she still had beer and wine in her refrigerator, no milk. She made her last cup of strong black coffee, not even bothering to taste it properly, and slipped into her quilted ‘Afghan’ skirt and embroidered black silk blouse not guessing that before five weeks had passed the $220 skirt would be unwearable.

Her period was late, but her period was often late, or early. She stopped in Darling Street, Balmain, and spent $15 on a pregnancy test kit and drove over the Harbour Bridge to Crows Nest where she was auditing a property developer. It wasn’t until after lunch she found the pregnancy test kit in her handbag.

In the property developer’s white bathroom she saw a slender phial of her urine turn a pretty violet colour.

She sat it on the window ledge and shook her head at it. Such was her capacity for denial that she assumed the kit was faulty and at three o’clock she spent another $15 on a second kit and got the same result.

She tried to phone her best friend at the Tax Office. Gia Katalanis had an office with a view and an answer machine on her desk. Maria left a message: ‘Extraordinary news.’

As for Alistair, she put it off. She knew where he was, in an office two floors above Gia’s. Even when she phoned him, on his direct line, at five o’clock, she did not know quite what she was going to say.

‘I want to buy you dinner,’ she told him, looking out of the property developer’s spare office to where $80,000 yachts heeled over in the Nor’-easter.

‘I can’t,’ he said.

She understood exactly what he meant – his wife.

‘Oh, yes you can,’ she said. She laughed, but it did not soften the effect – she had already crossed a line. ‘It’s something good,’ she said. ‘Not bad. It’s worth it.’

She knew how false this was even when she said it – that what she was to present him with was something totally unacceptable, something that could not fit into the odd shapes they had made of their lives.

‘I’m going to have to tell such dreadful lies,’ he said.

‘That’s life,’ she said.

But when she hung up she knew that was exactly what she did not want life to be. She dropped her half- finished can of Diet Coke into the rubbish bin. That night when she met Alistair at the Blue Moon Brasserie the first thing he noticed was that she had taken all the silver rings off her hands.

‘What happened?’ he asked as they sat down. It was her hands he was talking about.

But she was already telling him that she was pregnant and she would have the child.

She had rehearsed a more reasoned, gradual, diplomatic speech, but in the end the words came out gracelessly, sounding more angry than she thought she felt. ‘You’re going to have to choose,’ she said. It was amazing. It was just like saying ‘pass the bread’ – only words, gone already, disappeared into that loud river of talk that bounced off the hard tiled floor of the Brasserie.

Alistair nodded as he nodded with men when arguing on television, absorbing their points, holding his counsel, the picture of reasonableness. He was holding her newly naked hand, massaging her wrist, but he suddenly looked very far away and she was frightened by what she had begun.

He was almost fifty. He had a craggy, handsome face and curly grey hair. She had watched that face so closely for so many years she could no more describe him than she could, as a child, have described her mother or father. The shape of his face corresponded to some shape in her mind, a place to lie down and sleep and be safe.

‘I don’t care if we don’t get married,’ she said, although this was different from what she had planned to say. ‘But you’re going to have to choose.’

He sat looking at her, nodding his head. Without his face seeming to change, he began to cry.