Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

‘She thought you were too young,’ he said. ‘She thought you were going to change everything.’

Harriet shook her head. ‘That wasn’t the reason. I think she was in love with him. She wanted to look after him.’

He thought of those months after their mother died when Yvonne had come to stay. He could still see her painting in the garden. ‘It would never’ve worked,’ he said. ‘Dad couldn’t stand the smell of her cigars.’

They both laughed for a while and then fell silent.

‘Isn’t it strange,’ she said, ‘how death can bring a family together?’

That night he decided to sleep in Dad’s room. When he opened the door and turned on the light, everything was exactly as he remembered it. The smell of vanilla and talcum in the air. The glint of the green bottle on the glass shelf above the basin. The seven pillows.

He thought of the last time he’d seen Dad. When they said goodbye they’d embraced by the front door, a taxi waiting on the road outside. He’d caught a glimpse of the two of them reflected in the hall mirror and his heart had lurched because it looked as if he was propping up a corpse. Dad’s body seemed to sag, as if his bones had turned to mush, and his breath, usually so fresh, smelled sweet, the sweetness of rotting plants or compost. That sweet smell, it was strange how he’d recognised it. That sweet smell was death’s footman. It was the announcement you heard just before death made its entrance.

Back on India-May’s farm he’d hung that picture in his head. He’d carried it around with him, framed by the mirror’s gilt, like some kind of talisman. So long as he remembered the frailty of Dad’s grip on life, Dad’s fingers would never loosen and let go. That was how the superstition worked. But time passed; the picture faded, moved him less. He began to take Dad’s life for granted again. He forgot to remember. Dad had lasted so long, it was tempting to believe that he would last for ever. And that was fatal, of course.

He got into bed and lay down. He thought he heard the foghorn once, off High Head. Ten minutes passed, or maybe half an hour, it was hard to tell. Then a voice rose out of the darkness, hovered in the air, almost visible, like a hallucination.

‘Nathan? You awake?’

At first he didn’t know where he was, whose voice it was. He must have been asleep. And waking suddenly like that, you woke in a thousand different places at once, all the places that you’d ever been. It took him a moment.

‘Georgia?’

She was standing at the end of the bed with a candle. The room bucked and tilted in the unsteady yellow light. He watched her place the candle on the windowsill.

She came over and sat down and held him. ‘I didn’t want to sleep in my old bed,’ she whispered. ‘I wanted to sleep here, with you.’

‘What time is it?’

‘I don’t know. It must be about one.’ The bed listed, creaked, as she climbed in.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked her.

‘I think so. How about you?’

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Just tired.’

‘Do you want me to blow the candle out?’

He shook his head. ‘I had a friend who used to say that if you burned a candle in your window and it burned all night, then the world wouldn’t end while you were sleeping.’

Georgia smiled. ‘Who was that?’

‘She was called India-May.’

‘Funny name.’

‘She made it up. It was the name she started using when she left home.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen her for ages.’

He’d called the farm about a year after he left. He’d wanted to see how everybody was. Pete had answered. Pete was the one who’d told him.

‘She died, didn’t she?’ Georgia said.

He looked at her across the pillows. ‘I didn’t want to tell you.’

‘You did tell me. You’re my brother. You tell me everything.’

He was silent.

‘How did it happen?’ she asked.

‘It was funny, people were always saying things about her, about how she’d come to no good —’ He stopped again.

‘Tell me.’

‘There was a bar in town, it was down at the end of the main street, right where the buildings ended and the scrub began. There was a hill there, pretty steep, and the bar was at the bottom of it. She went in for a drink one time, she liked a few drinks around midday, she used to say it helped the long hot afternoons slide by,’ and Nathan smiled to himself, because he could hear her saying it. ‘She met some guy in there that day, some guy she used to go with, and he must’ve said something because the next thing anyone knew, she was screaming at him, Pete was in the bar the morning after, he said the window was all over the floor, apparently she’d thrown an ashtray at the guy and it had missed and taken the whole window out instead, and when he took her by the arm and tried to calm her down, she shook him off and ran out of the bar, right out in the street, and like I said, it was the bottom of a hill and there was a truck coming —’

He could see that part of Broken Springs so clearly, almost as if he was standing there. There was a wall on the far side of the street which was always being knocked over. Trucks would come hurtling down the hill, their brakes would fail, and they’d plough right through the wall and on into the field beyond. As soon as the wall was mended, another truck’s brakes would fail.

He could see the bar opposite too. The road dipping down into town and the bar with its brown tin roof and its dusty verandah, and a woman running out into the street, hair horizontal in the air behind her, strings of wooden beads swinging in a loop around her neck like a cow’s jaw chewing, her mouth wide open, a wedge hewn out of her face, as if someone had taken an axe to her, as if her mouth was a wound and her screaming the bleeding.

He looked across at Georgia. Her head on the pillow. Her face still, as it sometimes was before she began to cry. He felt for her hand and held it tight.

‘I didn’t want to tell you,’ he said.

He watched their candle moving the shadows around, keeping the end of the world at bay, keeping the two of them alive.

‘I had to go to the hospital,’ she said eventually. ‘I had to collect his things.’

‘Did you see him?’

‘They asked me if I wanted to. I said no. I just wanted to get out of there.’

‘I think I’ve got to see him. I haven’t seen him for so long.’

‘You’ll have to call them.’

‘I’ll call tomorrow.’

‘Maybe I’ll come too,’ she said, though her voice had shrunk at the thought.

‘My brother still,’ he said after a while, ‘aren’t you?’ And he waited, and then he heard one word come back, spoken in a whisper, she must have been close to sleep.

‘Yes.’

The hospital lay in the hills, about an hour away. Yvonne drove. Georgia and Harriet sat in the back. It was a bright day. White, blinding clouds and a breeze in the treetops like hands in hair. But Nathan felt a sickness rise in him at the thought of arriving, he didn’t want the journey to end. The sickness rose into his throat, and he had to keep swallowing. He was glad that they’d all decided to come. He wouldn’t have liked to be doing this alone.

Nobody talked much on the way out. As they climbed into the hills, the sky lowered over the car. A light rain began to fall.

The road that led to the hospital sloped upwards through a forest of pine trees. It was a straight road, the kind of road that leads to a temple or a sacred monument. Nathan looked out of the window. Once he saw a glade, a secret place with a floor of pale, sandy soil. Then the pines closed ranks again, their tall red trunks glowing softly in the gloom of the afternoon.