The Five Gates of Hell by Rupert Thomson Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜I know that,’ Jed said.
    â€˜I’ve been told.’
    â€˜Who told you?’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜They say she’s a whore.’
    Tip joined in. ‘Is that true? Is she a whore?’
    â€˜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 hisnose. 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.
    â€˜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