The Five Gates of Hell

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘I’m not talking about radios,’ he said. ‘I’m talking about you pretending I didn’t belong to you, you being ashamed. You still feel guilty about it. If you didn’t feel guilty, you’d already’ve thrown me out. But you haven’t and you won’t,’ and he looked at her, ‘because you’re guilty.’

  She banged her glass down so hard it cracked. And she held on to it, the skin stretched tight between each knuckle. ‘Stop telling me what I feel and what I don’t feel, for Christ’s sake. What do you know about what I feel? You don’t know a thing.’ She let go of the glass, looked down at her hand. She’d gashed the mound at the base of her thumb. Blood slid along the fine grooves on the inside of her wrist.

  She stood at the sink and ran cold water on to the wound. ‘I’m making hamburgers for dinner,’ she announced suddenly, without turning round.

  She dabbed at her cut with a piece of paper towel. He couldn’t remember seeing her bleeding before, or hurt, not ever. Dealing with this damage to herself, she seemed tentative and clumsy. There was a despair about her, a kind of fatalism, as if she might at any moment throw in the paper towel and sit down on a chair and simply bleed. He stood up and fetched the first-aid kit from the cupboard. He placed it on the draining-board beside her.

  ‘Thank you,’ she muttered.

  He watched her opening the kit and thought: I know a thing about you. Her drinking, her smeared face. A looseness in her head that could only be tightened by love. You’ve always chosen the wrong men, or let the wrong men choose you. Your life’s been one mistake after another. I’m only one of them.

  She stuck a plaster over the cut and moved to the chopping-board. She lit a cigarette and put it straight in the ashtray. Then she began to chop onions. The cigarette burned all the way down to that delicate garland of flowers, she didn’t touch it once. When she’d finished the onions she reached for the whisky bottle and held it up to the light. Half an inch left. She tipped it into her glass, no soda this time. She stood the empty bottle on the floor.

  ‘If you want something to drink, there’s wine in the fridge,’ she said.

  ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I don’t drink.’

  The smell of meat and onions frying began to load the air. He realised he’d eaten nothing all day.

  ‘Smells good,’ he said.

  She crossed the room and opened the patio doors. She didn’t seem to have heard him.

  They ate at the kitchen table. Afterwards they watched a movie on TV. It was about killer ants. There was one part where the ants were swarming across a blonde girl’s thigh while she was sleeping. A man, the hero, presumably, was standing on a beach with a gun in his hand.

  Jed turned to his mother. ‘You seen anything of Pop?’

  ‘Oh, you know. He drops in from time to time.’

  ‘If you can call smashing the door down dropping in.’ Smiling to himself, Jed looked across at his mother and was surprised to see that she was smiling too.

  They were both smiling, both at the same time.

  She poured herself another glass of wine. ‘You know, you weren’t really a mistake.’

  He was looking at the TV again. The blonde girl had just woken up. She was screaming.

  ‘You weren’t,’ she said. ‘We wanted you.’

  ‘Maybe I wasn’t,’ he said, ‘but you made me feel like one.’

  She sighed and sipped her drink. ‘I was too selfish, but that still doesn’t mean you were a mistake.’

  He nodded.

  The hero was running up the stairs, but it was too late.

  The blonde girl was dead.

  His mother cleared the plates away, then she went and stood in the doorway looking out into the night. The wind swelled and the trees in the yard shook like tambourines. One of the patio doors slammed against the outside wall.

  ‘It’s going to storm,’ she said.

  The wind pushed at her hair. A silence seemed to swoop down, and lightning burned the air behind her white. She seemed to have been drawn round haphazardly in black pencil. It made her look as if she would never move again. As if she would always be alone. In that moment he could see why they might laugh together, and why they might cry. Then she was pulling the doors shut, reaching up to fasten the bolt at the top, bending down to fasten the other bolt near the floor. She turned to him, her face dark with the effort. ‘I’m going up to bed now.’

  ‘What time do you go to work?’

  ‘About eight.’

  ‘Could you wake me?’

  She nodded. ‘Goodnight, Jed.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  That green sky he’d seen earlier, it was over the house now, loud and poisonous. He was drawn to the window. Thunder hid the sound of planes. (Or maybe they weren’t taking off tonight, maybe the weather was too bad.) Lightning flattened itself against the glass, a face with no features only inches from his own, a boy shouting from a balcony. He stepped back into the room.

  There was nothing much on TV, but he watched it anyway. Like water, it ran into every compartment in his head and left no room for anything else.

  He went to bed at eleven. As he climbed the stairs, the rain came with a sudden loud sigh. The roof shook under the weight of it. He passed his mother’s bedroom. There was no strip of light under the door. She must already be asleep.

  At three his eyes clicked open. He dressed in darkness, crept downstairs. The storm had passed on. It was quiet. A thick grey light lay on the furniture like a coat of dust. He felt his way into the lounge. There, in the corner, was the bureau desk that had belonged to his father. If he remembered right, the gun would be in the bottom drawer. He tried the drawer. Locked. Somehow that was encouraging. He reached underneath to see if the bottom could be removed, but it seemed solid. He’d have to force the lock. But what with? He crossed the hallway to the kitchen, returned with a pair of scissors, a chisel, some garden shears. He tried the scissors first. They bent. The shears next. Too big. He inserted the chisel into the gap and worked it back and forwards until he had leverage, then he began to push the handle of the chisel downwards, away from the desk. He could feel the sweat all slippery on his forehead and his throat. A crack suddenly, and he fell back. He thought the chisel had snapped, but it was the lock. He put the chisel down, pulled the drawer open and began to feel around inside. A pile of papers. A roll of Sellotape. More papers. It had to be there. Then his hand closed around a rectangular box.

  He lifted the box out of the drawer and carried it to the window. He opened the lid. Grey light spilled along the smooth, tooled grooves of the gun. It had belonged to his brother, Tom. Tom had brought it round during the days when Pop kept showing up outside the house at night and shouting threats.

  ‘Taste of his own medicine,’ Tom had said. It was one of the few things Tom had inherited from his father, this love of guns; his mouth bent when he talked about them, the same way it bent when he talked about certain types of women.

  Their mother was giggling nervously. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Take it.’ Tom seized her hand and wrapped her fingers round the gun. One off her nails caught on the butt and snapped. But the gun was a piece of witchcraft and she hardly noticed. Her fingers opened again, slowly, like a door finding its natural position on its hinges, and they all stared down at the gun. Too big for her hand, too big and dark and blunt. When they looked up again, looked at each other, their eyes seemed to be the same colour as the gun, and capable of the same violence.

  She did take it. But, as soon as Tom had driven away, she locked it in the desk. ‘I could never,’ and her shoulders rippled with disgust, ’never use something like that.’ Standing at the window with the gun in his hand Jed supposed he’d been relying on her to hold to that.

  Suddenly the darkness shrank and he was blind. He turned, blinking. Saw his mother standing in the doorway, one hand on the light switch. She was wearing a nightgown with short, puffy sleeves. A knife glimmered in her other hand. She ran towards him and he felt the knife slide through the cheap l
eather of his sleeve, scorch the muscle of his forearm. He twisted sideways, snatched at her wrist. The knife dropped to the carpet. He pushed her away from him.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ he said.

  She began to speak and her voice was thick as the light in the hallway, thick with pills. ‘You get out, you get out of here, get out –’ ‘You could’ve killed me,’ he said.

  ‘– you get out of my house, just get out,’ and then her voice lifted in pitch and volume, and she was screaming at him, ‘GET OUT, GET OUT, GET –’

  He slapped her hard across the side of her head, and she stopped, right in the middle of a word, as if he’d switched her off. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing,’ he said.

  She stood in the room, her shoulders hunched in the nightgown, her mouth wrenched out of shape.

  ‘I’ll take you up to bed,’ he told her, ‘then I’ll go.’

  He took her by the arm and, turning her round, led her back upstairs. He helped her into bed and pulled the covers over her. ‘I’m going to turn the light off now,’ he said. He turned the light off and stood by the door, listening. Her breathing was steady; she was asleep. He wondered what she’d think when she found his empty bed in the morning. He wondered whether she’d remember.

  Outside it was still dark. Rain scuttling in the gutters. When he reached the top of Mackerel Street he stopped and glanced up at the house on the corner. One light shining in an upstairs room made him feel that he was floating on an ocean, cut loose and drifting, but then he felt the weight of the gun in his jacket pocket, and it was a good purposeful weight, it was like ballast. There would be no drifting.

  He eased his jacket off and inspected his arm. He’d been lucky. It had taken all the knife’s strength just to slice through the sleeve so the wound was superficial. A thin, dark line of drying blood, more of a scratch than a cut. He lifted his arm to his mouth, licked the wound clean.

  He put his jacket back on. No lightening of the sky yet, but dawn could only be an hour away. There were blue flashes in the east, as if someone further down the coast was watching a giant TV. He decided to walk to the train station in Sweetwater. There used to be an all-night café under the platforms. He’d sit in the café and drink a cup of coffee and wait for the first train to the city. He searched his pockets for candy. Just a few fragments of Peanut Brittle and a handful of empty wrappers.

  It was two miles to the station and as he splashed along in his sandals he could taste blood in his mouth. Sharon’s lazy voice came back to him: You won’t like it. Men don’t.

  She was high that night, almost gone, otherwise she never would’ve let it happen. It was one of his rare nights off, and she’d come round to his two rooms under the Palace with a litre of mescal in a brown paper bag and half an ounce of grass in her bra. They were sprawled across his single bed, most of their clothes on the floor.

  ‘It’ll get everywhere.’ But she had this grin draped over her face.

  ‘It’s my place,’ he told her. ‘I don’t care where it gets.’

  ‘Well, all right. But don’t make a habit of it.’

  He put his mouth to her cunt. People think blood always tastes the same. That’s because they don’t know. There’s sweet blood and there’s sour blood. There’s blood that’s old and blood that tastes brand-new. Sometimes blood tastes cheap, like tin cans or cutlery, other times it tastes as rich as gold. Sharon’s blood tasted sugary that night. But with an edge to it, like fresh lime. He was down there so long that she came twice just from his tongue. She said nobody had ever done that to her before. Then they fucked and she was right, it did get everywhere. The next day he had to throw half his bed in the garbage. It was only later, with Celia, that he took to keeping the sheets. That had been her idea. Towards the end she became almost religious about it. Blood as sacrament, an emblem of their union. Blood as affirmation. Blood as power.

  The café was open. He drank a coffee and watched the clock go round. 4.55. 5.10. 5.23. Someone had left an early edition of the paper on the table next to him. He read it from front to back. 5.41. He thought of Sharon and her cunt brimming with that sweet, dark blood. Then he remembered how she’d rationed him. They’d been on and off for almost three years, and yet he could count the times. Once in the Palace, once in the storeroom. That was it. He wondered if Max liked it. Probably not. Men don’t.

  The city train came in at 6.05. It was crowded. Hundreds of people with sleep in their eyes and their heads nodding on their necks. The train rattled over the river. Between the grey metal struts he caught glimpses of the Witch’s Fingers glistening in the grainy light. Sometimes Celia’s body had looked like that, when it was hot, a silvering along the edges of her skin. Don’t make a habit of it. Of course, with Celia, that was precisely what it had become. A habit. Same time every month. And that evening when she turned to him on their sheet that was stained with roses, the power station lit up behind her like a twisted heap of pearls, and she said, ‘You know the really weird thing? It takes the pain away.’ Something went through him in that moment, it moved so fast he only saw its heels, but now, thinking back on it, he thought it might’ve been the closest he had ever got to love.

  A man fell against him, muttered an apology. He must’ve fallen asleep on his feet.

  The train dipped underground at Y Street. The lights flickered on, they trembled on and off, like the eyelids of someone who’s dreaming. Three minutes later they were pulling into Central Station. One screech of the brakes, and a lurch that sent people staggering.

  He bought two bags of Iceberg Mints at the news-stand, then he took the escalator up to the street. He thought he’d stroll down to the ocean, find himself a deck chair and a piece of shadow, doze for a few hours. Later he could breakfast at the Aquarium Café. He took the direct route, south from Central, through the M Street mall and down the hill past the Palace Hotel. He hadn’t meant to pass the Palace. He didn’t want any memories this morning. Not memories like that, anyway. They were knots in the smooth grain of a wood. They made the saw jump. You could lose a finger that way. He stared up at the building as he passed and knew why Creed had chosen it. The respectability, the grandeur, the sheer weight of that façade, they all told lies about him.

  Lies.

  His gaze dropped back to ground-level. The revolving doors began to spin, flick over, like the pages of a book, and out of the book stepped two figures, men.

  Jed edged back into the shade of a tree. Without taking his eyes off the doors, he unwrapped a mint. Fed it into his mouth, crushed it to fragments with his teeth.

  ‘My Christ,’ he whispered.

  One of the men was Neville Creed, the other man was Nathan Christie. They knew each other. They not only knew each other, they slept with each other too.

  He remembered Mitch’s words: I told them. But they already knew.

  They already knew.

  ‘No wonder,’ he whispered. ‘No fucking wonder.’

  And his mind leapt across seventeen years, a spark jumping between two terminals. The shark run. Nathan Christie had been found guilty in that dark corner of the harbour. If he’d been innocent he would’ve drowned, and Jed would never’ve seen him again. Only the guilty came back.

  He should’ve known.

  And this knowledge, so late in coming, burst through his head, one explosion, then another, then another, it was like a match dropped in an ammunition dump, and he reached into his pocket, and his hand tightened round the gun.

  3UR 1AL

  It even looked as if something was wrong. When he ran up the stairs he saw that Dad’s bedroom door was open. All through his childhood he’d been taught to close that door. Pull it until it clicks, Dad used to say, he couldn’t sleep if he thought the door wasn’t closed properly. And now it was open, wide open, like a raided tomb.

  ‘George?’

  She was lying stretched out on the bed, her head propped on a mass of pillows. She was watching TV. There were no other lights on in the room. Her face was flicker
ing: bright, dark, bright, dark. The whites of her eyes were luminous and fierce. They looked washed clean, somehow. He had the feeling that she’d been crying.

  He moved to the side of the bed. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said, ‘fine.’

  ‘You’re not dead or anything?’

  She smiled faintly. ‘Look at this. It’s the wedding.’

  ‘Wedding? What wedding?’ He sat on the edge of the bed. She was surrounded by bottles of pills. The bed clicked and rattled every time he moved. ‘Where did you get all these pills?’

  ‘They’re Dad’s. They were in his drawer.’

  ‘How many have you had?’

  ‘Not many.’

  ‘How many?’

  She shrugged. ‘About fifteen.’

  ‘Fifteen? Which ones?’

  ‘All different.’ She looked at him. ‘It doesn’t matter anyway. They’re mostly stale. They don’t do much.’

  ‘Stale? How can you tell?’

  ‘The dates on the bottles. Some of them are ten years old.’

  He looked at her dubiously.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Nat,’ she said, ‘I’m ALL RIGHT.’

  ‘You sounded so strange on the phone. Like one of those movie-stars who takes an overdose and then they start making phone-calls.’

  ‘You called me, remember?’

  ‘I know. But, you know.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry. I certainly didn’t mean to sound like one of those movie-stars.’

  It was so unlike her to be sarcastic, her face took on a shape he didn’t recognise. Waves of anger, and hurt under the anger like a reef. Uncomfortable, he turned to the TV.

  City Hall on a bright day, the shadows almost purple. A scrap of paper went tumbling across the wide, stone steps. He could see Dad and Harriet standing just inside the entrance, Dad agitated, smoothing his hair. A chip of white flashed in the gloom. Harriet’s teeth. She must’ve been saying something. Then they emerged, arm in arm. Into the sunlight, blinking. Dad took her hand. Their smiles seemed slowed down. The veins showed on the back of Dad’s hand, stood out like weak ropes. Moored in his body, but only just. Dad and Harriet turned to face each other, they were supposed to kiss. A moment’s hesitation.