The Five Gates of Hell

by Rupert Thomson

  A sudden explosion of glass made him jump. One of the power-station boys had knocked a table over on his way to the bathroom. Drinks everywhere.

  ‘Creed had Vasco’s brother killed,’ Mitch said, ‘and then he delivered the head himself. What do you think?’

  Jed picked up his glass and swirled the last inch of beer around. ‘I wouldn’t say anything about it if I was you.’

  ‘I’m not saying anything about it. I’m just telling you.’

  ‘How did you hear?’

  ‘I’ve got a couple of friends from the old days, they’re vultures now. One night I was down in a bar on V Street and their tongues got loose.’ Mitch looked up at Jed. ‘Why? You think it’s just talk?’

  ‘No,’ Jed said, ‘I think it’s true.’

  Mitch said nothing.

  ‘I worked for Creed,’ Jed went on. ‘I watched him. Driving someone, you get to do a lot of that. Stuff like what you’re talking about, it’s a game for him. It’s entertainment.’ He saw that face again, he heard the voice. ‘You know what he told me once? He told me there are no borders.’

  ‘If you knew all that,’ Mitch said, ‘how come you worked for him?’

  Jed just stared at him across the top of his glass.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ Mitch said. ‘Stupid question.’

  Wayne came over. ‘You boys are getting mighty serious.’

  Mitch laughed and drained his glass. ‘Give me another beer, Wayne. Then we’ll see who’s serious.’

  Mitch left the next morning at dawn. They walked to the edge of town and shook hands. The sun lifted over the hills and threw their shadows across the road.

  Mitch took a last look round. ‘You know what I like about out here? The air’s clean.’

  Jed didn’t say anything.

  Mitch swung his leg across the bike, braced his foot on the kickstart, and pushed down hard. The engine fired.

  Jed squinted into the low yellow sun. ‘Safe trip, Mitch.’

  Mitch nodded. ‘Be well.’ He fitted his goggles over his eyes. ‘Sell lots of ice-cream.’

  The back tyre mimed a shallow S, then the bike straightened up, began to shrink. The rasp and snap of the engine bounced against the walls of the houses behind him, tumbled over the rocks and dust beyond. There were gaps as Mitch eased his wrist back on the throttle. Then one long hum that slowly faded, became part of the silence.

  When Jed turned round, he saw Celia standing on the road. She was dressed in nothing but her cotton nightgown and her cardigan. Her feet were bare. He knew what she’d done. She’d crept out through her bedroom window, but she’d left half a dozen coarse blonde hairs behind her, flickering on the damaged flyscreen wire, like evidence.

  ‘He’s gone,’ she said.

  He nodded.

  ‘I liked him.’ She tipped one ear to the road, listening to the last of Mitch. The hem of her nightgown stirred. ‘Now he’s really gone.’ She moved her toes in the orange dust at the edge of the road. ‘He didn’t stay long, did he?’

  ‘Why would he stay?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She scratched her ribs through a tear in the cotton. ‘Why did you?’

  He stuck his hands in his pockets. Then took one hand out again and picked at his neck. The sun prickled on his skin. Those early rays could feel like insect legs.

  After Mitch came through, things were never quite the same. It was as if Mitch had left the freezer door ajar. There was the distant drone of an alarm and things began to thaw.

  Celia stole into his room one day while he was out at work. When he came home he found her peering into the well of his top hat. He took it away from her.

  ‘Moon Beach,’ she said. Her eyes were wide as new horizons.

  He heard the voices of the power-station boys on the street below. They always got drunk at the Commercial Hotel when their shift was over. He wanted Celia to leave. She pulled the blankets back instead and took off all her clothes.

  ‘What about Mrs O’Neill?’ he said.

  Celia laughed. ‘If it’s not on TV, she’s not interested.’

  But he wouldn’t fuck her, so she went to sleep. He paced round the bed. Felt invaded, nervous.

  ‘You’re not ugly,’ she said later, though nobody had mentioned ugliness, not even once. ‘You’re more sort of, I don’t know, hurt.’ She was lying on her back, pulling lazily at one of her nipples, watching it stretch. ‘Your skin,’ she said, ‘it shows it. Like you had boiling water on you or something. Like you were scalded. Did that happen, Jed? Did you have boiling water on you?’

  Her voice had brightened suddenly. She thought she was on to something. She thought she could know him as well as he knew himself. Maybe she thought she could know him better.

  He turned away from her. He didn’t want to look at her. He knew what the expression would be. All blown-up with sleeping. Fat with trust. People were always telling you things. What did they think they were, mirrors? Did they think that was the only way you could find out who you were, by listening to them?

  He went and stood by the window.

  Adam’s Creek, midnight. View from the second floor of Mrs O’Neill’s boarding house. A yellow light in the street, the yellow smudged with coal or dust. One telegraph pole, with a metal sign attached: MAIN STREET. A railway line.

  Just then a row of trucks rattled from right to left. They looked like giant soft-drink cans on wheels. They always passed at about the same time, right after midnight, and it was something he liked to watch, the way other people watch sunsets or the ocean. It was like letting your breath out slowly, it took him far away from himself.

  A man moved in front of the silver trucks, moved in the opposite direction. Shoulders pulled back, fists knocking against his thighs.

  ‘He’s late tonight.’

  Celia shifted in the bed. ‘Who is?’

  ‘Wayne.’

  A silence.

  ‘You’re all locked up,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if you were all rotten in there.’

  He turned again, surprised. He saw her breasts spilling across her ribs and that chip missing from her tooth where her brother hit her with a stone. She didn’t know she was right. She was just saying stuff. He saw her breasts and her broken tooth, and he moved towards the bed, seconds away from fucking her. It was best when it felt like you were fighting gravity, fighting the pull of forces greater than yourselves. Just now they were in the same place, like Wayne and the trucks, but sometime soon they’d be miles apart.

  Still. He’d allowed her closer than anyone else, and when his clothes were off and he was tired she read him the way she read the weather or the mountains or the dust, she ran her fingers over his pale, scarred body and she guessed close to the truth.

  They were still driving up to Blood Rock. Sometimes they’d fuck right away, or sometimes they’d wait till they were about to leave, but they’d always do it on the sheet, the same sheet he’d brought that first time, as if, without it, some spell might be broken and everything would fall apart. By now it was stained with blood, but Celia liked that, she thought it was romantic. ‘It looks like flowers,’ she said, ‘like roses.’ The sheet was a diary of their meetings, a history of their love. She suspected it might have special powers. If you wrapped it round you, for instance, it’d keep you from feeling any pain. Or if you spread it on the ground you could study it like tea-leaves and read the future there. Jed wasn’t so sure, he didn’t like the idea that the future was all decided already and he didn’t know anything about it, but he indulged her, and the bloodstains remained, and grew. He couldn’t have got rid of them anyway, even if he’d wanted to. He’d tried once, secretly, in Mrs O’Neill’s washing machine, but the powder wouldn’t shift them. It just wasn’t true what they said in those commercials.

  The last time they went to the rock, everything began the same way as usual. The sun was going down, the power station laid a creased white sleeve of smoke against the darkening sky. She sat and stared at the view, while he opened the t
runk and lifted out the sheet, complete with its light-brown rose of blood.

  When she turned and saw the sheet spread out on the ground she smiled and scuttled through the dust on her heels till she was next to him. He put a hand on her shoulder. Reached into her mouth with his tongue and moved it across her uneven teeth. Felt that tiny missing triangle. A murmur lifted in her throat like the sound of the wind blowing. His hand dipped through the buttons on her dress, grazed her nearest breast, felt the nipple gather.

  They fucked and fucked, and the flower on the sheet blushed red and grew new petals. A slow breeze moved across his naked back. She smiled at him with her mouth, her eyes wide and still.

  ‘Where’s your wedding ring?’

  He wasn’t quick enough. ‘What wedding ring?’

  ‘You’ve never been married,’ she said, ‘have you?’

  And, to his surprise, he said, ‘No.’

  He pulled out of her and lay down. His face seemed pressed against the sky. There was a long silence. Then an aeroplane flew by. It was so high up, it whined like a fly.

  ‘You’ve been lying all along,’ she said.

  Sooner or later he’d known that he would tell the truth. You can lie and lie beautifully, but sooner or later the truth comes back like a wave and sweeps everything before it. The people of Adam’s Creek had accepted him. People like Celia. People like Wayne and Zervos. They thought he was a bit peculiar, maybe, but they’d accepted him all the same. Peculiar, but not a liar. Well, they were fools. They were all fools. He’d been like that once, he’d trusted and believed, and look what had happened to him. He’d been thrown away. Thrown away like a candy wrapper, thrown away like trash. In his head they were trash too, for trusting and believing him. Part of him didn’t want to get away with it. Part of him wanted to be found out and punished. And so he’d told Celia the truth. And now there was nothing else he could say.

  There was one thing he hadn’t lied about, and that was her blood, how much he’d loved and honoured it, that wasn’t a lie. But it wasn’t enough to save them either. And she wouldn’t listen now. She turned her face away. He could only see one ear, some damp hair. When he leaned over her, tried to bring her face back, she tucked her lips inside her mouth and wouldn’t speak.

  It wouldn’t have been enough, though. It really wouldn’t. She belonged in this stage set, among these lies. She belonged here, where things weren’t real. It was a warp in time, a secret crease in space. This precipice, this sheet. She was here, but he wasn’t. Not really. It wasn’t really him.

  After he dropped her outside her house that evening he never saw her again. He woke up every day and went to work at the ice-cream parlour, but he began to hate the taste, the sight, the very thought of it. It was his life, all that frozen mess. His fury when the doorbell jangled and a family of tourists in shorts and visors came babbling in. His fury while they scanned the world of forty-five flavours.

  ‘Fudgana?’ They’d be blinking, their heads tilted at him, all at different angles. ‘What’s Fudgana?’

  ‘It’s our special,’ he’d hiss. ‘Four scoops of vanilla with hot fudge, banana wheels and whipped cream. It’s two-fifty.’

  They often had Fudgana and they were often, he hoped, violently sick in the car about half an hour later.

  His fury, his revulsion.

  One day he took the afternoon off without telling anyone. He drove out past the graveyard where he’d stood alone in the wind and hurt. He drove out of town and just kept going. There was nothing west of Adam’s Creek, nothing for miles. A low range of hills lifted in the north, yellow, rumpled, threadbare, as if someone had been carrying a lionskin and had grown tired of it and had thrown it down. Otherwise the land was flat and hot, studded with dull stones. Shreds of rubber twisted and coiled at the edge of the highway. Just tyres that had burst. When he first set foot in Adam’s Creek he used to think they were snakes or lizards, some kind of reptile anyway. It was that kind of country, somehow, safe things looked dangerous, specially in the corner of your eye. Or maybe the landscape was his mirror, and he was just seeing himself. In any case, he was still deceived sometimes, even after six years.

  He drove further than he meant to. The road was so straight, it was hard to stop. Stopping would’ve been like looking away from a hypnotist’s swinging silver watch. His long spine ached, and his eyes felt hot and flat against the windshield, like eggs broken on to a rock. The dense grey sky seemed denser than before, so grey in places that it seemed almost green. Then he saw the sign. A wooden sign stuck at the beginning of a red dirt track. LAKE QUIRINDI, it said. 24 MILES.

  He took the turning without knowing why. Thinking, maybe, that it would break the monotony, the tedious spell of the highway. He had to drive now, where before he had merely steered. There were pot-holes to avoid, riverbeds to cross. It seemed to give him a purpose which, up until he saw the sign, he hadn’t had. Though he couldn’t have said what that purpose might be.

  Soon there was nothing except the laboured surging of the engine and his head jolting on his spindly neck and a swarm of red dust in the rear window. He seemed to have been driving for ever. He’d be reaching the lake soon, and then what? A sudden vision of Celia, and the blood rushed to that part of him. He took one hand off the wheel and tried to push it down. He couldn’t leave it there for long. He was driving fast and the road kept surprising him. Those riverbeds could snap an axle as crisply as the way that Zervos snapped his fingers when he danced. One of those deep troughs of dust could suck his wheels down, and there’d be nobody passing on this road, not for days, maybe, maybe not even then, and he hadn’t thought to bring water along or tell anybody where he’d gone, it had all happened too fast, there hadn’t been a moment. He sat up straighter and locked both hands on the wheel. He could die out here, and he wasn’t ready. It wasn’t his time.

  The loud engine, the road slippery with dust. And then he came over a rise and saw the lake below. He stabbed the brake, stabbed too hard, and his back wheels slurred in the dirt.

  There was no water.

  Now he remembered someone telling him about this place. The lake itself had dried up thousands of years ago. It was some kind of ancient burial site. Relics had been unearthed. Pots, charms, bones. There were sand dunes here, he remembered. They’d been given names by the local people – the Grand Canyon, the Great Wall of China – on account of the strangeness of their formations. He could just make out the sand dunes now, a blond strip on the far side of the lake, a good ten miles away.

  He let the car forwards, down the hill, and on to the white road that led across the lake bed. Halfway across he imagined the water there again, he saw the lake fill up, some ghost of the ocean haunting him, and shuddered at the thought of drowning in such loneliness, in such heat. There were no animals here. Only a twitching at the edges of his vision. Snakes, he thought. And then he thought: Tyres. Just tyres.

  He stopped the car where the road lost itself in sand and got out. He stood still and listened. Heard one bird. It sounded like a tap dripping. Give it time and it would fill the lake all by itself, just with its song.

  The air was thick. So thick that the oxygen seemed buried in it, hard to extract. Breathing like mining. He looked up at the sky. Clouds on the boil, the whole sky simmering. White cracks showed in the grey, white cracks fanning out like the bones in the wings of birds. He looked down again and the sand seemed pink in this storm light. He began to walk, his eyes still on the ground. He passed scattered jawbones, pale twists of wood. He stopped and picked one up, and was surprised by how light it was. Everything had been sucked out of it. All the wood’s blood gone.

  He was climbing now. The sand under his feet had been crusty at first, ribbed, but now it was turning smooth, soft, unmarked. He’d left the castles and the monuments behind, he was climbing a dune that was featureless, untouched. Another footprint would’ve been a shock, a threat. The wind had risen. His ear to a seashell. There was only that now, the hollow roar and scrape of the wind
and the scuffing of his feet in the sand. He lifted his eyes and saw that he was almost at the top. He was about to move on when something tapped him on the shoulder. Someone. He jumped, spun round. Nobody there. And yet he could have sworn that someone had tapped him on the shoulder.

  And then raindrops began to fall in the sand all around him. Fat drops of rain placed in the sand, almost one by one, like counters on a board game. But there was no board. Or was there?

  And then, just as suddenly as they’d started, they stopped. It was the shortest rainstorm he’d ever seen. He could count the drops. There were thirty-six of them.

  And then he knew what it was that had tapped him on the shoulder. It was the first drop of rain.

  And he knew what it meant too. He’d been singled out. He’d been anointed. He was special. Places like this, they knew.

  He moved past the collection of dark holes in the sand and, with half a dozen steps, he’d reached the top of the rise. He half expected ocean, the white towers of Moon Beach, but there was only land, land that looked infinite, land without end, and he stood still and stared, as if by staring he could make something happen, the first drop of rain already drying on his shoulder.

  Heaven is a Real Place

  The phone woke Nathan out of a deep sleep. He reached out, and picked up the receiver. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Nathan?’

  He could tell it was long-distance, the line was so gravelly and hollow, but he didn’t recognise the voice. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘It’s Georgia.’

  Georgia? His eyes opened. This was unheard of, Georgia never called. He was about to make a joke about it when she said, ‘I don’t know how to say this.’ She sounded strict, almost officious. It took any jokes he might’ve made and threw them away.

  ‘I’ve never said it before.’ She paused. ‘My dad’s dead.’ She paused again. ‘Sorry, I don’t know why I said that. He’s your dad too.’

  They were on the phone for an hour, not really speaking, a few words scattered among the silence. They were linked, that was the important thing. It was as if they were clinging to each other, and they couldn’t let go. If one of them hung up they’d be torn apart again, three thousand miles.