‘It’s nothing to do with your family. It’s between me and the Tax Office.’
‘You don’t seem a very Tax Office sort of person.’
‘Well I am,’ Maria reddened. ‘I’m a very Tax Office sort of person. I hate all this criminal wealth. This state is full of it. It makes me sick. I see all these skunks with their car phones and champagne and I see all this homelessness and poverty. Do you know that one child in three in Australia grows up under the poverty line? You know how much tax is evaded every year? You don’t need socialism to fix that, you just need a good Taxation Office and a Treasury with guts. And for a while we had both. For five years. I didn’t join to piddle around rotten inefficient businesses like your family’s. I never did anything so insignificant in my life. I won’t do that sort of work. It fixes nothing. I’m crazy enough to think the world can change, but not like that.’
Without taking her eyes off him she put three spoons of sugar in her tea and stirred it.
‘Maria,’ Jack said, ‘I’m on your side.’
‘I’m sorry …’
‘I know I have a car phone …’
‘I’m sorry … I was offensive …’
‘No, no, I know you don’t know me very well, but I would do anything to help you.’
‘Jack, you’re very sweet. You were sweet last night.’ She touched his face again, and traced the shape of his lips with her forefinger.
‘You need someone to come and pick up your laundry in hospital … do you have someone who will do that for you?’
‘Jack,’ she started laughing, ‘please …’
‘No, really. Who’s going to do that for you?’
‘Jack, you are sweet. You were very sweet last night and today, I’m sorry, I was irritable with you when you didn’t wake me. You wanted me to rest and I read it as a control thing. I was wrong. I’m sorry.’
‘Will you have dinner with me again?’ he asked her.
He could see in her eyes that it was by no means certain. She took his hand and stroked it as if to diminish the pain she was about to cause him.
‘It could be early,’ he said, ‘I love to eat early.’
‘Jack, I really do need to sleep. I’m thirty-two weeks pregnant.’
‘Sure. How about tomorrow night then?’
She frowned. ‘You really want to see me so soon?’
‘I think the world can change too,’ he said, and Maria Takis knew he was in love with her and if she was going to be honest with herself she must admit it: she was relieved to have him present in her life.
47
Sarkis could not know that he was limping back and forth across the Catchprice family history. He did not connect the names of the streets he walked along on Wednesday morning – Frieda Crescent, Mortimer Street, Cathleen Drive. He carried Benny’s broken blue umbrella along their footpaths, not to reach anywhere – they did not go anywhere, they were criss-crosses on the map of an old poultry farm – but to save his pride by wasting time.
He was going back to Catchprice Motors to stop his mother going crazy, but he was damned if he would get there at eight-thirty. The air was soupy. His fresh shirt was already sticky on his skin. He walked in squares and rectangles. He passed along the line of the hall-way in the old yellow Catchprice house which was bulldozed flat after Frieda and Cacka’s poultry farm was sub-divided. He crossed the fence line where Cathy had set up noose- traps for foxes. He passed over the spot – once the base of a peppercorn tree, now a concrete culvert on Cathleen Drive – where Cacka, following doctor’s orders, first began to stretch the skin of his son’s foreskin.
He walked diagonally across the floor of the yellow-brick shed where Frieda and Cathy used to cool the sick hens down in heat waves, trod on two of the three graves in the cats’ cemetery, and, at the top of the hill where Mortimer Street met Boundary Road, walked clean through the ghost of the bright silver ten-thousand-gallon water tank in whose shadow Frieda Catchprice let Squadron Leader Everette put his weeping face between her legs.
Sarkis had pressed his suit trousers three times but they were still damp with last night’s rain. His jacket was pulled very slightly out of shape by the weight of the Swiss army knife.
His mother had always been smiling, optimistic. Even in the worst of the time when his father disappeared, she never cried or despaired. When she lost her job she did not cry. She began a vegetable garden. Through the summer she fed them on pumpkin, zucchini, eggplant. She triumphed in the face of difficulties. She made friends with the stony-faced clerks in the dole office. When the car was repossessed, she spent twenty dollars on a feast to celebrate the savings they would make because of it. When Sarkis was on television, she pretended she had never seen the programme.
But on the night he was captured and tortured by Benny Catchprice, she had cooked him a special lamb dinner on the strength of a pay cheque he had no intention of receiving. She had been waiting for him six hours. He came in the door without thinking about her, only of himself – the wound in his leg, his fear, his humiliation and when he spoke, it was – he saw this later – insensitive, unimaginative.
He should have had room in his heart to imagine the pressure she lived under. It did not even occur to him.
He should also have spoken clearly about what had happened. He should have said, ‘I was captured and tortured.’ So she would know, immediately.
Instead he said, ‘I’m not going back there.’
She began sobbing.
He tried to tell her what had happened to him, but he had said things in the wrong order and she could no longer hear anything. He tried to embrace her. She slapped his face.
He behaved like a child, he saw that later. He was not like a man, he was a baby, full of his own hurt, his own rights, his own needs. And when she slapped his face he was full of self-righteousness and anger.
He shouted at her. He said he would go away and leave her to be a whore for taxi-drivers.
The neighbours complained about the shouting as they complained about her Beatles records – by throwing potatoes on the roof. Who they were to waste food like this, who could say – they were Italians. The potatoes rolled down the tiles and bounced off the guttering.
In response she fetched a plastic basin and gave it to him.
‘Here,’ she said. Her eyes were loveless. ‘Get food.’
He saw that she meant pick up the potatoes—that they should eat them.
‘Mum. Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘You’re embarrassed!’
‘I am not embarrassed.’
‘You coward,’ she said. ‘All you care about is your suit and your hair. You coward, you leave me starving. Zorig, Zorig.’ Tears began running down her face. She had never cried for her husband like this. Sarkis had watched her comforting weeping neighbours who hardly knew Zorig Alaverdian, but she herself had not wept for him.
Sarkis could not bear it. ‘Don’t, please.’
He followed her to the back porch where she began struggling with her gum boots. ‘If he was here we would not have to pick up potatoes,’ she said. ‘We would be eating beef, lamb, whatever I wrote on the shopping list I would buy. Fish, a whole Schnapper, anything I wanted … where is the flashlight?’
‘We don’t need to pick up potatoes. Never. Mum, I promise, you won’t go hungry.’
‘Promise!’ she said. She found the flashlight. He struggled to take it from her. ‘You promised me a job,’ she said.
He took the basin and followed her out into the rain with the flashlight and umbrella. He said nothing about the wound in his leg. He helped her pick up potatoes.
Then she sat at the table under the portrait of Mesrop Mushdotz. He helped her clean up the damaged potatoes. They peeled them, cut out the gashes, and sliced them thin to be cooked in milk.
‘What is the matter with this job, Sar?’ she said, more gently, but with her eyes still removed from him. ‘What is not perfect?’
