The Tax Inspector

patchouli oil.

‘What will happen to you when you’re too old to be productive?’ he asked the doctor. His voice was high and breathless, trembling with emotion.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Cathy McPherson said. ‘For Christ’s sake, just keep out of this, Johnny.’

‘Christ?’ the boy said. ‘Would Christ want this?’

Cathy McPherson groaned. She closed her eyes and patted the air with the palms of her hands. ‘I can’t handle this …’

‘Krishna wouldn’t want this.’

‘Johnny, please, this is very hard for me.’

‘In the Vedic age the old people were the most respected.’

‘Fuck you.’ Cathy McPherson slapped the Hare Krishna across his naked head. The Hare Krishna did not move except to squeeze shut his eyes.

‘Stop it,’ said Maria. She struggled to her feet.

‘I think you should stop it,’ the doctor said, pointing a pen at Maria. ‘I think you should just make your appointment for another time, Mrs …’

‘Ms,’ Maria told the doctor.

The doctor rolled his eyes and went back to his form.

‘Ms Takis,’ said Maria, who had determined that Mrs Catchprice would not be committed, not today at least. ‘Perhaps you did not hear where I am from.’

‘You are a little Hitler from the Tax Department.’

‘Then you are a Jew,’ said Maria.

‘I am a what?’ said the doctor, rising from his seat, so affronted that Maria burst out laughing. The Hare Krishna had begun chanting softly.

‘Oh dear,’ she laughed. ‘Oh dear, I really have offended you.’

The doctor’s face was now burning. Freckles showed in the red.

‘What exactly do you mean by that?’

‘I meant no offence to Jews.’

‘But I am not a Jew, obviously.’

‘Oh, obviously,’ she smiled.

‘Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna.’

‘Shush darling,’ said Mrs Catchprice, who was straining towards the doctor so that she might miss none of this.

‘I meant that if I were a doctor with a good practice I would be very careful of attracting the attention of the Taxation Officer.’

‘Hell and Tommy,’ exclaimed Mrs Catchprice and blew her nose loudly.

‘I have an accountant.’

Mrs Catchprice snorted.

‘I bet you do,’ said Maria. ‘Do you know how many accountants were investigated by the Taxation Office last year?’

‘Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna.’

‘I’ll report you for this,’ said Cathy McPherson to Maria Takis.

‘And what will you “report” me for?’

‘For interfering in our family, for threatening our doctor.’

‘Mrs McPherson …’

‘Ms,’ hissed Cathy McPherson.

Maria shrugged. ‘Report me,’ she said. If Sally Ho ever heard what Maria had just done, she would be not just reprimanded – she would be drummed out. ‘They’ll be pleased to talk to you, believe me.’

The doctor was packing his bag. He slowly put away his papers and clipped his case shut.

‘I’ll phone you later, Mrs McPherson.’

‘Would you like one of my dolls?’ Mrs Catchprice asked Maria. ‘Choose any one you like.’

‘No, no,’ Maria said. ‘I couldn’t break up the collection …’

‘Jonathon,’ said Mrs Catchprice imperiously, ‘Jonathon, fetch this young lady a doll.’

‘Could I have a word with you?’ Cathy McPherson said.

‘Of course,’ said Maria, but Mrs Catchprice’s nails were suddenly digging into her arm again.

Cathy McPherson obviously wished to talk to her away from her mother, and Maria would have liked to have complied with her wishes but Mrs Catchprice’s nails made it impossible.

Maria did not feel comfortable with what she had just done. She did not think it right that she should interfere in another family’s life. She had been a bully, had misused her power. The child in her belly was made with a man whose great and simple vision it was that tax should be an agent for equity and care, and if this man was imperfect in many respects, even if he was a shit, that was not the issue, merely a source of pain.

Cathy McPherson stood before her with her damaged cream complexion and her cowboy boots. Maria would have liked to speak to her, but Mrs Catchprice had her by the arm.

‘Not here,’ said Cathy McPherson.

Mrs Catchprice’s nails released their pressure. Jonathon had placed a Japanese doll on her lap.

‘It’s a doll bride,’ said Mrs Catchprice, ‘Bernie Phillips brought it back from Japan. Do you know Bernie Phillips?’

‘This is my mother,’ said Cathy McPherson, her eyes welling up with tears. ‘Do you have the time to look after her? Are you going to come back and wash her sheets and cook her meals?’

‘No one needs to look after me,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘You are the one who needs looking after, Cathleen, and you’ve never been any different.’

‘Mother, I am forty-five years old. The cars I sell pay for everything you spend.’

‘I don’t eat any more,’ Mrs Catchprice said to Maria. ‘I just pick at things. I like party pies. Do you like party pies?’

‘I’ve got a whole band about to walk out on me and steal my name because I’m trying to care for you,’ Cathy said. ‘You want me to go on the road? You really want me to leave you to starve?’

‘Bernie Phillips brought it back from Japan,’ said Mrs Catchprice, placing the doll in Maria’s hand. ‘Now isn’t that something.’

‘Fuck you,’ screamed Cathy McPherson. ‘I hope you die.’

There was silence in the room for a moment. The noise came from outside – the rain on the tin roof, Cathy McPherson running down the fire escape in her white cowboy boots.

6

When she was twenty, after she had run away from both her marriage and her mother, Maria Takis went back to the island of Letkos to the house she was born in and stayed for six weeks with her mother’s uncle, Petros, a stern-looking old man who bicycled ten miles along the dirt road to Agios Constantinos for no other reason than to buy his great-niece an expensive tin of Nescafe which he believed would please her more than the gritty little thimblefuls of metries kafe he made on his single gas burner.

Petros was the worldly one. He had worked on ships to New York and Shanghai, Cape Town and Rio and to have questioned or refused the Nescafe would have been somehow to undercut who he was. Maria had not come all this way to make her life fit the expectations of others, but just the same she could no more tell him she hated Nescafe than she could confess that she was already married and separated.

Instead she said, ‘It is too hot today,’ and held the handles of his bicycle as if this might prevent him buying it.

‘It is always hot,’ he said. He had to wrench the bicycle away from her and his dark eyebrows pressed down on eyes that suddenly revealed a glittering temper.

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘It is hotter than it used to be.’

That made him laugh. He mounted his bicycle and rattled down the chalky road towards the square still