Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

The next week, after training, Tip asked him if he wanted to go eat. He hesitated. The nights he went swimming, Dad always waited till he got home and then they ate supper together. But he couldn’t say that to Tip, it wouldn’t make any sense, so he just nodded.

‘There’s a pizza joint in the neighbourhood,’ Tip said. ‘We could walk.’

‘Sure.’ Nathan had never had pizza before. Dad didn’t approve of it.

They didn’t talk much on the way. Just the ticking of Nathan’s wheels and a flat ring every time Tip swung his damp towel at a streetlamp. The place Tip knew was a biker’s hang-out called Pete’s Pizza. They sat on stools by the window and watched the bikes rip past the open doorway. The street seemed lit by the flare of a match, and it was loud with cars and screaming. Tip ordered two medium Cokes and a nine-inch Tex-Mex Special, with extra pepperoni. It was like a foreign language, a foreign country. And yet Nathan couldn’t help stealing glances at the clock. And every time he looked he could picture exactly what Dad would be doing. Seven-thirty: Dad would be sitting down to supper. Seven-forty-five: Dad would be biting his cornflakes up one hundred times. Eight: Dad would be swallowing his pills. Nathan slid his eyes in Tip’s direction. Swollen eyelids, grey lips. Hair that lay flush against his skull like animal pelt. Dad would be worried sick.

Tip caught him looking. ‘You got to be somewhere?’

Nathan shook his head. ‘No.’ He took a bite of pizza and spoke through it. ‘This pizza’s good.’

Tip nodded. He ate like he swam. He was halfway through his third slice before Nathan had even finished his first, and he was talking too — about his old man who was always on the drink these days, about the swimming trophies they were going to win, about the gang he was in.

‘The Womb Boys,’ he said. ‘You heard of us?’

Nathan hadn’t.

‘Blenheim.’ Tip put scorn into the name. ‘Might as well live on the moon.’ He explained that Vasco made the rules. Vasco was their president. ‘You know Vasco.’ It wasn’t a question. Everyone knew Vasco.

Nathan had only seen him once. Standing by a car in an alley near school. Black leather coat with IMMORTAL across the shoulderblades. Face the shape of a guitar. Moustache.

‘Sometimes we break into places and rip stuff off and sell it,’ Tip explained. ‘That’s fundraising. Other times we just kick back, drink vodka.’ He offered Nathan the last piece of pizza, then bit into it when Nathan shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Basically what we do’s sort of political, I guess.’

Nathan nodded. But it was eagerness. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘It’s what Vasco says. He says we’ve been born in a place where people come to die. He says he’s had enough. He’s declared war on Moon Beach. That’s what WOMB stands for, see. War On Moon Beach.’

Nathan was beginning to understand.

‘Like about a week ago,’ Tip went on. ‘Vasco picks up a paper on a train and reads something about a new funeral parlour that was going up in Carol Park.’ He grinned. ‘It went up all right. In smoke.’

‘You burned it down?’

‘Only the crematorium.’ Tip’s grin stretched wide across his face.

‘You burned down the crematorium?’

But Tip wouldn’t say anything else. He was one of the Womb Boys. Probably he was sworn to secrecy.

When Nathan walked in through the back door, he found Dad making his tea for the night. The clock in the kitchen said eight-thirty-five. He was over an hour and a half late.

‘Where on earth have you been, Nathan?’ Dad said. ‘I’ve been worried about you.’

‘I just went for something to eat. With one of the people on the swimming team.’ Nathan kissed Dad on the cheek, then he began to undo his anorak.

‘You smell funny.’

‘We had pizza.’

‘Pizza? Who did you have pizza with?’

‘Nobody special. His name’s Tip.’

Dad screwed his Thermos shut and dried the top. ‘I just hope you’re not getting in with the wrong people.’

Vasco lived in Mangrove Heights, on a bluff overlooking the river. The first time Jed saw the house, he couldn’t help thinking of the Empire of Junk. Towers jostled with gables, beams with columns. Gargoyles leered from the eaves, tongues sharp as the heads of arrows, eyes like shelled eggs. The front garden had been planted with all kinds of trees, so the house seemed to skulk. The path to the front door crackled with dead leaves. He could smell plaster, the inside of birds’ nests, river sewage.

‘I should’ve been born in a place like this,’ Jed said, but Vasco was opening the door and didn’t hear.

Vasco shared the house with Mario and Reg, his two great-uncles, and Rita, his sister. Rita was sixteen. She had a boyfriend who drove a dented white Chevrolet. She spent most nights at his place. Mario was almost eighty years old. He had the high, sloping forehead of someone from history. A Roman emperor, something like that. He had white cropped hair and ears you could’ve caught butterflies in. He spent all his time in a wheelchair. ‘There’s nothing wrong with his legs,’ Vasco said. ‘It’s just that, now the wheel’s been invented, he doesn’t see the point of walking. He thinks walking’s out of date.’

On the first evening Vasco and Jed were drinking beer on the porch when the front door opened and Mario rolled across the bare boards of the verandah and parked in a square of late sun. He sat in his maroon wheelchair, one hand cupped to his ear.

‘What’s he doing?’ Jed asked.

Mario looked down at Jed. ‘Listen.’ And he waited a few moments, his hand still cupped to his ear, and then he said, ‘Did you hear that?’

‘What?’ Jed said.

Mario smiled. ‘Money.’

On their way down to the pool hall that night, Vasco told Jed what he knew about Mario. Mario studied law at the university and, during his twenties, he built up an extremely successful practice. In a city like Moon Beach, there was never a shortage of business for a good lawyer, especially one like Mario who’d wisely decided to specialise in wills and probates. He’d also been something of an entrepreneur. While still practising law, he’d run a hearse-rental agency. Then, later, he’d bought into a handkerchief factory in Baker Park. Their most famous innovation was the funeral handkerchief, a plain white cotton handkerchief with a black border. Not long afterwards he patented the first black-edged tissue. He’d made millions, apparently, though nobody knew what he’d done with the money. His only extravagance had been to install an elevator in the house, so he could move between floors without getting out of his wheelchair.

‘So what did he mean this evening about hearing money?’ Jed asked.

‘It’s his factory across the river. He claims he can hear the money being made.’ Vasco looked at Jed and shrugged. ‘I told you. The guy’s senile.’

It suddenly occurred to Jed that he hadn’t heard anything about the other great-uncle, Reg Gorelli. Vasco showed him a photo of a skinny man with big ears and a handlebar moustache.

‘He’s religious,’ Vasco said, ‘locks himself in his room. You’ll probably never see him.’

The next night Jed sat next to Mario and strained to hear something. A coin, anything. Once he heard a clinking that could’ve been loose change, but then the woman from next door walked past with her dog on a metal lead. In any case, Mario wasn’t listening to loose change. He was more interested in bills. The larger the denomination, the better. Jed would never forget the night when, just before nightfall, the last light catching on his white stubble, Mario turned to him and whispered, ‘Listen. Hear that? Hundred-dollar bill.’