The Tax Inspector

27

Maria’s father was angry at the street she lived in. He spat at it and scuffed at its paspalum weeds with his half-laced boots. He hit the stone retaining wall outside Elizabeth Hindmath’s with his aluminium stick and lost the rubber stopper off the end. The rubber stopper rolled down the street, bouncing off the cobblestones, and finally lost itself in the morning-glory tangle opposite Maria’s cottage.

‘See, see,’ George Takis cried triumphantly, pointing his stick. ‘See.’

He meant the street was too steep for a woman with a baby.

‘Forty-five degrees,’ he said, ‘at least.’

It was nothing like forty-five degrees, but she did not contradict him. She did not point out that the streets of Letkos were far steeper and rougher than this one where she now lived in Sydney, that she herself had been pushed in an ancient German pram up streets steeper and rougher than the one that caused her father this upset – it was not the street he was upset with – it was the pregnancy. If he had articulated his anger honestly, he would have lost her. He was newly widowed and already had one daughter who would not speak to him, so he was angry with the street instead. It was too narrow, too steep. The drainage was bad and the cobbles were slippery. If she needed an ambulance they could never get it down there.

‘You live here, you need good brakes. What sort of brakes it got?’ He meant the pram. He wiped some dry white spittle from the corner of his lips and looked at her accusingly, his dark eyebrows pressed down hard upon his black eyes.

‘I don’t have one,’ she said. She did not want to think about the pram. She did not want to think about what life was going to be like.

He sighed.

‘I work,’ she said. ‘Remember.’

‘You’re not going to know what’s hit you, you know that? You don’t know what will happen to you. You get in trouble, you just stay in trouble. Always. Forever.’

‘Shut up, Ba-ba.’

‘You come home from the hospital, how are you going to buy a pram then? You need to have everything bought beforehand.’

‘Who told you that? Mrs Hellos?’

‘No one,’ he said, hitting at the Williamsons’ overgrown jasmine with his stick. ‘I talk to no one.’ He paused. ‘I was reading the magazines at the barber’s.’

‘About babies, Ba-Ba? In a barber’s shop magazine?’

‘I bought it,’ he said, fiddling with the button on his braces.

‘Ba-Ba, this doesn’t help me. Really. I know I must seem terrible to you, but it doesn’t help.’

‘Maria, come with me, I’ll buy you a nice one. Come on. I’ll buy it for you.’ She could not really be angry with him. She did not need to be told how her pregnancy hurt him and excited him, how he struggled with it, how he loved her. They went shopping for a pram at Leichhardt Market Town and he got angry about prices instead, and afterwards she cooked him the noodles and keftethes which his wife had made for him three times a week for forty years, and afterwards, when it was dark, Maria drove him home to his house in Newtown, slipping into Greek territory like a spy in a midget submarine.

At midnight on the night she had failed to delete the Catchprice file from the computer, Maria felt George Takis’s anger at the street might have some basis outside of his own shame. She parked her car up on Darling Street and then began the long walk down the steep lane.

She was tired already. She was heavy and sore and this was a street for a single woman with a flat stomach and healthy back. It was a street you walked down arm in arm with a lover, stumbling, laughing after too much wine, your vagina moist and warm and your legs smooth from waxing. This was so unsexy, and difficult. So endless.

She walked past the fallen stone wall at Elizabeth Hindmath’s house. The rocks had tumbled out on to the street just as George Takis had said they would. The path was slippery with moss and lichen and Maria stepped very carefully. There was a movement in her womb like a great bubble rising and rolling – but not breaking – and it made her exclaim softly and put her hand on her rising stomach.

Sometimes at night she would lie on her back and watch the baby move around her stomach, watch its ripples, and guess its limbs, and although she would always try to do this fondly, with wonder, she would often end up in tears. She knew her fondness was a fake.

The moon was full and the air was heavy with honeysuckle and jasmine. Someone was playing Country music in a house down the street. There was a smell of oil in the air – at least she thought it was oil – which seemed to come from the container ships at the bottom of the hill.

She did not realize that the Country music was coming from her house until she was right outside it. Then she saw the small red light – the ghetto blaster – in the centre of her own front steps. The hair stood on her neck.

‘Don’t you recognize a tax-payer when you see one?’ a male voice said.

Maria walked straight on.

Every Tax Inspector knows these stories: the mad ‘client’, whose business you have destroyed, who seeks you out and beats you or puts dog shit in your letter box. She kept on walking with her breath held hard in her throat. The cassette player turned off with a heavy thunk.

A woman called: ‘We didn’t think you’d be out so late. Being pregnant.’

Maria stopped a little distance off and stared into the shadow of her own veranda. She could see the axe she had left leaning against the stack of firewood.

‘Are you going to ask us in?’ the woman said. Her voice sounded thin, stretched tight between apology and belligerence.

‘Maybe,’ Maria said, ‘we could all meet for a cup of coffee in the morning.’

There was a light on at number 95, but it was twenty metres away down hill and the lane was so slippery with moss it would be dangerous to run.

‘We’ve got to work tomorrow.’ It was a teenage boy. She could see his hair – shining white as a knife in the night. ‘We’ve got customers to attend to.’

A cowboy boot shifted out of the shadow into the white spill from the street light.

‘Mrs McPherson?’ she asked.

The boy with the blond hair stood and walked down off the concrete steps.

‘Benjamin Catchprice,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘We’ve been waiting two hours.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Woooo,’ said Benny, dancing back, grinning, fanning his hands, ‘language.’

‘You scared me shitless, you little creep,’ Maria said. ‘Who gave you my address? What right do you think you have to come here in the middle of the night?’

‘We’re sorry about that,’ said Cathy McPherson. She was holding a goddam guitar – standing like a giantess blocking the access to the veranda, holding a guitar, wearing a cowgirl suit, her great strong legs apart as if it was her house, not Maria’s. ‘Really, we’re sorry. We really didn’t mean to frighten you. It wasn’t the middle of the night when we got here.’

‘Mrs McPherson,’ said Maria. ‘Don’t you realize how prejudicial it is for you to be here?’

Cathy McPherson stepped down off the step. ‘I’d be obliged,’ she said, ‘if I could use your toilet.’