Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

One of the stories happened to be standing right next to her. An old black man whose name, if Nathan overheard it right, was Twilight. He called himself Twilight, he was saying, because that was about where he was in his life, and she stood up and threw her arms around him and told him he was the fine high sun of noon to her, and he just looked at Nathan over her shoulder and rolled his eyes, much as to say she doesn’t know what time of day it is at all.

Twilight left soon afterwards, though she didn’t seem to want him to, and as she turned back to her gin she caught Nathan watching, and called across to him.

‘What’s that you’re drinking?’

‘Coke.’

‘You want a real drink?’

He smiled and shook his head. He told her he drank beer now and then, if he was thirsty, but that was about it. Mostly he stayed clean.

She seemed to be gathering him with her eyes, and then she took a spare strand of her pale hair and threw it over her shoulder, like it was salt or something, like it was lucky.

‘You’re unbelievable. How old are you?’

‘Twenty. Almost twenty-one.’

‘Most people your age, they haven’t even started getting dirty yet,’ she said, ‘and here you are, clean as a goddamn whistle. Unbelievable.’

‘I’m not that clean.’ He moved up the bar, took Twilight’s stool. He told her that he’d been so drunk once that he’d almost lost his teeth. He showed her the scar on his top lip where it hit the streetlight. She bought him another Coke.

India-May wasn’t her real name, it turned out. Nobody in that place seemed to have a real name. She’d changed it to India-May when she was seventeen. Just another way of leaving home, she said. Just another line drawn down the past. Talking of lines down the past, he said, he’d drawn his own. He told her about Moon Beach. How he’d left a year ago. How that place was dead for him. How it looked like a heap of rubble to him now.

She watched him with those blurred eyes of hers. ‘Where are you living?’

‘In town. A few blocks east of here.’

She began to tell him about a house she owned, it was an old farm, out past Modello. She said she had a spare room on the third floor. ‘If that’s any use to you.’

He hesitated. ‘Past Modello?’ Modello was north-east of Tomorrow Bay, about twenty miles inland.

‘Way past. You interested?’

‘Maybe.’ He’d been sharing an apartment with a surfer and the surfer’s girlfriend. Everything was like, totally intense. He wasn’t sure how much more he could take of it.

‘That black guy you saw, he stays there sometimes. A lot of people stay there sometimes, I guess.’ Then she seemed to tire suddenly, all the light and muscle spilling out of her, and she folded round her drink.

Soon afterwards he said he had to be going. She told him to think about it. Even gave him a number to call. He thanked her and walked out into heat and sunlight and stood laughing on the street. He’d forgotten it would be like this. So hot, so bright. Sometimes one world’s so new, it wipes the old one out.

Ten days later he called her and asked if the offer was still good.

‘I don’t say things I don’t mean. When d’you want to come out?’

‘As soon as possible.’

She didn’t miss a beat. ‘OK, this is how you find the house. It’s like I told you. It’s in the hills, north-east of town. Get on the highway going north, then drop down on to the Modello road. It starts off straight, then it gets to twist a bit, but there’s no cars and it’s real dreamy on the right, like you’re the only one alive. Just real dreamy. How are you coming?’

‘Bike.’

‘OK. Look for a tight bend about seven miles out of Broken Springs. You’ll know it when you see it because there’s a white cross there with BABY BOY SOPER painted on it. Some kid blew a tyre on the hill a few years back, the car flipped over, caught on fire, there was only his teeth left and a ring he’d just bought for his girl. So the story goes. Anyway. So right after the cross there’s a couple of trees. One of them’s deformed because of Baby Boy’s car tore a lump out of it on the way down. The track’s right there, no sign, just a track looking like it’s going nowhere. And it sort of is.’ She laughed from deep down in her throat. He thought she was probably stoned. ‘Five miles along that track you’ll see a grey roof. It’s the only house around. Kind of tumbledown. But there’ll be smoke in the chimney and beds with springs and dogs to keep the bogeyman away. But look, babe, you sure it’s what you want? It’s lonely as a grave out here and only the wind moaning and moaning all the time and you look like a city boy to me.’

City boy.

He rode up the next day, salt leaving the air as he climbed into the hills. Once he left the paved road he saw nobody. The track bucked and coiled through a landscape of smooth white boulders, grey pines, and cactus that twisted in the dust like a nest of snakes. After five miles — curiously enough she was accurate where he least expected her to be — he saw the house, crouching at the end of a ridge, just at the point where the track dipped down and hid. All loose tiles and cracked windows and walls patched up with sheets of tin, it used the colours of the land it stood in, grey and brown and yellow, so it had the look of a creature that should’ve been extinct, a creature that had only survived because it had a good disguise. It used to be a farm, he remembered her saying, and it still breathed like one. When he pulled into the yard, chickens ran off in straight lines through the dirt and dogs began to bounce around his tyres like ping-pong balls and people came round corners and leaned on things.

The place was cut off, true enough, but all that stuff about it being lonely as a grave, that was just her talking. She did a lot of that. She’d talk and talk, and make things bigger than they really were. Or sometimes she’d make them smaller. There was nothing lonely about it, unless you call living with six people lonely. There was Joan, a woman who was recovering from some kind of breakdown. There was an old man by the name of Fisher. There was a young married couple, Pete and Chrissie, and their baby. And there was Twilight, the old black man from the bar. That was six, not counting India-May herself and the family of gypsies who camped among the shredded tyres and blackened car-parts out the back. She surrounded herself with people, all different kinds, sometimes she was lucky, sometimes she wasn’t, but it didn’t matter to her. In her book the worst people were preferable to no people at all. She was someone who heard each grain in the hour-glass, she felt the passing seconds like sandpaper against her softest skin. Time actually seemed to hurt her, and people helped her get through it. She’d been ripped off more times than she could remember. Jewellery, money, clothes. Even a car once. She was philosophical about it. She believed it evened out, either in this life or the next time round. She was always showing Nathan things that she’d been given. It always seemed to him, as he was asked to examine some painting or basket or packet of seeds, for Christ’s sake, that she’d been had, that she’d come off worse. But she’d be smiling, and she’d be tossing her hair over her shoulder like salt, and she’d be saying in that breathless voice of hers, ‘See, I told you. Isn’t it beautiful?’ Sometimes it seemed to Nathan that her life was just that, a feat of held breath, just another ten seconds, just another five, and then death would flood her lungs like water, a string of glass bubbles to the surface and then nothing. She was scared in a way that he could understand. The kind of fear that sends you running across a six-lane highway or jumping into rapids. She was someone who ran towards her fear, screaming. Who tried to frighten it. Who, in another period of history, would’ve been worshipped as a saint or burned as a witch.