Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

‘Harriet?’

He’d almost forgotten that he was looking for her. If she was still in the garden, there was only one place she could be, and that was the summerhouse. As he bent down and began to force his way through the undergrowth he could taste alcohol in his mouth. It was a stale taste, musty, pale-grey.

‘Harriet?’

His voice only seemed to travel a few feet, then it stopped dead. As if it had been swallowed up. That was how that voice had sounded to him all those years ago. Dead. But near. Against his ear. That was why he’d turned round. And then, when he saw there was nothing there, he ran. He burst over the threshold and into the house, his right arm ripped open from the wrist to the elbow. It must’ve caught on something, a thorn, a bramble, a sharp branch. He hadn’t noticed. The blood ran down the inside of his arm, where the skin was pale, and collected in the palm of his hand as he held the wound out for Dad to look at. He still had the scar now, twenty years later, a long thin groove down the inside of his right forearm, as if he was made of candlewax and someone had run their fingernail the length of it.

‘Harriet?’

He saw her as he called her name for the third time. She was sitting on the steps of the summerhouse. He was seeing small things with such clarity now. A green leaf in her hair. Part of a spider’s web. The whites of her eyes clouded with red. She’d been crying, but she wasn’t crying now.

When she saw him she attempted a smile. It didn’t quite work. Her face was like a plate on a stick. Spinning. Balanced. But only for so long. The edges of her mouth were flickering, as if miniature hearts beat there. He sat down beside her, put an arm round her shoulders. He wanted to comfort her. She turned and pressed her face against his chest. She cried into the air below his chin.

He felt her shaking all the way through her bones and into his. He looked up through the branches into the sky, waiting for her tears to pass. The sun coloured the high branches a deep burnt orange. Down below, where they were sitting, the air softened, became almost visible, as if shaded in with charcoal, closer to smoke than air. A bird sang four notes and stopped. The first three notes were identical. The fourth started out the same way, then it stretched and lifted an octave. It was as if the bird had asked a question in whatever language it spoke.

She looked up at him and her mouth, already close to his, moved closer, seemed to falter, then moved closer and they kissed. He kept his mind completely still, it was like something preserved, like something in a jar in a laboratory, but his body came undone and shook, there was a sound inside him like the sound tracks make when a train’s coming, that hiss and crack the length of his veins, that shudder in his blood.

He couldn’t speak. He knew this was something that had been happening slowly for a long time, something that had to happen or he was lost, but it was such a brittle structure they were building, one word would topple it, shatter it, one word would be enough to jerk them back into that ordinary daylight where nothing could be changed or righted, nothing could unravel.

He took her hand and led her up the steps. It was the past inside, it was long ago. A tennis racket, a pair of flippers, a garden hose. The window with its barricade of foliage. The light barely filtered through. The smell of old dry rubber and dead grass. The smell of the wooden handles of spades. Two buttons of her blouse had come unfastened. He could see her breasts tilting against the black silk. She was sitting on his lap. They kissed again. He didn’t need to see her face. It was printed in his head, his memory. His knees between the insides of her thighs, she drew him sliding into her. He bit her neck, that muscle at the back. A gasp. Her hair swung against his face, and something metal fell. He heard himself, it sounded like a door opening somewhere inside him, it was an old door, it had been stuck for years, you had to heave on it, you needed all your strength, and then it gave a few inches, and cried out as it gave.

He felt silence descend and press on him. He looked at her. She was squatting on the floor, some distance from him.

‘Colours everywhere,’ he said.

She found a tissue, wiped between her legs.

‘You said that was what it was like,’ he said, ‘remember?’

She straightened her skirt. ‘We should go back.’

He watched her merge with the undergrowth until only her calves showed, pale as milk in the shadows.

It was done, she was gone; he was alone.

Now that Jed was driving, and the lines were feeding into the front of his car like white candy, piece after piece after piece, he thought of himself as others thought of him. He thought of himself as a parasite, a leech. No sense pretending otherwise. He knew whose blood he wanted too. Though he’d known that for six years.

It had happened soon after his drive out to to the lake. One night he was standing outside the back of the ice-cream parlour, washing the stainless-steel vats, when he heard voices coming from the manager’s office across the yard. It was so quiet out there. Turn around and there was desert clear to the horizon. Just wind plucking at the scrub and the soft electrical humming of the stars. He had no trouble picking up the conversation.

‘That guy Jed,’ Celia’s uncle said, his voice sloppy with alcohol, ‘you know the guy I mean?’

‘Yeah, I seen him.’ The second man had his back turned. Jed could only see a piece of blue shirt and one thick forearm. He didn’t recognise the voice.

‘That guy, there’s something about him —’

‘Makes your skin go cold just looking at him.’

‘Yeah. I don’t know why I hired him. Stranger like that, shit. There’s something about him, that’s for sure.’

One of the two men crushed a beer can.

‘It’s like you look at him and he’s sucking you dry,’ the second man said. ‘It’s like he’s a leech or something.’

Celia’s uncle let out a high cackling laugh. ‘You hit it there. We oughter call him that. We oughter call him the leech.’

When Jed heard that cackling laugh again, the stars went out. There was just the night and that lit window and his white fury. He wanted to kill them both.

Then later, stretched out on his bed at Mrs O’Neill’s, he let the name sink down through him like a stone, he watched it go, and by the time he saw it settle on the bottom he decided he liked it. The name began to grow on him, he began to feel it in his fingertips and in his blood, and in his love of blood, he began to see it as his power, his future.

A road sign loomed, snapped by. Four hundred miles to go. If he drove all night he might make Moon Beach by morning. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a cream toffee, stuck it in his mouth. The wrapper joined a heap of identical wrappers on the seat beside him. Your pockets crackle when you move. That was Carol’s voice in the car with him. He saw her standing outside the Starlite Bar, her mouth tilted upwards, stitched. He saw her stumble down the steps of the cathedral. He saw the barbed wire of her scar. You take kindness where you find it, she’d said to him once, because most of this world’s cruelty. We know that, Jed, don’t we? We know that. Some nights he’d felt such scorn for her, Don’t put me in the same coffin as you, it may be your time, but it isn’t mine. Other nights he’d almost cried. Most of this world’s cruelty.

They’d come for him. He’d known they were going to come, it was part of his initiation, he couldn’t leave until it happened. He heard their boots in the hall and up the stairs. He heard their voices pushing at the flimsy, chipboard walls. Celia’s uncle, that man in the blue shirt, a couple of the power-station boys. No shortage of men for the job. He waited on the edge of his bed. He watched their boots trample across his orange carpet. Steel toecaps, steel heels. Cracks in the leather red with dust.