Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

‘Thank you,’ she muttered.

He watched her opening the kit and thought: I know a thing about you. Her drinking, her smeared face. A looseness in her head that could only be tightened by love. You’ve always chosen the wrong men, or let the wrong men choose you. Your life’s been one mistake after another. I’m only one of them.

She stuck a plaster over the cut and moved to the chopping-board. She lit a cigarette and put it straight in the ashtray. Then she began to chop onions. The cigarette burned all the way down to that delicate garland of flowers, she didn’t touch it once. When she’d finished the onions she reached for the whisky bottle and held it up to the light. Half an inch left. She tipped it into her glass, no soda this time. She stood the empty bottle on the floor.

‘If you want something to drink, there’s wine in the fridge,’ she said.

‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I don’t drink.’

The smell of meat and onions frying began to load the air. He realised he’d eaten nothing all day.

‘Smells good,’ he said.

She crossed the room and opened the patio doors. She didn’t seem to have heard him.

They ate at the kitchen table. Afterwards they watched a movie on TV. It was about killer ants. There was one part where the ants were swarming across a blonde girl’s thigh while she was sleeping. A man, the hero, presumably, was standing on a beach with a gun in his hand.

Jed turned to his mother. ‘You seen anything of Pop?’

‘Oh, you know. He drops in from time to time.’

‘If you can call smashing the door down dropping in.’ Smiling to himself, Jed looked across at his mother and was surprised to see that she was smiling too.

They were both smiling, both at the same time.

She poured herself another glass of wine. ‘You know, you weren’t really a mistake.’

He was looking at the TV again. The blonde girl had just woken up. She was screaming.

‘You weren’t,’ she said. ‘We wanted you.’

‘Maybe I wasn’t,’ he said, ‘but you made me feel like one.’

She sighed and sipped her drink. ‘I was too selfish, but that still doesn’t mean you were a mistake.’

He nodded.

The hero was running up the stairs, but it was too late.

The blonde girl was dead.

His mother cleared the plates away, then she went and stood in the doorway looking out into the night. The wind swelled and the trees in the yard shook like tambourines. One of the patio doors slammed against the outside wall.

‘It’s going to storm,’ she said.

The wind pushed at her hair. A silence seemed to swoop down, and lightning burned the air behind her white. She seemed to have been drawn round haphazardly in black pencil. It made her look as if she would never move again. As if she would always be alone. In that moment he could see why they might laugh together, and why they might cry. Then she was pulling the doors shut, reaching up to fasten the bolt at the top, bending down to fasten the other bolt near the floor. She turned to him, her face dark with the effort. ‘I’m going up to bed now.’

‘What time do you go to work?’

‘About eight.’

‘Could you wake me?’

She nodded. ‘Goodnight, Jed.’

‘Goodnight.’

That green sky he’d seen earlier, it was over the house now, loud and poisonous. He was drawn to the window. Thunder hid the sound of planes. (Or maybe they weren’t taking off tonight, maybe the weather was too bad.) Lightning flattened itself against the glass, a face with no features only inches from his own, a boy shouting from a balcony. He stepped back into the room.

There was nothing much on TV, but he watched it anyway. Like water, it ran into every compartment in his head and left no room for anything else.

He went to bed at eleven. As he climbed the stairs, the rain came with a sudden loud sigh. The roof shook under the weight of it. He passed his mother’s bedroom. There was no strip of light under the door. She must already be asleep.

At three his eyes clicked open. He dressed in darkness, crept downstairs. The storm had passed on. It was quiet. A thick grey light lay on the furniture like a coat of dust. He felt his way into the lounge. There, in the corner, was the bureau desk that had belonged to his father. If he remembered right, the gun would be in the bottom drawer. He tried the drawer. Locked. Somehow that was encouraging. He reached underneath to see if the bottom could be removed, but it seemed solid. He’d have to force the lock. But what with? He crossed the hallway to the kitchen, returned with a pair of scissors, a chisel, some garden shears. He tried the scissors first. They bent. The shears next. Too big. He inserted the chisel into the gap and worked it back and forwards until he had leverage, then he began to push the handle of the chisel downwards, away from the desk. He could feel the sweat all slippery on his forehead and his throat. A crack suddenly, and he fell back. He thought the chisel had snapped, but it was the lock. He put the chisel down, pulled the drawer open and began to feel around inside. A pile of papers. A roll of Sellotape. More papers. It had to be there. Then his hand closed around a rectangular box.

He lifted the box out of the drawer and carried it to the window. He opened the lid. Grey light spilled along the smooth, tooled grooves of the gun. It had belonged to his brother, Tom. Tom had brought it round during the days when Pop kept showing up outside the house at night and shouting threats.

‘Taste of his own medicine,’ Tom had said. It was one of the few things Tom had inherited from his father, this love of guns; his mouth bent when he talked about them, the same way it bent when he talked about certain types of women.

Their mother was giggling nervously. ‘I can’t.’

‘Take it.’ Tom seized her hand and wrapped her fingers round the gun. One off her nails caught on the butt and snapped. But the gun was a piece of witchcraft and she hardly noticed. Her fingers opened again, slowly, like a door finding its natural position on its hinges, and they all stared down at the gun. Too big for her hand, too big and dark and blunt. When they looked up again, looked at each other, their eyes seemed to be the same colour as the gun, and capable of the same violence.

She did take it. But, as soon as Tom had driven away, she locked it in the desk. ‘I could never,’ and her shoulders rippled with disgust, ’never use something like that.’ Standing at the window with the gun in his hand Jed supposed he’d been relying on her to hold to that.

Suddenly the darkness shrank and he was blind. He turned, blinking. Saw his mother standing in the doorway, one hand on the light switch. She was wearing a nightgown with short, puffy sleeves. A knife glimmered in her other hand. She ran towards him and he felt the knife slide through the cheap leather of his sleeve, scorch the muscle of his forearm. He twisted sideways, snatched at her wrist. The knife dropped to the carpet. He pushed her away from him.

‘What’re you doing?’ he said.

She began to speak and her voice was thick as the light in the hallway, thick with pills. ‘You get out, you get out of here, get out —’ ‘You could’ve killed me,’ he said.

‘— you get out of my house, just get out,’ and then her voice lifted in pitch and volume, and she was screaming at him, ‘GET OUT, GET OUT, GET —’

He slapped her hard across the side of her head, and she stopped, right in the middle of a word, as if he’d switched her off. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing,’ he said.

She stood in the room, her shoulders hunched in the nightgown, her mouth wrenched out of shape.

‘I’ll take you up to bed,’ he told her, ‘then I’ll go.’