The Five Gates of Hell

by Rupert Thomson

  In ten minutes he was walking into TATTOO CITY. The walls were papered with the usual designs: anchors, roses, skulls. Nobody had numbers like he had. He could hear the buzzing of Mitch’s needle-gun. He stamped down to the workshop at the back. Mitch was working on a boy’s left shoulder. Jed waited for silence, then he bit off a piece of Brittle. Crisp as a bone snapping. It almost took his front teeth out. Then he said, ‘You set me up, Mitch.’

  Mitch looked round. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’

  ‘You fucking set me up. Admit it.’

  The boy peered at Jed, mouth hanging open. Jed wanted to fill it with something. Liquid concrete. Manure. Glue.

  Mitch spoke to the boy. ‘Give me ten minutes.’

  The boy nodded.

  Mitch put his needle-gun down and crossed the room. He stood in front of the door to his house, hands dangling against his thighs. ‘You want to talk or don’t you?’

  Jed led the way into the house. One dark corridor, all the rooms on the left. He passed the kitchen. Mitch’s old lady was sitting at the table, hands clasped together as if in prayer. Wisps of black hair veiled her eyes. Jed paused, but Mitch pushed him between the shoulderblades.

  ‘In the study.’

  The study was in the back. One small window looked on to the verandah where they’d drunk beer the week before. One wall was lined with shelves. Books, model boats, clocks.

  Mitch took a pipe out of the rack on the mantelpiece and began to pack it with tobacco. Jed counted the clocks, trying to keep his anger down. There were eleven. Mitch sank into a leather armchair. Jed counted the clocks again, just to make sure he hadn’t missed any. He hadn’t.

  ‘You look pretty strange,’ Mitch said. ‘You look so strange, I didn’t hardly recognise you.’

  ‘I could be looking even stranger,’ Jed said. ‘I could be fucking looking dead.’

  Mitch lit his pipe. He leaned forwards, tossed the match into the fireplace, leaned back again. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you can’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  ‘Why did you do it, Mitch? Why did you set me up like that?’

  Mitch moved his eyes on to Jed’s face and left them there. ‘How do you know it was me?’

  ‘It must’ve been you. You were the only one who knew.’

  ‘You might’ve been followed.’

  ‘I wasn’t followed. I know enough about driving to know that.’ Jed looked into the fireplace. All Mitch’s dead matches. All at different angles. Celia would’ve found some kind of omen in those matches.

  Celia.

  And his voice became patient, as if he had time, plenty of it. ‘When I called them this morning, they knew where I was. They knew exactly where I was.’

  ‘How do you know they knew?’ Mitch said. ‘What makes you so sure?’

  Jed’s temper flared. ‘Because they fucking blew my car up, that’s how.’ He catapulted out of his chair and kicked the wall. A black half-moon appeared on the faded paint.

  ‘Sit down, Jed.’

  He did as he was told. All the air drained out of him. Suddenly he could’ve cried.

  Mitch sucked on his pipe. Smoke moved through the room. It seemed to be constantly on the point of turning into something, of assuming some recognisable shape, but it would never quite commit itself.

  ‘You’re right,’ Mitch said finally. ‘I told them. But you know what? They already knew.’

  Jed stared at him. ‘They already knew? How?’

  ‘Beats me. But they did.’

  ‘But you still told them, Mitch. How could you do that? How come you even talked to them?’

  Mitch sighed. He put his pipe down on the hearth and rose to his feet. He unlocked the top drawer of his desk and took out a polaroid. He handed the polaroid to Jed and returned to his chair.

  It was a picture of Mitch’s old lady. She was lying in a coffin. Her face was white, her eyes were shut. Blood had trickled out of the corner of her mouth and then dried. She looked dead. Jed turned the polaroid over. On the back it said CO-OPERATE AND IT WON’T HAPPEN.

  He looked at the picture again. Nice make-up job. It was Morton’s work, no question about that.

  ‘What would you have done?’ Mitch said.

  Jed looked up. ‘Is she all right?’

  Mitch shrugged. ‘They held her for twenty-four hours. What do you want to hear?’

  A silence. The ticking of eleven clocks.

  ‘You’ve got to be fucking out of your mind messing with those people,’ Mitch said.

  Jed scowled. ‘I know what I’m doing. I worked with them.’

  ‘Worked with them?’ Mitch scoffed. ‘You drove.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘You were nothing.’

  ‘I was NOT NOTHING.’

  Mitch sighed. ‘You were nothing to them. That’s what those people do. They hang you on their Christmas tree, they put you where you look right, like one of those coloured balls, but pretty soon they get bored with you, your time’s over, they throw you out. Or maybe you break first. You’ve got some kind of shine, that’s why they choose you in the first place, but under that shine you’ve got you’re pretty fragile, pretty hollow. So you don’t last long. And people like that, they’re the ones that know it.’

  Jed watched Mitch lean down and knock his pipe against the hearth. He eased out of the chair.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry about Anne-Marie,’ he said. ‘I’m going now.’ He stood in front of Mitch. ‘Can you loan me ten dollars?’

  Mitch laughed.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Jed asked him.

  Mitch was still laughing. ‘Loan,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Jed said. ‘I’ll pay you back.’

  ‘Pay me back? Sure you’ll pay me back. What are you going to do, leave me ten bucks in your will?’

  ‘Where’s your faith, Mitch?’

  Mitch shook his head. ‘Not only dressed like a fucking preacher, talking like one too.’ He reached into his back pocket, snapped a twenty-dollar bill out into the air. ‘Here.’

  ‘I only asked for ten,’ Jed said.

  ‘Twenty’s all I’ve got.’

  ‘Thanks, Mitch.’ Jed stopped in the doorway. ‘I’ll see you around.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Mitch said, ‘sure you will.’

  Jed stood on the main street that ran through Rialto. The clouds that piled above the rooftops were veined like marble, almost green. The heavens would open before long. His lips tightened, taut as a drawn bow. He aimed a queer, crooked smile at the sky. It was the rain that had started it. It was the rain that told him he was special. So he’d lost everything. The car, his hat. The shirt off his back. So they knew his every move. So what. A fizzing began between his ribs. A fizzing that was like a lit fuse. He’d been underplaying it. He’d needed some final twist. And Mitch had handed it to him; he hadn’t meant to, but he had. Those people, they took blackmail and faded it to grey. It was a game for them. But he could use that game to draw them in. Then he could settle it, once and for all.

  With Mitch’s $20 he could afford to catch a taxi to his mother’s place. He asked the driver to drop him at the top of Mackerel Street. It was habit, a ritual, left over from the days when he used to leave transistor radios playing in her front garden. Like fingers pointing. Like ghosts come back to haunt her. He’d always have a taxi waiting at the top of the street so he could make his getaway.

  He began to walk down the hill. He could feel his right heel, the birth of a blister there. The new sandals didn’t fit quite as well as he’d thought. He turned the corner, into the part of the street that was dead-end. Houses the same colour as ice-cream. Lemon, peppermint, raspberry. Every flavour you could imagine. No trees, just streetlamps. And sidewalks inlaid with neat strips of grass. He was back in Mackerel Street, he was actually back. He wondered how long it had been. Curiosity, not sentiment. Was it twelve years? No, thirteen. Almost half his life ago. It was hard to believe. He looked up and found that his calculation had taken him all the way
to his front gate.

  He was just reaching for the latch when a movement in the corner of his eye distracted him. He turned in time to see the curtain swing back into place in the window of the house next door. It was that kind of neighbourhood. Every house hid the same voyeur. He was glad he looked so different. With his blond hair and his Christian outfit, there was little chance of being recognised by anyone. They would peer at him from behind their lace curtains and think: Stranger. The same way they had always peered at his mother and thought: Whore. He smiled grimly. In those days he would probably have agreed with them; he’d had good reasons for seeing her in that red light. Now? Who she was fucking was her own affair. He didn’t even care what colour their shoes were.

  He brought his eyes back into focus. Noticed casually, almost incidentally, that his mother was standing in the downstairs window looking at him. There followed a curious interval during which they both stared at each other without any change of expression. Then, almost with a jolt, they came alive again and he saw her say, ‘Jed?’

  He watched her approach, blurred and unidentifiable, in the frosted glass of the door. He couldn’t imagine what he was going to say to her. When the door opened, they both held their ground. They were searching each other’s faces, searching for words.

  She found some first. ‘What were you doing,’ she said, ‘skulking in the road like that?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Just thinking.’

  ‘I thought you were going to go away again.’

  ‘Would you have liked that better?’

  ‘Jed.’ The word came out sounding like cream poured over a spoon. That tone of voice, how well he remembered it.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘would you?’

  She sighed. ‘Are you going to stand on the doorstep all afternoon,’ she said, ‘or are you going to come in?’

  It smelt synthetic in the hall. It was her own smell, she carried it around with her. If you boiled her down, reduced her to her essence, it would smell of air freshener, nail polish, fashion magazines, he was sure of it. He waited for her to close the door, then he followed her down the corridor and into the kitchen. She wore the same kind of clothes she’d always worn: a pink velour sweatsuit and a pair of trainers with plump white tongues. Her dry blonde hair tucked under her jawbone, curled into the nape of her neck.

  ‘How about some coffee?’ she said. ‘It’s fresh.’

  ‘Sure. Great.’ He sat on a stool while she poured. He looked around. A lot of red and pink, a lot of stripped pine. The same old bric-à-brac above the sink: a china doll, a dog with one paw raised, a matador. A small colour TV on low volume. The early-evening news.

  She placed a cup of coffee in front of him with a waitress smile, then she sat down opposite him, on the other side of the breakfast bar. She held her own cup in both hands, just below her mouth. He could see that she had aged, even through the veil of steam. There were two faces, and one of them had slipped. A curious, smeared look. And nothing left of her eyebrows except two lines sketched in brown pencil.

  But she didn’t want him scrutinising her. ‘You look so,’ and she quickly sorted through words, as if they were dresses, and chose one, ‘different.’

  ‘That’s the idea,’ he said.

  She eyed him thoughtfully over the rim of her cup. ‘You should do something about your hair.’

  He laughed, slopping his coffee over. ‘I’m not one of your fucking clients, mother.’

  She went to the sink and came back with a damp cloth. ‘I’m running the place now, you know,’ she said. ‘It’s going very well.’ She lifted his cup and wiped the base, then she wiped the wood surface underneath.

  ‘That’s great.’ He couldn’t keep the sneer out of his voice. She was folding the cloth. Once, twice, three times. If she folded it much more, he thought, it might disappear altogether.

  ‘Did you come here to insult me, Jed?’ she said. ‘Is that why you came? Or was there something you wanted?’

  A plane went overhead, almost scraping the tiles off the roof. Cups nodded on their red plastic hooks. When the noise had died away, it seemed as if another layer had been stripped from the silence.

  ‘You must have a reason,’ she said, ‘after all these years.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with all these years,’ he said.

  ‘You were always so calculating. You never did anything without a reason.’

  ‘How come I need a reason?’ he said. ‘I’ve been away. I was away for a long time. I couldn’t’ve come to see you even if I’d wanted to.’ He thought of the phone-call he’d made from that booth on the highway. Six years ago. Henry, is that you?

  She came and sat down. ‘You got into trouble again, I suppose.’

  ‘I went and lived in a town called Adam’s Creek,’ he said. ‘The name was a joke. There wasn’t any creek, never had been.’ He turned his cup on its base. ‘There wasn’t even an Adam.’

  ‘Adam’s Creek?’ she said. ‘I never heard of it.’

  ‘It’s in the middle of nowhere.’ He told her about the Commercial Hotel and THE WORLD OF 45 FLAVOURS. But he looked at her once and her chin was propped on the flat of her hand as if it was about to be served by a waiter and she was looking out of the window. She wasn’t listening, he could tell, so he just stopped. She looked back at him and sighed, a sigh that didn’t seem to have anything to do with him.

  ‘I think I’ll go and lie down,’ he said. ‘I’m really tired.’

  She took his empty cup, put it in the sink with hers. ‘You can use your old room.’

  He stood up, stretched.

  ‘Do you want me to wake you?’ she said.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to sleep for an hour.’

  At the top of the stairs he stood by the window and looked out. This neighbourhood where he’d grown up, it was another world to him now, a world he had to search his blood for. This house was his home, that woman in the kitchen was his mother. He knew it, but it was a long time since he’d felt it. The feeling had gone, only the facts remained.

  When he opened the door to his old room he found himself nodding. It was exactly what he might have expected. There were two twin beds. There was a lamp with a white shade. There were small bowls of dried flowers. It was immaculate, anonymous; neutral as a motel room. There was nothing to suggest that he had ever slept there, not a trace of his presence. There wasn’t even the ghost of a radio.

  He took his jacket and his sandals off, and lay down on his side with his knees drawn up to his chest. He closed his eyes. Listened to the planes go over. That long slow rumble. His ribs vibrating gently. And he rose up over the rooftops of Sweetwater and beyond Mario’s handkerchief factory, beyond the river, he could see the tall white buildings of the city clustered tight as skittles, he could see Death Row and the slim black shape of the Paradise Corporation, like the shadow of a building, and the factory and the river vanished, and there was golden wood where they had been, a corridor of polished golden wood with gutters on either side, and he looked down at his hand and saw he was holding a huge black ball, and he took three steps forwards and swung his arm and let the ball go, and that long slow rumble in the sky, that was the sound of the ball rolling down the corridor of golden wood, rolling towards the cluster of tall buildings, plane after plane, and always that black ball rolling until at last he saw it slowly smash into the buildings, he saw the buildings stagger, topple over, every one of them, and there was no city any more, there was only a game that he had won, and the planes going over, they were the applause, a standing ovation, and he was turning away from that corridor of golden wood, one hand raised, a kind of hero now.

  When he woke, it was almost dark. He could hear music downstairs, dance music. He had no idea where he was. Propped on one elbow, he saw a jacket and a pair of sandals that some stranger must’ve left behind.

  And then he remembered; it all came back together slowly, like an explosion played in reverse. That music downstairs, that would
be his mother’s radio. She always tuned in to Latin stations at night. She used to cook to the rhythms of the tango and the rumba, she’d snap her fingers, tilt her hips, and he’d be watching, embarrassed, through a jungle of fingers. This was no motel, this was his old bedroom, this was home, and as for that stranger with the jacket and the sandals, that stranger was him.

  One of his knees had seized up. He eased both legs on to the floor and sat still. Then he buckled his sandals, wincing as the straps bit into his heels. He limped downstairs and into the kitchen. His mother was perched at the breakfast bar with a drink and a cigarette.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked her.

  ‘Scotch and soda. You want one?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t drink.’

  ‘Did you sleep well?’

  ‘I woke up,’ he said, ‘and I didn’t know where I was.’

  ‘That’s not surprising when you think how long it’s been.’

  ‘I heard the radio, and I remembered how you used to cook with that music on, and then I knew.’

  She smiled. ‘I still do.’ She folded her cigarette up in the ashtray. She’d smoked less than half of it. ‘Talking of that, are you staying for dinner?’

  ‘I need to stay the night.’ He watched her face. ‘Don’t worry, it’s only tonight. Then I’ll be gone.’

  ‘Need to?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Need to.’

  She took another cigarette out of her pack and looked at it as if she thought she might learn something from it. They were exactly the kind of cigarettes he would’ve imagined she smoked. Extra slim, extra mild. 100s. A delicate garland of flowers encircling the cigarette just below the filter.

  ‘You never told me anything, did you?’ she said.

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ he said, ‘you really don’t.’

  ‘That’s not giving me much say, is it?’

  ‘You lost the right to that a long time ago.’

  This time she stubbed her cigarette out as if it was alive and she wanted it dead. ‘You’ll never forgive me, will you, for throwing your stupid radios away.’