‘Don’t,’ Maria said. ‘It doesn’t help.’
‘I’m going to lose my band and my damn name,’ said Cathy, her lower lip quivering.
Maria stood up. She hoped the woman would not cry. ‘Catchprice Motors is in the computer with an “active” designation,’ she said gently. ‘Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t take it out.’
‘I believe you,’ Cathy stood up. ‘Come on, Benny. Enough’s enough.’
Now they were really going, Maria let herself look at the boy again. He caught her eye and did up his suit jacket and smiled. He did have an extraordinary face. If you saw it in a magazine you would pause to admire it – its mixture of innocence and decadence was very sexy – in a magazine.
‘I’ll see you around,’ he said.
‘You’ll see her in the morning,’ said his aunt. ‘Which is now.’
‘Yes, which is now,’ Maria stood.
She shepherded the singer along the corridor to the front door. In a moment they would be gone. The boy was behind her. Maria was so convinced that he was about to put a guiding hand on the small of her back that she put her own hand there to push it off.
At the front door, Cathy McPherson turned, and stopped. She was solid, immovable. She looked at Maria with her little blue eyes which somehow connected to the heart that had written the words of that song. Not ‘small’ eyes or ‘mean’ eyes, but certainly demanding and needful of something she could not have expressed. Her breath smelt of alcohol. She said: ‘When I was thirty-two I was ready to go out on the road. I mean, I wasn’t a baby any more. Then my father died, and my mother sort of made it impossible for me to leave.’
Maria could feel the boy behind. She could feel him like a shadow that lay across her back. She was too tired to listen to this confession but the eyes demanded that she must. They monitored her response.
‘I can’t tell you how my mother did it, but she made me stay. I was the one who was going to save the business. And I did save it and then my mother decided I was getting too big for my boots and she turned on me, and I would have gone then, except I could not walk away and see it crash. I’m a real fool, Ms Takis, a prize number one specimen fool. If you fine us, I’ll be stuck there. I won’t be able to leave them.’
It would have seemed false to be her comforter and her tormentor as well. So even when she began to cry all Maria did was offer her a Kleenex and pat her alien shoulder. She wanted her to leave the house. She took the guitar from her and together the three of them walked up Datchett Street.
At Darling Street she shook hands first with Cathy McPherson and then she turned to the boy. He said: ‘You can’t just abandon us, you know.’
Cathy said: ‘Come on, Benny.’
‘No, she understands me. She’s got a heart. She understands what I’m saying.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Cathy McPherson said. She grabbed his arm, and pulled him up the street. Maria could hear them hissing at each other as she walked back to her front door.
Tuesday
30
At Catchprice Motors they called a potential customer a ‘Prospect’, and as the big black cumulus clouds rolled in from the west and the first thunder of the day made itself heard above the pot-hole thump of the Fast-Mix Concrete trucks heading north towards the F4, Benny hooked a live one. It was a Tuesday, the second day of Benny’s new life.
He found the Prospect there at eight-thirty, crunching around in the gravel beside the Audi Quattro. Benny made no sudden movements, but when the Prospect found the Quattro’s door was locked, Benny was able to come forward and unlock it for him.
‘Thank you,’ the Prospect said.
‘No worries,’ Benny said, holding the black-trimmed door open and releasing a heady perfume of paint and leather. The driver’s seat made a small expensive squeak as it took the Prospect’s weight. The white paper carpet-protector rumpled beneath grey slip-ons whose little gold chains made Benny take them for Guccis. The guy folded his hands in his lap and asked to be given ‘the selling points’. Benny had not slept all night – he had been working on one more angle in his campaign to seduce the Tax Inspector – but now all of his gritty-eyed tiredness went away and the fibreglass splinters in his arms stopped itching and he squatted on the gravel beside the open door and talked about the Quattro for five minutes without lying once. He watched the Prospect as he spoke. He waited for signs of boredom, some indication that he should shift the venue, alter the approach, but the guy was treating this like information he just had to have. After twenty minutes, Benny’s knees were hurting and he had run out of stuff to say.
Then the Prospect got out of the Quattro. Then he and Benny stood side by side and looked at it together. The Prospect was five foot six, maybe five foot seven – shorter than Benny, but broader in the shoulders. He played sport, you could see it in the way he balanced on the balls of his feet. He had a broad nose, almost like a boxer’s, but you could not call him ugly. He was good-looking, in fact. He had a dark velvet suit and a small tuft of black hair – you could not call it a beard – sitting underneath his lower lip. He was twenty-two, maybe twenty-five years old, and he had Guccis on his feet and he was looking up at Benny – what a wood duck!
‘So,’ he said. ‘When do we do the test drive?’
‘Hey,’ said Benny, ‘don’t panic.’ The truth was: he was unlicensed. They would kill him if they saw him demo this unit. He was going to do it none the less, but gentlee gentlee catchee monkey – he had to wait for Mort who was sitting in a Commodore by the front office. He was hunched over in the seat reading out the engine functions on the computerized diagnostic device – the Compu-tech.
‘The thing you’ve got to appreciate about an Audi,’ Benny said, ‘is nothing is rushed. They rush to make all this G.M. shit, but not an Audi.’
‘I have something for you,’ the Prospect said.
Benny did not notice what he had. He was watching Mort unplug the Tech II and put it in his back pocket.
The Prospect was occupied with a separate matter – withdrawing a sleek silver envelope from his inside jacket pocket.
‘Here,’ he said.
He held it out to Benny.
Benny took the envelope. What do you want?
The Prospect smiled. Benny was spooked by his black eyes.
‘You have good taste in ties,’ the Prospect said. ‘I’m sure you will like this one.’
The envelope held a black and silver and green tie.
Benny felt a tingling at the back of his neck.
‘Silk,’ said Sarkis.
Benny looked up at the eyes and then down at the tie.
‘I’ll buy it,’ he said. He had a boner. He did not want a boner. He did not want a gift or come in his mouth, but the man’s eyes were like a sore tooth he could not keep from touching.
‘No, it’s a sample,’ said Sarkis. ‘I made it.’
Benny smiled at the Prospect. He wet his lips and smiled.
‘You make ties?’ he asked.
‘There are no good ties in Australia,’ said Sarkis, who was as impressed with Benny’s haircut as Benny had been with Sarkis’s shoes. You needed to be making big money to maintain a cut like that. ‘There’s a big market waiting for these ties. What I need is the capital to do it in a bigger way. Here … have it … It’s a gift.’