Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

He touched Silence on the arm. ‘Real nice job you’ve done.’

Silence accepted the compliment with another smile and a slight bow.

Jed turned to the woman. ‘You live here too?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘we’re just visiting.’ She opened the glass door to the balcony. It faced due north, towards the airport. ‘Bob likes it here,’ she said. ‘He sits here for hours drinking his milk and watching the planes.’

Jed stared at the baby again. It looked like a tortoise.

Silence tapped him on the arm and handed him a business card. On the blank side Silence had written something in block capitals: IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME.

‘No kidding,’ Jed said.

He held the card out for Silence to take, but Silence made a tearing gesture with his hands and pointed at the bin. Jed tore the card in two and dropped the pieces in the bin. He noticed that the bin was half full of identical business cards that had been torn in a similar way.

‘This all the things you say?’ Jed asked.

Silence nodded.

‘How long since you emptied it?’

Silence shrugged. ABOUT A MONTH, he wrote.

‘You don’t talk much, do you?’ Jed said. ‘I guess you never did.’

THERE’S TWO KINDS OF TALKING, Silence wrote. TALKING OUT LOUD AND TALKING IN YOUR HEAD.

Jed had to agree with that.

SO WHAT I CAN DO FOR YOU? Silence wrote.

‘I need somewhere to stay.’

NO PROBLEM.

‘Something else,’ Jed said. ‘I’m not here, OK? If anyone asks, don’t tell them a thing.’

HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO TELL THEM? I’M A DEAF MUTE, REMEMBER?

‘What if they tell you to write it down?’

Silence smiled and wrote, OW! I JUST HURT MY HAND.

Jed was given Tip’s old room. Eight feet by eight (in the old days they’d christened it the Cell). Now it was used for what Silence called ‘stock’: two rowing-machines, a stack of cordless phones, ten microwaves, and a mountain bike. There was just enough room left over for a bunk bed. Jed took the top bunk. He went to sleep early that night and woke before morning. He rolled on to his belly, stared out of the window. Dawn had driven yellow wedges into the darkness along the horizon. The city lay below, cool as ashes. He could hear no traffic, only the wind murmuring. He remembered the night Tip OD’d. High winds, storm-force. Clothes swayed on their rails, water see-sawed in the goldfish tank. Tip had shot up and tumbled sideways, his face grey, words like rubber. Jed called the ambulance, then he hid behind the sliding doors that used to house the altar and waited. It didn’t take them long. He heard boots on the floor, breathing, curses. And all the time the south wind moaning, like a choir of ghosts. That was where the ocean cemeteries were, south of the city, twelve miles out. When the wind blew from that direction, some people said it was the voices of the dead. The cops were so spooked that night, they didn’t even think to search the place. Lucky for him. That was the last time he saw Tip. He laid his head back on the pillow, watched the walls turn grey. There were ashes in urns on the floor above. There were fourteen people sealed into the walls downstairs. But you could flip fear over like a coin and then it meant protection. He was glad to be this high up, it made him feel out of reach, safe. And the wind? That was like airport music, it was nothing, it was just there. He fell asleep again and slept till midday.

He left for the asylum at five that afternoon. One phone-call had told him all he needed to know: the visiting hours (between six and eight) and the address (somewhere in Westwood Heights). From Mangrove he cut through the old meat-packing district towards the tunnel. It was a narrow road that ran along the southern lip of the harbour. No restaurants or stores here, just the steel-roll doors of warehouses, wide enough for trucks, and cobblestones instead of tarmac, and deep gutters for the blood to run down. When he reached the Helix, it spun him round till he was almost dizzy, then he dipped down under the harbour and rose again for air in Venus. He headed west on Highway 12. It was the same route he’d taken from Mitch’s place the day before, only now he was travelling in the opposite direction, away from the city. It was a gamble to be travelling at all, but it was one that he had to take, one that Mitch, for all his warnings, might understand. If anyone was going to understand what he was doing, it would be Mitch, he felt. He left the highway five miles further on, drove through Westwood and up into the foothills.

The location surprised him. He would’ve expected to find the asylum in one of the gloomier and more fetid sections of the city. But Westwood was a retirement suburb. Tree-lined streets, wrought-iron gates. Valets and video security. People died comfortably here, in monogrammed sheets, their heads wrapped in a soft cocoon of drugs. In fact, they didn’t really die at all; they ‘fell asleep’, they ‘joined their maker’, they were ‘called’. A death in Westwood was worth at least two or three in Mangrove. These had always been rich harvesting grounds for the Paradise Corporation.

It was dusk. He caught a glimpse of a building set high above the road and floodlit from beneath. That would be the place. He took a curve too fast and almost lost control. A black H showed in his headlamps. H for Hospital. He turned between stone gateposts. Another sign told him to go slow. After driving through acres of parkland, the grass turning blue as night came down, he saw a lawn. It was so neat, it frightened him. He’d met people like that. Suit on the outside, knife underneath. He reached into his inside pocket and took out a piece of candy. He tore the wrapper off and tossed it on the floor of the car.

In the lobby the girl behind the reception desk had fingernails that could have been his mother’s doing. An inch long and frosty-pink. The girl ignored him for a while. He had time to admire her crisp white uniform, to notice the glittery gold belt she wore around her waist.

He took his hat off, smoothed his hair. ‘I’m here to see Mr Gorelli,’ he said.

She glanced up at him and then her eyes slid sideways and came to rest on his right shoulder. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘I’m here to see Mr Gorelli. I rang earlier.’

The girl lifted a white phone. ‘There’s someone to see Mr Gorelli.’ She replaced the phone. ‘Sister will be along in a moment,’ she told him. ‘If you’d like to take a seat.’

He crossed the polished marble floor and sank down into a soft pink sofa. There were three more soft pink sofas in the lobby. There was a white grand piano too, like something from a winter fairy tale. The girl with the gold belt was watching him. When the clock struck six, she’d change into a vulture. He let his eyes drift away from her and through the room. Money was seeds. People threw it around and places like this sprang up out of the ground. He wondered how Vasco could afford it. And then his chin jerked upwards like a fish on a line. Maybe Creed was paying the bills. He was perverse enough.

‘Are you the gentleman who’s come to see Mr Gorelli?’

One look at the Sister and he thought he’d better smile. She was about fifty. Her face seemed to hang from some invisible hook, all its weight gathered in the folds of her cheeks and the rolls beneath her chin. The skin under her eyes looked stretched. As if it was being pulled downwards. As if, at any moment, it might tear.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m the gentleman,’ and he rose to his feet.

‘This way, please.’

‘How is he?’ He thought he ought to ask.

She eyed him over her shoulder. ‘Pretty much the same.’

The same as what?

He tried to remember what Mitch had told him. All he could see was a man curled naked in a gutter. It didn’t even look like Vasco.