The Tax Inspector (16 page)

28

Cathy was in this ridiculous position because she had done what
Benny
had said. She could not stand being told what to do by anyone, and she was here because
Benny
told her to be there – little frightened, crying Benny whom she used to take into bed and soothe to sleep – Benny who ground his teeth – Benny who wet his bed – Benny who did so badly at school she had to take him to Special Needs to have his I.Q. tested.

Now the alcohol had worn off and she was following the Tax Inspector into her house holding her guitar. She knew right away this woman had no personal connection with Benny. He had dreamed it. He had manufactured it inside his head.

Benny came behind her carrying his cassette player. He was smiling, not
at
anything or
for
anything, but smiling like an evangelist on television. He had been like this already when he had appeared in front of her. That was at ten o’clock and she had had a row with Howie about all the songs he had copyrighted ‘Big Mack’, and she had been sitting up drinking Scotch and Coke by herself because she was upset – about her mother, about the tax audit, about the ownership of songs she had written but now might not own, about the shambles she had made of her life – and Benny crept up the stairs – she had The Judds’ version of ‘Mr Pain’ playing really loud – and gave her such a fright. He just appeared in the kitchen in front of her and spoke. She nearly shat herself.

He said, ‘What are you doing to control your destiny?’

As if he read her mind.

He stood before her in his fancy suit and folded his hands in front of his crotch. The hands were even more amazing than the suit. She could not help staring at them – so white and clean like they had been peeled of history.

His hair shone like polyester in the neon light and when he spoke, it was in a language not his own – his mother’s perhaps (although who could remember after all this time how Sophie spoke?). In any case, it was not the language of a problem child, not someone whose I.Q. you worry about.

He said: ‘I can take you to talk to the Tax Inspector.’

Normally she would have poured him a drink and tried to talk him out of it, whatever the latest ‘it’ was. But she was dazzled, no other word for the experience. She turned off The Judds.

He said: ‘Her name is Takis. There are only three in the phone book and I’ve ruled out the other two. She’s not back yet because I’ve been ringing her every twenty minutes to check.’ He wiped some perspiration from his lip with a handkerchief with a small gold brand-name still stuck in the corner.

She had sipped some more of her Scotch. Howie always said the Coke killed the Scotch but she could taste it. ‘Ben, what’s happened to you?’

‘Getting fired was the best thing ever happened to me,’ he said. She started to say sorry – and she was sorry – it was the worst thing she’d ever had to do – but he held up his hand to stop her. ‘I’ve come to repay the favour,’ he said.

She pushed out a chair for him but he would not sit. He grasped the back of the chair with his hands and rocked it back and forth.

‘You can see I’ve changed?’

‘You could have been your Mum,’ she said.

He nodded his head and smiled at her. His eyes held hers. They were as clear as things washed in river water. ‘We all possess great power,’ he said. Jesus Christ – he gave her goose-bumps.

‘Get your guitar,’ he said. Not ‘please’ or ‘would you mind’, just ‘get your guitar’.

Later she told Howie: ‘It was like your dog stood up and talked to you. If the dog said get your guitar, you would. Just to see what happened next.’ She lied about dog. She did not think dog at all. What she was thinking of was that holy picture where the angel appears to Mary. Only later she said dog.

She sneaked into the bedroom where Howie was asleep, straight up and down on his back – taught himself to do it in a narrow bed. She got down the Gibson. She brought it back into the kitchen and he was trying to unplug the ghetto blaster from over the sink. He had all the power cords tangled – toaster, kettle, blender.

‘Benny, I don’t know this is smart,’ she said.

‘What’s smart? Waiting here so you get busted?’ He pulled the ghetto blaster cord clear of the mess and wound it round his wrist. ‘Spending the rest of your life stuck here paying off the tax bill? You want to stay here till you die?’

She saw it. She felt it. Some tight band clamped around her stomach.

‘The Tax Inspector
likes
me,’ he said. ‘That’s the key to everything.’

‘You talked to her?’

‘It’s personal. We’re going to call on her in a personal capacity. Come on Cathy – she’s kind. She’s a very kind person.’

‘She sure doesn’t feel kind about me.’

‘You have the power,’ Benny insisted. ‘I’ll introduce you properly. She is going to see who you are. We are going to show her your life.’

‘My life?’

‘Our lives have power,’ he said. ‘You’re an artist. What was it Ernest Tubb wrote to you?’

‘Oh, Ernest Tubb …’

‘You have the talent to … ?

‘The
ability
to change the rhythms of the human heart.’

‘Right. Ability. Plus: she’s pregnant. She’s full of milk.’

‘Benny,’ Cathy smiled, ‘there’s no milk till there’s a baby.’

‘O.K.,’ Benny said impatiently. ‘Forget that bit. Once she understands the consequences of her actions, she’ll go easy on you. Sing her a song. Show her who you are. You’ve got to sell her. You’ve got to demonstrate what’s at stake here. Come with me,’ he said.

And she did.

But now the alcohol had worn off and she felt sour and dehydrated and she just wanted to apologize. She stood on one side of the Tax Inspector’s neat white kitchen, filled with shame. Maria Takis was holding a shining metal kettle. Cathy admired ‘nice things’ although she did not own many and the obvious quality of the kettle, its good taste, its refinement, the sort of shop it must have come from, all this somehow made the intrusion worse. Cathy felt coarse and vulgar. She had not even washed her hair before she left.

‘Ms Takis,’ she said, although she hated to hear herself say ‘Ms’. ‘I think I’ve made a big mistake. I’m sorry. But I was really horrible to you this morning and it’s been on my mind and I just wanted to say how sorry I was. I know you’ve got your job to do.’

She said she was sorry. She made herself small. But there was no relief. All it did was make the woman look at her as if she was a frigging ant.

29

Cathy McPherson came back from the bathroom smelling of Elizabeth Arden and whisky. She wore her chamois leather cowgirl suit with high-heeled boots with spurs. Her waistcoat cut into her big fleshy arms. She stood in the kitchen doorway with her huge guitar and her little white hands and sent confusing signals with her eyes.

The guitar was a big instrument – too big to take visiting, but presumably too valuable to leave in a parked car. Cathy McPherson leaned against the doorway, on the hallway side, fiddling with the little mother-of-pearl guitar picks which were wedged in beside the tuning pegs like ticks on a cattle dog’s ear.

If this had been an investigation Maria had wanted to pursue, this would have been the turning point. Someone was about to divulge some information or to try to cut a deal, but Maria did not want more information about the Catchprices. She wanted them out of her house, out of her life and if this was a confession, she did not want to hear it.

She said: ‘You didn’t need to drive all this way to say sorry.’

‘But we didn’t come to say we were
sorry.’
It was the boy again, back from wherever he had been in her house. He slid around the edge of the guitar and stood with his back to the refrigerator. His hair looked as hard and white as spun polymer.

‘Would you mind staying right here?’ she said. She shifted her kettle on to the hottest and fastest of her gas jets. When she looked up, his eyes were on hers.

‘Mrs McPherson is going to sing to you,’ he said.

Maria looked at the woman.

‘I’m really a singer,’ she said. Her face was burning red.

The boy came into the kitchen and plugged the ghetto blaster into the power point next to the kettle.

‘We’re people, not numbers,’ he said. He would not take his eyes off her eyes. She thought: this is the sort of thing that happens in Muslim countries – these dangerous doe-eyed boys with their heads filled with images of western whores in negligees. She looked away from him to his aunt.

‘So you would like to sing to me in the hope it will affect your tax assessment?’

Cathy McPherson had the good grace to look embarrassed, but her nephew buttoned the jacket of his suit without taking his eyes away from Maria’s. ‘We think you’re human,’ he said in that nasal accent as sharp and cold as metal. He moistened his lips and smiled. For Chrissakes – he was coming on to her. ‘We want to talk to you like humans.’

‘O.K.,’ said Maria. ‘I’m going to make one cup of tea, then you’re going to sing, and then you’re going to get out of here because I’ve really had enough for one day.’

‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘We’re going to present two songs.’

‘You can have one.’

‘One is fine,’ Benny unbuttoned his suit coat. ‘You can have recorded or live.’

‘I don’t care what it is. Just do it.’

‘You’d like live?’

‘Sure, live.’

‘O.K., that will be live, then.’

He was one of those people whose personal space was too large, who could be too close to you when you were a metre from them.

She waited for the kettle to boil, staring at it like she might have stared at the floor numbers in an elevator. When the kettle boiled she gave them tea bags of English Breakfast tea but, for herself, an infuser filled with the foul-tasting Raspberry Leaf which Gia’s naturopath said would strengthen the uterine muscles and promote a quick labour.

The Catchprices jiggled their tea bags in silence and dropped them into the kitchen tidy she held open for them and then she shepherded them into the living-room.

Maria sat down on the rocking chair her father had bought for her and put her feet up on the foot stool. She began to see the comic aspect of her ‘information’ and began to observe details of the Catchprices’ dress in order to tell the story properly to Gia.

‘Is this going to be too loud?’ she asked.

‘If you’re worried about noise,’ Benny said, ‘we can play you the demo tape.’

‘It’s just acoustic’ Cathy was trying to fit her bottom on the window-ledge opposite. She strummed a few chords, stopped, started again, and then stood up. ‘Ms Takis,’ she said, ‘it would be more polite if I sang sitting down, but I’m damned if I can get myself comfortable.’

‘Fine,’ Maria said.

‘Thank you.’ Cathy tapped her boot three times. The floor shook. It was an old wooden Balmain cottage which was badly built even in 1849.

‘You were a married man I know,’
she sang. The voice got Maria in the belly. It was raw, almost croaky, and way too loud for this street, this time of the morning.

I shouldn’t have begun
.

Cathy McPherson changed physically. She became taller, straighter. The athletic armature of her body revealed itself and she rocked and rolled and showed a sexual confidence which was previously unimaginable. There was something happening in those belligerent little eyes which made her as soft as a cat rubbing itself against your leg.

You told me you’d always love your wife
I shouldn’t have begun
.

Thirty seconds ago she was big and blowzy like a farmer’s wife, or someone with fat burns on their sallow skin, working in a fish ’n’ chip shop at two o’clock in the morning. Her arms were still plump. Her belly still pressed against her leather skirt, but now you could not look at her without believing that this was someone who made love passionately – she was a sexual animal.

But it was late at night and I was lonely
I didn’t know I’d fall in love
and now you’ve gone and left me baby
with a freeway through my heart
.

She occupied Maria’s living-room like a compressor unit or some yellow-cased engine so loud and powerful that it demanded you accommodate yourself to it. This was what Maria did not like about it – she felt bullied on the one hand and seduced on the other. Also: the subject matter was discomforting. It seemed too close for coincidence.

Trucks are running
through the freeway in my heart
Twisting sheets
All this noise and pain
Ten retreads hissing
through the driving rain
.

Just as the second verse was about to start, the singer saw Maria’s face and stopped.

Maria said: ‘Thank you.’

Cathy shrugged.

Maria said: ‘How do you think this could affect my work?’

Cathy opened her mouth, then shut it, frowned, rubbed her bedraggled hair. ‘This doesn’t make a pinch of difference to anything does it?’

‘No, it can’t.’

‘Fine.’

‘What the hell could I do?’ said Maria, angrily. ‘What sort of corrupt person do you want me to be? Are you going to try to bribe me now?’

‘I’m sorry.’ And Cathy was sorry; at the same time she was angry. She was sorry she had placed herself in such a foolish position.

‘If I cared more for Country music I could say something intelligent about your song.’

‘You don’t like Country music?’

‘Not a lot, no.’

‘I think you do,’ Cathy said. ‘But you’re like your sort of person.’

Maria did not ask what her sort of person was.

‘You are moved by it. Allow me to know that. Allow me to judge what an audience is feeling. I saw you: you were moved by it. What did you tell yourself about it?
Oh I mustn’t be moved. This is masochistic?
Women like you always say “masochistic” when they feel things.’

‘O.K., I was moved.’

‘You’re saying that but what you’re trying to
tell
me is that you weren’t moved at all.’ Cathy said, sitting down. She sat on the edge of the sofa where Alistair and Maria used to make love. He used to kneel on the carpet there and she put her legs around his neck and opened up to him full of juice – she would get so wet all her thighs would be shining in the firelight and now there was a damn Catchprice sitting there holding a Gibson by the neck and another one watching and they were like burglars in her life.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Cathy said. ‘I’m a real banana to be here but I’ll tell you something for your future reference – Country music is about those places people like you drive past and patronize. You come to Franklin and you’ve decided, before you even get off the F4, that we are all retards and losers – unemployed, unemployable. Then you find we have an art gallery and some of us actually read books and you are
very impressed
. What you’ve just been listening to is poetry, but all you could hear was, oh, Country & Western. What I like about Country music is that it never patronizes anyone, not even single mothers.’

‘We’re not numbers,’ Benny said.

Cathy looked up at Benny as if she had forgotten he was there. She sighed, but said nothing. She needed something stronger than a cup of tea.

‘We’re people,’ said Benny.

Cathy looked at him again. He was not wilted or defeated. He was standing upright in the corner. Good for you, she thought. ‘You go ahead with this audit of yours,’ she told the Tax Inspector, ‘and I’ll be stuck in that shit-heap for the rest of my damn life just keeping them all alive. You go ahead, I’ll never get to sing except in pubs within a 100-kilometre radius. I should have just walked out when I had the business healthy. “Guilt-free”. That’s a song I wrote. “Guilt-free,” but if we get in strife with the tax, then I’m lumbered with the responsibility of a mother who hates me and a brother who refuses to sell a motor car because he wants to punish his Daddy for being a creep.’

‘Don’t,’ Maria said. ‘It doesn’t help.’

‘I’m going to lose my band and my damn name,’ said Cathy, her lower lip quivering.

Maria stood up. She hoped the woman would not cry. ‘Catchprice Motors is in the computer with an “active” designation,’ she said gently. ‘Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t take it out.’

‘I believe you,’ Cathy stood up. ‘Come on, Benny. Enough’s enough.’

Now they were really going, Maria let herself look at the boy again. He caught her eye and did up his suit jacket and smiled. He did have an extraordinary face. If you saw it in a magazine you would pause to admire it – its mixture of innocence and decadence was very sexy – in a magazine.

‘I’ll see you around,’ he said.

‘You’ll see her in the morning,’ said his aunt. ‘Which is now.’

‘Yes, which is now,’ Maria stood.

She shepherded the singer along the corridor to the front door. In a moment they would be gone. The boy was behind her. Maria was so convinced that he was about to put a guiding hand on the small of her back that she put her own hand there to push it off.

At the front door, Cathy McPherson turned, and stopped. She was solid, immovable. She looked at Maria with her little blue eyes which somehow connected to the heart that had written the words of that song. Not ‘small’ eyes or ‘mean’ eyes, but certainly demanding and needful of something she could not have expressed. Her breath smelt of alcohol. She said: ‘When I was thirty-two I was ready to go out on the road. I mean, I wasn’t a baby any more. Then my father died, and my mother sort of made it impossible for me to leave.’

Maria could feel the boy behind. She could feel him like a shadow that lay across her back. She was too tired to listen to this confession but the eyes demanded that she must. They monitored her response.

‘I can’t tell you how my mother did it, but she made me stay. I was the one who was going to save the business. And I did save it and then my mother decided I was getting too big for my boots and she turned on me, and I would have gone then, except I could not walk away and see it crash. I’m a real fool, Ms Takis, a prize number one specimen fool. If you fine us, I’ll be stuck there. I won’t be able to leave them.’

It would have seemed false to be her comforter and her tormentor as well. So even when she began to cry all Maria did was offer her a Kleenex and pat her alien shoulder. She wanted her to leave the house. She took the guitar from her and together the three of them walked up Datchett Street.

At Darling Street she shook hands first with Cathy McPherson and then she turned to the boy. He said: ‘You can’t just abandon us, you know.’

Cathy said: ‘Come on, Benny.’

‘No, she understands me. She’s got a heart. She understands what I’m saying.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Cathy McPherson said. She grabbed his arm, and pulled him up the street. Maria could hear them hissing at each other as she walked back to her front door.