The Tax Inspector Read Online Free PDF

it – no problems with the numbers.
    He had also spent $495 on the ‘Self-Actualization’ cassettes, $300 on the suit, $150 on sundries and, as for where the money came from, that was no one’s business and totally untraceable. So when his father began by saying, no way was he going to sell cars, all he did was ask himself ‘How do I attain the thing that I desire?’
    Then he followed the instructions of the ‘Self-Actualization’ cassettes, descending the imaginary coloured stairways to the mental image on the imaginary Sony Trinitron which showed the object of his desire. His father was finally irrelevant.
    The rain which had been falling all summer began to fall again. Summer used not to be like this. This was all the summer he had inherited. The raindrops were soft and fat. They made three large polka dots on the padded shoulders of his 80 per cent silk suit. He would not run. It was not in his new character to run. He walked out across the crunching gravel. His legs felt a little odd to him – as if he had just risen from his sick-bed. Rain ricocheted off the metallic roofs and bonnets of the Holdens and flecked his shining cheekbones with glittering beads of water. He passed beside the Audi 90. It was jet black. Very sexy. He could see himself reflected in it, held in it. When he came in the door of the Front Office he was blushing crimson.
    This was where Cathy thought he was going to sell petrol. The Front Office was at the front of the left-hand arm of the ‘U’ which made up Catchprice Motors. There were a couple of old Esso pumps out front and sometimes the apprentice would bring a car around to get a litre or two for a road test, but petrol was cheaper – and cleaner – at a regular service station. The underground petrol tanks at Catchprice Motors had been there nearly forty years. They were rusting on the inside, and the outside was under pressure from the water table. The petrol tanks Grandpa Catchprice had installed were now rising like whales and the concrete on the forecourt cracked a little more each summer. You would have to be mentally deficient to stand on the forecourt at Catchprice Motors.
    When Benny took up his station in the Front Office, the two old Esso petrol pumps were in the very centre of the big glass window in front of him. Behind his back was a white door with a grubby smudged area around its rattly metal handle. Across the road, through the giant trunks of camphor laurels which he was going to cut down the minute Cathy was on the road, he could see the abandoned boot-maker’s and bakery.
    Benny stood in the centre of the office with his legs apart and his hands folded behind his back. His skin smelt of soap. Rain sat on his cheekbones. In an ideal world, his brother would be beside him, might be beside him yet.
    He was going to sell his first car.
    When the rain stopped again, Benny planned to move out into the yard. He wanted them to see him. He wanted to see himself in the mirror of their faces.
    It was still raining when the first ‘prospect’ appeared. A woman in a white Mitsubishi Colt pulled up under the trees on the other side of the petrol pumps. The rain was heavy now, far too heavy to walk out into, and Benny did not see the red ‘Z’ plates which would have told him the Colt was a government car.
    He was the first member of the Catchprice family to see the Tax Inspector. He did not know there was anything to be frightened of. He adjusted his shirt cuffs. All he thought was: watch me.

5
    The Tax Inspector parked the Colt on a small island of weeds which was more closely associated with the Building Supplies Store than with Catchprice Motors. This was an old Taxation Office courtesy which Maria Takis, alone of all the auditors in her section, continued to observe – you did not humiliate your clients by parking a Taxation Officer car right on their doorstep, not even in the rain.
    A wall beside a pot-holed laneway bore flaking signwriting with arrows pointing