The Tax Inspector by Peter Carey Page A

it. Mort was walking across the yard this way, but he was probably on his way to hammer and yell at Benny’s cellar door. Mort’s house shared a hot water service with their apartment, but Mort had not visited them for nine years.
    ‘He’s coming here,’ she said. ‘This is it. It’s starting.’
    She had such amazing skin – very white and soft.
    ‘Don’t!’ She broke free from his hands, suddenly irritated.
    ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘It’ll be about the nursing home.’
    ‘They’re going to try and make me stay.’
    ‘Cathy, Cathy … they don’t even believe you’re leaving them.’
    ‘She’s sending him to say something to me.’
    ‘Honey, calm down. Think. What could they say to you at this stage?’
    Cathy’s eyes began to water. ‘She’s so unfair.’
    Howie stroked her neck. ‘You’re forty-six years old,’ he said. ‘You’re entitled to your own life.’
    ‘She makes him say it for her. He’s going to say how much she needs me.’ She put her hand on his sleeve. ‘He’s coming up the stairs.’
    ‘Let me lock the door,’ Howie said.
    Mort had not visited their apartment since he argued with Howie about the ping-pong table eleven years ago.
    ‘This is the living-room,’ he said. ‘There’s no room for a ping-pong table.’
    ‘With all respect,’ Howie had answered, ‘that’s not your business.’
    ‘Respect is something you wouldn’t know about,’ Mort said. ‘It’s the Family Home. You’re turning it into a joke.’
    Even allowing for the fact his father had just died, this was a crazy thing to say. Howie could not think of how to answer him.
    ‘Respect!’ Mort said.
    Then he slammed his fist into the brick wall behind Howie’s head. It came so close it grazed his ear.
    ‘I’ll lock the door,’ Howie said, not moving.
    Cathy poured some Benedictine into a tumbler. Then the door opened and she looked up and there was Mort and his lost wife, side by side. But it couldn’t be Sophie. Sophie had left thirteen years ago.

13
    It wasn’t Sophie. It was Benny. He had made himself into the spitting image of the woman who had shot him. Whether he had meant to do it, or if it was an accident of bright white hair, the effect was most disturbing, to Cathy anyway.
    All through the day the men from the workshop had come and gone with their grubby job cards, cracking their jokes about her nephew’s ‘look’, but not one of them had said – how could they have known, they were all too young – how like his mother it made him seem. His hair was the same colour, the exact same colour, and it gave his features a luminous, fresh-steamed look. Sophie had grown her hair long in the end but at the beginning she had it short like this and now you could see he had the cheekbones. He was like his mother, but he had a damaged, dangerous look his mother never had. No matter what shit she put up with from the Catchprices she kept her surface as fresh and clean as a pair of freshly whitened tennis shoes right up to the day she shot her son.
    Cathy said: ‘Benny, you look nice.’
    The person he made her think of was Elvis – not that he looked like Elvis, but he felt how Elvis must have felt when he walked into Sam Phillips’s recording studio in Memphis – a shy boy, who maybe never played but in his bedroom, with the mirror. Sam Phillips must have seen his sexy lips, but the thing that struck him was how inferior Elvis felt, how markedly inferior. He said this in an interview on more than one occasion.
    Benny had already phoned her once today to say he was going to ‘hurt’ her, and she knew he had a temper which you can only describe as violent, but she knew him with his little arms tight around her neck at three in the morning, and when she complimented him he blushed and lowered his eyes because he knew she meant it and would never lie to him.
    It was only when Mort heard his son’s name that he actually realized Benny had come up the stairs behind him.
    ‘Oh,