Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

Easy to say.

Nathan beat the first two waves, and then he had to fight even to stay in the same place. Every time he dived under a wave he felt it haul him back towards the shore. He looked for the captain, but he couldn’t see that blond head anywhere. A wave high enough to cut the sun out curled above him. He dived too late. He was sucked down, spun round, the weight of water crushing the breath out of him. Somehow he found the surface for a moment, took in air, then he was rolled again. He fetched up in the shallows, blinded, coughing.

A hand on his shoulder. ‘You OK?’

‘Yeah.’ But the salt burned the back of his throat; he could hardly speak.

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Want to try again?’

‘OK.’

And the same thing happened, only this time he almost drowned. He came to the surface, too weak to breathe, and was sinking back again when the captain took hold of him, and it was like some passage from the Bible, he felt as if he’d been raised from the dead, lifted by some divine, invisible hand. He heard a calm voice above the crashing water.

‘Relax, just relax.’

And he relaxed. The captain was some kind of prophet.

‘You’ll be fine. You’re going to drink some water, but you’ll be fine.’

And he was fine. But it wasn’t prophecy. What it was, in fact, as he came to understand later, was knowledge.

Back on the sand he felt limpness and bruising in every part of his body. But even more painful than that was the shame in his head. He hadn’t even got past the third wave, he’d failed, they’d never take him now.

‘Thanks for getting me out.’

The captain grinned. ‘That’s what I’m here for.’

‘I’m all right in the pool, but this,’ and he glanced over his shoulder, ‘this is nothing like the pool.’

‘No kidding.’ The captain turned his grey eyes on the waves. ‘The spring tides’re on their way.’ He looked at Nathan as Nathan got shakily to his feet. ‘I like what you did out there. Most guys, they wouldn’t’ve gone in a second time.’

Nathan shrugged.

‘Come down tomorrow. We’ll see how things work out.’

Nathan heard a chuckle behind him. He turned to see Tip standing on the sand, his feet turned outwards, his arms folded across his chest.

‘You must’ve drunk about half the fucking ocean.’

Nathan just looked at him. ‘Yeah, well,’ he said, ‘I was thirsty, wasn’t I?’

He almost died again on the way home. He jinked through the rush-hour traffic on the bridge, skimming down the outside of the fast lane, cutting back inside for the Blenheim exit. He reached the driveway breathless, threw his bicycle down, and ran into the house.

He found Dad sitting in his red chair.

‘You remember I had a trial for the lifeguards? Well, I’ve done it. I’m in.’

Dad was staring into the corner of the room, his spectacles dangling from one finger. ‘That’s good.’

‘For the Lifesaving Club, Dad. Just like you wanted.’

Dad just nodded. ‘Excellent.’

‘I almost drowned twice doing it.’

‘Well done.’

He sat down next to Dad and stared at him. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

Dad sighed. ‘I’m in love with her.’

Nathan looked around the room. ‘Who?’

‘Harriet.’

‘Harriet?’

All his excitement dwindled as his mind whirled back three months to a shopping trip with her. When he climbed into the car, she was smiling at him in that sugary way that used to make his teeth ache. But he’d probably smiled back.

As she shifted into reverse she turned to him again. ‘Tell me, Nathan, have you ever made love to a girl?’

He looked at her quickly, then he looked down at his hands. That smile again. There was something greedy under the sugar, something predatory. He felt her words trying to open him up. It was like she had a can-opener and he was just sitting there, a can of something. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Have you ever kissed a girl?’

‘Probably.’

‘Probably? Can’t you remember?’

‘Not recently,’ he said. ‘That’s what I meant.’

She gave him a curious look and then smiled to herself. Looking back at the road again, she had to swerve to avoid a man on a bicycle. She was still smiling as she swerved.

‘You must tell me about it when you do,’ she said. ‘When you make love for the first time, I mean. I want to know what you think.’

He glanced away from her, out of the window. An ice-cream parlour, a man with a dog, a tree. How was he going to get out of shopping next week?

‘It’s so wonderful, it’s like,’ and she left her mouth open while she thought, and then it came to her, and she smiled, ‘it’s like colours everywhere.’

Colours everywhere?

‘I want to know if you see those colours too.’ She was looking at him again. She seemed to have been looking at him practically the whole time. He couldn’t understand why they hadn’t crashed yet, why they weren’t wrapped round a tree or a streetlight, why they weren’t, in fact, dead.

Still smiling, Harriet parked the car. She knew she’d embarrassed him. She even seemed to have enjoyed it. He’d thought she was prying at the time, and resented it. But now he saw her questions in a different light. Maybe she’d just been excited that morning, and her excitement had spilled over. Maybe she’d just seen those colours everywhere for the first time. Maybe it’d happened the night before.

He looked across at Dad.

‘I didn’t want to tell you,’ Dad said. ‘Not until I was sure.’

‘I never realised.’

‘You wouldn’t have. We were careful. And anyway, you were hardly here.’

‘What do you mean, you were careful?’

‘We took,’ and suddenly Dad looked furtive, almost guilty, ‘special precautions.’

‘What kind of precautions?’

‘We had a piece of string.’ Dad explained how he had run the string from under his pillow, across his bedroom, out of his window, along the back wall of the house (where it was lost among the branches of a lilac bush) and in through Harriet’s window, ending in a loop that Harriet slipped over her big toe when she went to bed at night. They always waited until Nathan was either out or asleep, then Dad tugged on the string, and Harriet tiptoed across the landing and into his bed.

Dad unlocked his desk and took out a ball of strong brown string. ‘There, that’s it.’ Just looking at the string reminded him of too much. His eyes moved beyond it, out of focus.

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to ask her to come back and marry me.’

But he was more than twice Harriet’s age, as Harriet’s family pointed out, through Harriet, in her first letter. He wrote back, asking her whether she loved him. Of course she loved him, she said, but she had to think. He said that if she loved him there was nothing to think about. He told her he was going to drive into town and find a piece of string that was six thousand miles long, a piece of string that would reach right across the ocean, from his sad finger to her beautiful big toe. She wrote back saying how much she liked his last letter. She hoped he could find a piece of string like that. But then she said, ‘Maybe we need rope now,’ which only depressed him.

Towards the end of the summer he began to founder. He was still writing almost every day, but she was writing less. He felt a pain in his right hand that was caused, he said, by the great weight of his love passing from his heart into his pen. He also suspected that it might be arthritis. And then, a few days before his forty-ninth birthday, he received a letter, her first for over a week. She said she had a birthday surprise for him. She was coming back to marry him. He turned pale and almost fainted. Nathan had to reach up under his shirt with a towel and mop the cold sweat off his back.