Semak Vitamiser.
‘This is our inheritance,’ Benny said. ‘I’m not walking away from that and neither are you.’
Vish shook his head and rearranged his yellow robe. In the kitchen his grandmother was turning the single switch of the blender on and off, on and off.
‘Did you talk to Him?’
‘Who’s Him?’
‘You know who I mean … our father.’
‘He’s irrelevant.’
‘Oh yes? Really?’
‘His only relevance is these.’ He held up a bottle of pills – Serepax prescribed for Mr Mort Catchprice.
‘Benny, Benny. I thought you quit that.’
‘Benny, Benny, I’m not selling them. I’m trading them.’
‘For what?’
‘Personal transformation,’ Benny said.
Vish sighed. ‘Benny, he’s not going to let you do any of this. What do you think you’re going to do?’
‘Tonight,’ Benny rattled the Serepax and pushed them down into the grubby depths of his jeans pocket, ‘I’m swapping these with Bridget Plodder for a haircut. Tomorrow, I’m personally moving some of that stock off the floor.’
‘You’re selling cars?’ Benny was coated with dirt. He had grimy wrists, dull hair, this film across his skin, but there was, once again, this luminous intensity in his eyes. ‘You don’t even have a driving licence.’
‘He can’t stop me,’ Benny said. ‘I’ve turned the tables. I’ve got him over a barrel.’
‘Stay away from him, Ben.’
‘Vish, you don’t even know who I am. I’ve changed.’
‘You’re sixteen. He can do what he likes with you.’
‘I’ve
For the second time that evening, Benny opened his mouth wide for Vish and pushed his face forward. Vish looked into his brother’s mouth. Whatever it was he was meant to see in there, he couldn’t see it.
4
At three-thirty on Monday morning Vish performed his ablutions, chanted
At five-thirty Granny Catchprice had her Maxwell House standing up at the kitchen sink. She politely ate some of the cold pancakes her grandson offered her.
At six-thirty the pair of them, she in an aqua-coloured, quilted dressing-gown, he in his yellow dhoti and kurta, opened the heavy Cyclone gates to the car yard and locked the Yale padlock back on its bolt.
Just after the seven o’clock news there was a short, heavy thunderstorm.
At seven-thirty Mort Catchprice, unaware that his elder son had spent the night in his grandmother’s apartment, gingerly nursed a newly registered vehicle through the yellow puddles of the service road and out on to the wet highway which was already heavy with city-bound traffic.
At eight-fifteen Cathy and Howie came down from their apartment and crossed the gravel to unlock first the showroom and then the Spare Parts Department. She wore her snake-skin boots. He wore pointy-toed suede shoes. He walked with the weight on his heels to keep the toes from spoiling in the wet.
At eight-twenty the air compressor thumped into life.
At eight-thirty-three a high racketing noise cut across the yard from the workshop – an air-driven power wrench spun the wheel nuts off the right-hand rear wheel of an HQ Holden.
At eight-thirty-five Benny Catchprice rose from the cellar one step at a time, feeling the actual weight of himself in his own calf muscles as he came up the steep stairs without touching the grimy handrail. He rose up through the cracked, oil-stained, concrete floor of the old lube bay and stood in the thick syrupy air, breathing through his mouth, blinking at the light, his stomach full of butterflies.
He was transformed.
His rat-tailed hair was now a pure or poisonous white, cut spiky short, but – above the little shell-flat ears – swept upwards with clear sculpted brush strokes, like atrophied angel wings. The eyes, which had always alarmed teachers and social workers and were probably responsible, more than any other factor, for his being prescribed Ritalin when eight years old, were so much at home in their new colouring that no one would think to mention them – no longer contradictory, they seemed merely nervous as they flicked from one side of the car yard to the other, from the long side wall of the workshop to the high louvred windows of his grandmother’s kitchen.
His brow seemed broader and his round chin more perfectly defined, although this may have been the result of nothing more than Phisohex, soap, petroleum jelly, all of which had helped produce his present cleanliness.
His lips, however, were the most remarkable aspect of his new look. What was clear here now in the reflected quartz-gravel light underneath the cobwebbed rafters had not been clear yesterday: they were almost embarrassingly sensual.
Benny was fully aware of this, and he carried with him a sense of his new power together with an equally new shyness. He was waiting to be looked at. He lined up the toes of his shoes with the crumbling concrete shore of the old lube bay floor. He knew he was on the very edge of his life and he balked, hesitating before the moment when he would change for ever.
The old lube was directly beneath the cobwebbed underfloor of Cathy and Howie’s apartment, at the back end of the car yard farthest from the big sliding Cyclone gates. He looked out at the glittering white gravel of his inheritance.
The Camiras and Commodores were laid out like fish on a bed of crushed ice. They were metallic blue and grey. There was a dust silver Statesman fitted with black upholstery. On the left-hand side near the front office was a Commodore S.S. with spunky alloy wheels in the shape of a spinning sun. The G.M. cars were angled towards the road, like arrows which suggested but did not quite point towards the creature the family seemed so frightened of – the Audi Quattro 90 with leather trim. A $75,000 motor car they had traded from a bankrupt estate.
The compressor cut off, revealing the high whine of a drill press which had been going all the time. In a moment one of the mechanics would look out over his bench top and see him. Benny could imagine himself from their point of view. They would see the suit, the hair, and they would whistle. They would think he was effeminate and stupid, and maybe he was stupid, in a way. But in other ways he was not stupid at all. He had redevelopment plans for that workshop, and he knew exactly how to finance it.
When Vish had abandoned him five years ago, had run off to leave him unprotected, he had drawn Vish on his cellar wall, being fucked by a donkey with a dunce’s hat. He had drawn his father tied to a chair. He had drawn a black eagle but it would not go black enough. That was a long time ago, on the day he had moved into the cellar. He did not draw these dumb things any more. The donkey and dunce’s cap were now covered with a dense knitted blanket of red and blue handwriting. Among these words, one set repeated.
He was stupid, maybe, but he would not continue to be what he was, and when Cathy fired him he had already spent $400 on a Finance and Insurance course at the Zebra Motor Inn and he had passed it – no problems with the numbers.
He had also spent $495 on the ‘Self-Actualization’ cassettes, $300 on the suit, $150 on sundries and, as for where the money came from, that was no one’s business and totally untraceable. So when his father began by saying, no way was he going to sell cars, all he did was ask himself ‘How do I attain the thing that I desire?’
Then he followed the instructions of the ‘Self-Actualization’ cassettes, descending the imaginary coloured stairways to the mental image on the imaginary Sony Trinitron which showed the object of his desire. His father was finally irrelevant.
The rain which had been falling all summer began to fall again. Summer used not to be like this. This was all the summer he had inherited. The raindrops were soft and fat. They made three large polka dots on the padded shoulders of his 80 per cent silk suit. He would not run. It was not in his new character to run. He walked out across
