Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

He didn’t even wait for Mario’s reaction. He whirled out on to the landing and stood there, trembling. He’d have to try Reg. As he stamped off down the corridor, his footsteps fascist on the floorboards, it occurred to him that he’d never actually set eyes on Reg. Not ever. Not even once.

He knocked on Reg’s door. A silence, then a tiny scraping sound. He could feel Reg staring at him through the Judas eye.

‘What do you want?’

‘I’m looking for Vasco.’

‘He’s not here.’

Jed rested his cheek against the door. Like a confessional, only nobody was telling anybody anything. He heard the Judas eye scrape shut, then the creak of floorboards as Reg backed away.

‘Reg?’ He knocked on the door again. ‘Reg!’

But Reg had withdrawn deep into the room. He’d pulled Jesus over his head like a blanket and he wouldn’t be coming out for a long time.

The streets seemed empty that morning. Jed scoured the neighbourhood. Somebody had to know something. It was a hot day. Only faded curtains stirring lazily in apartment windows.

At last he found Silence, Tip’s ten-year-old brother, standing in a patch of wasteground, throwing stones at a row of tin cans. It was one of Silence’s favourite things. He couldn’t hear the stone hit the can, or the can hit the ground, but he liked the way it looked.

‘You seen Vasco?’ Jed said.

Silence picked the words off Jed’s lips, neatly, one by one, the way you pick fleas off a dog. He shook his head and began to hunt around in the scrub grass. Eventually he found what looked like a piece of a bicycle. He drew a circle in the mud, a circle with two slit eyes and a downturned mouth.

‘A face,’ Jed said. ‘Vasco?’

Silence nodded.

He sealed the face off with a series of vertical lines and reinforced the downturned mouth.

‘Oh no,’ Jed said. ‘It’s jail, right?’

Silence nodded again and touched the lobe of his ear.

Jed translated. ‘That’s what you heard.’

He watched as Silence scraped his heel across the picture, as if it might be used as evidence. Silence had always been very earnest and very careful. A secret, you always felt, would be safer with him than with anyone.

‘You know where?’ he asked.

Silence shrugged. He picked up a stone and slung it at the row of tin cans. One dropped. Silence had this way of putting an end to things. That stone, it meant he’d told Jed all he knew. End of conversation.

Jed thanked him. He walked home slowly, the long way round.

That night Rita rang. She was crying.

‘Have you heard?’ she said.

‘Yeah.’

‘What’s going to happen now?’

‘I don’t know. What did they pick him up for?’

‘Arson.’

That figured. ‘Where is he?’

‘They’re holding him downtown, but they’re going to move him soon.’

‘Where to?’

‘Some detention centre. They won’t let you visit, though. You’re not old enough. Only people like parents can go.’

‘He hasn’t got any parents.’

‘I know.’

He called the place the following morning, and they confirmed what Rita had told him. Nobody under the age of eighteen. That meant even Rita didn’t qualify for a couple of months. He wrote a letter instead, asking Vasco what had happened, and what he should do. It was ten days before he received the reply, and it wrongfooted him when it came.

Listen, Jed, there is something you can do for me. I’ve got this brother called Francis. He’s about nine. Lives with some family over in Torch Bay. I go and see him, like maybe every couple of weeks, but now I can’t any more. Maybe you could go and explain things to him. He’s at 25025 Oakwood Drive. Take it easy. Vasco. P.S. The woman who lives there is a BITCH.

A brother?

He told Tip, and Tip seemed just as astonished. ‘Christ,’ Tip said, ‘he kept that under his hat, didn’t he?’

The next day Jed caught a bus to the harbour. He sat on a green bench at the end of Quay 5, waiting for the Torch Bay ferry. The sky had clouded over, and wind scuffed and pinched the grey water. It was the kind of day that goaded you until you felt like smashing it.

Such anger in him already.

How was he going to, as Vasco put it, explain things? He couldn’t even explain things to himself.

The ferry filled with tourists. Their sun-visors, their ice-creams. Their ceaseless, eager babble. Instead of taking a seat, Jed leaned against the metal door that led down to the engines. He read the instructions on what to do if the boat capsized. Half of him wished it would.

When the ferry docked in Torch Bay, he was the first down the gangplank. He pushed through the crush of people on the quay, slipped into the quiet of a sidestreet. Three or four blocks back from the harbour the ground began to slope upwards; boutiques gave way to houses; trees appeared.

Oakwood Drive was a wide residential street, its sidewalks planted with mahogany and wild oak. Houses stood in their own grounds, some Spanish-looking, some ranch-style, all of them the size of palaces. There was no dirt here, no life. The only sound came from a man who was operating a machine that sucked up leaves. It didn’t matter where Jed put his eyes, it always looked like a postcard. His mother would’ve loved it.

25025 Oakwood Drive was a mansion. Red bricks, white shutters. Immaculate green lawns. Even a flagpole. The gravel crunched under Jed’s boots as he started up the drive. He felt watched. It was nothing like his experience outside Reg Gorelli’s door. No Judas eye here, no lens to draw his nose forwards till he looked like a fish or a rat. No, this watching was far more sophisticated: it was more like a landscape, and he was a speck on the landscape, a dot, something you could swat with ease, and nobody would ever hear, not if you coughed at the same time.

He searched the porch for a bell, but all he could find was a chain of wrought-iron links. He reached up and pulled on it, half expecting a sudden rush of water. Instead he heard two solemn notes that sounded stolen from a church and, before the second of these notes had died away, the door opened and a woman stood in front of him. She had high, horizontal cheekbones, so her eyes seemed to be perching on ledges. Eyes like birds of prey. Any moment one of them might swoop down, snatch at him, and swerve away again, his heart dripping in its beak. Jed heard Vasco’s voice: The woman who lives there is a BITCH.

He swallowed. ‘I’ve come to see Francis. I’ve got a message from his brother.’

‘His brother?’ Her voice was so cold. She probably kept it in the icebox.

‘Yeah, his brother. Vasco.’

‘Francis has no brother.’

‘But Vasco told me.’

‘Who’s that?’ said another voice, smaller, younger, not cold at all. ‘Who’s at the door?’

Jed tried to peer round the woman, but she narrowed the gap to six inches and filled it with her buzzard eyes and her rippling turquoise dress.

‘Francis has no brother,’ she repeated. ‘There must be some mistake.’

Strange that she should choose that word.

‘Goodbye.’ She closed the door.

A gust of air-conditioned air moved past his face and lost itself in the heat of the driveway.

He didn’t feel safe until he reached the sidewalk. Then he looked back over his shoulder. The house lay on its lawn, perfectly still, immaculate, blank. He thought of his old tapes, the ones he’d had for years, the ones he’d used over and over again. Their silence was always different to the silence of a new tape: it was loaded, prickly, with things recorded and erased; a silence that was like ghosts. That house was an old tape masquerading as a new one. It had recorded and erased, but it was pretending it had just come out of the cellophane. It had ghosts, but it wasn’t owning up to them.