The Five Gates of Hell

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘A face,’ Jed said. ‘Vasco?’

  Silence nodded.

  He sealed the face off with a series of vertical lines and reinforced the downturned mouth.

  ‘Oh no,’ Jed said. ‘It’s jail, right?’

  Silence nodded again and touched the lobe of his ear.

  Jed translated. ‘That’s what you heard.’

  He watched as Silence scraped his heel across the picture, as if it might be used as evidence. Silence had always been very earnest and very careful. A secret, you always felt, would be safer with him than with anyone.

  ‘You know where?’ he asked.

  Silence shrugged. He picked up a stone and slung it at the row of tin cans. One dropped. Silence had this way of putting an end to things. That stone, it meant he’d told Jed all he knew. End of conversation.

  Jed thanked him. He walked home slowly, the long way round.

  That night Rita rang. She was crying.

  ‘Have you heard?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What’s going to happen now?’

  ‘I don’t know. What did they pick him up for?’

  ‘Arson.’

  That figured. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘They’re holding him downtown, but they’re going to move him soon.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Some detention centre. They won’t let you visit, though. You’re not old enough. Only people like parents can go.’

  ‘He hasn’t got any parents.’

  ‘I know.’

  He called the place the following morning, and they confirmed what Rita had told him. Nobody under the age of eighteen. That meant even Rita didn’t qualify for a couple of months. He wrote a letter instead, asking Vasco what had happened, and what he should do. It was ten days before he received the reply, and it wrongfooted him when it came.

  Listen, Jed, there is something you can do for me. I’ve got this brother called Francis. He’s about nine. Lives with some family over in Torch Bay. I go and see him, like maybe every couple of weeks, but now I can’t any more. Maybe you could go and explain things to him. He’s at 25025 Oakwood Drive. Take it easy. Vasco. P.S. The woman who lives there is a BITCH.

  A brother?

  He told Tip, and Tip seemed just as astonished. ‘Christ,’ Tip said, ‘he kept that under his hat, didn’t he?’

  The next day Jed caught a bus to the harbour. He sat on a green bench at the end of Quay 5, waiting for the Torch Bay ferry. The sky had clouded over, and wind scuffed and pinched the grey water. It was the kind of day that goaded you until you felt like smashing it.

  Such anger in him already.

  How was he going to, as Vasco put it, explain things? He couldn’t even explain things to himself.

  The ferry filled with tourists. Their sun-visors, their ice-creams. Their ceaseless, eager babble. Instead of taking a seat, Jed leaned against the metal door that led down to the engines. He read the instructions on what to do if the boat capsized. Half of him wished it would.

  When the ferry docked in Torch Bay, he was the first down the gangplank. He pushed through the crush of people on the quay, slipped into the quiet of a sidestreet. Three or four blocks back from the harbour the ground began to slope upwards; boutiques gave way to houses; trees appeared.

  Oakwood Drive was a wide residential street, its sidewalks planted with mahogany and wild oak. Houses stood in their own grounds, some Spanish-looking, some ranch-style, all of them the size of palaces. There was no dirt here, no life. The only sound came from a man who was operating a machine that sucked up leaves. It didn’t matter where Jed put his eyes, it always looked like a postcard. His mother would’ve loved it.

  25025 Oakwood Drive was a mansion. Red bricks, white shutters. Immaculate green lawns. Even a flagpole. The gravel crunched under Jed’s boots as he started up the drive. He felt watched. It was nothing like his experience outside Reg Gorelli’s door. No Judas eye here, no lens to draw his nose forwards till he looked like a fish or a rat. No, this watching was far more sophisticated: it was more like a landscape, and he was a speck on the landscape, a dot, something you could swat with ease, and nobody would ever hear, not if you coughed at the same time.

  He searched the porch for a bell, but all he could find was a chain of wrought-iron links. He reached up and pulled on it, half expecting a sudden rush of water. Instead he heard two solemn notes that sounded stolen from a church and, before the second of these notes had died away, the door opened and a woman stood in front of him. She had high, horizontal cheekbones, so her eyes seemed to be perching on ledges. Eyes like birds of prey. Any moment one of them might swoop down, snatch at him, and swerve away again, his heart dripping in its beak. Jed heard Vasco’s voice: The woman who lives there is a BITCH.

  He swallowed. ‘I’ve come to see Francis. I’ve got a message from his brother.’

  ‘His brother?’ Her voice was so cold. She probably kept it in the icebox.

  ‘Yeah, his brother. Vasco.’

  ‘Francis has no brother.’

  ‘But Vasco told me.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ said another voice, smaller, younger, not cold at all. ‘Who’s at the door?’

  Jed tried to peer round the woman, but she narrowed the gap to six inches and filled it with her buzzard eyes and her rippling turquoise dress.

  ‘Francis has no brother,’ she repeated. ‘There must be some mistake.’

  Strange that she should choose that word.

  ‘Goodbye.’ She closed the door.

  A gust of air-conditioned air moved past his face and lost itself in the heat of the driveway.

  He didn’t feel safe until he reached the sidewalk. Then he looked back over his shoulder. The house lay on its lawn, perfectly still, immaculate, blank. He thought of his old tapes, the ones he’d had for years, the ones he’d used over and over again. Their silence was always different to the silence of a new tape: it was loaded, prickly, with things recorded and erased; a silence that was like ghosts. That house was an old tape masquerading as a new one. It had recorded and erased, but it was pretending it had just come out of the cellophane. It had ghosts, but it wasn’t owning up to them.

  He bought a bag of Hawaiian Teardrops and sat on a wooden bench in the Torch Bay ferry terminal. Hawaiian Teardrops were hard chunks of pineapple candy that were coated with sugar crystals. If you ate too many of them, they took the skin off the inside of your mouth. He ate the whole bag and stared out over the grey water. Rain scratched on the windows, but it was still hot, hard to breathe. He felt the door close again. And that gust of cool air across his face.

  He remembered a morning not so long ago. He’d woken to the sound of hammer-blows. He’d reached out, across the gap between the two mattresses, and shoved Vasco in the ribs.

  ‘What’s that noise?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Vasco mumbled. ‘Maybe Reg is crucifying himself again.’

  Jed put his glasses on and eased out of bed. He poked his head out of the room. A man in blue dungarees was fitting a lock on Reg’s door.

  ‘Morning,’ Jed said. ‘Nice lock’

  The man patted the lock. ‘This is the business, this is. You can’t get stronger than this.’

  The new lock was just the latest addition to Reg’s defence system. They never really found out whether it was to keep Jesus in or the world out. Maybe there was nothing happening behind the door, or maybe there was Reg fastened to a home-made cross, some white cloth draped around his skinny loins, his moustache stained yellow by the vinegar.

  Finally it was just another thing you couldn’t get at.

  He saw that woman’s eyes widen like wings and leave her face. He saw the blank sockets, smooth as the inside of nests. He had to go and stand on the deck, both hands fastened to the cold rail. The ferry was rolling now, pitching into the waves. Sometimes it stalled, shuddering. Then it pitched forwards into the waves again. The city see-sawed, rain swarmed out of the sky. The inside of his mouth felt sweet but raw. A woma
n in a green mackintosh asked him if he was all right, she had to ask him three times before he could answer simply, ‘Yes.’

  Vasco’s case came up the following month. He was sentenced to eighteen months in a corrective institution. The next thing Jed heard, Vasco was somehow involved in the death of another inmate and he was sent to a top-security detention centre in another county.

  Jed had always thought of Vasco as high-frequency. He’d always seen Vasco as a kind of radio, picking up stations that no other radio could pick up. Maybe that was true, but maybe it was also true that he was picking up the wrong stations, stations that were dangerous. Jed had read about people hearing voices. He’d seen it in the paper. Some guy kills fourteen people and then he says, It was the voices, the voices told me to do it. That guy, he’s picking up the wrong stations. And suddenly he feared for his friend.

  It was seven years before he saw him again.

  Three

  Colours Everywhere

  The moment Nathan saw Harriet step out of the taxi, he knew that they’d slipped up somewhere. In the five years since their mother died they’d had nine different au pair girls and every single one of them had been ugly. It was basically Dad’s idea. He thought ugly girls were less trouble. Nathan and Georgia would spend entire afternoons sifting through the pictures the agency had sent. It was a game to them, and they often went too far, choosing some girl with a broken nose or a moustache. Even though they were playing by Dad’s rules, it’d be Dad, in the end, who’d object. There’d have to be a compromise: they’d settle on some plain girl who’d grown up on a farm.

  But there was Harriet, standing on the sidewalk in a pink sleeveless dress and white shoes with straps round the ankles. Her eyes sent out rays like cut glass turning in the sun. Her hair was light-brown, with a fringe that skimmed her eyebrows. Her limbs were slim and tanned. Nathan’s first thought on that warm September afternoon, and it may also have been Dad’s first thought, judging by the way his voice had lifted an octave in nervousness, was: She’s just not ugly enough.

  She was smiling as they walked out to the street to greet her, and Nathan recognised the smile from her picture. Her two front teeth overlapped slightly like fingers crossed for good luck. A moment of carelessness in the construction of her face. The slip that made her beautiful. He watched her run a hand through Georgia’s hair. He still couldn’t understand how they’d come to choose her. It must’ve been an old picture, taken at an unflattering age. Either that, or she just wasn’t photogenic.

  He carried her cases upstairs. She followed him. When he reached her room he put the cases down again and held the door open for her. It was a small room, but it faced west, over the garden. The hills rose in the distance, their browns and golds invaded by a wedge of black. There’d been a fire on the ridge that summer.

  But she’d stopped inside the doorway. ‘Oh,’ she said, and turned to him. ‘There are bars on the window.’

  He smiled. ‘There are bars on all the windows. It’s just the style of architecture. It’s sort of Spanish.’

  She reached up, pushed a hand into her fringe. One silver bracelet skittered down her arm.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s not a prison.’

  She sat down on the edge of the bed, tested the mattress with one hand. Then she smiled up at him. A wide, uncomplicated smile. ‘I’m glad it’s not a prison.’

  She was like no au pair girl they’d ever had before. She couldn’t cook, she played the radio too loud, she went out dancing at night. The house seemed to be admitting more light than it usually did; it was as if someone had knocked a few new windows in the walls. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, though. Perhaps her beauty was, in itself, disturbance enough. Her six months passed and at the end of that time she did what au pair girls always did: she flew home.

  Nathan hardly noticed. Not long after Harriet arrived, Mr Marshal had called Dad and asked him whether he’d thought of putting Nathan forward for the Moon Beach Lifesaving Club. Dad hadn’t, but he thoroughly approved of the idea; fitness, a sense of discipline, the ability to set a good example and, if need be, help others, these were all attributes that he held dear. As a result of that phone-call Nathan spent most of the weekday nights that winter training in the outdoor pool on Sunset Drive, and by the time Harriet left in the spring he was ready to apply for membership.

  On the first Saturday in April he rode down to the beach to meet with the captain of the Club. It was still early, nobody much about, just a few old people from the hotels; he looked at each of them as a person he might one day save. As he headed across the warm sand towards the look-out tower he passed two lifeguards. He’d met them once, at the pool with Tip. One of them was called Finn, which was a good name for a lifeguard, he thought. The other one was Ade. He told them he was trying out for the Club. They wished him luck.

  The captain was waiting by the tower, as arranged. He wore scarlet trunks and every time he moved you saw the muscles shift under his skin. He took one look at Nathan, then he turned his eyes out to the ocean, shook his hands on the end of his wrists. ‘You the guy who wants to join the Club?’

  Nathan said he was.

  ‘Let’s go for a swim.’

  They walked down to the waterline. Wave after wave slammed on to the packed sand. A dull hard sound, like a hand brought down on wood. The beach seemed to shudder every time.

  ‘Dumpers,’ the captain said. ‘Think you can handle it?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘I’ll give it a try.’

  The captain nodded. ‘You’ve got to get under the first wave. Then get your head up and grab yourself some air before the next wave hits.’

  Easy to say.

  Nathan beat the first two waves, and then he had to fight even to stay in the same place. Every time he dived under a wave he felt it haul him back towards the shore. He looked for the captain, but he couldn’t see that blond head anywhere. A wave high enough to cut the sun out curled above him. He dived too late. He was sucked down, spun round, the weight of water crushing the breath out of him. Somehow he found the surface for a moment, took in air, then he was rolled again. He fetched up in the shallows, blinded, coughing.

  A hand on his shoulder. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yeah.’ But the salt burned the back of his throat; he could hardly speak.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Want to try again?’

  ‘OK.’

  And the same thing happened, only this time he almost drowned. He came to the surface, too weak to breathe, and was sinking back again when the captain took hold of him, and it was like some passage from the Bible, he felt as if he’d been raised from the dead, lifted by some divine, invisible hand. He heard a calm voice above the crashing water.

  ‘Relax, just relax.’

  And he relaxed. The captain was some kind of prophet.

  ‘You’ll be fine. You’re going to drink some water, but you’ll be fine.’

  And he was fine. But it wasn’t prophecy. What it was, in fact, as he came to understand later, was knowledge.

  Back on the sand he felt limpness and bruising in every part of his body. But even more painful than that was the shame in his head. He hadn’t even got past the third wave, he’d failed, they’d never take him now.

  ‘Thanks for getting me out.’

  The captain grinned. ‘That’s what I’m here for.’

  ‘I’m all right in the pool, but this,’ and he glanced over his shoulder, ‘this is nothing like the pool.’

  ‘No kidding.’ The captain turned his grey eyes on the waves. ‘The spring tides’re on their way.’ He looked at Nathan as Nathan got shakily to his feet. ‘I like what you did out there. Most guys, they wouldn’t’ve gone in a second time.’

  Nathan shrugged.

  ‘Come down tomorrow. We’ll see how things work out.’

  Nathan heard a chuckle behind him. He turned to see Tip standing on the sand, his feet turned outwards, his arms folded across
his chest.

  ‘You must’ve drunk about half the fucking ocean.’

  Nathan just looked at him. ‘Yeah, well,’ he said, ‘I was thirsty, wasn’t I?’

  He almost died again on the way home. He jinked through the rush-hour traffic on the bridge, skimming down the outside of the fast lane, cutting back inside for the Blenheim exit. He reached the driveway breathless, threw his bicycle down, and ran into the house.

  He found Dad sitting in his red chair.

  ‘You remember I had a trial for the lifeguards? Well, I’ve done it. I’m in.’

  Dad was staring into the corner of the room, his spectacles dangling from one finger. ‘That’s good.’

  ‘For the Lifesaving Club, Dad. Just like you wanted.’

  Dad just nodded. ‘Excellent.’

  ‘I almost drowned twice doing it.’

  ‘Well done.’

  He sat down next to Dad and stared at him. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  Dad sighed. ‘I’m in love with her.’

  Nathan looked around the room. ‘Who?’

  ‘Harriet.’

  ‘Harriet?’

  All his excitement dwindled as his mind whirled back three months to a shopping trip with her. When he climbed into the car, she was smiling at him in that sugary way that used to make his teeth ache. But he’d probably smiled back.

  As she shifted into reverse she turned to him again. ‘Tell me, Nathan, have you ever made love to a girl?’

  He looked at her quickly, then he looked down at his hands. That smile again. There was something greedy under the sugar, something predatory. He felt her words trying to open him up. It was like she had a can-opener and he was just sitting there, a can of something. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Have you ever kissed a girl?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Probably? Can’t you remember?’

  ‘Not recently,’ he said. ‘That’s what I meant.’

  She gave him a curious look and then smiled to herself. Looking back at the road again, she had to swerve to avoid a man on a bicycle. She was still smiling as she swerved.