Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

Vasco had inherited the same ears. Scooped out at the top and tilted forwards, as if they’d been thrown on a potter’s wheel. But what was it that Vasco heard? Jed wished he could record it and play it back. Would it be sad, like the voices of whales? Or would it screech at you, like the brakes on subway cars sometimes? On second thoughts, maybe he didn’t want to know.

One Saturday night he was sitting in the kitchen making labels for his tapes. It was late and the house was quiet. All the lights off upstairs and Rita out somewhere. He had made a tape of Mario. There was one classic bit where Mario said, ‘Listen, hear that?’ and Jed said, ‘No, what is it?’ and Mario said, ‘Money,’ and then there was absolute silence. He’d thought of playing it to Mario, to prove you couldn’t hear money, but then he realised it wouldn’t prove anything. The silence was the same silence. Mario would hear money in it.

Suddenly the kitchen door crashed open. It was Vasco. He stood in the centre of the room, panting.

‘Why don’t you use an axe next time?’ Jed said.

Then he saw the rips in the knees of Vasco’s jeans. And the palms of his hands, red and black. Blood and gravel.

‘I got run over,’ Vasco said.

Jed stared at him. ‘What?’

‘I fucking got run over.’ Vasco didn’t seem to believe it himself. He was sitting with his hands held out in front of him, palms upwards, as if testing for rain.

Then he turned and stared at Jed, and all the skin seemed to slip down his face. ‘Scraper’s dead.’

‘What?’

‘They wanted me, but I got out the way. They got Scraper instead.’ His face began to tighten again.

‘Who wanted you?’

‘I didn’t hear it coming. I just didn’t fucking hear it.’ Vasco kicked the fridge twice, denting the door.

‘Who was it?’

Vasco just stared at him. ‘Who do you think?’

It was only then that Jed realised the full extent of Vasco’s obsession. It was death that was after him. It was death, of course. After all, you couldn’t declare war on death without expecting a bit of retaliation, could you?

It took Jed almost two hours to dig the gravel out of Vasco’s hands. For the last twenty minutes he worked with a needle, the tip blackened in a flame. And when he dabbed iodine into the wounds, Vasco sizzled through his white lips, the noise of a branding iron on flesh.

The next day Vasco showed Jed where it had happened. Both his hands were bound, and blunt as the heads of snakes. Dark spots of blood seeping through from the palms, as if he was some kind of risen Christ. Which in a way he was that morning. Down the hill and into Omega. This was dockland. Old warehouses, uneven streets. One narrow strip of sunlight running down the gutter. The rest in shadow. Parked trucks glittering and clumsy. Winches dipping like the beaks of birds.

‘Look,’ and Vasco had to punch the air because he couldn’t point, ‘this is it.’

The skidmarks showed as two loose S-shapes scorched on the tarmac. Vasco walked over, stood in the crook of one of them.

‘Scraper’s death,’ he said.

Jed tried standing there too, and felt an odd sensation. It was as if a shadow had slipped through his body. A different kind of shadow, though. The kind of shadow that the shadow in the street would’ve been frightened of. He saw Scraper laid out on an embalming table, he saw the blur of ginger hair on Scraper’s forearms. Like they were going too fast. But not any more. He heard knives. They sounded like loose change. He shivered.

‘You were lucky, Vasco.’ He put all this brightness that he didn’t feel into his voice. He wanted to be lifted up.

But Vasco wasn’t listening to him. He was gazing back along the street. Maybe he heard the car again. Or not again, but for the first time. The way he should’ve heard it the night before. When he turned to Jed he seemed to have been thinking all the way round something. He was tired, but he was sure. ‘They couldn’t have killed me. It’s not my time.’

‘Could you hear it coming?’ Jed asked him.

Vasco swung back to face him. ‘What?’

‘Your death,’ Jed said. ‘You reckon you could hear it coming?’

‘What the fuck are you talking about, Jed?’

Jed turned away. They were standing on the moment of collision, the sun was high and white, and three men were shouting at the end of the street. That was all the world was. A high white sun, some tyre marks, three men shouting. Sometimes it seemed as if he’d always been very old. People said that time lasted for ever when you were young. That was lies. Lies and rosy spectacles. His spectacles had steel frames and time was those tattoos on Vasco’s arm. They were more like time than any clock. Once, in the Empire Of Junk, he’d seen an hour-glass. Now that came closest to the truth. Except you could turn it upside down and start again. So that was lies too. The sand should run out the first time, run right out. Once, and once only. Time wasn’t outside you, it was inside. What was time for Scraper? Thirteen and a bit years, that’s what it was. Time was something that went bad, like fruit. To be used before it was all used up. Though, for most people, the only way to live was to deny that. As Vasco was doing now. And Jed suddenly realised, under that high white sun, on the day after Scraper died; he realised that everyone was scared. His mother was scared. Old Mr Garbett was scared. Even Vasco was scared.

Though there he was, standing on the street, the word IMMORTAL flashing on his coat like a gauntlet thrown to fate. And he was saying something. ‘I guess you’ll be there to record it when it happens,’ he was saying, ‘won’t you, Jed?’

Dad was lying in bed, propped on his seven pillows, when Nathan walked in. A bottle of eucalyptus oil stood in a basin of hot water in the corner of the room.

‘It should be ready by now,’ Dad said, ‘but you’d better test it first.’

Nathan moved over to the washbasin. It was one of the holy objects, this bottle of oil. It was ancient, made of ribbed green glass, green as seaweed. It had six sides and a cork stopper. Dad must’ve lost the original top. He’d found a cork that almost fitted and then he’d whittled it down. Now, years later, it looked as if it belonged.

The oil was fine: not too hot, not too cold. He let the water out of the basin and brought the bottle over to the bed. Dad took off his nightclothes, the blue sweater with the holes in, the torn pyjama jacket, and lay face down, his head turned sideways on the pillows. He flinched as the oil ran across his back, then he relaxed and said, ‘It’s all right.’

It had been hard to touch Dad the first time. Everything looked so injured that he couldn’t work out where to start. Dad had sensed his hesitation. ‘Just be gentle,’ he said. ‘Do the shoulders first.’ That was a good thing to say. There was nothing wrong with his shoulders. The damage only began further down. One side of his body sagged where the ribs had been cut away, so his spine seemed strangely marooned. The scars shone like pink wax. You could still see the holes left by the hypodermic needles when they’d drained the fluid out of his lungs. The needles were so big, Dad had told him once, that you could actually see the ends.

The funny thing was, he didn’t look disabled. If you’d seen him walking along the street you wouldn’t’ve noticed anything unusual. There were no obvious signs or clues. No crutches, for instance. No wheelchair. No, it wasn’t until you saw him naked that you realised the full extent of the damage. Perhaps not even then. You still couldn’t see the lungs. If you watched him closely you could see that he breathed a bit quicker than most people, like a bird, Nathan had always thought, but how many people looked that closely? Dad only had half of one lung and a third of the other. Something like that, anyway. He couldn’t fly in planes or swim underwater. He had to avoid elevators, phone booths, cellars. All those places could kill him. Even bad weather could kill him. That was why everything was so dangerous. That was why he had to be so careful.