The Tax Inspector by Peter Carey Read Free Book Online Page A

would have been somehow to undercut who he was. Maria had not come all this way to make her life fit the expectations of others, but just the same she could no more tell him she hated Nescafe than she could confess that she was already married and separated.
    Instead she said, ‘It is too hot today,’ and held the handles of his bicycle as if this might prevent him buying it.
    ‘It is always hot,’ he said. He had to wrench the bicycle away from her and his dark eyebrows pressed down on eyes that suddenly revealed a glittering temper.
    ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘It is hotter than it used to be.’
    That made him laugh. He mounted his bicycle and rattled down the chalky road towards the square still laughing out loud and when her parents’ friends and relations came to meet her he would tell them, ‘When Maria lived here the summers used to be cooler.’
    Everyone in Letkos found this very funny and Maria found them very irritating.
    ‘I didn’t remember the heat,’ Maria said, too many times. ‘Only the air. We left in the autumn and arrived in Sydney in the summer.’ She told them about how hot it had been walking the streets of Newtown looking for work with her mother – like hell, like a heat so hot and poisonous you could not breathe – but she could see their eyes glaze over as they stopped listening to her. It was not their way of thinking about Australia and they did not want to hear. Australians were all rich, all drank Nescafe. That was why Nikkos refused to apologize for the state of her parents’ house. He was meant to look after it but he had stolen the furniture and let the goats eat the pomegranate tree and he could not see that this would matter to Maria or her family. But she had grown up mourning for this beautiful little house which Nikkos had filled with goat shit. It was the place her mother meant when she said, ‘Let’s go home,’ whispering to her husband in bed in a shared house in Sydney where you could hear the people in the next room doing everything.
    On the ground floor of the house in Letkos her mother had cooked preserves, fried eggplant, keftethes – the room was always sweet with spices and oil. In the house which Nikkos had wrecked they kept almonds and walnuts and dry rustling bundles of beans. Maria had sat on the wooden doorstep in a great parallelogram of sunshine, eating pomegranate from the tree in the garden.
    The first house in Sydney was a painful contrast. They rented a room from a friend of an uncle in Agios Constantinos. His name was Dimitri Papandreou. He smelt of sweat and old rags and was stingy. He used newspaper instead of toilet paper. He turned off the hot water when he left the house each morning. He had a secret tap no one else could find, not even Helen, who was smaller than Maria, and who was sent climbing under the floor boards to search for it. Dimitri Papandreou’s wife worked at Glo-weave. The family therefore expected Maria’s mother to look after all of the Papandreous. Dimitri Papandreou would cook lentils or beans and keep them in an aluminium pot in the fridge for weeks. It was his way of criticizing Maria’s mother.
    ‘Let’s go home,’ Maria’s mother said whenever she imagined they were alone, but she never had a chance – fifteen men from the village had come to Australia and they were all working on the production line at the British Motor Corporation in Zetland. They were like men in a team.
    Helen would ask their father if they could go home, but Maria was less principled. She sat on his lap and he stroked her hair.
    ‘O Pateras son ine trellos,’ (‘Your father is crazy’) her mother would say as she and Maria and Helen looked for work in the merciless heat (so endlessly hot, inescapably hot) of the Newtown streets. She had no English and Maria would walk with her to interpret and to help push Helen’s stroller.
    ‘What does that sign say?’
    ‘Just a room to let.’
    ‘It looks like a factory.’
    ‘No,