The Five Gates of Hell (7 page)

Tip caught him looking. ‘You got to be somewhere?'

Nathan shook his head. ‘No.' He took a bite of pizza and spoke through it. ‘This pizza's good.'

Tip nodded. He ate like he swam. He was halfway through his third slice before Nathan had even finished his first, and he was talking too – about his old man who was always on the drink these days, about the swimming trophies they were going to win, about the gang he was in.

‘The Womb Boys,' he said. ‘You heard of us?'

Nathan hadn't.

‘Blenheim.' Tip put scorn into the name. ‘Might as well live on the moon.' He explained that Vasco made the rules. Vasco was their president. ‘You know Vasco.' It wasn't a question. Everyone knew Vasco.

Nathan had only seen him once. Standing by a car in an alley near school. Black leather coat with IMMORTAL across the shoulderblades. Face the shape of a guitar. Moustache.

‘Sometimes we break into places and rip stuff off and sell it,' Tip explained. ‘That's fundraising. Other times we just kick back, drink vodka.' He offered Nathan the last piece of pizza, then bit into it when Nathan shook his head. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘Basically what we do's sort of political, I guess.'

Nathan nodded. But it was eagerness. ‘What d'you mean?'

‘It's what Vasco says. He says we've been born in a place where people come to die. He says he's had enough. He's declared war on Moon Beach. That's what WOMB stands for, see. War On Moon Beach.'

Nathan was beginning to understand.

‘Like about a week ago,' Tip went on. ‘Vasco picks up a paper on a train and reads something about a new funeral parlour that was going up in Carol Park.' He grinned. ‘It went up all right. In smoke.'

‘You burned it down?'

‘Only the crematorium.' Tip's grin stretched wide across his face.

‘You burned down the crematorium?'

But Tip wouldn't say anything else. He was one of the Womb Boys. Probably he was sworn to secrecy.

When Nathan walked in through the back door, he found Dad making his tea for the night. The clock in the kitchen said eight-thirty-five. He was over an hour and a half late.

‘Where on earth have you been, Nathan?' Dad said. ‘I've been worried about you.'

‘I just went for something to eat. With one of the people on the swimming team.' Nathan kissed Dad on the cheek, then he began to undo his anorak.

‘You smell funny.'

‘We had pizza.'

‘Pizza? Who did you have pizza with?'

‘Nobody special. His name's Tip.'

Dad screwed his Thermos shut and dried the top. ‘I just hope you're not getting in with the wrong people.'

Vasco lived in Mangrove Heights, on a bluff overlooking the river. The first time Jed saw the house, he couldn't help thinking of the Empire of Junk. Towers jostled with gables, beams with columns. Gargoyles leered from the eaves, tongues sharp as the heads of arrows, eyes like shelled eggs. The front garden had been planted with all kinds of trees, so the house seemed to skulk. The path to the front door crackled with dead leaves. He could smell plaster, the inside of birds' nests, river sewage.

‘I should've been born in a place like this,' Jed said, but Vasco was opening the door and didn't hear.

Vasco shared the house with Mario and Reg, his two great-uncles, and Rita, his sister. Rita was sixteen. She had a boyfriend who drove a dented white Chevrolet. She spent most nights at his place. Mario was almost eighty years old. He had the high, sloping forehead of
someone from history. A Roman emperor, something like that. He had white cropped hair and ears you could've caught butterflies in. He spent all his time in a wheelchair. ‘There's nothing wrong with his legs,' Vasco said. ‘It's just that, now the wheel's been invented, he doesn't see the point of walking. He thinks walking's out of date.'

On the first evening Vasco and Jed were drinking beer on the porch when the front door opened and Mario rolled across the bare boards of the verandah and parked in a square of late sun. He sat in his maroon wheelchair, one hand cupped to his ear.

‘What's he doing?' Jed asked.

Mario looked down at Jed. ‘Listen.' And he waited a few moments, his hand still cupped to his ear, and then he said, ‘Did you hear that?'

‘What?' Jed said.

Mario smiled. ‘Money.'

On their way down to the pool hall that night, Vasco told Jed what he knew about Mario. Mario studied law at the university and, during his twenties, he built up an extremely successful practice. In a city like Moon Beach, there was never a shortage of business for a good lawyer, especially one like Mario who'd wisely decided to specialise in wills and probates. He'd also been something of an entrepreneur. While still practising law, he'd run a hearse-rental agency. Then, later, he'd bought into a handkerchief factory in Baker Park. Their most famous innovation was the funeral handkerchief, a plain white cotton handkerchief with a black border. Not long afterwards he patented the first black-edged tissue. He'd made millions, apparently, though nobody knew what he'd done with the money. His only extravagance had been to install an elevator in the house, so he could move between floors without getting out of his wheelchair.

‘So what did he mean this evening about hearing money?' Jed asked.

‘It's his factory across the river. He claims he can hear the money being made.' Vasco looked at Jed and shrugged. ‘I told you. The guy's senile.'

It suddenly occurred to Jed that he hadn't heard anything about the other great-uncle, Reg Gorelli. Vasco showed him a photo of a skinny man with big ears and a handlebar moustache.

‘He's religious,' Vasco said, ‘locks himself in his room. You'll probably never see him.'

The next night Jed sat next to Mario and strained to hear something. A coin, anything. Once he heard a clinking that could've been loose
change, but then the woman from next door walked past with her dog on a metal lead. In any case, Mario wasn't listening to loose change. He was more interested in bills. The larger the denomination, the better. Jed would never forget the night when, just before nightfall, the last light catching on his white stubble, Mario turned to him and whispered, ‘Listen. Hear that? Hundred-dollar bill.'

Vasco had inherited the same ears. Scooped out at the top and tilted forwards, as if they'd been thrown on a potter's wheel. But what was it that Vasco heard? Jed wished he could record it and play it back. Would it be sad, like the voices of whales? Or would it screech at you, like the brakes on subway cars sometimes? On second thoughts, maybe he didn't want to know.

One Saturday night he was sitting in the kitchen making labels for his tapes. It was late and the house was quiet. All the lights off upstairs and Rita out somewhere. He had made a tape of Mario. There was one classic bit where Mario said, ‘Listen, hear that?' and Jed said, ‘No, what is it?' and Mario said, ‘Money,' and then there was absolute silence. He'd thought of playing it to Mario, to prove you couldn't hear money, but then he realised it wouldn't prove anything. The silence was the same silence. Mario would hear money in it.

Suddenly the kitchen door crashed open. It was Vasco. He stood in the centre of the room, panting.

‘Why don't you use an axe next time?' Jed said.

Then he saw the rips in the knees of Vasco's jeans. And the palms of his hands, red and black. Blood and gravel.

‘I got run over,' Vasco said.

Jed stared at him. ‘What?'

‘I fucking got run over.' Vasco didn't seem to believe it himself. He was sitting with his hands held out in front of him, palms upwards, as if testing for rain.

Then he turned and stared at Jed, and all the skin seemed to slip down his face. ‘Scraper's dead.'

‘What?'

‘They wanted me, but I got out the way. They got Scraper instead.' His face began to tighten again.

‘Who wanted you?'

‘I didn't hear it coming. I just didn't fucking hear it.' Vasco kicked the fridge twice, denting the door.

‘Who was it?'

Vasco just stared at him. ‘Who do you think?'

It was only then that Jed realised the full extent of Vasco's obsession. It was death that was after him. It was death, of course. After all, you couldn't declare war on death without expecting a bit of retaliation, could you?

It took Jed almost two hours to dig the gravel out of Vasco's hands. For the last twenty minutes he worked with a needle, the tip blackened in a flame. And when he dabbed iodine into the wounds, Vasco sizzled through his white lips, the noise of a branding iron on flesh.

The next day Vasco showed Jed where it had happened. Both his hands were bound, and blunt as the heads of snakes. Dark spots of blood seeping through from the palms, as if he was some kind of risen Christ. Which in a way he was that morning. Down the hill and into Omega. This was dockland. Old warehouses, uneven streets. One narrow strip of sunlight running down the gutter. The rest in shadow. Parked trucks glittering and clumsy. Winches dipping like the beaks of birds.

‘Look,' and Vasco had to punch the air because he couldn't point, ‘this is it.'

The skidmarks showed as two loose S-shapes scorched on the tarmac. Vasco walked over, stood in the crook of one of them.

‘Scraper's death,' he said.

Jed tried standing there too, and felt an odd sensation. It was as if a shadow had slipped through his body. A different kind of shadow, though. The kind of shadow that the shadow in the street would've been frightened of. He saw Scraper laid out on an embalming table, he saw the blur of ginger hair on Scraper's forearms. Like they were going too fast. But not any more. He heard knives. They sounded like loose change. He shivered.

‘You were lucky, Vasco.' He put all this brightness that he didn't feel into his voice. He wanted to be lifted up.

But Vasco wasn't listening to him. He was gazing back along the street. Maybe he heard the car again. Or not again, but for the first time. The way he should've heard it the night before. When he turned to Jed he seemed to have been thinking all the way round something. He was tired, but he was sure. ‘They couldn't have killed me. It's not my time.'

‘Could you hear it coming?' Jed asked him.

Vasco swung back to face him. ‘What?'

‘Your death,' Jed said. ‘You reckon you could hear it coming?'

‘What the fuck are you talking about, Jed?'

Jed turned away. They were standing on the moment of collision,
the sun was high and white, and three men were shouting at the end of the street. That was all the world was. A high white sun, some tyre marks, three men shouting. Sometimes it seemed as if he'd always been very old. People said that time lasted for ever when you were young. That was lies. Lies and rosy spectacles. His spectacles had steel frames and time was those tattoos on Vasco's arm. They were more like time than any clock. Once, in the Empire Of Junk, he'd seen an hour-glass. Now that came closest to the truth. Except you could turn it upside down and start again. So that was lies too. The sand should run out the first time, run right out. Once, and once only. Time wasn't outside you, it was inside. What was time for Scraper? Thirteen and a bit years, that's what it was. Time was something that went bad, like fruit. To be used before it was all used up. Though, for most people, the only way to live was to deny that. As Vasco was doing now. And Jed suddenly realised, under that high white sun, on the day after Scraper died; he realised that everyone was scared. His mother was scared. Old Mr Garbett was scared. Even Vasco was scared.

Though there he was, standing on the street, the word IMMORTAL flashing on his coat like a gauntlet thrown to fate. And he was saying something. ‘I guess you'll be there to record it when it happens,' he was saying, ‘won't you, Jed?'

Dad was lying in bed, propped on his seven pillows, when Nathan walked in. A bottle of eucalyptus oil stood in a basin of hot water in the corner of the room.

‘It should be ready by now,' Dad said, ‘but you'd better test it first.'

Nathan moved over to the washbasin. It was one of the holy objects, this bottle of oil. It was ancient, made of ribbed green glass, green as seaweed. It had six sides and a cork stopper. Dad must've lost the original top. He'd found a cork that almost fitted and then he'd whittled it down. Now, years later, it looked as if it belonged.

The oil was fine: not too hot, not too cold. He let the water out of the basin and brought the bottle over to the bed. Dad took off his nightclothes, the blue sweater with the holes in, the torn pyjama jacket, and lay face down, his head turned sideways on the pillows. He flinched as the oil ran across his back, then he relaxed and said, ‘It's all right.'

It had been hard to touch Dad the first time. Everything looked so injured that he couldn't work out where to start. Dad had sensed his hesitation. ‘Just be gentle,' he said. ‘Do the shoulders first.' That was a good thing to say. There was nothing wrong with his shoulders. The damage only began further down. One side of his body sagged where the ribs had been cut away, so his spine seemed strangely marooned. The scars shone like pink wax. You could still see the holes left by the hypodermic needles when they'd drained the fluid out of his lungs. The needles were so big, Dad had told him once, that you could actually see the ends.

The funny thing was, he didn't
look
disabled. If you'd seen him walking along the street you wouldn't've noticed anything unusual. There were no obvious signs or clues. No crutches, for instance. No wheelchair. No, it wasn't until you saw him naked that you realised the full extent of the damage. Perhaps not even then. You still couldn't see the lungs. If you watched him closely you could see that he breathed a bit quicker than most people, like a bird, Nathan had
always thought, but how many people looked that closely? Dad only had half of one lung and a third of the other. Something like that, anyway. He couldn't fly in planes or swim underwater. He had to avoid elevators, phone booths, cellars. All those places could kill him. Even bad weather could kill him. That was why everything was so dangerous. That was why he had to be so careful.