The Five Gates of Hell

by Rupert Thomson

  If he’d been Tommy, of course, it would’ve been a different story. Tommy was his brother, but he was twelve years older, more like an uncle, really. He worked as a foreman at a construction site in Rialto. She wouldn’t’ve minded Tommy hanging round the beauty parlour. He had thick shiny hair and he walked with his legs slightly bent so you could imagine a horse between them. Once he did a hundred press-ups with a girl in a bikini standing on his back (Jed saw the photo). He wasn’t bad for business. He wasn’t bad at all.

  That twelve-year gap between him and Tommy, he knew what it meant. It meant he was a mistake. And not only that, but he was ugly too, just so nobody forgot. Only something so unintended could’ve turned out so wrong. Born in a bottle of vodka one night, his mother had told him once. Poured out of her seven months later like some sickly cocktail. They had to put him in a kind of see-through tent so he could breathe. ‘Oh Muriel,’ she was fond of saying, ‘I don’t know what you did to deserve it.’ She’d be sitting at her dresssing-table mirror, and he’d be standing beside her, watching her put her make-up on. Eye-shadow, mascara, rouge. Made her look just like plastic. And then she’d roll her eyes and sigh. ‘Must be someone’s idea of a joke.’ Someone was God, and she was always flirting with him, same as she did with any man.

  These were the good days, when her disgust could seem like a kind of affection. But there were times when it didn’t seem like anything apart from what it was.

  The year he turned nine he discovered junk stores. He felt at home there. The people who ran them didn’t care if he was ugly; most of them were ugly too, and some of them, maybe they were mistakes as well. Old Mr Garbett, he was ugly all right. He ran Jed’s favourite store. It was on Airdrome Boulevard. The Empire of Junk, it was called. Old Mr Garbett had a moon face and eyes that seeped. He sat on a leather armchair just inside the door with a brown bottle of beer standing beside his right foot. He wore the same mustard cardigan every day, and smoked cigarettes with wrinkles in them like the legs of elephants. The strangest thing about him was, his lips were the same colour as his face. It was here that Jed found the radios.

  That first afternoon he was so excited that he ran all the way home. Along the boulevard, down Mackerel Street, through the front gate, straight into his mother’s bedroom. She was sitting at her dressing-table as usual. Instead of turning round, she used the mirror to look at him. ‘Do you have to bring those in here, Jed?’

  ‘They’re only radios.’

  ‘Yes, but look at them. They’re filthy.’

  There was something wrong with what she was saying. But she’d thrown him off balance and he couldn’t think.

  ‘And what do you want radios for, anyway?’ It was sweet, that voice of hers, it was always sweet, somehow, but like all sweet things too much of it could make you ill. ‘We’ve already got a radio in the kitchen.’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘What’s different about it?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. These ones have names. It’s the names that I like.’

  A plane went over, and all her tiny bottles jostled and clinked.

  ‘Names?’ She frowned. ‘What names?’

  ‘You know, the names of the stations. Moscow, Brussels, Helsinki. Those names.’

  If only Pop was still around, he thought. Pop would have understood. Trouble was, Pop had moved out about a year before. Jed knew it was final when he saw Pop carrying his gun magazines out to the car. Pop had the same passion for collecting as Jed did, only Pop collected guns. He had nineteen of them. Six were special, and hung on the wall in the den. The rest, he actually used. Sometimes, on weekends, he used to take Jed out to the abandoned graveyard on Normandy Hill and they’d shoot at the wooden crosses. The bull’s-eye was the place where the parts of the cross joined, but Jed liked to shoot at the arms and watch the bits fly off. Pop loved guns so much, he’d even named his sons after them: Thomas Colt Morgan, Jed Gattling Morgan (if he’d had a girl he would’ve called her Baretta). He wanted to change his own name to Winchester, but Muriel wouldn’t hear of it. Winchester Morgan! He always thought that would’ve sounded grand. As it was, he had to be satisfied with Pop. Not even Bang. Just Pop.

  About every month or two Pop would come back, late at night, a few drinks under his belt. The door would shake, then the windows, then the door again, it didn’t seem so strange, it was just like another plane going over, and then his voice would force its way through the mailbox. ‘Muriel? Let me in, will you? Muriel? Goddammit, Muriel, let me in.’ And Muriel would call Tommy. Or if Tommy wasn’t home she’d call the police. ‘He’s drunk,’ she’d say. ‘I think he’s got a gun.’ She didn’t like calling the police, though, because the cars’d scream into the street, the lights’d flash and then everybody’d know. She was a beautician, and she had her reputation to think of.

  And now she turned to him and it was as if she’d been reading his mind. ‘You must get this from your father.’

  She banned his radios from the house, but that just drove Jed’s passion underground. He became a regular at the Empire of Junk. He’d insert himself into the darkest corners of the store, dust burning in his nostrils, the tips of his fingers grey as if with ashes, and he would often emerge at the end of an hour with radios that Mr Garbett hadn’t even known were there.

  By the time he was ten he had more than a hundred radios, radios of every size, make, and year. Some didn’t work at all; these he dismantled. Others produced only static, but that was all right too; he could still switch them on and watch the lights come up behind the names like some kind of miniature simulated dawn. A few of the old radios still worked, and he was addicted to the way the voices grew in volume as the set warmed up, and how the voices always sounded so muffled, so cosy, like people wrapped up against cold weather; though it was the present he was listening to, somehow it always sounded like the past. Other boys his age had model aeroplanes or toy soldiers or guns. He looked down on them. A model aeroplane had had no previous life, a toy soldier had no soul, a gun couldn’t talk to you. But a radio.

  One Saturday morning he left the house at around midday and set off up Mackerel Street. He’d seen a radio in the window of the Empire of Junk the day before, but the place had been closed. He bought a quarter of Lemon Sherbet Bombs at the candy store on Airdrome Boulevard. With their fizzy white centres they matched the excitement he felt. It was a hot morning. July, it must’ve been, or August. The streets smelt of simmering green vegetables and gas leaks. It was the kind of weather where air-conditioners bust and old people just evaporated. He walked in the gutter as he always did, pausing every now and then to poke at something with his toe. He wore his white T-shirt and his old jeans and his red baseball cap on back to front. When he reached the Empire he stopped in the doorway. Something was different. It was a strange kind of different, though. Like when someone starts wearing a new pair of glasses or they shave their eyebrows off or something. At first you don’t know what it is. Jed squinted down at Mr Garbett and all around him too, and then he realised. Mr Garbett was sitting on a stained green sofa. The leather armchair had gone. Jed eyed the sofa, then he eyed Mr Garbett. Mr Garbett raised his bottle to his pale lips and drank, as if it was the sight of Jed, and not the weather, that made him thirsty.

  ‘Where’s the chair gone?’ Jed asked.

  ‘Sold it,’ Mr Garbett said.

  ‘Didn’t realise it was for sale.’

  ‘Everything in here’s for sale.’

  Jed looked at the bottle in Mr Garbett’s hand. ‘How much for the beer?’

  Mr Garbett smiled faintly on his stained green sofa. ‘You know anything about tape recorders?’

  ‘Tape recorders? What’s that?’

  Mr Garbett stood up. It was the first time he’d ever done that. His belly pushed against the inside of his cardigan. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said.

  Jed followed Mr Garbett towards a small room at the back of the store. When he reached the threshold he stopped in his tracks. Inside the r
oom was such a concentration of junk as he’d never seen before. There seemed to be something from every place in the world. You could single out one object and imagine the church or mansion or garage that had once surrounded it. That was the thing about junk. It had been places, seen things you could only guess at. He put his mother in the doorway and looked at her face and grinned. She’d have a fit.

  ‘Now then,’ Mr Garbett said. He bent down and grunted as his belly crushed the breath out of his lungs. He lifted something that looked a bit like a radio on to the table, then he sat down and his eyes swivelled in their slits. ‘That there’s a tape recorder,’ he said.

  Jed went and stood next to the table. He stared down at the machine. The top of it looked like a face. Two big round eyes with spokes and an oblong plastic mouth. ‘What’s it do?’

  ‘You really don’t know?’

  Jed shook his head.

  Mr Garbett handed him a white plastic box on the end of a wire. ‘Say something.’

  Jed couldn’t think of anything.

  ‘Sit down here.’ Mr Garbett patted his own knee. ‘Easier to think of something sitting down.’

  Jed sat on his knee. Mr Garbett smelt like casinos when you walk past their open doors first thing in the morning. Drink and smoke and money that’s been through too many hands.

  ‘Now,’ Mr Garbett said, ‘say something.’

  Jed watched him turn a fat white switch. The eyes on the top of the machine began to revolve. A green light glowed.

  ‘Don’t know what to say,’ Jed muttered.

  ‘That’ll do it.’ The eyes spun back the other way, stopped, then began to revolve again. Mr Garbett put a hand on Jed’s hip. ‘Now,’ he whispered, ‘listen.’

  A gritty roaring sound, like the ocean dragging pebbles.

  ‘Hear that?’ Mr Garbett said. ‘That’s the room.’

  Jed looked around to see where the roar was coming from, then he heard a small, sullen voice: ‘Don’t know what to say.’

  ‘What do you think of that?’ Mr Garbett said.

  Jed knew exactly what he thought. ‘That’s even better than a radio,’ he said, and watched as Mr Garbett’s hands fumbled at the buttons on his jeans.

  He felt he was spreading outwards, moving outwards fast, like ink being soaked up by a piece of blotting paper. He had no centre and no edges and he was moving outwards smoothly, and there was nothing in his head.

  Some time later he heard a voice say, ‘Did you like that?’ and the voice was disembodied, as if it had come out of the tape recorder.

  He opened his eyes. The room had shrunk and turned yellow, but it was piled high with junk he recognised. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It was nice.’

  ‘Well,’ Mr Garbett said, ‘if you don’t say nothing about it, maybe it’ll happen again.’

  ‘A secret?’

  ‘That’s it. A secret.’

  Jed nodded and slipped off Mr Garbett’s knee. He knew all about secrets. Most of his radios were secrets. One secret more or less didn’t make any difference.

  ‘You forgot something,’ Mr Garbett said.

  Jed turned in the doorway.

  Mr Garbett pointed at the tape recorder on the table, but Jed still didn’t understand.

  ‘You can have it,’ Mr Garbett said.

  Jed wasn’t used to being given things. ‘The tape recorder?’

  Mr Garbett smiled. ‘I’ve got hundreds.’

  Jed lifted the machine off the table and stood with it in his arms and couldn’t think what to say, so he repeated what he’d said before, only with more intensity this time. ‘It’s better than a radio.’ And then he had a moment of clairvoyance. ‘It sort of makes my radios dead.’

  Mr Garbett nodded. ‘Maybe.’ He walked Jed to the front of the shop. ‘Say you got it from a scrapyard.’ He looked around. ‘It’s the truth, really.’

  But Jed never had to say anything. He sneaked it in through his bedroom window, the same way he’d sneaked all his radios in. He hid it under the bed, wrapped in an old curtain.

  And then, no more than a couple of weeks later, he came home from school one afternoon to find the radios gone. Every single one of them. A deft glance under the bed told him that she’d missed the tape recorder. That was something. But still. Over one hundred radios. He turned cold inside and something tightened in his head.

  ‘They were garbage, Jed. Most of them didn’t even work.’

  She had come up behind him, while he’d been staring at the emptiness in his room. He turned slowly. She was fixing her hair up in a soft knot with both hands, so she looked like some kind of vase. If he’d been big enough he would’ve picked her up and dashed her against the wall. A thousand pieces. No, a million. And no glue, not ever. He took one step forwards and slammed the door in her stupid made-up face.

  ‘Come on, Jed,’ she cooed from the other side. ‘Don’t be like that.’ She banged on the wood with the flat of her hand. He knew it was the flat of her hand. She was careful never to scrape her knuckles or break her nails. She was a real beautician. ‘Jed?’ Her voice had hardened. ‘Jed, come on. Don’t be boring.’

  He sat on the edge of his bed and stared at her through the door. He thought he heard her mutter, ‘Little bastard,’ and she banged once more, one last time, and then there was silence. Then high-heels across the hallway and the kitchen door clicked shut.

  He climbed out of his bedroom window and stamped off up Mackerel Street, his red baseball cap jammed on sideways, as if he was turning left. That woman with the wedges of electric-pink and blue above her eyes. That woman, the beautician. His mother. She’d gone and thrown his radios away. All one hundred and twelve of them. She’d even thrown the Ferguson away, three feet high with wings of polished wood to gather the sound. Two years’ work collecting those radios. Two years’ love.

  He was wearing jeans that concertinaed round his ankles and a black T-shirt that said SUICIDE; he was thinking about changing it to MURDER now. He wedged his hands in his pockets, his thin arms locked and stiff. His head began to buzz like the TV screen when a channel shuts down at night. They call it snow sometimes, but it’s nothing like snow. It’s nowhere near that peaceful.

  She must’ve been planning it for ages with that nail-polish brain of hers. You’d need a special man to shift one hundred and twelve radios. You’d need a truck. He couldn’t believe it. He just couldn’t believe it. He tipped his head to the clouds and groaned out loud. An old lady stopped and looked at him, concerned. He glared at her and stamped on up the road, round the corner and into Airdrome Boulevard.

  MURDER. That was the answer. Then, when she was dead, he could send her to the embalming studio, plenty of pink and blue, he’d say, don’t spare the pink and blue, he’d make her look like she was going to a fucking disco, and then they could put her in one of those viewing theatres on Central Avenue, he didn’t know how much it cost, he didn’t care, he’d save up. He could see it now:

  MURIEL MORGAN NOW SHOWING ONE WEEK ONLY

  She’d be laid out in her coffin, pink satin it’d be, with blue trimmings, to go with her make-up, maybe some neon too, and there’d be radios all round her, hundreds of radios, all tuned to different stations, all on top volume. He’d surround her with radios. He’d bury her in radios.

  He walked halfway across the city that day, he walked until night fell. He stood under the harbour bridge and watched the lights come on downtown. He leaned his head back against a pillar and shut his eyes and felt the silver trains shake down through the stone. He’d scattered his rage along a hundred streets and he was almost smiling now. He had a new idea.

  The next day he didn’t go to school. He went to visit Mr Garbett instead. Mr Garbett was definitely a mistake, he knew that now. One look at him and it was obvious. There was an understanding between them that didn’t need any words. And since he had so much in common with this man who smelt like a casino and ruled an empire of junk from a stained green throne, it was only
fitting that he should have a part to play in Jed’s plan.

  ‘How’s the tape recorder?’ Mr Garbett asked.

  ‘Great, thanks.’

  Mr Garbett shifted on the sofa. ‘Sorry, but I haven’t got any new radios in.’ He grinned. It was one of their private jokes. New radios.

  ‘That’s all right,’ Jed said. ‘I’m not looking for radios any more.’

  ‘Oh?’ Mr Garbett gave Jed a curious, almost wounded look.

  ‘My mum chucked them out. The whole lot.’

  ‘Why’d the hell she do that?’

  Jed shrugged. ‘She said they were dirty.’

  Mr Garbett’s face slackened. The corners of his mouth drooped. Only one thing could do that to Mr Garbett. The wanton destruction of junk. He took a long draught from his brown bottle, then he let out a soft belch and stared into the road. Finally, and without a change of expression, he said, ‘It must’ve taken her a long time.’

  Jed grinned for the first time since it happened. ‘Ages, I bet. There were over a hundred.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mr Garbett said. ‘Some people.’

  He dabbed at one eye with the corner of a handkerchief. For a moment Jed thought he was crying, mourning the passing of the radios, but then he realised: it was just Mr Garbett’s eye leaking, like it always did.

  ‘You know that tape recorder?’ Jed said. ‘Well, I need a longer wire for the mike, maybe about,’ and he screwed his face up, thinking, ‘about fifty feet long. And I need a smaller mike too. That other one, it’s too, I don’t know, too clumsy.’