The Tax Inspector Read Online Free

when she grilled them in her narrow galley up above the car yard the fat spurted and flared and ignited in long liquid spills which left a sooty spoor on the glossy walls of her kitchen and a fatty smell which impregnated the bride dolls in the display case and the flock velvet upholstery on the chairs in the room where Vish sat opposite his expressionless brother. He knew whatever had gone wrong with Benny was his fault. This was something which was always understood between them – that Vish had abandoned his little brother too easily.
    It was eleven o’clock on Sunday night and the griller was cold and the chop fat lay thick and white as candle wax in the bottom of the grill pan in the kitchen sink. Granny Catchprice was on her knees, her head deep in the kitchen cupboard, trying to find the implements for making cocktails. She was busying herself, just as she had busied herself through Cacka’s emphysema. Then she had run ahead of her feelings with brooms and dusters. Now she was going to make her grandson’s aerated brandy crusters but first she had to find the Semak Vitamiser in among the pressure cooker and the automatic egg poacher and all the aluminium saucepans she had cast aside when Benny told her that aluminium drove you crazy in old age.
    People were used to thinking of Granny Catchprice as a tall woman although she was no more than five foot six and now, kneeling on the kitchen floor in a blue Crimplene pant suit which emphasized the slimness of her shoulders and the losses of mastectomy, she looked small and frail, too frail to be kneeling on a hard floor. The bright neon light revealed the eggshell scalp beneath her grey hair. Her lower lip protruded in her concentration and she frowned into the darkness of the cupboard.
    ‘Drat,’ she said. She pulled saucepans from the cupboard and dropped them on to the torn vinyl floor in order to make her search less complicated. She forgot Vish did not drink alcohol and he was too engrossed in his fearful diagnosis of his brother’s condition to pay any attention to what she was doing.
    The word Schizophrenia had come into his mind when he looked into Benny’s ulcerated mouth and now he was wondering how he could find out what Schizophrenia really was. A saucepan clattered. His grandmother’s red setter yelped and skittered across the slippery kitchen floor.
    Benny winked at him.
    Vish narrowed his eyes.
    Benny pursed his lips mischievously and looked over his high bony shoulder towards the kitchen, then back at his older brother.
    ‘Bah-bah-bah,’ he said. ‘Bah-Barbara-ann.’
    Vish did not normally even think profanity. But when this quoted line from their father’s favourite song told him that Benny’s lost voice, his curved spine, his dead eyes, his whole emotional collapse had been an act, he thought fuck . He felt angry enough to break something, but as he watched his grinning brother take a pack of Marlboros from the rolled-up sleeve of his T-shirt, all he actually did was squinch up his eyes a little.
    Benny lit a cigarette and placed the pack carefully in front of him on the table. He rolled his T-shirt up high to where you could see the first mark life had made on him – a pale ghost of a scar like a blue-ringed smallpox vaccination. He leaned back and, having checked his Grandma again, put his long legs and combat boots on the table and tilted back on the chair.
    ‘No, seriously …’ he said.
    ‘Seriously!’
    For a moment it looked as if Benny was going to mimic his brother’s outraged squeak, but then he seemed to change his mind. ‘No, seriously,’ he said, ‘I’ve got something great for you.’
    There was a long silence.
    ‘An opportunity,’ said Benny.
    Vish was breathing through his nose and shaking his head very slowly. He brought his hands up on the table and rubbed at the cuts on his knuckles. ‘Do you know what it takes for me to come out here? Do you know what it costs me?’ His eyes were so squinched up they were