The Tax Inspector

44

At half-past ten on Tuesday night, Maria Takis left Chez Oz to see the Daniel Makeveitch painting at Jack Catchprice’s beach house.

As Chez Oz was on Craigend Street, and as the Brahmachari ashram was around the corner, it was not astonishing that they should, in hurrying out into the night, bump into Vishnabarnu on the pavement, but Maria was astonished none the less.

‘Hi,’ she said, with an exuberance and a familiarity totally new in her relationship with Vish. ‘Small world.’

‘Not really,’ said Vish, and nodded at Jack.

He was with another Hare Krishna, a soft, olive-skinned man of forty or so who had noticeably crooked teeth and a scholarly stoop.

‘The ashram is here,’ Vishnabarnu pointed to the grey stucco block of flats. ‘The temple is round the corner from the fire station. I walk past here six times a day.’

‘That’s an ashram?’ Maria smiled. She was excited and happy. ‘I always imagined something more exotic.’

The other Hare Krishna took a step away and stared off into the night.

‘I could have given you a lift to town,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?’

Vishnabarnu looked at his friend. Something passed between them. When Vish looked back to Maria he was almost laughing.

‘No,’ he said.

The older Hare Krishna began to walk towards the ashram.

‘This is goodbye.’ Vish shook Maria’s hand. ‘Excuse me.’

And then, without saying a word to his uncle, he followed his friend, who was already in the dark, arched doorway of the grey stuccoed building.

‘He thinks I’m the devil,’ Jack said as he let her into the Jaguar.

‘I don’t like them generally,’ Maria said. ‘The way they treat their women …’

‘It’s about what you’d expect from people trying to duplicate life in a sixteenth-century Indian village …’

‘But they do feed the street kids in the Cross and also when your sister was trying to have your mother committed. Yes, that happened on Monday. He was very good then. You get the feeling he’s capable of doing what’s needed.’

‘What was needed?’

‘Well not much as it turned out. But you get the feeling from him that he is timid but that he would go to the wall with you. That’s a very impressive quality.’ She paused. ‘Even if he does think you’re the devil.’

They drove down past the lighted car showrooms in William Street with their back-lit, bunny-suited, teenage prostitutes and the long, slow line of cruising traffic in the kerbside lane. They turned right down into Woolloomooloo beneath the Eastern Suburbs railway bridge and up beside the art gallery and on to the Cahill Expressway which cut like a prison wall across the tiny mouth of Port Jackson.

‘If you look at the Cahill Expressway,’ Jack said, ‘you can understand almost all of this city. I had an investor here from Strasbourg last week. It was his observation. That you can see how corrupt the city is from looking at it.’

‘Because of the Expressway?’

‘Things like the Expressway.’

‘Was this a good thing or a bad thing, from an investor’s point of view?’

He looked at her, bristling a little. ‘A disappointing thing,’ he said at last. He was silent for a minute as they came up the rock cutting and on to Sydney Harbour Bridge, but then he went on more softly. ‘You can read a city. You can see who’s winning and who’s losing. In this city,’ he said, ‘the angels are not winning.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Did I sound offensive?’

‘No,’ he said, but she was sure he was sulking and she had, as they drove beneath the high, bright windows of insurance companies and advertising agencies in North Sydney, one of those brief periods of estrangement that marked her feelings for Jack Catchprice.

‘It’s true I go to work in the swamp each day,’ he said, ‘but I do try to wipe my boots when I come into decent people’s homes.’

‘Oh relax,’ Maria said. ‘Please.’

‘I am relaxed,’ he smiled. ‘Well, no, I’m not relaxed. I probably want you to like me too much.’

‘I like you,’ she said uneasily.

At the top of the hill above The Spit, he took the long, lonely road which cuts across the back of French’s Forest.

‘I never came this way,’ she said.

‘You normally go through Dee. Why? This is much nicer.’

Maria did not like the countryside particularly. She did not like the lonely gravel roads she saw disappearing into the bush on either side of the road. The signposts to places like Oxford Falls did not sound romantic to her, but reminded her how foolish she was being taking this drive with a single man who kept special pillows for pregnant women’s legs.

He was a Catchprice, for Chrissakes. He came from a disturbed and difficult home. Anything could have happened to him. It was stupid to place herself in this situation to see a painting she had already seen in the Makeveitch retrospective at the art gallery of New South Wales.

He began to play Miles Davis, ‘Kind of Blue’. She imagined his father holding his sheet music, roaring like a beast in a fairy tale. She loved this music, but now she knew he was tone deaf it suggested a sort of inauthenticity and forced an unfavourable comparison with Alistair, who was musically gifted and whom she saw, in the soft green glow of the Jaguar’s instrument lights, Jack Catchprice rather resembled.

‘It’s farther than I remembered,’ she said, a little later as they emerged from the bush into the brightly lit coastal strip at Narrabeen.

‘Are you tired?’

‘A little, I guess.’

‘You could sleep there if you wanted. There’s a guest room.’

‘Oh no,’ she said.

‘Or I could take you back.’

‘I’ll just stay a moment and look at the painting.’

But it was not the painting but the house that captivated her, and when she was standing there at last, she could not fear a man who lived in a house whose main living-room had an arched roof which opened like an eyelid to the night sky, whose side walls were of pleated canvas, a house whose strong, rammed-earth back wall promised all the solidity of a castle but whose substance then evaporated before her eyes as Jack, clambering first on to the roof, and then round the walls, opened the house to the cabbage tree palms which filled the garden and in whose rustling hearts one could hear brush-tailed possums.

It was a night of clouds and moon, of dark and light, and as Maria sat in a rocking-chair in the middle of the teak-floored living-room she felt as she had previously felt one late summer afternoon in the Duomo in Milan, a feeling of such serendipitous peace that she felt she could, if she would let herself, just weep. She sat there rocking gently, looking up at the moon-edged clouds scudding across the belt of Orion and all the dense bright dust of the Milky Way while Jack Catchprice made camomile in a small raku teapot.

‘You should develop Sydney like this,’ she said when he came back, kneeling beside her in a sarong and bare feet. She rocked back and forth. ‘I didn’t know that places like this even existed on the earth.’ A moment later she asked: ‘Is the architect famous?’

‘Only with architects. Watch the tea. I’m putting it just here. When you’ve finished it, we can look at the painting.’

He was standing at the back of the rocking-chair and she stood, to be able to talk to him properly.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘there goes the possum family.’

She turned. Along the top of the wall, at the place where the eyelid of roof opened to the sky, she could make out a brush-tailed possum.

‘See,’ he said, ‘the baby is on her back.’

He was standing behind her, with his two hands holding her swollen belly and nuzzling her neck. ‘It’s very beautiful,’ he said.

In another situation the sentimentality of this observation might have made her hostile, but now it actually touched her. She began to do exactly what she had planned she would not do and as she, now, turned and kissed him, she felt not the weight of her pregnancy but the quite overwhelming ache of desire.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you a surprise.’

He had a very beautiful mouth. Up close he smelt of apples. She kissed him hungrily but insistently, hanging on his neck and feeling him take her whole weight in his shoulders and in his arms. She was not willing to be parted, made a small humming sound of pleasure in the back of her throat while mosquitoes drew blood from her shoulder and the back of his hands.

He noticed first. He held up his thumb and forefinger to show her a crumpled wing and bent proboscis, a smear of blood.

‘Normally I light coils,’ he said, ‘but I think they may be too toxic … for this fellow.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said. He made her feel negligent.

‘I have mosquito netting,’ he said. And before she understood what he meant he had led her along the galley-like kitchen and down into a bedroom which was hung with a cobalt blue silk net.

‘Hey, hey,’ she said when she realized his intention. ‘Whoa, Jack, stop now.’

But he was already inside the net. He sat cross-legged, smiling at her.

‘There are no mosquitoes in here.’

‘I’m not going in there,’ she said.

‘Just a cuddle,’ he said.

She laughed. There were mosquitoes in the air around her hair. She could feel them more than hear them.

He grinned. He flicked on a switch at the bed head. A light illuminated the cabbage tree palms in the garden. Then he lit three fat yellow candles above the bed head. Their flames were reflected in the pool immediately outside the bedroom window.

‘Jack, I’m too old for this bachelor pad stuff.’

‘I never bring strangers here,’ he said.

‘I bet,’ she said, but then she thought, what the hell. She got in under the net but now she was there the spell was broken. She had been so happy kissing him but now she was inside the net she was lumpy and graceless. She was too big. There was nowhere to put her feet.

‘Look, Jack,’ she said. ‘Look at me.’ She snapped at the support stockings which had hitherto been hidden under her long dress. ‘Do you really wish to seduce this? You’re a nice man. Why don’t we wait a few months?’

‘You look beautiful.’

‘My back hurts. I can’t even see my feet when I stand up. Even while I’m kissing you I’ve got this thing inside me kicking and nudging me for attention. I can’t concentrate.’

‘We could try. We could just lie here.’

‘I don’t know you.’ She put her arm around him, but she felt the wrong shape to kiss sitting down. ‘You don’t know me. It’s not smart for people to just jump into bed any more.’

‘Is this a discussion about the Unmentionable?’

‘I don’t want to offend you.’

‘You don’t offend me at all. We could play it safe.’

‘Safer, not actually safe,’ she smiled. While still involved in her monogamous adulterous relationship with Alistair, she had complacently pitied those who must go through this. She had never thought that the tone of the conversation might be quite so tender.

He touched her on the forehead between her eyes and ran his finger down the line of her nose. ‘I’ll make love to you 100 per cent safe.’

She had never imagined you could say these words and still feel tender, but now she was lying on her side and he was lying on his and he had those clear blue Catchprice eyes and such sweet crease marks around his eyes. She touched them. These were what women called ‘crow’s feet’. They were beautiful.

‘Is there 100 per cent?’ she asked.

‘Is this safe?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Does this feel safe?’

‘Jack, don’t.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll keep my word. Is this safe?’

‘Of course.’

She let him undress her and caress her swollen body. God, she thought – this is how people die.

‘Is this beautiful to you?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘You glisten.’

He cradled her stomach in his hands and kissed her back and then he turned her and kissed her stomach, not once but slowly, as if he was following the points on a star map that only he could see.

Maria unbuttoned his shirt.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you’re very beautiful.’ He had a tanned chest covered with tight curled golden hairs. He was already releasing his sarong. She began to kiss him, to kiss his chest, to nuzzle her face among the soft apple-sweet hairs, discovering as she did so a hunger for the scents and textures of male skin.

‘Get the condom,’ she heard herself say.

‘You sure?’

‘Mmm.’

‘I’ve got it.’

‘I’m crazy,’ she said.

It was the second night she had stayed up late with members of the Catchprice family.