Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

It was a picture of Mitch’s old lady. She was lying in a coffin. Her face was white, her eyes were shut. Blood had trickled out of the corner of her mouth and then dried. She looked dead. Jed turned the polaroid over. On the back it said CO-OPERATE AND IT WON’T HAPPEN.

He looked at the picture again. Nice make-up job. It was Morton’s work, no question about that.

‘What would you have done?’ Mitch said.

Jed looked up. ‘Is she all right?’

Mitch shrugged. ‘They held her for twenty-four hours. What do you want to hear?’

A silence. The ticking of eleven clocks.

‘You’ve got to be fucking out of your mind messing with those people,’ Mitch said.

Jed scowled. ‘I know what I’m doing. I worked with them.’

‘Worked with them?’ Mitch scoffed. ‘You drove.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘You were nothing.’

‘I was NOT NOTHING.’

Mitch sighed. ‘You were nothing to them. That’s what those people do. They hang you on their Christmas tree, they put you where you look right, like one of those coloured balls, but pretty soon they get bored with you, your time’s over, they throw you out. Or maybe you break first. You’ve got some kind of shine, that’s why they choose you in the first place, but under that shine you’ve got you’re pretty fragile, pretty hollow. So you don’t last long. And people like that, they’re the ones that know it.’

Jed watched Mitch lean down and knock his pipe against the hearth. He eased out of the chair.

‘Look, I’m sorry about Anne-Marie,’ he said. ‘I’m going now.’ He stood in front of Mitch. ‘Can you loan me ten dollars?’

Mitch laughed.

‘What’s so funny?’ Jed asked him.

Mitch was still laughing. ‘Loan,’ he said.

‘It’s all right,’ Jed said. ‘I’ll pay you back.’

‘Pay me back? Sure you’ll pay me back. What are you going to do, leave me ten bucks in your will?’

‘Where’s your faith, Mitch?’

Mitch shook his head. ‘Not only dressed like a fucking preacher, talking like one too.’ He reached into his back pocket, snapped a twenty-dollar bill out into the air. ‘Here.’

‘I only asked for ten,’ Jed said.

‘Twenty’s all I’ve got.’

‘Thanks, Mitch.’ Jed stopped in the doorway. ‘I’ll see you around.’

‘Yeah,’ Mitch said, ‘sure you will.’

Jed stood on the main street that ran through Rialto. The clouds that piled above the rooftops were veined like marble, almost green. The heavens would open before long. His lips tightened, taut as a drawn bow. He aimed a queer, crooked smile at the sky. It was the rain that had started it. It was the rain that told him he was special. So he’d lost everything. The car, his hat. The shirt off his back. So they knew his every move. So what. A fizzing began between his ribs. A fizzing that was like a lit fuse. He’d been underplaying it. He’d needed some final twist. And Mitch had handed it to him; he hadn’t meant to, but he had. Those people, they took blackmail and faded it to grey. It was a game for them. But he could use that game to draw them in. Then he could settle it, once and for all.

With Mitch’s $20 he could afford to catch a taxi to his mother’s place. He asked the driver to drop him at the top of Mackerel Street. It was habit, a ritual, left over from the days when he used to leave transistor radios playing in her front garden. Like fingers pointing. Like ghosts come back to haunt her. He’d always have a taxi waiting at the top of the street so he could make his getaway.

He began to walk down the hill. He could feel his right heel, the birth of a blister there. The new sandals didn’t fit quite as well as he’d thought. He turned the corner, into the part of the street that was dead-end. Houses the same colour as ice-cream. Lemon, peppermint, raspberry. Every flavour you could imagine. No trees, just streetlamps. And sidewalks inlaid with neat strips of grass. He was back in Mackerel Street, he was actually back. He wondered how long it had been. Curiosity, not sentiment. Was it twelve years? No, thirteen. Almost half his life ago. It was hard to believe. He looked up and found that his calculation had taken him all the way to his front gate.

He was just reaching for the latch when a movement in the corner of his eye distracted him. He turned in time to see the curtain swing back into place in the window of the house next door. It was that kind of neighbourhood. Every house hid the same voyeur. He was glad he looked so different. With his blond hair and his Christian outfit, there was little chance of being recognised by anyone. They would peer at him from behind their lace curtains and think: Stranger. The same way they had always peered at his mother and thought: Whore. He smiled grimly. In those days he would probably have agreed with them; he’d had good reasons for seeing her in that red light. Now? Who she was fucking was her own affair. He didn’t even care what colour their shoes were.

He brought his eyes back into focus. Noticed casually, almost incidentally, that his mother was standing in the downstairs window looking at him. There followed a curious interval during which they both stared at each other without any change of expression. Then, almost with a jolt, they came alive again and he saw her say, ‘Jed?’

He watched her approach, blurred and unidentifiable, in the frosted glass of the door. He couldn’t imagine what he was going to say to her. When the door opened, they both held their ground. They were searching each other’s faces, searching for words.

She found some first. ‘What were you doing,’ she said, ‘skulking in the road like that?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Just thinking.’

‘I thought you were going to go away again.’

‘Would you have liked that better?’

‘Jed.’ The word came out sounding like cream poured over a spoon. That tone of voice, how well he remembered it.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘would you?’

She sighed. ‘Are you going to stand on the doorstep all afternoon,’ she said, ‘or are you going to come in?’

It smelt synthetic in the hall. It was her own smell, she carried it around with her. If you boiled her down, reduced her to her essence, it would smell of air freshener, nail polish, fashion magazines, he was sure of it. He waited for her to close the door, then he followed her down the corridor and into the kitchen. She wore the same kind of clothes she’d always worn: a pink velour sweatsuit and a pair of trainers with plump white tongues. Her dry blonde hair tucked under her jawbone, curled into the nape of her neck.

‘How about some coffee?’ she said. ‘It’s fresh.’

‘Sure. Great.’ He sat on a stool while she poured. He looked around. A lot of red and pink, a lot of stripped pine. The same old bric-à-brac above the sink: a china doll, a dog with one paw raised, a matador. A small colour TV on low volume. The early-evening news.

She placed a cup of coffee in front of him with a waitress smile, then she sat down opposite him, on the other side of the breakfast bar. She held her own cup in both hands, just below her mouth. He could see that she had aged, even through the veil of steam. There were two faces, and one of them had slipped. A curious, smeared look. And nothing left of her eyebrows except two lines sketched in brown pencil.

But she didn’t want him scrutinising her. ‘You look so,’ and she quickly sorted through words, as if they were dresses, and chose one, ‘different.’

‘That’s the idea,’ he said.

She eyed him thoughtfully over the rim of her cup. ‘You should do something about your hair.’

He laughed, slopping his coffee over. ‘I’m not one of your fucking clients, mother.’