The Five Gates of Hell

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘The wire’s no problem,’ Mr Garbett said. ‘I’m getting some in this week. The mike could take a bit longer.’

  Jed dropped into the store at least once a week after that and sometimes he let Mr Garbett take him into the back room and open his jeans and turn him into that slow ink. The memory of the radios was like a sore place on his body that he only felt when he was in a certain position; he had to press it every now and then so he didn’t forget. By the end of the month he had the wire and the mike. His mother had found a new man, an embalmer called Adrian who wore grey shoes. The time had come.

  He waited until she went to work one morning, then he took out the wire and the new mike from their hiding-place inside the air-conditioning in his bedroom. The mike was particularly satisfying; it was round and white, the size of a button, and the top was a minute copper grille that looked like a fly’s eye. He ran the wire under his carpet and out into the corridor. So far, so good. The next part was tricky, though. The carpet in the corridor had been secured at the edges with tacks, and he had to prise the tacks loose before he could conceal the wire beneath. It took him almost an hour to run the wire from his bedroom door to his mother’s, and most of that time he held his breath, praying that nothing brought her home early. When he opened the door to her room he came to a standstill. The dressing-table peopled by tiny potent bottles, the wall-lights designed to resemble candles (fake wax drips, flame-shaped bulbs), the double bed fringed with satin dust-ruffles: it gave him the feeling that he was standing in a shrine, that even his presence was sacrilege. He closed his eyes and summoned up the ghosts of his radios. He saw the dawn that came up behind the dial in one, he lingered on the sweeping ocean-liner curves of another. He remembered their names, and heard their voices. He muttered stations to himself like incantations, like curses: Moscow, Brussels, Helsinki. ‘Hilversum,’ he muttered, ‘Reykjavik,’ and he saw his radios in the garbage dump, he saw their cases crushed and shattered, their innards ripped out, spilled on the ground, their voices silenced for ever, and when he opened his eyes his mother’s room seemed to shrink in the face of his new resolve. Tiny bright explosions pocked the precious air, as if something white-hot had burned holes right through reality. The furniture looked charred at the edges. He noticed the clock beside her bed. Almost eleven-thirty. She sometimes came home for lunch. He had better get on.

  He levered up the tacks that held her pale-green carpet flush to the wall and tucked the wire underneath, then he knocked the tacks back into the same holes. It took him twenty minutes to reach the bed. There was really only one place for the mike. He pulled the bed away from the wall and fastened the mike to the back of the headboard with a strip of insulating tape. He pushed the bed against the wall and stood back. After examining the bed from all angles to make sure the wire was invisible, he returned to his room. All set. Now for the trial run. He switched the tape recorder to RECORD and ran back up the corridor to his mother’s room. He stood beside her stack of frilly pillows and thought for a moment.

  ‘Testing, testing.’ He nodded to himself. That’s what they said. But what else? He couldn’t remember. ‘I hope this works.’ He paused, and then fiercely, ‘It’d better.’

  Back in his own room he wound the tape back and switched to PLAY. Nothing for long seconds, then a rustling, like leaves, then his voice, wrapped up, as if he was talking through cloth. His voice, though. It had worked. He switched the tape recorder off and sat on the floor, his thighs pulled tight against his chest, his chin on his knees.

  His mother didn’t come home for lunch.

  He left the mike taped to the back of the headboard for two weeks. During that time the embalmer came round four times. The first time there was an argument in the bedroom. The embalmer was trying to smooth things over, restore things to normal. But he could only do that with dead bodies, apparently. Something was thrown, something broke. Jed couldn’t guess what it was. Probably that blue vase by the window. There was a silence, and then tears. His mother’s. It was interesting, but it wasn’t what he wanted. The second time nothing happened at all. They just went to sleep. The third time a plane went over right at the crucial moment and ruined everything. He almost gave up. Almost. The fourth time he was in the hall when they came in the front door. It was midnight, and they were both drunk.

  ‘What the hell are you doing up?’ His mother was wearing a red dress that was stained dark with wine or sweat. She looked the way a rose petal looks when you crush it between finger and thumb. The embalmer hung back, awkward at being observed. White shoes tonight. Pretty fancy. Jed didn’t say anything. He just backed into his room and closed the door.

  First there was rustling. That would be them kissing, undressing. At least a minute of that. Then five creaks, one after the other, very brisk. The bed, presumably. Then a whimper (his mother) and a grunt (the embalmer). Then voices. Hers first, ‘Oh Adrian,’ then his, ‘Muriel,’ then hers again, ‘Oh God.’ God was three syllables. And then a creak. Not the bed this time. A human creak. The embalmer coming. Bit quick, that. Then, about a minute later, a low flapping rumble followed by a whine as the embalmer, Adrian, began to snore. It was better than he could’ve expected. It was perfect.

  The next day he went to see Mr Garbett and asked whether he could get a copy made. Mr Garbett said he’d take care of it. Jed didn’t tell Mr Garbett not to listen to it, and he knew, when Mr Garbett handed the duplicate and the original back a week later, that he had. It didn’t matter. Jed doubted whether he’d ever see Mr Garbett again. His days of junk were over.

  That night he waited in his room with the tape recorder primed. He looked at his watch. It was six-thirty. She usually got home at around seven. He sat on the edge of his bed and wedged a Lemon Sherbet Bomb in his cheek and turned his head to the street. It had been another hot day. Through the window he could hear the hiss of sprinklers watering small lawns. It wasn’t often you could hear the sprinklers. Maybe there was a strike at the airport or something.

  It was almost nine when he heard the key turn in the lock. He’d been waiting so long, his heart jumped at the sound. Then he froze. She wasn’t alone. He could hear a man’s voice. Pop’s.

  He opened his door and stood in the hall.

  ‘You could at least offer me a cup of coffee,’ he heard Pop saying. ‘I’ve been waiting two hours.’

  ‘Nobody asked you to wait, did they?’ She was trying to close the door on him, but he was stronger.

  ‘Muriel.’ Pop was pleading now. ‘One cup of coffee.’

  She weakened. ‘All right. One cup of coffee and that’s it.’

  Pop stepped into the light. He’d greased his hair back and he was wearing a clean shirt, but it was no good.

  ‘One cup,’ he said, and winked at Jed. He was like one of those salesmen who stick their feet in the door.

  Don’t you see? Jed wanted to shout. It’s no good.

  ‘Your mother and I,’ Pop said, ‘we’re just going to have a little talk.’ That wink again. A smirk.

  IT’S NO GOOD.

  When Pop moved towards the kitchen, he trailed this smell behind him, ashes or rust, old worn-down things, things you normally throw out. Jed was sure his mother could smell it too. Though she had different names for it, of course. She called it weakness, failure, regret.

  He went and sat in his room while they had their ‘little talk’. He heard the shouting, he heard a plate break. The smell was everywhere, you wanted to hold your nose. No amount of violence or repentance could freshen the air.

  And he realised, with a slight shock, that Pop didn’t count any more. Pop was just another Adrian. A noise, a pair of feet, an inadequacy. He felt sorry for Pop, but in a distant way, as you might feel sorry for someone on TV. He wanted Pop out of the house, even more than his mother did.

  An hour later the kitchen door opened. Jed opened his own door a crack, and listened.

  ‘A second chance, that’s all I’m asking.’

  ‘What do you think this is, some stupid g
ame?’

  The house shook as the front door banged against the inside wall. Through his window Jed saw Pop stamping off up Mackerel Street, clouding the air with empty threats.

  He found his mother standing in the kitchen. Her face had the polished look of a trophy. It was a game, whatever she said, and it looked as if she’d won again. He returned to his room and, leaving the door ajar, turned the tape recorder on. Top volume. And waited.

  The tape had only reached the creaking stage when she came and stood in the doorway. ‘What’s this you’re playing?’ she asked, light, yet tense, as if she had already guessed.

  Jed watched the transparent wheels spin round, one eager, empty, one slow and burdened with knowledge. He watched the slim brown tape unwind, unwind.

  When the whimpering began, he looked up into his mother’s face. He saw the light shrink in her eyes then, without seeming to move, she unleashed herself, the air a blur of red nails and flailing hands, she was hissing and muttering, she seemed to have eight arms, like that statue that he’d seen in Mr Garbett’s store, which Mr Garbett said had come from India. She caught him twice with open-handed blows that made his head buzz like a jam jar of flies, and one of her nails tore the skin at the corner of his mouth, as if he ought to be smiling. He didn’t try to back away, he just wrapped his head in his hands and when the beating stopped he slowly took his hands away and peered up at her. She was panting and her arms were fastened against her sides and her hair had come unpinned and hung in tangled strands across her eyes. She looked more natural now than ever before. She looked like a witch. He wanted her to hold him now, he wanted to burn with her, but he knew it wouldn’t happen. And so it was like TV again. Everything was like TV.

  ‘How could you do that?’ she was saying in a strange, flat voice. ‘How could you do a thing like that?’

  Easy.

  ‘You threw my radios away.’

  The embalmer began to snore.

  Lunging at the tape recorder, she snatched up the spool and tore the tape to shreds. When she tired of that she threw it down and stamped on the top of the tape recorder. Then she bent down and picked the tape recorder up and hurled it against the wall. It dropped to the carpet and the casing came away, fractured in two places. There was a dent in the wall where it had hit.

  Jed watched all this impassively, as if he could change channels any time he pleased. He didn’t care what she did. The tape recorder had already served its purpose, and he had wrapped his spare copy of the tape in industrial plastic, then he’d locked it inside an old metal toolbox, and he’d buried the toolbox halfway up the garden on the right, next to the fence. There was nothing she could do to hurt him. He felt one side of his mouth grinning where she had cut him. He watched her turn to him and scrape the hair back out of her eyes.

  ‘You won’t do that again,’ she said.

  He said, ‘I don’t need to.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘I’ve got a copy of that tape,’ he said, ‘and if you ever touch any of my stuff again, I’ll send it to Pop.’ He paused; it didn’t sound enough. ‘And the neighbours,’ he said. ‘And that shop where you work.’

  Her eyes were blank now, and her cheeks hung, slack and looped, from the bones of her face. She turned and walked out of the room. He heard her bedroom door click quietly shut.

  His first taste of revenge. Sweet.

  Two

  The Womb Boys

  A light rain was falling on the city, so light it sounded like rats. Jed turned into the alleyway that ran behind the school and stopped to wipe the flecks off his spectacles. Looking up again, through clear glass now, he saw four figures arranged in front of him. Their stillness had an urgency to it and he knew right away that it was him they’d been waiting for.

  Three of them perched high on dark-green garbage dumpsters. He knew their names: José PS Mendoza, Scraper O’Malley and Tip Stubbs. The fourth leaned his shoulderblades against the wall, hands folded on his chest. He wore a black leather coat and a moustache. It was Vasco Gorelli. Known as Gorilla, though never to his face. He’d had the moustache since he was ten.

  Near silence.

  Only the light rain scurrying across the rooftops, and the tss-tss-tss of PS Mendoza’s headphones.

  It was strange. Normally you couldn’t talk to Vasco, you couldn’t even get close to him. You had to wait for a summons or an audience. He was like a sort of pope. He had lieutenants – O’Malley, Stubbs, Mendoza – then he had a whole string of runners: Thomas Baby Vail, Slim Jimmy Chung, Cramps Crenshaw and Tip’s younger brother, a deaf-mute known as Silence. When you saw Vasco walk down the street you saw the petals of a flower and suddenly a flower seemed strong, a flower seemed dangerous. A small gang, but tight. A flower that closed up for the night. A furled umbrella. And when the rain came, which it did sometimes, one snap, a flick, and the gang sprang open, kept him dry. That was how it worked.

  So why the sudden interest?

  Jed was used to isolation. His face was like some kind of cul-de-sac. It said NO THROUGH ROAD to most people. Confronted with him, they always turned round, backed away. He wasn’t wounded exactly. No, not wounded; not any more. It had planted the seeds of scorn in him. It had bred a curious arrogance. You don’t know what you’re missing, he would think. If only you knew.

  And now this.

  Maybe the boys were bored that day. Just lookng for some poor bastard to pick on. And he came along with his pitted skin and his glasses and his knees put on the wrong way round and they thought: This one’ll do. Scraper and Tip eyed him from above with a strange, dislocated venom. It was like someone saying, Look, nothing personal, but we’re going to kill you now, all right?

  Vasco took the cigarette out of his mouth, sent it spinning through the air. One bounce on the wet street. Tss. He pushed away from the wall, hunched his shoulders against the rain. One word was stamped across his back in silver studs: IMMORTAL.

  ‘Christ, Morgan, you’re so fucking ugly you’re hardly even human.’ It was curious, but he made it sound like admiration. It was as if he’d heard about Jed’s ugliness and he’d sought it out and it had come up to his expectations.

  ‘I know that,’ Jed said.

  ‘I’ve been told.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘My mother.’

  Vasco chipped at a weed with the heel of his boot. ‘So is it true what they say about your mother?’

  Jed stared at Vasco without blinking. ‘What do they say?’

  ‘They say she’s a whore.’

  Tip joined in. ‘Is that true? Is she a whore?’

  ‘They say she fucks people who fuck dead people.’ Vasco looked up from the weed he was torturing. ‘What about that? Is that true?’

  Jed scrutinised them one by one.

  P S. Short for Personal Stereo. He’d picked up a pair of headphones somewhere, but he’d never been able to afford a Walkman to plug them into, so he just wore the headphones and made that noise you always hear when you’re next to someone who’s got one: that tss-tss-tss. PS had been wearing phones for a year now and he could make the noise without even moving his lips.

  Scraper. The guinea-pig. Gazing up into the sky, sensing the drizzle on his freckled skin. All Jed could see of Scraper’s head was a thick neck and a chin like the toe of a boot. Jed gave himself a knife and drew it calmly across the tight, offered throat and watched blood fountain into the steamy grey air.

  Tip was closer, more focused. Leering down from his heap of garbage. Brawny shoulders, swollen eyelids, grease in the wings of his nose. Tip swam freestyle for some city team or other. Big fish, small pool.

  They were all, in their different ways, waiting for him to break down: lose his temper, burst into tears, piss himself. But they’d misread his bad skin and his glasses. They’d picked on the wrong person. They simply hadn’t understood. He felt almost disappointed. Still, he managed a faint smile.

  ‘She’s not as smart as a whore,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t get pa
id for it.’

  He’d delivered the reply in his own time, like a comedian, and it caught all four gang-members off guard. They were too surprised to laugh. They couldn’t believe he wasn’t defending his mother. His own mother. They wanted to know why. He told them about the radios. They nodded. It made sense to them. Then he casually threw in some stuff about revenge, the tape of his mother, the grunts, the whimpers, and he saw a kind of awe appear. Fear, he sensed, was present in this awe of theirs. Then he knew they were his. Though he’d pretend to be theirs, of course.

  With that one story he paid his entrance fee. Suddenly he was one of the Womb Boys, as they were known – the gang that had declared war on Moon Beach, war on death. On long quiet nights, camped round a fire in some vacant lot in Mangrove East, Vasco would turn to him and say, ‘Tell us the story of the radios.’ And he would tell it. And afterwards the silence would come down and Vasco would hand him a beer. People still looked at him, but their looking was different now, it seemed tempered with respect. He was going through a phase of Cinnamon Hearts. They lasted a long time and they turned the entire inside of your mouth red. This only added to his strange notoriety.

  One morning Vasco took him down to Moon River at low tide. Among the slippery rocks, the reeling gulls, the sludge, this was where Vasco did his thinking. Idly they combed the mudbanks for a necklace or a watch, something they could pawn at Mr Franklin’s establishment on Central Avenue. Just for a moment, as he prodded and jabbed at one particular rock with his sharp stick, Vasco looked younger, looked the age he actually was, an age that Tip and Scraper were never allowed to see. The three tombstones on his left shoulder, that was how old people thought he was. Jed looked into the tattoos as if they were windows and suddenly, standing in the stench of the river, he had the feeling that he could see into Vasco, see what was coming.