The Tax Inspector

the logical conclusion. She walked a little closer to Mort, frowning and then there was nothing left to do but fire. Even as she did it, she thought she lacked the courage.

She fired from less than a metre. The bullet missed her husband and caused a red flower to blossom on the arm of her son’s Mickey Mouse T-shirt.

It was Sophie who called out, not Benny. Benny looked as if he’d fallen playing – his lip pouted and his big eyes swelled with tears.

Sophie held out a hand towards him, but Mort crouched on the floor, holding his corduroy trousers together, shielding the wounded child with his big body. Benny clung to his father. He had his arms around his neck. Blood was smeared all round Mort’s ears and collar.

Sophie reached out towards her son but he flinched from her.

‘Go way,’ he screamed. He was three years old, alive with rage towards her. She could not bear to be the focus of it. ‘Go way.’

The windows were filthy. The sunlight illuminated the small balls of fluff which drifted across the uncarpeted floor. Their child’s blood was a bright, bright red, like newly opened paint. It flooded the chest of Benny’s shirt. Sophie felt soaked with shame. It was unendurable.

‘What did you do that for?’ Mort was crying, stroking Benny’s head.

She felt the first flicker of doubt.

‘You know what you were doing, slime.’

‘Tell me,’ Mort screamed. ‘Tell me what we’ve done.’

She brought another shell into the chamber, but everything she thought so definitely was now dissolving in the acid of her chronic uncertainty. What she had seen was already like a thing she might have feared or dreamed or even, yes, imagined.

‘I was kissing his tummy,’ he said. He had blood on his fingers. He was streaking blood through his son’s fair hair.

‘Kissing!’

‘I was fucking kissing him,’ he said. ‘For Chrissake, Sophie. Why do you want to kill our little boy?’

She looked at his big swollen lips and his bright blaming eyes and saw the way the terrified child held him around the neck, and she believed him.

It was like you pour water on a fire that is burning you. Sophie just put the barrel of the rifle in her mouth and fired. She messed that up as well. The bullet passed beside her spinal column, and out through the back of her neck.

She ran from the house, across the car yard. She waited for a wall, a barrier, but nothing stopped her flight. Her father-in-law was selling a Ford Customline to a man in a leather jacket. He held up his hand and waved to her. She ran down Loftus Street, splashing blood behind her. She had not planned to leave, not leave her little boys, not leave by train, but she was at the railway station and she had twenty dollars in her slacks and she had done a crime and she bought a ticket and boarded the 6.25 train to Sydney which was just departing from the platform next to the booth. She was dripping blood and nearly fainting but no one looked at her particularly. No one tried to stop her. She just kept on going. She just kept on going on and on, and as the train pulled out she could see the Demolition Derby in the back paddock behind Catchprice Motors.

22

When his little brother was being bashed up by Matty Evans behind the boys’ lavatories, Vish came running into the school yard from the hole in the fence next to the milk factory. He had a housebrick. He was not yet Vish – he was still John. He was nine years old. He was bigger than Benny but he still had to carry the brick in both hands. He pushed his way through the circle of yelling boys and threw the brick, point blank. It hit Matty Evans on the side of the head and he dropped so fast and lay so still that the little kids started crying, thinking he was dead. There was a dark red pool of blood glistening on the hot asphalt playground, and teachers were yelling and making everyone stand in line even though it was the magpie season and two kids were swooped just standing there. Johnny Catchprice vomited up his sandwiches, just as the ambulance arrived. It drove straight into the school yard and left deep ruts in the grass in front of ‘Paddles’ Rogers’s rose garden.

Matty Evans got six stitches and they clipped his hair like he was a dog with mange. Paddles paddled Johnny Catchprice for every one of those stitches. Johnny’s hand puffed up so much he had to be excused from English Composition and this was why Mort put on his suit and came up to the school to talk to Paddles during the double Algebra on Thursday afternoon.

Everyone thought he had come to threaten law suits, but Mort was not shocked by either the crime or the punishment. What panicked Mort was that he maybe had a ‘disturbed child’ on his hands, that a whiff of his home life could be detected in the open air. He put on his grey suit and went up to school, not to sue, but to plug the leak somehow. He was not sure how he would do it, not even when he opened his mouth.

Paddles was a little bald-headed man with a swagger and a hairy chest which grew up under his shirt collar. He felt himself an inch away from litigation and so he was chatty and pleasant and over-eager. He looked across at Johnny and winked.

Johnny laid his bandaged hand on his lap and looked out of the window at the ruts the ambulance had left on the green lawn.

‘No matter who bullied whom,’ Mort said, ‘I never saw him do anything like this in all his life. And when I say all his life, I mean, all his life. I don’t know if you know it, but his mother left us when he was five …’

‘Noo-na,’ said Paddles sympathetically. He was confused about what Mort Catchprice was up to. This gave him an odd ‘hanging-on-every-word’ look.

‘She just pissed off.’

Johnny shut his eyes.

‘At that time I couldn’t cook, I couldn’t sew, and I wasn’t seeing my kids as much as I should have. I was coaching the Under-fifteens in the football and the cricket. I was setting up the panel shop. But suddenly there were all these fucking bureaucrats – pardon my French – wanted to take my boys away, because I was a man.’

‘Isn’t that typical,’ said Paddles. ‘Sure. I can imagine …’

‘You can imagine,’ Mort said. ‘You can imagine I soon found out how to cook and how to sew. I was there for them in the morning and I was there for them at night, so when I say Johnny doesn’t do this sort of thing,’ Mort kicked Johnny underneath the desk, ‘hitting a boy with a brick. When I say this is not him, I know what I’m talking about. You understand me?’

‘Yes,’ Paddles said. ‘Sure. Hell, yes.’ The minute he said yes he thought he had made a legal mistake.

‘Good,’ Mort said, kicking Johnny again. ‘So you understand why I’m upset – I work for years of my life to give you a sweet, gentle kid, you give me back a kid who hits another kid with a brick.’

It was only then that Johnny got the joke – his dad was lying.

‘It’s not in his character. I hope you agree?’

Paddles thought he could see Mort assembling evidence for court. ‘Without prejudice?’ He saw the kid trying to hide his grin. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘It will never happen again.’ He meant the strapping.

Mort meant brick-throwing. ‘That’s your decision,’ he said, ‘totally, but if I hear of any more behaviour like this, you’re the man I’ll be holding responsible.’

Johnny and his father walked out of the school, making odd little noises up behind their noses, holding their laughter in like you keep water in a garden hose with your thumb. They walked out across the lawn, biting their lips and creasing their eyes.

They left a screech of rubber on Vernon Street that stayed there for two months. Mort was wailing with laughter, banging the wheel. Thump, thump, thump with the fat heel of his hand, and his lips now all big and loose with pleasure at the lie he had told. He grabbed Johnny’s thigh – a horse bite – and squeezed him till he yelped, and then Johnny laughed too, not at the lie, but at their shared experience, their complicity.

‘Not in his character!’

It was 100 per cent his character. That was the joke – this mild, sweet-faced boy could attack his father with a tyre lever.