The Five Gates of Hell (3 page)

‘Your father's not very well, Nathan,' she said. ‘He's going to need help,' and she peered at him over the rims of her dark glasses, ‘especially from you.'

‘I know.' He looked out of the window. The sun was so bright that day. Like a razorblade it cut round the roadside diners, the billboards, the trees. Such sharp edges to everything. But thinking of Dad, Dad's sadness and Dad's wounds, that thought was like shadows. He saw the place where he'd grown up. Somehow there was shadow even in the yellow of the sunlight on the lawn. As if all colour, even the brightest, held darkness. Nothing was safe. Everything could turn, give way. Fifty miles north of Moon Beach they drove into a gas station and he couldn't see anything for a moment. It was just being in the shadow after being in the sun. But that was what it felt like to be going home.

When they turned into the driveway, Dad was leaning against a pillar, almost shy. He ran into Dad's arms. Smelt the wool of his cardigan, smelt the talcum powder he used. He remembered the skull and how it smelt of nothing, and he was happy then. Dad smelt of things. Dad was alive.

Dad spoke to Yvonne. ‘He looks well. Was he a good boy?'

‘He was very good.'

Nathan touched Dad's arm. ‘Is Georgia back?'

‘She'll be back tomorrow.'

That night Nathan spent an hour arranging his trophies on his bedroom windowsill. He gave the bird's skull pride of place, the silver coin shining in one of the empty sockets like a brand-new eye. It was a kind of reminder: if his life was a book, then the skull marked the place that he'd got up to. He sat on his bed. Heard a car grind up the hill in low gear; a distant siren; the hum of someone talking downstairs. It was so quiet. He moved to the window. Tilted his head back on his neck. A soft crunching sound, like gravel shifting in water, like a finger pushed into sand. He undid the string on his pyjamas and, rolling over, pushed against the hard part of the mattress and then, as if by magic, it was morning.

She'll be back tomorrow, Dad had said. And she was. One front tooth missing and her black hair twisted into two short plaits. It was
a relief to see her, he felt he'd been holding his breath until she arrived. Since his dream about the jets, he didn't feel he could trust anyone with her. He knew he couldn't bear to lose her. That moment in the dream when the gap opened up between their hands, that was such panic. He could see their fingers separating in slow motion, like pieces of a space capsule. It was a relief and a reprieve. He'd learned something. Life was booby-trapped and there was no easy passage through. You had to jump from colour to colour, from happiness to happiness. And all those possible explosions in between. It could be all over any time. Those movies where the hero runs against the constant red and orange blooms of fire, where all the bullets noisily fly wide, that just wasn't true. Or true, but very difficult. Or just plain lucky. He'd be more patient with her in the future. Even walking home from school. Even on the dreaded hill.

In the past Dad had sometimes rested in his bedroom after lunch. Now he rested every day, often for two hours. If Nathan and Georgia stayed home they had to be quiet till he came downstairs again. It wasn't easy. Silence didn't come naturally to Georgia, it never had, and Dad slept so lightly he could hear the handle on the back door turn. Nathan invented a new game. He called it Red Indian Feet.

‘You've got to have Red Indian feet,' he said, ‘like this,' and he went into a sort of crouch, with his knees bent and his fingers spread in the air.

You had to talk in a whisper or, better still, in sign language, which they learned from a book about deaf people. You had to walk in a special way: your heel touched the ground first, then the hard outside edge of your foot, then the ball of your foot and, finally, your toes. You had to make devilish Red Indian faces. It was the simplest of games, yet it worked like a charm. Georgia crept through the house, shoulders lifted on a level with her ears, hands spread in front of her, eyes wide. She'd turn a corner and there he'd be, a hunchback with a twisted face, and because you weren't allowed to cry out, because everything happened in silence and slow motion, they'd both double up, roll gasping on the carpet, and the only way to hold the laughter in was to run out to the garden and stuff your mouth with mud and grass and stones.

The jets were still flying. High altitude. Sometimes, as he lay on his back and stared into the sky, he saw a glint of silver high up in the blue. But heard nothing. That was what the word dead was. That glint of silver, that speed he could never guess. At night Georgia used to cry out and he'd wake in the next room and see her through the
open door, flailing at the empty air like someone waving goodbye with both hands at once. He invented another game, to calm her. Windshield Wipers, he called it. You had to lie on your back and move your head from side to side on the pillow and make a soft droning sound. They did it together, in their separate beds. It wiped the bad dreams away, it brought the deep sleep back. After their mother went to the bottom of the sea, the days would pass in silence, the nights in fear. They walked through their childhood on Red Indian feet. Not a crack from a stick, not a creak from a stair. Not a sound.

On the way down in the car Aunt Yvonne had told Nathan that she'd just be staying a week or two, until they settled back in, but in the end she stayed till Christmas. Nathan would come home from school to find her painting in the garden, an overcoat thrown over her shoulders, lipstick smeared across her mouth, a cheroot burning in her left hand. ‘I'm making the whole neighbourhood reek,' she shouted. ‘It's your father's fault. He won't let me smoke in the house.'

Nathan spoke to Dad. ‘It's not
that
bad,' he said. ‘It's only like cupboards.'

But Dad shook his head and fixed his eyes on the corner of the room. ‘It gets in my pipes. It makes me cough.'

So Yvonne went on painting outdoors, often until dusk, sometimes even later, by candlelight. The fresh air seemed to inspire her. It was like her studio, she said, only more so. She was beginning to move out of her ball period, though she hadn't made up a name for her new period yet. The balls had gone, it was true. They'd rolled right out of her pictures, and the lines that used to hold them in place were no longer straight, they now wriggled horizontally across the canvas.

‘I don't know,' said Nathan, who'd become the leading authority on her work. ‘It could be the ocean, I suppose.'

Yvonne turned to him, and her eyes narrowed in the candlelight and her lips stretched wide across her face. He knew the meaning of the look. It meant that things were coinciding in a way that pleased her. He'd seen the same smile earlier that summer when she discovered that sausages tasted good with marmalade.

The day she left, he helped her lash the new paintings to the roof of her station wagon. ‘I need to get back,' she shouted. ‘My ocean period's just beginning, and it'll flourish up there, I can feel it.'

He glanced at the sky anxiously. ‘I hope it doesn't rain.'

She squatted beside him, her back against the wheel, her face close to his. ‘Promise me something, Nat.'

‘What?'

‘Try not to be too serious, OK?'

He nodded. ‘OK.'

‘Come on,' and she got to her feet and took his hand, ‘I've got something for you.'

She led him into the kitchen. There was a painting leaning against the wall. She turned it round. ‘There,' she said, ‘that's for you.'

It was a ball painting. A ball of marbled grey and white against a background of midnight-blue. It was one of the first paintings of hers that he'd looked at. It was a real moon.

Yvonne stood with arms folded and legs astride, like her own easel. ‘What do you think?'

‘It's one of my favourites,' he said. ‘You knew that, didn't you?'

That evening he hung the moon painting in his narrow room and then he lay down on his bed. He saw Aunt Yvonne driving back up the coast in her old beat-up station wagon and sent his love with her on the passenger seat. She'd told him Dad needed help, though he'd known that already. Dad seemed to be moving through air that was different to everybody else's, it was thick and sticky, built out of cobwebs. When Dad smiled, it looked wrong; it was as if someone had made a joke and he hadn't got it, but he was pretending that he had. He could see that Dad was in some kind of terrible danger, and he wanted to rescue him, but he didn't know how. Instead, he did everything he was asked to do, and did it without complaining. He hid his own fears and wishes, and only took them out in private, under the eye of the moon. He was a good boy.

He tried to keep his promise to Yvonne, he tried not to be too serious, but it was hard because those jets kept coming over. The scream of silver, the ghostly stalks of dust, the hands separating like two parts of a rocket ship. He'd wake up and lie still, waiting for Dad to die. His mother had been strong, that was what he'd always been told, and now she'd gone to the bottom of the ocean, seaweed necklaces and fish swimming through the spaces in her head. She'd been strong and she'd died, so what chance did Dad have?

He lay on his back in the narrow room and listened for his sister's breathing through the half-open door, listened for his father's slightly faster breathing through the thin wall to the right. He lay like a toppled toy soldier, hands pressed tight against his thighs, every muscle rigid. He couldn't move his eyes. Because the jets flew beyond his dream, they were in the room with him, silent and lethal, swooping like birds in the grey air. It could happen any moment.

He listened to his father breathing and waited for it to stop. He listened to his sister breathing and made plans for their loneliness.

Those daybreaks.

He was eleven then.

Jed's mother said she didn't want him hanging round the beauty parlour after school, it was bad for business, what with him looking the way he did and all, so he'd walk home and climb out through the bathroom window and on to the roof. They lived in Sweetwater, right out near the airport. It was always funny the first time someone came to the house. A plane would go over and they'd duck or flinch. It was that loud. Once someone even threw themselves face down on the kitchen floor like someone in a war movie. Out on the roof, though, that was best. He'd lie on his back and watch the planes fly over. So close they almost grazed the tip of his nose. He liked the way his ears crackled, he liked to feel the house shake. And sometimes there was the sense that his legs were rising into the air, that the roof was sliding out from under him.

If he'd been Tommy, of course, it would've been a different story. Tommy was his brother, but he was twelve years older, more like an uncle, really. He worked as a foreman at a construction site in Rialto. She wouldn't've minded Tommy hanging round the beauty parlour. He had thick shiny hair and he walked with his legs slightly bent so you could imagine a horse between them. Once he did a hundred press-ups with a girl in a bikini standing on his back (Jed saw the photo). He wasn't bad for business. He wasn't bad at all.

That twelve-year gap between him and Tommy, he knew what it meant. It meant he was a mistake. And not only that, but he was ugly too, just so nobody forgot. Only something so unintended could've turned out so wrong. Born in a bottle of vodka one night, his mother had told him once. Poured out of her seven months later like some sickly cocktail. They had to put him in a kind of see-through tent so he could breathe. ‘Oh Muriel,' she was fond of saying, ‘I don't know
what
you did to deserve it.' She'd be sitting at her dresssing-table mirror, and he'd be standing beside her, watching her put her make-up on. Eye-shadow, mascara, rouge. Made her look just like plastic. And
then she'd roll her eyes and sigh. ‘Must be someone's idea of a joke.' Someone was God, and she was always flirting with him, same as she did with any man.

These were the good days, when her disgust could seem like a kind of affection. But there were times when it didn't seem like anything apart from what it was.

The year he turned nine he discovered junk stores. He felt at home there. The people who ran them didn't care if he was ugly; most of them were ugly too, and some of them, maybe they were mistakes as well. Old Mr Garbett, he was ugly all right. He ran Jed's favourite store. It was on Airdrome Boulevard. The Empire of Junk, it was called. Old Mr Garbett had a moon face and eyes that seeped. He sat on a leather armchair just inside the door with a brown bottle of beer standing beside his right foot. He wore the same mustard cardigan every day, and smoked cigarettes with wrinkles in them like the legs of elephants. The strangest thing about him was, his lips were the same colour as his face. It was here that Jed found the radios.

That first afternoon he was so excited that he ran all the way home. Along the boulevard, down Mackerel Street, through the front gate, straight into his mother's bedroom. She was sitting at her dressing-table as usual. Instead of turning round, she used the mirror to look at him. ‘Do you have to bring those in here, Jed?'

‘They're only radios.'

‘Yes, but look at them. They're filthy.'

There was something wrong with what she was saying. But she'd thrown him off balance and he couldn't think.

‘And what do you want radios for, anyway?' It was sweet, that voice of hers, it was always sweet, somehow, but like all sweet things too much of it could make you ill. ‘We've already got a radio in the kitchen.'

‘That's different.'

‘What's different about it?'

He shrugged. ‘I don't know. These ones have names. It's the names that I like.'

A plane went over, and all her tiny bottles jostled and clinked.

‘Names?' She frowned. ‘What names?'