The Tax Inspector (5 page)

7

‘Yes, but do we have milk?’ Mrs Catchprice used her walking stick to flick a magazine out of her path. ‘It’s very clever,’ she told Maria. She hit the magazine so hard the pages tore. ‘The roof leaks right into the kitchen sink. It washes my dishes for me.’

‘Mrs Catchprice,’ Maria smiled. ‘It’s nearly eleven.’

‘Are you hungry?’

‘I really need to start our meeting.’

‘You sit down,’ Mrs Catchprice said.

‘There are questions I have to ask you, or your accountant.’

‘Vish will get you a glass of milk.’

Mrs Catchprice struck the magazine again. Vish crossed from the kitchen to the plastic and paper confusion of the annexe, holding out a carton of milk at arm’s length. He gently lowered the milk carton into a green plastic bag.

‘You take my chair,’ Mrs Catchprice told Maria. ‘It’s too low for me.’ She pushed the magazine with the rubber tip of her stick and slid it underneath a bookcase.

‘Gran, the milk was off.’

‘Be a dear,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘Go and see Cathy. They’ve got milk in Spare Parts for the staff teas.’

‘I can’t ask Cathy. Cathy won’t give me milk.’

‘You don’t understand Cathy,’ said Mrs Catchprice. She pulled free a dining chair, turned it on one leg so it faced away from the bride dolls, and then sat down on it hard. ‘Ask her for milk,’ she said. ‘She won’t kill you.’

Maria thought: she ‘plonks’ herself down. She is pretty, but not graceful. She is full of sharp, abrupt movements which you can admire for their energy, their decisiveness.

She looked to see what the Hare Krishna was going to do about his orders. He had already gone.

‘Bad milk!’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘I’ve got old.’

‘We all get old,’ Maria said, but really she was being polite. She had an audit to begin. She wanted to make it fast and clean – a one-day job if possible.

‘One minute you’re a young girl falling in love and the next you look at your hand and it’s like this.’ She held it up. It was old and blotched, almost transparent in places.

Maria looked at the hand. It was papery dry. She thought of bits of broken china underneath a house.

‘I can see it like you see it,’ Mrs Catchprice said. ‘I can see an old woman’s hand. It has nothing to do with me. I think I’ll have brandy in my milk. Did he take an umbrella?’

‘I guess so.’

‘I know he looks peculiar but he’s very kind. He looks like such a dreadful bully, don’t you think?’ She leaned forward, frowning.

Maria had worked in the Tax Office twelve years and had never begun an audit in such a homey atmosphere. She opened her briefcase, removed a pad and laid it on her lap. ‘He’s got a nice smile,’ she said.

‘Yes, he has.’ Mrs Catchprice fitted a Salem into her mouth and lit it without taking her eyes off Maria Takis’s face. ‘The Catchprices all have kissing lips. Actually,’ she said, as if the thought was new to her, ‘he’s the spitting image of my late husband. Did you meet his younger brother, Benny? Vish’s been looking after Benny since he could stand. They told you about their mother?’

‘I haven’t talked to anyone,’ Maria said. ‘I thought my colleague had talked to you to set up this interview. I …’

‘Did you talk to Jack? Jack Catchprice, my youngest son.’ She nodded to a colour photograph hanging on the wall beside the doorway to the kitchen. It was of a good-looking man in an expensive suit shaking hands with the Premier of the State of New South Wales. ‘Jack’s the property developer. He tells everyone about his funny family. He tells people at lunch – Benny’s mother tried to shoot her little boy.’

Maria closed the pad.

‘It’s no secret,’ Mrs Catchprice said. ‘Benny’s mother tried to shoot him. What sort of mother is that? Nice, pretty-looking girl and then, bang, bang, shoots her little boy in the arm. Benny was three years old. I’m not making it up. Shot him, with a rifle.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? God knows. Who would ever know a thing like that?’

‘What was she charged with?’

‘Oh no,’ Mrs Catchprice said. ‘We wouldn’t report it. What would be the point? She went away, that’s what matters. We wouldn’t want the family put through a court case as well. Everyone in Franklin gossips about it anyway. They all know the story – on the Sunday Sophie Catchprice was confirmed an Anglican, on the Monday she did this … thing.
Confirmed,’
said Mrs Catchprice, responding to the confusion on Maria’s face. ‘You’re a Christian aren’t you? Your mother still goes to church I bet? Is she a Catholic?’

The Tax Inspector’s mother was dead, but she said, ‘Greek Orthodox.’

‘How fascinating,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘How lovely.’

It was not the last time Maria would wonder if Mrs Catchprice was sincere and yet she could not dismiss this enthusiastic brightness as false. Mrs Catchprice might really find it fascinating – she brought her Salem to her lips, inhaled and released the smoke untidily. ‘I always told them here in Franklin,’ she said, ‘that if they went in with the Presbyterians I’d switch over to the Catholics. We never had a Greek Orthodox. I never thought about Greeks. But now I suppose we have. We have all types here now. The Greek Orthodox is like the Catholic I think, is it not?’

‘The service is very beautiful.’

‘Oh I
do
like this,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘It’s so
lovely
you are here. Has Johnny gone for the milk?’

‘Mrs Catchprice, do you know why I’m here?’

‘You mean, am I really ga-ga?’ said Mrs Catchprice, butting her Salem out in an ugly yellow Venetian glass ashtray.

‘No,’ Maria said, ‘I did not mean that at all.’

‘You are a Tax Inspector?’

‘Yes. And I’ll need an office to begin doing my audit.’

‘They’re up to something, all right.’

Maria cocked her head, not understanding.

‘You met her?’ Mrs Catchprice said.

‘Your daughter?’

‘And her husband. I don’t like him but I’ve only got myself to blame for the fact she even met him.’

‘And you feel they are up to something?’

‘There’s something fishy going on there. You’ll see in a moment. They’ll have to give you access to the books. They won’t let me look but they can’t stop you. I think you’ll find the tax all paid,’ said Mrs Catchprice, folding her hands in her lap. ‘We’ve always paid our tax. It’s not the tax I’m worried about.’

Maria felt tired.

‘People always expect car dealers to be crooks, but you try buying a car from a classified ad and you’ll see where the crooks are. When my husband was alive, we always worked in with the law. We always supported the police. We always gave them presents at Christmas. A bottle of sparkling burgundy for the sergeant and beer for the constables. I would wrap up the bottles for him. He’d take them down to the police. They thought he was the ant’s pants.’

‘Mrs Catchprice,’ Maria said, patting the old woman’s hand to ease the sharp point she was making, ‘you weren’t
bribing
the police?’

‘It was a small town. We always supported the police.’

‘And now you’re supporting the Taxation Office.’

‘I wonder where that boy is with the milk.’

‘Mrs Catchprice. Are you Mrs F. Catchprice?’

‘Frieda,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘I’ve got the same name as the woman who was involved with D. H. Lawrence. She was a nasty piece of work.’

‘There’s no other Mrs F. Catchprice in your family?’

‘One’s enough,’ she laughed. ‘You ask the kids.’

‘So you are the public officer and also the one with the anomalies to report?’

‘Me? Oh no, I don’t think so.’ Mrs Catchprice folded her arms across her chest and shook her head.

‘You didn’t telephone the Taxation Office to say you were worried that your business had filed a false tax return?’

‘You should talk to Cath and Howie. They’re the ones with all the tricks up their sleeves. All this talk about being a professional musician is just bluff. She’s an amateur. She couldn’t make a living at it. No, no – what they want is to set up a motor business of their own, in competition to us. That’s their plan – you mark my words. But when you look at the books, you take my word, you’re going to find some hanky-panky. I won’t lay charges, but they’re going to have to pay it back.’

‘Mrs Catchprice, you do understand – I’m a
tax
auditor. I’m here to investigate tax, nothing else. You phoned the Taxation Office. Your call is on record.’

Mrs Catchprice looked alarmed.

‘They recorded me? Is that what you say?’

‘They recorded your name.’

Mrs Catchprice was looking at Maria, but it was a moment before Maria saw that there were tears flooding down her ruined cheeks.

‘The terrible thing is,’ said Mrs Catchprice, ‘the terrible thing is that I just can’t remember.’

8

At twelve o’clock Mort Catchprice returned from the coast with a Volvo trade-in and saw Benny standing in front of the Audi Quattro. He did not recognize him. He knew his son intimately, of course, had held his little body, bathed it, cleaned it, cared for it from the year his wife had run away. He had seen his body change like a subject in slow-motion photography, seen its arms thicken and its shoulders broaden, its hooded little penis grow longer and wider, its toenails change texture and thickness, insect bites appear and fade, cuts open like flowers and close up with scabs the colour of dead rose petals. He knew what his son was like – a teenager with pimples, razor rash, pubic hair – someone who treated his skin as if he wished to make himself repulsive – left it smeared with dirt, ingrained with the residue of sumps and gearboxes. He had rank-smelling hair and lurid T-shirts in whose murky painted images his father could see only violence and danger.

What Mort saw as he drove slowly down the lane-way to the workshop, was not his son but a salesman, hired without his knowledge, against his wishes, a slick car salesman like Jack, neater than Jack, someone they could not, in any case, afford to pay.

He was mad already when he drove in beneath the open roller doors into the large grey steel-trussed space that was the workshop. He parked the Volvo on a vacant Tecalemit two-poster hoist.

He moved an oxy gas stand and began to push a battered yellow jack back against the wall when Arthur Dermott came shuffling over from his work bench rubbing his hands with a rag and grinning under his wire-framed spectacles.

‘They tell you?’ he asked, reaching for the crumpled pack of Camels in his back pocket.

Mort felt hot around the neck.
He saw the salesman. He knows I’m weak
.

‘They tell me what?’

‘Tax office is raiding you,’ Arthur said, lighting the cigarette with satisfaction.

He saw the salesman
.

‘What?’

‘Tax Office is raiding you. The way we heard, it was serious. The boys are a bit stirred up, job-security-wise.’

‘Bullshit, Arthur. Who told you that?’

Arthur nodded towards Spare Parts. ‘Howie come and took Jesse off the fuel pumps to carry all the books up to your Mum’s apartment. They’re doing their raid up there.’

‘All right, Arthur, how about the Camira?’

‘A Welsh plug and some coolant.’

‘You road test it?’

‘It’s an R.T., yep.’

‘O.K., now you can pre-delivery the blue Commodore.’

‘I thought I was going to do the brakes on the Big Mack truck?’

‘Forget the fucking Big Mack truck, just do what the fuck I tell you.’

It was true what Granny Catchprice said – the Catchprices had kissy lips. Mort had the best set of all of them. And although he was a wide and burly man, spilling with body hair, and with a rough, wide nose which had been broken twice on the football field, it was the lips which were remarkable not just for their fullness but also – in that bed of blue-black stubble – their delicacy.

Yet had you seen him emerge from under the roller doors of the workshop you would have seen a fighter, not a kisser. He came up the concrete lane-way beside the Spare Parts Department like a front row forward, occupying the centre of the road. He wore a clean white boiler suit, cut short at the arms and open for two or three press studs so the hairy mat of his wide chest was visible. He walked with a roll to his shoulders and his lips had gone thin and his eyes were looking at nothing they could see.

He knew there was no way he could have been told about the Tax Inspector, but he was still mad about not being told. When he passed the fern-filled window of Spare Parts he was giving them a chance to tell him, but they did not tap on the window or come out to tell him.

Also: they had hired a salesman without consultation.

In any case, fuck them, they made him angry almost every day of his life. Now he was going to piss the salesman off. He did not want to fight. He was sick of fight, sick of his body being a mass of stretching ropes. All he wanted was to be someone with a Garage, not a Service Station, not a Dealership, not a Franchise, but a Garage with deep, wide, oil stains on the floor and a stack of forty-four-gallon drums along his back fence, a Garage in a country town. There was one in the paper this week, at Blainey – $42,000, vendor finance. Blainey would be good enough. You could be the guy who drives the school bus, delivers the kerosene and fuel oil, cuts the rust spots out of the school teacher’s old car, fixes the butcher’s brakes with used parts, is handy with a lathe, is a good shot, a good bloke, a scout master, the coach of the football team, someone who, when looking for a screw or bolt, upturns a drum full of old saved screws and bolts on to the workshop floor and can find – there it is – a ⅜-inch Whitworth thread with a Phillips head.

Instead he had one kid lost to a cult, the other with severe learning difficulties and the belief he was a genius. He had a $567,000 debt to GMAC and a tax audit which, maybe, who knows, would put the lot of them in jail.

He stepped around the puddle on the end of the lane-way and crossed by the petrol pumps. There, twenty metres ahead of him, standing in front of the Audi Quattro, was the striking blond-haired young man in a glistening grey suit, the salesman. He was flexing his knees, holding his yellow-covered guide to auction prices behind his back. When he turned and looked him straight in the eye, Mort felt a sexual shiver which made him speak more harshly than he had planned.

‘Get your arse out of here,’ he said.

‘You promised,’ the salesman said, but he turned and walked away, swinging his shoulders and wiggling his butt like a frigging tom cat. My God, it was an embarrassment, the way he moved.

‘And don’t come back,’ he said. Even as he said it he recognized his son. He wanted to cry out, to protest. He felt the blood rise hot in his neck and take possession of his face. He stood in his overalls in the middle of the yard, bright red.

His phone was ringing – loud as a fire bell. He walked towards it, shaking his head. In any other business of this size, one where the sales director was not wasting half her time trying to be a Country singer, there would be a service manager to answer the phone and soothe the customers. There would also be a workshop manager to co-ordinate the work flow, and a foreman to diagnose the major problems, work on the difficult jobs, do the final road tests and then tick them off on the spread sheet. Mort did all of these jobs. So even while he worried what the hell he would do about his embarrassing son, he also knew that three Commodores on the spread sheet were in for a fuel pump recall. General Motors graded this job as 4.2 which meant they would pay Catchprice Motors for forty-two minutes’ labour, but they made no allowance for the time it took to drain the tank. He tried to cover himself by using Jesse, the first-year apprentice, but each recall still cost the business fifty dollars. That was Howie’s calculation. He had said to Howie: ‘What you want me to do about it?’

Howie said: ‘Just help us keep Benny out of Spare Parts, Mort. Benny loses us more in a day than you could in a week.’

Mort walked into the Spare Parts Department to ask Cathy would she hold his calls for half an hour so he could help out on the fuel pumps. She should be standing in the showroom, but she never would. She had a handwritten sign there, saying please come over to Spare Parts and now she was on the phone making a parts order, doing Benny’s job in fact, probably fucking up as well.

Howie was on the phone too. He was meant to look like Elvis’s original drummer, D. J. Fontana. This was bullshit. He looked like what he would have been if Granny Catchprice had never hired him – a country butcher. He had a tattoo on his forearm and a ducktail haircut, always four weeks too long. He had his pointy shoes up on the desk, and the phone wedged underneath his chin. He had smoke curling round his hair, and clinging to his face. He stank of it.

‘Listen, Barry, no: I went in there personally and asked them for it. They haven’t got the record in stock. It’s not even on their damn computer.’ He paused. ‘I know.’ He paused again and nodded to Mort to sit down. He lived his life surrounded by radiator hoses and shock absorbers but he acted like he was in show business. It was pathetic. He wore
suits
, probably the only spare parts manager in Australia to do it. The suits all came mail order – with extra long jackets and padded shoulders.

‘We
were
number eight. That was two days ago. If you can’t keep the record in the shops, we’re dead meat.’

He took his feet off the desk but only to flick ash off his trousers.

‘I’m sympathetic, of course I am.’ He was a slime. He was dark-haired and pale-skinned and he closed his heavy-lidded eyes when he spoke to you. That made you think he was shy, but he was a slime. Before he came into their lives, Cathy never fought with anyone.

When Howie put the phone down, Mort said: ‘They tell me the Tax Department is upstairs with Mum.’ He was pleased with how he said it – calm, not shaky.

‘It’s an audit,’ Howie said. He had the desk covered with papers. Mort saw the record company logo – nothing to do with Catchprice Motors.

‘So what’s that mean?’ Mort asked. ‘An audit?’

Howie opened his drawer and pulled out a pink and black pamphlet. He stood up and brought it over to the counter. Mort took it from him. It was titled
Desk Audits & You
. ‘They tell me Benny’s gone blond.’

‘What’s it mean?’ Mort tapped the brochure on the counter.

‘It means ooh-la-la,’ Howie said.

‘What’s it mean?’ Mort could feel himself blushing. ‘Are we in the shit or aren’t we?’

‘Mort, you’re blushing,’ Howie said.

He could not walk out. He had to stay there, enduring whatever it was that Howie knew, or thought he knew, about his son.