The Five Gates of Hell

by Rupert Thomson

  He saw an elderly couple approaching.

  ‘The cathedral?’ They consulted each other, they disagreed, they changed their minds. At last they pointed back up the street, nodding and smiling.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ they chorused gaily. ‘Yes, we’re sure.’

  He ran off up the street, turned a corner, then another, and stopped. Still no sign of the cathedral. The elderly couple must have been mistaken.

  He teetered on the brink of panic now. One step forwards and he would fall headlong. He looked one way, then he looked the other. Sweat seeped into his eyes. Thoughts came from all directions and collided. He felt he might be going mad.

  A car came towards him. He stepped out into the road and waved his arms. The man behind the wheel was only too willing to oblige. ‘Of course, of course,’ he said. ‘Jump in.’ He seemed to think that Nathan was new to the city. Every now and then he lifted a finger off the wheel and pointed out some famous bridge or statue or museum. Nathan was about to free the man from his illusion when the man braked and, leaning across Nathan, opened the door for him.

  ‘There you are,’ he said.

  Nathan got out and looked around. ‘But the cathedral.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ the man said. And, shifting into gear, he drove away.

  Nathan looked round. Scrapyards, jetties, railway tracks. The sun was setting. He felt no sense of urgency now. Waves were pages turning. Railway trucks were edged in gold.

  When he woke he was lying in Dad’s bed. Georgia was bent over the basin, throwing up. It was the morning of the funeral.

  The day proved awkward from the beginning, like a knife you can’t pick up without cutting yourself. Harriet slipped on the stairs and twisted her ankle. Yvonne couldn’t find the fish brooch that she always wore for funerals. She lit a cheroot to calm herself, and promptly burned a hole in her dress. Georgia had taken pills to settle her stomach, but she was still throwing up every hour.

  The car arrived at two. The funeral director had a cold; he had to keep reaching into the back for tissues. ‘Usually, of course, these are for clients,’ he said, ‘but in this case, if you don’t mind,’ and he blew his nose again, and sighed.

  Nathan glanced at Georgia.

  She summoned up the makings of a smile. ‘I think the pills are beginning to work,’ she said.

  He pushed the hair back from her forehead. ‘One thing about a sea burial,’ he said. ‘If you want to throw up, at least you can just do it over the side.’

  They arrived at the Y Street wharf. The chartered boat was already moored by the quay. The traditional awning, white canvas with black edges, fluttered in the breeze. A modest congregation sat underneath on benches.

  As they waited for the casket to be hoisted on to the boat, Nathan noticed a preacher on the other side of the quay. You could tell he was a preacher. He had a microphone in his hand and his eyes were set way back in his head, as if he’d seen the Lord once too often. Nathan watched him step on to a crate. There was a crackle and a whine from the microphone.

  ‘This is God’s distant early-warning system.’

  A drunk lay slumped against an oil drum, a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag beside him. At the sound of the preacher’s voice he twitched, wiped one eye with the back of his hand, and looked up, moistening his lips.

  ‘Heaven is a real place,’ the preacher said. ‘There are people up there right now, enjoying themselves.’

  The drunk lifted his bottle and shook the last few drops into his throat. ‘Well, how about that,’ he said and, turning his head in the direction of the preacher, he shouted, ‘Hallelujah,’ then he winked at Nathan, as if they were in this together, and fell back in a heap and shut his eyes.

  The preacher turned his volume up. His voice now carried across the quay to the boat, interfering with the sombre piped music. Several members of the congregation looked round.

  ‘Seven years ago,’ the preacher informed them, ‘I was a useless person.’ He pointed at the drunk. ‘Seven years ago I was like him, but then Jesus,’ and his voice rose and wavered, and his eyes lifted to the sky, ‘yes, Jesus, he came to me and he planted the seeds of truth in me –’

  A black woman stood below the preacher. She tilted her head on one side as if she was trying very hard to understand.

  Then she must’ve said something.

  The preacher levelled a finger at her. ‘You’ve got a filthy mouth.’ His eyes scoured the small audience for support. ‘You see? This here’s what –’

  Suddenly Yvonne was standing below him. She reached up, snatched the microphone out of his hands. With two brisk movements she wrenched the wire loose and tossed the microphone into the water. It was so brutal, and yet so matter of fact. It was like watching somebody wring a chicken’s neck.

  ‘Someone had to do it,’ she hissed through her black veil as she passed Nathan on the way back.

  They followed the coffin on to the boat and took their seats in the front row. The engines shuddered, the ropes were loosed; the quay slid backwards like a piece of moving scenery. Nathan could still see the preacher standing, shocked and speechless, on his box. The earthquakes in people’s heads, half the city’s population was cracked, a rabble of doom-merchants, psychos, ghouls. They could smell a funeral a mile off, and out they crawled, out of the woodwork. A funeral lit them up, it was like fuel, it kept them burning for days. It wasn’t just the old and the rich who moved to Moon Beach. The city was like a dangerous bend in a road. If you sat on that bend for long enough you’d be sure to see something.

  A shadow passed the length of the boat and Nathan looked up. The bridge arched high above. This was where the harbour ended and the ocean began. The boat lurched as the first real waves lifted the bow and dropped it again. He glanced at Georgia. Though pale, she seemed to be holding up.

  She put her head close to his. ‘Everything’s going wrong.’

  He squeezed her hand.

  ‘It’s so quiet,’ she whispered. ‘I hate it.’

  He nodded. Then he nudged her. ‘Dad would’ve liked it.’

  She smiled at that.

  It was quieter still when they reached the place. They passed between two floating pedestals, the gateway to the cemetery.

  YOU ARE NOW ENTERING CORAL PASTURES.

  The engines cut out, some kind of anchor dropped. Then only the slapping of waves against the hull, the creak and whine of timbers straining, the screech of gulls.

  The priest rose to his feet and began to speak. He talked of Dad’s faith. His courage and resilience in the face of adversity. His sense of humour.

  Nathan’s mind wandered. His mood seemed like a distillation of his dream. The panic, then the calm. His eyes drifted over the side. They were such queer, still patches of water, the ocean cemeteries. The sites had been chosen carefully, between the main shipping lanes and north of the gulfstream, so they were free of disturbance, both from boats and from currents. The ocean bed was a maze of fissures and ravines. Nobody knew how deep they went. There was a story about an oil tanker that had veered off course and steamed right through Heaven Sound. That was the last anyone heard of it. Helicopters were sent out, teams of divers too, but the water yielded nothing, not a single body, not a trace of oil.

  There was a crash. He turned just in time to see the coffin sink below the surface of the waves. The engines spluttered, churned. The congregation shifted on their benches, moved their feet. Somebody coughed. The boat swung round, cutting a neat sickle of white water on the ocean, and Nathan saw the city on the horizon, twelve miles away. It must be a long time, he thought, since Dad had travelled this far.

  The wake took place at the house on Mahogany Drive. No more than a dozen people came. Nathan moved among the guests, offering drinks, accepting condolences. His dream came to him in flashes. The packed cathedral. All those people weeping. How sarcastic that now seemed.

  After an hour most people had left. Yvonne looked round, assembling a cour
ageous smile. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘at least they’re together now.’

  Harriet was standing right behind her. ‘Who’s together?’

  And suddenly the air seemed deadened, as if there’d been an explosion. The few guests that remained stood about in small, shocked groups.

  It will require, Nathan thought, a certain amount of tact.

  ‘Who’s together?’ Harriet asked again.

  Nathan spoke gently. ‘Dad asked to be buried with our mother. It was in the will.’

  Harriet put her glass on the table and left the room. In the hush that followed they heard the back door slam. Through the window Nathan saw Harriet stumbling down the garden.

  ‘I didn’t mean –’ Yvonne began.

  Nathan put an arm around her. ‘I know you didn’t.’

  ‘Go after her,’ Yvonne said. ‘Make sure she’s all right.’ She turned away. ‘I just wasn’t thinking.’

  Nathan left the house by the french windows. He crossed the lawn and passed through a covered archway. The vegetable garden beyond had been allowed to run wild. He walked between rows of fruit trees. The fruit lay rotting, unwanted, in the long grass. He passed through a second archway. The wooden hoop supporting the foliage had almost collapsed beneath its weight. He had to bend double to get through. Once on the other side he stood still and looked around. This was the part of the garden they used to call the Jungle. There was something about the Jungle. It wasn’t big enough to get lost in, but almost. When you stood in the Jungle, the house seemed dimensions away, as if, in order to get back indoors, you had to alter the way your mind worked, you had to think your way back in. How foreign their names sounded when they heard them called. How eerie. And suddenly he remembered standing here, it was dark-green all around him, but the sky above was blue, the sun must’ve been setting, it was quiet, just the creak of a tree, the whir of an insect’s wing, he’d been standing motionless, as if in a trance, and then he heard a voice, his mother’s voice. ‘Nathan?’ she called, and he called back, ‘Yes?’ but there was no second call, and he turned round, and there was nobody there, not a sound, and he felt strange then, he felt as if he’d been visited. It couldn’t have been far from where he was standing now, though he wouldn’t have been able to say where exactly.

  ‘Harriet?’

  He’d almost forgotten that he was looking for her. If she was still in the garden, there was only one place she could be, and that was the summerhouse. As he bent down and began to force his way through the undergrowth he could taste alcohol in his mouth. It was a stale taste, musty, pale-grey.

  ‘Harriet?’

  His voice only seemed to travel a few feet, then it stopped dead. As if it had been swallowed up. That was how that voice had sounded to him all those years ago. Dead. But near. Against his ear. That was why he’d turned round. And then, when he saw there was nothing there, he ran. He burst over the threshold and into the house, his right arm ripped open from the wrist to the elbow. It must’ve caught on something, a thorn, a bramble, a sharp branch. He hadn’t noticed. The blood ran down the inside of his arm, where the skin was pale, and collected in the palm of his hand as he held the wound out for Dad to look at. He still had the scar now, twenty years later, a long thin groove down the inside of his right forearm, as if he was made of candlewax and someone had run their fingernail the length of it.

  ‘Harriet?’

  He saw her as he called her name for the third time. She was sitting on the steps of the summerhouse. He was seeing small things with such clarity now. A green leaf in her hair. Part of a spider’s web. The whites of her eyes clouded with red. She’d been crying, but she wasn’t crying now.

  When she saw him she attempted a smile. It didn’t quite work. Her face was like a plate on a stick. Spinning. Balanced. But only for so long. The edges of her mouth were flickering, as if miniature hearts beat there. He sat down beside her, put an arm round her shoulders. He wanted to comfort her. She turned and pressed her face against his chest. She cried into the air below his chin.

  He felt her shaking all the way through her bones and into his. He looked up through the branches into the sky, waiting for her tears to pass. The sun coloured the high branches a deep burnt orange. Down below, where they were sitting, the air softened, became almost visible, as if shaded in with charcoal, closer to smoke than air. A bird sang four notes and stopped. The first three notes were identical. The fourth started out the same way, then it stretched and lifted an octave. It was as if the bird had asked a question in whatever language it spoke.

  She looked up at him and her mouth, already close to his, moved closer, seemed to falter, then moved closer and they kissed. He kept his mind completely still, it was like something preserved, like something in a jar in a laboratory, but his body came undone and shook, there was a sound inside him like the sound tracks make when a train’s coming, that hiss and crack the length of his veins, that shudder in his blood.

  He couldn’t speak. He knew this was something that had been happening slowly for a long time, something that had to happen or he was lost, but it was such a brittle structure they were building, one word would topple it, shatter it, one word would be enough to jerk them back into that ordinary daylight where nothing could be changed or righted, nothing could unravel.

  He took her hand and led her up the steps. It was the past inside, it was long ago. A tennis racket, a pair of flippers, a garden hose. The window with its barricade of foliage. The light barely filtered through. The smell of old dry rubber and dead grass. The smell of the wooden handles of spades. Two buttons of her blouse had come unfastened. He could see her breasts tilting against the black silk. She was sitting on his lap. They kissed again. He didn’t need to see her face. It was printed in his head, his memory. His knees between the insides of her thighs, she drew him sliding into her. He bit her neck, that muscle at the back. A gasp. Her hair swung against his face, and something metal fell. He heard himself, it sounded like a door opening somewhere inside him, it was an old door, it had been stuck for years, you had to heave on it, you needed all your strength, and then it gave a few inches, and cried out as it gave.

  He felt silence descend and press on him. He looked at her. She was squatting on the floor, some distance from him.

  ‘Colours everywhere,’ he said.

  She found a tissue, wiped between her legs.

  ‘You said that was what it was like,’ he said, ‘remember?’

  She straightened her skirt. ‘We should go back.’

  He watched her merge with the undergrowth until only her calves showed, pale as milk in the shadows.

  It was done, she was gone; he was alone.

  Skull Candy

  Now that Jed was driving, and the lines were feeding into the front of his car like white candy, piece after piece after piece, he thought of himself as others thought of him. He thought of himself as a parasite, a leech. No sense pretending otherwise. He knew whose blood he wanted too. Though he’d known that for six years.

  It had happened soon after his drive out to to the lake. One night he was standing outside the back of the ice-cream parlour, washing the stainless-steel vats, when he heard voices coming from the manager’s office across the yard. It was so quiet out there. Turn around and there was desert clear to the horizon. Just wind plucking at the scrub and the soft electrical humming of the stars. He had no trouble picking up the conversation.

  ‘That guy Jed,’ Celia’s uncle said, his voice sloppy with alcohol, ‘you know the guy I mean?’

  ‘Yeah, I seen him.’ The second man had his back turned. Jed could only see a piece of blue shirt and one thick forearm. He didn’t recognise the voice.

  ‘That guy, there’s something about him –’

  ‘Makes your skin go cold just looking at him.’

  ‘Yeah. I don’t know why I hired him. Stranger like that, shit. There’s something about him, that’s for sure.’

  One of the two men crushed a beer can.

  ‘It’s like yo
u look at him and he’s sucking you dry,’ the second man said. ‘It’s like he’s a leech or something.’

  Celia’s uncle let out a high cackling laugh. ‘You hit it there. We oughter call him that. We oughter call him the leech.’

  When Jed heard that cackling laugh again, the stars went out. There was just the night and that lit window and his white fury. He wanted to kill them both.

  Then later, stretched out on his bed at Mrs O’Neill’s, he let the name sink down through him like a stone, he watched it go, and by the time he saw it settle on the bottom he decided he liked it. The name began to grow on him, he began to feel it in his fingertips and in his blood, and in his love of blood, he began to see it as his power, his future.

  A road sign loomed, snapped by. Four hundred miles to go. If he drove all night he might make Moon Beach by morning. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a cream toffee, stuck it in his mouth. The wrapper joined a heap of identical wrappers on the seat beside him. Your pockets crackle when you move. That was Carol’s voice in the car with him. He saw her standing outside the Starlite Bar, her mouth tilted upwards, stitched. He saw her stumble down the steps of the cathedral. He saw the barbed wire of her scar. You take kindness where you find it, she’d said to him once, because most of this world’s cruelty. We know that, Jed, don’t we? We know that. Some nights he’d felt such scorn for her, Don’t put me in the same coffin as you, it may be your time, but it isn’t mine. Other nights he’d almost cried. Most of this world’s cruelty.

  They’d come for him. He’d known they were going to come, it was part of his initiation, he couldn’t leave until it happened. He heard their boots in the hall and up the stairs. He heard their voices pushing at the flimsy, chipboard walls. Celia’s uncle, that man in the blue shirt, a couple of the power-station boys. No shortage of men for the job. He waited on the edge of his bed. He watched their boots trample across his orange carpet. Steel toecaps, steel heels. Cracks in the leather red with dust.