Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

‘I don’t know. Depends how long it takes.’

Mitch was still looking at him. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’

Jed drank from his can instead of answering. Sure he knew.

‘Because it seems to me,’ Mitch went on, ‘that you’ve lost touch.’

Jed rested his can on his belly and scratched his ribs with his free hand. ‘What are you talking about, Mitch?’

‘I’m talking about maybe you’ve forgotten how this city works.’

‘I know how this city works. I was born here.’

‘I said maybe you forgot. You’ve been living out in the middle of nowhere selling ice-cream, for Christ’s sake.’ Mitch took a deep breath, let it out again. ‘When did you get back?’

‘I told you. A few days ago.’

‘How many?’

‘Four.’

‘Four days.’ Mitch nodded to himself. ‘They’ll know you’re back by now.’

Jed’s body seemed to freeze up. He stared into Mitch’s face and only his heart was moving. ‘What do you know about it?’

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Mitch said. ‘You know what they’re like. They’ve got eyes in the back of their heads. You’ve been here four days and you’ve been walking round in that fucking hat and you think they haven’t noticed.’ He crumpled his can and threw it in the yard. ‘Shit. You want another beer?’

‘Sure.’

While Mitch was indoors, Jed thought back.

His first night. Thousands of tourists in town for the celebrations, the streets jumping with firecrackers, blue suits, the dance of death. Chaos: surely that was the best disguise there was.

Then three nights in Blenheim. There was nothing to connect him to that section of the city. Nathan was from the deep past. They were linked by the finest thread. Go back fifteen years and walk into a field and turn over the right square-inch of ground. It was that fine. No chance.

He’d talked, sure he’d talked, but he hadn’t given anything away, not really. He hadn’t told anyone his name, though he’d been tempted to. The more people who knew it, the less power it had. He’d remembered that. Ideally nobody should know. And, at the moment, nobody did.

He thought of Sharon and the pouch of soft leather she used to wear on a string around her neck. He’d asked her what it was for. He remembered how her eyes widened with suspicion and her hand moved instinctively to her neck. She wouldn’t tell him. He used the kind of arguments that other people used. Blackmail in its most trivial and vulgar form.

‘You’re holding out on me,’ he said once.

‘It’s like there’s something between us,’ he said some other time.

He kept on and on at her, and in the end, of course, she succumbed. She called it her magic bag, she said. She claimed it protected her. She made the mistake of telling him that nobody, nobody, had ever looked inside.

One night they were lying in bed. It was late, they were drowsy, it was after love. Light came from somewhere, blue neon light, the washeteria across the street? It switched parts of their bodies on and off.

‘That bag you’ve got,’ he said, ‘it’s shit.’

She rose out of the bed, the sheet clutched against her chest. ‘What did you say?’

‘I looked in that bag of yours when you were asleep. A few fish bones and some dust. What’s that going to do?’ He chuckled, leaned up on one elbow.

One of her breasts pushed past the sheet, the nipple wide and glossy, the blue light teased him with glimpses, he felt a shifting against the inside of his thigh, he wanted to take that nipple between his teeth, to run his lips across the soft, slack skin of her belly, to put his tongue between her legs and watch her eyes roll back, he’d lost all contact with what he’d said, the blue light, her body, now you see it, now you don’t, so when her fist sent flame through his head, it was as if she’d struck a match, it was suddenly too bright, then, just as suddenly, dark again, and he was on the floor, the force of the blow had lifted him right off the bed, tumbled him across the room.

She leaned over him, her breath stale with grass and cheap white wine. ‘I could kill you.’

He opened one hand, a feeble appeal. ‘A few fish bones,’ he muttered.

The breath gushed out of her. She wrenched at the bag. The string bit into her skin, drew sudden blood. She heaved the window open, flung the bag into the street below.

He understood it now, that rage of hers. He should have understood it then. When your magic was stolen from you, it left you open and alone, you were skin against knives and knives against stone. It blew air into the lungs of your nightmares so they grew tall and straight and walked through the dawn with you and on into the day. There was nothing between you and all the bad things. Maybe, in a way, he’d known what he was doing. Maybe he’d been trying to tell her something, trying to teach her a lesson. You can’t wear your magic on the outside. That’s just asking for it. You’ve got to keep it somewhere deep down and secret. He knew because it had happened to him. The radios. All those years ago, but still. He had new magic now — a name, that drop of rain, some bruises — and he wore it out of sight, under his skin, inside his head. It was safer there. Nobody could take it away from him because nobody could see it, nobody knew it was there.

Mitch came back with two beers. ‘You been thinking about what I said?’ He stood against the light, one hand tucked into the back of his jeans, feet spread wide on the warped boards of the verandah.

‘Yeah.’ Jed opened the can, swallowed a mouthful. The chill slid into him and spread.

But he was still thinking about the night Sharon threw her magic bag out of the window. They couldn’t have been in her apartment in Baker Park, he was thinking. There was a washeteria across the street from the apartment, but it didn’t have a neon sign. It had never had one. He thought hard. There had been storm-force winds that night. He could remember Sharon crouching on the bed. The building was swaying, she said. She had vertigo.

He swallowed another mouthful of beer. He had it now. That blue light wasn’t the washeteria. It was a strobe-light in the East Tower. The light wasn’t usually there, but there’d been a party going on that night.

It wasn’t Baker Park. It was the Towers of Remembrance.

The Towers of Remembrance.

When he left that place on the thirteenth floor he’d given it to Tip’s brother, Silence. He wondered if Silence was still living there. Silence. The youngest member of the Womb Boys. A deaf mute.

He was grinning now. It was so obvious. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?

He looked up and saw that Mitch had been watching him. ‘I’ve got one piece of advice for you,’ Mitch said.

Jed took the grin off his face. ‘I’m listening.’

‘Leave town.’

‘You know I can’t do that.’

‘Well,’ Mitch said, ‘don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

Instead of driving south from Mitch’s place, towards the Towers, Jed drove west, into the setting sun. He might have been followed to Mitch’s and, if that was the case, then the trail had to end, and end suddenly.

As he drove he remembered the video he’d watched while he was waiting for Nathan in the aquarium. It was about an octopus that could take on the precise colour and texture of its surroundings. It could also move between its various disguises with extraordinary speed and guile. There was one sequence in the video when the camera found the octopus lodged in a bed of weeds. The octopus was almost invisible; its body had turned a dark-green, its tentacles drifted, blending with the strands of plant life. But as soon as it sensed the presence of the camera it reacted. One twitch and it was hurtling along the ocean bed. It seemed almost jet-propelled. Abrupt changes of direction. Sudden clouds of ink. Then it vanished. When the camera found it again, it was fifty yards away, masquerading as a piece of rock. This was pretty much the kind of manoeuvre that Jed had in mind.