The Five Gates of Hell (2 page)

‘She's going somewhere else.'

A whirl through his stomach as he thought it might be for ever and ever, like prayers. Yvonne put her hand on the back of his head. ‘It's only for a few weeks,' she said. ‘You'll be back together before you know it,' and he looked up at her, with her copper hair that fitted on her scalp like a magnet and her smile that was bright, missed lipstick and crooked teeth, and suddenly he trusted her again, and could smile back. So it was settled.

The day came for them to leave. Dad called Nathan into the lounge and pressed a silver coin into his hand. ‘I just wanted to give you something,' he said, and then he turned his head away. Nathan clutched the coin in his fingers and stared at the table leg, how it had an ankle, and how the ankle curved into a golden paw. How one of the claws was chipped.

Dad waved goodbye from an upstairs room, his face rising in the window like a pale moon, smudged craters for his mouth and eyes. A full moon seen through glass. Bad luck, as Yvonne, who was superstitious, might've said. She wore her special fish brooch that morning. She believed that fish were sacred. ‘They're the guardians of the soul,' he'd heard her say, and he couldn't pretend he understood. She'd been wearing the brooch for a week now, ever since her sister, his mother, ever since it happened. It stood for loss, it was so she remembered, it was how you could tell she was sad. You'd never have guessed otherwise. Yvonne dressed like someone from another time. Which time, though, nobody could ever quite decide. Dad was always asking her where the costume party was; it was one of his jokes. For the drive up north she'd fastened her copper hair in a canary-yellow headscarf. Triangles of turquoise swung from the lobes of her ears. She wore dark glasses with tortoiseshell frames and a silk blouse that wrinkled and shimmered like a piece cut out of the ocean. A small box, made from the same metal as her hair, hung from a chain around her neck. Inside the box was a clove of fresh garlic wrapped in a twist of crackly red paper. To thin her blood, she said, and keep the devil on his toes. But it was still the fish brooch that you noticed most. When the man in the gas station leaned one friendly smeared forearm on the window and asked how much she wanted, Nathan watched the fish catch his eye and reel it in, and suddenly the man was stepping back and ducking his head and muttering how sorry he was.

‘My sister just died,' Aunt Yvonne said. ‘This is her little boy.'

She turned away and stared through the windshield, into the light, and Nathan could see her right eye through the side of her dark glasses, could see the tears shuddering on her lower lid. Back on the highway she rolled her window down and stepped hard on the gas pedal, it might've been a beetle the way she crushed it into the floor. The needle on the speedometer leapt and trembled. Ninety, ninety-five. He thought she was going to cry, but she didn't. He thought she was brave.

It was six hours to Hosannah Beach and he didn't glance at the silver coin that Dad had given him, not even once. All the way he clutched it tight in the palm of his hand and felt the bevelled edge bite into his skin. They arrived in darkness, the headlights trained on a stand of cactus, its leaves a pale chalk green and sharp as the fins of sharks. Waiting in the car while Yvonne unlocked the house, he brought his hand up to his face and opened it. His sweat had the bitter smell of hot metal, hot and bitter, this was what leaving home would always smell like. Through the open window he heard the wind in the pine trees and the ocean, he couldn't tell which was which, he was too drowsy now from the long drive, and then Yvonne's voice, calling him inside.

He woke early and listened. Nothing. He lifted his head. Morning lay against the window in a thick grey fog. He left the warmth of his bed and crept downstairs, thinking he would be the first, but when he turned into the kitchen he found Yvonne adjusting the shoulder-strap on her black swimsuit. Her skin looked dry and brown and crinkly like the paper Dad gave him to paint on when it rained.

‘I was just going for a swim,' she said. ‘Would you like to come?'

The house stood on a low cliff overlooking a stony beach. A narrow footpath led down steep rocks to the sea. There was a handrail, made out of wooden posts and faded orange fishing rope. You had to hold on tight, otherwise you might fall. He let her lead the way. She held one arm out in the air as if the footpath was a tightrope. The backs of her thighs rumpled and quivered. Once on level ground she became strong again. He liked the way she marched across the beach, as if she was leading an army, the stones chinking under her wide bare feet like chain mail.

The water was colder than he was used to. He swam until his lungs burned, then he wrapped himself in a towel and explored the beach. He found a skull wedged between two rocks and managed to prise it loose without breaking it. He showed it to Yvonne.

‘It's some kind of gull,' she told him.

‘Can I keep it?'

She laughed. ‘What would you do if I said no?'

He smiled, but was uneasy.

Then he looked down at the skull again, his skull, and a strange pleasure eased through him. Everything spread outwards from the object he held in his hand, everything spread round him, unlimited, available.

Back at the house, after their swim, they ate a breakfast of eggs speckled with fresh herbs from the garden and waffles soaked in maple syrup and tall glasses of cold milk.

‘You know, I think it's the first time I've ever seen you swim,' Yvonne said. ‘You're pretty good in the water, aren't you? You were made for it, I'd say.'

‘Dad says it's in my blood.' Nathan licked a trickle of syrup off his finger. ‘You know when you get hot and sweat? That's how you can tell. You taste it and if it tastes like salt, it's because the sea's in your blood. Dad's got the sea in his blood too. He told me.'

She was smiling down at him. Sometimes, when she smiled, her whole face seemed to wobble, like a drop of rain just before it falls off a twig.

For the first few days the weather stayed damp and grey. In the early afternoon the sun would almost burn through, you could sense the blue sky somewhere high above, the blue sky planes fly through, and then the light would fade and the mist would come ghosting in off the ocean, over the dunes and the marshland, over the withered silver bushes that looked like bits of witches, over the old coast road, and you had to switch your headlights on if you drove to the store, even though it was still daytime, otherwise some tree'd step out and put an end to everything.

Yvonne told him about the walk out to the headland. She had cut the path herself, she said, with her own two hands and a machete, and nobody must ever know. It was their secret, other people would ruin it, you must never tell, she said.

‘Who would I tell?' he asked her, and saw that smile on her face again, that smile that was like a drop of rain, and then she took his head in one hand and brought it to her breast and held it there.

He went on the walk every day. You left the house through the sliding doors at the front, crossed a garden of tangled shrubs and plants and, when you reached the cliff edge, you pushed your way
through a bush and there was the hidden entrance to the path. You followed the cliff edge for a long time, the sea sleeping way below, that rustle as it rolled over in its bed, that sigh. Eventually you were forced inland, through a forest of twisted black trees and green grass, and it was this forest that delivered you out on to the headland. It was sixty feet high, but still the spray came vaulting over the edge, a fright every time because you couldn't hear it coming, it was like someone jumping out from behind a door. He found a flat rock near the edge and sat and watched the wind lift clouds of fine spray off the top lips of the waves.

One day Aunt Yvonne followed him out. He heard her as a movement in the grass behind him and didn't need to turn. He'd known that, sooner or later, she would come. She sat down next to him and locked her arms round her knees.

He'd been thinking, and now he turned to her. ‘When my mother died, where did she go?'

‘She went into the ocean.' Yvonne took his hand in hers. ‘She loved the ocean. It was in her blood, just like it's in yours.' She lit a cheroot and suddenly the world smelled like the inside of a cupboard that hadn't been opened for years. ‘When you go back to the ocean,' she said, ‘all the bad things you've ever done, they're washed away. You're purified, cleansed, ready for the next life. You know that skull you found?'

He nodded.

‘Remember how pure and white it was?'

He remembered.

‘Well, that's what the ocean does,' she said. ‘Takes out all the dirt, all the stains of having been alive.'

‘You mean, like a washing machine?' he said.

She laughed. ‘Just like a washing machine.'

That night, in his room, he took the bird's skull and held it under the lamp. Aunt Yvonne was right. There was only pure white bone. No trace of anything else. Slowly he raised the skull to his nose and sniffed. There was no smell. He wished he could dive down to the ocean bed and watch his mother's soul rising from her pure white bones. But it struck him suddenly that he could no longer remember what she looked like. He wouldn't have known how to recognise her.

During the second week, the weather changed and all the pale colours he remembered from two years before came back. The yellows, the whites, the eggshell-blues. Yvonne began to paint again. After their dawn swim together, she would retire to her studio in the east
wing of the house, her hair wrapped in a twist of bright silk, a box of cheroots under her arm. Once he heard the click of her studio door he knew he'd be alone till noon. There were no rules for how to use the time; she expected him to make his own. He filled the first days searching the dunes for shells and skulls or curling into their soft hollows with a book. He was lying on his back one morning after swimming, one hand draped against his belly, the other bent behind his head. His trunks had slipped down and the sun seemed to tug on his blood, he felt his penis swell and push against the damp wool and then, like someone in a trance, he didn't know what he was doing and yet he knew what to do, he built the hot sand into a mound beneath his towel and, turning on to his stomach, began to rub himself against the mound, his legs like scissors, his eyes tight shut, and then that part of him seemed to leap, the sun's red through his eyelids vanished, he saw green, cool green, water fathoms down, the gloom inside a wood, the stalks of plants, and the breath came out of him ah-ah-ah-ah-ah like something tumbling down a flight of stairs. When he opened his eyes again, the air was blue glass, and a man in a tall hat and a black coat stood on the sand, between him and the ocean. The man raised his stick in greeting, then walked on. Nathan watched until the man grew thin and warped in the fierce air, then he let his breath out and stood up, legs shaking. As he rinsed his towel in the ocean he wondered who the man was. Could he be one of the strangers Dad had talked about?

Walking back to the house that afternoon, he looked up through the bushes and saw Yvonne standing on the verandah. She wore a dress that was as green as an empty bottle of wine and her hands were smeared with red, he thought for a moment that she'd hurt herself, then he knew that it was just paint. She was leaning forwards from the waist, her head straining on her neck, as if her house was an island and she was scouring the horizon for a wisp of smoke, as if she was hoping she might be saved. He stood below her, unseen. It was a still day. All he heard was one gust of wind passing through the chimes like something breaking slowly, beautifully, inside her. He entered the house through the back door and began to prepare some sandwiches for lunch. ‘Well,' Yvonne said, when she walked into the kitchen a few minutes later, ‘at least they won't have paint on them for once,' and he smiled at her over his shoulder and, if it was a stranger that he'd seen on the beach, well, he thought, at least I didn't talk to him, at least nothing happened.

The next day, towards sunset, he knocked on the door to her studio
and walked in. Aunt Yvonne stood in front of her black easel, palette and paintbrush in her fists like sword and shield, her body concealed inside a pale-blue tent. She always worked with the windows open and, that evening, a wind had lifted off the ocean. Nothing in the room was still. Everything fluttered, flapped and rattled. The dried flowers, the drawings on the walls, her hair. The effect was less one of walking into a room than of suddenly finding oneself travelling at high speed in an open car. He had to shout to make himself heard.

‘Yvonne?'

She waved him over. When he was standing beside her, she jabbed at the easel. ‘What do you think?'

He looked at the picture. Lots of white and blue balls, trapped between lines. At first he thought of noughts and crosses, and then he realised there weren't any crosses. Then he didn't know what he thought.

‘What's it supposed to be?' he asked her.

‘It's whatever you want it to be.'

‘Don't you know?'

She shook her head. ‘Have you got any ideas?'

He looked at the picture for longer, then he looked at the others, stacked in piles against the wall. In some of the pictures there were lots of balls, in others there was only one: a white ball on a blue background, for instance; a red ball on grey. He thought he understood these better. He went back to the picture on the easel and suddenly he had it. ‘It's moons,' he said, and felt sure that he was right.

‘Moons,' she said. And folded her arms across her chest and tilted her head on one side. ‘Moons,' she said again and, walking round to the back of the picture, she wrote MOONS on it, and the date. There was her grin and then there was his. Hers wide and delighted. His still uncertain, but slowly becoming less so.

September came and still the weather held. Nights when even a single sheet seemed too heavy on his skin. Yvonne took to sitting on the kitchen floor with the fridge door open and a tall drink clinking in her fist. He could tell that time had passed by looking in the mirror; his blond hair had bleached almost white, his nose was powdered with freckles and he could see pale half-moons in the bays between his fingers. He felt his weeks with Yvonne had washed everything clean out of his head. It was almost as if he'd gone to the bottom of the ocean too, he could imagine what that was like now, he could almost imagine his mother there. His head felt like the gull's skull he'd
packed so carefully in his case. It felt empty, picked clean, pure. Leave it outside and it would whistle in the wind. Drop it into the sea and the fish would swim through its eyes and ears like a game. He could hardly remember what he was returning to. On the drive back down to Moon Beach, Yvonne reminded him.