Shire Hall to make municipal offices six storeys high. Benny could tell you the value of the rates the Shire collected each year: $26 million. There was drug addiction and unemployment it is true, but there were airline pilots and dentists out along the Gorge. They came tooling down the F4 in Porsches and Volvos.
All of this should have been good for business, but Catchprice Motors, a collection of soiled and flaking white stucco buildings with barley-sugar columns and arched windows, had somehow got itself isolated from the action. It was stranded out on the north end of Loftus Street opposite the abandoned boot-maker’s and bakery. Loftus Street fed the stream of the F4, but the commercial centre had shifted to a mall half a mile to the south and there were now many people, newcomers to the area, to whom the name Catchprice had no meaning at all. They did not know there was a G.M. dealership tucked away between A.S.P. Building Supplies and the Franklin District Ambulance Centre.
There was a sign, of course, which said CATCHPRICE MOTORS and most of the Catchprices lived right behind it. Gran Catchprice’s windows looked out through the holes in the letters ‘A’ and ‘P’. Her grown-up son, Benny’s father, lived in a red-brick bungalow which fitted itself against the back wall of the workshop like a shelf fungus against a eucalyptus trunk and her married daughter, Cathy, had taken over the old place above the lube bay.
The Catchprices clustered around the quartz-gravel heart of the business. Time-switched neon lights lay at their centre. The odours of sump oil and gasoline sometimes penetrated as far as their linen closets. They were in debt to the General Motors Acceptance Corporation for $567,000.
That Sunday night following Benny’s dismissal, two members of the family kept him company. They sat above the showroom where the late Albert (‘Cacka’) Catchprice had sold his first 1946 Dodge to Jack Iggulden. In those days the rooms above the showroom had been Cacka’s offices, but now they were his widow’s home. The glass display case which had once displayed bottled snakes and sporting trophies now held Frieda Catchprice’s famous collection of bride dolls. There were eighty-nine of them. They were all frizzy, frilly, with red lips and big eyes. They occupied the entire back wall of her living-room.
Granny Catchprice was eighty-six years old. She liked to smoke Salem cigarettes. When she put one in her mouth, her lower lip stretched out towards it like a horse will put out its lip towards a lump of sugar. She was not especially self-critical, but she knew how she looked when she did this – an old tough thing. She was not a tough thing. She made jokes about her leaking roof but she was frightened there was no money to fix it. She made jokes, also, about the state of the bride dolls behind the glass display case. She liked to say, ‘Us girls are getting on,’ but the truth was she could not even look at the dolls, their condition upset her so. She would walk into the room and look up towards the neon tubes, or down towards the white-flecked carpet. She ducked, dodged, avoided. She always sat at the one place at her dining table, with her back hard against the case of dolls. The glass on the case was smeared. Sometimes it became all clouded up with condensation and the dolls had streaks of mould and mildew which, at a distance, looked like facial hair.
When she sat with her back to the dolls on Sunday night she had to face her youngest grandson. She would have preferred not to see how his spine was curved over and how his animated eyes had gone quite dead. He was not bright, had never been bright, could still not spell ‘vehicle’ or ‘chassis’ but he had a shining will she had always thought was like her own. She did not necessarily like him, but he was like a stringy weed that could get slashed and trampled on and only come back stronger because of it. Of all the things she had ever expected of him, this was the last – that he should allow himself to be destroyed.
She gave him a big white-dentured smile. ‘Well,’ she told him. ‘The worst accidents happen at sea.’
He did not seem to hear her.
She looked across at his brother for support. She had dragged that one out here all the way from the Hare Krishna temple in Kings Cross but now he was here she could see that he was more frightened by his brother’s collapse than she was. His name was Johnny but now he was a Hare Krishna he would not answer to it. He was Vishnabarnu – Vish – he looked at her and gave a little shrug. He had his grandfather’s big knobbly chin and wide nose, and when he shrugged he squinched up his eyes just like Cacka used to do and she thought he would be no use to anyone.
He had the same neck as his grandfather as well, and those sloping strong shoulders and the huge calves which knotted and unknotted when he walked. He would be no real use, but she liked to have him near her and she had to stop herself reaching out to touch his saffron kurta with her nicotine-stained fingers. He was so clean – she could smell washed cotton, soap, shaving cream.
‘It’s not worth being upset about,’ Vish was telling Benny. ‘It’s a dream. Think of it as a dream.’
Benny looked at Vish and blinked. It was the first thing to actually engage his attention.
‘That’s right,’ Vish said, speaking in the way you coax a baby’s arms into its sleeves, or a nervous horse into its bridle. ‘That’s right.’
Benny opened his mouth wide – ah.
Vish leaned across the table on his elbows, squinting and frowning. He peered right into the darkness of Benny’s open mouth. Then he turned to his grandmother who was in her big chair with her back to the dolls’ case.
‘Gran,’ he said. ‘I think you’re wanted in the kitchen.’
She went meekly. It was not characteristic of her.
2
The rain was so bad that summer that the plastic-painted walls of the ashram developed water bubbles which ballooned like condoms. You had to puncture them with a pin and catch the water in a cup. The quilts which the devotees threw on top of the rusty-hinged wardrobes at four each morning became sticky with damp and sour with mildew. The walls of the staircase they flip-flopped down on their way to chant
Govinda-dasa oversaw them. He had been a devotee since the early years when Prabhupada was still alive and nothing that had happened since his death had shaken him, not the corruption of the Australian guru whose name he would never pronounce, not the expulsion of Jayatirtha who was accused of taking drugs and sleeping with female devotees, not the murders at the temple in California. He was now forty-one. He had a sharp, intelligent face with dark, combative eyes and small, white, slightly crooked teeth. He said ‘deities’ not ‘deetes’. He was educated and ironic, a slight, olive-skinned man with a scholarly stoop.
Govinda-dasa was not an easy man to work for. He was too often disappointed or irritated with the human material that was given him. He was kind and generous but these qualities lay like milk-skin on the surface of his impatience, wrinkling and shivering at the smallest disturbance. He could not believe that young men whose only concern in life was the service of Krishna could be so complacent.
He found spots on tables which had seemed perfectly clean before his eyes had rested on them. He liked the
Govinda-dasa had such a passion for bleach that you could smell it still amid the ghee and cardamom and turmeric at ten o’clock on a busy night. He made it so strong that Vishnabarnu wore rubber gloves to stop the rash on his thick, farmer’s arms. Vishnabarnu did not mind the bleach. Being inside Ghopal’s was the opposite of Catchprice Motors – it was like being inside an egg. The Formica tables shone like pearly shells under neon light.
It was Govinda-dasa who took Gran Catchprice’s call the night after the day when Benny got fired. He recognized the old woman’s voice. She was an
He had such a big body, wide across the shoulders and chest, but his voice was high and raspy and his eyes lacked confidence. Now the phone call had produced a deep frown mark just to the right of his wide nose. He placed
