The Five Gates of Hell

by Rupert Thomson

  Yvonne told him about the walk out to the headland. She had cut the path herself, she said, with her own two hands and a machete, and nobody must ever know. It was their secret, other people would ruin it, you must never tell, she said.

  ‘Who would I tell?’ he asked her, and saw that smile on her face again, that smile that was like a drop of rain, and then she took his head in one hand and brought it to her breast and held it there.

  He went on the walk every day. You left the house through the sliding doors at the front, crossed a garden of tangled shrubs and plants and, when you reached the cliff edge, you pushed your way through a bush and there was the hidden entrance to the path. You followed the cliff edge for a long time, the sea sleeping way below, that rustle as it rolled over in its bed, that sigh. Eventually you were forced inland, through a forest of twisted black trees and green grass, and it was this forest that delivered you out on to the headland. It was sixty feet high, but still the spray came vaulting over the edge, a fright every time because you couldn’t hear it coming, it was like someone jumping out from behind a door. He found a flat rock near the edge and sat and watched the wind lift clouds of fine spray off the top lips of the waves.

  One day Aunt Yvonne followed him out. He heard her as a movement in the grass behind him and didn’t need to turn. He’d known that, sooner or later, she would come. She sat down next to him and locked her arms round her knees.

  He’d been thinking, and now he turned to her. ‘When my mother died, where did she go?’

  ‘She went into the ocean.’ Yvonne took his hand in hers. ‘She loved the ocean. It was in her blood, just like it’s in yours.’ She lit a cheroot and suddenly the world smelled like the inside of a cupboard that hadn’t been opened for years. ‘When you go back to the ocean,’ she said, ‘all the bad things you’ve ever done, they’re washed away. You’re purified, cleansed, ready for the next life. You know that skull you found?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Remember how pure and white it was?’

  He remembered.

  ‘Well, that’s what the ocean does,’ she said. ‘Takes out all the dirt, all the stains of having been alive.’

  ‘You mean, like a washing machine?’ he said.

  She laughed. ‘Just like a washing machine.’

  That night, in his room, he took the bird’s skull and held it under the lamp. Aunt Yvonne was right. There was only pure white bone. No trace of anything else. Slowly he raised the skull to his nose and sniffed. There was no smell. He wished he could dive down to the ocean bed and watch his mother’s soul rising from her pure white bones. But it struck him suddenly that he could no longer remember what she looked like. He wouldn’t have known how to recognise her.

  During the second week, the weather changed and all the pale colours he remembered from two years before came back. The yellows, the whites, the eggshell-blues. Yvonne began to paint again. After their dawn swim together, she would retire to her studio in the east wing of the house, her hair wrapped in a twist of bright silk, a box of cheroots under her arm. Once he heard the click of her studio door he knew he’d be alone till noon. There were no rules for how to use the time; she expected him to make his own. He filled the first days searching the dunes for shells and skulls or curling into their soft hollows with a book. He was lying on his back one morning after swimming, one hand draped against his belly, the other bent behind his head. His trunks had slipped down and the sun seemed to tug on his blood, he felt his penis swell and push against the damp wool and then, like someone in a trance, he didn’t know what he was doing and yet he knew what to do, he built the hot sand into a mound beneath his towel and, turning on to his stomach, began to rub himself against the mound, his legs like scissors, his eyes tight shut, and then that part of him seemed to leap, the sun’s red through his eyelids vanished, he saw green, cool green, water fathoms down, the gloom inside a wood, the stalks of plants, and the breath came out of him ah-ah-ah-ah-ah like something tumbling down a flight of stairs. When he opened his eyes again, the air was blue glass, and a man in a tall hat and a black coat stood on the sand, between him and the ocean. The man raised his stick in greeting, then walked on. Nathan watched until the man grew thin and warped in the fierce air, then he let his breath out and stood up, legs shaking. As he rinsed his towel in the ocean he wondered who the man was. Could he be one of the strangers Dad had talked about?

  Walking back to the house that afternoon, he looked up through the bushes and saw Yvonne standing on the verandah. She wore a dress that was as green as an empty bottle of wine and her hands were smeared with red, he thought for a moment that she’d hurt herself, then he knew that it was just paint. She was leaning forwards from the waist, her head straining on her neck, as if her house was an island and she was scouring the horizon for a wisp of smoke, as if she was hoping she might be saved. He stood below her, unseen. It was a still day. All he heard was one gust of wind passing through the chimes like something breaking slowly, beautifully, inside her. He entered the house through the back door and began to prepare some sandwiches for lunch. ‘Well,’ Yvonne said, when she walked into the kitchen a few minutes later, ‘at least they won’t have paint on them for once,’ and he smiled at her over his shoulder and, if it was a stranger that he’d seen on the beach, well, he thought, at least I didn’t talk to him, at least nothing happened.

  The next day, towards sunset, he knocked on the door to her studio and walked in. Aunt Yvonne stood in front of her black easel, palette and paintbrush in her fists like sword and shield, her body concealed inside a pale-blue tent. She always worked with the windows open and, that evening, a wind had lifted off the ocean. Nothing in the room was still. Everything fluttered, flapped and rattled. The dried flowers, the drawings on the walls, her hair. The effect was less one of walking into a room than of suddenly finding oneself travelling at high speed in an open car. He had to shout to make himself heard.

  ‘Yvonne?’

  She waved him over. When he was standing beside her, she jabbed at the easel. ‘What do you think?’

  He looked at the picture. Lots of white and blue balls, trapped between lines. At first he thought of noughts and crosses, and then he realised there weren’t any crosses. Then he didn’t know what he thought.

  ‘What’s it supposed to be?’ he asked her.

  ‘It’s whatever you want it to be.’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  She shook her head. ‘Have you got any ideas?’

  He looked at the picture for longer, then he looked at the others, stacked in piles against the wall. In some of the pictures there were lots of balls, in others there was only one: a white ball on a blue background, for instance; a red ball on grey. He thought he understood these better. He went back to the picture on the easel and suddenly he had it. ‘It’s moons,’ he said, and felt sure that he was right.

  ‘Moons,’ she said. And folded her arms across her chest and tilted her head on one side. ‘Moons,’ she said again and, walking round to the back of the picture, she wrote MOONS on it, and the date. There was her grin and then there was his. Hers wide and delighted. His still uncertain, but slowly becoming less so.

  September came and still the weather held. Nights when even a single sheet seemed too heavy on his skin. Yvonne took to sitting on the kitchen floor with the fridge door open and a tall drink clinking in her fist. He could tell that time had passed by looking in the mirror; his blond hair had bleached almost white, his nose was powdered with freckles and he could see pale half-moons in the bays between his fingers. He felt his weeks with Yvonne had washed everything clean out of his head. It was almost as if he’d gone to the bottom of the ocean too, he could imagine what that was like now, he could almost imagine his mother there. His head felt like the gull’s skull he’d packed so carefully in his case. It felt empty, picked clean, pure. Leave it outside and it would whistle in the wind. Drop it into the sea and the fish would swim through its eyes and ears like a game. He could hardly remember
what he was returning to. On the drive back down to Moon Beach, Yvonne reminded him.

  ‘Your father’s not very well, Nathan,’ she said. ‘He’s going to need help,’ and she peered at him over the rims of her dark glasses, ‘especially from you.’

  ‘I know.’ He looked out of the window. The sun was so bright that day. Like a razorblade it cut round the roadside diners, the billboards, the trees. Such sharp edges to everything. But thinking of Dad, Dad’s sadness and Dad’s wounds, that thought was like shadows. He saw the place where he’d grown up. Somehow there was shadow even in the yellow of the sunlight on the lawn. As if all colour, even the brightest, held darkness. Nothing was safe. Everything could turn, give way. Fifty miles north of Moon Beach they drove into a gas station and he couldn’t see anything for a moment. It was just being in the shadow after being in the sun. But that was what it felt like to be going home.

  When they turned into the driveway, Dad was leaning against a pillar, almost shy. He ran into Dad’s arms. Smelt the wool of his cardigan, smelt the talcum powder he used. He remembered the skull and how it smelt of nothing, and he was happy then. Dad smelt of things. Dad was alive.

  Dad spoke to Yvonne. ‘He looks well. Was he a good boy?’

  ‘He was very good.’

  Nathan touched Dad’s arm. ‘Is Georgia back?’

  ‘She’ll be back tomorrow.’

  That night Nathan spent an hour arranging his trophies on his bedroom windowsill. He gave the bird’s skull pride of place, the silver coin shining in one of the empty sockets like a brand-new eye. It was a kind of reminder: if his life was a book, then the skull marked the place that he’d got up to. He sat on his bed. Heard a car grind up the hill in low gear; a distant siren; the hum of someone talking downstairs. It was so quiet. He moved to the window. Tilted his head back on his neck. A soft crunching sound, like gravel shifting in water, like a finger pushed into sand. He undid the string on his pyjamas and, rolling over, pushed against the hard part of the mattress and then, as if by magic, it was morning.

  She’ll be back tomorrow, Dad had said. And she was. One front tooth missing and her black hair twisted into two short plaits. It was a relief to see her, he felt he’d been holding his breath until she arrived. Since his dream about the jets, he didn’t feel he could trust anyone with her. He knew he couldn’t bear to lose her. That moment in the dream when the gap opened up between their hands, that was such panic. He could see their fingers separating in slow motion, like pieces of a space capsule. It was a relief and a reprieve. He’d learned something. Life was booby-trapped and there was no easy passage through. You had to jump from colour to colour, from happiness to happiness. And all those possible explosions in between. It could be all over any time. Those movies where the hero runs against the constant red and orange blooms of fire, where all the bullets noisily fly wide, that just wasn’t true. Or true, but very difficult. Or just plain lucky. He’d be more patient with her in the future. Even walking home from school. Even on the dreaded hill.

  In the past Dad had sometimes rested in his bedroom after lunch. Now he rested every day, often for two hours. If Nathan and Georgia stayed home they had to be quiet till he came downstairs again. It wasn’t easy. Silence didn’t come naturally to Georgia, it never had, and Dad slept so lightly he could hear the handle on the back door turn. Nathan invented a new game. He called it Red Indian Feet.

  ‘You’ve got to have Red Indian feet,’ he said, ‘like this,’ and he went into a sort of crouch, with his knees bent and his fingers spread in the air.

  You had to talk in a whisper or, better still, in sign language, which they learned from a book about deaf people. You had to walk in a special way: your heel touched the ground first, then the hard outside edge of your foot, then the ball of your foot and, finally, your toes. You had to make devilish Red Indian faces. It was the simplest of games, yet it worked like a charm. Georgia crept through the house, shoulders lifted on a level with her ears, hands spread in front of her, eyes wide. She’d turn a corner and there he’d be, a hunchback with a twisted face, and because you weren’t allowed to cry out, because everything happened in silence and slow motion, they’d both double up, roll gasping on the carpet, and the only way to hold the laughter in was to run out to the garden and stuff your mouth with mud and grass and stones.

  The jets were still flying. High altitude. Sometimes, as he lay on his back and stared into the sky, he saw a glint of silver high up in the blue. But heard nothing. That was what the word dead was. That glint of silver, that speed he could never guess. At night Georgia used to cry out and he’d wake in the next room and see her through the open door, flailing at the empty air like someone waving goodbye with both hands at once. He invented another game, to calm her. Windshield Wipers, he called it. You had to lie on your back and move your head from side to side on the pillow and make a soft droning sound. They did it together, in their separate beds. It wiped the bad dreams away, it brought the deep sleep back. After their mother went to the bottom of the sea, the days would pass in silence, the nights in fear. They walked through their childhood on Red Indian feet. Not a crack from a stick, not a creak from a stair. Not a sound.

  On the way down in the car Aunt Yvonne had told Nathan that she’d just be staying a week or two, until they settled back in, but in the end she stayed till Christmas. Nathan would come home from school to find her painting in the garden, an overcoat thrown over her shoulders, lipstick smeared across her mouth, a cheroot burning in her left hand. ‘I’m making the whole neighbourhood reek,’ she shouted. ‘It’s your father’s fault. He won’t let me smoke in the house.’

  Nathan spoke to Dad. ‘It’s not that bad,’ he said. ‘It’s only like cupboards.’

  But Dad shook his head and fixed his eyes on the corner of the room. ‘It gets in my pipes. It makes me cough.’

  So Yvonne went on painting outdoors, often until dusk, sometimes even later, by candlelight. The fresh air seemed to inspire her. It was like her studio, she said, only more so. She was beginning to move out of her ball period, though she hadn’t made up a name for her new period yet. The balls had gone, it was true. They’d rolled right out of her pictures, and the lines that used to hold them in place were no longer straight, they now wriggled horizontally across the canvas.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Nathan, who’d become the leading authority on her work. ‘It could be the ocean, I suppose.’

  Yvonne turned to him, and her eyes narrowed in the candlelight and her lips stretched wide across her face. He knew the meaning of the look. It meant that things were coinciding in a way that pleased her. He’d seen the same smile earlier that summer when she discovered that sausages tasted good with marmalade.

  The day she left, he helped her lash the new paintings to the roof of her station wagon. ‘I need to get back,’ she shouted. ‘My ocean period’s just beginning, and it’ll flourish up there, I can feel it.’

  He glanced at the sky anxiously. ‘I hope it doesn’t rain.’

  She squatted beside him, her back against the wheel, her face close to his. ‘Promise me something, Nat.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Try not to be too serious, OK?’

  He nodded. ‘OK.’

  ‘Come on,’ and she got to her feet and took his hand, ‘I’ve got something for you.’

  She led him into the kitchen. There was a painting leaning against the wall. She turned it round. ‘There,’ she said, ‘that’s for you.’

  It was a ball painting. A ball of marbled grey and white against a background of midnight-blue. It was one of the first paintings of hers that he’d looked at. It was a real moon.

  Yvonne stood with arms folded and legs astride, like her own easel. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s one of my favourites,’ he said. ‘You knew that, didn’t you?’

  That evening he hung the moon painting in his narrow room and then he lay down on his bed. He saw Aunt Yvonne driving back up the coast in her old beat-up station
wagon and sent his love with her on the passenger seat. She’d told him Dad needed help, though he’d known that already. Dad seemed to be moving through air that was different to everybody else’s, it was thick and sticky, built out of cobwebs. When Dad smiled, it looked wrong; it was as if someone had made a joke and he hadn’t got it, but he was pretending that he had. He could see that Dad was in some kind of terrible danger, and he wanted to rescue him, but he didn’t know how. Instead, he did everything he was asked to do, and did it without complaining. He hid his own fears and wishes, and only took them out in private, under the eye of the moon. He was a good boy.

  He tried to keep his promise to Yvonne, he tried not to be too serious, but it was hard because those jets kept coming over. The scream of silver, the ghostly stalks of dust, the hands separating like two parts of a rocket ship. He’d wake up and lie still, waiting for Dad to die. His mother had been strong, that was what he’d always been told, and now she’d gone to the bottom of the ocean, seaweed necklaces and fish swimming through the spaces in her head. She’d been strong and she’d died, so what chance did Dad have?

  He lay on his back in the narrow room and listened for his sister’s breathing through the half-open door, listened for his father’s slightly faster breathing through the thin wall to the right. He lay like a toppled toy soldier, hands pressed tight against his thighs, every muscle rigid. He couldn’t move his eyes. Because the jets flew beyond his dream, they were in the room with him, silent and lethal, swooping like birds in the grey air. It could happen any moment.

  He listened to his father breathing and waited for it to stop. He listened to his sister breathing and made plans for their loneliness.

  Those daybreaks.

  He was eleven then.

  Moscow, Brussels, Helsinki

  Jed’s mother said she didn’t want him hanging round the beauty parlour after school, it was bad for business, what with him looking the way he did and all, so he’d walk home and climb out through the bathroom window and on to the roof. They lived in Sweetwater, right out near the airport. It was always funny the first time someone came to the house. A plane would go over and they’d duck or flinch. It was that loud. Once someone even threw themselves face down on the kitchen floor like someone in a war movie. Out on the roof, though, that was best. He’d lie on his back and watch the planes fly over. So close they almost grazed the tip of his nose. He liked the way his ears crackled, he liked to feel the house shake. And sometimes there was the sense that his legs were rising into the air, that the roof was sliding out from under him.