Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

He took her by the arm and, turning her round, led her back upstairs. He helped her into bed and pulled the covers over her. ‘I’m going to turn the light off now,’ he said. He turned the light off and stood by the door, listening. Her breathing was steady; she was asleep. He wondered what she’d think when she found his empty bed in the morning. He wondered whether she’d remember.

Outside it was still dark. Rain scuttling in the gutters. When he reached the top of Mackerel Street he stopped and glanced up at the house on the corner. One light shining in an upstairs room made him feel that he was floating on an ocean, cut loose and drifting, but then he felt the weight of the gun in his jacket pocket, and it was a good purposeful weight, it was like ballast. There would be no drifting.

He eased his jacket off and inspected his arm. He’d been lucky. It had taken all the knife’s strength just to slice through the sleeve so the wound was superficial. A thin, dark line of drying blood, more of a scratch than a cut. He lifted his arm to his mouth, licked the wound clean.

He put his jacket back on. No lightening of the sky yet, but dawn could only be an hour away. There were blue flashes in the east, as if someone further down the coast was watching a giant TV. He decided to walk to the train station in Sweetwater. There used to be an all-night café under the platforms. He’d sit in the café and drink a cup of coffee and wait for the first train to the city. He searched his pockets for candy. Just a few fragments of Peanut Brittle and a handful of empty wrappers.

It was two miles to the station and as he splashed along in his sandals he could taste blood in his mouth. Sharon’s lazy voice came back to him: You won’t like it. Men don’t.

She was high that night, almost gone, otherwise she never would’ve let it happen. It was one of his rare nights off, and she’d come round to his two rooms under the Palace with a litre of mescal in a brown paper bag and half an ounce of grass in her bra. They were sprawled across his single bed, most of their clothes on the floor.

‘It’ll get everywhere.’ But she had this grin draped over her face.

‘It’s my place,’ he told her. ‘I don’t care where it gets.’

‘Well, all right. But don’t make a habit of it.’

He put his mouth to her cunt. People think blood always tastes the same. That’s because they don’t know. There’s sweet blood and there’s sour blood. There’s blood that’s old and blood that tastes brand-new. Sometimes blood tastes cheap, like tin cans or cutlery, other times it tastes as rich as gold. Sharon’s blood tasted sugary that night. But with an edge to it, like fresh lime. He was down there so long that she came twice just from his tongue. She said nobody had ever done that to her before. Then they fucked and she was right, it did get everywhere. The next day he had to throw half his bed in the garbage. It was only later, with Celia, that he took to keeping the sheets. That had been her idea. Towards the end she became almost religious about it. Blood as sacrament, an emblem of their union. Blood as affirmation. Blood as power.

The café was open. He drank a coffee and watched the clock go round. 4.55. 5.10. 5.23. Someone had left an early edition of the paper on the table next to him. He read it from front to back. 5.41. He thought of Sharon and her cunt brimming with that sweet, dark blood. Then he remembered how she’d rationed him. They’d been on and off for almost three years, and yet he could count the times. Once in the Palace, once in the storeroom. That was it. He wondered if Max liked it. Probably not. Men don’t.

The city train came in at 6.05. It was crowded. Hundreds of people with sleep in their eyes and their heads nodding on their necks. The train rattled over the river. Between the grey metal struts he caught glimpses of the Witch’s Fingers glistening in the grainy light. Sometimes Celia’s body had looked like that, when it was hot, a silvering along the edges of her skin. Don’t make a habit of it. Of course, with Celia, that was precisely what it had become. A habit. Same time every month. And that evening when she turned to him on their sheet that was stained with roses, the power station lit up behind her like a twisted heap of pearls, and she said, ‘You know the really weird thing? It takes the pain away.’ Something went through him in that moment, it moved so fast he only saw its heels, but now, thinking back on it, he thought it might’ve been the closest he had ever got to love.

A man fell against him, muttered an apology. He must’ve fallen asleep on his feet.

The train dipped underground at Y Street. The lights flickered on, they trembled on and off, like the eyelids of someone who’s dreaming. Three minutes later they were pulling into Central Station. One screech of the brakes, and a lurch that sent people staggering.

He bought two bags of Iceberg Mints at the news-stand, then he took the escalator up to the street. He thought he’d stroll down to the ocean, find himself a deck chair and a piece of shadow, doze for a few hours. Later he could breakfast at the Aquarium Café. He took the direct route, south from Central, through the M Street mall and down the hill past the Palace Hotel. He hadn’t meant to pass the Palace. He didn’t want any memories this morning. Not memories like that, anyway. They were knots in the smooth grain of a wood. They made the saw jump. You could lose a finger that way. He stared up at the building as he passed and knew why Creed had chosen it. The respectability, the grandeur, the sheer weight of that façade, they all told lies about him.

Lies.

His gaze dropped back to ground-level. The revolving doors began to spin, flick over, like the pages of a book, and out of the book stepped two figures, men.

Jed edged back into the shade of a tree. Without taking his eyes off the doors, he unwrapped a mint. Fed it into his mouth, crushed it to fragments with his teeth.

‘My Christ,’ he whispered.

One of the men was Neville Creed, the other man was Nathan Christie. They knew each other. They not only knew each other, they slept with each other too.

He remembered Mitch’s words: I told them. But they already knew.

They already knew.

‘No wonder,’ he whispered. ‘No fucking wonder.’

And his mind leapt across seventeen years, a spark jumping between two terminals. The shark run. Nathan Christie had been found guilty in that dark corner of the harbour. If he’d been innocent he would’ve drowned, and Jed would never’ve seen him again. Only the guilty came back.

He should’ve known.

And this knowledge, so late in coming, burst through his head, one explosion, then another, then another, it was like a match dropped in an ammunition dump, and he reached into his pocket, and his hand tightened round the gun.

It even looked as if something was wrong. When he ran up the stairs he saw that Dad’s bedroom door was open. All through his childhood he’d been taught to close that door. Pull it until it clicks, Dad used to say, he couldn’t sleep if he thought the door wasn’t closed properly. And now it was open, wide open, like a raided tomb.

‘George?’

She was lying stretched out on the bed, her head propped on a mass of pillows. She was watching TV. There were no other lights on in the room. Her face was flickering: bright, dark, bright, dark. The whites of her eyes were luminous and fierce. They looked washed clean, somehow. He had the feeling that she’d been crying.

He moved to the side of the bed. ‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said, ‘fine.’

‘You’re not dead or anything?’

She smiled faintly. ‘Look at this. It’s the wedding.’