The Tax Inspector was shaking her head and frowning.
‘Mr Catchprice, please … don’t do this.’
Mort looked at Benny and saw that he was frowning too. He thought: maybe he can read my lips. He said: ‘No one set out to be crooked. Not even Cathy.’
‘Mr Catchprice, please.’ She put out her hand as if to touch him and then something about him, some stiffness, stopped her. ‘Please just relax.’
He laughed. It was a stupid laugh, a snort. He could not help it.
She looked at him oddly.
‘He wants me to show you our life,’ he said.
The Tax Inspector frowned at him. She had such a pretty face. Benny was right – it was a kind face, but she would kill him with a rock if she could see his soul. Every time you turn on the television, someone is saying: child sexual abuse. But they don’t see how Benny comes to me, crawling into my bed and rubbing my dick, threatening me with jail. Is this abuse?
‘Maybe I should show you the true Catchprice life?’ he said. He felt half dizzy.
I am the one trying to stop this stuff and he is crawling into bed and rubbing my dick and he will have a kid and do it to his kid, and he will be the monster and they’ll want to kill him. Today he is the victim, tomorrow he is the monster. They do not let you be the two at once. They do not see: it is common because it is natural. No, I am not saying it is natural, but if it is so common how come it is not natural?
The rain was pouring down now. It was spilling across the front office guttering and running down the windows like a fish shop window.
Maria Takis looked at Mort Catchprice. He was staring her directly in the eyes and his own eyes were too alive, too excited for the context. His lips trembled a little. It occurred to her he was having a mental breakdown.
34
Cathy, at ten years old, you should have seen her – a prodigy. She’d never heard of Sleepy La Beef or Boogie or Rock-a-Billy. She listened to a Frankie Laine record once and laughed at it like everybody else. She knew Don Giovanni, Isolde, Madame Butterfly. Her teacher was Sister Stoughton at the Catholic School. There was no yodelling there. She sang ‘Kyrie Eleison’ at St John’s at Christmas before an audience which included the Governor General. There was no ‘Hound Dogs’ or ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. The nearest she came to that sort of thing was the jeans with rolled-up cuffs she wore to square dancing classes at the Mechanics’ Institute. She did not like square dancing either, said it was like going fencing with a wireless turned up loud. She was nine years old when she said that.
But she was not spoiled, or precious. Frieda thought how lucky she was, to have this girl, not a silly girl, or a flighty girl, but a girl like her Mummy, a practical girl – pretty as all got out, with tangled curls like a blonde Shirley Temple. She did not have her mother’s build. No one would ever tell her she had sparrow legs. They were sturdy, smooth-skinned. Frieda could not help touching them, feeling the solidity of them. She was her legs – sturdy and reliable.
At ten years old she was up before the alarm clock to make the wet mash for the chooks – wheat, pollard, bran mash and warm water, all mixed up in the same tub they took their baths in. Cathy always knew she was important in the family. She counted the eggs and helped clean them for market. Frieda encouraged her to see what she was achieving.
Mort at twelve was dreamy and difficult, had moods, would want to help one day and then not the next, wet his bed, got head lice ten times for Cathy’s two. He was weepy and clingy one day and gruff and angry and would not even let you touch him the next. He was the one you could love best when he was asleep. You could not guess that he would be the one to care for her when she was old, that he would cook her stew to eat, make sure she had her rum and Coke, sit with her into the night playing cribbage.
Cathy and her Frieda had matching yellow gum boots and they would stomp around the chook yard together, before dawn. They used old kitchen forks to break the ice on the cement troughs so the hens could drink.
It was Cathy who discovered that the light they left on to keep away the foxes also made the hens lay more. She counted the eggs. She was a smart girl, not a difficult girl – you did not need to fear she was plotting some scheme against her family.
And when they moved to the car business in town it was no different. At fourteen she knew how to record the day’s petrol sales, enter the mechanics’ cards on to the job cards, even reconcile the till.
Then Frieda gave Howie a job in Spare Parts, and it was as though she had brought a virus into their healthy lives. Cathy had never even heard of Rock-a-Billy. She did not know what it was. She only knew the very best sort of music, and suddenly there he was playing her this trash, and she was wearing tight skirts which did not suit her build and writing songs about things she could not possibly understand. She paid ten dollars a time to register them in the United States. Australia was not good enough. Everything Yankee was the bee’s knees. She began to argue with everyone. She broke her father’s heart and then she decided she was not happy. She decided it to win the contest. Something came into her eyes, some anger so deep you could not even hope to touch it.
Howie wore pink shirts and charcoal grey suits. He was always so meek-seeming, yes Ma-am, no Ma-am. He could fool you at first. He fooled Frieda. She defended him against Mort and Cacka – his bodgie hair cut, his ‘brothel creeper’ shoes. But they were right and she was wrong – Howie was really a nothing, a little throw-away with no loyalty to anyone.
But he got his way – he married Cathy and a month later he took her to inspect the old Ford Dealership and enquire about renting the premises. Frieda heard that for a fact, from Herbert Beckett down at Beckett’s Real Estate – Cathy Catchprice was ready to go into competition against her own flesh and blood. Frieda never trusted the pair of them after that, never, ever.
When Cathy came up the stairs on Tuesday morning berating her for hiring a new salesman and accusing her of stealing the company books, Frieda Catchprice saw her daughter as you see into a lighted window from a speeding train, saw the pretty little girl helping her paint wood oil on the roosts, screwing her eyes up against the fumes.
Next thing she was a demon, some piece of wickedness with small blue eyes and teeth bared right up to the gum line.
‘The Tax Office doesn’t need the ledgers to lock you up in jail,’ she said.
Frieda hugged her arms across her flat chest. She was wearing brown leather slippers and an aqua quilted dressing-gown. She had a tough look on her face – her little jaw set, her lower lip protruding, but she was scared of what Cathy would do to her, and her hand, when she brought the Salem to her lips, was trembling.
‘I hired the salesman,’ she said. ‘That’s my right, but if you think I pinched the ledgers – you’ve got a fertile imagination.’
But the ledgers were gone and she would not invite Cathy into her living-room to give her the pleasure of seeing this was so. So they stayed all crushed in that little annexe – Frieda, Cathy, Vish – like Leghorns in a wire cage for the train.
‘You’ve got no right to hire an ant,’ Cathy said, tossing her head down towards where Sam the Armenian was making friends with Benny. ‘When Takis sees the books are gone she’s going to go through this business like a dose of salts.’
‘I’m not the one who should be worried,’ Frieda said.
‘Mum, what are you imagining?’