Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

Dad sighed. ‘That’s good. Just there.’

Nathan worked the warm oil into the shoulders.

‘You’ve got the same touch as your mother.’

Your mother. He always said that. It made her sound so far away, so high up. It was like your excellency, your honour. Your mother.

But Dad’s thoughts had taken a different turning. ‘Did I ever tell you how we came to live here?’

‘No.’

Nathan smiled to himself. He knew how much Dad looked forward to having his back done, how much it helped, but he also sometimes suspected that it was just an excuse, a chance for Dad to talk to him.

‘Your grandmother had just gone into hospital and I’d just come out.’ Dad paused, remembering. ‘She told us we could have her house. She said she wouldn’t be needing it any more.’

Nathan knew this part of the story. His grandmother had put herself in a mental home, that whole side of the family were a bit mad, apparently, and she’d given them the house for nothing. He prompted Dad. ‘Then what happened?’

‘It was spring,’ Dad began, and his voice turned dreamy as he reached back into the past.

He drove up the coast with Kay, his wife of seven months, beside him. Such happiness: he felt it so acutely, it had almost seemed like pain. There was no highway in those days, only an old switchback road. In the dips you found towns, as secret and intact as fossils, towns with names like Peacehaven and Marble Bay; from the rises you could see ships inching along the horizon, and waves so far away they looked, he remembered Kay saying, ‘like the creases on your knuckles’.

When they reached High Head they bought ice-creams from a van that was playing ‘Moon River’ (and there the river, magically, was, hundreds of feet below and to the east), the melody all cracked and jangly and slow, and then they crossed smooth grass to the precipice, peered down from behind a low wire fence, and there was the famous lighthouse, hoops of red and white, it must’ve been sixty feet high, but it looked like a toy, and he said, ‘People come here to jump,’ and Kay took his arm and pressed her cheek against his shoulder and said, ‘We’re so lucky,’ not to have a reason to, he thought she meant, not to even think of it, the misery that might bring you here, though he could never be sure with Kay, she took off in such strange directions sometimes, words seemed to mean different things to her, it was as if she had her own personal dictionary.

They must’ve stood there for, oh, in his memory it took up more room than some whole years, and then she broke away from him and ran off down the path, and he called out, ‘Careful, Kay, be careful,’ and he went after her, but he couldn’t run, you see, all those years in hospital, they’d sucked the running out of him. When he caught up with her at last, she was standing three feet from the edge in her black ski-pants, they were the fashion then, and her cream wool sweater, rising and falling with her breathing, but three feet from the edge! and there was no fence now, why did she like to scare him so? He took her in his arms, and he kissed the side of her neck and behind her ear, and then he kissed her on the lips, he breathed her in as deeply as his damaged lungs allowed, as if those were his last moments with her, as if he was already beginning to lose her, and he felt he’d never be close enough, even naked, making love, his skin on hers, their bodies joined like hands in prayer, pressed together all the way along, even bellies, even knees, even then he’d never be close enough. Perhaps that was true for everyone, but when he saw her run along the edge like that he sensed the recklessness in her, it had been there all along, but now it frightened him. He had this sudden premonition, that she might leave him behind, alone, but he kept the premonition hidden, he just pulled her tighter to him, his arms were still strong, he pulled her tight against him, so tight that she cried out, ‘Jack, stop,’ and she was laughing, ‘Jack, you’ll break me.’

Listening to all the happiness, happiness that had actually produced him, Nathan had felt lulled, comforted, but suddenly the vision of Dad holding his wife, that love and worry, it mirrored his own too closely: his fingers faltered.

Dad noticed. ‘Are you tired?’

‘A bit.’

‘You stop then.’ Dad sat up and, reaching behind him, pulled his nightclothes on.

Nathan put the green bottle back in its place on the glass shelf above the washbasin. He wanted to hold Dad tight and stop him dying. He didn’t want to be left behind, with everything to do. He just hoped he died first. One silent jet looped through the room. Or almost silent. A sound like tyres in rain. He ran the hot tap fast and reached for the soap.

‘Are you all right, Nathan?’

‘Yes. I’m fine.’

‘Nothing’s worrying you?’

The water was almost too hot for his hands. He shook his head. ‘No.’

‘If you’re worried about something, you’ll tell me, won’t you?’

He nodded. He switched the tap off, dried his hands.

‘Thank you for doing my back.’

He turned at last and smiled at the sight of Dad propped on seven pillows in his ragged clothes.

‘That’s all right,’ he said.

The day before Scraper’s funeral Vasco took Jed with him to the tattoo parlour. ‘You’ll meet Mitch,’ he said as they jumped a bus on Central Avenue. ‘Mitch does the best tombstones in town.’

Central Avenue had always been Jed’s favourite street. As its name suggested, it ran straight as an arrow through the heart of the city. Aloof in the west, accustomed to the tick-tock of high-heels and the trickle of limo tyres, it hit mid-town and slummed it, movie-theatres, fast-food stands and go-go bars, neon and slang, then it moved further east, turning sullen and jangly, stained with cheap wine and bad blood, only to end its life under the concrete pillars that supported the Moon River Bridge. Mitch’s tattoo parlour was just west of here, in a section known as the Strip. Wedged between a sex cinema and a liquor store, it had a window that was opaque, pasted over with skulls and knives and snakes. The sign above the door said TATTOO CITY in old cracked gold paint that reminded Jed of circuses.

He followed Vasco inside. Mitch was sitting in the back of the store, trying to prise the grease out from under his nails with a key.

Vasco stood in front of Mitch. ‘Slow day.’

Mitch winced as he dug too deep. Then he looked up, saw who it was. ‘Christ, someone else dead?’

‘You shouldn’t complain,’ Vasco said. ‘Someone dies, you get to do another stone. You do another stone, you make money.’

Mitch tossed the key on to the table and stood up. ‘Real big shot, aren’t you?’ He looked at Jed. ‘Who’s this?’

‘This is Jed,’ Vasco said. ‘He records stuff.’

Mitch left his eyes on Jed, but absent-mindedly, the way you might leave your hand in your pocket. Something Jed learned about Mitch the first time he saw him: Mitch didn’t ask many questions; either he knew already, or he didn’t want to know. Something he recognised too: the use of silence.

Mitch moved over to the table that held his instruments. He’d worn his jeans so long they looked polished. His hair hung down his back in lank tails, like the seaweed under the pier.

‘He’s a blackmailer,’ Vasco added.

‘Only when it’s really necessary,’ Jed explained.

‘Necessary?’ Mitch said. ‘Jesus, what a pair.’

Vasco grinned at Jed.

Mitch turned round, the needle-gun in one hand, the spray in the other. ‘So you want this tombstone or what?’

Vasco sat in a chair, his bare arm braced against the edge of the table. He already had three tombstones. Lucky (obviously he hadn’t been, not very), Jack Frost and Motorboy, their names in blue block-capitals, no dates. Now Scraper.