The Five Gates of Hell

The Jets

The first time Nathan had the dream, he was staying at his aunt’s house on the Cape.

He was standing on a barren plain with his sister, their hands linked as if to cross a road safely, the way they’d been taught. There were no roads, though, not in this place, no human markings of any kind. No trees either. No scrub. Just dust and stones, distant mountains, brutal sun.

Then, in the distance, a mirror-flash of silver and the jets came tearing through the membrane of the sky. The air turned to sound, there was nothing left to breathe, and in his ears the stammer of machine guns as the bullets scuffed the dust around their feet, raised rows of ghostly plants that grew one after another in the dry ground, hung in the air, then crumbled, and their hands were pulled apart, and they scattered, screaming, limbs of water, breath like saws attacking wood.

He woke up. Listened for his sister’s breathing through the half-open door. Couldn’t hear anything. Listened for his father’s slightly faster breathing through the thin wall to the right. Couldn’t hear anything. He could hear another kind of breathing. A breathing he didn’t recognise. Rasping, sucking, rattling. Lungs like chains. The sea.

He opened his eyes. Everything was white and pale-blue. Curtains decorated with anchors and mermaids, the steering wheels of ships. The skull of a seagull above the bed, a silver coin winking where the right eye used to be. A heap of shells unsorted on the rug, the shells he’d found only the day before. He was in the wrong house. He was staying with his Aunt Yvonne. 121 Ocean Drive, Hosannah Beach, The Cape. He repeated the address to himself, scarcely moving his lips. Dad had told him to learn it, in case he got lost.

Dad.

Nathan’s mind slipped back to the sunlit afternoon a month ago, the reason he was here now. He saw himself halfway up the hill. He smelt the melting road, the tar as soft as fudge, you could leave a footprint if you pressed hard enough. The melting road, the trees heavy in the heat. He could even feel the sweat trickling under his grey school shirt. He looked back down the hill, and shouted, ‘Georgia, come on.’

He walked home from school with Georgia every day. It usually took about half an hour, but that was her fault. She was so slow. Alone he could’ve walked it in fifteen minutes. He stared back down the hill. Look at her. She wasn’t even trying. She was just standing there, one fist pressed to the corner of her mouth. She was probably crying. He supposed he must’ve upset her or something. The hill, it was always the worst part.

He muttered ‘Jesus’ under his breath, a new word and just about strong enough for what he felt, and, heaving a sigh, began to retrace his steps. He wished he could just leave her behind, it wasn’t far to the house now, another five minutes, but he’d promised, Dad had made him promise, and what if something happened? There were people called strangers and you talked to them and then something happened. He didn’t know what that something was. It was too bad to even talk about. He reached Georgia and stood looking down at her. He could only see the top of her head. ‘What’s wrong now?’

‘You left me.’

He didn’t say anything. Instead, he watched a thick chalk line grow longer in the sky. When you screwed up your eyes you could just make out the tiny silver speck of the plane. He tried to imagine the man inside that tiny silver speck and a shiver slid up his spine and vanished into the short hairs at the back of his neck. He wondered how fast the plane was going. Five hundred? A thousand? He looked down into Georgia’s face, her wet eyelashes, her trembling lower lip. If you were a plane, he thought, we’d be home by now. We’d’ve been home hours ago. He looked at his sister and wished she was a plane.

‘You left me,’ she said again.

‘I didn’t mean to,’ he said. ‘It’s just you’re so slow.’

‘I’m five. If you were five you’d be slow.’

‘Not as slow as you.’

Georgia scowled. She wiped one eye with her sleeve and turned and stared back the way they’d come.

‘I hate this road.’

He took her hand. ‘Come on, George. Just walk.’

‘My legs hurt.’

‘Don’t think about your legs, just walk. It’s not much further now.’

He played the game where you have to step in between the cracks on the sidewalk, except he invented a new forfeit: if you stepped on a crack you had to run three paces. He knew that in games Georgia always did the things you weren’t supposed to do; she couldn’t resist treading on the cracks and so she kept having to run three paces and they reached the top of the hill without her even noticing.

That was the hard part over. From the crest of the hill you could see the corner of Mahogany Drive, which was where they lived. Another hundred yards and they’d be home. Still, he must’ve let go of her hand again, because he was alone when he turned into the driveway and saw Aunt Yvonne’s station wagon parked outside the front door.

He ran back to the gate. ‘Guess what, George.’

Fifty yards away, Georgia stopped, looked up. She was too tired to guess what.

‘Aunt Yvonne’s here,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

But he couldn’t wait for her. He ran into the house through the back door, and it was like running from day into night, his voice sounded far away and he couldn’t see, only the dim shape of Dad with his head in his hands, and his aunt’s voice somewhere overhead.

‘Your mother’s dead,’ she told him, and he cried because the word had such a dull, empty sound.

She tried to explain. ‘When someone dies,’ she said, ‘they go away.’

‘When do they come back?’

‘They don’t,’ she said. ‘They don’t come back.’

She seemed to want him to ask more questions, but he couldn’t think of any. He stared at his shoes, the toes pale from kicking stones.

‘Auntie?’

‘Yes?’

‘Can I go and play in the garden now?’

A sigh came out of her, and her face crumpled up. He stared at her for one long moment and then ran out of the house. Someone called his name. He ran down the garden, the inside of his head all blank and hollow, smooth as the lawn beneath his feet. He didn’t stop until he reached the wild part of the garden, the part he called the Jungle. He stood still, in gloom that was almost green. He looked up, past branches tipped in orange, into the deep blue sky where the chalk line that the plane had drawn was just beginning to break up.

The next day, after breakfast, Yvonne asked him if he’d like to come and stay at her house on the beach. He’d been before, some other summer, and he remembered the excitement of those words ‘house on the beach’, but things were different now, with different meanings, so he thought for a moment, then he said, ‘What about George?’

‘She’s going somewhere else.’

A whirl through his stomach as he thought it might be for ever and ever, like prayers. Yvonne put her hand on the back of his head. ‘It’s only for a few weeks,’ she said. ‘You’ll be back together before you know it,’ and he looked up at her, with her copper hair that fitted on her scalp like a magnet and her smile that was bright, missed lipstick and crooked teeth, and suddenly he trusted her again, and could smile back. So it was settled.

The day came for them to leave. Dad called Nathan into the lounge and pressed a silver coin into his hand. ‘I just wanted to give you something,’ he said, and then he turned his head away. Nathan clutched the coin in his fingers and stared at the table leg, how it had an ankle, and how the ankle curved into a golden paw. How one of the claws was chipped.

Dad waved goodbye from an upstairs room, his face rising in the window like a pale moon, smudged craters for his mouth and eyes. A full moon seen through glass. Bad luck, as Yvonne, who was superstitious, might’ve said. She wore her special fish brooch that morning. She believed that fish were sacred. ‘They’re the guardians of the soul,’ he’d heard her say, and he couldn’t pretend he understood. She’d been wearing the brooch for a week now, ever since her sister, his mother, ever since it happened. It stood for loss, it was so she remembered, it was how you could tell she was sad. You’d never have guessed otherwise. Yvonne dressed like someone from another time. Which time, though, nobody could ever quite decide. Dad was always asking her where the costume party was; it was one of his jokes. For the drive up north she’d fastened her copper hair in a canary-yellow headscarf. Triangles of turquoise swung from the lobes of her ears. She wore dark glasses with tortoiseshell frames and a silk blouse that wrinkled and shimmered like a piece cut out of the ocean. A small box, made from the same metal as her hair, hung from a chain around her neck. Inside the box was a clove of fresh garlic wrapped in a twist of crackly red paper. To thin her blood, she said, and keep the devil on his toes. But it was still the fish brooch that you noticed most. When the man in the gas station leaned one friendly smeared forearm on the window and asked how much she wanted, Nathan watched the fish catch his eye and reel it in, and suddenly the man was stepping back and ducking his head and muttering how sorry he was.

‘My sister just died,’ Aunt Yvonne said. ‘This is her little boy.’

She turned away and stared through the windshield, into the light, and Nathan could see her right eye through the side of her dark glasses, could see the tears shuddering on her lower lid. Back on the highway she rolled her window down and stepped hard on the gas pedal, it might’ve been a beetle the way she crushed it into the floor. The needle on the speedometer leapt and trembled. Ninety, ninety-five. He thought she was going to cry, but she didn’t. He thought she was brave.

It was six hours to Hosannah Beach and he didn’t glance at the silver coin that Dad had given him, not even once. All the way he clutched it tight in the palm of his hand and felt the bevelled edge bite into his skin. They arrived in darkness, the headlights trained on a stand of cactus, its leaves a pale chalk green and sharp as the fins of sharks. Waiting in the car while Yvonne unlocked the house, he brought his hand up to his face and opened it. His sweat had the bitter smell of hot metal, hot and bitter, this was what leaving home would always smell like. Through the open window he heard the wind in the pine trees and the ocean, he couldn’t tell which was which, he was too drowsy now from the long drive, and then Yvonne’s voice, calling him inside.

He woke early and listened. Nothing. He lifted his head. Morning lay against the window in a thick grey fog. He left the warmth of his bed and crept downstairs, thinking he would be the first, but when he turned into the kitchen he found Yvonne adjusting the shoulder-strap on her black swimsuit. Her skin looked dry and brown and crinkly like the paper Dad gave him to paint on when it rained.

‘I was just going for a swim,’ she said. ‘Would you like to come?’

The house stood on a low cliff overlooking a stony beach. A narrow footpath led down steep rocks to the sea. There was a handrail, made out of wooden posts and faded orange fishing rope. You had to hold on tight, otherwise you might fall. He let her lead the way. She held one arm out in the air as if the footpath was a tightrope. The backs of her thighs rumpled and quivered. Once on level ground she became strong again. He liked the way she marched across the beach, as if she was leading an army, the stones chinking under her wide bare feet like chain mail.

The water was colder than he was used to. He swam until his lungs burned, then he wrapped himself in a towel and explored the beach. He found a skull wedged between two rocks and managed to prise it loose without breaking it. He showed it to Yvonne.

‘It’s some kind of gull,’ she told him.

‘Can I keep it?’

She laughed. ‘What would you do if I said no?’

He smiled, but was uneasy.

Then he looked down at the skull again, his skull, and a strange pleasure eased through him. Everything spread outwards from the object he held in his hand, everything spread round him, unlimited, available.

Back at the house, after their swim, they ate a breakfast of eggs speckled with fresh herbs from the garden and waffles soaked in maple syrup and tall glasses of cold milk.

‘You know, I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen you swim,’ Yvonne said. ‘You’re pretty good in the water, aren’t you? You were made for it, I’d say.’

‘Dad says it’s in my blood.’ Nathan licked a trickle of syrup off his finger. ‘You know when you get hot and sweat? That’s how you can tell. You taste it and if it tastes like salt, it’s because the sea’s in your blood. Dad’s got the sea in his blood too. He told me.’

She was smiling down at him. Sometimes, when she smiled, her whole face seemed to wobble, like a drop of rain just before it falls off a twig.

For the first few days the weather stayed damp and grey. In the early afternoon the sun would almost burn through, you could sense the blue sky somewhere high above, the blue sky planes fly through, and then the light would fade and the mist would come ghosting in off the ocean, over the dunes and the marshland, over the withered silver bushes that looked like bits of witches, over the old coast road, and you had to switch your headlights on if you drove to the store, even though it was still daytime, otherwise some tree’d step out and put an end to everything.

Yvonne told him about the walk out to the headland. She had cut the path herself, she said, with her own two hands and a machete, and nobody must ever know. It was their secret, other people would ruin it, you must never tell, she said.

‘Who would I tell?’ he asked her, and saw that smile on her face again, that smile that was like a drop of rain, and then she took his head in one hand and brought it to her breast and held it there.

He went on the walk every day. You left the house through the sliding doors at the front, crossed a garden of tangled shrubs and plants and, when you reached the cliff edge, you pushed your way through a bush and there was the hidden entrance to the path. You followed the cliff edge for a long time, the sea sleeping way below, that rustle as it rolled over in its bed, that sigh. Eventually you were forced inland, through a forest of twisted black trees and green grass, and it was this forest that delivered you out on to the headland. It was sixty feet high, but still the spray came vaulting over the edge, a fright every time because you couldn’t hear it coming, it was like someone jumping out from behind a door. He found a flat rock near the edge and sat and watched the wind lift clouds of fine spray off the top lips of the waves.

One day Aunt Yvonne followed him out. He heard her as a movement in the grass behind him and didn’t need to turn. He’d known that, sooner or later, she would come. She sat down next to him and locked her arms round her knees.

He’d been thinking, and now he turned to her. ‘When my mother died, where did she go?’

‘She went into the ocean.’ Yvonne took his hand in hers. ‘She loved the ocean. It was in her blood, just like it’s in yours.’ She lit a cheroot and suddenly the world smelled like the inside of a cupboard that hadn’t been opened for years. ‘When you go back to the ocean,’ she said, ‘all the bad things you’ve ever done, they’re washed away. You’re purified, cleansed, ready for the next life. You know that skull you found?’

He nodded.

‘Remember how pure and white it was?’

He remembered.

‘Well, that’s what the ocean does,’ she said. ‘Takes out all the dirt, all the stains of having been alive.’

‘You mean, like a washing machine?’ he said.

She laughed. ‘Just like a washing machine.’

That night, in his room, he took the bird’s skull and held it under the lamp. Aunt Yvonne was right. There was only pure white bone. No trace of anything else. Slowly he raised the skull to his nose and sniffed. There was no smell. He wished he could dive down to the ocean bed and watch his mother’s soul rising from her pure white bones. But it struck him suddenly that he could no longer remember what she looked like. He wouldn’t have known how to recognise her.

During the second week, the weather changed and all the pale colours he remembered from two years before came back. The yellows, the whites, the eggshell-blues. Yvonne began to paint again. After their dawn swim together, she would retire to her studio in the east wing of the house, her hair wrapped in a twist of bright silk, a box of cheroots under her arm. Once he heard the click of her studio door he knew he’d be alone till noon. There were no rules for how to use the time; she expected him to make his own. He filled the first days searching the dunes for shells and skulls or curling into their soft hollows with a book. He was lying on his back one morning after swimming, one hand draped against his belly, the other bent behind his head. His trunks had slipped down and the sun seemed to tug on his blood, he felt his penis swell and push against the damp wool and then, like someone in a trance, he didn’t know what he was doing and yet he knew what to do, he built the hot sand into a mound beneath his towel and, turning on to his stomach, began to rub himself against the mound, his legs like scissors, his eyes tight shut, and then that part of him seemed to leap, the sun’s red through his eyelids vanished, he saw green, cool green, water fathoms down, the gloom inside a wood, the stalks of plants, and the breath came out of him ah-ah-ah-ah-ah like something tumbling down a flight of stairs. When he opened his eyes again, the air was blue glass, and a man in a tall hat and a black coat stood on the sand, between him and the ocean. The man raised his stick in greeting, then walked on. Nathan watched until the man grew thin and warped in the fierce air, then he let his breath out and stood up, legs shaking. As he rinsed his towel in the ocean he wondered who the man was. Could he be one of the strangers Dad had talked about?

Walking back to the house that afternoon, he looked up through the bushes and saw Yvonne standing on the verandah. She wore a dress that was as green as an empty bottle of wine and her hands were smeared with red, he thought for a moment that she’d hurt herself, then he knew that it was just paint. She was leaning forwards from the waist, her head straining on her neck, as if her house was an island and she was scouring the horizon for a wisp of smoke, as if she was hoping she might be saved. He stood below her, unseen. It was a still day. All he heard was one gust of wind passing through the chimes like something breaking slowly, beautifully, inside her. He entered the house through the back door and began to prepare some sandwiches for lunch. ‘Well,’ Yvonne said, when she walked into the kitchen a few minutes later, ‘at least they won’t have paint on them for once,’ and he smiled at her over his shoulder and, if it was a stranger that he’d seen on the beach, well, he thought, at least I didn’t talk to him, at least nothing happened.

The next day, towards sunset, he knocked on the door to her studio and walked in. Aunt Yvonne stood in front of her black easel, palette and paintbrush in her fists like sword and shield, her body concealed inside a pale-blue tent. She always worked with the windows open and, that evening, a wind had lifted off the ocean. Nothing in the room was still. Everything fluttered, flapped and rattled. The dried flowers, the drawings on the walls, her hair. The effect was less one of walking into a room than of suddenly finding oneself travelling at high speed in an open car. He had to shout to make himself heard.

‘Yvonne?’

She waved him over. When he was standing beside her, she jabbed at the easel. ‘What do you think?’

He looked at the picture. Lots of white and blue balls, trapped between lines. At first he thought of noughts and crosses, and then he realised there weren’t any crosses. Then he didn’t know what he thought.

‘What’s it supposed to be?’ he asked her.

‘It’s whatever you want it to be.’

‘Don’t you know?’

She shook her head. ‘Have you got any ideas?’

He looked at the picture for longer, then he looked at the others, stacked in piles against the wall. In some of the pictures there were lots of balls, in others there was only one: a white ball on a blue background, for instance; a red ball on grey. He thought he understood these better. He went back to the picture on the easel and suddenly he had it. ‘It’s moons,’ he said, and felt sure that he was right.

‘Moons,’ she said. And folded her arms across her chest and tilted her head on one side. ‘Moons,’ she said again and, walking round to the back of the picture, she wrote MOONS on it, and the date. There was her grin and then there was his. Hers wide and delighted. His still uncertain, but slowly becoming less so.

September came and still the weather held. Nights when even a single sheet seemed too heavy on his skin. Yvonne took to sitting on the kitchen floor with the fridge door open and a tall drink clinking in her fist. He could tell that time had passed by looking in the mirror; his blond hair had bleached almost white, his nose was powdered with freckles and he could see pale half-moons in the bays between his fingers. He felt his weeks with Yvonne had washed everything clean out of his head. It was almost as if he’d gone to the bottom of the ocean too, he could imagine what that was like now, he could almost imagine his mother there. His head felt like the gull’s skull he’d packed so carefully in his case. It felt empty, picked clean, pure. Leave it outside and it would whistle in the wind. Drop it into the sea and the fish would swim through its eyes and ears like a game. He could hardly remember what he was returning to. On the drive back down to Moon Beach, Yvonne reminded him.

‘Your father’s not very well, Nathan,’ she said. ‘He’s going to need help,’ and she peered at him over the rims of her dark glasses, ‘especially from you.’

‘I know.’ He looked out of the window. The sun was so bright that day. Like a razorblade it cut round the roadside diners, the billboards, the trees. Such sharp edges to everything. But thinking of Dad, Dad’s sadness and Dad’s wounds, that thought was like shadows. He saw the place where he’d grown up. Somehow there was shadow even in the yellow of the sunlight on the lawn. As if all colour, even the brightest, held darkness. Nothing was safe. Everything could turn, give way. Fifty miles north of Moon Beach they drove into a gas station and he couldn’t see anything for a moment. It was just being in the shadow after being in the sun. But that was what it felt like to be going home.

When they turned into the driveway, Dad was leaning against a pillar, almost shy. He ran into Dad’s arms. Smelt the wool of his cardigan, smelt the talcum powder he used. He remembered the skull and how it smelt of nothing, and he was happy then. Dad smelt of things. Dad was alive.

Dad spoke to Yvonne. ‘He looks well. Was he a good boy?’

‘He was very good.’

Nathan touched Dad’s arm. ‘Is Georgia back?’

‘She’ll be back tomorrow.’

That night Nathan spent an hour arranging his trophies on his bedroom windowsill. He gave the bird’s skull pride of place, the silver coin shining in one of the empty sockets like a brand-new eye. It was a kind of reminder: if his life was a book, then the skull marked the place that he’d got up to. He sat on his bed. Heard a car grind up the hill in low gear; a distant siren; the hum of someone talking downstairs. It was so quiet. He moved to the window. Tilted his head back on his neck. A soft crunching sound, like gravel shifting in water, like a finger pushed into sand. He undid the string on his pyjamas and, rolling over, pushed against the hard part of the mattress and then, as if by magic, it was morning.

She’ll be back tomorrow, Dad had said. And she was. One front tooth missing and her black hair twisted into two short plaits. It was a relief to see her, he felt he’d been holding his breath until she arrived. Since his dream about the jets, he didn’t feel he could trust anyone with her. He knew he couldn’t bear to lose her. That moment in the dream when the gap opened up between their hands, that was such panic. He could see their fingers separating in slow motion, like pieces of a space capsule. It was a relief and a reprieve. He’d learned something. Life was booby-trapped and there was no easy passage through. You had to jump from colour to colour, from happiness to happiness. And all those possible explosions in between. It could be all over any time. Those movies where the hero runs against the constant red and orange blooms of fire, where all the bullets noisily fly wide, that just wasn’t true. Or true, but very difficult. Or just plain lucky. He’d be more patient with her in the future. Even walking home from school. Even on the dreaded hill.

In the past Dad had sometimes rested in his bedroom after lunch. Now he rested every day, often for two hours. If Nathan and Georgia stayed home they had to be quiet till he came downstairs again. It wasn’t easy. Silence didn’t come naturally to Georgia, it never had, and Dad slept so lightly he could hear the handle on the back door turn. Nathan invented a new game. He called it Red Indian Feet.

‘You’ve got to have Red Indian feet,’ he said, ‘like this,’ and he went into a sort of crouch, with his knees bent and his fingers spread in the air.

You had to talk in a whisper or, better still, in sign language, which they learned from a book about deaf people. You had to walk in a special way: your heel touched the ground first, then the hard outside edge of your foot, then the ball of your foot and, finally, your toes. You had to make devilish Red Indian faces. It was the simplest of games, yet it worked like a charm. Georgia crept through the house, shoulders lifted on a level with her ears, hands spread in front of her, eyes wide. She’d turn a corner and there he’d be, a hunchback with a twisted face, and because you weren’t allowed to cry out, because everything happened in silence and slow motion, they’d both double up, roll gasping on the carpet, and the only way to hold the laughter in was to run out to the garden and stuff your mouth with mud and grass and stones.

The jets were still flying. High altitude. Sometimes, as he lay on his back and stared into the sky, he saw a glint of silver high up in the blue. But heard nothing. That was what the word dead was. That glint of silver, that speed he could never guess. At night Georgia used to cry out and he’d wake in the next room and see her through the open door, flailing at the empty air like someone waving goodbye with both hands at once. He invented another game, to calm her. Windshield Wipers, he called it. You had to lie on your back and move your head from side to side on the pillow and make a soft droning sound. They did it together, in their separate beds. It wiped the bad dreams away, it brought the deep sleep back. After their mother went to the bottom of the sea, the days would pass in silence, the nights in fear. They walked through their childhood on Red Indian feet. Not a crack from a stick, not a creak from a stair. Not a sound.

On the way down in the car Aunt Yvonne had told Nathan that she’d just be staying a week or two, until they settled back in, but in the end she stayed till Christmas. Nathan would come home from school to find her painting in the garden, an overcoat thrown over her shoulders, lipstick smeared across her mouth, a cheroot burning in her left hand. ‘I’m making the whole neighbourhood reek,’ she shouted. ‘It’s your father’s fault. He won’t let me smoke in the house.’

Nathan spoke to Dad. ‘It’s not that bad,’ he said. ‘It’s only like cupboards.’

But Dad shook his head and fixed his eyes on the corner of the room. ‘It gets in my pipes. It makes me cough.’

So Yvonne went on painting outdoors, often until dusk, sometimes even later, by candlelight. The fresh air seemed to inspire her. It was like her studio, she said, only more so. She was beginning to move out of her ball period, though she hadn’t made up a name for her new period yet. The balls had gone, it was true. They’d rolled right out of her pictures, and the lines that used to hold them in place were no longer straight, they now wriggled horizontally across the canvas.

‘I don’t know,’ said Nathan, who’d become the leading authority on her work. ‘It could be the ocean, I suppose.’

Yvonne turned to him, and her eyes narrowed in the candlelight and her lips stretched wide across her face. He knew the meaning of the look. It meant that things were coinciding in a way that pleased her. He’d seen the same smile earlier that summer when she discovered that sausages tasted good with marmalade.

The day she left, he helped her lash the new paintings to the roof of her station wagon. ‘I need to get back,’ she shouted. ‘My ocean period’s just beginning, and it’ll flourish up there, I can feel it.’

He glanced at the sky anxiously. ‘I hope it doesn’t rain.’

She squatted beside him, her back against the wheel, her face close to his. ‘Promise me something, Nat.’

‘What?’

‘Try not to be too serious, OK?’

He nodded. ‘OK.’

‘Come on,’ and she got to her feet and took his hand, ‘I’ve got something for you.’

She led him into the kitchen. There was a painting leaning against the wall. She turned it round. ‘There,’ she said, ‘that’s for you.’

It was a ball painting. A ball of marbled grey and white against a background of midnight-blue. It was one of the first paintings of hers that he’d looked at. It was a real moon.

Yvonne stood with arms folded and legs astride, like her own easel. ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s one of my favourites,’ he said. ‘You knew that, didn’t you?’

That evening he hung the moon painting in his narrow room and then he lay down on his bed. He saw Aunt Yvonne driving back up the coast in her old beat-up station wagon and sent his love with her on the passenger seat. She’d told him Dad needed help, though he’d known that already. Dad seemed to be moving through air that was different to everybody else’s, it was thick and sticky, built out of cobwebs. When Dad smiled, it looked wrong; it was as if someone had made a joke and he hadn’t got it, but he was pretending that he had. He could see that Dad was in some kind of terrible danger, and he wanted to rescue him, but he didn’t know how. Instead, he did everything he was asked to do, and did it without complaining. He hid his own fears and wishes, and only took them out in private, under the eye of the moon. He was a good boy.

He tried to keep his promise to Yvonne, he tried not to be too serious, but it was hard because those jets kept coming over. The scream of silver, the ghostly stalks of dust, the hands separating like two parts of a rocket ship. He’d wake up and lie still, waiting for Dad to die. His mother had been strong, that was what he’d always been told, and now she’d gone to the bottom of the ocean, seaweed necklaces and fish swimming through the spaces in her head. She’d been strong and she’d died, so what chance did Dad have?

He lay on his back in the narrow room and listened for his sister’s breathing through the half-open door, listened for his father’s slightly faster breathing through the thin wall to the right. He lay like a toppled toy soldier, hands pressed tight against his thighs, every muscle rigid. He couldn’t move his eyes. Because the jets flew beyond his dream, they were in the room with him, silent and lethal, swooping like birds in the grey air. It could happen any moment.

He listened to his father breathing and waited for it to stop. He listened to his sister breathing and made plans for their loneliness.

Those daybreaks.

He was eleven then.

Moscow, Brussels, Helsinki

Jed’s mother said she didn’t want him hanging round the beauty parlour after school, it was bad for business, what with him looking the way he did and all, so he’d walk home and climb out through the bathroom window and on to the roof. They lived in Sweetwater, right out near the airport. It was always funny the first time someone came to the house. A plane would go over and they’d duck or flinch. It was that loud. Once someone even threw themselves face down on the kitchen floor like someone in a war movie. Out on the roof, though, that was best. He’d lie on his back and watch the planes fly over. So close they almost grazed the tip of his nose. He liked the way his ears crackled, he liked to feel the house shake. And sometimes there was the sense that his legs were rising into the air, that the roof was sliding out from under him.

If he’d been Tommy, of course, it would’ve been a different story. Tommy was his brother, but he was twelve years older, more like an uncle, really. He worked as a foreman at a construction site in Rialto. She wouldn’t’ve minded Tommy hanging round the beauty parlour. He had thick shiny hair and he walked with his legs slightly bent so you could imagine a horse between them. Once he did a hundred press-ups with a girl in a bikini standing on his back (Jed saw the photo). He wasn’t bad for business. He wasn’t bad at all.

That twelve-year gap between him and Tommy, he knew what it meant. It meant he was a mistake. And not only that, but he was ugly too, just so nobody forgot. Only something so unintended could’ve turned out so wrong. Born in a bottle of vodka one night, his mother had told him once. Poured out of her seven months later like some sickly cocktail. They had to put him in a kind of see-through tent so he could breathe. ‘Oh Muriel,’ she was fond of saying, ‘I don’t know what you did to deserve it.’ She’d be sitting at her dresssing-table mirror, and he’d be standing beside her, watching her put her make-up on. Eye-shadow, mascara, rouge. Made her look just like plastic. And then she’d roll her eyes and sigh. ‘Must be someone’s idea of a joke.’ Someone was God, and she was always flirting with him, same as she did with any man.

These were the good days, when her disgust could seem like a kind of affection. But there were times when it didn’t seem like anything apart from what it was.

The year he turned nine he discovered junk stores. He felt at home there. The people who ran them didn’t care if he was ugly; most of them were ugly too, and some of them, maybe they were mistakes as well. Old Mr Garbett, he was ugly all right. He ran Jed’s favourite store. It was on Airdrome Boulevard. The Empire of Junk, it was called. Old Mr Garbett had a moon face and eyes that seeped. He sat on a leather armchair just inside the door with a brown bottle of beer standing beside his right foot. He wore the same mustard cardigan every day, and smoked cigarettes with wrinkles in them like the legs of elephants. The strangest thing about him was, his lips were the same colour as his face. It was here that Jed found the radios.

That first afternoon he was so excited that he ran all the way home. Along the boulevard, down Mackerel Street, through the front gate, straight into his mother’s bedroom. She was sitting at her dressing-table as usual. Instead of turning round, she used the mirror to look at him. ‘Do you have to bring those in here, Jed?’

‘They’re only radios.’

‘Yes, but look at them. They’re filthy.’

There was something wrong with what she was saying. But she’d thrown him off balance and he couldn’t think.

‘And what do you want radios for, anyway?’ It was sweet, that voice of hers, it was always sweet, somehow, but like all sweet things too much of it could make you ill. ‘We’ve already got a radio in the kitchen.’

‘That’s different.’

‘What’s different about it?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. These ones have names. It’s the names that I like.’

A plane went over, and all her tiny bottles jostled and clinked.

‘Names?’ She frowned. ‘What names?’

‘You know, the names of the stations. Moscow, Brussels, Helsinki. Those names.’

If only Pop was still around, he thought. Pop would have understood. Trouble was, Pop had moved out about a year before. Jed knew it was final when he saw Pop carrying his gun magazines out to the car. Pop had the same passion for collecting as Jed did, only Pop collected guns. He had nineteen of them. Six were special, and hung on the wall in the den. The rest, he actually used. Sometimes, on weekends, he used to take Jed out to the abandoned graveyard on Normandy Hill and they’d shoot at the wooden crosses. The bull’s-eye was the place where the parts of the cross joined, but Jed liked to shoot at the arms and watch the bits fly off. Pop loved guns so much, he’d even named his sons after them: Thomas Colt Morgan, Jed Gattling Morgan (if he’d had a girl he would’ve called her Baretta). He wanted to change his own name to Winchester, but Muriel wouldn’t hear of it. Winchester Morgan! He always thought that would’ve sounded grand. As it was, he had to be satisfied with Pop. Not even Bang. Just Pop.

About every month or two Pop would come back, late at night, a few drinks under his belt. The door would shake, then the windows, then the door again, it didn’t seem so strange, it was just like another plane going over, and then his voice would force its way through the mailbox. ‘Muriel? Let me in, will you? Muriel? Goddammit, Muriel, let me in.’ And Muriel would call Tommy. Or if Tommy wasn’t home she’d call the police. ‘He’s drunk,’ she’d say. ‘I think he’s got a gun.’ She didn’t like calling the police, though, because the cars’d scream into the street, the lights’d flash and then everybody’d know. She was a beautician, and she had her reputation to think of.

And now she turned to him and it was as if she’d been reading his mind. ‘You must get this from your father.’

She banned his radios from the house, but that just drove Jed’s passion underground. He became a regular at the Empire of Junk. He’d insert himself into the darkest corners of the store, dust burning in his nostrils, the tips of his fingers grey as if with ashes, and he would often emerge at the end of an hour with radios that Mr Garbett hadn’t even known were there.

By the time he was ten he had more than a hundred radios, radios of every size, make, and year. Some didn’t work at all; these he dismantled. Others produced only static, but that was all right too; he could still switch them on and watch the lights come up behind the names like some kind of miniature simulated dawn. A few of the old radios still worked, and he was addicted to the way the voices grew in volume as the set warmed up, and how the voices always sounded so muffled, so cosy, like people wrapped up against cold weather; though it was the present he was listening to, somehow it always sounded like the past. Other boys his age had model aeroplanes or toy soldiers or guns. He looked down on them. A model aeroplane had had no previous life, a toy soldier had no soul, a gun couldn’t talk to you. But a radio.

One Saturday morning he left the house at around midday and set off up Mackerel Street. He’d seen a radio in the window of the Empire of Junk the day before, but the place had been closed. He bought a quarter of Lemon Sherbet Bombs at the candy store on Airdrome Boulevard. With their fizzy white centres they matched the excitement he felt. It was a hot morning. July, it must’ve been, or August. The streets smelt of simmering green vegetables and gas leaks. It was the kind of weather where air-conditioners bust and old people just evaporated. He walked in the gutter as he always did, pausing every now and then to poke at something with his toe. He wore his white T-shirt and his old jeans and his red baseball cap on back to front. When he reached the Empire he stopped in the doorway. Something was different. It was a strange kind of different, though. Like when someone starts wearing a new pair of glasses or they shave their eyebrows off or something. At first you don’t know what it is. Jed squinted down at Mr Garbett and all around him too, and then he realised. Mr Garbett was sitting on a stained green sofa. The leather armchair had gone. Jed eyed the sofa, then he eyed Mr Garbett. Mr Garbett raised his bottle to his pale lips and drank, as if it was the sight of Jed, and not the weather, that made him thirsty.

‘Where’s the chair gone?’ Jed asked.

‘Sold it,’ Mr Garbett said.

‘Didn’t realise it was for sale.’

‘Everything in here’s for sale.’

Jed looked at the bottle in Mr Garbett’s hand. ‘How much for the beer?’

Mr Garbett smiled faintly on his stained green sofa. ‘You know anything about tape recorders?’

‘Tape recorders? What’s that?’

Mr Garbett stood up. It was the first time he’d ever done that. His belly pushed against the inside of his cardigan. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said.

Jed followed Mr Garbett towards a small room at the back of the store. When he reached the threshold he stopped in his tracks. Inside the room was such a concentration of junk as he’d never seen before. There seemed to be something from every place in the world. You could single out one object and imagine the church or mansion or garage that had once surrounded it. That was the thing about junk. It had been places, seen things you could only guess at. He put his mother in the doorway and looked at her face and grinned. She’d have a fit.

‘Now then,’ Mr Garbett said. He bent down and grunted as his belly crushed the breath out of his lungs. He lifted something that looked a bit like a radio on to the table, then he sat down and his eyes swivelled in their slits. ‘That there’s a tape recorder,’ he said.

Jed went and stood next to the table. He stared down at the machine. The top of it looked like a face. Two big round eyes with spokes and an oblong plastic mouth. ‘What’s it do?’

‘You really don’t know?’

Jed shook his head.

Mr Garbett handed him a white plastic box on the end of a wire. ‘Say something.’

Jed couldn’t think of anything.

‘Sit down here.’ Mr Garbett patted his own knee. ‘Easier to think of something sitting down.’

Jed sat on his knee. Mr Garbett smelt like casinos when you walk past their open doors first thing in the morning. Drink and smoke and money that’s been through too many hands.

‘Now,’ Mr Garbett said, ‘say something.’

Jed watched him turn a fat white switch. The eyes on the top of the machine began to revolve. A green light glowed.

‘Don’t know what to say,’ Jed muttered.

‘That’ll do it.’ The eyes spun back the other way, stopped, then began to revolve again. Mr Garbett put a hand on Jed’s hip. ‘Now,’ he whispered, ‘listen.’

A gritty roaring sound, like the ocean dragging pebbles.

‘Hear that?’ Mr Garbett said. ‘That’s the room.’

Jed looked around to see where the roar was coming from, then he heard a small, sullen voice: ‘Don’t know what to say.’

‘What do you think of that?’ Mr Garbett said.

Jed knew exactly what he thought. ‘That’s even better than a radio,’ he said, and watched as Mr Garbett’s hands fumbled at the buttons on his jeans.

He felt he was spreading outwards, moving outwards fast, like ink being soaked up by a piece of blotting paper. He had no centre and no edges and he was moving outwards smoothly, and there was nothing in his head.

Some time later he heard a voice say, ‘Did you like that?’ and the voice was disembodied, as if it had come out of the tape recorder.

He opened his eyes. The room had shrunk and turned yellow, but it was piled high with junk he recognised. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Really?’

‘It was nice.’

‘Well,’ Mr Garbett said, ‘if you don’t say nothing about it, maybe it’ll happen again.’

‘A secret?’

‘That’s it. A secret.’

Jed nodded and slipped off Mr Garbett’s knee. He knew all about secrets. Most of his radios were secrets. One secret more or less didn’t make any difference.

‘You forgot something,’ Mr Garbett said.

Jed turned in the doorway.

Mr Garbett pointed at the tape recorder on the table, but Jed still didn’t understand.

‘You can have it,’ Mr Garbett said.

Jed wasn’t used to being given things. ‘The tape recorder?’

Mr Garbett smiled. ‘I’ve got hundreds.’

Jed lifted the machine off the table and stood with it in his arms and couldn’t think what to say, so he repeated what he’d said before, only with more intensity this time. ‘It’s better than a radio.’ And then he had a moment of clairvoyance. ‘It sort of makes my radios dead.’

Mr Garbett nodded. ‘Maybe.’ He walked Jed to the front of the shop. ‘Say you got it from a scrapyard.’ He looked around. ‘It’s the truth, really.’

But Jed never had to say anything. He sneaked it in through his bedroom window, the same way he’d sneaked all his radios in. He hid it under the bed, wrapped in an old curtain.

And then, no more than a couple of weeks later, he came home from school one afternoon to find the radios gone. Every single one of them. A deft glance under the bed told him that she’d missed the tape recorder. That was something. But still. Over one hundred radios. He turned cold inside and something tightened in his head.

‘They were garbage, Jed. Most of them didn’t even work.’

She had come up behind him, while he’d been staring at the emptiness in his room. He turned slowly. She was fixing her hair up in a soft knot with both hands, so she looked like some kind of vase. If he’d been big enough he would’ve picked her up and dashed her against the wall. A thousand pieces. No, a million. And no glue, not ever. He took one step forwards and slammed the door in her stupid made-up face.

‘Come on, Jed,’ she cooed from the other side. ‘Don’t be like that.’ She banged on the wood with the flat of her hand. He knew it was the flat of her hand. She was careful never to scrape her knuckles or break her nails. She was a real beautician. ‘Jed?’ Her voice had hardened. ‘Jed, come on. Don’t be boring.’

He sat on the edge of his bed and stared at her through the door. He thought he heard her mutter, ‘Little bastard,’ and she banged once more, one last time, and then there was silence. Then high-heels across the hallway and the kitchen door clicked shut.

He climbed out of his bedroom window and stamped off up Mackerel Street, his red baseball cap jammed on sideways, as if he was turning left. That woman with the wedges of electric-pink and blue above her eyes. That woman, the beautician. His mother. She’d gone and thrown his radios away. All one hundred and twelve of them. She’d even thrown the Ferguson away, three feet high with wings of polished wood to gather the sound. Two years’ work collecting those radios. Two years’ love.

He was wearing jeans that concertinaed round his ankles and a black T-shirt that said SUICIDE; he was thinking about changing it to MURDER now. He wedged his hands in his pockets, his thin arms locked and stiff. His head began to buzz like the TV screen when a channel shuts down at night. They call it snow sometimes, but it’s nothing like snow. It’s nowhere near that peaceful.

She must’ve been planning it for ages with that nail-polish brain of hers. You’d need a special man to shift one hundred and twelve radios. You’d need a truck. He couldn’t believe it. He just couldn’t believe it. He tipped his head to the clouds and groaned out loud. An old lady stopped and looked at him, concerned. He glared at her and stamped on up the road, round the corner and into Airdrome Boulevard.

MURDER. That was the answer. Then, when she was dead, he could send her to the embalming studio, plenty of pink and blue, he’d say, don’t spare the pink and blue, he’d make her look like she was going to a fucking disco, and then they could put her in one of those viewing theatres on Central Avenue, he didn’t know how much it cost, he didn’t care, he’d save up. He could see it now:

MURIEL MORGAN NOW SHOWING ONE WEEK ONLY

She’d be laid out in her coffin, pink satin it’d be, with blue trimmings, to go with her make-up, maybe some neon too, and there’d be radios all round her, hundreds of radios, all tuned to different stations, all on top volume. He’d surround her with radios. He’d bury her in radios.

He walked halfway across the city that day, he walked until night fell. He stood under the harbour bridge and watched the lights come on downtown. He leaned his head back against a pillar and shut his eyes and felt the silver trains shake down through the stone. He’d scattered his rage along a hundred streets and he was almost smiling now. He had a new idea.

The next day he didn’t go to school. He went to visit Mr Garbett instead. Mr Garbett was definitely a mistake, he knew that now. One look at him and it was obvious. There was an understanding between them that didn’t need any words. And since he had so much in common with this man who smelt like a casino and ruled an empire of junk from a stained green throne, it was only fitting that he should have a part to play in Jed’s plan.

‘How’s the tape recorder?’ Mr Garbett asked.

‘Great, thanks.’

Mr Garbett shifted on the sofa. ‘Sorry, but I haven’t got any new radios in.’ He grinned. It was one of their private jokes. New radios.

‘That’s all right,’ Jed said. ‘I’m not looking for radios any more.’

‘Oh?’ Mr Garbett gave Jed a curious, almost wounded look.

‘My mum chucked them out. The whole lot.’

‘Why’d the hell she do that?’

Jed shrugged. ‘She said they were dirty.’

Mr Garbett’s face slackened. The corners of his mouth drooped. Only one thing could do that to Mr Garbett. The wanton destruction of junk. He took a long draught from his brown bottle, then he let out a soft belch and stared into the road. Finally, and without a change of expression, he said, ‘It must’ve taken her a long time.’

Jed grinned for the first time since it happened. ‘Ages, I bet. There were over a hundred.’

‘I don’t know,’ Mr Garbett said. ‘Some people.’

He dabbed at one eye with the corner of a handkerchief. For a moment Jed thought he was crying, mourning the passing of the radios, but then he realised: it was just Mr Garbett’s eye leaking, like it always did.

‘You know that tape recorder?’ Jed said. ‘Well, I need a longer wire for the mike, maybe about,’ and he screwed his face up, thinking, ‘about fifty feet long. And I need a smaller mike too. That other one, it’s too, I don’t know, too clumsy.’

‘The wire’s no problem,’ Mr Garbett said. ‘I’m getting some in this week. The mike could take a bit longer.’

Jed dropped into the store at least once a week after that and sometimes he let Mr Garbett take him into the back room and open his jeans and turn him into that slow ink. The memory of the radios was like a sore place on his body that he only felt when he was in a certain position; he had to press it every now and then so he didn’t forget. By the end of the month he had the wire and the mike. His mother had found a new man, an embalmer called Adrian who wore grey shoes. The time had come.

He waited until she went to work one morning, then he took out the wire and the new mike from their hiding-place inside the air-conditioning in his bedroom. The mike was particularly satisfying; it was round and white, the size of a button, and the top was a minute copper grille that looked like a fly’s eye. He ran the wire under his carpet and out into the corridor. So far, so good. The next part was tricky, though. The carpet in the corridor had been secured at the edges with tacks, and he had to prise the tacks loose before he could conceal the wire beneath. It took him almost an hour to run the wire from his bedroom door to his mother’s, and most of that time he held his breath, praying that nothing brought her home early. When he opened the door to her room he came to a standstill. The dressing-table peopled by tiny potent bottles, the wall-lights designed to resemble candles (fake wax drips, flame-shaped bulbs), the double bed fringed with satin dust-ruffles: it gave him the feeling that he was standing in a shrine, that even his presence was sacrilege. He closed his eyes and summoned up the ghosts of his radios. He saw the dawn that came up behind the dial in one, he lingered on the sweeping ocean-liner curves of another. He remembered their names, and heard their voices. He muttered stations to himself like incantations, like curses: Moscow, Brussels, Helsinki. ‘Hilversum,’ he muttered, ‘Reykjavik,’ and he saw his radios in the garbage dump, he saw their cases crushed and shattered, their innards ripped out, spilled on the ground, their voices silenced for ever, and when he opened his eyes his mother’s room seemed to shrink in the face of his new resolve. Tiny bright explosions pocked the precious air, as if something white-hot had burned holes right through reality. The furniture looked charred at the edges. He noticed the clock beside her bed. Almost eleven-thirty. She sometimes came home for lunch. He had better get on.

He levered up the tacks that held her pale-green carpet flush to the wall and tucked the wire underneath, then he knocked the tacks back into the same holes. It took him twenty minutes to reach the bed. There was really only one place for the mike. He pulled the bed away from the wall and fastened the mike to the back of the headboard with a strip of insulating tape. He pushed the bed against the wall and stood back. After examining the bed from all angles to make sure the wire was invisible, he returned to his room. All set. Now for the trial run. He switched the tape recorder to RECORD and ran back up the corridor to his mother’s room. He stood beside her stack of frilly pillows and thought for a moment.

‘Testing, testing.’ He nodded to himself. That’s what they said. But what else? He couldn’t remember. ‘I hope this works.’ He paused, and then fiercely, ‘It’d better.’

Back in his own room he wound the tape back and switched to PLAY. Nothing for long seconds, then a rustling, like leaves, then his voice, wrapped up, as if he was talking through cloth. His voice, though. It had worked. He switched the tape recorder off and sat on the floor, his thighs pulled tight against his chest, his chin on his knees.

His mother didn’t come home for lunch.

He left the mike taped to the back of the headboard for two weeks. During that time the embalmer came round four times. The first time there was an argument in the bedroom. The embalmer was trying to smooth things over, restore things to normal. But he could only do that with dead bodies, apparently. Something was thrown, something broke. Jed couldn’t guess what it was. Probably that blue vase by the window. There was a silence, and then tears. His mother’s. It was interesting, but it wasn’t what he wanted. The second time nothing happened at all. They just went to sleep. The third time a plane went over right at the crucial moment and ruined everything. He almost gave up. Almost. The fourth time he was in the hall when they came in the front door. It was midnight, and they were both drunk.

‘What the hell are you doing up?’ His mother was wearing a red dress that was stained dark with wine or sweat. She looked the way a rose petal looks when you crush it between finger and thumb. The embalmer hung back, awkward at being observed. White shoes tonight. Pretty fancy. Jed didn’t say anything. He just backed into his room and closed the door.

First there was rustling. That would be them kissing, undressing. At least a minute of that. Then five creaks, one after the other, very brisk. The bed, presumably. Then a whimper (his mother) and a grunt (the embalmer). Then voices. Hers first, ‘Oh Adrian,’ then his, ‘Muriel,’ then hers again, ‘Oh God.’ God was three syllables. And then a creak. Not the bed this time. A human creak. The embalmer coming. Bit quick, that. Then, about a minute later, a low flapping rumble followed by a whine as the embalmer, Adrian, began to snore. It was better than he could’ve expected. It was perfect.

The next day he went to see Mr Garbett and asked whether he could get a copy made. Mr Garbett said he’d take care of it. Jed didn’t tell Mr Garbett not to listen to it, and he knew, when Mr Garbett handed the duplicate and the original back a week later, that he had. It didn’t matter. Jed doubted whether he’d ever see Mr Garbett again. His days of junk were over.

That night he waited in his room with the tape recorder primed. He looked at his watch. It was six-thirty. She usually got home at around seven. He sat on the edge of his bed and wedged a Lemon Sherbet Bomb in his cheek and turned his head to the street. It had been another hot day. Through the window he could hear the hiss of sprinklers watering small lawns. It wasn’t often you could hear the sprinklers. Maybe there was a strike at the airport or something.

It was almost nine when he heard the key turn in the lock. He’d been waiting so long, his heart jumped at the sound. Then he froze. She wasn’t alone. He could hear a man’s voice. Pop’s.

He opened his door and stood in the hall.

‘You could at least offer me a cup of coffee,’ he heard Pop saying. ‘I’ve been waiting two hours.’

‘Nobody asked you to wait, did they?’ She was trying to close the door on him, but he was stronger.

‘Muriel.’ Pop was pleading now. ‘One cup of coffee.’

She weakened. ‘All right. One cup of coffee and that’s it.’

Pop stepped into the light. He’d greased his hair back and he was wearing a clean shirt, but it was no good.

‘One cup,’ he said, and winked at Jed. He was like one of those salesmen who stick their feet in the door.

Don’t you see? Jed wanted to shout. It’s no good.

‘Your mother and I,’ Pop said, ‘we’re just going to have a little talk.’ That wink again. A smirk.

IT’S NO GOOD.

When Pop moved towards the kitchen, he trailed this smell behind him, ashes or rust, old worn-down things, things you normally throw out. Jed was sure his mother could smell it too. Though she had different names for it, of course. She called it weakness, failure, regret.

He went and sat in his room while they had their ‘little talk’. He heard the shouting, he heard a plate break. The smell was everywhere, you wanted to hold your nose. No amount of violence or repentance could freshen the air.

And he realised, with a slight shock, that Pop didn’t count any more. Pop was just another Adrian. A noise, a pair of feet, an inadequacy. He felt sorry for Pop, but in a distant way, as you might feel sorry for someone on TV. He wanted Pop out of the house, even more than his mother did.

An hour later the kitchen door opened. Jed opened his own door a crack, and listened.

‘A second chance, that’s all I’m asking.’

‘What do you think this is, some stupid game?’

The house shook as the front door banged against the inside wall. Through his window Jed saw Pop stamping off up Mackerel Street, clouding the air with empty threats.

He found his mother standing in the kitchen. Her face had the polished look of a trophy. It was a game, whatever she said, and it looked as if she’d won again. He returned to his room and, leaving the door ajar, turned the tape recorder on. Top volume. And waited.

The tape had only reached the creaking stage when she came and stood in the doorway. ‘What’s this you’re playing?’ she asked, light, yet tense, as if she had already guessed.

Jed watched the transparent wheels spin round, one eager, empty, one slow and burdened with knowledge. He watched the slim brown tape unwind, unwind.

When the whimpering began, he looked up into his mother’s face. He saw the light shrink in her eyes then, without seeming to move, she unleashed herself, the air a blur of red nails and flailing hands, she was hissing and muttering, she seemed to have eight arms, like that statue that he’d seen in Mr Garbett’s store, which Mr Garbett said had come from India. She caught him twice with open-handed blows that made his head buzz like a jam jar of flies, and one of her nails tore the skin at the corner of his mouth, as if he ought to be smiling. He didn’t try to back away, he just wrapped his head in his hands and when the beating stopped he slowly took his hands away and peered up at her. She was panting and her arms were fastened against her sides and her hair had come unpinned and hung in tangled strands across her eyes. She looked more natural now than ever before. She looked like a witch. He wanted her to hold him now, he wanted to burn with her, but he knew it wouldn’t happen. And so it was like TV again. Everything was like TV.

‘How could you do that?’ she was saying in a strange, flat voice. ‘How could you do a thing like that?’

Easy.

‘You threw my radios away.’

The embalmer began to snore.

Lunging at the tape recorder, she snatched up the spool and tore the tape to shreds. When she tired of that she threw it down and stamped on the top of the tape recorder. Then she bent down and picked the tape recorder up and hurled it against the wall. It dropped to the carpet and the casing came away, fractured in two places. There was a dent in the wall where it had hit.

Jed watched all this impassively, as if he could change channels any time he pleased. He didn’t care what she did. The tape recorder had already served its purpose, and he had wrapped his spare copy of the tape in industrial plastic, then he’d locked it inside an old metal toolbox, and he’d buried the toolbox halfway up the garden on the right, next to the fence. There was nothing she could do to hurt him. He felt one side of his mouth grinning where she had cut him. He watched her turn to him and scrape the hair back out of her eyes.

‘You won’t do that again,’ she said.

He said, ‘I don’t need to.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I’ve got a copy of that tape,’ he said, ‘and if you ever touch any of my stuff again, I’ll send it to Pop.’ He paused; it didn’t sound enough. ‘And the neighbours,’ he said. ‘And that shop where you work.’

Her eyes were blank now, and her cheeks hung, slack and looped, from the bones of her face. She turned and walked out of the room. He heard her bedroom door click quietly shut.

His first taste of revenge. Sweet.