‘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, shit,’ he said.
Cathy looked at Mort and wondered now if he even saw the similarity.
Benny raised his eyebrows at his father and shrugged apologetically. He put out his hand as if to take his sleeve or his hand, but the sleeves on Mort’s overall were cut off and there was nothing to hold on to except a hand he would not take. Cathy would have taken his hand, but it was not offered her.
Benny had been in trouble with almost everything, lying, cheating, truancy, shop-lifting, selling bottled petrol for inhalation, trying to buy Camira parts from the little crooks who hung about in Franklin Mall; but now he just looked very young and frightened of being laughed at. He walked lightly on his feet, holding his back straight. You could hear his new shoes squeaking as he crossed the room to the yellow vinyl armchair which had once belonged to Cacka. When he sat and crossed his long legs, he revealed socks as long as a clergyman’s – no skin showed. Benny folded his clean hands in his lap and looked directly at his father, blushing.
Mort’s colour was also high and his lips had a loose embarrassed look. He shook his head and shut his eyes.
‘Ignore your father,’ Cathy said. ‘You look wonderful, better than your uncle Jack.’
‘Thanks Cath,’ Mort said. He leaned against the window-sill opposite her and stared critically at the stupid ping-pong table. It was not properly joined in the middle. It was marked with stains from their ‘Social Ambitions’ – ring marks from glasses and bottles, sticky circles of Benedictine stuck with dust.
‘You singing tonight?’ he asked. ‘You got a jig-jig?’
‘Very funny,’ she said. ‘What do you want?’
Mort shook his head as if in disappointment at this hostility. He looked down at his boots a moment as if he was considering a riposte, but then he looked up, spoke in what was, for him, in the circumstances, a calm voice: ‘Why does this Tax Inspector have her office in Mum’s apartment?’
‘You come up here to ask about that?’ Cathy crossed her arms below her breasts and shook her head.
‘Mort …’ Howie said.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Cathy said.
‘Tough,’ said Mort.
‘The auditor needs a desk,’ Howie said, ‘that’s all. She could have taken any vacant desk. She could have had your office.’
‘You wouldn’t want me near a Tax Inspector,’ Mort said. ‘You couldn’t trust me not to give the game away.’
Cathy looked into his eyes and he held hers. He was her brother in a way that Jack had never been. She and Mort were the ones who had sung opera together, killed chooks, sold cars, but now she had no idea what he thought about anything.
‘There is no game,’ Cathy said.
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘No,’ Cathy said. ‘You wouldn’t, but you’d better find out. If I was you I’d be finding out what makes this business tick pretty damn fast.’
‘You going to try and run away again, Cathy?’ Mort grinned. ‘Did you get another letter from The Gold Chain Troubadour?’
There was silence which was broken by the sound of Benedictine being poured into Cathy’s tumbler. Benny crossed his legs and laid his left palm softly on the back of the right hand.
‘Look,’ Mort said. ‘What I came up here to say was that I’ve had a talk to Mum.’
Cathy poured herself some extra Benedictine, but then she didn’t drink it.
‘I talked with Mum and we both decided that if you want to sell the back paddock to cover us with any back taxes, we’ll vote in favour. That’s why I’m here, to tell you that.’
‘Do you remember,’ Howie said, smiling sideways at Cathy, ‘that we wrote your mother in as head salesman?’
‘Sure.’
‘And we claimed tax deductions for what we said we paid her?’
‘Sure, I remember that. We had Jack’s smart-arse accountant. You all got excited about how you were going to keep the trade-ins off the books. But do you remember what I said then?’
‘Tell me.’
‘I said that I didn’t want to do business like Jack. I said we’ve gone off the rails. We shouldn’t be playing tricks with tax. We should be running the business by its original principles …’
‘Mort,’ Howie said. ‘I’m trying to explain that if this audit goes through we are going to need twenty back paddocks to pay the bill.’