Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

Mitch took a last look round. ‘You know what I like about out here? The air’s clean.’

Jed didn’t say anything.

Mitch swung his leg across the bike, braced his foot on the kickstart, and pushed down hard. The engine fired.

Jed squinted into the low yellow sun. ‘Safe trip, Mitch.’

Mitch nodded. ‘Be well.’ He fitted his goggles over his eyes. ‘Sell lots of ice-cream.’

The back tyre mimed a shallow S, then the bike straightened up, began to shrink. The rasp and snap of the engine bounced against the walls of the houses behind him, tumbled over the rocks and dust beyond. There were gaps as Mitch eased his wrist back on the throttle. Then one long hum that slowly faded, became part of the silence.

When Jed turned round, he saw Celia standing on the road. She was dressed in nothing but her cotton nightgown and her cardigan. Her feet were bare. He knew what she’d done. She’d crept out through her bedroom window, but she’d left half a dozen coarse blonde hairs behind her, flickering on the damaged flyscreen wire, like evidence.

‘He’s gone,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘I liked him.’ She tipped one ear to the road, listening to the last of Mitch. The hem of her nightgown stirred. ‘Now he’s really gone.’ She moved her toes in the orange dust at the edge of the road. ‘He didn’t stay long, did he?’

‘Why would he stay?’

‘I don’t know.’ She scratched her ribs through a tear in the cotton. ‘Why did you?’

He stuck his hands in his pockets. Then took one hand out again and picked at his neck. The sun prickled on his skin. Those early rays could feel like insect legs.

After Mitch came through, things were never quite the same. It was as if Mitch had left the freezer door ajar. There was the distant drone of an alarm and things began to thaw.

Celia stole into his room one day while he was out at work. When he came home he found her peering into the well of his top hat. He took it away from her.

‘Moon Beach,’ she said. Her eyes were wide as new horizons.

He heard the voices of the power-station boys on the street below. They always got drunk at the Commercial Hotel when their shift was over. He wanted Celia to leave. She pulled the blankets back instead and took off all her clothes.

‘What about Mrs O’Neill?’ he said.

Celia laughed. ‘If it’s not on TV, she’s not interested.’

But he wouldn’t fuck her, so she went to sleep. He paced round the bed. Felt invaded, nervous.

‘You’re not ugly,’ she said later, though nobody had mentioned ugliness, not even once. ‘You’re more sort of, I don’t know, hurt.’ She was lying on her back, pulling lazily at one of her nipples, watching it stretch. ‘Your skin,’ she said, ‘it shows it. Like you had boiling water on you or something. Like you were scalded. Did that happen, Jed? Did you have boiling water on you?’

Her voice had brightened suddenly. She thought she was on to something. She thought she could know him as well as he knew himself. Maybe she thought she could know him better.

He turned away from her. He didn’t want to look at her. He knew what the expression would be. All blown-up with sleeping. Fat with trust. People were always telling you things. What did they think they were, mirrors? Did they think that was the only way you could find out who you were, by listening to them?

He went and stood by the window.

Adam’s Creek, midnight. View from the second floor of Mrs O’Neill’s boarding house. A yellow light in the street, the yellow smudged with coal or dust. One telegraph pole, with a metal sign attached: MAIN STREET. A railway line.

Just then a row of trucks rattled from right to left. They looked like giant soft-drink cans on wheels. They always passed at about the same time, right after midnight, and it was something he liked to watch, the way other people watch sunsets or the ocean. It was like letting your breath out slowly, it took him far away from himself.

A man moved in front of the silver trucks, moved in the opposite direction. Shoulders pulled back, fists knocking against his thighs.

‘He’s late tonight.’

Celia shifted in the bed. ‘Who is?’

‘Wayne.’

A silence.

‘You’re all locked up,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if you were all rotten in there.’

He turned again, surprised. He saw her breasts spilling across her ribs and that chip missing from her tooth where her brother hit her with a stone. She didn’t know she was right. She was just saying stuff. He saw her breasts and her broken tooth, and he moved towards the bed, seconds away from fucking her. It was best when it felt like you were fighting gravity, fighting the pull of forces greater than yourselves. Just now they were in the same place, like Wayne and the trucks, but sometime soon they’d be miles apart.

Still. He’d allowed her closer than anyone else, and when his clothes were off and he was tired she read him the way she read the weather or the mountains or the dust, she ran her fingers over his pale, scarred body and she guessed close to the truth.

They were still driving up to Blood Rock. Sometimes they’d fuck right away, or sometimes they’d wait till they were about to leave, but they’d always do it on the sheet, the same sheet he’d brought that first time, as if, without it, some spell might be broken and everything would fall apart. By now it was stained with blood, but Celia liked that, she thought it was romantic. ‘It looks like flowers,’ she said, ‘like roses.’ The sheet was a diary of their meetings, a history of their love. She suspected it might have special powers. If you wrapped it round you, for instance, it’d keep you from feeling any pain. Or if you spread it on the ground you could study it like tea-leaves and read the future there. Jed wasn’t so sure, he didn’t like the idea that the future was all decided already and he didn’t know anything about it, but he indulged her, and the bloodstains remained, and grew. He couldn’t have got rid of them anyway, even if he’d wanted to. He’d tried once, secretly, in Mrs O’Neill’s washing machine, but the powder wouldn’t shift them. It just wasn’t true what they said in those commercials.

The last time they went to the rock, everything began the same way as usual. The sun was going down, the power station laid a creased white sleeve of smoke against the darkening sky. She sat and stared at the view, while he opened the trunk and lifted out the sheet, complete with its light-brown rose of blood.

When she turned and saw the sheet spread out on the ground she smiled and scuttled through the dust on her heels till she was next to him. He put a hand on her shoulder. Reached into her mouth with his tongue and moved it across her uneven teeth. Felt that tiny missing triangle. A murmur lifted in her throat like the sound of the wind blowing. His hand dipped through the buttons on her dress, grazed her nearest breast, felt the nipple gather.

They fucked and fucked, and the flower on the sheet blushed red and grew new petals. A slow breeze moved across his naked back. She smiled at him with her mouth, her eyes wide and still.

‘Where’s your wedding ring?’

He wasn’t quick enough. ‘What wedding ring?’

‘You’ve never been married,’ she said, ‘have you?’

And, to his surprise, he said, ‘No.’

He pulled out of her and lay down. His face seemed pressed against the sky. There was a long silence. Then an aeroplane flew by. It was so high up, it whined like a fly.

‘You’ve been lying all along,’ she said.

Sooner or later he’d known that he would tell the truth. You can lie and lie beautifully, but sooner or later the truth comes back like a wave and sweeps everything before it. The people of Adam’s Creek had accepted him. People like Celia. People like Wayne and Zervos. They thought he was a bit peculiar, maybe, but they’d accepted him all the same. Peculiar, but not a liar. Well, they were fools. They were all fools. He’d been like that once, he’d trusted and believed, and look what had happened to him. He’d been thrown away. Thrown away like a candy wrapper, thrown away like trash. In his head they were trash too, for trusting and believing him. Part of him didn’t want to get away with it. Part of him wanted to be found out and punished. And so he’d told Celia the truth. And now there was nothing else he could say.