Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

‘You won’t do that again,’ she said.

He said, ‘I don’t need to.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I’ve got a copy of that tape,’ he said, ‘and if you ever touch any of my stuff again, I’ll send it to Pop.’ He paused; it didn’t sound enough. ‘And the neighbours,’ he said. ‘And that shop where you work.’

Her eyes were blank now, and her cheeks hung, slack and looped, from the bones of her face. She turned and walked out of the room. He heard her bedroom door click quietly shut.

His first taste of revenge. Sweet.

A light rain was falling on the city, so light it sounded like rats. Jed turned into the alleyway that ran behind the school and stopped to wipe the flecks off his spectacles. Looking up again, through clear glass now, he saw four figures arranged in front of him. Their stillness had an urgency to it and he knew right away that it was him they’d been waiting for.

Three of them perched high on dark-green garbage dumpsters. He knew their names: José PS Mendoza, Scraper O’Malley and Tip Stubbs. The fourth leaned his shoulderblades against the wall, hands folded on his chest. He wore a black leather coat and a moustache. It was Vasco Gorelli. Known as Gorilla, though never to his face. He’d had the moustache since he was ten.

Near silence.

Only the light rain scurrying across the rooftops, and the tss-tss-tss of PS Mendoza’s headphones.

It was strange. Normally you couldn’t talk to Vasco, you couldn’t even get close to him. You had to wait for a summons or an audience. He was like a sort of pope. He had lieutenants — O’Malley, Stubbs, Mendoza — then he had a whole string of runners: Thomas Baby Vail, Slim Jimmy Chung, Cramps Crenshaw and Tip’s younger brother, a deaf-mute known as Silence. When you saw Vasco walk down the street you saw the petals of a flower and suddenly a flower seemed strong, a flower seemed dangerous. A small gang, but tight. A flower that closed up for the night. A furled umbrella. And when the rain came, which it did sometimes, one snap, a flick, and the gang sprang open, kept him dry. That was how it worked.

So why the sudden interest?

Jed was used to isolation. His face was like some kind of cul-de-sac. It said NO THROUGH ROAD to most people. Confronted with him, they always turned round, backed away. He wasn’t wounded exactly. No, not wounded; not any more. It had planted the seeds of scorn in him. It had bred a curious arrogance. You don’t know what you’re missing, he would think. If only you knew.

And now this.

Maybe the boys were bored that day. Just lookng for some poor bastard to pick on. And he came along with his pitted skin and his glasses and his knees put on the wrong way round and they thought: This one’ll do. Scraper and Tip eyed him from above with a strange, dislocated venom. It was like someone saying, Look, nothing personal, but we’re going to kill you now, all right?

Vasco took the cigarette out of his mouth, sent it spinning through the air. One bounce on the wet street. Tss. He pushed away from the wall, hunched his shoulders against the rain. One word was stamped across his back in silver studs: IMMORTAL.

‘Christ, Morgan, you’re so fucking ugly you’re hardly even human.’ It was curious, but he made it sound like admiration. It was as if he’d heard about Jed’s ugliness and he’d sought it out and it had come up to his expectations.

‘I know that,’ Jed said.

‘I’ve been told.’

‘Who told you?’

‘My mother.’

Vasco chipped at a weed with the heel of his boot. ‘So is it true what they say about your mother?’

Jed stared at Vasco without blinking. ‘What do they say?’

‘They say she’s a whore.’

Tip joined in. ‘Is that true? Is she a whore?’

‘They say she fucks people who fuck dead people.’ Vasco looked up from the weed he was torturing. ‘What about that? Is that true?’

Jed scrutinised them one by one.

P S. Short for Personal Stereo. He’d picked up a pair of headphones somewhere, but he’d never been able to afford a Walkman to plug them into, so he just wore the headphones and made that noise you always hear when you’re next to someone who’s got one: that tss-tss-tss. PS had been wearing phones for a year now and he could make the noise without even moving his lips.

Scraper. The guinea-pig. Gazing up into the sky, sensing the drizzle on his freckled skin. All Jed could see of Scraper’s head was a thick neck and a chin like the toe of a boot. Jed gave himself a knife and drew it calmly across the tight, offered throat and watched blood fountain into the steamy grey air.

Tip was closer, more focused. Leering down from his heap of garbage. Brawny shoulders, swollen eyelids, grease in the wings of his nose. Tip swam freestyle for some city team or other. Big fish, small pool.

They were all, in their different ways, waiting for him to break down: lose his temper, burst into tears, piss himself. But they’d misread his bad skin and his glasses. They’d picked on the wrong person. They simply hadn’t understood. He felt almost disappointed. Still, he managed a faint smile.

‘She’s not as smart as a whore,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t get paid for it.’

He’d delivered the reply in his own time, like a comedian, and it caught all four gang-members off guard. They were too surprised to laugh. They couldn’t believe he wasn’t defending his mother. His own mother. They wanted to know why. He told them about the radios. They nodded. It made sense to them. Then he casually threw in some stuff about revenge, the tape of his mother, the grunts, the whimpers, and he saw a kind of awe appear. Fear, he sensed, was present in this awe of theirs. Then he knew they were his. Though he’d pretend to be theirs, of course.

With that one story he paid his entrance fee. Suddenly he was one of the Womb Boys, as they were known — the gang that had declared war on Moon Beach, war on death. On long quiet nights, camped round a fire in some vacant lot in Mangrove East, Vasco would turn to him and say, ‘Tell us the story of the radios.’ And he would tell it. And afterwards the silence would come down and Vasco would hand him a beer. People still looked at him, but their looking was different now, it seemed tempered with respect. He was going through a phase of Cinnamon Hearts. They lasted a long time and they turned the entire inside of your mouth red. This only added to his strange notoriety.

One morning Vasco took him down to Moon River at low tide. Among the slippery rocks, the reeling gulls, the sludge, this was where Vasco did his thinking. Idly they combed the mudbanks for a necklace or a watch, something they could pawn at Mr Franklin’s establishment on Central Avenue. Just for a moment, as he prodded and jabbed at one particular rock with his sharp stick, Vasco looked younger, looked the age he actually was, an age that Tip and Scraper were never allowed to see. The three tombstones on his left shoulder, that was how old people thought he was. Jed looked into the tattoos as if they were windows and suddenly, standing in the stench of the river, he had the feeling that he could see into Vasco, see what was coming.

Then Vasco straightened up. ‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘How did you get the idea?’

Jed shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It just came to me.’

‘You’re dangerous,’ Vasco said. ‘You need watching.’

‘Lucky I’m on your side then, isn’t it?’

Vasco scooped up a handful of river-mud and flung it in Jed’s direction. Jed ducked and, grinning, showed Vasco his crimson devil’s mouth. But the grin faded as his thoughts turned to his mother, the last four years, their uneasy truce. She was still bringing men home with her, but defiantly now, as if she wanted him to witness it and disapprove. To Jed, these men of hers were all one man, their boots shifting on the carpet, their bodies too big for the rooms; they reminded him, curiously enough, of his brother, Tommy. He stared at them and ignored them, both at the same time. He’d become an expert at the look. Ten years later it would serve him well.