The Five Gates of Hell (11 page)

The gang howled. PS and his jokes.

Jed came over. ‘Bet you were shit-scared.'

‘Anyone would've been,' Nathan said. ‘You would've been too.'

Jed pushed his thin lips out and shook his head.

‘Yeah, you would,' Nathan said.

‘No, I wouldn't,' Jed said and, reaching behind him, he produced the sign that said DANGER SHARKS. ‘There's no sharks out there.'

Nathan was staring at the sign.

‘Yeah, it's the same sign,' Jed said. ‘Vasco got it a few weeks back. Didn't you, Vasco?'

Vasco was smoking a cigarette on the parapet. He seemed bored now, his fires had burned low. He blew a long slow trumpet of smoke into the night. ‘Yeah,' he said. ‘Ripped it off from some beach. Some beach somewhere.' He eased down off the wall and flicked his stub into the harbour. Tss. ‘Let's split.' He had this way of talking to nobody in particular. The sky or something. But everybody listened.

The Womb Boys began to slope off down the causeway. Nathan picked up the rest of his clothes and was about to follow them when Jed barred his way. ‘Not you.'

He had to find his own way back. By the time he got home, it was after two. Closing the front door, his hand slipped and the lock snapped shut.

‘Shit,' he whispered, and stood in the hallway, listening.

He heard a creak from Dad's bed and a click as Dad's bedroom door opened. Dad's voice, wary and thin, floated down from the landing. ‘George?'

Standing at the bottom of the stairs, Nathan saw Dad appear at the top, one hand clutching the banisters.

‘It's me, Dad. Nathan. I'm just going to bed.'

‘I thought I heard the front door.'

‘No, it must've been the kitchen you heard.'

Luckily, Dad's head was blurred with all the pills he took to sleep. The front door and the kitchen door made completely different sounds. Normally he would've realised that.

‘Please try and be quiet, Nathan.'

‘Sorry, Dad.'

A few minutes later he lay down in bed and stared into the darkness above his head. It hurt to lie to Dad and he wished he didn't have to, but Dad was so fragile and the truth could smash him. He only lied to protect Dad. Isn't that what you did for someone you loved, lied for them? And his lies were soft, like pillows. They were good lies, he
told himself. They were white. And, having convinced himself of that, he turned over, and drifted into sleep.

When Vasco went missing, Jed didn't even notice at first. Vasco was always out, doing his rounds or lying low. He always had business to attend to. There was stuff that was hot to be shifted. He was dealing too. Not that Vasco approved of drugs. It was just that he was fighting a war, and drugs were the most efficient way of raising finance. ‘After all,' he'd say, ‘politicians do it.' Sometimes he'd be gone for twenty-four hours. Then he'd call Jed from some apartment, some bar. Or he'd simply turn up at the house. Not this time. This time Jed didn't hear a thing.

On the third day Jed went upstairs to look for Mario. Maybe Mario would know. Maybe those Gorelli ears had picked something up. He knocked on Mario's door. Wheels trundled over the floor and the door eased open.

Over Mario's head Jed saw dark lounge suits hanging from the picture rail, and sepia photographs of the handkerchief factory in its heyday framed in gold. The light in the room was muted and brown, and the air smelt of Mario's paraffin lamp and the oil that he used to lubricate the moving parts of his two wheelchairs.

‘You know where Vasco is?' Jed asked.

Mario seemed irritated. ‘How would I know that?'

‘I just thought you might've heard something.'

‘No.' And then Mario's head tipped cunningly on his neck, and the eye nearest to Jed gleamed, and he lurched forwards, as if he'd been shot in the back, a pearl of spittle on his lower lip. ‘I thought I heard a thousand-dollar bill today. Do you think,' and his eye gleamed up at Jed, shiny as glass, and just as dead, ‘do you think they make thousand-dollar bills?'

Jed didn't know about thousand-dollar bills, but he knew about Mario. Just then, suddenly. He knew why Mario had never fucked anyone. Mario was too selfish. He wanted to keep all his sperm to himself. Nobody else deserved it. And so he looked like a Roman emperor and rode around in wheelchairs and pretended he could hear money. What a character, people said. Isn't he good for his age? they said. But he wasn't a character and he wasn't good for his age. He was a piece of shit for his age. He was a fraud.

‘There's no such thing,' Jed said, ‘and you fucking know it.'

He didn't even wait for Mario's reaction. He whirled out on to the landing and stood there, trembling. He'd have to try Reg. As he stamped off down the corridor, his footsteps fascist on the floorboards, it occurred to him that he'd never actually set eyes on Reg. Not ever. Not even once.

He knocked on Reg's door. A silence, then a tiny scraping sound. He could feel Reg staring at him through the Judas eye.

‘What do you want?'

‘I'm looking for Vasco.'

‘He's not here.'

Jed rested his cheek against the door. Like a confessional, only nobody was telling anybody anything. He heard the Judas eye scrape shut, then the creak of floorboards as Reg backed away.

‘Reg?' He knocked on the door again. ‘Reg!'

But Reg had withdrawn deep into the room. He'd pulled Jesus over his head like a blanket and he wouldn't be coming out for a long time.

The streets seemed empty that morning. Jed scoured the neighbourhood. Somebody had to know something. It was a hot day. Only faded curtains stirring lazily in apartment windows.

At last he found Silence, Tip's ten-year-old brother, standing in a patch of wasteground, throwing stones at a row of tin cans. It was one of Silence's favourite things. He couldn't hear the stone hit the can, or the can hit the ground, but he liked the way it looked.

‘You seen Vasco?' Jed said.

Silence picked the words off Jed's lips, neatly, one by one, the way you pick fleas off a dog. He shook his head and began to hunt around in the scrub grass. Eventually he found what looked like a piece of a bicycle. He drew a circle in the mud, a circle with two slit eyes and a downturned mouth.

‘A face,' Jed said. ‘Vasco?'

Silence nodded.

He sealed the face off with a series of vertical lines and reinforced the downturned mouth.

‘Oh no,' Jed said. ‘It's jail, right?'

Silence nodded again and touched the lobe of his ear.

Jed translated. ‘That's what you heard.'

He watched as Silence scraped his heel across the picture, as if it might be used as evidence. Silence had always been very earnest and very careful. A secret, you always felt, would be safer with him than with anyone.

‘You know where?' he asked.

Silence shrugged. He picked up a stone and slung it at the row of tin cans. One dropped. Silence had this way of putting an end to things. That stone, it meant he'd told Jed all he knew. End of conversation.

Jed thanked him. He walked home slowly, the long way round.

That night Rita rang. She was crying.

‘Have you heard?' she said.

‘Yeah.'

‘What's going to happen now?'

‘I don't know. What did they pick him up for?'

‘Arson.'

That figured. ‘Where is he?'

‘They're holding him downtown, but they're going to move him soon.'

‘Where to?'

‘Some detention centre. They won't let you visit, though. You're not old enough. Only people like parents can go.'

‘He hasn't got any parents.'

‘I know.'

He called the place the following morning, and they confirmed what Rita had told him. Nobody under the age of eighteen. That meant even Rita didn't qualify for a couple of months. He wrote a letter instead, asking Vasco what had happened, and what he should do. It was ten days before he received the reply, and it wrongfooted him when it came.

Listen, Jed, there is something you can do for me. I've got this brother called Francis. He's about nine. Lives with some family over in Torch Bay. I go and see him, like maybe every couple of weeks, but now I can't any more. Maybe you could go and explain things to him. He's at 25025 Oakwood Drive. Take it easy. Vasco. P.S. The woman who lives there is a BITCH.

A brother?

He told Tip, and Tip seemed just as astonished. ‘Christ,' Tip said, ‘he kept that under his hat, didn't he?'

The next day Jed caught a bus to the harbour. He sat on a green bench at the end of Quay 5, waiting for the Torch Bay ferry. The sky had clouded over, and wind scuffed and pinched the grey water. It
was the kind of day that goaded you until you felt like smashing it.

Such anger in him already.

How was he going to, as Vasco put it, explain things? He couldn't even explain things to himself.

The ferry filled with tourists. Their sun-visors, their ice-creams. Their ceaseless, eager babble. Instead of taking a seat, Jed leaned against the metal door that led down to the engines. He read the instructions on what to do if the boat capsized. Half of him wished it would.

When the ferry docked in Torch Bay, he was the first down the gangplank. He pushed through the crush of people on the quay, slipped into the quiet of a sidestreet. Three or four blocks back from the harbour the ground began to slope upwards; boutiques gave way to houses; trees appeared.

Oakwood Drive was a wide residential street, its sidewalks planted with mahogany and wild oak. Houses stood in their own grounds, some Spanish-looking, some ranch-style, all of them the size of palaces. There was no dirt here, no life. The only sound came from a man who was operating a machine that sucked up leaves. It didn't matter where Jed put his eyes, it always looked like a postcard. His mother would've loved it.

25025 Oakwood Drive was a mansion. Red bricks, white shutters. Immaculate green lawns. Even a flagpole. The gravel crunched under Jed's boots as he started up the drive. He felt watched. It was nothing like his experience outside Reg Gorelli's door. No Judas eye here, no lens to draw his nose forwards till he looked like a fish or a rat. No, this watching was far more sophisticated: it was more like a landscape, and he was a speck on the landscape, a dot, something you could swat with ease, and nobody would ever hear, not if you coughed at the same time.

He searched the porch for a bell, but all he could find was a chain of wrought-iron links. He reached up and pulled on it, half expecting a sudden rush of water. Instead he heard two solemn notes that sounded stolen from a church and, before the second of these notes had died away, the door opened and a woman stood in front of him. She had high, horizontal cheekbones, so her eyes seemed to be perching on ledges. Eyes like birds of prey. Any moment one of them might swoop down, snatch at him, and swerve away again, his heart dripping in its beak. Jed heard Vasco's voice: The woman who lives there is a BITCH.

He swallowed. ‘I've come to see Francis. I've got a message from his brother.'

‘His brother?' Her voice was so cold. She probably kept it in the icebox.

‘Yeah, his brother. Vasco.'

‘Francis has no brother.'

‘But Vasco told me.'

‘Who's that?' said another voice, smaller, younger, not cold at all. ‘Who's at the door?'

Jed tried to peer round the woman, but she narrowed the gap to six inches and filled it with her buzzard eyes and her rippling turquoise dress.

‘Francis has no brother,' she repeated. ‘There must be some mistake.'

Strange that she should choose that word.

‘Goodbye.' She closed the door.

A gust of air-conditioned air moved past his face and lost itself in the heat of the driveway.

He didn't feel safe until he reached the sidewalk. Then he looked back over his shoulder. The house lay on its lawn, perfectly still, immaculate, blank. He thought of his old tapes, the ones he'd had for years, the ones he'd used over and over again. Their silence was always different to the silence of a new tape: it was loaded, prickly, with things recorded and erased; a silence that was like ghosts. That house was an old tape masquerading as a new one. It had recorded and erased, but it was pretending it had just come out of the cellophane. It had ghosts, but it wasn't owning up to them.

He bought a bag of Hawaiian Teardrops and sat on a wooden bench in the Torch Bay ferry terminal. Hawaiian Teardrops were hard chunks of pineapple candy that were coated with sugar crystals. If you ate too many of them, they took the skin off the inside of your mouth. He ate the whole bag and stared out over the grey water. Rain scratched on the windows, but it was still hot, hard to breathe. He felt the door close again. And that gust of cool air across his face.

He remembered a morning not so long ago. He'd woken to the sound of hammer-blows. He'd reached out, across the gap between the two mattresses, and shoved Vasco in the ribs.

‘What's that noise?'

‘I don't know,' Vasco mumbled. ‘Maybe Reg is crucifying himself again.'

Jed put his glasses on and eased out of bed. He poked his head out
of the room. A man in blue dungarees was fitting a lock on Reg's door.

‘Morning,' Jed said. ‘Nice lock'

The man patted the lock. ‘This is the business, this is. You can't get stronger than this.'

The new lock was just the latest addition to Reg's defence system. They never really found out whether it was to keep Jesus in or the world out. Maybe there was nothing happening behind the door, or maybe there was Reg fastened to a home-made cross, some white cloth draped around his skinny loins, his moustache stained yellow by the vinegar.

Finally it was just another thing you couldn't get at.

He saw that woman's eyes widen like wings and leave her face. He saw the blank sockets, smooth as the inside of nests. He had to go and stand on the deck, both hands fastened to the cold rail. The ferry was rolling now, pitching into the waves. Sometimes it stalled, shuddering. Then it pitched forwards into the waves again. The city see-sawed, rain swarmed out of the sky. The inside of his mouth felt sweet but raw. A woman in a green mackintosh asked him if he was all right, she had to ask him three times before he could answer simply, ‘Yes.'