Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

He had a large room on the second floor, with bright-green walls and a tangerine bedspread. The curtains looked like spring, but a spring that had happened somewhere else: all green shoots and rainfall and blossom. There was a plug-in kettle, an electric ring for cooking on, and a Gideon’s bible, for solace. It was from this room that he wrote his first and only communications with the outside world. One weekend he bought two postcards of the Adam’s Creek power station at night (they were the only postcards there were) and sat down at his rickety table by the window with a pen. He wrote the first card to Mitch. He thanked Mitch again for the tattoo and said it was lasting pretty well, considering. He told Mitch to say hello to his old lady. He said the clock in the local post office was busted and maybe Mitch would drop by and fix it sometime. Then he put, ‘But your bike probably wouldn’t make it, would it? Yours, Jed.’ Grinning, he turned to the second card. This would be for Sharon. There were times when he missed her; hers was the only woman’s body that he’d ever known. He remembered surprising her once at work. She’d just got a job at Simon Peter’s, a twenty-four-hour supermarket chain that catered for all funeral needs. Their logo was a yawning grave (a black triangle with the top cut off). Their slogan? OUR PRICES ARE SIX FEET UNDER EVERYBODY ELSE’S. His eyes lifted to the window, but they didn’t see the telegraph wires or the railway tracks or the range of dusty yellow hills beyond. They saw Sharon standing in the plastic-flowers aisle. She was wearing a black nylon coat and a badge that said SHARON LACEY. SECTION MANAGER. Her eyes widened at the sight of him. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Make like I’m a customer,’ he whispered. ‘Show me where something is.’

She took him to the far aisle and showed him the salt tablets. They were called Weepies. You took them to replace the salt your tears had bereaved you of. Or so the packet said.

He noticed a door that said STAFF ONLY. ‘What’s in there?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Just stock.’

He led her through the door. She was right. Boxes stacked in piles, nobody around. He sat her down and began to unfasten her coat. She smelt of ammonia, violets, sweat. ‘It must be hot wearing all this nylon,’ he said. In the distance he could hear the requiem mass that was being piped at a discreet volume throughout the store.

‘You can’t,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve got my period.’

‘I don’t mind about that.’

‘It’s not safe.’

‘Of course it’s safe. You just said. You’ve got your period.’

‘It’s not safe here ,’ Sharon hissed. ‘My job. They’ll kill —’

He was inside her before she could finish the sentence.

‘They won’t kill you,’ he said after a while. ‘You’re too important.’ He tapped her badge. ‘You’re Section Manager.’

‘That’s the whole point,’ she said, but she was laughing by then. ‘I’m supposed to set an example.’

Afterwards Jed tore open the cardboard box they’d done it on. Inside, conveniently, were hundreds of packets of black-edged tissues. As he crouched behind her, mopping the blood off the back of her thighs, he could feel his erection returning. It was the first time he’d realised that a woman’s blood had the power to excite him.

‘You’re crazy,’ Sharon said, ‘you know that?’

But he’d stopped now, he was staring at the tissue.

‘I know who invented these.’ He smiled up at her. ‘I lived in the same house as him once. He thought walking was old-fashioned, so he used to go round in a wheelchair.’

Sharon was shaking her head. ‘Crazy.’

Smiling, he lowered his pen to the paper. He told her he was very far away. He was working in a Chinese restaurant, he said. He hoped she was all right. He hesitated, then he wrote, ‘Remember that time in the storeroom?’

He never really expected to hear back from either of them. He didn’t know why he’d written, except maybe to let people know that he was alive. If you could call working in the kitchens of a Chinese restaurant being alive.

The Wang Garden was like no Chinese restaurant he had ever seen. From the outside it looked like a bank (and with good reason, if Wayne was to be believed: ‘That guy,’ Wayne said, ‘he’s raking it in’). It had a façade of brand-new brick, a solid wooden door, and no windows. But walking inside was like walking into some hijacked piece of a South Sea island. Fake sunbeams played on tables of polished black wood. Guitars crooned softly against a rustling of surf. The real highlight, though, was the grotto, which took up most of one wall. If you looked past the rock pools and the exotic plants, past the miniature waterfall, you could see blue sky, a stand of coconut palms, and even, in the distance, a lagoon. Through hidden speakers came the rhythmic itch of cicadas. And, every twenty minutes or so, a storm broke: thunder rumbled, lightning flickered, and tropical rain came crashing down from the showerheads fitted in the ceiling. The man responsible for all this, the ‘guy’ who was ‘raking it in’, was Mr Zervos. Zervos had a huge dense beard that might have been a cutting from the grotto’s undergrowth. He stamped through the restaurant beating the pineapple air with his short muscular arms. Zervos was the only Greek in town. Everybody called him Adam’s Greek.

The Wang Garden was the only restaurant in that part of the country, unless you counted the Paragon Café, which served pizza and eggs and didn’t seem to know the meaning of its name. At weekends people came from up to fifty miles around. On busy nights like these Zervos paid Jed an extra $1.25 an hour to pack take-outs. He made it sound like a fortune, this extra $1.25, it was only because he liked Jed so much, he didn’t know what had come over him, maybe he had a fever, an extra $1.25, it was madness. And Jed would be smiling, not at Zervos and his torrent of language, but at the memory of the $10,000, the eight thousand $1.25s, that he had thrown in Creed’s face.

He spent most of his time in the kitchens, among blue neon flytraps and steaming silver vats. There was no door between the kitchens and the alley at the back, only a curtain of brown and yellow beads that clicked when there was a breeze, which was just about never because it was summer and the only time the air moved was when Zervos waved his short arms or a truck went past outside. It was one of the busy nights, a Friday, most likely, and he was just spooning some number 42 into a white take-out carton when a voice from behind him whispered, ‘Give me a bit of chicken, mister. I’m going to die of hunger otherwise.’

He looked up and caught his first glimpse of Celia through the beads. He saw some tangled blonde hair, he saw the white light of the kitchen catch on the rough edge of a broken tooth.

‘Go on, one of those little boxes, that’ll do.’

The curtain parted, clicking, and now he saw her hair all coarse and fraying like rope coming undone and her breasts pushing against an old green cardigan, and he knew who she was. He’d heard men in the bar talking about her. Men with nothing in their heads always filled them up with bits of women’s bodies.

‘You can’t come in here,’ he hissed.

She flinched, stepped back. The bead curtain closed behind her, closed over her like water. It was so sudden, so complete, that it unnerved him. He went to the curtain and peered out. She’d flattened herself against the outside wall like someone in a spy movie. She was facing away from him, down the alley.

‘Why don’t you go home to eat like everyone else?’ he said.

She kept her face turned away. ‘It’s my mum and dad. They locked me out while they throw stuff at each other. And I can’t buy anything because I haven’t got any money.’ Now she looked at him. ‘What’s wrong with you?’