The Five Gates of Hell (51 page)

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.'

‘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 leather 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.