Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

‘I used to work back east,’ he said. ‘Got laid off. Thought I’d take a trip.’

‘You got here a week ago, you’d’ve cooked.’

‘Still pretty hot.’

‘You did right coming through Adam’s Creek,’ Wayne said. ‘It gets a bit rough round here from time to time, there’s a power station out past the ridge and the boys do their drinking here, but mosdy we’re pretty friendly.’

Rough. Jed smiled. They didn’t know what rough was.

Wayne showed him to a room on the first floor, at the front of the building. A cracked sink, an iron bed. When Jed opened the wardrobe, the empty hangers jangled like wind-chimes. It was a nice illusion. Not even the faintest of breezes here. The window looked out on to a wide wooden verandah with a few deadbeat chairs and a metal table that took one leg off the ground when you leaned on it.

‘Bibles,’ he muttered.

From the verandah you looked down on Main Street, with its asphalt all cracked and splintered by the heat. A high wire-mesh fence divided the street from the railway tracks beyond. The line wasn’t used much any more, Wayne had told him. Only for taking coal from the hills in the south to the power station just over the ridge. The yard was a desert of flint chips and rolling stock that was almost extinct. The signal box had shed its paint. Weeds grew, mauve and yellow, between the rails.

He lay down on his bed that first night, his hands folded on his chest, his boots still on. He’d been driving for days, he’d forgotten how many, and he was tired of the white lines painted down the middle of the highway, he was tired to the centre of his bones. The trouble was, once you’d been driving for that long, you drove right through your tiredness and out into a dreamland where only the road was moving. He’d driven into Adam’s Creek the same way he’d driven into a hundred other small towns. But he’d braked suddenly, and broken the momentum. He’d looked round and it had seemed like just about the first place he’d seen, and some part of him deep down had said: It’s got to be somewhere, why not here? After all, he couldn’t go on driving for ever, he’d just drive straight into another ocean, and that was what he was trying to get away from, wasn’t it, the ocean?

At nine o’clock he left his room and went down to the bar. Wayne drew him a beer. ‘Welcome to Adam’s Creek.’ Wayne turned to the two men at the bar. ‘One creek that never runs dry, eh, boys?’ The laughter that followed was routine. The echo of a million other nights.

Jed hadn’t drunk beer since the night he met Sharon, but he didn’t flinch. He raised his glass. ‘It’s good to be here, Wayne,’ he said, and swallowed half of it before he put it down. He made that noise that men who drink beer make, and wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist.

One of the two men leaned over. ‘So where’s all the bibles then?’

‘Bibles?’ Jed said. ‘What bibles?’

‘Ain’t you selling bibles?’ The man had slack cheeks that shook like jelly when he spoke.

Jed smiled and took a risk. ‘I’d sell my sister first.’

Wayne spluttered. He turned and yelled to the woman who was polishing a glass at the other end of the bar. ‘Did you hear that, Linda? He’d sell his sister first.’

Linda took one look at Jed and went on polishing the glass. ‘Wouldn’t fetch much by the look of it.’

Jed raised a grin. ‘What are you drinking, Linda?’

‘I’ll have a beer,’ she said.

He got drunk that night, though not as drunk as he pretended to be. He was a man drowning his sorrows, he’d decided. He was a man drinking to forget. And slowly he let his sorrows spill. He’d seen a hundred funerals. He knew how it was done. Six or seven drinks inside him, he leaned on the bar. ‘I just want to forget her, Wayne.’

‘Who’s that, Jed?’

‘My wife.’

You couldn’t show up in a place like Adam’s Creek without a few questions being asked, Jed knew that, so he’d dreamed up a story. He’d got the idea from a song he’d heard on the radio while he was driving. It was about a wife who’d cheated on her husband, she’d left him for his best friend, and now the man was on the road trying to mend his broken heart. To him it sounded ridiculous, but he thought it was the kind of lie that people might believe. People like feeling pity for people, it makes them feel lucky. Well, he was going to give them the chance, wasn’t he? After being the man who’d sell his sister, he was about to become the man who’d lost his wife.

‘She made a fool of me, Wayne,’ he said. ‘I just want to forget the whole damn thing.’

‘You go ahead,’ Wayne said. ‘She wasn’t worth it. You just go right ahead and forget her.’

And because Jed couldn’t picture the wife who was supposed to have left him, because he had no idea what she looked like, he found himself believing that he was doing a pretty good job.

When, just before closing, Wayne said, ‘So what’s with the top hat, Jed?’ Jed knew what the answer was, and he was drunk enough to carry it off.

Slowly he removed the hat and slowly he looked down at it, his vision blurred by alcohol, but for all anyone knew it could have been tears. ‘This hat?’ he said. ‘This is the hat I wore to my wedding.’

He looked up. There was a big rear-view mirror over the bar so he could see the glances being exchanged behind his back. He could see the pity surfacing.

‘You know, it’s strange, Wayne, but I’ve completely forgotten what she looks like.’ He smiled bravely. ‘It’s almost like she never existed.’ And, looking down again, he felt the weight of Wayne’s hand on his shoulder.

*

A couple of days, he’d said, but he ended up staying in the Commercial Hotel for almost a year. During the first few months he worked with a gang of local road-menders, filling pot-holes on the highway, smoothing cambers, paving the dirt tracks that led to ranches. He spent most of his daylight hours outside. His lean pocked body tightened, turned brown, found a different shape. In that clear air he felt himself settling into his new skin. Some days he didn’t say a word. He just didn’t have any. Words would take longer. Not that anyone noticed. The road-menders were a sullen bunch. Then, towards Christmas, the work dwindled and he was laid off. He took the first job he could find, washing dishes at the Wang Garden, a Chinese restaurant two blocks down the street from the hotel. Lunchtimes and evenings, $4.50 an hour. Shortly after he started at the restaurant he told Wayne that he was moving to Mrs O’Neill’s boarding house on the corner of Main Street and Railway Avenue.

‘How long are you going to stay there?’ Wayne said. ‘A couple of days?’ He laughed so hard, he almost pulled a muscle.

Mrs O’Neill had startled red hair and a face that was like a dried-up river bed. She sat in her front room with the curtains drawn and the TV on and the door ajar. All you could see through the gap was a strip of wall and half a fridge. There were two pictures taped to the side of the fridge: Jesus and Donald Duck. Mrs O’Neill had the sweetest tooth in Adam’s Creek, and Jed won a place in her affections on his very first day by buying her a Rocky Road on his way back from work. He’d just discovered Rocky Roads. Made from peanuts, nougat, and chunks of glacé cherry, and covered in a thick coating of milk chocolate, it was the best candy bar that he’d ever come across. Whenever he passed Mrs O’Neill’s room after that, it was always, ‘Bring me a Rocky Road, would you, Matt, there’s a dear.’ That was the other thing about Mrs O’Neill. She thought his name was Matt. ‘My name’s Jed,’ he’d told her, more times than he could remember, but every time he passed her door she called out,’ Matt, honey, is that you?’ Maybe it was her way of telling him that she knew he was lying. Not about his name, but about everything else. But then, how could she know that? he thought. How the fuck could she know anything with Jesus and Donald Duck taped to the side of her fridge and her brain blended to mush by all that TV? She didn’t know. Nobody knew.