Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

‘Oh, you know,’ Harriet said. ‘Fifteen, sixteen. It’s a difficult time for a boy.’

A shoe bounced off his shoulder, and he looked up. Finn stood ten yards away, poised to throw the other one.

‘Lighten up, Nates,’ Finn said. ‘Lighten up or we’ll fucking tie you to a chair and paint you.’

Nathan looked round the room. Finn, Larry, Ade. They were all grinning and shifting from one leg to another. They were always so loose in their heads. If he’d been granted a wish right then, that’s what he would’ve asked for.

It turned into one of those nights. They all tumbled out of the clubhouse at the same time. Finn had someone’s black convertible. They drove through a sunset sky to the Vista Room on High Head. Finn knew the girl who worked behind the bar. They drank cold beer and played pool. Out in the parking-lot they smoked a joint that tied the two halves of Nathan’s brain together like shoelaces. He tripped and fell into the back of the car. They drove back downtown. Hard lights brushed across his face. They were talking about Tip. Words like loser. Words like sick. Laughter and he opened his eyes. He’d wanted to say something and couldn’t remember what. They were crossing the bridge now. Warm air. Arcs of metal dark against the brown sky. That harbour smell of concrete, vodka, seaweed.

Seaweed, concrete. Blenheim Point at midnight.

Sometimes he just had to get out of the house, and Blenheim Point was where he went. It was a floating jetty where you caught the ferry to the city. But at midnight the last ferry would’ve been and gone. There was never anybody there. He sat on one of the plastic beer crates that the fishermen had left behind and stared into the darkness of the harbour with its lights all prickling gold. Waves came from nowhere suddenly, and rocked the jetty: the tide on the turn. That place. It was his respite, his breathing-space.

And then, one night, a fat man in a dinner jacket and a black bow tie had lurched towards him out of the darkness, his appearance so unheralded, so unlikely, somehow, that Nathan almost laughed. It was like a magician’s trick, and he wouldn’t have been surprised to find a top hat in the vicinity. He watched the man bounce softly off a pillar; the man’s belly, barely restrained by a velvet cummerbund, seemed about to spill. It would have to’ve been a very large top hat.

‘How much?’ The man belched rather than spoke, his words reaching Nathan in a blast of alcohol.

‘How much what?’

‘How much for,’ and the man’s head swerved on his neck, ‘you know.’

‘No, I don’t know.’

The man leaned one hand on the pillar and swayed like a building in high wind. ‘Come on, sonny,’ he whispered, and he leaned down, leering, so Nathan could see the copper hairs bristling in his nostrils and the pale bumps on his left cheek, ‘don’t play games with me.’

Nathan tried to duck under the man’s arm, but the man chuckled and took hold of his shoulder carelessly and twirled him closer. Nathan pushed a hand into the man’s face. He felt the wetness of the man’s mouth, the sharpness of the man’s teeth. He pulled his hand back. Suddenly he noticed that the man was only six feet from the edge of the jetty, and he pushed the man again, in the belly this time, as hard as he could. The man staggered backwards, snatched one-handed at the air, as if the air was solid and might save him, and crashed on to his back. One roll sideways and he was in the harbour. It looked so casual, like an afterthought.

Nathan waited to make sure the man wasn’t going to drown. Then he bent close to the man’s face, but not too close, and said, ‘You’d better watch it, there’s sharks in there,’ and then he turned and ran up the steps to his bicycle and rode home. He hadn’t been back to the jetty since.

That fat man, he was like a flash from the past. A hallucination, courtesy of the Womb Boys. Guil-ty, Guil-ty. He could see Harriet smirking, all her suspicions confirmed. It seemed that no matter where he went he encountered the same innuendoes, the same violations. He felt hounded, quarried, cornered. There was nowhere left to go, and it was beginning to exhaust him.

‘It was only a joke, Nates,’ he murmured. ‘Only a joke.’

‘Now he’s talking to himself,’ someone said, and someone else laughed.

But it wasn’t a joke, whichever way you looked at it.

They hit the Oasis on C Street. They drank shots. Tequila, vodka, tequila. They met two guys who ran the ice-cream van on the pier. Their names drifted into focus and then out again. Larry and Ade evaporated with two blondes from a basement club called Six Feet Under. Finn was still around, still driving. Nathan took the front seat. A girl was sitting next to him, her eyelids two half-moons. She smelt like cucumber. So fresh and pale-green, so clean. He wondered what to say to her. Bottles knocked against his feet, as if shifting in the currents on the ocean bed. Every time Finn opened his mouth, smoke came out.

Her name, magically, was Lilah.

Have you done it yet?

‘Next stop the 22 Club,’ Finn screamed into the wind. More lights, Lilah’s eyes closed, his thigh against hers. It felt like the only part of him that was alive, that burning piece of skin, the rest of him was cold and nowhere. The 22 Club was a golden doorway framing a flight of stairs that was carpeted in red. Two men stood on either side of the door like pillars, one white, one black, both exactly the same height. Finn knew the black one. They were in free.

He was dancing. Two Oriental girls did delicate things with their feet. Their faces were blank. Like plates. Suddenly he couldn’t stand the place. A hand appeared on his shoulder. Ade. He was back. ‘Lilah says she likes you.’

He sat down. It was later, but not much. Their table was see-through, surfboard-shaped, its surface littered with ashtrays and drinks.

It’s a difficult time for a boy.

He reached out with his right arm and swept the table clean. Bottles and glasses shattered. There were screams. Through the crowd he saw the Oriental girls place their hands over their mouths like fans. Then he was seized by two men, one black, one white.

They dragged him across the Club, down the red stairs and out through the gold doors. They threw him into the gutter. He hit the base of a streetlight with his face and felt his lip split.

‘Don’t you ever fucking come back here again,’ the white man said, ‘all right?’

‘Don’t worry, he won’t.’ It was Ade. He must’ve followed them down. ‘This whole place stinks of shit.’

The white man turned. ‘And you,’ he said, levelling a finger. ‘I see your face again, I crush it in the ground.’

Nathan laughed.

Finn walked over. ‘What’s got into you?’

‘I never saw anything like that before,’ Ade said.

‘I saw it in the movies once,’ Larry said.

‘Where’s Lilah?’ Nathan asked.

Nobody knew.

Lilah could’ve saved him, but not any more.

It was time to go home, somebody said.

Colours everywhere. But there was only one colour he could see, and that was red.

Jed stood outside the Central Theatre just east of downtown with a can of ice-cold soda. He was on his lunch-hour from the sound studio. He wore a black singlet, boots, fatigues. His baseball cap said AL’S BLANK TAPES. He took a long pull on the soda and sighed as it slid down. Years ago he used to come here with the Womb Boys. ‘Let’s go down the Central, let’s go look at the dead people.’ Vasco always went on about how important it was. He called it Know Your Enemy. His eyes would flick across the corpses, across the theatre the corpses were in, out to the street the theatre was on, and he’d say, ‘This is what we’re up against,’ and he’d swing his arm so hard he almost dislocated it, ‘all this.’