The Five Gates of Hell

The Womb Boys

A light rain was falling on the city, so light it sounded like rats. Jed turned into the alleyway that ran behind the school and stopped to wipe the flecks off his spectacles. Looking up again, through clear glass now, he saw four figures arranged in front of him. Their stillness had an urgency to it and he knew right away that it was him they’d been waiting for.

Three of them perched high on dark-green garbage dumpsters. He knew their names: José PS Mendoza, Scraper O’Malley and Tip Stubbs. The fourth leaned his shoulderblades against the wall, hands folded on his chest. He wore a black leather coat and a moustache. It was Vasco Gorelli. Known as Gorilla, though never to his face. He’d had the moustache since he was ten.

Near silence.

Only the light rain scurrying across the rooftops, and the tss-tss-tss of PS Mendoza’s headphones.

It was strange. Normally you couldn’t talk to Vasco, you couldn’t even get close to him. You had to wait for a summons or an audience. He was like a sort of pope. He had lieutenants — O’Malley, Stubbs, Mendoza — then he had a whole string of runners: Thomas Baby Vail, Slim Jimmy Chung, Cramps Crenshaw and Tip’s younger brother, a deaf-mute known as Silence. When you saw Vasco walk down the street you saw the petals of a flower and suddenly a flower seemed strong, a flower seemed dangerous. A small gang, but tight. A flower that closed up for the night. A furled umbrella. And when the rain came, which it did sometimes, one snap, a flick, and the gang sprang open, kept him dry. That was how it worked.

So why the sudden interest?

Jed was used to isolation. His face was like some kind of cul-de-sac. It said NO THROUGH ROAD to most people. Confronted with him, they always turned round, backed away. He wasn’t wounded exactly. No, not wounded; not any more. It had planted the seeds of scorn in him. It had bred a curious arrogance. You don’t know what you’re missing, he would think. If only you knew.

And now this.

Maybe the boys were bored that day. Just lookng for some poor bastard to pick on. And he came along with his pitted skin and his glasses and his knees put on the wrong way round and they thought: This one’ll do. Scraper and Tip eyed him from above with a strange, dislocated 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.

‘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.

‘I know that,’ Jed said.

‘I’ve been told.’

‘Who told you?’

‘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?’

‘They say she’s a whore.’

Tip joined in. ‘Is that true? Is she a whore?’

‘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 his nose. 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.

‘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 for a necklace or a watch, something they could pawn at Mr Franklin’s establishment on Central Avenue. Just for a moment, as he prodded and jabbed at one particular rock with his sharp stick, Vasco looked younger, looked the age he actually was, an age that Tip and Scraper were never allowed to see. The three tombstones on his left shoulder, that was how old people thought he was. Jed looked into the tattoos as if they were windows and suddenly, standing in the stench of the river, he had the feeling that he could see into Vasco, see what was coming.

Then Vasco straightened up. ‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘How did you get the idea?’

Jed shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It just came to me.’

‘You’re dangerous,’ Vasco said. ‘You need watching.’

‘Lucky I’m on your side then, isn’t it?’

Vasco scooped up a handful of river-mud and flung it in Jed’s direction. Jed ducked and, grinning, showed Vasco his crimson devil’s mouth. But the grin faded as his thoughts turned to his mother, the last four years, their uneasy truce. She was still bringing men home with her, but defiantly now, as if she wanted him to witness it and disapprove. To Jed, these men of hers were all one man, their boots shifting on the carpet, their bodies too big for the rooms; they reminded him, curiously enough, of his brother, Tommy. He stared at them and ignored them, both at the same time. He’d become an expert at the look. Ten years later it would serve him well.

‘It’s not easy living there.’ He took Vasco’s stick and jabbed at a rock.

Vasco looked at him sideways. ‘Why don’t you move out?’

‘Where to?’

‘Plenty of room at my place.’

It was winter and the air was sharp. Everything you looked at seemed cut out with scissors. The light fell in blue-and-yellow twists on the surface of the river. Jed could see Sweetwater on the far bank, a plane scorching the air as it lifted over the rooftops. He could almost feel the house shake. He could almost smell the nail polish.

He looked at Vasco. ‘What about your parents?’

‘I haven’t got any.’

‘You must live with someone.’

‘My sister, but she’s hardly ever there. Otherwise there’s only Mario and Reg. But they’re both senile.’

‘Senile? What’s that?’

‘Means when you’re nearly dead. You’re still alive, but only just —’

Jed stopped listening. He was thinking of the men who were all one man doing one thing. He was remembering his mother’s face in her dressing-table mirror. He was imagining her toss his radios casually into oblivion. And he knew then that Vasco was right. But still something reached across the river, something stretched out like arms and tried to claw him back. He didn’t know what it was. He took a step backwards, slipped on the mud and almost fell.

‘Course there won’t be anyone for you to record fucking. My sister does all her fucking at her boyfriend’s. And Mario and Reg, they’ve probably never fucked in their lives.’ Vasco spread his hands. ‘So what do you say?’

Jed nodded, grinned. ‘Does it need saying?’

Vasco bought a bottle of vodka to celebrate and they drank it in the old sailors’ graveyard in Mangrove South. This was where the funeral business had first put down its roots. Over the wall, between two warehouses, Jed could just make out the Witch’s Fingers, four long talons of sand that lay in the mouth of the river. Rumour had it that, on stormy nights a century ago, they used to reach out, gouge holes in passing ships, and drag them down. Hundreds of wrecks lay buried in that glistening silt. The city’s black heart had beaten strongly even then. There was one funeral director, supposedly, who used to put lamps out on the Fingers and lure ships to their doom. Times had changed. There hadn’t been a wreck for years, and all the parlours had moved downtown (their old premises had been converted into speedboat showrooms, fishing-tackle stores), but he could see that, for Vasco, the graveyard might have peculiar significance.

Drunk for the first time in his life, Jed saw Vasco with absolute clarity, as if Vasco was outlined in mercury. Vasco was leaning against a stone, eyes shut, chin tipped, teeth bared. Then his head came down and his eyes opened wide and they were like the windshield of a car that’s never been anywhere. No record of any insects or moisture or dust. They were so wiped clean. Brutal without meaning to be, brutal and vague. It was something Jed knew about, knew by instinct, it was a quality that he possessed himself. But Vasco didn’t seem to know about it at all. He just had it. He was the dreamer who kills people in his sleep.

The next day Jed packed a small bag while his mother was at work. Just before he left he took a pen and a piece of paper and sat down at the breakfast bar. ‘I’ve gone to stay with a friend,’ he wrote. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

Wishful thinking. He was pretty sure that relief would be her first reaction. One less blemish in her life. He wondered, as he folded the paper in half and taped it to the TV screen, whether Pop had left a note when he walked out on her.

It was pure chance that Nathan ever got to know Tip. The city had worked hard to keep them apart. Nathan grew up in Blenheim, a garden suburb on the west shore. Tip, on the other hand, came from the east, some housing project way past Z Street. Definitely the wrong end of the alphabet. Though their swimming styles were just as diverse — Nathan slipped through the water, leaving hardly a crease behind; Tip thrashed it into an angry froth — it was the water that brought them together. They both swam for a team known as the Moon Beach Minnows. They trained three evenings a week in the outdoor pool on Sunset Drive, swimming lap after lap while Marshal, the team coach, patrolled the poolside in his maroon sweatsuit and his snow-white sneakers, booming their times through a rolled-up copy of the sports paper. Between them, they won most of the junior competitions.

One Wednesday, in practice, Nathan raced Tip over one hundred metres and beat him by almost five seconds. He touched the curved tiles at the end of the pool and, rolling on to his back, watched the planes float down through the soft brown sky. The margin of his victory surprised him. His time had been good, but not that good. Tip heaved his hard white body out of the pool and stood with his towel draped round his shoulders. Then he turned his head to one side and spat clear through the wire-mesh fence fifteen feet away. Part habit, part disgust. Nathan grinned. Somehow Tip never left any spit hanging on the wire, it always seemed to soar right into the darkness that lay beyond.

‘I saw you, Stubbs,’ Marshal bellowed.

Tip nodded. ‘Sorry.’

Down in the pool Nathan still had a grin on his face. Tip noticed it, and winked. Maybe they came from different parts of town, but they both knew an old woman when they saw one.

Later that night Nathan left the building just ahead of Tip. While Nathan unlocked his bicycle, Tip stood on the steps, his towel still coiled around his neck, his lips grey in the sodium lights. Nathan could smell the chlorine on his skin.

‘So how come you always ride?’ Tip said. ‘Most people, someone comes for them.’

Nathan shrugged. ‘I like to ride.’ It wasn’t strictly true. He had no choice. There simply wasn’t anyone who could’ve picked him up. Dad hardly ever left the house, and Fosca, the new au pair girl, didn’t know how to drive.

‘Where d’you live?’

‘Blenheim.’

‘Blenheim? Jesus. Long ride.’ Tip must’ve known this already. He was just checking. ‘So what’s your old man do?’

He’d be expecting millionaire or something. Mention Blenheim, that’s what people always thought.

‘He doesn’t do anything,’ Nathan said.

Tip pinched his nose between finger and thumb, flicked his hand at the wall, and then sniffed. ‘What d’you mean, he doesn’t do anything?’

‘He doesn’t do anything. He can’t. He’s disabled.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

Tip looked at the ground, then he looked at Nathan again, sidelong. ‘What kind of disabled?’

Tip was trying to look casual, but Nathan could see he was curious. An old man who was screwed up, that was credentials. It was like that plastic grown-ups had. Amex, Visa, Mastercard. It said something about you, it got you into places.

‘He’s only sort of got about half of each lung,’ Nathan said, ‘and he’s had most of his ribs cut out.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah, and he’s got an orange disc in his car. Means he can park anywhere.’

Tip nodded. ‘Cool.’

Nathan almost pinched his nose between finger and thumb, as Tip had done, but he thought he might get it wrong. He just sniffed instead. ‘What’s your old man do?’

‘He doesn’t do anything either.’

‘How come?’ Nathan said. ‘Not disabled, is he?’

This would probably have started a fight if he’d said it a week ago. Now it drew a slack grin out of Tip. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He used to work in the docks. Got laid off a couple of months back.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Nathan chipped at a weed with his shoe. He hoped it looked sort of sympathetic.

‘Yeah, well.’ Tip stared off in the direction of the football field. ‘I got to be going. See you around.’

The next week, after training, Tip asked him if he wanted to go eat. He hesitated. The nights he went swimming, Dad always waited till he got home and then they ate supper together. But he couldn’t say that to Tip, it wouldn’t make any sense, so he just nodded.

‘There’s a pizza joint in the neighbourhood,’ Tip said. ‘We could walk.’

‘Sure.’ Nathan had never had pizza before. Dad didn’t approve of it.

They didn’t talk much on the way. Just the ticking of Nathan’s wheels and a flat ring every time Tip swung his damp towel at a streetlamp. The place Tip knew was a biker’s hang-out called Pete’s Pizza. They sat on stools by the window and watched the bikes rip past the open doorway. The street seemed lit by the flare of a match, and it was loud with cars and screaming. Tip ordered two medium Cokes and a nine-inch Tex-Mex Special, with extra pepperoni. It was like a foreign language, a foreign country. And yet Nathan couldn’t help stealing glances at the clock. And every time he looked he could picture exactly what Dad would be doing. Seven-thirty: Dad would be sitting down to supper. Seven-forty-five: Dad would be biting his cornflakes up one hundred times. Eight: Dad would be swallowing his pills. Nathan slid his eyes in Tip’s direction. Swollen eyelids, grey lips. Hair that lay flush against his skull like animal pelt. Dad would be worried sick.

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?’

Tombstone Tattoos

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.

Dad sighed. ‘That’s good. Just there.’

Nathan worked the warm oil into the shoulders.

‘You’ve got the same touch as your mother.’

Your mother. He always said that. It made her sound so far away, so high up. It was like your excellency, your honour. Your mother.

But Dad’s thoughts had taken a different turning. ‘Did I ever tell you how we came to live here?’

‘No.’

Nathan smiled to himself. He knew how much Dad looked forward to having his back done, how much it helped, but he also sometimes suspected that it was just an excuse, a chance for Dad to talk to him.

‘Your grandmother had just gone into hospital and I’d just come out.’ Dad paused, remembering. ‘She told us we could have her house. She said she wouldn’t be needing it any more.’

Nathan knew this part of the story. His grandmother had put herself in a mental home, that whole side of the family were a bit mad, apparently, and she’d given them the house for nothing. He prompted Dad. ‘Then what happened?’

‘It was spring,’ Dad began, and his voice turned dreamy as he reached back into the past.

He drove up the coast with Kay, his wife of seven months, beside him. Such happiness: he felt it so acutely, it had almost seemed like pain. There was no highway in those days, only an old switchback road. In the dips you found towns, as secret and intact as fossils, towns with names like Peacehaven and Marble Bay; from the rises you could see ships inching along the horizon, and waves so far away they looked, he remembered Kay saying, ‘like the creases on your knuckles’.

When they reached High Head they bought ice-creams from a van that was playing ‘Moon River’ (and there the river, magically, was, hundreds of feet below and to the east), the melody all cracked and jangly and slow, and then they crossed smooth grass to the precipice, peered down from behind a low wire fence, and there was the famous lighthouse, hoops of red and white, it must’ve been sixty feet high, but it looked like a toy, and he said, ‘People come here to jump,’ and Kay took his arm and pressed her cheek against his shoulder and said, ‘We’re so lucky,’ not to have a reason to, he thought she meant, not to even think of it, the misery that might bring you here, though he could never be sure with Kay, she took off in such strange directions sometimes, words seemed to mean different things to her, it was as if she had her own personal dictionary.

They must’ve stood there for, oh, in his memory it took up more room than some whole years, and then she broke away from him and ran off down the path, and he called out, ‘Careful, Kay, be careful,’ and he went after her, but he couldn’t run, you see, all those years in hospital, they’d sucked the running out of him. When he caught up with her at last, she was standing three feet from the edge in her black ski-pants, they were the fashion then, and her cream wool sweater, rising and falling with her breathing, but three feet from the edge! and there was no fence now, why did she like to scare him so? He took her in his arms, and he kissed the side of her neck and behind her ear, and then he kissed her on the lips, he breathed her in as deeply as his damaged lungs allowed, as if those were his last moments with her, as if he was already beginning to lose her, and he felt he’d never be close enough, even naked, making love, his skin on hers, their bodies joined like hands in prayer, pressed together all the way along, even bellies, even knees, even then he’d never be close enough. Perhaps that was true for everyone, but when he saw her run along the edge like that he sensed the recklessness in her, it had been there all along, but now it frightened him. He had this sudden premonition, that she might leave him behind, alone, but he kept the premonition hidden, he just pulled her tighter to him, his arms were still strong, he pulled her tight against him, so tight that she cried out, ‘Jack, stop,’ and she was laughing, ‘Jack, you’ll break me.’

Listening to all the happiness, happiness that had actually produced him, Nathan had felt lulled, comforted, but suddenly the vision of Dad holding his wife, that love and worry, it mirrored his own too closely: his fingers faltered.

Dad noticed. ‘Are you tired?’

‘A bit.’

‘You stop then.’ Dad sat up and, reaching behind him, pulled his nightclothes on.

Nathan put the green bottle back in its place on the glass shelf above the washbasin. He wanted to hold Dad tight and stop him dying. He didn’t want to be left behind, with everything to do. He just hoped he died first. One silent jet looped through the room. Or almost silent. A sound like tyres in rain. He ran the hot tap fast and reached for the soap.

‘Are you all right, Nathan?’

‘Yes. I’m fine.’

‘Nothing’s worrying you?’

The water was almost too hot for his hands. He shook his head. ‘No.’

‘If you’re worried about something, you’ll tell me, won’t you?’

He nodded. He switched the tap off, dried his hands.

‘Thank you for doing my back.’

He turned at last and smiled at the sight of Dad propped on seven pillows in his ragged clothes.

‘That’s all right,’ he said.

The day before Scraper’s funeral Vasco took Jed with him to the tattoo parlour. ‘You’ll meet Mitch,’ he said as they jumped a bus on Central Avenue. ‘Mitch does the best tombstones in town.’

Central Avenue had always been Jed’s favourite street. As its name suggested, it ran straight as an arrow through the heart of the city. Aloof in the west, accustomed to the tick-tock of high-heels and the trickle of limo tyres, it hit mid-town and slummed it, movie-theatres, fast-food stands and go-go bars, neon and slang, then it moved further east, turning sullen and jangly, stained with cheap wine and bad blood, only to end its life under the concrete pillars that supported the Moon River Bridge. Mitch’s tattoo parlour was just west of here, in a section known as the Strip. Wedged between a sex cinema and a liquor store, it had a window that was opaque, pasted over with skulls and knives and snakes. The sign above the door said TATTOO CITY in old cracked gold paint that reminded Jed of circuses.

He followed Vasco inside. Mitch was sitting in the back of the store, trying to prise the grease out from under his nails with a key.

Vasco stood in front of Mitch. ‘Slow day.’

Mitch winced as he dug too deep. Then he looked up, saw who it was. ‘Christ, someone else dead?’

‘You shouldn’t complain,’ Vasco said. ‘Someone dies, you get to do another stone. You do another stone, you make money.’

Mitch tossed the key on to the table and stood up. ‘Real big shot, aren’t you?’ He looked at Jed. ‘Who’s this?’

‘This is Jed,’ Vasco said. ‘He records stuff.’

Mitch left his eyes on Jed, but absent-mindedly, the way you might leave your hand in your pocket. Something Jed learned about Mitch the first time he saw him: Mitch didn’t ask many questions; either he knew already, or he didn’t want to know. Something he recognised too: the use of silence.

Mitch moved over to the table that held his instruments. He’d worn his jeans so long they looked polished. His hair hung down his back in lank tails, like the seaweed under the pier.

‘He’s a blackmailer,’ Vasco added.

‘Only when it’s really necessary,’ Jed explained.

‘Necessary?’ Mitch said. ‘Jesus, what a pair.’

Vasco grinned at Jed.

Mitch turned round, the needle-gun in one hand, the spray in the other. ‘So you want this tombstone or what?’

Vasco sat in a chair, his bare arm braced against the edge of the table. He already had three tombstones. Lucky (obviously he hadn’t been, not very), Jack Frost and Motorboy, their names in blue block-capitals, no dates. Now Scraper.

Mitch worked without speaking. There was only the buzz of the needle-gun and the hiss of the disinfectant spray. About halfway through, a guy in a sleeveless leather jacket walked in. He showed Mitch his tattoo: a hooded man with a double-sided axe.

Mitch only took his eyes off Vasco’s tombstone for a moment. ‘It’s shit. Who did it?’

‘I got it when I was drunk. Can you fix it?’

‘Yeah, I can fix it. For a hundred bucks I’ll put in some background too. Make it look real killer.’

‘What about tomorrow?’

Mitch nodded. ‘Don’t come in here drunk.’

The guy grinned foolishly and left.

Mitch looked at Vasco. ‘There are too many of those.’

Otherwise it was silence. Homage to Scraper.

Vasco didn’t speak to Jed until they left the place. Then he said, ‘One day I’ll probably be covered with tombstones.’ He turned to Jed, laughing. ‘One of them’ll probably be yours.’

Jed looked at him, just looked at him.

Vasco pushed him in the chest, trying to jog the needle that was saying the same thing over and over. ‘No need to get all fucked up about it. It was only a joke.’ He ducked into a doorway, lit a cigarette, then stepped out on to the sidewalk again.

Jed watched the wind bend the smoke out of Vasco’s mouth and off into nothing. So you’re going to wear my tombstone, he thought. So tell me something. Who’s going to wear yours? Tell me that. Don’t talk to me about I’m fucked up.

He looked through the tattoos the way you might look through church windows, but before he could see Vasco all laid out like some martyr carved in stone he shook the picture loose and hit Vasco on his arm, the arm that wasn’t a graveyard, hit Vasco so hard that he fell against a store-front and the glass bulged inwards, creaked and almost gave.

‘What’s that for?’ Vasco said.

Jed grinned. ‘Let’s go get a beer or something.’

Scraper’s funeral was discount. Special offer. Free silver crucifix pendant thrown in. You could always tell. It took place in one of the cemeteries that ringed the northern suburbs. You could see them from the freeway, bare hills covered with a stubble of crosses, bleak places even in the famous Moon Beach sunshine. The poor were buried there. The lost. The forgotten.

The Womb Boys arrived early and sat on stones at the top of the slope. Vasco had taken his bandage off, and his memorial to Scraper looked painful; the new bright blue of the tattoo had raised a raw red welt (though, according to Mitch, this only ever lasted a day or two). They watched the hearse trickle along the gravel avenue. Bald tyres, dented fender. A thin squeal as it braked. Vasco scowled and lit another cigarette.

Two men in moth-eaten black lifted Scraper’s coffin on to a stainless-steel trolley and wheeled it across the grass. They looked like waiters in a cheap restaurant. And then the ultimate insult. Scraper was buried at the bottom of a slope. He wouldn’t even have a view. There were only two people there who hadn’t been paid. A man in a brown suit and a woman in a veil. Scraper’s parents. They looked guilty and ashamed, as if death was a crime their son had committed.

‘For Christ’s sake.’ Vasco stood up suddenly. ‘This isn’t a funeral,’ he said, ‘this is a charade.’

That night Jed and Vasco sat up late, working on a plan of revenge. It was Jed’s first active contribution and he was gratified to find that Vasco backed almost every one of his suggestions. The following evening Vasco called a meeting in the house on Mangrove Heights. The gang assembled in the dining-room at nine o’clock. Tall white candles burned in the two silver candelabras that Tip had stolen from a church the week before. Mario rolled overhead like distant thunder.

Vasco rose to his feet.

‘This time we’re taking extreme measures. This time,’ and he smiled grimly, ‘it’s Gorilla warfare.’

So he’d heard the whispers with those ears of his. So he knew his name. Laughter shook the room.

‘What’ve you got in mind?’ Cramps Crenshaw asked.

Vasco passed his hand across a candle’s flame, then looked down at his blackened palm. ‘Another fire.’

Two nights later they met outside the construction site of a new funeral complex in Meadowland. It was on the far side of the river, just south of Sweetwater. Standing by the security fence, Jed suddenly remembered this area as fields. When he was young, Pop had taken him for walks here and, together, they’d given names to things. There was an old dead tree that Pop had called Winchester because it was the vague shape of a rifle and because he couldn’t be called Winchester himself. Jed peered through the fence at the levelled ground, he peered at the yellow bulldozers, the colour of cowardice, and suddenly he felt the anger Vasco felt. A different root, but just as strong.

After appointing a sentry to keep watch, Vasco scaled the fence. He climbed close to the support stanchion so the wire mesh didn’t sag or buckle. The rest of the gang followed, dropping lightly into the weeds on the other side. Dark mounds lay on the ground. Cramps Crenshaw had done a thorough job of poisoning the dogs. Vasco began to hand out pieces of paper. Every piece was printed with the same slogan: DEATH TO THE FUNERAL BUSINESS.

‘What are these?’ Tip asked.

‘They’re curses,’ Vasco explained. ‘Look.’ Running into the nearest building, he climbed a series of ladders to the roof. He held up a piece of paper and let it drop into the gap between the still-unfinished walls. ‘This building is now damned.’

When the curses had been sealed into the walls of every building on the site, he gathered the gang around him once again. ‘Who’s got the lighter fluid?’

PS stepped forwards and handed Vasco a small yellow can.

‘We’re only doing one,’ Vasco said.

‘One?’ PS sounded disappointed.

‘One.’ Vasco’s eyes moved across the faces of his gang. ‘The power’s in the curses.’ he said. ‘Burning a house down, that’s just our calling card.’

It took PS a moment to see it. The things Vasco came out with, it often took his gang a while to see. Then PS nodded and he fitted his phones over his ears and his music started up.

They watched as Vasco climbed high into the rafters of the main office and sprayed the new blond wood with lighter fuel. He lit the end of the trail of fuel the same way you light a fuse. The central roofbeam was a sudden ribbon of fire. It made the same sound a clean sheet makes when it’s snapped out over a bed.

Vasco slid back down the ladders, dropping the last ten feet. He stood in the front entrance, wiping his hands on his coat. Sombre now, he surveyed the faces of his gang.

‘This is for Scraper,’ he said.

The gang responded, and one word was stamped on the quiet air. ‘Scraper!’

Then they were running towards the fence, the rest of the curses spilling from Vasco’s hands, streaming out behind him, scattering across the mud. They split into groups, according to plan, just as the sirens started in the distance.

Two hours later each one of the gang-members reported in by phone, as arranged. There’d been no arrests. Lying in bed that night, Jed played the whole thing back. One picture stuck. It was Vasco walking out of the door in his leather coat, the roof on fire above his head.

He woke early the next morning. It was still cool, but he opened the window and, leaning on the ledge, looked down at the river. A ship slid by. Then another. Years later, in exile, he would watch the railway trucks from his hotel, and it would sink a well in him, and he would taste the same calm water.

One night Nathan woke and he was falling. He landed at the bottom of a flight of stairs. It was dark. He reached out, touched a wall. It felt like brick. This was the second time it had happened. The other time he hadn’t woken up. He’d just walked round the house turning all the taps on and Dad had walked round after him and turned them off again. He wasn’t at home now, though. It didn’t feel like home. It was too cold. Too big. He sat still on the cold floor. He tried to work out where he was.

There was a bitter smell. Like metal. No, like oil. And slowly he put it together. Usually he spent at least part of each summer at Aunt Yvonne’s house, but this year she was ill and he’d been unable to go. Dad had sent him on summer camp instead. It was run by people called the Pilgrims. It was a sort of adventure holiday with a bit of God thrown in. They were staying down the coast from Moon Beach in a building that used to be an army barracks, and it still smelt of that thin, dark oil that soldiers rub into guns.

There were three identical dormitories in the barracks, one on top of the other. The stairs that linked the dormitories were also identical. They were strange stairs, wide and deep, their edges sheathed in rubber. His feet didn’t know these stairs the way they knew the stairs at home. He must’ve stumbled almost straight away. This being so, it made sense to think that he’d come from the dormitory directly above. Pleased with this piece of logic, feeling better already despite the bruises on his knee and hip, he climbed back up the stairs and opened the dormitory door. The air churned with the breathing of the other boys. The tall windows were severe with moonlight. He walked to where his bed was, then stopped. He couldn’t believe it. There was somebody sleeping in it. Was he in the wrong dormitory after all? No, look. That blanket on the bed, it was his. He could tell by the satiny edge to it. It was his pale-blue blanket from home. Dad had taken it out of the airing cupboard specially.

He went up to the head of the bed and shook the sleeping boy by the shoulder. ‘What are you doing in my bed?’

‘It’s my bed,’ came the reply.

‘It’s my bed,’ Nathan hissed. ‘You’re in my bed.’

The boy mumbled, shrugged, rolled over.

Nathan checked again, this time by looking out of the window. The view was exactly as it should be. The wide, grey parade ground; the rifle range; four palm trees. It was his bed.

He went round to the other side, shook the boy’s shoulder again. ‘This is my bed,’ he said, ‘honestly.’

The boy opened his eyes. There was nothing in his eyes. No sense, no recognition.

‘You’ve got to go back to your own bed,’ Nathan explained.

The boy lifted his head off the pillow and stared at Nathan with his dark, blank eyes. He spoke very clearly, as if he was reciting something from memory, something he’d learned but didn’t understand. ‘It’s not your bed,’ he said, ‘so go away,’ and then he lowered his head and closed his eyes. In five seconds he was asleep again. Nathan could tell by the breathing. He knew about breathing. He’d spent whole nights lying awake and listening to it, making sure it didn’t stop.

He took one step backwards. He couldn’t risk talking any louder. He might wake someone up and then there’d be a scandal. Someone sleeping in your bed, it didn’t look good. There’d been a scandal at the camp two years before. Two boys were sent home early. They’d been found in the rifle range after lights out. Everyone knew what that meant.

Miserable now, and cold, he did the only thing he could think of: he began to insert himself into his bed alongside the other boy. They were narrow beds and it took him long minutes, with long minutes of stillness in between, to get into a position where sleep might be possible. He must’ve fallen asleep in the end, however, because he woke suddenly and it was light. He was a different person to the person he’d been during the night. He looked around and panicked. The blanket on the bed, it wasn’t pale-blue like his, it was pale-green. He looked across at the next bed and recognised the face. It belonged to one of the prayer-leaders. It was so obvious this morning. He was in the wrong dormitory. The wrong bed.

Praying nobody had seen him, he eased out of the bed. He tiptoed the fifty yards to the door. Opened it without making one single creak, then closed it again, just as silently. Dad would’ve been proud of him. Back downstairs he slid into his own cold bed and, closing his eyes, pretended he’d been there all night.

He realised how narrow his escape had been when, less than five minutes later, the rising-bell began to sound. But, as it turned out, somebody must’ve seen him. Word went round at breakfast that Christie had slept in someone else’s bed. Later that day he was summoned to the padre’s office.

‘So tell me, Christie,’ the padre said, resting his chin on one hand and looking steadily into Nathan’s soul, ‘what exactly happened last night?’

‘I was sleepwalking.’

The padre said nothing.

‘If you don’t believe me, ask my father,’ Nathan said. ‘He knows I do it.’

‘Do you know why you do it?’

Nathan shrugged. ‘My father says it started after my mother died.’

No action was taken, but that didn’t stop the rumours spreading. Overnight Nathan acquired the reputation for being some kind of prostitute and nothing he said could change anyone’s mind. His blond hair and his green eyes were used as evidence against him. The only thing the boys weren’t sure of was how much he charged.

Three nights later he walked in his sleep again, but this time he woke up in a field. Once he’d recovered from the terror of not knowing where he was, he felt only relief. There was nothing scandalous about a field. Though, once again, his absence from his own bed was noted and people thought the worst.

He spent the last two weeks of the holidays at home. As the days passed and the new semester loomed, he was overtaken by a sense of dread. He knew that some of the boys at camp went to the same school as he did. What if they remembered? What if word got out? Dad took him into the sitting-room one day and asked him what the matter was. He told Dad that he didn’t want to go back to school. Dad wanted to know why. It was a question that he found he couldn’t answer. So back he went.

For the first few days he hardly spoke. He tried to will himself into a kind of invisibility. It seemed to be working, because he heard nothing. Then, one evening during the second week, he was leaving the pool with Tip when he noticed a thin figure sitting on the grass bank under the streetlamp. Red baseball cap, acne, spectacles. Something contaminating about him. Like you could get a disease just by looking.

‘What’s he doing here?’ Nathan asked.

Tip looked. ‘You know him?’

‘I’ve seen him around. Blackmailed his mother or something, didn’t he?’

A grin from Tip. ‘You heard about that?’

‘It was all over the school.’

‘Yeah,’ and Tip nodded, ‘yeah, I guess it was.’ He turned to the thin figure who had uncoiled from the bank and was shambling over. ‘Hey, Jed, what’s up?’

Jed didn’t answer. He was looking at Nathan. ‘There’s going to be a shark run,’ he said.

‘Great,’ Tip said. ‘Who’s doing it?’

‘I’ll give you one guess.’ Jed was still looking at Nathan.

Tip understood and looked away. ‘How come?’

‘There’s talk about him. We want to see if he’s guilty.’

Nathan’s heart sank. So they knew.

‘What talk?’ Tip asked, but Jed wouldn’t say.

Nathan spoke to Tip. ‘It’s not true,’ he said, ‘none of it’s true,’ but nobody was listening.

‘He a good swimmer?’ Jed was looking at Nathan, but he was talking to Tip.

Tip said he was.

‘Oh shit,’ and Jed smirked. ‘Looks bad.’

Tip scraped at the gravel with his boot.

‘He’ll do it, won’t he?’ Jed said.

‘I guess.’

‘What’s wrong?’ Jed said. ‘He chicken?’

‘Ask him,’ Tip said.

‘What’s a shark run?’ Nathan said.

Jed took Tip’s sleeve. ‘It’s happening in Blackwater Bay, Saturday night. It’s your job to make sure he’s there.’ Then he turned to leave. Tip turned with him.

‘Hey, Tip,’ Nathan called out. ‘What’s all this about?’

Tip spoke over his shoulder. ‘I’ll tell you Saturday. I’ve got to go now.’

Nathan was left standing with his bicycle.

He watched Tip and Jed slouch off into the night. As they passed through the streedamp’s pyramid of light, he saw the word WOMB painted across the back of Jed’s cheap leather jacket. It was no surprise to learn that Jed was part of the gang.

He watched them move beyond the light and vanish into the darkness where the road was. It was as if they’d both been switched off, as if they’d never been there at all. If only. A fine rain began to fall. He climbed on to his bicycle. He rode fast, but he was still soaked by the time he reached home.

The Shark Run

Summer rose from the river like a sack of dead air. Jed had been living in the house on Mangrove Heights for almost six months now and nobody had even seemed to notice, let alone object. Mario treated him as if he’d always been there. He looked at Jed in the same way that he listened to the money on the far side of the river; Jed was as real as all his other hallucinations. Rita was never in the house long enough to suspect that Jed might actually be living there; she just thought he stayed over a lot. Reg was no problem either. He rarely left his room. You heard him sometimes — a creak on the stairs, the click of a door — but you never saw him. And there hadn’t been a sound from Muriel. It was as if Jed had moved from one dimension to another. His original dimension hadn’t reported him missing, and his new dimension didn’t acknowledge his presence. Maybe what he’d really done was end up somewhere between the two. Some days he almost felt invisible.

One morning in July, while everyone was still asleep, he left the house. The moment he stepped on to the platform in Mangrove East, a train pulled in. It took him across the river to Baker Park. There was a Sweetwater bus waiting at the stop when he walked out of the station. Everything seemed preordained, blessed. If someone had tried to assassinate him that morning, the bullet would’ve missed his head by a quarter of an inch.

It was still only seven-forty-five when he turned the corner into Mackerel Street. His mother left for work at around nine. Used to, anyway. There’d be enough time; more than enough. He wondered what she’d say when she saw him. He wondered if he’d grown.

He worked his way round to the back of the house. The kitchen door was open, and sunlight spilled into the room. She was standing by the fridge, peeling the silver foil off the top of a yoghurt. Maybe she sensed the light change behind her because she turned suddenly and saw him, and her left hand jerked sideways, knocking a carton of orange juice on to the floor. She fell to her knees with a cloth. One of his hands wandered away from his body, out into the air. It’s only juice, he wanted to say. But it was better to say nothing. He knew her. It was already too late. He always seemed to make her break things. He didn’t even have to touch anything. It was like those women with high voices, except he didn’t even have to sing. He stayed where he was, on the doorstep. The kitchen floor looked dangerous, somehow. He might step on it and fall right through.

She wrung the cloth out in the sink, her face holy and still, as if they were her own tears that she was wringing out of the cloth, her own tears splattering on to the bright metal.

And then, without turning, ‘Where’ve you been, Jed?’

That break in her voice. As if his absence was a hangnail and it had caught on every day that had passed since he had gone. It sounded so convincing that he almost believed her.

‘Why?’ he said. ‘Have you been worried?’

‘Worried?’ She was facing him now, arms folded. ‘Of course I’ve been worried.’

‘Did you think something bad had happened?’

‘For Christ’s sake, Jed, it’s been months. Where’ve you been?’

‘What did you do? Did you call the police?’

‘You told me not to.’

He looked at her. That wasn’t the reason. ‘You didn’t call anyone, did you?’

‘I called school. I called your friends —’

‘I’ve been staying with a friend. I don’t remember you calling.’

‘Which friend’s that?’

She was sly, but he wasn’t falling for her tricks.

‘Did you leave a message?’ he said. ‘If you did, I never got it.’

Of course she hadn’t left a message. But he had this knife and he had to twist it. It was the same old duel.

‘You don’t change,’ she said, ‘do you?’

He didn’t say anything. He tried the floor with one foot, as if it was water. It held.

‘You’re only thirteen, Jed. I’ve a right to know where you —’

‘Fourteen.’

‘What?’

‘I’m fourteen now. You didn’t even know.’

‘It was a mistake.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was, wasn’t it?’

He’d forgotten his birthday too. It had happened a couple of months back, and he’d completely forgotten. It hadn’t hurt him to forget. It only hurt him now, now he’d found out that she’d forgotten too. That’s what birthdays were. Days when you found out where you stood. Who was on your side and who wasn’t. Nothing to do with how old you were.

The sun was in his eyes. He shifted.

‘You seen Pop?’ he asked.

‘Not for a while.’

He nodded. ‘Well, anyway,’ he said, ‘I just thought I’d come and see how you were.’

And now you’ve seen. And now you’ve remembered.

‘You’re not coming in?’ Her voice had softened.

He shook his head. ‘I should get going.’

‘Come and sit down, Jed. I’ll make you a cup of coffee.’

‘I’ve got to go.’

‘So you’re not going to tell me anything.’

He stepped back into the yard.

‘I’m your mother, Jed. I’m supposed to know. Legally.’

‘Since when did you care about legally?’

‘I’ll call the police.’

He shrugged. ‘Call them.’ He had nothing in common with her. It was as if even the blood in their veins had been changed.

He tried to think of something.

‘How’s Adrian?’ he said.

She looked blank. ‘Who?’

It was lucky that Dad went to bed so early.

Nathan waited twenty minutes, then he opened the french windows and stepped out into the garden. There was no light showing behind Dad’s bedroom curtains. He must be asleep already. Back indoors, Nathan changed into the clothes he’d hidden under the stairs: a black sweater, old jeans, sneakers. He let himself out of the house, leaving the door key on the porch, in the third cactus from the left, then he rode down to the subway station, locked his bicycle to the railings, and caught one of the silver trains that went over the bridge into the city.

He got out at Mangrove Central. Tip was already waiting at the barrier. The clock in the ticket office said ten-thirty.

‘You’re late,’ Tip said.

‘Yeah, well,’ and Nathan grimaced, ‘had to wait for my old man to go to bed, didn’t I?’

Blackwater Bay lay at the east end of the harbour, but from Mangrove Central it was inland, due north. It was an area that he’d been taught to avoid, and he moved on light feet, as if the streets could open up and swallow him. He didn’t know where he was, and said as much to Tip. Tip just nodded, his eyes swivelling in their swollen lids. He was chewing a huge knot of gum. There was no place left for talk. Nathan felt a tightening in his belly now. He felt he was walking towards his own slaughter. No, not walking towards it. Being led.

‘This shark run,’ he said, as casually as he could manage, ‘anyone done it before?’

‘Scraper did it once.’

‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

Tip nodded. ‘PS did it too.’

Great. Just great. Scraper had always been a guinea-pig. If someone had an idea, they always tried it out on old Scraper. He was one of those people who’d do anything. He had a slack smile that covered both pain and pleasure, so you couldn’t tell what he was feeling, you couldn’t tell the difference. If you’d told him to cut his head off, he would’ve done it, and that smile’d still be on his face afterwards. As for PS, he was nuts. He’d do it for a dare. Just as long as you didn’t make him take those phones off his head. It was no consolation to hear that Scraper and PS had done the shark run, no consolation at all. He wished he’d never asked.

They were walking along Five Dock Road. Trees lined one side, the grey grass of a park between. Dockyards on the other. This was the east end of the harbour, more than a mile from the bridge. The water stopped here. Half a dozen bays of stagnant, black water, the surface smeared with oil slicks, condoms, orange peel, insults hurled at the water by the land.

They passed a row of padlocked gates: ALLIED COAL. PIONEER CEMENT. STERLING SHIP REPAIRS AND ENGINEERING. They paused to watch a crane sink its jaws into the open hold of a ship and rise again with a mouthful of coal, dust spilling from between its teeth, grey against the brown night sky, then Tip nudged Nathan in the ribs, held his watch up, and they hurried on.

They turned down an alley, crossed a narrow iron bridge that spanned a canal. The canal had smooth, concrete banks and held no more than a couple of feet of water, water that was sealed in by a lid of green slime. Metal spars stuck out, like the elbows of people who’d drowned. They climbed over a gate and suddenly they were walking on grass. A breeze clattered in the palm trees that bordered the canal. The grass sloped down to a wall of loose rocks. Beyond the rocks lay the harbour.

‘This is the place,’ Tip said, and Nathan, who’d been hoping they’d never arrive, began to shiver.

As he looked round he saw several figures moving towards him. They fanned out in an arc, ten-feet gaps between them, like a net trawling for fish. The net closed and suddenly Vasco was standing in front of Tip, black leather coat and a cigarette in the shelter of his palm. He pulled on the cigarette and in the brief red glow Nathan saw the faces of the Womb Boys: José PS Mendoza, Cramps Crenshaw, Slim Jimmy Chung, Jed Morgan, Thomas Baby Vail, two others he didn’t know the names of, and the ghost of Scraper O’Malley, half his face caved in, inlaid with silver from that fast car’s fender. They were all there, passing a bottle around. Scraper drank too, twisting his mouth away from the wound.

Vasco spoke to Tip. ‘It’s almost eleven. What kept you?’

‘Trains’re fucked up.’ Tip took the bottle and swallowed a mouthful, then he wiped his lips on his sleeve.

Why had he lied? Maybe, Nathan thought, because you didn’t mention things like family to Vasco. He wouldn’t’ve known what you were talking about.

Vasco pulled on his cigarette again, let the breeze haul the smoke across his teeth. He turned to Nathan. ‘You’ve got a pretty bad reputation.’

Nathan looked at his feet.

‘That stuff you’ve been doing, you’ve been doing it at God camp. God don’t like that, Christie. I don’t like it either.’

‘I got into his bed, that’s all. I thought —’

‘That’s all.’ Vasco laughed, and two or three gang members joined in.

‘I was sleepwalking,’ Nathan said.

Jed stepped forwards. He was wearing a T-shirt that said SUICIDE PACT on the front. On the back it said YOU FIRST. ‘You were what?’ he said.

‘I was sleepwalking.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘I was. I’ve been sleepwalking for years. Ever since —’

‘Ever since what?’ Jed had come a step closer. Nathan could see the dead flakes of skin on his face.

‘Nothing’

‘OK, this is the thing,’ Vasco said. ‘He does the shark run. If he gets taken, he’s innocent. If he survives, he’s guilty. Right?’

‘Right,’ shouted the Womb Boys.

‘That’s not fair,’ Nathan said.

Jed stretched his head out on his long, reptile neck and leered into Nathan’s face. ‘Who the fuck said anything about fair?’

Vasco lifted one arm towards the water. ‘See that?’ He was pointing at a warehouse that had the words VENUS ISLAND CONTAINER TERMINAL painted across its metal roof.

Nathan nodded.

‘What you got to do is, you got to swim to it,’ Vasco said. ‘That’s the shark run.’

‘I still don’t get it,’ Nathan said. ‘Why’s it called the shark run?’

Sniggers from the gang.

Vasco led him down to the waterline and showed him a sign that was mounted on a metal pole. On the sign was the silhouette of someone swimming freestyle with a red bar drawn through it. Below it were the words DANGER SHARKS.

‘That’s why,’ Vasco said.

Nathan looked round, caught Tip’s eye.

‘PS did it,’ Tip said.

‘You told me that,’ Nathan said.

‘Wore his headphones,’ Jed said. ‘So he wouldn’t hear the sharks coming.’

PS was nodding. Though he might just’ve been nodding to the imaginary music in his head.

‘This is different,’ Vasco said. ‘This is a trial.’

‘If a shark gets you,’ Jed said, ‘you won’t feel anything. Just cold.’ He leered. ‘Just cold where a piece of you’s gone.’

Vasco nodded. ‘Yeah, I heard that too.’

Nathan stared out into the bay. A few weeks before they’d found a girl’s body floating six miles off the coast. She’d been swimming on Moon Beach and a shark had taken her. Her name, he remembered, was Shelley. According to her mother, Shelley had always been ‘real strong in the water’.

Vasco pulled his sleeve up and pointed at the tombstone tattoo on his bicep. The name on the stone was Scraper O’Malley. No dates. ‘Just think,’ he said. ‘You could be next.’ His teeth shone in the moonlight. ‘That’s what you’re here for, in this shit-forsaken town. To die. To end up on my arm. I’ll carry the lot of you before I’m through,’ and he tipped his head back, and his laughter was so dry it was like sticks snapping in his throat, and his shoulders shook under his famous leather coat.

There was a hysteria to Vasco, and it was the first time Nathan had been close enough to notice it. The members of Vasco’s gang, they followed him because they couldn’t follow him. Nobody could go where he went, but seeing someone do that, it made you want to try. They got as close as they could, and when people did that it looked like some kind of worship. Nathan felt the power of this, the blast, like heat from a furnace, and for a moment he forgot to feel scared.

Tip took the bottle off PS. ‘Here,’ he said to Nathan. ‘Have some, it’ll keep you warm.’

‘Yeah,’ PS said, ‘kept me warm,’ and he opened his mouth to laugh and left it open, but no laughter came out. So he closed it again and went on listening to music that didn’t exist.

Nathan didn’t bother looking at the label. He just raised the bottle to his lips and swallowed twice. Handed the bottle back again. Nothing at first, then the whole of his insides lit up. He stripped down to his shorts and felt the breeze move curious fingers across his skin, as if it was blind and trying to work out who he was. He climbed over the cold, slippery rocks, climbed down to the water’s edge. So black it looked, just like its name, with bits of smashed gold from the lights on the highway. Feel your way in slow, Tip had told him. There’s all kinds of shit in there. The clash and sneeze of a truck as it shifted gears on the causeway. He wasn’t thinking of the danger, of the sharks. He was too preoccupied with how strange it felt to be standing at the edge of the harbour in the middle of the night with nothing on. The world had never felt so big.

The water rose past his knees. Another couple of feet and he’d be able to push himself forwards and begin. Over his shoulder he could see the Womb Boys fanned out on the rocks. Silent now, just watching. This was their evening’s entertainment. A small red light glowed. Vasco’s cigarette. Like the light that shows on a machine when the power’s on. No use delaying this. He faced the container terminal again and pushed himself forwards, into the harbour.

He swam breaststroke, that way he could keep his head out of the water. It also meant he couldn’t cut through the water as efficiently, it meant he was slower. The waves were small, but they came in quick succession, they kept slapping him in the face, always on the same cheek. He tasted oil on his lips.

Halfway across he heard Dad’s voice. Wrap up warm, Dad was saying. Don’t forget to wrap up warm.

Nathan began to laugh. He drank the harbour, one mouthful, then another. He was choking now. He had to stop, tread water, he had to fight for breath. And that was when the fear took hold, in that moment, when he was upright in the water, when his legs were dangling, he pictured what might be lying on the bottom, there’d be bodies, there’d be people who’d turned blue with cold down there, and what if one of them reached up and seized him by the ankle, and then he remembered the sharks, their teeth sinking into him, their grip like ice, just cold where a piece of you’s gone, and he began to swim as fast as he could, he switched to freestyle, swam the way he swam when he was swimming for the city, he was back in the pool on Sunset Drive, he tasted chlorine now instead of oil, he even heard the cheering, that tinny rushing sound, and the next time he looked up he was only twenty-five yards out, and he still had his legs, and he could see the Womb Boys sitting on a parapet, they must’ve run round by the highway, or else Vasco had stolen a car again, he was always doing that, apparently, that was why he’d been expelled.

He lowered his legs, but his feet sank into sludge, so he swam as close to the island as he could and then crawled the last few yards on hands and knees, through the shallows, over cans and bottles and plastic bags, and up on to the towpath, and it wasn’t until then that he heard the voices:

‘Guil-ty, guil-ty, guil-ty.’

Vasco stepped forwards. ‘Sharks must be busy someplace else tonight,’ he said, and everybody laughed.

Nathan wanted to join in, but it was hard to laugh, his teeth were chattering too much. He was beginning to shiver again, and the wind made his skin feel like metal.

‘Where are my clothes?’

Tip threw him his clothes. Nathan wrapped himself in his sweater, and stood hunched, his hands clasped under his chin. Tip handed him the bottle, almost empty now. He took a mouthful, swilled it round, and spat it on the concrete.

‘That water,’ Vasco said, ‘bet that water tastes real bad.’

PS pushed his phones away from his ears. ‘Swallowed about half of it myself,’ he said. ‘Never been the same since.’ And slid his phones back over his ears again. Tss-Tss-Tss.

The gang howled. PS and his jokes.

Jed came over. ‘Bet you were shit-scared.’

‘Anyone would’ve been,’ Nathan said. ‘You would’ve been too.’

Jed pushed his thin lips out and shook his head.

‘Yeah, you would,’ Nathan said.

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Jed said and, reaching behind him, he produced the sign that said DANGER SHARKS. ‘There’s no sharks out there.’

Nathan was staring at the sign.

‘Yeah, it’s the same sign,’ Jed said. ‘Vasco got it a few weeks back. Didn’t you, Vasco?’

Vasco was smoking a cigarette on the parapet. He seemed bored now, his fires had burned low. He blew a long slow trumpet of smoke into the night. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Ripped it off from some beach. Some beach somewhere.’ He eased down off the wall and flicked his stub into the harbour. Tss. ‘Let’s split.’ He had this way of talking to nobody in particular. The sky or something. But everybody listened.

The Womb Boys began to slope off down the causeway. Nathan picked up the rest of his clothes and was about to follow them when Jed barred his way. ‘Not you.’

He had to find his own way back. By the time he got home, it was after two. Closing the front door, his hand slipped and the lock snapped shut.

‘Shit,’ he whispered, and stood in the hallway, listening.

He heard a creak from Dad’s bed and a click as Dad’s bedroom door opened. Dad’s voice, wary and thin, floated down from the landing. ‘George?’

Standing at the bottom of the stairs, Nathan saw Dad appear at the top, one hand clutching the banisters.

‘It’s me, Dad. Nathan. I’m just going to bed.’

‘I thought I heard the front door.’

‘No, it must’ve been the kitchen you heard.’

Luckily, Dad’s head was blurred with all the pills he took to sleep. The front door and the kitchen door made completely different sounds. Normally he would’ve realised that.

‘Please try and be quiet, Nathan.’

‘Sorry, Dad.’

A few minutes later he lay down in bed and stared into the darkness above his head. It hurt to lie to Dad and he wished he didn’t have to, but Dad was so fragile and the truth could smash him. He only lied to protect Dad. Isn’t that what you did for someone you loved, lied for them? And his lies were soft, like pillows. They were good lies, he told himself. They were white. And, having convinced himself of that, he turned over, and drifted into sleep.

When Vasco went missing, Jed didn’t even notice at first. Vasco was always out, doing his rounds or lying low. He always had business to attend to. There was stuff that was hot to be shifted. He was dealing too. Not that Vasco approved of drugs. It was just that he was fighting a war, and drugs were the most efficient way of raising finance. ‘After all,’ he’d say, ‘politicians do it.’ Sometimes he’d be gone for twenty-four hours. Then he’d call Jed from some apartment, some bar. Or he’d simply turn up at the house. Not this time. This time Jed didn’t hear a thing.

On the third day Jed went upstairs to look for Mario. Maybe Mario would know. Maybe those Gorelli ears had picked something up. He knocked on Mario’s door. Wheels trundled over the floor and the door eased open.

Over Mario’s head Jed saw dark lounge suits hanging from the picture rail, and sepia photographs of the handkerchief factory in its heyday framed in gold. The light in the room was muted and brown, and the air smelt of Mario’s paraffin lamp and the oil that he used to lubricate the moving parts of his two wheelchairs.

‘You know where Vasco is?’ Jed asked.

Mario seemed irritated. ‘How would I know that?’

‘I just thought you might’ve heard something.’

‘No.’ And then Mario’s head tipped cunningly on his neck, and the eye nearest to Jed gleamed, and he lurched forwards, as if he’d been shot in the back, a pearl of spittle on his lower lip. ‘I thought I heard a thousand-dollar bill today. Do you think,’ and his eye gleamed up at Jed, shiny as glass, and just as dead, ‘do you think they make thousand-dollar bills?’

Jed didn’t know about thousand-dollar bills, but he knew about Mario. Just then, suddenly. He knew why Mario had never fucked anyone. Mario was too selfish. He wanted to keep all his sperm to himself. Nobody else deserved it. And so he looked like a Roman emperor and rode around in wheelchairs and pretended he could hear money. What a character, people said. Isn’t he good for his age? they said. But he wasn’t a character and he wasn’t good for his age. He was a piece of shit for his age. He was a fraud.

‘There’s no such thing,’ Jed said, ‘and you fucking know it.’

He didn’t even wait for Mario’s reaction. He whirled out on to the landing and stood there, trembling. He’d have to try Reg. As he stamped off down the corridor, his footsteps fascist on the floorboards, it occurred to him that he’d never actually set eyes on Reg. Not ever. Not even once.

He knocked on Reg’s door. A silence, then a tiny scraping sound. He could feel Reg staring at him through the Judas eye.

‘What do you want?’

‘I’m looking for Vasco.’

‘He’s not here.’

Jed rested his cheek against the door. Like a confessional, only nobody was telling anybody anything. He heard the Judas eye scrape shut, then the creak of floorboards as Reg backed away.

‘Reg?’ He knocked on the door again. ‘Reg!’

But Reg had withdrawn deep into the room. He’d pulled Jesus over his head like a blanket and he wouldn’t be coming out for a long time.

The streets seemed empty that morning. Jed scoured the neighbourhood. Somebody had to know something. It was a hot day. Only faded curtains stirring lazily in apartment windows.

At last he found Silence, Tip’s ten-year-old brother, standing in a patch of wasteground, throwing stones at a row of tin cans. It was one of Silence’s favourite things. He couldn’t hear the stone hit the can, or the can hit the ground, but he liked the way it looked.

‘You seen Vasco?’ Jed said.

Silence picked the words off Jed’s lips, neatly, one by one, the way you pick fleas off a dog. He shook his head and began to hunt around in the scrub grass. Eventually he found what looked like a piece of a bicycle. He drew a circle in the mud, a circle with two slit eyes and a downturned mouth.

‘A face,’ Jed said. ‘Vasco?’

Silence nodded.

He sealed the face off with a series of vertical lines and reinforced the downturned mouth.

‘Oh no,’ Jed said. ‘It’s jail, right?’

Silence nodded again and touched the lobe of his ear.

Jed translated. ‘That’s what you heard.’

He watched as Silence scraped his heel across the picture, as if it might be used as evidence. Silence had always been very earnest and very careful. A secret, you always felt, would be safer with him than with anyone.

‘You know where?’ he asked.

Silence shrugged. He picked up a stone and slung it at the row of tin cans. One dropped. Silence had this way of putting an end to things. That stone, it meant he’d told Jed all he knew. End of conversation.

Jed thanked him. He walked home slowly, the long way round.

That night Rita rang. She was crying.

‘Have you heard?’ she said.

‘Yeah.’

‘What’s going to happen now?’

‘I don’t know. What did they pick him up for?’

‘Arson.’

That figured. ‘Where is he?’

‘They’re holding him downtown, but they’re going to move him soon.’

‘Where to?’

‘Some detention centre. They won’t let you visit, though. You’re not old enough. Only people like parents can go.’

‘He hasn’t got any parents.’

‘I know.’

He called the place the following morning, and they confirmed what Rita had told him. Nobody under the age of eighteen. That meant even Rita didn’t qualify for a couple of months. He wrote a letter instead, asking Vasco what had happened, and what he should do. It was ten days before he received the reply, and it wrongfooted him when it came.

Listen, Jed, there is something you can do for me. I’ve got this brother called Francis. He’s about nine. Lives with some family over in Torch Bay. I go and see him, like maybe every couple of weeks, but now I can’t any more. Maybe you could go and explain things to him. He’s at 25025 Oakwood Drive. Take it easy. Vasco. P.S. The woman who lives there is a BITCH.

A brother?

He told Tip, and Tip seemed just as astonished. ‘Christ,’ Tip said, ‘he kept that under his hat, didn’t he?’

The next day Jed caught a bus to the harbour. He sat on a green bench at the end of Quay 5, waiting for the Torch Bay ferry. The sky had clouded over, and wind scuffed and pinched the grey water. It was the kind of day that goaded you until you felt like smashing it.

Such anger in him already.

How was he going to, as Vasco put it, explain things? He couldn’t even explain things to himself.

The ferry filled with tourists. Their sun-visors, their ice-creams. Their ceaseless, eager babble. Instead of taking a seat, Jed leaned against the metal door that led down to the engines. He read the instructions on what to do if the boat capsized. Half of him wished it would.

When the ferry docked in Torch Bay, he was the first down the gangplank. He pushed through the crush of people on the quay, slipped into the quiet of a sidestreet. Three or four blocks back from the harbour the ground began to slope upwards; boutiques gave way to houses; trees appeared.

Oakwood Drive was a wide residential street, its sidewalks planted with mahogany and wild oak. Houses stood in their own grounds, some Spanish-looking, some ranch-style, all of them the size of palaces. There was no dirt here, no life. The only sound came from a man who was operating a machine that sucked up leaves. It didn’t matter where Jed put his eyes, it always looked like a postcard. His mother would’ve loved it.

25025 Oakwood Drive was a mansion. Red bricks, white shutters. Immaculate green lawns. Even a flagpole. The gravel crunched under Jed’s boots as he started up the drive. He felt watched. It was nothing like his experience outside Reg Gorelli’s door. No Judas eye here, no lens to draw his nose forwards till he looked like a fish or a rat. No, this watching was far more sophisticated: it was more like a landscape, and he was a speck on the landscape, a dot, something you could swat with ease, and nobody would ever hear, not if you coughed at the same time.

He searched the porch for a bell, but all he could find was a chain of wrought-iron links. He reached up and pulled on it, half expecting a sudden rush of water. Instead he heard two solemn notes that sounded stolen from a church and, before the second of these notes had died away, the door opened and a woman stood in front of him. She had high, horizontal cheekbones, so her eyes seemed to be perching on ledges. Eyes like birds of prey. Any moment one of them might swoop down, snatch at him, and swerve away again, his heart dripping in its beak. Jed heard Vasco’s voice: The woman who lives there is a BITCH.

He swallowed. ‘I’ve come to see Francis. I’ve got a message from his brother.’

‘His brother?’ Her voice was so cold. She probably kept it in the icebox.

‘Yeah, his brother. Vasco.’

‘Francis has no brother.’

‘But Vasco told me.’

‘Who’s that?’ said another voice, smaller, younger, not cold at all. ‘Who’s at the door?’

Jed tried to peer round the woman, but she narrowed the gap to six inches and filled it with her buzzard eyes and her rippling turquoise dress.

‘Francis has no brother,’ she repeated. ‘There must be some mistake.’

Strange that she should choose that word.

‘Goodbye.’ She closed the door.

A gust of air-conditioned air moved past his face and lost itself in the heat of the driveway.

He didn’t feel safe until he reached the sidewalk. Then he looked back over his shoulder. The house lay on its lawn, perfectly still, immaculate, blank. He thought of his old tapes, the ones he’d had for years, the ones he’d used over and over again. Their silence was always different to the silence of a new tape: it was loaded, prickly, with things recorded and erased; a silence that was like ghosts. That house was an old tape masquerading as a new one. It had recorded and erased, but it was pretending it had just come out of the cellophane. It had ghosts, but it wasn’t owning up to them.

He bought a bag of Hawaiian Teardrops and sat on a wooden bench in the Torch Bay ferry terminal. Hawaiian Teardrops were hard chunks of pineapple candy that were coated with sugar crystals. If you ate too many of them, they took the skin off the inside of your mouth. He ate the whole bag and stared out over the grey water. Rain scratched on the windows, but it was still hot, hard to breathe. He felt the door close again. And that gust of cool air across his face.

He remembered a morning not so long ago. He’d woken to the sound of hammer-blows. He’d reached out, across the gap between the two mattresses, and shoved Vasco in the ribs.

‘What’s that noise?’

‘I don’t know,’ Vasco mumbled. ‘Maybe Reg is crucifying himself again.’

Jed put his glasses on and eased out of bed. He poked his head out of the room. A man in blue dungarees was fitting a lock on Reg’s door.

‘Morning,’ Jed said. ‘Nice lock’

The man patted the lock. ‘This is the business, this is. You can’t get stronger than this.’

The new lock was just the latest addition to Reg’s defence system. They never really found out whether it was to keep Jesus in or the world out. Maybe there was nothing happening behind the door, or maybe there was Reg fastened to a home-made cross, some white cloth draped around his skinny loins, his moustache stained yellow by the vinegar.

Finally it was just another thing you couldn’t get at.

He saw that woman’s eyes widen like wings and leave her face. He saw the blank sockets, smooth as the inside of nests. He had to go and stand on the deck, both hands fastened to the cold rail. The ferry was rolling now, pitching into the waves. Sometimes it stalled, shuddering. Then it pitched forwards into the waves again. The city see-sawed, rain swarmed out of the sky. The inside of his mouth felt sweet but raw. A woman in a green mackintosh asked him if he was all right, she had to ask him three times before he could answer simply, ‘Yes.’

Vasco’s case came up the following month. He was sentenced to eighteen months in a corrective institution. The next thing Jed heard, Vasco was somehow involved in the death of another inmate and he was sent to a top-security detention centre in another county.

Jed had always thought of Vasco as high-frequency. He’d always seen Vasco as a kind of radio, picking up stations that no other radio could pick up. Maybe that was true, but maybe it was also true that he was picking up the wrong stations, stations that were dangerous. Jed had read about people hearing voices. He’d seen it in the paper. Some guy kills fourteen people and then he says, It was the voices, the voices told me to do it. That guy, he’s picking up the wrong stations. And suddenly he feared for his friend.

It was seven years before he saw him again.