The Five Gates of Hell (12 page)

Vasco's case came up the following month. He was sentenced to eighteen months in a corrective institution. The next thing Jed heard, Vasco was somehow involved in the death of another inmate and he was sent to a top-security detention centre in another county.

Jed had always thought of Vasco as high-frequency. He'd always seen Vasco as a kind of radio, picking up stations that no other radio could pick up. Maybe that was true, but maybe it was also true that he was picking up the wrong stations, stations that were dangerous. Jed had read about people hearing voices. He'd seen it in the paper. Some guy kills fourteen people and then he says, It was the voices, the voices told me to do it. That guy, he's picking up the wrong stations. And suddenly he feared for his friend.

It was seven years before he saw him again.

The moment Nathan saw Harriet step out of the taxi, he knew that they'd slipped up somewhere. In the five years since their mother died they'd had nine different au pair girls and every single one of them had been ugly. It was basically Dad's idea. He thought ugly girls were less trouble. Nathan and Georgia would spend entire afternoons sifting through the pictures the agency had sent. It was a game to them, and they often went too far, choosing some girl with a broken nose or a moustache. Even though they were playing by Dad's rules, it'd be Dad, in the end, who'd object. There'd have to be a compromise: they'd settle on some plain girl who'd grown up on a farm.

But there was Harriet, standing on the sidewalk in a pink sleeveless dress and white shoes with straps round the ankles. Her eyes sent out rays like cut glass turning in the sun. Her hair was light-brown, with a fringe that skimmed her eyebrows. Her limbs were slim and tanned. Nathan's first thought on that warm September afternoon, and it may also have been Dad's first thought, judging by the way his voice had lifted an octave in nervousness, was: She's just not ugly enough.

She was smiling as they walked out to the street to greet her, and Nathan recognised the smile from her picture. Her two front teeth overlapped slightly like fingers crossed for good luck. A moment of carelessness in the construction of her face. The slip that made her beautiful. He watched her run a hand through Georgia's hair. He still couldn't understand how they'd come to choose her. It must've been an old picture, taken at an unflattering age. Either that, or she just wasn't photogenic.

He carried her cases upstairs. She followed him. When he reached her room he put the cases down again and held the door open for her. It was a small room, but it faced west, over the garden. The hills rose in the distance, their browns and golds invaded by a wedge of black. There'd been a fire on the ridge that summer.

But she'd stopped inside the doorway. ‘Oh,' she said, and turned to him. ‘There are bars on the window.'

He smiled. ‘There are bars on all the windows. It's just the style of architecture. It's sort of Spanish.'

She reached up, pushed a hand into her fringe. One silver bracelet skittered down her arm.

‘It's all right,' he said. ‘It's not a prison.'

She sat down on the edge of the bed, tested the mattress with one hand. Then she smiled up at him. A wide, uncomplicated smile. ‘I'm glad it's not a prison.'

She was like no au pair girl they'd ever had before. She couldn't cook, she played the radio too loud, she went out dancing at night. The house seemed to be admitting more light than it usually did; it was as if someone had knocked a few new windows in the walls. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, though. Perhaps her beauty was, in itself, disturbance enough. Her six months passed and at the end of that time she did what au pair girls always did: she flew home.

Nathan hardly noticed. Not long after Harriet arrived, Mr Marshal had called Dad and asked him whether he'd thought of putting Nathan forward for the Moon Beach Lifesaving Club. Dad hadn't, but he thoroughly approved of the idea; fitness, a sense of discipline, the ability to set a good example and, if need be, help others, these were all attributes that he held dear. As a result of that phone-call Nathan spent most of the weekday nights that winter training in the outdoor pool on Sunset Drive, and by the time Harriet left in the spring he was ready to apply for membership.

On the first Saturday in April he rode down to the beach to meet with the captain of the Club. It was still early, nobody much about, just a few old people from the hotels; he looked at each of them as a person he might one day save. As he headed across the warm sand towards the look-out tower he passed two lifeguards. He'd met them once, at the pool with Tip. One of them was called Finn, which was a good name for a lifeguard, he thought. The other one was Ade. He told them he was trying out for the Club. They wished him luck.

The captain was waiting by the tower, as arranged. He wore scarlet trunks and every time he moved you saw the muscles shift under his skin. He took one look at Nathan, then he turned his eyes out to the ocean, shook his hands on the end of his wrists. ‘You the guy who wants to join the Club?'

Nathan said he was.

‘Let's go for a swim.'

They walked down to the waterline. Wave after wave slammed on to the packed sand. A dull hard sound, like a hand brought down on wood. The beach seemed to shudder every time.

‘Dumpers,' the captain said. ‘Think you can handle it?'

He took a deep breath. ‘I'll give it a try.'

The captain nodded. ‘You've got to get under the first wave. Then get your head up and grab yourself some air before the next wave hits.'

Easy to say.

Nathan beat the first two waves, and then he had to fight even to stay in the same place. Every time he dived under a wave he felt it haul him back towards the shore. He looked for the captain, but he couldn't see that blond head anywhere. A wave high enough to cut the sun out curled above him. He dived too late. He was sucked down, spun round, the weight of water crushing the breath out of him. Somehow he found the surface for a moment, took in air, then he was rolled again. He fetched up in the shallows, blinded, coughing.

A hand on his shoulder. ‘You OK?'

‘Yeah.' But the salt burned the back of his throat; he could hardly speak.

‘You sure?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Want to try again?'

‘OK.'

And the same thing happened, only this time he almost drowned. He came to the surface, too weak to breathe, and was sinking back again when the captain took hold of him, and it was like some passage from the Bible, he felt as if he'd been raised from the dead, lifted by some divine, invisible hand. He heard a calm voice above the crashing water.

‘Relax, just relax.'

And he relaxed. The captain was some kind of prophet.

‘You'll be fine. You're going to drink some water, but you'll be fine.'

And he was fine. But it wasn't prophecy. What it was, in fact, as he came to understand later, was knowledge.

Back on the sand he felt limpness and bruising in every part of his body. But even more painful than that was the shame in his head. He hadn't even got past the third wave, he'd failed, they'd never take him now.

‘Thanks for getting me out.'

The captain grinned. ‘That's what I'm here for.'

‘I'm all right in the pool, but this,' and he glanced over his shoulder, ‘this is nothing like the pool.'

‘No kidding.' The captain turned his grey eyes on the waves. ‘The spring tides're on their way.' He looked at Nathan as Nathan got shakily to his feet. ‘I like what you did out there. Most guys, they wouldn't've gone in a second time.'

Nathan shrugged.

‘Come down tomorrow. We'll see how things work out.'

Nathan heard a chuckle behind him. He turned to see Tip standing on the sand, his feet turned outwards, his arms folded across his chest.

‘You must've drunk about half the fucking ocean.'

Nathan just looked at him. ‘Yeah, well,' he said, ‘I was thirsty, wasn't I?'

He almost died again on the way home. He jinked through the rush-hour traffic on the bridge, skimming down the outside of the fast lane, cutting back inside for the Blenheim exit. He reached the driveway breathless, threw his bicycle down, and ran into the house.

He found Dad sitting in his red chair.

‘You remember I had a trial for the lifeguards? Well, I've done it. I'm in.'

Dad was staring into the corner of the room, his spectacles dangling from one finger. ‘That's good.'

‘For the Lifesaving Club, Dad. Just like you wanted.'

Dad just nodded. ‘Excellent.'

‘I almost drowned twice doing it.'

‘Well done.'

He sat down next to Dad and stared at him. ‘What's wrong with you?'

Dad sighed. ‘I'm in love with her.'

Nathan looked around the room. ‘Who?'

‘Harriet.'

‘Harriet?'

All his excitement dwindled as his mind whirled back three months to a shopping trip with her. When he climbed into the car, she was smiling at him in that sugary way that used to make his teeth ache. But he'd probably smiled back.

As she shifted into reverse she turned to him again. ‘Tell me, Nathan, have you ever made love to a girl?'

He looked at her quickly, then he looked down at his hands. That smile again. There was something greedy under the sugar, something
predatory. He felt her words trying to open him up. It was like she had a can-opener and he was just sitting there, a can of something. ‘No,' he said.

‘Have you ever kissed a girl?'

‘Probably.'

‘Probably? Can't you remember?'

‘Not recently,' he said. ‘That's what I meant.'

She gave him a curious look and then smiled to herself. Looking back at the road again, she had to swerve to avoid a man on a bicycle. She was still smiling as she swerved.

‘You must tell me about it when you do,' she said. ‘When you make love for the first time, I mean. I want to know what you think.'

He glanced away from her, out of the window. An ice-cream parlour, a man with a dog, a tree. How was he going to get out of shopping next week?

‘It's so wonderful, it's like,' and she left her mouth open while she thought, and then it came to her, and she smiled, ‘it's like colours everywhere.'

Colours everywhere?

‘I want to know if you see those colours too.' She was looking at him again. She seemed to have been looking at him practically the whole time. He couldn't understand why they hadn't crashed yet, why they weren't wrapped round a tree or a streetlight, why they weren't, in fact, dead.

Still smiling, Harriet parked the car. She knew she'd embarrassed him. She even seemed to have enjoyed it. He'd thought she was prying at the time, and resented it. But now he saw her questions in a different light. Maybe she'd just been excited that morning, and her excitement had spilled over. Maybe she'd just seen those colours everywhere for the first time. Maybe it'd happened the night before.

He looked across at Dad.

‘I didn't want to tell you,' Dad said. ‘Not until I was sure.'

‘I never realised.'

‘You wouldn't have. We were careful. And anyway, you were hardly here.'

‘What do you mean, you were careful?'

‘We took,' and suddenly Dad looked furtive, almost guilty, ‘special precautions.'

‘What kind of precautions?'

‘We had a piece of string.' Dad explained how he had run the string from under his pillow, across his bedroom, out of his window, along
the back wall of the house (where it was lost among the branches of a lilac bush) and in through Harriet's window, ending in a loop that Harriet slipped over her big toe when she went to bed at night. They always waited until Nathan was either out or asleep, then Dad tugged on the string, and Harriet tiptoed across the landing and into his bed.

Dad unlocked his desk and took out a ball of strong brown string. ‘There, that's it.' Just looking at the string reminded him of too much. His eyes moved beyond it, out of focus.

‘So what are you going to do?'

‘I'm going to ask her to come back and marry me.'

But he was more than twice Harriet's age, as Harriet's family pointed out, through Harriet, in her first letter. He wrote back, asking her whether she loved him. Of course she loved him, she said, but she had to think. He said that if she loved him there was nothing to think about. He told her he was going to drive into town and find a piece of string that was six thousand miles long, a piece of string that would reach right across the ocean, from his sad finger to her beautiful big toe. She wrote back saying how much she liked his last letter. She hoped he could find a piece of string like that. But then she said, ‘Maybe we need rope now,' which only depressed him.

Towards the end of the summer he began to founder. He was still writing almost every day, but she was writing less. He felt a pain in his right hand that was caused, he said, by the great weight of his love passing from his heart into his pen. He also suspected that it might be arthritis. And then, a few days before his forty-ninth birthday, he received a letter, her first for over a week. She said she had a birthday surprise for him. She was coming back to marry him. He turned pale and almost fainted. Nathan had to reach up under his shirt with a towel and mop the cold sweat off his back.

Three weeks later, the marriage took place. Standing on the steps of City Hall for the wedding photographs in her navy-blue suit and her sheer black stockings, Harriet achieved a temporary sophistication. Dad stood beside her. He looked both proud and guilty of something. As if happiness was a reward and he wasn't sure he'd done enough to deserve it. After the ceremony they celebrated with lunch at the revolving restaurant on Sunset Tower. Forty-two floors up, a 360-degree view. One of the most exclusive restaurants in the city. Harriet ordered a bottle of champagne and four glasses.