‘Hey,’ the boy said and did something with the gun which made it click-clack. ‘My stupid teachers told me I was stupid. My stupid father thinks I’m stupid. But I’ll tell you two things you can rely on. Number one: I’m going to run this business. Number two: you’re going to be my F&I man.’ Maybe he saw what he had done. His voice rose, it changed its tone, although you could not say it was anything as strong as pleading. ‘You’ll be able to drive a car,’ Benny said, ‘eat at restaurants, order any fucking thing you want.’
Sarkis tried to spit but his mouth was dry and all that came out were a few white bits. ‘I’m going to kill you,’ he said. ‘I won’t need a gun.’
‘You’re going to kill two hundred thou a year?’ Benny stood, and smiled. ‘Jesus, Sam, if I’d known you were going to get this upset …’
‘You’d what?’ he said.
Benny frowned. ‘You don’t get it, do you? I’m going to transform your life.’ He looked very young and not very bright. There was perspiration on his upper lip and forehead.
Sarkis groaned.
Benny’s brow contracted further: ‘I could have chosen anyone …’
Sarkis did not bother to remind him it was Mrs Catchprice who had chosen him. The gun was so close. The thought he could grab it and twist it away was very tempting, but also stupid.
‘All you need to remember,’ Benny was saying, ‘you just learned – I’m the boss, and you never contradict me on the job.’
‘How can you be the boss?’ Sarkis said. ‘How old are you? Sixteen? I bet you don’t even have a driving licence.’
Benny held the gun out with his right hand while he moved a step towards the wall. Sarkis thought, he’s an actor: if he fires that now he’ll break his wrist. With his left hand (smiling all the time) Benny unscrewed the wide-necked jar where a fat brown king snake lay coiled on itself in a sea of tea-coloured liquid. He took a black plastic cap from an aerosol can and dipped it into the liquid which he then raised to his red, perfect lips, and drank.
‘That’s my licence,’ Benny said, ‘I live and breathe it. Comprendo?’
Sarkis comprendoed nothing. He watched Benny smirk and wipe his lips and walk towards the cellar door, backwards, across the planks, never once seeming to look down. When he was at the door he transferred the gun to both hands and held it hard against his shoulder.
‘Say you’re my F&I man,’ he said.
Sarkis looked at his eyes and saw his brows contract and knew: he’s going to murder me.
‘Say it,’ Benny’s chin trembled.
‘I’m your F&I man.’
‘We start fresh tomorrow. O.K. You understand me? Eight-thirty.’
‘I’ll be here,’ Sarkis said. ‘I promise.’
Benny unlocked the bolts on the rusty metal door and swung it open. Sarkis felt the cool, clear chill of the normal world. He limped up the steps towards the rain, but all the time he felt the dull heat of the gun across his shoulder blades and not until he was finally through the labyrinth of the Spare Parts Department, in the dark lane-way leading to the workshop, did he realize he was too badly hurt to run. He limped slowly home through the orange-lighted rain, ashamed.
Wednesday
46
Jack Catchprice woke with his prize beside him in the bed, her mouth open, her chin a little slack, her leg around the spare pillow he had fetched for her just before dawn. He put his hand out to touch her belly, and then withdrew it.
He knew then he was going to keep her, and the child too, of course, the child particularly – another man’s child did not create an obstacle – it had almost the opposite effect. She had arrived complete. She was as he would have dreamed her to be – with a child that was not, in any way, a reproduction of himself.
It was all he could do not to touch her, wake her, talk to her and he slid sideways out of the bed as if fleeing his own selfish happiness. He lifted the veil of mosquito netting and put his feet on the floor.
The walls were open to the garden and he could almost have touched the cabbage tree palms dripping dry after the night of rain. The new pattern of wet summers had depressed him, but now he found in the rotting smells of his jungle garden such deep calm, such intimations of life and death, of fecundity and purpose that he knew he could, had it been necessary, have extracted happiness from hailstones.
The sun was shining, at least for now. He could roll back the roof and wear his faded silk Javanese sarong and pad across the teak floor in bare feet and watch the tiny skinks slither across the floor in front of him and see the red-tailed cockatoos and listen to the high chatter of the lorikeets as they pursued their neurotic, fluttering, complaining lives in the higher branches of his neighbour’s eucalyptus.
He made coffee, he looked at the garden, he let the Tax Inspector sleep past seven, eight, nine o’clock. When it came to nine, he phoned his office.
The woman’s voice which answered his office phone was deep and rather dry.
‘Bea,’ he said, ‘we’re going to have to cancel Lend Lease this morning.’
A long silence.
‘Bea …’
‘I hear you,’ she said.
‘So could you please tell the others …’
‘What do you want me to tell them? That they worked two months for nothing?’
‘Sure,’ Jack smiled. ‘That’s perfect. Also, if you could call Michael McGorgan at Lend Lease.’
‘I suppose I tell him you’ve fallen in love?’
Jack’s lips pressed into the same almost prim little ‘v’ they had made last night, when he told her about Makeveitch’s painting. How could he tell Bea – he had been given the impossible thing.
‘All I hope,’ Bea said, ‘is this one doesn’t have a PhD.’
Jack finished his call with his face and eyes creased up from smiling. He walked barefoot through the garden to borrow bacon and eggs from the peevish widow of the famous broadcaster who lived next door.
When the bacon was almost done and the eggs were sitting, broken, each one in its own white china cup, he went to the Tax Inspector and kissed her on her splendid lips, and wrapped her shining body in a kimono and brought her, half-webbed in sleep, to wait for her breakfast in the garden. She smelled of almond oil and apricots.
‘You know what time it is?’ she said as he brought her the bacon and eggs.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I hope you like your eggs like this.’
‘You really should have woken me.’
He sat opposite her and passed her salt and pepper. ‘Pregnant women need their sleep.’
She looked at him a long time, and he felt himself not necessarily loved, but rather weighed up, as if she knew his secrets and did not care for them.
‘Are you sorry?’ he asked her.
‘Of course not,’ she said, but drank from her orange juice immediately, and he saw it was all less certain between them than he had hoped or believed and he had a premonition of a loss he felt he could not bear.
‘Should I have woken you early?’
‘Oh,’ she smiled. ‘Probably not. These are lovely eggs.’
He watched her eat. ‘Today I’ll get a blood test,’ he said, a little experimentally. ‘I don’t know how long they take but I’ll send the results to you by courier the moment they are in. I don’t want you to worry about last night.’
‘Oh,’ she said, but her tone was positive. ‘O.K., I’ll do the same for you.’
‘You don’t need to. They’ve been running HIV tests on you since you were pregnant.’
‘Can they do that?’
‘No, but they do.’