The Tax Inspector

13

It wasn’t Sophie. It was Benny. He had made himself into the spitting image of the woman who had shot him. Whether he had meant to do it, or if it was an accident of bright white hair, the effect was most disturbing, to Cathy anyway.

All through the day the men from the workshop had come and gone with their grubby job cards, cracking their jokes about her nephew’s ‘look’, but not one of them had said – how could they have known, they were all too young – how like his mother it made him seem. His hair was the same colour, the exact same colour, and it gave his features a luminous, fresh-steamed look. Sophie had grown her hair long in the end but at the beginning she had it short like this and now you could see he had the cheekbones. He was like his mother, but he had a damaged, dangerous look his mother never had. No matter what shit she put up with from the Catchprices she kept her surface as fresh and clean as a pair of freshly whitened tennis shoes right up to the day she shot her son.

Cathy said: ‘Benny, you look nice.’

The person he made her think of was Elvis – not that he looked like Elvis, but he felt how Elvis must have felt when he walked into Sam Phillips’s recording studio in Memphis – a shy boy, who maybe never played but in his bedroom, with the mirror. Sam Phillips must have seen his sexy lips, but the thing that struck him was how inferior Elvis felt, how markedly inferior. He said this in an interview on more than one occasion.

Benny had already phoned her once today to say he was going to ‘hurt’ her, and she knew he had a temper which you can only describe as violent, but she knew him with his little arms tight around her neck at three in the morning, and when she complimented him he blushed and lowered his eyes because he knew she meant it and would never lie to him.

It was only when Mort heard his son’s name that he actually realized Benny had come up the stairs behind him.

‘Oh, shit,’ he said.

Cathy looked at Mort and wondered now if he even saw the similarity.

Benny raised his eyebrows at his father and shrugged apologetically. He put out his hand as if to take his sleeve or his hand, but the sleeves on Mort’s overall were cut off and there was nothing to hold on to except a hand he would not take. Cathy would have taken his hand, but it was not offered her.

Benny had been in trouble with almost everything, lying, cheating, truancy, shop-lifting, selling bottled petrol for inhalation, trying to buy Camira parts from the little crooks who hung about in Franklin Mall; but now he just looked very young and frightened of being laughed at. He walked lightly on his feet, holding his back straight. You could hear his new shoes squeaking as he crossed the room to the yellow vinyl armchair which had once belonged to Cacka. When he sat and crossed his long legs, he revealed socks as long as a clergyman’s – no skin showed. Benny folded his clean hands in his lap and looked directly at his father, blushing.

Mort’s colour was also high and his lips had a loose embarrassed look. He shook his head and shut his eyes.

‘Ignore your father,’ Cathy said. ‘You look wonderful, better than your uncle Jack.’

‘Thanks Cath,’ Mort said. He leaned against the window-sill opposite her and stared critically at the stupid ping-pong table. It was not properly joined in the middle. It was marked with stains from their ‘Social Ambitions’ – ring marks from glasses and bottles, sticky circles of Benedictine stuck with dust.

‘You singing tonight?’ he asked. ‘You got a jig-jig?’

‘Very funny,’ she said. ‘What do you want?’

Mort shook his head as if in disappointment at this hostility. He looked down at his boots a moment as if he was considering a riposte, but then he looked up, spoke in what was, for him, in the circumstances, a calm voice: ‘Why does this Tax Inspector have her office in Mum’s apartment?’

‘You come up here to ask about that?’ Cathy crossed her arms below her breasts and shook her head.

‘Mort …’ Howie said.

‘I don’t believe you,’ Cathy said.

‘Tough,’ said Mort.

‘The auditor needs a desk,’ Howie said, ‘that’s all. She could have taken any vacant desk. She could have had your office.’

‘You wouldn’t want me near a Tax Inspector,’ Mort said. ‘You couldn’t trust me not to give the game away.’

Cathy looked into his eyes and he held hers. He was her brother in a way that Jack had never been. She and Mort were the ones who had sung opera together, killed chooks, sold cars, but now she had no idea what he thought about anything.

‘There is no game,’ Cathy said.

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘No,’ Cathy said. ‘You wouldn’t, but you’d better find out. If I was you I’d be finding out what makes this business tick pretty damn fast.’

‘You going to try and run away again, Cathy?’ Mort grinned. ‘Did you get another letter from The Gold Chain Troubadour?’

There was silence which was broken by the sound of Benedictine being poured into Cathy’s tumbler. Benny crossed his legs and laid his left palm softly on the back of the right hand.

‘Look,’ Mort said. ‘What I came up here to say was that I’ve had a talk to Mum.’

Cathy poured herself some extra Benedictine, but then she didn’t drink it.

‘I talked with Mum and we both decided that if you want to sell the back paddock to cover us with any back taxes, we’ll vote in favour. That’s why I’m here, to tell you that.’

‘Do you remember,’ Howie said, smiling sideways at Cathy, ‘that we wrote your mother in as head salesman?’

‘Sure.’

‘And we claimed tax deductions for what we said we paid her?’

‘Sure, I remember that. We had Jack’s smart-arse accountant. You all got excited about how you were going to keep the trade-ins off the books. But do you remember what I said then?’

‘Tell me.’

‘I said that I didn’t want to do business like Jack. I said we’ve gone off the rails. We shouldn’t be playing tricks with tax. We should be running the business by its original principles …’

‘Mort,’ Howie said. ‘I’m trying to explain that if this audit goes through we are going to need twenty back paddocks to pay the bill.’

‘And I’m trying to tell you, Mr Rock ’n’ Roll,’ said Mort, suddenly shouting and jabbing his finger at Howie, ‘that this business will run itself just fine if we stop listening to crooks and stick to Cacka’s philosophy.’

It was very quiet. Then there was a squeaking noise. The ping-pong table started to move in front of Benny’s nose. It pushed towards him, then withdrew. It was Cathy pushing with her big thighs. She had a bright little smile on her face.

‘Philosophy?’ she said. Her mouth was small in her big face and she had two hot spots on her pale cheeks. ‘What sort of philosophy would that be, Mort? Like Socrates? Like Mussolini? What sort of philosophy did you have in mind exactly?’

Mort said: ‘He was one of the greats.’ Benny looked down at the floor. He thought: don’t, please don’t.

‘Mort,’ Cathy said. ‘Say he was a creep. Admit it. It’s not your fault.’

‘He was human, but he was one of the greats.’

‘Look at us,’ Cathy said. There was a bang as she slammed her glass down on the table. Benedictine spilled. (Howie went to the kitchen to get a Wettex. Benny despised him for doing it.) ‘Look at us,’ Cathy said, watching Howie wipe the table. ‘We don’t know how to be happy. Look out of the window. We’re car dealers. That’s all we do. You cannot be a great car dealer.’

‘You can be a great boot-maker,’ Mort said.

Benny agreed. He took a facelette of Aloe-Vera and wiped the back of his hands. He thought: I will be a great car dealer.

Cathy took the Wettex from Howie and folded it and placed it on the table. Howie picked it up and took it out to the kitchen.

‘You want to talk about great,’ Cathy said. ‘Elvis was great.’

Mort laughed.

‘Hank Williams was great, but Christ, Morty, even if you could be a great car dealer, you could not be great and bankrupt at the same time.’

‘Spend some time with the books, Mort. I’d be happy to take you through them.’

‘Listen,’ Mort said. ‘I don’t like this business. I don’t think you like it either, but we’re stuck with it. If we want to save our arse, we should go back to Cacka’s principles.’

‘And what principles were you thinking of?’ Howie asked.

‘You remember Catchprice Motors, Cathy?’ Mort asked his sister. ‘We didn’t wind our speedos back. We paid our taxes. We told the truth.’

‘Why do you mime the words of the hymns in church?’ Howie asked.

Mort looked at him, his mouth loose.

‘I just meant to ask you,’ Howie said. ‘I wondered why you won’t sing out loud. Barry Peterson asked me why someone with such a good voice wouldn’t sing out loud. I wondered if this had something to do with Cacka’s philosophy.’

‘Shut up, Howie,’ Cathy said.

‘What I’m getting to,’ Mort said, his neck now blazing red above his white overall collar, ‘is Cacka paid his taxes. He’d have shut the doors if he couldn’t pay his taxes.’

‘Mort,’ said Cathy, more gently than before, ‘Franklin has changed.’

‘If it’s changed so much we have to be cheats, I’d rather run some little garage up at Woop-woop. I’d rather be on the dole.’

‘You might get your wish,’ Cathy said.

‘How?’ asked Benny.

They all looked at him. For a moment the only noise came from the rattling air-conditioner.

‘What?’ Cathy said, frowning at him.

‘How will my father get his wish?’

‘What this conversation is about, Benjamin, is that we are being investigated by the Taxation Department.’

‘I know that.’

‘And by the time they have finished with us, we’ll have to sell the business to pay them back.’

‘So, what are you going to do, Cathy?’ Benny asked.

‘Don’t speak to your auntie like that.’

‘No,’ Benny insisted, ‘what are you going to do to protect us? What positive steps can be taken towards realizing our desires?’ He blushed and stood up. They were all staring at him. Not one of them had any idea of who he was and what it was he had quoted to them. Howie was smirking, but none of them had any plan appropriate to their situation. In their shiny suits and frills and oily overalls, they were creatures at the end of an epoch. The climate had changed and they were puzzled to find the familiar crops would no longer grow. He stood up. He was full of light. They saw him, but did not see him, for the best and most vital part of him was already walking down the path towards the actualization of his desires. I am new. I am born now. Even while they stared at him across the bottle-stained emptiness of the ping-pong table, he was descending the staircase, not the one that led to his physical actual cellar – not the metal staircase with its perforated treads, the oil-stained ladder with the banister he must not touch – but the other staircases which are described in seven audio cassettes, Actualizations and Affirmations 1–14.

He was descending the blue staircase (its treads shimmering like oil on water, its banisters clear, clean, stainless steel) and all they could think was that he had no right to wear a suit.

At the bottom of the blue staircase he found the yellow staircase.

At the bottom of the yellow staircase, the pink.

At the bottom of the pink, the ebony.

At the end of the ebony, the Golden Door.

Beyond the Golden Door was the Circular Room of Black Marble.

In the centre of the Circular Room of Black Marble he visualized a Sony Trinitron.

Benny turned on the Sony Trinitron and saw there the vivid picture of what it was he desired: all the books and ledgers of Catchprice Motors, wrapped in orange garbage bags and sealed with silver tape.

‘Leave it to me,’ he said out loud.

By then he was already walking across the crushed gravel of the car yard. His father was a yard ahead of him.

‘What?’ he said.