The Tax Inspector

46

Jack Catchprice woke with his prize beside him in the bed, her mouth open, her chin a little slack, her leg around the spare pillow he had fetched for her just before dawn. He put his hand out to touch her belly, and then withdrew it.

He knew then he was going to keep her, and the child too, of course, the child particularly – another man’s child did not create an obstacle – it had almost the opposite effect. She had arrived complete. She was as he would have dreamed her to be – with a child that was not, in any way, a reproduction of himself.

It was all he could do not to touch her, wake her, talk to her and he slid sideways out of the bed as if fleeing his own selfish happiness. He lifted the veil of mosquito netting and put his feet on the floor.

The walls were open to the garden and he could almost have touched the cabbage tree palms dripping dry after the night of rain. The new pattern of wet summers had depressed him, but now he found in the rotting smells of his jungle garden such deep calm, such intimations of life and death, of fecundity and purpose that he knew he could, had it been necessary, have extracted happiness from hailstones.

The sun was shining, at least for now. He could roll back the roof and wear his faded silk Javanese sarong and pad across the teak floor in bare feet and watch the tiny skinks slither across the floor in front of him and see the red-tailed cockatoos and listen to the high chatter of the lorikeets as they pursued their neurotic, fluttering, complaining lives in the higher branches of his neighbour’s eucalyptus.

He made coffee, he looked at the garden, he let the Tax Inspector sleep past seven, eight, nine o’clock. When it came to nine, he phoned his office.

The woman’s voice which answered his office phone was deep and rather dry.

‘Bea,’ he said, ‘we’re going to have to cancel Lend Lease this morning.’

A long silence.

‘Bea …’

‘I hear you,’ she said.

‘So could you please tell the others …’

‘What do you want me to tell them? That they worked two months for nothing?’

‘Sure,’ Jack smiled. ‘That’s perfect. Also, if you could call Michael McGorgan at Lend Lease.’

‘I suppose I tell him you’ve fallen in love?’

Jack’s lips pressed into the same almost prim little ‘v’ they had made last night, when he told her about Makeveitch’s painting. How could he tell Bea – he had been given the impossible thing.

‘All I hope,’ Bea said, ‘is this one doesn’t have a PhD.’

Jack finished his call with his face and eyes creased up from smiling. He walked barefoot through the garden to borrow bacon and eggs from the peevish widow of the famous broadcaster who lived next door.

When the bacon was almost done and the eggs were sitting, broken, each one in its own white china cup, he went to the Tax Inspector and kissed her on her splendid lips, and wrapped her shining body in a kimono and brought her, half-webbed in sleep, to wait for her breakfast in the garden. She smelled of almond oil and apricots.

‘You know what time it is?’ she said as he brought her the bacon and eggs.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I hope you like your eggs like this.’

‘You really should have woken me.’

He sat opposite her and passed her salt and pepper. ‘Pregnant women need their sleep.’

She looked at him a long time, and he felt himself not necessarily loved, but rather weighed up, as if she knew his secrets and did not care for them.

‘Are you sorry?’ he asked her.

‘Of course not,’ she said, but drank from her orange juice immediately, and he saw it was all less certain between them than he had hoped or believed and he had a premonition of a loss he felt he could not bear.

‘Should I have woken you early?’

‘Oh,’ she smiled. ‘Probably not. These are lovely eggs.’

He watched her eat. ‘Today I’ll get a blood test,’ he said, a little experimentally. ‘I don’t know how long they take but I’ll send the results to you by courier the moment they are in. I don’t want you to worry about last night.’

‘Oh,’ she said, but her tone was positive. ‘O.K., I’ll do the same for you.’

‘You don’t need to. They’ve been running HIV tests on you since you were pregnant.’

‘Can they do that?’

‘No, but they do.’

He had no idea if what he said was true or not. He was not worried about HIV. He was concerned only with somehow establishing the presence of those qualities – scrupulousness, integrity – the lack of which he was sure went so much against him.

She leaned across and rubbed some dried shaving cream from behind his ear. ‘And what else will you do?’

He took her hand and held it in both of his. ‘What else are you worried by? Let me fix it for you. It’s what I like most about business. Everyone is always brought down by all the obstacles and difficulties, but there’s almost nothing you can’t fix.’

‘Not the money?’

‘Not the money what?’

‘Not the money you like about business. I would have thought that was very attractive?’

‘Well money is important of course, in so far as it can provide.’ He used this word carefully, suggesting, he hoped, ever so tangentially, accidentally almost, his credentials as provider. ‘But after a certain stage, it’s not why people work. Do you doubt that?’

‘Uh-uh,’ Maria said, her mouth full of bacon. ‘But there’s nothing you can fix for me. I tried to fix mine myself.’

‘Maybe I could succeed where you’ve failed.’

‘This is very specialized.’

‘Just the same …’

‘Jack, this is my work.’

‘I’m a generalist,’ he smiled. ‘Tell me your problem.’

He could see her deciding whether to be offended by him or not. She hesitated, frowned.

‘Will you tell me the truth if I ask you a direct question?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Did your family call you up to somehow “nobble” me?’

‘My mother called me, yes. But I came to calm her down, not to nobble you.’

‘Would you believe me if I told you I had already actually tried to stop their audit myself, and that my problem is I couldn’t – can’t?’

‘Sure … yes, of course, if you said so.’

‘Jack, this is a big secret I’m telling you …’

‘I’m very good with secrets.’

‘I’m telling you something I could be sent to jail for. I tried to stop it.’

‘Why would you do that for Catchprice Motors? I wouldn’t.’

‘It’s nothing to do with your family. It’s between me and the Tax Office.’

‘You don’t seem a very Tax Office sort of person.’

‘Well I am,’ Maria reddened. ‘I’m a very Tax Office sort of person. I hate all this criminal wealth. This state is full of it. It makes me sick. I see all these skunks with their car phones and champagne and I see all this homelessness and poverty. Do you know that one child in three in Australia grows up under the poverty line? You know how much tax is evaded every year? You don’t need socialism to fix that, you just need a good Taxation Office and a Treasury with guts. And for a while we had both. For five years. I didn’t join to piddle around rotten inefficient businesses like your family’s. I never did anything so insignificant in my life. I won’t do that sort of work. It fixes nothing. I’m crazy enough to think the world can change, but not like that.’

Without taking her eyes off him she put three spoons of sugar in her tea and stirred it.

‘Maria,’ Jack said, ‘I’m on your side.’

‘I’m sorry …’

‘I know I have a car phone …’

‘I’m sorry … I was offensive …’

‘No, no, I know you don’t know me very well, but I would do anything to help you.’

‘Jack, you’re very sweet. You were sweet last night.’ She touched his face again, and traced the shape of his lips with her forefinger.

‘You need someone to come and pick up your laundry in hospital … do you have someone who will do that for you?’

‘Jack,’ she started laughing, ‘please …’

‘No, really. Who’s going to do that for you?’

‘Jack, you are sweet. You were very sweet last night and today, I’m sorry, I was irritable with you when you didn’t wake me. You wanted me to rest and I read it as a control thing. I was wrong. I’m sorry.’

‘Will you have dinner with me again?’ he asked her.

He could see in her eyes that it was by no means certain. She took his hand and stroked it as if to diminish the pain she was about to cause him.

‘It could be early,’ he said, ‘I love to eat early.’

‘Jack, I really do need to sleep. I’m thirty-two weeks pregnant.’

‘Sure. How about tomorrow night then?’

She frowned. ‘You really want to see me so soon?’

‘I think the world can change too,’ he said, and Maria Takis knew he was in love with her and if she was going to be honest with herself she must admit it: she was relieved to have him present in her life.