The Tax Inspector

The Tax Inspector was already erecting her umbrella, juggling with her papers and her case. When he saw her age, how pregnant she was, he laughed. The little bullshitter was going out with her?

This Tax Inspector was very, very pretty – a lovely soft wide mouth, and stern and handsome nose. He saw straightaway that she would want to walk quickly through the rain and that he was going to have to stop her. He was going to talk to her in front of the Front Office. This was what he had agreed with Benny.

You would think it would be humiliating, to be a prancing bear for your disturbed son. But actually, no. He was dancing on the edge of freedom.

‘Mort Catchprice,’ he said.

He had the workshop courtesy umbrella, big enough to take to the beach. He held it over her and her umbrella. She put her own umbrella down, but the rain was bouncing around their ankles. He guessed it was worse for the woman with stockings on.

Benny stood behind the glass with a strange-looking young man in a light-coloured suit. He grinned and pointed his finger at his father.

You want me to show her my life?

O.K., I touched you.

Not touched.

O.K., fucked, sucked. I made you stutter and wet your bed. Made you a liar too, quite likely. My skin responded. It’s physiology. The male skin – you touch it, you get a response. Like jellyfish – you touch them, they fire out darts. The jellyfish cannot control it. There are men more sensitive than others. Is that unnatural? You hold their hand, they get a hard-on. Whose fault is that? When does that happen? If there is no reason then there is no God.

If there is a God I am not a monster.

In my great slimy shape, in my two great eyes, my dark slimy heart, I am not a monster. Was I the sort of creep who hangs round scout troops, molesting strangers?

‘It must have occurred to you,’ he said to the Tax Inspector, when he had introduced himself, ‘that what you decide affects our whole life.’

She took a step away and put up her own umbrella again.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All the time.’

Behind her back, he could see Benny winking and grinning. Benny could not hear a damn word he said.

‘Does it look bad for us?’ he asked.

‘It looks nothing much yet,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’ll just be fine.’

‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘It won’t be fine.’

‘Maybe you should let me discover that.’

‘I don’t need to. I can tell you,’ he said. He was a little out of breath, but he felt great. ‘Look at the salary claims for our sales manager. I’d look at that one closely.’ There was thunder all around them now. The traffic on Loftus Street was driving with its headlights on. ‘Plus the trade-ins. You’re going to find the lack of trade-ins interesting.’

The Tax Inspector was shaking her head and frowning.

‘Mr Catchprice, please … don’t do this.’

Mort looked at Benny and saw that he was frowning too. He thought: maybe he can read my lips. He said: ‘No one set out to be crooked. Not even Cathy.’

‘Mr Catchprice, please.’ She put out her hand as if to touch him and then something about him, some stiffness, stopped her. ‘Please just relax.’

He laughed. It was a stupid laugh, a snort. He could not help it.

She looked at him oddly.

‘He wants me to show you our life,’ he said.

The Tax Inspector frowned at him. She had such a pretty face. Benny was right – it was a kind face, but she would kill him with a rock if she could see his soul. Every time you turn on the television, someone is saying: child sexual abuse. But they don’t see how Benny comes to me, crawling into my bed and rubbing my dick, threatening me with jail. Is this abuse?

‘Maybe I should show you the true Catchprice life?’ he said. He felt half dizzy.

I am the one trying to stop this stuff and he is crawling into bed and rubbing my dick and he will have a kid and do it to his kid, and he will be the monster and they’ll want to kill him. Today he is the victim, tomorrow he is the monster. They do not let you be the two at once. They do not see: it is common because it is natural. No, I am not saying it is natural, but if it is so common how come it is not natural?

The rain was pouring down now. It was spilling across the front office guttering and running down the windows like a fish shop window.

Maria Takis looked at Mort Catchprice. He was staring her directly in the eyes and his own eyes were too alive, too excited for the context. His lips trembled a little. It occurred to her he was having a mental breakdown.

34

Cathy, at ten years old, you should have seen her – a prodigy. She’d never heard of Sleepy La Beef or Boogie or Rock-a-Billy. She listened to a Frankie Laine record once and laughed at it like everybody else. She knew Don Giovanni, Isolde, Madame Butterfly. Her teacher was Sister Stoughton at the Catholic School. There was no yodelling there. She sang ‘Kyrie Eleison’ at St John’s at Christmas before an audience which included the Governor General. There was no ‘Hound Dogs’ or ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. The nearest she came to that sort of thing was the jeans with rolled-up cuffs she wore to square dancing classes at the Mechanics’ Institute. She did not like square dancing either, said it was like going fencing with a wireless turned up loud. She was nine years old when she said that.

But she was not spoiled, or precious. Frieda thought how lucky she was, to have this girl, not a silly girl, or a flighty girl, but a girl like her Mummy, a practical girl – pretty as all got out, with tangled curls like a blonde Shirley Temple. She did not have her mother’s build. No one would ever tell her she had sparrow legs. They were sturdy, smooth-skinned. Frieda could not help touching them, feeling the solidity of them. She was her legs – sturdy and reliable.

At ten years old she was up before the alarm clock to make the wet mash for the chooks – wheat, pollard, bran mash and warm water, all mixed up in the same tub they took their baths in. Cathy always knew she was important in the family. She counted the eggs and helped clean them for market. Frieda encouraged her to see what she was achieving.

Mort at twelve was dreamy and difficult, had moods, would want to help one day and then not the next, wet his bed, got head lice ten times for Cathy’s two. He was weepy and clingy one day and gruff and angry and would not even let you touch him the next. He was the one you could love best when he was asleep. You could not guess that he would be the one to care for her when she was old, that he would cook her stew to eat, make sure she had her rum and Coke, sit with her into the night playing cribbage.

Cathy and her Frieda had matching yellow gum boots and they would stomp around the chook yard together, before dawn. They used old kitchen forks to break the ice on the cement troughs so the hens could drink.

It was Cathy who discovered that the light they left on to keep away the foxes also made the hens lay more. She counted the eggs. She was a smart girl, not a difficult girl – you did not need to fear she was plotting some scheme against her family.

And when they moved to the car business in town it was no different. At fourteen she knew how to record the day’s petrol sales, enter the mechanics’ cards on to the job cards, even reconcile the till.

Then Frieda gave Howie a job in Spare Parts, and it was as though she had brought a virus into their healthy lives. Cathy had never even heard of Rock-a-Billy. She did not know what it was. She only knew the very best sort of music, and suddenly there he was playing her this trash, and she was wearing tight skirts which did not suit her build and writing songs about things she could not possibly understand. She paid ten dollars a time to register them in the United States. Australia was not good enough. Everything Yankee was the bee’s knees. She began to argue