Frieda knew she was at a disadvantage – age – the brain losing its way, forgetting names, losing a thought sometimes in the middle of its journey. She had looked at the ledgers herself and the truth was, she could no longer follow them. She hid her weakness from her daughter, cloaking herself in sarcasm.
‘I can imagine you might find the prospect of an audit frightening.’
‘But you’re the public officer,’ Cathy said. ‘You’re the one who goes to jail.’
Jail! Good God. She sucked on her Salem so hard that she had nearly an inch of glowing tobacco on the end of the white paper. ‘I’ve never cheated anyone.’
‘Would you happen to recall the renovation we claimed on the showroom?’ Cathy said.
‘I don’t know what lies you’ve been telling.’
‘Oh come on!’
Frieda could feel her chin begin to tremble. ‘All they’ll find when they investigate is who is fiddling whom.’
‘It wasn’t the showroom. It was your new bathroom.’
‘I asked Mrs Takis to keep an eye out for me. I’ll be very interested to hear what she finds out.’
‘Please,’ Vish said.
‘You might think this Takis is cute,’ Cathy said.
Frieda did not think Maria Takis was cute at all. She imagined she would turn out to be an officious bitch. That was why she took so much trouble to be nice to her.
Cathy said: ‘She’s a killer.’
‘Good,’ said Frieda. ‘That’s just what I want.’ She jabbed out her cigarette into the plastic garbage can – it made a smell like an electrical fire. ‘I want a killer.’
‘You look at her eyes and nose – that’ll tell you. She’s one of those people who can’t forgive anyone. Mummy,’ Cathy said, ‘she’s going to destroy everything you spent your life making.’
The ‘Mummy’ took Frieda by surprise. Cathy was smart. She saw that. She saw how it affected her. She pushed her advantage. ‘You might not be able to believe this, but I’m trying to help you.’
‘It’s true,’ Vish said, nodding his head up and down. He was acting as though she was a horse he had to calm.
Cathy was the same. She held out her hand towards Frieda. She might have had a damn sugar lump in it, but Frieda whacked the hand away.
‘Why did you do that?’
The answer was – because you think I’m simple. She did not say it. She was not entering into any arguments. You could lose an argument but it did not affect the truth. She folded her arms across her chest.
‘There’s something you think I did,’ Cathy said. ‘That’s it isn’t it?’
Frieda gave Cathy an icy smile.
‘Why do we keep hurting each other?’ Vish said. It was the scratchy broken voice that made his grandmother turn towards him. His mouth was loose, glistening wet and mortified. Tears were oozing from his squeezed-shut eyes, washing down his broad cheeks. ‘All we ever do,’ he bawled, ‘is hurt each other.’
Cathy put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Johnny,’ she said, ‘you’re better staying in your ashram. You’re happy there, you should just stay there.’
‘He came to see me,’ Frieda said. ‘If you don’t like it here, Cathy, why don’t you go?’
‘I want to go,’ Cathy said. ‘I want to go away and have my own life, but I have to help you first. I have to get it straight between us.’
‘You’ve helped enough already,’ Frieda said. ‘Vish will help me back inside.’
As Cathy ran down the fire escape, Vish walked his grandmother back into the decaying darkness of the living-room. He sat her at the table and brought her ashtray and a glass of Diet Coke with Bundaberg rum in it. He blew his nose on a tight wet ball of Kleenex.
‘You don’t want to let Cathy upset you,’ his grandmother said.
‘Everybody is miserable here, Gran. There’s no one who’s happy.’
She brought the full focus of her attention to him and he had the feeling that she was, finally, ‘seeing’ him. ‘You think we should all be Hare Krishnas?’ she asked.
Vish hesitated. He looked at his grandmother’s face and did not know what things he was permitted to say to it.
‘You want me to say what I really think?’
She made an impatient gesture with her hand.
‘Let the business go to hell,’ he said.
He waited but he could read no more of her reaction than had he been staring out of a window at the night.
‘It’s making Benny very sick,’ he said. ‘If you let the business go … I know this will sound extreme … I really do think you’d save his life.’
‘I never wanted this business,’ she said. ‘Did you know that? I wanted little babies, and a farm. I wanted to grow things.’ She had a slight sing-song cadence in her voice. It was like the voice she used when praying out loud in church and he could not tell if what she was saying was true or merely sentimental. ‘It was your grandfather who wanted the business. I never liked the smell of a motor business. He worshipped Nellie Melba and Henry Ford. They were the two for him, Nellie & Henry. I never liked the music, I admit it, and I never gave a damn about Henry Ford, but he was my husband, for better or for worse. It was Henry Ford this, and Henry Ford that, and now I look out of the windows and I see these cars, you know what I see?’
‘It’s a prison,’ Vish said, then blushed.
‘I was perfectly right not to like the smell. My nose had more sense than a hundred Henry Fords. They’re pumping out poison,’ she said. ‘Our noses told us that, like they tell you if a fish is bad or fresh. Who ever liked the smell of exhaust smoke?’
‘Benny.’
‘Do you know we put concrete over perfectly good soil when we made this car yard? There’s concrete underneath all the gravel in the car yard. Your grandfather liked concrete. He liked to hose it down. But there’s good soil under there, and that’s what upsets me. It’s like a smothered baby.’
‘Then let them have it,’ Vish said, ‘Let them take it …’
‘I’d rather blow it up,’ she said. ‘With her and Howie in it.’
‘No, no …’
‘I mean it.’
‘I meant the tax. If the Tax Department wants to fine us …’
‘I didn’t work all my life to let the Tax Department take everything I’d built up.’
The telephone began ringing in the kitchen.
‘You’ve got to,’ Vish said.
‘I don’t “got to” anything.’ His Granny did not seem to hear the telephone. She looked at him in a way she had never looked at him before, more in the way she looked at Cathy, but never at Vish. It produced an equivalent change in him, a toughening of his stance, a stubbornness in the muscles of his thick neck that made his grandmother (so used to thinking of his gentleness, of seeing him chant, light his incense, say his Krishnas, bless his prasadum) see his physical bulk, his great muscled forearm, his squashed nose and the big fists he was now clenching stubbornly upon her dining-table.
Someone began knocking on the door.
35
The first thing Maria noticed was that the Catchprice Motors books were not on Mrs Catchprice’s table where she had left them. There was an ashtray and a glass of some black liquid and when she sat down at the central dining chair on the long side and opened her briefcase she found the surface of the table unpleasantly sticky.
The Hare Krishna was called Fish. He plugged the telephone in beside the bride dolls’ cabinet and Maria began to create the correct emotional distance between herself and her client who now sat down on a yellow vinyl chair some three metres away and arranged her ashtray and cigarettes on its stuffed arm.
Maria looked across the room, frowning. If pregnancy had not prevented her, she would have chosen this as the day to wear her black suit.