Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

‘Come on, Jed,’ she cooed from the other side. ‘Don’t be like that.’ She banged on the wood with the flat of her hand. He knew it was the flat of her hand. She was careful never to scrape her knuckles or break her nails. She was a real beautician. ‘Jed?’ Her voice had hardened. ‘Jed, come on. Don’t be boring.’

He sat on the edge of his bed and stared at her through the door. He thought he heard her mutter, ‘Little bastard,’ and she banged once more, one last time, and then there was silence. Then high-heels across the hallway and the kitchen door clicked shut.

He climbed out of his bedroom window and stamped off up Mackerel Street, his red baseball cap jammed on sideways, as if he was turning left. That woman with the wedges of electric-pink and blue above her eyes. That woman, the beautician. His mother. She’d gone and thrown his radios away. All one hundred and twelve of them. She’d even thrown the Ferguson away, three feet high with wings of polished wood to gather the sound. Two years’ work collecting those radios. Two years’ love.

He was wearing jeans that concertinaed round his ankles and a black T-shirt that said SUICIDE; he was thinking about changing it to MURDER now. He wedged his hands in his pockets, his thin arms locked and stiff. His head began to buzz like the TV screen when a channel shuts down at night. They call it snow sometimes, but it’s nothing like snow. It’s nowhere near that peaceful.

She must’ve been planning it for ages with that nail-polish brain of hers. You’d need a special man to shift one hundred and twelve radios. You’d need a truck. He couldn’t believe it. He just couldn’t believe it. He tipped his head to the clouds and groaned out loud. An old lady stopped and looked at him, concerned. He glared at her and stamped on up the road, round the corner and into Airdrome Boulevard.

MURDER. That was the answer. Then, when she was dead, he could send her to the embalming studio, plenty of pink and blue, he’d say, don’t spare the pink and blue, he’d make her look like she was going to a fucking disco, and then they could put her in one of those viewing theatres on Central Avenue, he didn’t know how much it cost, he didn’t care, he’d save up. He could see it now:

MURIEL MORGAN NOW SHOWING ONE WEEK ONLY

She’d be laid out in her coffin, pink satin it’d be, with blue trimmings, to go with her make-up, maybe some neon too, and there’d be radios all round her, hundreds of radios, all tuned to different stations, all on top volume. He’d surround her with radios. He’d bury her in radios.

He walked halfway across the city that day, he walked until night fell. He stood under the harbour bridge and watched the lights come on downtown. He leaned his head back against a pillar and shut his eyes and felt the silver trains shake down through the stone. He’d scattered his rage along a hundred streets and he was almost smiling now. He had a new idea.

The next day he didn’t go to school. He went to visit Mr Garbett instead. Mr Garbett was definitely a mistake, he knew that now. One look at him and it was obvious. There was an understanding between them that didn’t need any words. And since he had so much in common with this man who smelt like a casino and ruled an empire of junk from a stained green throne, it was only fitting that he should have a part to play in Jed’s plan.

‘How’s the tape recorder?’ Mr Garbett asked.

‘Great, thanks.’

Mr Garbett shifted on the sofa. ‘Sorry, but I haven’t got any new radios in.’ He grinned. It was one of their private jokes. New radios.

‘That’s all right,’ Jed said. ‘I’m not looking for radios any more.’

‘Oh?’ Mr Garbett gave Jed a curious, almost wounded look.

‘My mum chucked them out. The whole lot.’

‘Why’d the hell she do that?’

Jed shrugged. ‘She said they were dirty.’

Mr Garbett’s face slackened. The corners of his mouth drooped. Only one thing could do that to Mr Garbett. The wanton destruction of junk. He took a long draught from his brown bottle, then he let out a soft belch and stared into the road. Finally, and without a change of expression, he said, ‘It must’ve taken her a long time.’

Jed grinned for the first time since it happened. ‘Ages, I bet. There were over a hundred.’

‘I don’t know,’ Mr Garbett said. ‘Some people.’

He dabbed at one eye with the corner of a handkerchief. For a moment Jed thought he was crying, mourning the passing of the radios, but then he realised: it was just Mr Garbett’s eye leaking, like it always did.

‘You know that tape recorder?’ Jed said. ‘Well, I need a longer wire for the mike, maybe about,’ and he screwed his face up, thinking, ‘about fifty feet long. And I need a smaller mike too. That other one, it’s too, I don’t know, too clumsy.’

‘The wire’s no problem,’ Mr Garbett said. ‘I’m getting some in this week. The mike could take a bit longer.’

Jed dropped into the store at least once a week after that and sometimes he let Mr Garbett take him into the back room and open his jeans and turn him into that slow ink. The memory of the radios was like a sore place on his body that he only felt when he was in a certain position; he had to press it every now and then so he didn’t forget. By the end of the month he had the wire and the mike. His mother had found a new man, an embalmer called Adrian who wore grey shoes. The time had come.

He waited until she went to work one morning, then he took out the wire and the new mike from their hiding-place inside the air-conditioning in his bedroom. The mike was particularly satisfying; it was round and white, the size of a button, and the top was a minute copper grille that looked like a fly’s eye. He ran the wire under his carpet and out into the corridor. So far, so good. The next part was tricky, though. The carpet in the corridor had been secured at the edges with tacks, and he had to prise the tacks loose before he could conceal the wire beneath. It took him almost an hour to run the wire from his bedroom door to his mother’s, and most of that time he held his breath, praying that nothing brought her home early. When he opened the door to her room he came to a standstill. The dressing-table peopled by tiny potent bottles, the wall-lights designed to resemble candles (fake wax drips, flame-shaped bulbs), the double bed fringed with satin dust-ruffles: it gave him the feeling that he was standing in a shrine, that even his presence was sacrilege. He closed his eyes and summoned up the ghosts of his radios. He saw the dawn that came up behind the dial in one, he lingered on the sweeping ocean-liner curves of another. He remembered their names, and heard their voices. He muttered stations to himself like incantations, like curses: Moscow, Brussels, Helsinki. ‘Hilversum,’ he muttered, ‘Reykjavik,’ and he saw his radios in the garbage dump, he saw their cases crushed and shattered, their innards ripped out, spilled on the ground, their voices silenced for ever, and when he opened his eyes his mother’s room seemed to shrink in the face of his new resolve. Tiny bright explosions pocked the precious air, as if something white-hot had burned holes right through reality. The furniture looked charred at the edges. He noticed the clock beside her bed. Almost eleven-thirty. She sometimes came home for lunch. He had better get on.

He levered up the tacks that held her pale-green carpet flush to the wall and tucked the wire underneath, then he knocked the tacks back into the same holes. It took him twenty minutes to reach the bed. There was really only one place for the mike. He pulled the bed away from the wall and fastened the mike to the back of the headboard with a strip of insulating tape. He pushed the bed against the wall and stood back. After examining the bed from all angles to make sure the wire was invisible, he returned to his room. All set. Now for the trial run. He switched the tape recorder to RECORD and ran back up the corridor to his mother’s room. He stood beside her stack of frilly pillows and thought for a moment.