Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

He was dropped under a streetlamp, the only person left on the bus. A patch of mauled light. Gritty sidewalk, scarred with a million cigarette burns. Weeds and spit and oil. Place like this, the only glitter was the knife just before it sank in. Place like this, there wasn’t any gold. He moved quickly, head just ahead of his feet, feet in the shadows. Left down one street, right on the next, left down another, then he could smell the sea. He turned into Ocean Boulevard. Dented cars, flop motels, the Lucky Dip bar. Cars with no aerials, no hubcaps. Neon signs with half their letters missing. People disappeared here too.

The Towers of Remembrance stood back from the road, in a stretch of land that was paved, like a parking-lot, and lit by random floodlights. There were four grim towers set in a loose cross-shaped arrangement and linked by concrete walkways. They used to be cemeteries, high-rise cemeteries, but they’d been derelict for years. To the north and east there were housing projects. To the south, a road that led nowhere and, beyond that, the ocean.

He crossed the asphalt and passed under a walkway. Wind moaned in the passages, stirring bitter smells of urine and fish. He stood in the central area, a kind of concrete garden. A few stone benches, a fountain sprayed with first names, declarations of love, four-letter words. This would once have been a place for contemplation. He looked up at the towers surrounding him. Many of the dead bodies had been removed. Their places had been taken by the living. Squatters, mostly. Of all the towers, the South Tower seemed the brightest, the most inhabited. He would start there. But as he looked into the sky sudden clouds came speeding across the top of the building and the building seemed to be falling on to him. He ran towards the entrance, his insides turning over.

He began to climb the stairs. Six doors on the first floor, all locked. On the fourth floor he found a door that was open. Inside was one bare room. Light filtered through a narrow window. He bent down, felt around. Chips of broken china, plastic flowers, dust. China that might’ve been an urn. Dust that might’ve been ashes. Now he had dead people on his fingers. He left the room, climbed quickly to the next floor. Once again, all the doors were locked. He tried to remember what he’d heard. Some of the ‘graves’ were just cupboards. But others were like apartments. You could sleep there, keep watch over your dead. He shivered.

He climbed again, from the ninth floor to the tenth. He looked up once, and jumped. A man in a shiny suit was standing at the top of the stairs.

Nathan swallowed. ‘Do you know where Tip Stubbs lives?’

The man walked right past him.

‘What about Jed Morgan?’

The man turned the corner and vanished. Standing there, in the half-light, it suddenly struck Nathan that the man might not have been real.

‘Tip,’ he yelled into the stairwell. ‘Tip? Are you there?’

He ran back down the stairs.

Once outside, he stood in the wind. The desolation crept into his bones and he began to shake. What was he supposed to do now? He looked up at the tower. That vertigo again. He imagined opening a door and finding Tip. His eyes shut to slits. The eyelids burred. Like screws.

‘They’re going to throw you out.’

‘Let them.’

And Jed a shadow by the window, the inside of his jacket lined with needles.

He saw an old man’s face. Bald on top, strands of grey hair plastered to his neck. Mouth stretched in the strangest grin. Long teeth stuck into his gums like ice-cream sticks. And, behind him, a curving wall of fast green water. And such noise in his ears, like gravel spilling off a truck. He reached around the man’s head, took him by the chin — then he felt the man swerve away from him, and saw him swallowed by the water, swallowed whole. He tried to follow the man, but the wave broke and he was yards away. He swam back to the place. The man had gone.

Back on shore he ran to the captain.

‘It was a rip,’ the captain said. ‘Nothing you could do.’

‘One moment he was there and then —’ Nathan couldn’t go on.

‘Some people get away. It’s one of the laws of the ocean.’ The captain put a hand on Nathan’s shoulder. ‘You did your best, that’s all that counts.’

But you lost him.

Nathan couldn’t eat for days. He kept seeing that man’s face against a rising wall of water. It had happened six months ago, but some things stay fresh in your head.

The wind, sticky with salt, clung to his clothes, his skin. He was cold. He walked the half an hour to Mangrove Central thinking of nothing, and caught a train home. The next morning the captain called a meeting in the clubhouse, as Nathan had known he would, and announced that, in view of his recent poor attendance, Tip Stubbs was being expelled from the Club. This came as no surprise to most Club members. Someone who didn’t show up, it meant you weren’t carrying your weight, it was seen as an act of selfishness, a breach of trust. Tip had stayed away too long; he’d been written off, forgotten. The only surprise was to hear his name again and to think that he’d ever been one of them.

Towards the end of the day Nathan was changing in the locker-room when Finn walked in with Ade and a friend of Ade’s called Larry.

‘Hey, Nates, I almost forgot,’ Finn said. ‘Your stepmother was here yesterday.’

Nathan stared up at him. ‘When?’

‘In the afternoon. She dropped in to see you, but you’d already left.’

‘That was his stepmother?’ Ade let out a low whistle.

Larry called across the room, ‘I could use a stepmother like that.’

‘Use,’ Ade said, and smirked.

Nathan slammed his locker door back on its hinges. ‘For Christ’s sake. She’s married to my dad.’

‘Nates,’ Ade said, ‘we were just joking.’

‘Yeah, it was only a joke,’ Larry said. ‘What’s the matter? Can’t you take a joke?’

Nathan sighed. He didn’t understand what Harriet was up to. During her time as an au pair, her prying had been innocent, playful. Almost a year had passed since then, and now there was an edge. A persistence. There were some days when he felt as if he was under siege.

‘So tell me, Nathan,’ she’d asked him only the other day, ‘have you done it yet?’ They were in the car. On their way back from the supermarket.

‘Done what?’

‘Made love to a girl.’

He didn’t answer her. There was so much sugar in her smile, he felt ill. He thought it might be diabetes.

‘How old are you?’ she asked him.

‘Sixteen.’

‘Where I come from, boys’ve all done it by the time they’re sixteen. Where I come from, that’s normal.’

He wouldn’t look at her. He stared out of the window instead. ‘I’m thinking of becoming a monk,’ he said.

It was a mild, sunny day and Dad was sitting on the porch, waiting for their return. When he heard the car he stood up, smiling. ‘How did it go?’ he asked. As if shopping was a polar expedition. As if it could go wrong.

‘We had a great time,’ Harriet said. Then she turned to Nathan. ‘Didn’t we?’

But Nathan was already moving past her with the box of groceries. There was a ritual to the unpacking of the groceries. Dad always supervised, making certain things were put where they belonged. ‘You know where the tomatoes go?’ he’d say. ‘Third shelf down.’ Everybody knew where the tomatoes went, but Dad was simply expressing his pleasure at the presence of these new tomatoes, at their place in the order of things, at his own tight world. This time, though, Nathan left the groceries on the kitchen table and climbed the stairs to his room. He heard Dad and Harriet discussing him below.

‘What’s wrong with Nathan?’ Dad said.