Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

He stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Your eyes, they’re pinned wide open.’ She grinned. ‘You look like an astronaut. You look like you just landed back on earth or something and it’s a real shock.’

He said nothing.

‘Where did you come from anyway?’ ‘From the coast.’

‘I know who you are. You’re the strange one who turned up in a top hat. I heard you shouting at it. In the cemetery.’

He handed her the carton of chicken. ‘Here.’

‘Thanks.’ When she smiled her two front teeth stuck out. One of them was chipped. She caught him looking. ‘My brother hit me with a stone.’

‘I’d better go back in,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘I’ll see you around.’

When he turned back into the kitchen, Zervos was scowling at him. ‘Where’s the take-out?’

‘Problem with the chicken.’

‘Problem with the chicken? What problem?’

‘It was bad, Zervos. Bad chicken. I had to throw it out.’

‘You throw out my chicken?’

‘It was bad, Zervos. You can’t give people bad chicken. People die of bad chicken.’

‘My chicken, my chicken.’ Zervos was dancing on the tiled floor and beating at the air.

‘Chicken’s a weapon, Zervos. You can murder people with chicken.’

‘Just fix me some more, OK? Good chicken, bad chicken, any fucking chicken. Just chicken. And fix it real quick, OK? I don’t pay you extra one twenty-five to throw my chickens in the garbage. Jesus God. I could get someone they do that for nothing.’

Jed didn’t know it, but Celia was listening on the other side of the curtain, her laughter stifled by a mouthful of number 42. The next time she said, ‘Give me some chicken,’ she said it in the vacant lot behind the Commercial Hotel, and it was a different kind of chicken altogether.

That first time, he couldn’t be sure, it was after midnight, too dark to tell, her belly and her legs lay like patches of moonlight on the ground, he couldn’t be sure, but as he lifted away from her he thought he smelt that rich, metallic smell. It was like scrapyards, old boats, money. He had to check. He jumped to his feet and pulled his pants up over his knees.

‘What are you doing?’ she hissed.

‘I’ll be right back.’

He scrambled across the lot to a lit window, the men’s room at the back of the hotel. In the yellow light that fell all bleary through the frosted glass the blood showed up brown. It excited him so much, he had to fuck her again. He didn’t tell her it was the blood, though. Not then.

After the second time she stared up at him, her eyes wide.

‘Now who’s the astronaut?’ he said.

‘You remember everything,’ she whispered.

‘No, I don’t,’ he said. ‘Most things I forget.’

‘What about me?’ she asked him. ‘Will you remember me?’

He didn’t say anything.

One frog croaked, and then another, and then they couldn’t hear each other speak. That was why she’d chosen the place. It was dark, and there were two kinds of frogs, one fast, pitched high, the other deep and slow. Nobody would hear them fucking with all those frogs croaking, that was the idea. Nobody would know.

‘Why?’ he said. ‘You done this before?’

She grinned up at him. ‘Maybe.’

The next month they drove up to Blood Rock. It was a place that Jed had found by chance during his first few weeks in Adam’s Creek. You drove east, up into the hills. About ten miles out of town there was a turning on the right. The track was two miles long and ended in a precipice. It was a vantage point, marked on the map. The Adam’s Creek power station sprawled in the dust-bowl valley below, its chimneys lit as green as Mars. Smoke poured upwards, pale-grey and blurred, like make-up smudged by tears. Away to the east lay the cooling-water lake, known by local people as the Blue Lagoon. To the west you could see a sprinkling of town lights and, further west, the hills where the coal came from. West of the hills was the highway, a finger dipped in the dust of the mines and run all the way across the land to the horizon.

He parked two hundred yards from the precipice and let her walk the rest. She reached the edge and stood still for a long time, only her skirt fluttering, and the ends of her hair. It was obvious she’d never been before. Later she told him that she was surprised he’d found the place, grateful that he’d taken her. It said something about what he felt for her. It said something that she knew he’d never put in words.

The sun set in front of her. It seemed too bright that evening, almost chemical. A sulphurous yellow, the blue of gas. He went and opened the trunk. Lifted a sheet out and sent it billowing through the air. Watched it drift down, settle on the ground. Dusk made the white cotton glow.

‘What’s that for?’ She stood ten yards away, her chin tucked into her shoulder.

He knelt down on the sheet. ‘I thought we could fuck on it.’

‘But it’s my time.’

He liked the way she said that. ‘I know it’s your time. That’s why I brought the sheet.’

‘Don’t you mind?’

‘Why should I mind?’

‘Some people think it’s disgusting.’

‘Whose blood is it?’

Her forehead puckered. One finger curled into her broken tooth. It was as if she really didn’t know the answer.

‘It’s your blood,’ he said, ‘isn’t it?’

She was grinning now, and once she’d grinned, of course, she had to let him. She was too intrigued not to.

It wasn’t actually called Blood Rock, that was just their private name for it, because it was there that Jed made his confession. About what excited him most. He’d timed that first drive with such care. It occurred exactly four weeks after the frogs. He’d been counting the days.

The summer passed. Every month they drove up into the hills, their sheet folded neatly in the trunk, their lust, by contrast, scarcely containable. One evening in August — it was their fourth night in a row; her blood kept flowing that month — he turned to her and saw an expression on her face that he didn’t recognise. It was like wonder, and he couldn’t guess the root of it.

‘You know the weird thing?’ she said. ‘The weird thing is, you take my pain away.’

She told him how she used to dread her time. There’d be one night every month when somebody took a knife to the softest part of her. She’d twist and turn, she’d fold herself double, she’d cry out. Nothing helped, not even aspirins. It just had to be gone through. Since she’d met him, though, it didn’t happen any more. It was because he fucked her at the beginning of her blood, she said. It was like he loosened her inside. Her look of wonder deepened. It was like they were made for each other, she said, wasn’t it?

He was sitting on the edge of the sheet now. In the valley below the power station was lit up like a tangle of pearls, like some romantic gift.

‘I wish I could give you that,’ he said.

She saw where he was looking, and laughed and kissed his face.

Soon afterwards he left the Wang (though Zervos tried to tempt him to stay by offering him an extra, wait for it, thirty-five cents an hour!) and started working days at the ice-cream parlour on Main Street which belonged, coincidentally, to Celia’s uncle (or maybe not so coincidentally since, in a town like Adam’s Creek, population 2,200, most people ended up being related sooner or later). It was a move that sealed him in Mrs O’Neill’s affections: he now brought her free ice-cream as well as the traditional Rocky Road.

One morning in October he was wiping the counter down when he heard a motorbike approaching. He thought nothing of it at the time. Two of the power-station boys had bikes. They held races out by the railway tracks on Saturdays. But he looked up all the same and saw the bike pass by, the rider wearing an unfamiliar black helmet and black leathers, the motorbike low-slung, bulging, making a noise that made him think of someone beating cream in a bowl with a wooden spoon.