The Five Gates of Hell (33 page)

He could imagine the suffocation, he really could. The string that had once been fastened lightly round her toe had tightened during the years of marriage, slowly tightened into a leash. And she'd strained at it, strained at it until it snapped. But, looking into her face, it didn't seem as if her years of freedom had been particularly kind to her. There were those, of course, who'd say that she'd only herself to blame. She shouldn't have left, should she?

He turned his glass on its base. ‘What does Yvonne think about you coming back?'

‘I don't think she minds.'

‘I was going to say. You seem to be getting on pretty well.'

She fastened on to his meaning. ‘Yes, that's funny, isn't it? She never had much time for me before.'

‘She thought you were too young,' he said. ‘She thought you were going to change everything.'

Harriet shook her head. ‘That wasn't the reason. I think she was in love with him. She wanted to look after him.'

He thought of those months after their mother died when Yvonne had come to stay. He could still see her painting in the garden. ‘It would never've worked,' he said. ‘Dad couldn't stand the smell of her cigars.'

They both laughed for a while and then fell silent.

‘Isn't it strange,' she said, ‘how death can bring a family together?'

That night he decided to sleep in Dad's room. When he opened the door and turned on the light, everything was exactly as he remembered it. The smell of vanilla and talcum in the air. The glint of the green bottle on the glass shelf above the basin. The seven pillows.

He thought of the last time he'd seen Dad. When they said goodbye they'd embraced by the front door, a taxi waiting on the road outside. He'd caught a glimpse of the two of them reflected in the hall mirror and his heart had lurched because it looked as if he was propping up a corpse. Dad's body seemed to sag, as if his bones had turned to mush, and his breath, usually so fresh, smelled sweet, the sweetness of rotting plants or compost. That sweet smell, it was strange how he'd recognised it. That sweet smell was death's footman. It was the announcement you heard just before death made its entrance.

Back on India-May's farm he'd hung that picture in his head. He'd carried it around with him, framed by the mirror's gilt, like some kind of talisman. So long as he remembered the frailty of Dad's grip on life, Dad's fingers would never loosen and let go. That was how the superstition worked. But time passed; the picture faded, moved him less. He began to take Dad's life for granted again. He forgot to remember. Dad had lasted so long, it was tempting to believe that he would last for ever. And that was fatal, of course.

He got into bed and lay down. He thought he heard the foghorn once, off High Head. Ten minutes passed, or maybe half an hour, it was hard to tell. Then a voice rose out of the darkness, hovered in the air, almost visible, like a hallucination.

‘Nathan? You awake?'

At first he didn't know where he was, whose voice it was. He must have been asleep. And waking suddenly like that, you woke in a thousand different places at once, all the places that you'd ever been. It took him a moment.

‘Georgia?'

She was standing at the end of the bed with a candle. The room bucked and tilted in the unsteady yellow light. He watched her place the candle on the windowsill.

She came over and sat down and held him. ‘I didn't want to sleep in my old bed,' she whispered. ‘I wanted to sleep here, with you.'

‘What time is it?'

‘I don't know. It must be about one.' The bed listed, creaked, as she climbed in.

‘Are you all right?' he asked her.

‘I think so. How about you?'

‘I'm fine,' he said. ‘Just tired.'

‘Do you want me to blow the candle out?'

He shook his head. ‘I had a friend who used to say that if you burned a candle in your window and it burned all night, then the world wouldn't end while you were sleeping.'

Georgia smiled. ‘Who was that?'

‘She was called India-May.'

‘Funny name.'

‘She made it up. It was the name she started using when she left home.'

‘Where is she now?'

‘I don't know. I haven't seen her for ages.'

He'd called the farm about a year after he left. He'd wanted to see how everybody was. Pete had answered. Pete was the one who'd told him.

‘She died, didn't she?' Georgia said.

He looked at her across the pillows. ‘I didn't want to tell you.'

‘You did tell me. You're my brother. You tell me everything.'

He was silent.

‘How did it happen?' she asked.

‘It was funny, people were always saying things about her, about how she'd come to no good –' He stopped again.

‘Tell me.'

‘There was a bar in town, it was down at the end of the main street, right where the buildings ended and the scrub began. There was a hill there, pretty steep, and the bar was at the bottom of it. She went in for a drink one time, she liked a few drinks around midday, she used to say it helped the long hot afternoons slide by,' and Nathan smiled to himself, because he could hear her saying it. ‘She met some guy in there that day, some guy she used to go with, and he must've said something because the next thing anyone knew, she was screaming at him, Pete was in the bar the morning after, he said the window was all over the floor, apparently she'd thrown an ashtray at the guy and it had missed and taken the whole window out instead, and when he took her by the arm and tried to calm her down, she shook him off and ran out of the bar, right out in the street, and like I said, it was the bottom of a hill and there was a truck coming –'

He could see that part of Broken Springs so clearly, almost as if he was standing there. There was a wall on the far side of the street which was always being knocked over. Trucks would come hurtling
down the hill, their brakes would fail, and they'd plough right through the wall and on into the field beyond. As soon as the wall was mended, another truck's brakes would fail.

He could see the bar opposite too. The road dipping down into town and the bar with its brown tin roof and its dusty verandah, and a woman running out into the street, hair horizontal in the air behind her, strings of wooden beads swinging in a loop around her neck like a cow's jaw chewing, her mouth wide open, a wedge hewn out of her face, as if someone had taken an axe to her, as if her mouth was a wound and her screaming the bleeding.

He looked across at Georgia. Her head on the pillow. Her face still, as it sometimes was before she began to cry. He felt for her hand and held it tight.

‘I didn't want to tell you,' he said.

He watched their candle moving the shadows around, keeping the end of the world at bay, keeping the two of them alive.

‘I had to go to the hospital,' she said eventually. ‘I had to collect his things.'

‘Did you see him?'

‘They asked me if I wanted to. I said no. I just wanted to get out of there.'

‘I think I've got to see him. I haven't seen him for so long.'

‘You'll have to call them.'

‘I'll call tomorrow.'

‘Maybe I'll come too,' she said, though her voice had shrunk at the thought.

‘My brother still,' he said after a while, ‘aren't you?' And he waited, and then he heard one word come back, spoken in a whisper, she must have been close to sleep.

‘Yes.'

The hospital lay in the hills, about an hour away. Yvonne drove. Georgia and Harriet sat in the back. It was a bright day. White, blinding clouds and a breeze in the treetops like hands in hair. But Nathan felt a sickness rise in him at the thought of arriving, he didn't want the journey to end. The sickness rose into his throat, and he had to keep swallowing. He was glad that they'd all decided to come. He wouldn't have liked to be doing this alone.

Nobody talked much on the way out. As they climbed into the hills, the sky lowered over the car. A light rain began to fall.

The road that led to the hospital sloped upwards through a forest
of pine trees. It was a straight road, the kind of road that leads to a temple or a sacred monument. Nathan looked out of the window. Once he saw a glade, a secret place with a floor of pale, sandy soil. Then the pines closed ranks again, their tall red trunks glowing softly in the gloom of the afternoon.

When they reported to the hospital reception, the nurse on duty showed them into a waiting-room. They sat on orange plastic chairs. There was a fish tank and a heap of magazines. There were paintings of flowers on the walls. A man in a white coat limped past the open doorway, pushing a trolley piled high with linen, a cigarette between his fingers. Nathan stood by the window, and looked out into the gardens.

That morning he'd revived an old custom. Leaving Georgia sleeping, he'd knocked on Yvonne's door and asked her if she wanted to go swimming. They drove to a quiet beach west of High Head. It was still early. The sand took the glittery morning light and threw it back into his eyes like a mirror. One wooden jetty crept out over the water on brittle insect legs. And the waves, pale pale green and mauve between.

When he was tired of swimming he climbed a ladder to the jetty. The wooden slats had bleached grey. A creaking like old doors opening and closing. The same rhythm as breathing. He walked down to the end. An old man was sitting on an upturned beer crate, a plastic bag for bait and a bucket of fish beside him. He wore great clothes. A maroon jacket and a panama hat with a shiny black ribbon. White bristles stood out on his cheeks. Nathan sat down. The wooden slats were already warm from the sun. He dangled his legs over the edge and let his body dry. He could see Yvonne, she was floating on her back. Beyond her, further out, a motor launch cut through the water. Not long afterwards he felt the wash slopping against the jetty. The jetty moved lazily, like someone in their sleep. He watched the old man fit another piece of bait on his line and flick the hook backhanded through the air. A prim plop as it landed, sank. The old man tugged gently on the line.

‘What kind of fish are you catching?' Nathan asked.

Smiling, the old man shrugged. ‘I don't know the name of it.'

It seemed right, what the old man said. You sat in the sun, the hours passed. In the end, sooner or later, something happened. You didn't need to know the name of it.

After their swim, Nathan and Yvonne stopped for coffee and doughnuts in a diner on the highway. They sat at a small table by the
window. Sunlight on formica, salt on skin. Yvonne began to talk about Dad.

‘I hardly ever saw him,' she said, ‘but we used to talk on the phone for hours. We used to send each other pictures. Look,' and she opened her handbag and reached inside, ‘this was one I'd been saving for him –' Her voice cracked and she began to cry.

He put his hand over hers. ‘It's all right.'

‘I'm stupid,' she said.

‘No, you're not.'

‘All these people,' she said. ‘I'm embarrassing you.'

He wanted to cheer her up. ‘Do you remember the time I was staying with you and that couple came round?'

‘Couple?' She looked up, her eyes swollen.

‘That nervous couple,' he said. ‘Their car broke down. You let them use the phone.'

After they'd used the phone, Yvonne said they could wait in the lounge. She sat them down on the sofa. She gave them brandy. The wife didn't know what to make of Yvonne at all. Her eyes kept alighting on Yvonne and taking off again. They tried the walls instead, but there were forty-six paintings on the walls. Every colour moon you could imagine (and some you couldn't). Nowhere to land, not unless you had a spaceship.

Her husband was braver. He rose from the sofa and placed himself in front of a picture. Green moon, yellow universe. ‘Very good,' he said, ‘really very good.'

Yvonne was standing at the far end of the room in her red tent dress, her arms extended, a glass of brandy glimmering in one hand. She looked like a sort of fierce lamp. She took one step forwards and shouted, ‘Yes, I'm in the middle of my ball period, if you want to know,' and the brandy slopped out of her glass and dropped into the part of the carpet that was orange and was never seen again.

‘I think they're moons,' Nathan said. Then he turned to the couple. ‘What do you think they are?'

But Yvonne couldn't wait. ‘Balls,' she shouted. ‘They're balls.'

Yvonne was smiling down into her coffee. ‘Those were good times,' she said, ‘weren't they?'

He pressed her hand. They weren't good times, of course, they were terrible, but he knew what she meant.

‘I'm so sorry to keep you waiting.' It was the sister. She was standing in the doorway with a tight smile on her face. ‘We had an emergency.'

She ushered them down a long corridor through countless swing
doors. The temperature dropped. A morgue appeared on the left like a reason.

She talked to fill the silence. ‘Mr Christie was known here,' she said. ‘He was very well liked.'

These were dead sentences. She might have been reading from a tombstone.

There was nothing you could say.

They passed through another set of doors and out into the open air. It seemed cold up here in the hills. Mist had collected in the trees. There was a sense of abandonment and neglect. A tap dripping endlessly.

They followed the sister across a lawn and into a small chapel built, like the rest of the hospital, out of crumbling red brick. She vanished behind a velvet curtain. They waited, not speaking. A few moments later she appeared again and told them they could go in. She warned them about the steep steps. She said she'd be outside if they needed her.

Nathan passed through the curtain and stopped at the top of the steps. Georgia stopped behind him. She was peering over his shoulder, he could feel her breath on his neck, warm and then nothing, warm and then nothing. Dad lay below, stretched out under a heavy cloth of blue and gold. Two candles flickered at his head. Nathan walked towards him, down the steps, across the stone floor.