The Five Gates of Hell (18 page)

She gave him a room on the third floor. Walls the colour of eggshell, a row of glass bottles on the mantelpiece, and a bed with springs, as promised. It was a spiritual room, she told him, it had been waiting for him, and standing at the window that evening he could almost believe it. He could see right down the valley. Tomorrow Bay glowed beyond the hills, an orange dome in the dark-blue sky, as if a spaceship had just landed. But the town seemed alien to him now, he felt no pull at all. He would be happy where he was. In the morning he sat down at the kitchen table and she explained how the house
worked. All her ‘guests' paid rent, some in money, some in kind. The old man mended shoes. The woman with the breakdown cooked the meals. And Twilight, well, she'd leave that to his imagination. ‘You choose how you want to pay,' she said. ‘It doesn't matter to me.'

He chose to pay in money. That year he was working at Seaview Lodge, a mock-Tudor hotel just off the highway as you headed north out of Tomorrow Bay. The people who stayed there were mostly in their sixties, and they preferred the sun-lounge and the tea-room to the beach. Only the fanatics swam, plunging their bald heads and tumbling flesh into the water at dawn. He arranged the deck chairs and parasols in the morning and folded them away at night. He collected litter on a pointed stick. He raked the sand. There was very little actual lifesaving to be done. He saved an heiress once, and almost wished he hadn't. A miracle how her cramp disappeared the moment he took her in his arms. ‘He's a hero,' she announced to the small crowd that had gathered on the beach, ‘a gen-u-ine hero,' and insisted on inviting him to dinner that night. Over dessert and coffee she told him about the pool she had at home. ‘It's inlaid with gold mosaic. You never swam in anything so heavenly.' And then she offered him a position as her own private lifeguard. Position. She actually used that word. ‘Money's no object,' she said. But he turned the offer down, making his excuses with a grace and tact that only served to enhance her admiration.

‘Do you know what she said?' he told the waitresses later. ‘She said, “Money's no object,” and do you know what I said?'

They couldn't guess.

‘I said, “Nor am I.”'

‘You didn't,' they said.

He grinned. ‘I wanted to.'

For weeks afterwards the waitresses were always sidling up to him and whispering, ‘Money's no object.' The chambermaids teased him too. He was, in any case, a mystery to them. He was open and friendly, but he never focused his attentions on any one of them in particular (unlike his predecessor, who had focused his attentions on five of them, one after the other). They decided he must have some violent, jealous woman in the mountains, and he let them believe it.

The ride home took about forty minutes. He headed west on a slim dark road that arrowed across the coastal plain and up into the hills, where it began to come adrift. No cars suddenly. No light. Only thoughts for company, thoughts that jumped like colts from one piece of ground to quite another piece of ground altogether. The whistle of
air in his helmet, the smell of the hot dust cooling. If he reached the top before sunset he would stop and watch the last light leave the ocean, the clouds above sweetening in colour, as if they were slowly being dipped in syrup. Real dreamy, just like India-May had said. The landscape was spoiled only by a pyramid of trash that rose into the sky some distance to the north. This was the municipal dump. Though it was situated five miles out of town, its sweet odour would carry along the beaches when the wind blew in the wrong direction, and had even been known, on occasion, to invade the corridors of Seaview Lodge. By the time he reached the farm, the dogs would be chained up for the night. They knew his bike and didn't bark. He'd switch his engine off and listen to the black air buzz.

Once inside he'd climb the stairs to his room and close the door and gaze through the window at the sky. Still as deep water. Only the ripple of a car in the valley, a distant aeroplane. He'd lie on his bed under the roof and turn the leather bracelet on his wrist. He'd been given it by an old woman who played the flute. She sat under a palm tree just beyond the hotel fence. Her skin was olive, the colour of slow rivers, her limbs as thin as wire. She always wore the same red plastic raincoat. Every time it rained, which was most afternoons for about fifteen minutes, she played the flute. She always played the same piece. She seemed to have chosen it specially because it lasted the same length of time as the average shower. Sometimes she finished before the rain did, sometimes afterwards, and he'd never forget one afternoon when her last note coincided with the last drop of rain and he heard her laugh in astonishment. She had sounded, in that moment, like a young girl. He had to speak to her. Though all he could say, when he was standing in front of her, was, ‘I'm glad you're here.' She reached into her pocket and handed him the leather bracelet, and he put it on right away. He'd worn it ever since. Sometimes it would seem as if the music rose out of the bracelet and, hands linked behind his head, he'd topple slowly into sleep, only to wake later, his arms numb, the moon caught in the window, and all his clothes still on. And voices drifted up from below, no words, just resonances, it was like the murmur of a plucked string, it was the same hum, like being inside an instrument. And sometimes he'd go downstairs and open the kitchen door, his eyes blinking against the sudden light, and he'd join the others in a cup of India-May's herb tea.

It was on just such a night that he stayed up late and found himself alone with her. She was rolling a joint in her worn fingers.

‘So tell me, Nathan,' she said, without looking up, ‘what is it you're running from?'

He smiled. It was the kind of cliché you expected from her, but it was also the one question he'd always been asked and never answered. And so he smiled. Because he recognised it. Because he knew that, this time, he was going to answer it.

He began to talk. He didn't know where the talk was taking him, he only felt that it was flowing, and knew that things which flowed were clean. And came quickly to one particular night, a night that had always been a secret.

He was sitting out by the pool at home. It was after eleven, a still, warm night. A tree had blossomed near the water, its white flowers breathing a perfume that was like magnolias. A faint click came from behind him. He looked round. Someone was standing on the terrace, a silhouette against the french windows. It was Harriet. She must've thought she was alone because she stretched in a way that seemed unfettered, private. Then she noticed him, he could tell because she went motionless, then she pushed herself forwards, hips first, into the moonlight.

She came and sat down beside him. ‘What are you doing out here, Nathan?'

‘Oh, just sitting,' he said, ‘thinking.'

‘That's the trouble with you. You think too much.'

He laughed softly. Maybe he did. But it was kind of ironic, really. He wouldn't've spent half as much time thinking if she hadn't been around.

‘I thought you were in bed,' he said.

‘I stayed up to watch a show on TV.'

‘Any good?'

‘It was just a show. You know, music and dancing.'

She'd thrown the words out lightly into the darkness. But there was a wistfulness, a nostalgia. He remembered a letter that she'd written to Dad. Something about being tired of the bright lights. Even back then he'd thought it sounded strange; she was only twenty-one, after all.

‘Where's Dad?' he asked her.

‘He went to bed hours ago.'

A bird called from a tree at the end of the garden. A low, brooding murmur. Harriet stood up and began to unzip her skirt.

‘I'm going for a swim.' She was laughing at her own impulsiveness.

‘Now?'

‘Why not?' She looked down at him, the lower half of her face masked by her shoulder. ‘Join me?'

He shook his head. ‘I don't really feel like it.' But he did. He could already feel that dark water creeping up over his body as he lowered himself in.

Harriet stepped out of her skirt. Then, crossing her arms in front of her, she lifted her blouse over her head and dropped it on top. She'd been lying in the garden all summer, and her skin looked almost black against her white silk underwear. He knew it was silk. She'd told him once in the car; she'd said she couldn't wear anything else. He tried not to look at her. He didn't want her to think he was interested. When he did look at her he concentrated on the flaws, the slightly swollen thighs, the stomach rumpled by childbirth.

Still, he thought she felt his eyes on her, he thought she liked the feeling, because she lingered at the edge of the pool, staring into the darkness, before she moved down the steps and into the water. She waded out of the shallow end, trailing her fingertips across the surface, then she gave herself, the water rustling as it accepted her, like a present being unwrapped. Halfway up the pool she turned and swam back towards him. ‘It's so beautiful. Are you sure you won't come in?'

It seemed so intimate, this invitation, with her face tipped up to his and Dad's curtains closed behind her, but it was only a swim, what harm could it do? He stripped down to his shorts and slid over the side. He sighed as the water closed round him like a glove. Floating on his back, he stared up into the sky. The moon was sinking, yellow now. A plane droned overhead, one red light on its wing-tip winking. Trees bloomed dark at the edges of his vision. He'd almost forgotten that he wasn't alone. Then the water rustled and a voice breathed into his ear. ‘I told you, didn't I?'

Harriet was standing beside him. He twisted sideways and his feet found the bottom. Now he was standing too. She took her hair in both hands and, looking at him, began to wring it out. Her bra had become transparent, and her breasts showed clearly below her arm, the nipples sharp beneath the wet cloth. She let her arms drop. The insides of her wrists knocked against her hips. She moved a step closer to him and seemed to lose her balance in the water. She put a hand on his chest, as if to steady herself, but then she left it there and reached up with her mouth. He felt his mouth drawn down to hers, he felt one of her thighs edge forwards, wedge between his legs. He pulled away from the kiss. Small waves scuttled to the side of the pool.

She seemed surprised. ‘What's wrong?'

What's wrong?
He wanted to shout, but couldn't. Those closed curtains. The man sleeping so lightly behind.

‘Don't you like it?'

‘No,' he hissed.

He could tell she didn't believe him. But maybe when he turned away from her and swam to the edge of the pool and hauled himself out, maybe she believed him then. He didn't bother to look round and find out. Snatching up his clothes, he walked back into the house and up the stairs to his room.

The next day, at breakfast, Dad said, ‘There was water all over the floor when I came down this morning.'

Harriet smiled. ‘I went swimming with Nathan in the middle of the night. I forgot to tell you.'

‘In the middle of the night?'

Harriet smiled. She'd known that Dad would seize on that particular aspect of the story. If something wasn't part of his routine, he found it unimaginable, hugely eccentric, almost humorous. She'd known that. She was much shrewder than Nathan had given her credit for, and he now trusted her even less.

From that time on, she cooled towards him. Those sweet looks she'd always specialised in, they suddenly became barbed, like chocolates injected with poison. She was constantly asking him why he never brought girls home. She began to accuse him of having love-affairs with the other lifeguards. ‘I think homosexuality is a disease,' she'd say suddenly, at breakfast. ‘What do you think, Nathan?'

He shook his head at the memory, looked across the table at India-May.

‘And were you?' she asked him.

‘Was I what?'

‘Having love-affairs with lifeguards.'

‘No.' He smiled. ‘She didn't understand the bond. We were close, yes, but it was like brothers.'

India-May nodded slowly, tipped some ash into a saucer. ‘So you had to carry all this alone. Couldn't you talk to anyone?'

‘There wasn't anyone.'

There was only one person apart from Dad, and that was Georgia. She'd just turned thirteen. She wore her hair greased back and hung out a lot. Espresso bars, mostly. Sometimes he had to go and pick her up. He always rang the place first and told her he was on his way. He didn't want her losing face with her friends just because her old man
worried too much, and anyway he liked the air of conspiracy. He'd lean against a wall on the other side of the street and watch her. She'd be sitting at a table, gum tumbling in her open mouth, smoke rising from her hand, as if she was a puppet and that wavering blue thread controlled her every move. In her own time she'd slap some money on the table and then she'd kind of unfold, and the faces of the others would tip to hers. She'd push past some guy and his chin would tilt and his eyes would follow her as she left. She'd stand on the sidewalk, hands stuffed in her jacket pockets, and Nathan would jerk his head, to tell her where the car was, and she'd walk down her side of the street and he'd walk down his, and it was only once they were in the car that anyone would've realised they were connected in any way, and by then it was too late, because nobody could see them. They'd always played games, this was just the latest.

But she was only thirteen. How could he tell her anything? All he could do was sit by and watch as she caught on.

He remembered her first outburst. It was lunchtime. He could still see Harriet putting her fork down and heaving a sigh of relief. ‘Well, at least Rona will be normal,' she said, and turned to Rona who was knocking her spoon against her plastic bowl, ‘won't you, darling?'

Dad frowned. ‘Why do you say that?'