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

Mama.’
    ‘It’s a factory,’ she said half-heartedly. ‘No, Helen, no, no wee-wee yet. He’s crazy. His life was better. He had a house – better oil, better fruit. Look what we had to carry out here – oil, ouzo – in our bags – he asks me to carry oil to him. Now he sends me out here to be humiliated.’
    ‘Please, Mama, don’t.’
    ‘Don’t don’t.’ Her mother’s eyes were more and more shrunken, like throubes , shrunken in on themselves around the small hard pip. ‘Don’t you say “don’t” to me. You think he is happy? Listen to them all when they sit around. What are they talking about?’
    They came to the house. They sat in a circle in the kitchen. They were all from Agios Constantinos. They said, remember the year this happened. Remember the time that happened. They never talked about Australia.
    ‘What is better here?’ her mother asked. ‘Help her. Help her. She has to wee-wee.’ She was ashamed to have Helen pee in the street and turned her back even as she said, ‘Help her.’
    ‘The future,’ Maria said, holding her little sister suspended over a gutter between two parked cars.
    ‘That’s what he says, but you never wanted to go. You were only four and you didn’t want to go.’
    ‘I know, Mama,’ Maria said bustling her sister back into the stroller.
    ‘You lost the use of your legs.’
    ‘I know, I know.’
    ‘He went to Athens for his immigration tests and when he came back and we told you we were going to Australia, you lost the use of your legs. The doctor had to come all the way to Agios Constantinos in an ambulance.’
    Her father always said there was no ambulance.
    ‘An ambulance,’ her mother said. ‘He couldn’t find anything the matter.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘You can’t remember. Do you remember your father held out the loukoumia to you and you ran to get them. It was a trick to make you walk but if he hadn’t offered you sweets you wouldn’t have walked – you didn’t want to go. We had a house. For what did we come? So I can walk the streets and be a beggar for work? Did you ever see anyone in Agios Constantinos do their wee-wee in the street?’
    The newspapers, of course, had their columns of employment ads, but the Letkos women could not read the letters of the alien alphabet. The newspapers were closed to them. They walked. They worked an area – Enmore, Alexandria, Surry Hills – going from factory to factory, following up the rumours their relations brought to the house. It was all piece-work, and her mother hated piece-work. Childhood friends competed against each other to see who would get the bonus, who would get fired.
    Once a week they called on Switch-Electrics Pty Ltd in Camperdown. The women would converge on the footpath, swelling out around the Mercedes-Benzes which were never booked for parking on the footpath, pushing towards the door marked OFFICE . They would be there from seven in the morning. At eight o’clock the son would emerge. He had three folds of fat on his neck above his shirt collar. He had thick arms covered in pale hair. He had three pens in his shirt pocket.
    He would point his thick finger into the crowd and say, ‘You, you.’
    He was like God. He did not have to explain his choices.
    ‘You and you.’
    One time he might choose you and another time he might not.
    ‘No more. Vamoose.’
    The woman would beg in Greek, in Italian, in Spanish, in Catalan. They would do anything – kneel, weep – it was acting, but sincere at the same time.
    The man with the pens in his shirt pocket would flap his arms at them as though they were hens.
    ‘Piss off. Go home.’
    Sometimes the man’s mother would come out. She was nearly sixty but she dressed like a film star with tight belts and high heels. She had bright yellow blonde hair and pink arms and red lips and dark glasses. She would come out of a side door carrying a mop bucket filled with water. She would swing it back and then hurl it towards the women, who were