The Tax Inspector (7 page)

11

She was carrying gelignite in her white leather clutch-bag when she first danced with ‘Cacka’ Catchprice. He arrived in August as official scorer for the touring Franklin ‘Magpies’.

All that time I was pretty and did not know it
.

This thought could still make her rheumy eyes water – she had been brought up to think herself so goddam plain, such a collection of faults – wide mouth, small bosom, thin legs – which would all be clear for all the world to snicker at if she did not listen to her mother’s advice about her shoes, her skirt, her lipstick colour.

I could have married anyone I damn well pleased
.

When she walked into town in gum boots, holding gelignite in her clutch-bag, her dancing shoes in a paper bag, she had decided to get married, to anyone, she did not care – anything would be better than staying in that house another year – but when she opened the wire gate in the fence around the C.W.A. rooms, she almost lost her resolve and her legs went weak and rubbery and she really thought she was going to faint.

She saw men in blazers leaning against the ugly concrete veranda posts. There was a string of coloured lights in a necklace underneath the veranda guttering. Under the wash of blue and red there were girls she recognized, people she had ‘dealt with’ in the shops who were now powerful and pretty in scallops of peach organza. They did not try to speak to her. The smell of beer came out to meet her, as alien as sweat, hair oil, pipe tobacco. She had to make herself continue up the path in her gum boots.

Inside it was no better. She sat beneath the crepe paper streamers, on a chair in a corner by the tea urn, and removed her muddy gum boots. She kept her head down, convinced that everyone was looking at her. When she saw that the gum boots were too big to fit in her paper bag, she did not know what to do with them.

If it had not been for the gum boots Cacka might never have spoken to her. If she had come in with shiny black high heels, he would almost certainly have found her beyond his reach. But he came from a red clay farm where you had to wear gum boots to go to take a shit at night. His mother wore gum boots to get from the back door to the hire car which took them to their father’s funeral.

‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’m going to put these out the back. You tell me when you want them. I’ll get them for you.’

‘You’re most kind,’ she said.

‘How about a dance when I get back?’

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘I know I’m not an oil painting.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That would be lovely.’

He had this bulk, this thick neck and sloping shoulders, so all his strength seemed centred in his chest, which occasionally touched her breasts when he danced with her, formally, apologetically. He held her as if she were somehow fragile, and she let herself be held this way. She had spent three years being ‘strong’ and now she was so tensed and wound up that when, by the fifth dance, she allowed herself to give her weight to him, she could not give a part of it, but laid the full load on his shoulders which she dampened with a tear or two.

His nose had a big bump in it just beneath the eye, and his left ear was slightly squashed and the skin around his left eye was blue and yellow, but he was also very gentle, and it was not that opportunistic gentleness the roughest man will adopt around a woman – it was written permanently on his lips which were soft and well-shaped and formed little cooing words she felt like warm oil-drops in her ears. This was a man whose secret passion was the Opera, who had the complete HMV recording of
Die Zauberflöte
hidden beneath his bed – eight 78 rpm records with a cast most of whose names he could not pronounce – Tiana Lemnitz, Erna Berger, Helge Rosvaenge, Gerhard Hüsch, and the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham.

Die Zauberflöte
, however, meant nothing to Frieda. She was thirsty for what was practical, and when she drew him out she was the daughter of a man with little coloured pens and pretty pencils and paper plans on flimsy sheets of tracing paper. She loved to hear him talk about post-hole digging, barbed wire, white ants, concrete fencing posts, poultry sheds.

‘You really want to hear this stuff?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes,’ she said.

‘Truly?’

‘Truly and really.’

And when the band played ‘Begin the Beguine’ she held him tightly and sang the words softly in his ear. It was that which put the little wet spot on his Jockey shorts – that voice she did not even know she had. He told his mate, Billy Johnston, with whom he shared a room at the Dorrigo Court House Hotel, ‘I didn’t even kiss her, mate. I didn’t even touch her. She’s got these little tits, you know. I think I love her.’

At ten o’clock in the morning on the day after the dance, he came to call on her. She met him in her gum boots – halfway up the muddy drive – and told him she was going to have a flower farm there. She was going to blast those trees herself if no one would do it for her.

She said this almost angrily, for she had to say it and she expected that saying it would drive him from her, but Cacka was too shocked to laugh – he thought he never saw a sadder bit of country in his life.

‘If it’s flowers you want,’ he said, ‘I could show you land more suitable.’

All her life she would accuse him of lying about this, but even she knew this was not quite fair. Cacka withheld things and had secrets but he rarely told an outright lie. This land did exist, forty-five minutes from the central markets just the way he said it did. He was happy and in love. He really saw the land. He really saw Gerberas on it. It was the opposite of lying.

What he omitted was that it was part of a deceased estate and held up for probate.

It was ten years before Frieda and Albert Catchprice finally got possession of that land, and then she was the one who showed him how he could put a motor business on it. The only thing she had ever wanted was a flower farm, but what she got instead was the smell of rubber radiator hoses, fan belts, oil, grease, petrol vapour, cash flows, overdrafts and customers whose bills ran 90, 120 days past due. It was this she could not stand – she did it to herself.

12

It was the day they had tried to put her in a nursing home, but it would be the same on any other day – when Mrs Catchprice went to lock the big Cyclone gates of Catchprice Motors, she would look up at Cathy and Howie’s apartment window. The look would say: just try and stop me.

At six o’clock exactly – in two minutes’ time – Howie would look through the Venetian blinds and see her apartment door open, like a tricky clock in a Victorian arcade. First, the old woman would put her nose out and sniff the air. Then she would look down at the cars. Then she would come out on to the landing and stare at the window where she thought her enemy was waiting for her to die.

She thought it was Howie who conspired to commit her. She needed no proof. It was obvious. He was fiddling with the books, renting other premises, preparing to set up as a Honda dealer, in opposition.

He was plotting, certainly, continually, every moment of the day, but what he was plotting to do was to have a life like Ernest Tubb, The Gold Chain Troubadour. He was plotting to have his wife run away with him.

It was only Cathy who kept him locked inside those Cyclone gates. She had an entire band trying to drag her out on to the road. She had ‘Drunk as a Lord’ with a
bullet
on the Country charts. She had fans who wrote to her. She had a life to go to, but she was a Catchprice, and she was tangled in all that mad Catchprice shit that had her shouting at her mother while she fed her, at war with her brother while she fretted about his loneliness, firing her nephew while she went running to his cellar door, knocking and crying and leaving presents for him – she bought him
dope
, for Chrissakes,
dope
, in a pub, to cheer him up. You would not want to know about that kid’s life, his brother either. They were like institution kids with old men’s eyes in their young faces, but she loved them, unconditionally, with an intensity that she tried to hide even from her husband. Howie could not trust those boys, either of them, but he had learned not to speak against them in his wife’s presence.

Indeed, Howie had become as calculating and secretive as Granny Catchprice thought he was, but he did not covet Catchprice money or the Catchprice Goodwill Factor and he did not want to set up in competition to the family firm. His ‘happy thought’ was of long tendrils of vines snaking through brick walls of Catchprice Motors, collapsed fire escapes, high walls covered by bearded mosses and flaking lichens, rusting Cyclone fence collapsing under a load of Lantana and wild passionfruit. He was not counting on Granny Catchprice’s death to free him – he judged it would be too long in coming.

Mrs Catchprice had the only authorized keys to the Cyclone gates, and she would not give them up. Every morning at half-past six she opened them, and every night she locked them up again. They were not light or easy. You could see her lean her brittle little shoulders into the hard steel and guess what it might take her to get those big galvanized rollers moving. But she would not give up those keys to anyone. If you wanted to get a car out of the yard outside the ‘hours’ you were meant to go up the fire escape and ask her, please, if it was not too much trouble.

Granny did not have guests and neither did Mort. When they shut the gates at night it was as if they were severing connection with ‘The General Public’ until the morning.

It was only Howie and Cathy who were ‘social’. Their guests had to drive down the workshop lane-way and park outside the entrance to the Spare Parts Department. They then honked once or twice and Howie went down to let them in. This was never any problem with musicians. But Howie was sometimes embarrassed to have their visitors first approach their apartment along a steel-shelved avenue stacked with leaf springs and shock absorbers.

At six o’clock, on the dot, Gran Catchprice came out on to her landing. She not only looked across at him, she bowed, and gave a mocking little curtsy.

‘You old chook,’ he said. He frowned and fitted a cigarette into the corner of his smile.

Cathy came in from the kitchen with two cans of Resch’s Pilsener. She was wearing a gingham skirt which showed off her strong, well-shaped legs, and white socks and black shoes like a school kid. She gave him one can and sat on the rickety ping-pong table.

It was two and a half hours before their meeting with the band but already she had that high nervous look she had in the fifteen minutes before she did a show. He loved that look. You could not say she was beautiful, but he sat night after night in bars for a hundred miles around Franklin and watched men change their opinion of her as she sang.

She had a good band, but it was nothing special. She had a good voice, but there were better. It was her words, and it was her feelings. She could turn the shit of her life into jewels. She had plump arms and maybe a little too much weight under the chin and her belly pushed out against her clothes, but she was sexy. You had to say, whatever problems she had in bed, she was a sexy woman. You could watch men see it in her, but never straightaway.

‘Big night,’ he said. He stood up so she could take the bar stool and he sat instead on the ping-pong table.

‘Sure,’ she said. She was bright and tight, could barely talk. Tonight she was going to have her meeting with the band and with the lawyer. She drank her beer. He leaned across to rub her neck, but you could not touch her neck or shoulders unless she had been drinking.

‘Don’t, hon.’ She took his hand and held it. Something had happened with the neck and shoulders. Sentimental Cacka had dragged her out of bed at two in the morning to sing ‘Batti, batti’ from
Don Giovanni
to his visitors. It happened then, he guessed. She never said exactly, but he saw it exactly, in his mind’s eye. You could see the shadows of it. You could draw a map from them.

‘What you think?’ she said.

‘About what?’

‘Will I do it?’

‘You’ve got to decide,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you what to do.’

‘I’m just hurt, I guess. I’m pissed off with them for talking to a lawyer.’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I know.’ He patted her thigh sympathetically – he was the one who had persuaded Craig and Steve Putzel that they could pull Cathy out on the road if they did what he said. He was the one who found them this so-called Entertainment Lawyer. He had manoeuvred them all to this point where they were an inch away from having the lives they wanted, all of them. He brushed some ash off his suede shoe. He buttoned his suit jacket and unbuttoned it.

‘Big night,’ he said again. Through the Venetian blinds he could see Mort walking down the fire escape from this mother’s apartment. This time next year, all this was going to seem like a bad dream.

Cathy saw Mort too. ‘They’ve been talking about the doctor,’ she said. ‘You can bet on it. He’s been telling her it was all my idea, the coward.’

Howie always thought Mort was a dangerous man, but he doubted he would be dishonest in the way Cathy imagined. He watched Mort as he bent over the whitewashed sign Howie had written on the windscreen of the red Toyota truck. He scratched at it with his fingernail.

‘He doesn’t like my sign,’ he said.

Cathy lifted the Venetian blind a fraction so it pinged.

Mrs Catchprice had walked back from the gates and joined her son. She also scratched at the whitewash with one of her keys.

‘You know he thinks “As-new” is sleazy,’ Cathy said. ‘You must have known they’d wipe it off.’

‘Ah,’ said Howie, ‘who cares.’

That surprised her. She looked at him with her head on one side and then, silently, drew aside his jacket, undid a shirt button, and looked at the colour of his rash.

She said: ‘You really think I’m going to take the leap, don’t you?’

He wasn’t counting on anything until it happened. She had been this close four years before, and once again, two years before that. Each time Granny Catchprice pulled her strings. You would not believe the tricks the old woman could pull to keep her workhorse working.

‘If we’re done for tax I can’t go on the road. You know that. I can’t just desert them.’

‘Yes you can,’ he said. He did up his shirt button. ‘This time you’ve got to.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to.’

She had that tightness in her bones, a flushed luminous look, as if she was about to do a show. He watched her drain her beer.

‘You look beautiful,’ he said.

‘This time I’m going to do it.’

‘When you look like that I want to fuck you.’ He came and held her from behind and began to kiss her neck. She accepted his kisses. They lay on her skin like unresolved puzzles.

‘He’s coming up here,’ she said.

She meant Mort. He could see why she said it. Mort was walking across the yard this way, but he was probably on his way to hammer and yell at Benny’s cellar door. Mort’s house shared a hot water service with their apartment, but Mort had not visited them for nine years.

‘He’s coming
here,’
she said. ‘This is it. It’s starting.’

She had such amazing skin – very white and soft.

‘Don’t!’ She broke free from his hands, suddenly irritated.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘It’ll be about the nursing home.’

‘They’re going to try and make me stay.’

‘Cathy, Cathy … they don’t even believe you’re leaving them.’

‘She’s sending him to say something to me.’

‘Honey, calm down. Think. What could they say to you at this stage?’

Cathy’s eyes began to water. ‘She’s so unfair.’

Howie stroked her neck. ‘You’re forty-six years old,’ he said. ‘You’re entitled to your own life.’

‘She makes him say it for her. He’s going to say how much she needs me.’ She put her hand on his sleeve. ‘He’s coming up the stairs.’

‘Let me lock the door,’ Howie said.

Mort had not visited their apartment since he argued with Howie about the ping-pong table eleven years ago.

‘This is the living-room,’ he said. ‘There’s no room for a ping-pong table.’

‘With all respect,’ Howie had answered, ‘that’s not your business.’

‘Respect is something you wouldn’t know about,’ Mort said. ‘It’s the Family Home. You’re turning it into a joke.’

Even allowing for the fact his father had just died, this was a crazy thing to say. Howie could not think of how to answer him.

‘Respect!’ Mort said.

Then he slammed his fist into the brick wall behind Howie’s head. It came so close it grazed his ear.

‘I’ll lock the door,’ Howie said, not moving.

Cathy poured some Benedictine into a tumbler. Then the door opened and she looked up and there was Mort and his lost wife, side by side. But it couldn’t be Sophie. Sophie had left thirteen years ago.