Read Online The Tax Inspector by Peter Carey - Free Book Online

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