The Five Gates of Hell

The First Drop Of Rain

Jed drove north to begin with, his wrist a rectangle of heat and all that numbness just behind his eyes, but after two days the roads drew him inland, over high mountains, and soon he was heading due west. The mountains lay down, sprawled on the land like tired dogs. Then there were no mountains at all. Sometimes he saw a row of trees on the horizon. In the heat-haze they were saints walking on water, they didn’t seem to touch the ground at all. Towards nightfall the sun balanced on the end of the road and then not even his special lenses helped. He’d be half blind by the time he stopped for sleep, his vision clunking with green and purple balls. In the mornings, standing in some motel parking-lot, the air scorched his lungs, it was like breathing the air above a fire. He drove with the windows shut. It was cooler. Skulls and dust outside. Tornadoes that spun across the blue sky like vases thrown on some mad potter’s wheel. The weather was like a scourge, the land could kill you. Out here, on the desert’s edge, penance could be done. Out here he could spend his years of exile.

The first time he drove into Adam’s Creek he saw a picture of Creed in a store window and he stabbed the brake. The car slewed. A truck filled his mirror and overflowed. A sneezing of brakes, a clash of gears, and it lumbered past, the driver glaring down, fingers twitching and a black hole for a mouth. It wasn’t Creed in the window, after all, it was just some advert for brilliantine, but his heart didn’t know the difference and he sat there until it slowed.

Two miles out of town he pulled into a shallow ditch and switched the engine off. Looking around, he saw that he’d parked outside a graveyard. There was no church. Only a tin shelter with three walls and a bench. A few gaunt trees. Some rocks. It was the kind of place where you waited for a bus that never came.

He left his car and moved through the yellow grass, his arms clutched across his chest. He felt the inch of bare skin above his socks as two cold metal bands. He’d never thought that you could shiver in a desert, but it was late afternoon and the sun had fallen behind the hills and a chill wind cut across the graves. The wind dropped once, and he watched in astonishment as flies landed on his face and hands in clots. Then the wind rose again and plucked his top hat off his head and sent it bowling among the stones. He’d been sitting in the car so long, it was hard for him to run. His ankles clicked, his knees snapped, but he was after it, past crosses, round tombs, over mounds. Families passed beneath his feet, and he caught glimpses of their tragedies: TREASURED DAUGHTER. OUR DEAR BABIES. BELOVED WIFE. Only two days before he’d called his mother from a pay-phone on the highway. When she answered, he just listened.

‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Who’s this?’

He waited.

‘That you, Henry?’ she said.

So. It was Henry now.

‘Henry?’ she said, raising her voice now. ‘Is that you?’

He put the phone down. He didn’t exist for her. Henry existed (whoever Henry was). But he didn’t. That was the truth.

His BELOVED MOTHER.

‘Stop,’ he shouted at his hat. ‘Stop,’ he shouted. ‘Wait for me.’

All the biggest words rose off the stones towards him: mother, love, father, memory, son, heaven. He felt nothing. He was nobody his mother knew, and there were no beloveds. He caught his hat and put it on.

He was so cold when he climbed back into the car, his lips mauve in the mirror, his teeth drumming in his head. All week he’d been trying not to think. He’d wanted to drive until anything he remembered would seem as if it had happened to someone else. A movie, another person’s memory, the words of a song. And finally, that afternoon in the graveyard, he knew the door had slammed on his life and the door was one of those big silver refrigerator doors and he saw his life hanging behind that door like meat. It no longer felt like a life. His or anyone else’s.

He fumbled the key into the ignition with numb fingers. Once the engine caught, he turned the car round and drove back into Adam’s Creek, population 2,200, elevation 21 metres.

When he arrived he found that he’d already become something of a legend. The landlord of the Commercial Hotel gave him a nod as he walked through the door. ‘How are you doing?’

Jed nodded. ‘Not bad. You?’

The landlord nodded. ‘Saw you earlier.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. You were the one who braked on Main Street. Denny Buder nearly crushed you flat.’ The landlord was smiling, his face broad and red and open.

Strange to be seeing still things, Jed thought. He was used to white lines, asphalt, trees. All moving. Towards and past. Faces didn’t do that. They just hung in front of you, like lamps.

He blinked. ‘You got a room?’

‘We got single rooms. Seven dollars a night.’ The landlord licked his thumb and flicked the register open. ‘You going to be staying long?’

‘I don’t know yet. A couple of nights, maybe.’

‘Names’s Wayne,’ the landlord said. Jed stuck a hand out.

‘Jed,’ he said. ‘Jed Morgan.’

He paid cash for the room.

‘Yeah,’ Wayne said, ‘just about everyone must’ve saw you this morning. Not often you get someone braking like that on Main Street. And wearing a hat like that and all. Thought you were selling bibles, some of them did.’

When Jed said nothing, Wayne said, ‘You don’t sell bibles, do you?’

Jed shook his head slowly. ‘No, I don’t.’

‘So what do you do then?’

Jed couldn’t figure out why, but he didn’t mind the landlord’s curiosity. In other towns he’d left way before the question mark, his Coke still fizzing at the top of the glass. Now it seemed like a relief to be talking, a novelty, a test of wit.

‘I used to work back east,’ he said. ‘Got laid off. Thought I’d take a trip.’

‘You got here a week ago, you’d’ve cooked.’

‘Still pretty hot.’

‘You did right coming through Adam’s Creek,’ Wayne said. ‘It gets a bit rough round here from time to time, there’s a power station out past the ridge and the boys do their drinking here, but mosdy we’re pretty friendly.’

Rough. Jed smiled. They didn’t know what rough was.

Wayne showed him to a room on the first floor, at the front of the building. A cracked sink, an iron bed. When Jed opened the wardrobe, the empty hangers jangled like wind-chimes. It was a nice illusion. Not even the faintest of breezes here. The window looked out on to a wide wooden verandah with a few deadbeat chairs and a metal table that took one leg off the ground when you leaned on it.

‘Bibles,’ he muttered.

From the verandah you looked down on Main Street, with its asphalt all cracked and splintered by the heat. A high wire-mesh fence divided the street from the railway tracks beyond. The line wasn’t used much any more, Wayne had told him. Only for taking coal from the hills in the south to the power station just over the ridge. The yard was a desert of flint chips and rolling stock that was almost extinct. The signal box had shed its paint. Weeds grew, mauve and yellow, between the rails.

He lay down on his bed that first night, his hands folded on his chest, his boots still on. He’d been driving for days, he’d forgotten how many, and he was tired of the white lines painted down the middle of the highway, he was tired to the centre of his bones. The trouble was, once you’d been driving for that long, you drove right through your tiredness and out into a dreamland where only the road was moving. He’d driven into Adam’s Creek the same way he’d driven into a hundred other small towns. But he’d braked suddenly, and broken the momentum. He’d looked round and it had seemed like just about the first place he’d seen, and some part of him deep down had said: It’s got to be somewhere, why not here? After all, he couldn’t go on driving for ever, he’d just drive straight into another ocean, and that was what he was trying to get away from, wasn’t it, the ocean?

At nine o’clock he left his room and went down to the bar. Wayne drew him a beer. ‘Welcome to Adam’s Creek.’ Wayne turned to the two men at the bar. ‘One creek that never runs dry, eh, boys?’ The laughter that followed was routine. The echo of a million other nights.

Jed hadn’t drunk beer since the night he met Sharon, but he didn’t flinch. He raised his glass. ‘It’s good to be here, Wayne,’ he said, and swallowed half of it before he put it down. He made that noise that men who drink beer make, and wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist.

One of the two men leaned over. ‘So where’s all the bibles then?’

‘Bibles?’ Jed said. ‘What bibles?’

‘Ain’t you selling bibles?’ The man had slack cheeks that shook like jelly when he spoke.

Jed smiled and took a risk. ‘I’d sell my sister first.’

Wayne spluttered. He turned and yelled to the woman who was polishing a glass at the other end of the bar. ‘Did you hear that, Linda? He’d sell his sister first.’

Linda took one look at Jed and went on polishing the glass. ‘Wouldn’t fetch much by the look of it.’

Jed raised a grin. ‘What are you drinking, Linda?’

‘I’ll have a beer,’ she said.

He got drunk that night, though not as drunk as he pretended to be. He was a man drowning his sorrows, he’d decided. He was a man drinking to forget. And slowly he let his sorrows spill. He’d seen a hundred funerals. He knew how it was done. Six or seven drinks inside him, he leaned on the bar. ‘I just want to forget her, Wayne.’

‘Who’s that, Jed?’

‘My wife.’

You couldn’t show up in a place like Adam’s Creek without a few questions being asked, Jed knew that, so he’d dreamed up a story. He’d got the idea from a song he’d heard on the radio while he was driving. It was about a wife who’d cheated on her husband, she’d left him for his best friend, and now the man was on the road trying to mend his broken heart. To him it sounded ridiculous, but he thought it was the kind of lie that people might believe. People like feeling pity for people, it makes them feel lucky. Well, he was going to give them the chance, wasn’t he? After being the man who’d sell his sister, he was about to become the man who’d lost his wife.

‘She made a fool of me, Wayne,’ he said. ‘I just want to forget the whole damn thing.’

‘You go ahead,’ Wayne said. ‘She wasn’t worth it. You just go right ahead and forget her.’

And because Jed couldn’t picture the wife who was supposed to have left him, because he had no idea what she looked like, he found himself believing that he was doing a pretty good job.

When, just before closing, Wayne said, ‘So what’s with the top hat, Jed?’ Jed knew what the answer was, and he was drunk enough to carry it off.

Slowly he removed the hat and slowly he looked down at it, his vision blurred by alcohol, but for all anyone knew it could have been tears. ‘This hat?’ he said. ‘This is the hat I wore to my wedding.’

He looked up. There was a big rear-view mirror over the bar so he could see the glances being exchanged behind his back. He could see the pity surfacing.

‘You know, it’s strange, Wayne, but I’ve completely forgotten what she looks like.’ He smiled bravely. ‘It’s almost like she never existed.’ And, looking down again, he felt the weight of Wayne’s hand on his shoulder.

*

A couple of days, he’d said, but he ended up staying in the Commercial Hotel for almost a year. During the first few months he worked with a gang of local road-menders, filling pot-holes on the highway, smoothing cambers, paving the dirt tracks that led to ranches. He spent most of his daylight hours outside. His lean pocked body tightened, turned brown, found a different shape. In that clear air he felt himself settling into his new skin. Some days he didn’t say a word. He just didn’t have any. Words would take longer. Not that anyone noticed. The road-menders were a sullen bunch. Then, towards Christmas, the work dwindled and he was laid off. He took the first job he could find, washing dishes at the Wang Garden, a Chinese restaurant two blocks down the street from the hotel. Lunchtimes and evenings, $4.50 an hour. Shortly after he started at the restaurant he told Wayne that he was moving to Mrs O’Neill’s boarding house on the corner of Main Street and Railway Avenue.

‘How long are you going to stay there?’ Wayne said. ‘A couple of days?’ He laughed so hard, he almost pulled a muscle.

Mrs O’Neill had startled red hair and a face that was like a dried-up river bed. She sat in her front room with the curtains drawn and the TV on and the door ajar. All you could see through the gap was a strip of wall and half a fridge. There were two pictures taped to the side of the fridge: Jesus and Donald Duck. Mrs O’Neill had the sweetest tooth in Adam’s Creek, and Jed won a place in her affections on his very first day by buying her a Rocky Road on his way back from work. He’d just discovered Rocky Roads. Made from peanuts, nougat, and chunks of glacé cherry, and covered in a thick coating of milk chocolate, it was the best candy bar that he’d ever come across. Whenever he passed Mrs O’Neill’s room after that, it was always, ‘Bring me a Rocky Road, would you, Matt, there’s a dear.’ That was the other thing about Mrs O’Neill. She thought his name was Matt. ‘My name’s Jed,’ he’d told her, more times than he could remember, but every time he passed her door she called out,’ Matt, honey, is that you?’ Maybe it was her way of telling him that she knew he was lying. Not about his name, but about everything else. But then, how could she know that? he thought. How the fuck could she know anything with Jesus and Donald Duck taped to the side of her fridge and her brain blended to mush by all that TV? She didn’t know. Nobody knew.

He had a large room on the second floor, with bright-green walls and a tangerine bedspread. The curtains looked like spring, but a spring that had happened somewhere else: all green shoots and rainfall and blossom. There was a plug-in kettle, an electric ring for cooking on, and a Gideon’s bible, for solace. It was from this room that he wrote his first and only communications with the outside world. One weekend he bought two postcards of the Adam’s Creek power station at night (they were the only postcards there were) and sat down at his rickety table by the window with a pen. He wrote the first card to Mitch. He thanked Mitch again for the tattoo and said it was lasting pretty well, considering. He told Mitch to say hello to his old lady. He said the clock in the local post office was busted and maybe Mitch would drop by and fix it sometime. Then he put, ‘But your bike probably wouldn’t make it, would it? Yours, Jed.’ Grinning, he turned to the second card. This would be for Sharon. There were times when he missed her; hers was the only woman’s body that he’d ever known. He remembered surprising her once at work. She’d just got a job at Simon Peter’s, a twenty-four-hour supermarket chain that catered for all funeral needs. Their logo was a yawning grave (a black triangle with the top cut off). Their slogan? OUR PRICES ARE SIX FEET UNDER EVERYBODY ELSE’S. His eyes lifted to the window, but they didn’t see the telegraph wires or the railway tracks or the range of dusty yellow hills beyond. They saw Sharon standing in the plastic-flowers aisle. She was wearing a black nylon coat and a badge that said SHARON LACEY. SECTION MANAGER. Her eyes widened at the sight of him. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Make like I’m a customer,’ he whispered. ‘Show me where something is.’

She took him to the far aisle and showed him the salt tablets. They were called Weepies. You took them to replace the salt your tears had bereaved you of. Or so the packet said.

He noticed a door that said STAFF ONLY. ‘What’s in there?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Just stock.’

He led her through the door. She was right. Boxes stacked in piles, nobody around. He sat her down and began to unfasten her coat. She smelt of ammonia, violets, sweat. ‘It must be hot wearing all this nylon,’ he said. In the distance he could hear the requiem mass that was being piped at a discreet volume throughout the store.

‘You can’t,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve got my period.’

‘I don’t mind about that.’

‘It’s not safe.’

‘Of course it’s safe. You just said. You’ve got your period.’

‘It’s not safe here,’ Sharon hissed. ‘My job. They’ll kill —’

He was inside her before she could finish the sentence.

‘They won’t kill you,’ he said after a while. ‘You’re too important.’ He tapped her badge. ‘You’re Section Manager.’

‘That’s the whole point,’ she said, but she was laughing by then. ‘I’m supposed to set an example.’

Afterwards Jed tore open the cardboard box they’d done it on. Inside, conveniently, were hundreds of packets of black-edged tissues. As he crouched behind her, mopping the blood off the back of her thighs, he could feel his erection returning. It was the first time he’d realised that a woman’s blood had the power to excite him.

‘You’re crazy,’ Sharon said, ‘you know that?’

But he’d stopped now, he was staring at the tissue.

‘I know who invented these.’ He smiled up at her. ‘I lived in the same house as him once. He thought walking was old-fashioned, so he used to go round in a wheelchair.’

Sharon was shaking her head. ‘Crazy.’

Smiling, he lowered his pen to the paper. He told her he was very far away. He was working in a Chinese restaurant, he said. He hoped she was all right. He hesitated, then he wrote, ‘Remember that time in the storeroom?’

He never really expected to hear back from either of them. He didn’t know why he’d written, except maybe to let people know that he was alive. If you could call working in the kitchens of a Chinese restaurant being alive.

The Wang Garden was like no Chinese restaurant he had ever seen. From the outside it looked like a bank (and with good reason, if Wayne was to be believed: ‘That guy,’ Wayne said, ‘he’s raking it in’). It had a façade of brand-new brick, a solid wooden door, and no windows. But walking inside was like walking into some hijacked piece of a South Sea island. Fake sunbeams played on tables of polished black wood. Guitars crooned softly against a rustling of surf. The real highlight, though, was the grotto, which took up most of one wall. If you looked past the rock pools and the exotic plants, past the miniature waterfall, you could see blue sky, a stand of coconut palms, and even, in the distance, a lagoon. Through hidden speakers came the rhythmic itch of cicadas. And, every twenty minutes or so, a storm broke: thunder rumbled, lightning flickered, and tropical rain came crashing down from the showerheads fitted in the ceiling. The man responsible for all this, the ‘guy’ who was ‘raking it in’, was Mr Zervos. Zervos had a huge dense beard that might have been a cutting from the grotto’s undergrowth. He stamped through the restaurant beating the pineapple air with his short muscular arms. Zervos was the only Greek in town. Everybody called him Adam’s Greek.

The Wang Garden was the only restaurant in that part of the country, unless you counted the Paragon Café, which served pizza and eggs and didn’t seem to know the meaning of its name. At weekends people came from up to fifty miles around. On busy nights like these Zervos paid Jed an extra $1.25 an hour to pack take-outs. He made it sound like a fortune, this extra $1.25, it was only because he liked Jed so much, he didn’t know what had come over him, maybe he had a fever, an extra $1.25, it was madness. And Jed would be smiling, not at Zervos and his torrent of language, but at the memory of the $10,000, the eight thousand $1.25s, that he had thrown in Creed’s face.

He spent most of his time in the kitchens, among blue neon flytraps and steaming silver vats. There was no door between the kitchens and the alley at the back, only a curtain of brown and yellow beads that clicked when there was a breeze, which was just about never because it was summer and the only time the air moved was when Zervos waved his short arms or a truck went past outside. It was one of the busy nights, a Friday, most likely, and he was just spooning some number 42 into a white take-out carton when a voice from behind him whispered, ‘Give me a bit of chicken, mister. I’m going to die of hunger otherwise.’

He looked up and caught his first glimpse of Celia through the beads. He saw some tangled blonde hair, he saw the white light of the kitchen catch on the rough edge of a broken tooth.

‘Go on, one of those little boxes, that’ll do.’

The curtain parted, clicking, and now he saw her hair all coarse and fraying like rope coming undone and her breasts pushing against an old green cardigan, and he knew who she was. He’d heard men in the bar talking about her. Men with nothing in their heads always filled them up with bits of women’s bodies.

‘You can’t come in here,’ he hissed.

She flinched, stepped back. The bead curtain closed behind her, closed over her like water. It was so sudden, so complete, that it unnerved him. He went to the curtain and peered out. She’d flattened herself against the outside wall like someone in a spy movie. She was facing away from him, down the alley.

‘Why don’t you go home to eat like everyone else?’ he said.

She kept her face turned away. ‘It’s my mum and dad. They locked me out while they throw stuff at each other. And I can’t buy anything because I haven’t got any money.’ Now she looked at him. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

He stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Your eyes, they’re pinned wide open.’ She grinned. ‘You look like an astronaut. You look like you just landed back on earth or something and it’s a real shock.’

He said nothing.

‘Where did you come from anyway?’ ‘From the coast.’

‘I know who you are. You’re the strange one who turned up in a top hat. I heard you shouting at it. In the cemetery.’

He handed her the carton of chicken. ‘Here.’

‘Thanks.’ When she smiled her two front teeth stuck out. One of them was chipped. She caught him looking. ‘My brother hit me with a stone.’

‘I’d better go back in,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘I’ll see you around.’

When he turned back into the kitchen, Zervos was scowling at him. ‘Where’s the take-out?’

‘Problem with the chicken.’

‘Problem with the chicken? What problem?’

‘It was bad, Zervos. Bad chicken. I had to throw it out.’

‘You throw out my chicken?’

‘It was bad, Zervos. You can’t give people bad chicken. People die of bad chicken.’

‘My chicken, my chicken.’ Zervos was dancing on the tiled floor and beating at the air.

‘Chicken’s a weapon, Zervos. You can murder people with chicken.’

‘Just fix me some more, OK? Good chicken, bad chicken, any fucking chicken. Just chicken. And fix it real quick, OK? I don’t pay you extra one twenty-five to throw my chickens in the garbage. Jesus God. I could get someone they do that for nothing.’

Jed didn’t know it, but Celia was listening on the other side of the curtain, her laughter stifled by a mouthful of number 42. The next time she said, ‘Give me some chicken,’ she said it in the vacant lot behind the Commercial Hotel, and it was a different kind of chicken altogether.

That first time, he couldn’t be sure, it was after midnight, too dark to tell, her belly and her legs lay like patches of moonlight on the ground, he couldn’t be sure, but as he lifted away from her he thought he smelt that rich, metallic smell. It was like scrapyards, old boats, money. He had to check. He jumped to his feet and pulled his pants up over his knees.

‘What are you doing?’ she hissed.

‘I’ll be right back.’

He scrambled across the lot to a lit window, the men’s room at the back of the hotel. In the yellow light that fell all bleary through the frosted glass the blood showed up brown. It excited him so much, he had to fuck her again. He didn’t tell her it was the blood, though. Not then.

After the second time she stared up at him, her eyes wide.

‘Now who’s the astronaut?’ he said.

‘You remember everything,’ she whispered.

‘No, I don’t,’ he said. ‘Most things I forget.’

‘What about me?’ she asked him. ‘Will you remember me?’

He didn’t say anything.

One frog croaked, and then another, and then they couldn’t hear each other speak. That was why she’d chosen the place. It was dark, and there were two kinds of frogs, one fast, pitched high, the other deep and slow. Nobody would hear them fucking with all those frogs croaking, that was the idea. Nobody would know.

‘Why?’ he said. ‘You done this before?’

She grinned up at him. ‘Maybe.’

The next month they drove up to Blood Rock. It was a place that Jed had found by chance during his first few weeks in Adam’s Creek. You drove east, up into the hills. About ten miles out of town there was a turning on the right. The track was two miles long and ended in a precipice. It was a vantage point, marked on the map. The Adam’s Creek power station sprawled in the dust-bowl valley below, its chimneys lit as green as Mars. Smoke poured upwards, pale-grey and blurred, like make-up smudged by tears. Away to the east lay the cooling-water lake, known by local people as the Blue Lagoon. To the west you could see a sprinkling of town lights and, further west, the hills where the coal came from. West of the hills was the highway, a finger dipped in the dust of the mines and run all the way across the land to the horizon.

He parked two hundred yards from the precipice and let her walk the rest. She reached the edge and stood still for a long time, only her skirt fluttering, and the ends of her hair. It was obvious she’d never been before. Later she told him that she was surprised he’d found the place, grateful that he’d taken her. It said something about what he felt for her. It said something that she knew he’d never put in words.

The sun set in front of her. It seemed too bright that evening, almost chemical. A sulphurous yellow, the blue of gas. He went and opened the trunk. Lifted a sheet out and sent it billowing through the air. Watched it drift down, settle on the ground. Dusk made the white cotton glow.

‘What’s that for?’ She stood ten yards away, her chin tucked into her shoulder.

He knelt down on the sheet. ‘I thought we could fuck on it.’

‘But it’s my time.’

He liked the way she said that. ‘I know it’s your time. That’s why I brought the sheet.’

‘Don’t you mind?’

‘Why should I mind?’

‘Some people think it’s disgusting.’

‘Whose blood is it?’

Her forehead puckered. One finger curled into her broken tooth. It was as if she really didn’t know the answer.

‘It’s your blood,’ he said, ‘isn’t it?’

She was grinning now, and once she’d grinned, of course, she had to let him. She was too intrigued not to.

It wasn’t actually called Blood Rock, that was just their private name for it, because it was there that Jed made his confession. About what excited him most. He’d timed that first drive with such care. It occurred exactly four weeks after the frogs. He’d been counting the days.

The summer passed. Every month they drove up into the hills, their sheet folded neatly in the trunk, their lust, by contrast, scarcely containable. One evening in August — it was their fourth night in a row; her blood kept flowing that month — he turned to her and saw an expression on her face that he didn’t recognise. It was like wonder, and he couldn’t guess the root of it.

‘You know the weird thing?’ she said. ‘The weird thing is, you take my pain away.’

She told him how she used to dread her time. There’d be one night every month when somebody took a knife to the softest part of her. She’d twist and turn, she’d fold herself double, she’d cry out. Nothing helped, not even aspirins. It just had to be gone through. Since she’d met him, though, it didn’t happen any more. It was because he fucked her at the beginning of her blood, she said. It was like he loosened her inside. Her look of wonder deepened. It was like they were made for each other, she said, wasn’t it?

He was sitting on the edge of the sheet now. In the valley below the power station was lit up like a tangle of pearls, like some romantic gift.

‘I wish I could give you that,’ he said.

She saw where he was looking, and laughed and kissed his face.

Soon afterwards he left the Wang (though Zervos tried to tempt him to stay by offering him an extra, wait for it, thirty-five cents an hour!) and started working days at the ice-cream parlour on Main Street which belonged, coincidentally, to Celia’s uncle (or maybe not so coincidentally since, in a town like Adam’s Creek, population 2,200, most people ended up being related sooner or later). It was a move that sealed him in Mrs O’Neill’s affections: he now brought her free ice-cream as well as the traditional Rocky Road.

One morning in October he was wiping the counter down when he heard a motorbike approaching. He thought nothing of it at the time. Two of the power-station boys had bikes. They held races out by the railway tracks on Saturdays. But he looked up all the same and saw the bike pass by, the rider wearing an unfamiliar black helmet and black leathers, the motorbike low-slung, bulging, making a noise that made him think of someone beating cream in a bowl with a wooden spoon.

Five minutes later the door jangled and the man in the helmet and the leathers walked in. He looked at the card on the counter. It said WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF 45 FLAVOURS.

‘Give me all 45,’ he said. ‘Large cone.’

Jed smiled. Mitch took off his helmet. There were streaks of vanilla in his hair.

‘You’re getting old, Mitch,’ Jed said.

‘Is that a nice way to greet someone who’s ridden three thousand miles to see you?’

‘You wouldn’t ride three thousand miles to see anyone,’ Jed said. ‘That’s what I always liked about you.’ He vaulted over the counter and wrapped his arms round Mitch. They didn’t reach. He smelled the dust and oil of three thousand miles on Mitch’s jacket. He spoke into the smell. ‘It’s good to see you.’

Mitch sat down on one of the fancy white chairs with the scrolls on the back and the dainty feet. ‘I was doing a trip, coast to coast. Thought I’d call in.’

After work Jed took Mitch to the hotel for a drink. He introduced Mitch to Wayne and Linda. ‘He’s an old friend of mine,’ Jed said. ‘Haven’t seen him for years.’

‘I heard you come in,’ Wayne said. ‘Sounded like a jet plane’d landed on the street.’

Mitch nodded. ‘It’s not built to go that slow. Place to hear it is on the highway. Sounds real sweet out there. Sounds like sugar being poured in a dish.’

The door slammed open and Celia walked in. She was wearing her short fluttery pink skirt with the flowers on and her denim jacket and a pair of pink hightops.

‘Hey, missie,’ Wayne said. ‘Why don’t you bust right through the wall next time.’ He looked at Mitch and Jed, and shrugged.

Celia walked right over. She gave Jed a slow wink and then leaned back against the bar, the points of her elbows resting on the old brass rail. ‘Who’s this, Jed?’

‘This is Mitch,’ he told her. ‘He’s an old friend.’ He turned to Mitch. ‘This here’s Celia.’

Mitch’s chin dipped an inch and then lifted again. ‘Pleased to meet you, Celia. How would you like to come for a ride?’

Celia just looked at him, running her tongue back and forward through that chip in her teeth, then she looked at Jed. ‘You say he’s a friend of yours?’

‘Yes, he is.’

Celia looked at Mitch again. ‘What kind of bike’ve you got?’

Mitch smiled. ‘Harley.’

‘What the hell.’ She pushed away from the bar and linked her arm through Mitch’s. ‘Let’s see what it does.’

Jed played pool in the back with one of the power-station boys. He was just losing for the third time when Celia walked back in, Mitch behind her. She looked as if the wind had blown everything except sheer joy clean out of her head.

‘Oh Jed.’ She was still breathless and there was air in her words. ‘We went right out to the Blue Lagoon. We did a century on the power-station road.’ She put an arm round him and kissed his neck. The buttons on her denim jacket were cold. She smelt of speed, cool dust, high blood. She broke away from him again. ‘Can I get you a drink, Mitch?’

Mitch smiled. ‘Beer.’

‘You, Jed?’

‘The same.’

Mitch sat down at the small round table in the corner. Jed leaned his cue against the wall and joined him.

‘You better get a bike, Jed.’

‘Looks that way.’

‘So how long you been here now? Five years?’

‘Close enough.’

‘How much’ve you told them?’

‘Nothing.’

‘They don’t know anything about you?’

‘All they know is stuff I made up.’

Celia was returning with the beer, three glasses in between her hands, her tongue wedged in that chip in her teeth.

Mitch watched her. ‘Not even her?’

Celia put two of the beers on the table, then she stood back, knuckles of her right hand on her hip, and said she had to go and talk to someone.

Jed waited until she’d left and then he said, ‘Not even her.’ He swallowed some beer. ‘You seen Sharon?’

‘I seen her.’

‘How is she?’

‘She’s fine. She married some guy.’

Jed nodded. ‘I sent two cards, one to you and one to her. That’s all the remembering I’ve done. And telling, even less than that.’

Mitch turned his beer can on the table, made a few new rings. Then he said, ‘I heard a story that might interest you.’

Jed lifted his head.

‘You remember Vasco?’

‘Of course,’ Jed said. Fear suddenly. It had come from nowhere, out of a long silence, like something fired from a gun.

‘I did a tattoo for him. One of those tombstones he always has, you know. Only this time it covered half his back.’

‘What was the name on it?’

‘Francis.’

Jed looked down into his drink. ‘Where is he now?’

‘Two days after I did the tattoo they found him on a street in Los Ilusiones. It was sometime after midnight. He was all curled up in the gutter, naked. No sign of his clothes. It was in the papers. They took him to that private clinic, the one in the hills. Far as I know, he’s still there.’

Jed sipped his beer. It tasted sharp and frothy. He could see Vasco on the street, fourteen years old, face like a guitar. It’s not my time.

‘Seems a parcel was delivered to his house on Christmas Eve. To be more specific, a box was delivered. Seems his brother’s head was inside it.’ Mitch glanced at Jed. ‘Kind of an interesting Christmas present.’

When Jed didn’t say anything, Mitch went on. ‘And here’s the really interesting part. Seems the box was delivered by none other than Mr Neville Creed. In person.’

Jed could see it. A ring on the doorbell and Maria’s tights hiss their way across the hall. A postman’s standing on the doorstep. ‘Special delivery, ma’am.’ Maria’s never seen this postman before, but it’s not so strange, they always take new people on at Christmas. She signs for the parcel. ‘Happy Christmas, ma’am,’ the postman says and, as he steps back into the darkness, she notices he’s wearing gloves. If anything’s strange, that is. Because it isn’t cold. Not cold at all.

Jed shivered. He was imagining what happened next. Christmas morning. The tree’s all lit up. It’s the moment everyone’s been waiting for. It’s time to open the presents –

A sudden explosion of glass made him jump. One of the power-station boys had knocked a table over on his way to the bathroom. Drinks everywhere.

‘Creed had Vasco’s brother killed,’ Mitch said, ‘and then he delivered the head himself. What do you think?’

Jed picked up his glass and swirled the last inch of beer around. ‘I wouldn’t say anything about it if I was you.’

‘I’m not saying anything about it. I’m just telling you.’

‘How did you hear?’

‘I’ve got a couple of friends from the old days, they’re vultures now. One night I was down in a bar on V Street and their tongues got loose.’ Mitch looked up at Jed. ‘Why? You think it’s just talk?’

‘No,’ Jed said, ‘I think it’s true.’

Mitch said nothing.

‘I worked for Creed,’ Jed went on. ‘I watched him. Driving someone, you get to do a lot of that. Stuff like what you’re talking about, it’s a game for him. It’s entertainment.’ He saw that face again, he heard the voice. ‘You know what he told me once? He told me there are no borders.’

‘If you knew all that,’ Mitch said, ‘how come you worked for him?’

Jed just stared at him across the top of his glass.

‘Yeah, I know,’ Mitch said. ‘Stupid question.’

Wayne came over. ‘You boys are getting mighty serious.’

Mitch laughed and drained his glass. ‘Give me another beer, Wayne. Then we’ll see who’s serious.’

Mitch left the next morning at dawn. They walked to the edge of town and shook hands. The sun lifted over the hills and threw their shadows across the road.

Mitch took a last look round. ‘You know what I like about out here? The air’s clean.’

Jed didn’t say anything.

Mitch swung his leg across the bike, braced his foot on the kickstart, and pushed down hard. The engine fired.

Jed squinted into the low yellow sun. ‘Safe trip, Mitch.’

Mitch nodded. ‘Be well.’ He fitted his goggles over his eyes. ‘Sell lots of ice-cream.’

The back tyre mimed a shallow S, then the bike straightened up, began to shrink. The rasp and snap of the engine bounced against the walls of the houses behind him, tumbled over the rocks and dust beyond. There were gaps as Mitch eased his wrist back on the throttle. Then one long hum that slowly faded, became part of the silence.

When Jed turned round, he saw Celia standing on the road. She was dressed in nothing but her cotton nightgown and her cardigan. Her feet were bare. He knew what she’d done. She’d crept out through her bedroom window, but she’d left half a dozen coarse blonde hairs behind her, flickering on the damaged flyscreen wire, like evidence.

‘He’s gone,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘I liked him.’ She tipped one ear to the road, listening to the last of Mitch. The hem of her nightgown stirred. ‘Now he’s really gone.’ She moved her toes in the orange dust at the edge of the road. ‘He didn’t stay long, did he?’

‘Why would he stay?’

‘I don’t know.’ She scratched her ribs through a tear in the cotton. ‘Why did you?’

He stuck his hands in his pockets. Then took one hand out again and picked at his neck. The sun prickled on his skin. Those early rays could feel like insect legs.

After Mitch came through, things were never quite the same. It was as if Mitch had left the freezer door ajar. There was the distant drone of an alarm and things began to thaw.

Celia stole into his room one day while he was out at work. When he came home he found her peering into the well of his top hat. He took it away from her.

‘Moon Beach,’ she said. Her eyes were wide as new horizons.

He heard the voices of the power-station boys on the street below. They always got drunk at the Commercial Hotel when their shift was over. He wanted Celia to leave. She pulled the blankets back instead and took off all her clothes.

‘What about Mrs O’Neill?’ he said.

Celia laughed. ‘If it’s not on TV, she’s not interested.’

But he wouldn’t fuck her, so she went to sleep. He paced round the bed. Felt invaded, nervous.

‘You’re not ugly,’ she said later, though nobody had mentioned ugliness, not even once. ‘You’re more sort of, I don’t know, hurt.’ She was lying on her back, pulling lazily at one of her nipples, watching it stretch. ‘Your skin,’ she said, ‘it shows it. Like you had boiling water on you or something. Like you were scalded. Did that happen, Jed? Did you have boiling water on you?’

Her voice had brightened suddenly. She thought she was on to something. She thought she could know him as well as he knew himself. Maybe she thought she could know him better.

He turned away from her. He didn’t want to look at her. He knew what the expression would be. All blown-up with sleeping. Fat with trust. People were always telling you things. What did they think they were, mirrors? Did they think that was the only way you could find out who you were, by listening to them?

He went and stood by the window.

Adam’s Creek, midnight. View from the second floor of Mrs O’Neill’s boarding house. A yellow light in the street, the yellow smudged with coal or dust. One telegraph pole, with a metal sign attached: MAIN STREET. A railway line.

Just then a row of trucks rattled from right to left. They looked like giant soft-drink cans on wheels. They always passed at about the same time, right after midnight, and it was something he liked to watch, the way other people watch sunsets or the ocean. It was like letting your breath out slowly, it took him far away from himself.

A man moved in front of the silver trucks, moved in the opposite direction. Shoulders pulled back, fists knocking against his thighs.

‘He’s late tonight.’

Celia shifted in the bed. ‘Who is?’

‘Wayne.’

A silence.

‘You’re all locked up,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if you were all rotten in there.’

He turned again, surprised. He saw her breasts spilling across her ribs and that chip missing from her tooth where her brother hit her with a stone. She didn’t know she was right. She was just saying stuff. He saw her breasts and her broken tooth, and he moved towards the bed, seconds away from fucking her. It was best when it felt like you were fighting gravity, fighting the pull of forces greater than yourselves. Just now they were in the same place, like Wayne and the trucks, but sometime soon they’d be miles apart.

Still. He’d allowed her closer than anyone else, and when his clothes were off and he was tired she read him the way she read the weather or the mountains or the dust, she ran her fingers over his pale, scarred body and she guessed close to the truth.

They were still driving up to Blood Rock. Sometimes they’d fuck right away, or sometimes they’d wait till they were about to leave, but they’d always do it on the sheet, the same sheet he’d brought that first time, as if, without it, some spell might be broken and everything would fall apart. By now it was stained with blood, but Celia liked that, she thought it was romantic. ‘It looks like flowers,’ she said, ‘like roses.’ The sheet was a diary of their meetings, a history of their love. She suspected it might have special powers. If you wrapped it round you, for instance, it’d keep you from feeling any pain. Or if you spread it on the ground you could study it like tea-leaves and read the future there. Jed wasn’t so sure, he didn’t like the idea that the future was all decided already and he didn’t know anything about it, but he indulged her, and the bloodstains remained, and grew. He couldn’t have got rid of them anyway, even if he’d wanted to. He’d tried once, secretly, in Mrs O’Neill’s washing machine, but the powder wouldn’t shift them. It just wasn’t true what they said in those commercials.

The last time they went to the rock, everything began the same way as usual. The sun was going down, the power station laid a creased white sleeve of smoke against the darkening sky. She sat and stared at the view, while he opened the trunk and lifted out the sheet, complete with its light-brown rose of blood.

When she turned and saw the sheet spread out on the ground she smiled and scuttled through the dust on her heels till she was next to him. He put a hand on her shoulder. Reached into her mouth with his tongue and moved it across her uneven teeth. Felt that tiny missing triangle. A murmur lifted in her throat like the sound of the wind blowing. His hand dipped through the buttons on her dress, grazed her nearest breast, felt the nipple gather.

They fucked and fucked, and the flower on the sheet blushed red and grew new petals. A slow breeze moved across his naked back. She smiled at him with her mouth, her eyes wide and still.

‘Where’s your wedding ring?’

He wasn’t quick enough. ‘What wedding ring?’

‘You’ve never been married,’ she said, ‘have you?’

And, to his surprise, he said, ‘No.’

He pulled out of her and lay down. His face seemed pressed against the sky. There was a long silence. Then an aeroplane flew by. It was so high up, it whined like a fly.

‘You’ve been lying all along,’ she said.

Sooner or later he’d known that he would tell the truth. You can lie and lie beautifully, but sooner or later the truth comes back like a wave and sweeps everything before it. The people of Adam’s Creek had accepted him. People like Celia. People like Wayne and Zervos. They thought he was a bit peculiar, maybe, but they’d accepted him all the same. Peculiar, but not a liar. Well, they were fools. They were all fools. He’d been like that once, he’d trusted and believed, and look what had happened to him. He’d been thrown away. Thrown away like a candy wrapper, thrown away like trash. In his head they were trash too, for trusting and believing him. Part of him didn’t want to get away with it. Part of him wanted to be found out and punished. And so he’d told Celia the truth. And now there was nothing else he could say.

There was one thing he hadn’t lied about, and that was her blood, how much he’d loved and honoured it, that wasn’t a lie. But it wasn’t enough to save them either. And she wouldn’t listen now. She turned her face away. He could only see one ear, some damp hair. When he leaned over her, tried to bring her face back, she tucked her lips inside her mouth and wouldn’t speak.

It wouldn’t have been enough, though. It really wouldn’t. She belonged in this stage set, among these lies. She belonged here, where things weren’t real. It was a warp in time, a secret crease in space. This precipice, this sheet. She was here, but he wasn’t. Not really. It wasn’t really him.

After he dropped her outside her house that evening he never saw her again. He woke up every day and went to work at the ice-cream parlour, but he began to hate the taste, the sight, the very thought of it. It was his life, all that frozen mess. His fury when the doorbell jangled and a family of tourists in shorts and visors came babbling in. His fury while they scanned the world of forty-five flavours.

‘Fudgana?’ They’d be blinking, their heads tilted at him, all at different angles. ‘What’s Fudgana?’

‘It’s our special,’ he’d hiss. ‘Four scoops of vanilla with hot fudge, banana wheels and whipped cream. It’s two-fifty.’

They often had Fudgana and they were often, he hoped, violently sick in the car about half an hour later.

His fury, his revulsion.

One day he took the afternoon off without telling anyone. He drove out past the graveyard where he’d stood alone in the wind and hurt. He drove out of town and just kept going. There was nothing west of Adam’s Creek, nothing for miles. A low range of hills lifted in the north, yellow, rumpled, threadbare, as if someone had been carrying a lionskin and had grown tired of it and had thrown it down. Otherwise the land was flat and hot, studded with dull stones. Shreds of rubber twisted and coiled at the edge of the highway. Just tyres that had burst. When he first set foot in Adam’s Creek he used to think they were snakes or lizards, some kind of reptile anyway. It was that kind of country, somehow, safe things looked dangerous, specially in the corner of your eye. Or maybe the landscape was his mirror, and he was just seeing himself. In any case, he was still deceived sometimes, even after six years.

He drove further than he meant to. The road was so straight, it was hard to stop. Stopping would’ve been like looking away from a hypnotist’s swinging silver watch. His long spine ached, and his eyes felt hot and flat against the windshield, like eggs broken on to a rock. The dense grey sky seemed denser than before, so grey in places that it seemed almost green. Then he saw the sign. A wooden sign stuck at the beginning of a red dirt track. LAKE QUIRINDI, it said. 24 MILES.

He took the turning without knowing why. Thinking, maybe, that it would break the monotony, the tedious spell of the highway. He had to drive now, where before he had merely steered. There were pot-holes to avoid, riverbeds to cross. It seemed to give him a purpose which, up until he saw the sign, he hadn’t had. Though he couldn’t have said what that purpose might be.

Soon there was nothing except the laboured surging of the engine and his head jolting on his spindly neck and a swarm of red dust in the rear window. He seemed to have been driving for ever. He’d be reaching the lake soon, and then what? A sudden vision of Celia, and the blood rushed to that part of him. He took one hand off the wheel and tried to push it down. He couldn’t leave it there for long. He was driving fast and the road kept surprising him. Those riverbeds could snap an axle as crisply as the way that Zervos snapped his fingers when he danced. One of those deep troughs of dust could suck his wheels down, and there’d be nobody passing on this road, not for days, maybe, maybe not even then, and he hadn’t thought to bring water along or tell anybody where he’d gone, it had all happened too fast, there hadn’t been a moment. He sat up straighter and locked both hands on the wheel. He could die out here, and he wasn’t ready. It wasn’t his time.

The loud engine, the road slippery with dust. And then he came over a rise and saw the lake below. He stabbed the brake, stabbed too hard, and his back wheels slurred in the dirt.

There was no water.

Now he remembered someone telling him about this place. The lake itself had dried up thousands of years ago. It was some kind of ancient burial site. Relics had been unearthed. Pots, charms, bones. There were sand dunes here, he remembered. They’d been given names by the local people — the Grand Canyon, the Great Wall of China — on account of the strangeness of their formations. He could just make out the sand dunes now, a blond strip on the far side of the lake, a good ten miles away.

He let the car forwards, down the hill, and on to the white road that led across the lake bed. Halfway across he imagined the water there again, he saw the lake fill up, some ghost of the ocean haunting him, and shuddered at the thought of drowning in such loneliness, in such heat. There were no animals here. Only a twitching at the edges of his vision. Snakes, he thought. And then he thought: Tyres. Just tyres.

He stopped the car where the road lost itself in sand and got out. He stood still and listened. Heard one bird. It sounded like a tap dripping. Give it time and it would fill the lake all by itself, just with its song.

The air was thick. So thick that the oxygen seemed buried in it, hard to extract. Breathing like mining. He looked up at the sky. Clouds on the boil, the whole sky simmering. White cracks showed in the grey, white cracks fanning out like the bones in the wings of birds. He looked down again and the sand seemed pink in this storm light. He began to walk, his eyes still on the ground. He passed scattered jawbones, pale twists of wood. He stopped and picked one up, and was surprised by how light it was. Everything had been sucked out of it. All the wood’s blood gone.

He was climbing now. The sand under his feet had been crusty at first, ribbed, but now it was turning smooth, soft, unmarked. He’d left the castles and the monuments behind, he was climbing a dune that was featureless, untouched. Another footprint would’ve been a shock, a threat. The wind had risen. His ear to a seashell. There was only that now, the hollow roar and scrape of the wind and the scuffing of his feet in the sand. He lifted his eyes and saw that he was almost at the top. He was about to move on when something tapped him on the shoulder. Someone. He jumped, spun round. Nobody there. And yet he could have sworn that someone had tapped him on the shoulder.

And then raindrops began to fall in the sand all around him. Fat drops of rain placed in the sand, almost one by one, like counters on a board game. But there was no board. Or was there?

And then, just as suddenly as they’d started, they stopped. It was the shortest rainstorm he’d ever seen. He could count the drops. There were thirty-six of them.

And then he knew what it was that had tapped him on the shoulder. It was the first drop of rain.

And he knew what it meant too. He’d been singled out. He’d been anointed. He was special. Places like this, they knew.

He moved past the collection of dark holes in the sand and, with half a dozen steps, he’d reached the top of the rise. He half expected ocean, the white towers of Moon Beach, but there was only land, land that looked infinite, land without end, and he stood still and stared, as if by staring he could make something happen, the first drop of rain already drying on his shoulder.

Heaven is a Real Place

The phone woke Nathan out of a deep sleep. He reached out, and picked up the receiver. ‘Yes?’

‘Nathan?’

He could tell it was long-distance, the line was so gravelly and hollow, but he didn’t recognise the voice. ‘Who’s this?’

‘It’s Georgia.’

Georgia? His eyes opened. This was unheard of, Georgia never called. He was about to make a joke about it when she said, ‘I don’t know how to say this.’ She sounded strict, almost officious. It took any jokes he might’ve made and threw them away.

‘I’ve never said it before.’ She paused. ‘My dad’s dead.’ She paused again. ‘Sorry, I don’t know why I said that. He’s your dad too.’

They were on the phone for an hour, not really speaking, a few words scattered among the silence. They were linked, that was the important thing. It was as if they were clinging to each other, and they couldn’t let go. If one of them hung up they’d be torn apart again, three thousand miles.

Afterwards he couldn’t move. Something lowered over him like glass, something seemed to be positioned between him and the world. He could see his room — the white walls, the shelf of shells, the ocean in the window — but they could’ve belonged to anyone, they meant nothing.

Then the crying came, surprising him. Came like a sudden gust of wind, banging doors in him, shaking him to his foundations. Later, he sat on the bed, his insides chilled, his throat raw. He tried to sleep, but sleep hid somewhere else. He switched the radio on, just for the company of voices. He thought maybe he’d make some soup. It seemed absurd, everything ordinary did, but he made it anyway. In the afternoon he ran through light rain to buy a plane ticket home.

An hour into the flight he noticed a woman in a black dress sitting across the aisle from him. She clutched a bouquet of flowers in both hands, and her lips moved constantly, as if in prayer. Then, as the plane began to circle above Moon Beach, her head drooped and tears fell into her lap. The stewardess tried to comfort her, but the woman waved her away without looking up. Nathan turned to the window. He had a curious feeling of release; other people had taken portions of his grief upon themselves, and they were expressing it on his behalf. He was feeling lighter and lighter with every second that passed. There was helium in his blood. He could’ve floated clean away. Was this how you were supposed to feel? Dad’s dead, he told himself, dead. The way you might pinch yourself to see if you were dreaming. But he felt nothing. Nothing except this lightness, this elation.

The plane banked, and he pressed his face against the cold window. The ocean tilted up to meet him, its dark surface studded with points of light that looked like constellations, fallen stars. The tourist sitting next to him asked him what they were. Nathan explained that the bright lights marked the boundaries of the ocean cemeteries. The lights that were fainter were memory buoys. They were the equivalent of tombstones on land: they marked the actual graves. While he was talking he noticed scratch-marks on the water, hundreds of white gashes, and suddenly the captain’s voice, crackling over the intercom, interrupted him. The ships they could see on the right side of the aircraft were returning from a rehearsal for the service of remembrance that was held on the ocean every year. Towards the end of the week, in case they hadn’t realised, a unique festival was due to take place in Moon Beach. It was known as the Day of the Dead.

Nathan leaned back in his seat. He hadn’t realised.

Of all the weeks to be flying into Moon Beach, he thought. Of all the times for Dad to die.

When he was young, it had been one of the days he most looked forward to. Yvonne would come and stay, and she’d always bring a fish with her, a huge fish freshly caught from the ocean, and she’d gut it on the kitchen table. Fish should be eaten, she said, because fish were the guardians of the soul, and she was so powerful in her belief that nobody dared to disagree. He remembered how the fish lay gaping on its bed of newspaper, the flesh dark-red and subtly ribbed where it was split in half, and Yvonne with her sleeves rolled back and her wrists dipped in blood that smelt of tin.

It was a day that abounded in peculiar traditions. Pass any candy store in the city and there’d be marzipan skulls and sugar fish and little white chocolate bones for 5 cents each. Pass any bakery and you’d see cakes slathered in blue icing, cakes sprinkled with sea-salt. If you made a Day of the Dead cake at home you always hid a coin in it, and the person who found it was supposed to live for ever. Once, when she was four, Georgia had swallowed the coin and almost choked. It was still one of her favourite stories about herself. In the afternoon there’d be costume parties. You dressed up as Lazarus or Frankenstein, or you went as one of your dead relations. Or, if you couldn’t think of anything else, you just wore something blue because that was the colour you went when you were buried at the bottom of the ocean. And everywhere there were bowls of candy and slices of special home-made Day of the Dead cake. He could still remember the taste of that blue icing. Nobody’s mother ever got it right. You always had to spit it out and shove it down the back of some chair.

Later, when it grew dark, a fleet of ships would set sail for the ocean cemeteries, and the remembrance service would be held. Lying awake in his room, he’d imagine the boats rocking and the priest’s voice pushed and pulled by the wind. And then, later still, after the boats had gone, the dead would rise from the ocean bed and walk on the water. They gathered the flowers that had been left as offerings, they blew the floating candles out. Smoke that smelt of churches poured from the wicks, drifted over the slowly heaving ocean, hid their feet. It was a night of strange occurrences. It was the night that everyone was Jesus.

The plane landed. He said goodbye to the tourist and wished him a pleasant stay. From the airport he took a train into the city. He travelled in the buffet car, leaning against the window with a drink. The track ran parallel to the South Coast Expressway, through land that was flat, a wasteground of weeds and shale. It was almost ten now, long after rush-hour, but the road was bright with cars. Southbound there were tailbacks for miles. Thousands drove in for the celebrations. All Friday night the streets would be packed with people dressed from head to toe in blue. Sometimes they painted their hands and faces too. Sometimes they dyed their hair. That was what you did in Moon Beach. Turned blue once a year. And then, sooner or later, you turned blue for ever.

Now they were racing through the inner-city suburbs on slick rails. Rialto, Euclid, Mangrove West. The eastbound helix coiled against the sky like a giant concrete snail. Beyond the tenement blocks and the shopping malls lay the ocean, a black cloak spread on the ground, a hem of white foam where the waves broke. The train pulled into Central Station and Nathan stepped down on to the platform with his case. Moon Beach Central had been built in the style of a temple. A floor of polished marble, a domed ceiling of gold mosaic. Footsteps merged with voices, merged and echoed, the air seemed to be filled with whispering, the sound of prayer. Nathan walked swiftly to the exit. He passed posters for funeral parlours and women shaking tins for God. Heat, such heat, even at ten o’clock at night. There was an old man from one of the doom societies. He was raving about Armageddon and the fires of hell. He had to keep breaking off so he could mop the sweat from his face and neck.

Nathan hailed a taxi on the front steps of the station. ‘The west shore,’ he told the driver. ‘Blenheim.’

The driver eyed his case. ‘You on vacation?’

‘I live here,’ Nathan said, then he corrected himself. ‘I grew up here.’

The driver was searching for a gap in the traffic. ‘It’s like a fucking circus tonight.’

Nathan grinned. Moon Beach taxi-drivers were famous for their pessimism, their own vicious brand of gloom.

‘The paper the other day,’ the driver was saying now, ‘you know what it said? It said people aren’t dying fast enough.’ He put a finger to his temple like a pistol. ‘Is that crazy or what?’

Nathan agreed that it was crazy.

‘The funeral parlours, that’s a business, they got to expand, but people’re living longer than before, advances in medicine, right? So there’s all this advertising to get people to move here. Suntrap of the south, the gold coast, shit like that. They’re giving people tax breaks, casino vouchers, free cars. You name it. You know why? They’ve got to feed the funeral parlours, that’s why. You listen to those buildings sometime. You can almost hear them chewing, man.’

They passed the Moon Beach Hilton. This was the traditional venue of the Annual Day of the Dead Ball. Blue tie and tails, of course. They passed the Paradise Corporation building. That famous cross of white neon would soon be glowing blue. You can almost hear them chewing.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ Nathan said.

‘Sure I’m right. You been away too long is all.’ The driver tipped his head back, without taking his eyes off the road. ‘How long you been away?’

‘About four years.’

‘What did I tell you?’

Nathan conceded the point. ‘And I wouldn’t be back here now if my dad hadn’t died.’

‘Your father died, you say?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’m sorry, man.’

‘It’s all right.’

‘No, really, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t’ve talked that way if I knew that.’

They were in Blenheim now. Nathan leaned forwards, stared at scenery that, even in the dark, he knew off by heart and could recite. That tree, that store, that view. And there was the gatepost Dad had driven into because he’d been eyeing some young girl instead of looking where he was going. Nathan smiled. Then they were turning into Mahogany Drive and something lurched inside him, as if it was love he was meeting, not death.

They pulled up outside the house. He put his case on the sidewalk and paid the driver, then he looked over his shoulder.

Viviente.

The name had taken on an ironic, almost malicious air. The whitewashed walls were stained with mould. The windows skulked behind their black wrought-iron grilles. The paint had chipped off the gate. The house must have looked like this, he thought, when his parents first arrived, more than thirty years ago. It had come full circle. Now he could imagine children being frightened of it. Only the bravest would break in, light fires on the tile floors.

He turned to thank the driver, but the taxi had gone. He looked up just in time to see the two red tail-lights drop behind the hill. He shrugged and, picking his case up, walked towards the house.

He rang the bell. The door opened and Harriet stood in front of him. He thought for a moment that time had been operated on. A nip here, a tuck there, and it was seven years ago. But then he noticed her hair, she’d dyed it black, it curved round and down, into her jawbones, and the skin above and below her eyes looked shiny and hard. She’d aged. This realisation touched him, took the shock of seeing her and softened it.

‘I tried to call you this morning,’ she said, ‘but you’d already left.’

‘That’s all right,’ he said and, stepping forwards, he kissed her on the cheek.

As he moved past her, into the hallway, she took his arm.

‘About Yvonne,’ she said.

‘What about her?’

‘It’s been very hard on her.’

‘Is she here too?’

Harriet nodded. ‘I just wanted to warn you.’

He walked down the tile hallway and into the kitchen. It was a big room with a polished oak table and a door that opened to the garden. Yvonne was sitting at the table with a cheroot and a tall glass of wine. Veiled in smoke, only dimly visible, she looked like the result of a magic trick.

‘Yvonne,’ he said.

‘Oh Nathan,’ she cried out, ‘thank God you’re here.’

They embraced. He could smell jasmine, garlic, turpentine, and, closing his eyes, he could cling to the illusion that nothing had changed.

But she was talking into his shoulder. ‘You’re so late. We were worried about you.’

Smiling, he pulled away from her. Her hair was the same bright copper glow, and yet, below it, her face had collapsed in heavy folds, like cloth.

‘I know,’ she said, ‘I look dreadful.’ She shrugged and reached for her cheroot. ‘I supppose it’s the grief.’

‘You look like nobody else,’ he said, ‘same as always.’ He held her again, then he looked round. ‘Where’s George?’

‘She’s going to be late,’ Yvonne said.

Harriet handed him a glass of wine. ‘She said she’d come and wake you up when she got back.’

‘You must be hungry,’ Yvonne said. She made him a sandwich and brought it to the table. He looked down at it, smiling.

‘What’s so funny?’ she said.

He held the sandwich up. ‘It’s the first sandwich you’ve ever made me that hasn’t got any paint on it.’

They opened another bottle of wine and sat round the table. He told them about the journey down, the woman in black, the taxi-driver. Yvonne lit another cheroot, filled the room with the smell of the inside of cupboards. Harriet washed the dishes. The TV muttered in the background. It all seemed quite familiar, ordinary, relaxed. That, in itself, was strange. He felt snapped back into a past that had never happened.

At midnight Yvonne went to bed. There was still some wine left in the bottle, so he stayed up with Harriet to finish it off. Harriet seemed to have forgotten the grievances she’d had against him. It was as if that letter had never been written. He remembered something Georgia had said about her once. ‘The fights we had, they blew away like bad weather. Mostly I got on with her.’

He looked up again just as Harriet spoke. ‘You must’ve been surprised when I answered the door.’

He smiled. ‘Yes, I was.’

‘You weren’t angry?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’ Anger wasn’t something he’d felt even a flicker of.

Her eyes lingered on him, then believed him. ‘You see, I had to come.’

‘Why?’

She tapped her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray. ‘It was like an instinct. I loved him. When you love someone like that you want to say goodbye.’

‘I thought you said goodbye seven years ago.’

Her face hardened. She crushed her cigarette against the side of the ashtray.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean it to sound like that.’

She stared down into her drink. ‘Just because I left him,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t mean I stopped loving him. I just couldn’t live with him any more. I couldn’t breathe.’ She lifted her drink and swirled it around. ‘I just had to get away, that’s all.’

He could imagine the suffocation, he really could. The string that had once been fastened lightly round her toe had tightened during the years of marriage, slowly tightened into a leash. And she’d strained at it, strained at it until it snapped. But, looking into her face, it didn’t seem as if her years of freedom had been particularly kind to her. There were those, of course, who’d say that she’d only herself to blame. She shouldn’t have left, should she?

He turned his glass on its base. ‘What does Yvonne think about you coming back?’

‘I don’t think she minds.’

‘I was going to say. You seem to be getting on pretty well.’

She fastened on to his meaning. ‘Yes, that’s funny, isn’t it? She never had much time for me before.’

‘She thought you were too young,’ he said. ‘She thought you were going to change everything.’

Harriet shook her head. ‘That wasn’t the reason. I think she was in love with him. She wanted to look after him.’

He thought of those months after their mother died when Yvonne had come to stay. He could still see her painting in the garden. ‘It would never’ve worked,’ he said. ‘Dad couldn’t stand the smell of her cigars.’

They both laughed for a while and then fell silent.

‘Isn’t it strange,’ she said, ‘how death can bring a family together?’

That night he decided to sleep in Dad’s room. When he opened the door and turned on the light, everything was exactly as he remembered it. The smell of vanilla and talcum in the air. The glint of the green bottle on the glass shelf above the basin. The seven pillows.

He thought of the last time he’d seen Dad. When they said goodbye they’d embraced by the front door, a taxi waiting on the road outside. He’d caught a glimpse of the two of them reflected in the hall mirror and his heart had lurched because it looked as if he was propping up a corpse. Dad’s body seemed to sag, as if his bones had turned to mush, and his breath, usually so fresh, smelled sweet, the sweetness of rotting plants or compost. That sweet smell, it was strange how he’d recognised it. That sweet smell was death’s footman. It was the announcement you heard just before death made its entrance.

Back on India-May’s farm he’d hung that picture in his head. He’d carried it around with him, framed by the mirror’s gilt, like some kind of talisman. So long as he remembered the frailty of Dad’s grip on life, Dad’s fingers would never loosen and let go. That was how the superstition worked. But time passed; the picture faded, moved him less. He began to take Dad’s life for granted again. He forgot to remember. Dad had lasted so long, it was tempting to believe that he would last for ever. And that was fatal, of course.

He got into bed and lay down. He thought he heard the foghorn once, off High Head. Ten minutes passed, or maybe half an hour, it was hard to tell. Then a voice rose out of the darkness, hovered in the air, almost visible, like a hallucination.

‘Nathan? You awake?’

At first he didn’t know where he was, whose voice it was. He must have been asleep. And waking suddenly like that, you woke in a thousand different places at once, all the places that you’d ever been. It took him a moment.

‘Georgia?’

She was standing at the end of the bed with a candle. The room bucked and tilted in the unsteady yellow light. He watched her place the candle on the windowsill.

She came over and sat down and held him. ‘I didn’t want to sleep in my old bed,’ she whispered. ‘I wanted to sleep here, with you.’

‘What time is it?’

‘I don’t know. It must be about one.’ The bed listed, creaked, as she climbed in.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked her.

‘I think so. How about you?’

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Just tired.’

‘Do you want me to blow the candle out?’

He shook his head. ‘I had a friend who used to say that if you burned a candle in your window and it burned all night, then the world wouldn’t end while you were sleeping.’

Georgia smiled. ‘Who was that?’

‘She was called India-May.’

‘Funny name.’

‘She made it up. It was the name she started using when she left home.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen her for ages.’

He’d called the farm about a year after he left. He’d wanted to see how everybody was. Pete had answered. Pete was the one who’d told him.

‘She died, didn’t she?’ Georgia said.

He looked at her across the pillows. ‘I didn’t want to tell you.’

‘You did tell me. You’re my brother. You tell me everything.’

He was silent.

‘How did it happen?’ she asked.

‘It was funny, people were always saying things about her, about how she’d come to no good —’ He stopped again.

‘Tell me.’

‘There was a bar in town, it was down at the end of the main street, right where the buildings ended and the scrub began. There was a hill there, pretty steep, and the bar was at the bottom of it. She went in for a drink one time, she liked a few drinks around midday, she used to say it helped the long hot afternoons slide by,’ and Nathan smiled to himself, because he could hear her saying it. ‘She met some guy in there that day, some guy she used to go with, and he must’ve said something because the next thing anyone knew, she was screaming at him, Pete was in the bar the morning after, he said the window was all over the floor, apparently she’d thrown an ashtray at the guy and it had missed and taken the whole window out instead, and when he took her by the arm and tried to calm her down, she shook him off and ran out of the bar, right out in the street, and like I said, it was the bottom of a hill and there was a truck coming —’

He could see that part of Broken Springs so clearly, almost as if he was standing there. There was a wall on the far side of the street which was always being knocked over. Trucks would come hurtling down the hill, their brakes would fail, and they’d plough right through the wall and on into the field beyond. As soon as the wall was mended, another truck’s brakes would fail.

He could see the bar opposite too. The road dipping down into town and the bar with its brown tin roof and its dusty verandah, and a woman running out into the street, hair horizontal in the air behind her, strings of wooden beads swinging in a loop around her neck like a cow’s jaw chewing, her mouth wide open, a wedge hewn out of her face, as if someone had taken an axe to her, as if her mouth was a wound and her screaming the bleeding.

He looked across at Georgia. Her head on the pillow. Her face still, as it sometimes was before she began to cry. He felt for her hand and held it tight.

‘I didn’t want to tell you,’ he said.

He watched their candle moving the shadows around, keeping the end of the world at bay, keeping the two of them alive.

‘I had to go to the hospital,’ she said eventually. ‘I had to collect his things.’

‘Did you see him?’

‘They asked me if I wanted to. I said no. I just wanted to get out of there.’

‘I think I’ve got to see him. I haven’t seen him for so long.’

‘You’ll have to call them.’

‘I’ll call tomorrow.’

‘Maybe I’ll come too,’ she said, though her voice had shrunk at the thought.

‘My brother still,’ he said after a while, ‘aren’t you?’ And he waited, and then he heard one word come back, spoken in a whisper, she must have been close to sleep.

‘Yes.’

The hospital lay in the hills, about an hour away. Yvonne drove. Georgia and Harriet sat in the back. It was a bright day. White, blinding clouds and a breeze in the treetops like hands in hair. But Nathan felt a sickness rise in him at the thought of arriving, he didn’t want the journey to end. The sickness rose into his throat, and he had to keep swallowing. He was glad that they’d all decided to come. He wouldn’t have liked to be doing this alone.

Nobody talked much on the way out. As they climbed into the hills, the sky lowered over the car. A light rain began to fall.

The road that led to the hospital sloped upwards through a forest of pine trees. It was a straight road, the kind of road that leads to a temple or a sacred monument. Nathan looked out of the window. Once he saw a glade, a secret place with a floor of pale, sandy soil. Then the pines closed ranks again, their tall red trunks glowing softly in the gloom of the afternoon.

When they reported to the hospital reception, the nurse on duty showed them into a waiting-room. They sat on orange plastic chairs. There was a fish tank and a heap of magazines. There were paintings of flowers on the walls. A man in a white coat limped past the open doorway, pushing a trolley piled high with linen, a cigarette between his fingers. Nathan stood by the window, and looked out into the gardens.

That morning he’d revived an old custom. Leaving Georgia sleeping, he’d knocked on Yvonne’s door and asked her if she wanted to go swimming. They drove to a quiet beach west of High Head. It was still early. The sand took the glittery morning light and threw it back into his eyes like a mirror. One wooden jetty crept out over the water on brittle insect legs. And the waves, pale pale green and mauve between.

When he was tired of swimming he climbed a ladder to the jetty. The wooden slats had bleached grey. A creaking like old doors opening and closing. The same rhythm as breathing. He walked down to the end. An old man was sitting on an upturned beer crate, a plastic bag for bait and a bucket of fish beside him. He wore great clothes. A maroon jacket and a panama hat with a shiny black ribbon. White bristles stood out on his cheeks. Nathan sat down. The wooden slats were already warm from the sun. He dangled his legs over the edge and let his body dry. He could see Yvonne, she was floating on her back. Beyond her, further out, a motor launch cut through the water. Not long afterwards he felt the wash slopping against the jetty. The jetty moved lazily, like someone in their sleep. He watched the old man fit another piece of bait on his line and flick the hook backhanded through the air. A prim plop as it landed, sank. The old man tugged gently on the line.

‘What kind of fish are you catching?’ Nathan asked.

Smiling, the old man shrugged. ‘I don’t know the name of it.’

It seemed right, what the old man said. You sat in the sun, the hours passed. In the end, sooner or later, something happened. You didn’t need to know the name of it.

After their swim, Nathan and Yvonne stopped for coffee and doughnuts in a diner on the highway. They sat at a small table by the window. Sunlight on formica, salt on skin. Yvonne began to talk about Dad.

‘I hardly ever saw him,’ she said, ‘but we used to talk on the phone for hours. We used to send each other pictures. Look,’ and she opened her handbag and reached inside, ‘this was one I’d been saving for him —’ Her voice cracked and she began to cry.

He put his hand over hers. ‘It’s all right.’

‘I’m stupid,’ she said.

‘No, you’re not.’

‘All these people,’ she said. ‘I’m embarrassing you.’

He wanted to cheer her up. ‘Do you remember the time I was staying with you and that couple came round?’

‘Couple?’ She looked up, her eyes swollen.

‘That nervous couple,’ he said. ‘Their car broke down. You let them use the phone.’

After they’d used the phone, Yvonne said they could wait in the lounge. She sat them down on the sofa. She gave them brandy. The wife didn’t know what to make of Yvonne at all. Her eyes kept alighting on Yvonne and taking off again. They tried the walls instead, but there were forty-six paintings on the walls. Every colour moon you could imagine (and some you couldn’t). Nowhere to land, not unless you had a spaceship.

Her husband was braver. He rose from the sofa and placed himself in front of a picture. Green moon, yellow universe. ‘Very good,’ he said, ‘really very good.’

Yvonne was standing at the far end of the room in her red tent dress, her arms extended, a glass of brandy glimmering in one hand. She looked like a sort of fierce lamp. She took one step forwards and shouted, ‘Yes, I’m in the middle of my ball period, if you want to know,’ and the brandy slopped out of her glass and dropped into the part of the carpet that was orange and was never seen again.

‘I think they’re moons,’ Nathan said. Then he turned to the couple. ‘What do you think they are?’

But Yvonne couldn’t wait. ‘Balls,’ she shouted. ‘They’re balls.’

Yvonne was smiling down into her coffee. ‘Those were good times,’ she said, ‘weren’t they?’

He pressed her hand. They weren’t good times, of course, they were terrible, but he knew what she meant.

‘I’m so sorry to keep you waiting.’ It was the sister. She was standing in the doorway with a tight smile on her face. ‘We had an emergency.’

She ushered them down a long corridor through countless swing doors. The temperature dropped. A morgue appeared on the left like a reason.

She talked to fill the silence. ‘Mr Christie was known here,’ she said. ‘He was very well liked.’

These were dead sentences. She might have been reading from a tombstone.

There was nothing you could say.

They passed through another set of doors and out into the open air. It seemed cold up here in the hills. Mist had collected in the trees. There was a sense of abandonment and neglect. A tap dripping endlessly.

They followed the sister across a lawn and into a small chapel built, like the rest of the hospital, out of crumbling red brick. She vanished behind a velvet curtain. They waited, not speaking. A few moments later she appeared again and told them they could go in. She warned them about the steep steps. She said she’d be outside if they needed her.

Nathan passed through the curtain and stopped at the top of the steps. Georgia stopped behind him. She was peering over his shoulder, he could feel her breath on his neck, warm and then nothing, warm and then nothing. Dad lay below, stretched out under a heavy cloth of blue and gold. Two candles flickered at his head. Nathan walked towards him, down the steps, across the stone floor.

They’d covered his face with a square of gauze. It looked as if it had landed there by chance, like a piece of paper or a leaf. The next gust of wind would blow it away. Except there wasn’t any wind. The air was still, chilling.

His face was curiously smooth and youthful. His mouth had fallen open in a kind of sigh. There were no signs of violence, nothing to suggest that his death had not been peaceful. He looked like a pope, Nathan thought, or a saint. A holy man who’d prepared for his death, who might even, perhaps, have welcomed it.

It was only when he moved round to the side that he saw the blue, chapped ears and the hair, frozen and brittle, as if you could snap it off. It was only then that he noticed how raw and scalded the neck looked, how it bulged. Now that the death looked painful, now that he could see traces of a struggle, he began, in a kind of panic, to say things in his head, he began to talk to the dead man. He said he was sorry for not visiting more often, sorry for not being there, for not, for not, for not, these omissions of his, these confessions, they rose into his closed mouth until it seemed that he might choke, they were jumbled up, dislocated, like old bones in a crypt, but he knew they fitted together, he knew they would form a skeleton where he could hang the flesh and muscle of his guilt.

He looked at Georgia. She tried to smile, but her smile wavered, didn’t hold. He remembered taking her to school, it was after their mother died, Georgia would’ve been seven, she didn’t want to go, there were girls who tied her to trees, it was her accent or her looks, he couldn’t remember now, but he had to take her because he’d promised Dad, Dad who didn’t know anything, the scratches on her legs were brambles, the bruises on her wrists were something else, he couldn’t remember now, how could they tell him the truth, how could they tell him anything when all he did was sit in dark rooms with his head in his hands, his head haunted by her ghost, and each dawn broke like the slow blow of a hammer. It was a nice road, the road that led to the school. High grass banks and trees for carving your initials on and ditches trickling with water. One morning he saw a clock lying under a bush. ‘Look at that,’ he said, and crouched and peered, drawing her in, ‘a clock, how strange,’ strange because it was an antique clock with inlaid wood and round brass knobs for legs, it should have been softly ticking away on someone wealthy’s mantelpiece, a china shepherdess on either side, a marble fireplace below, and yet here it was, lying under a bush, and tilted at a curious angle as if it was drunk, and not ticking at all. That morning they parted under the trees, he never took her all the way to the gates, that would only have made things worse, that morning she looked the way she always looked, rings under her eyes and her whole body braced for the ordeal that lay ahead, how hard it was to leave her always, maybe that was why they always drew the parting out, sometimes it took minutes, just the saying goodbye, they backed away from each other, then stopped and called something out, then backed away again, they called out special words that they’d made up, words to fill the distance between them, words for the things they couldn’t say, they backed away till he was under the trees or she was through the gates, whichever happened first, she looked the same way she always looked that morning, except for one thing, she had a clock tucked under her arm, the clock they’d found together, the clock that didn’t tick, the lonely clock. It was the same thing, his sister then, his father now, Georgia walking towards a beating in the school yard, Dad fighting for breath in his red chair, he wanted to save them, only he could do it, who else was there, but he hadn’t, he couldn’t, not really, but the wanting to, the failure to, you couldn’t get away from that.

Harriet climbed back up the steps. Yvonne followed her.

He wanted to leave now too, but he had to make some kind of contact with the dead man first. Touching the face through that gauze would have seemed like sacrilege, so he chose the hair instead. He reached out cautiously. It was stiff, chilled. It was both wet and dry at the same time. Like ice. He shivered, turned away. Georgia had been watching him.

‘What did it feel like?’ she whispered.

‘Cold,’ he whispered. ‘Not like hair at all.’

She came closer, reached out, touched. Then drew back quickly, as if she’d just been burned.

After leaving the chapel, they went walking in the gardens. They set off from the same place but, like pieces of something that had just exploded, they each took a different course across the lawn. Though later, driving home, Nathan saw it another way. It wasn’t like an explosion. They were separate, there was space between them, but, like flowers in a vase, they were all standing in the same water.

The next morning Nathan and Georgia were required, as executors of the will, to meet with Dad’s lawyer. He was a dull man with bad teeth. His jacket was ripped at the armpit. They sat obediently in leather chairs while he read the document out loud. A massive, antiquated fan whirred and clattered in the corner of the office, turning on its metal stem, examining them one by one. The will was straightforward enough. Dad had left slightly more money than expected, and that money was to be divided equally between Nathan, Georgia and Rona, Rona’s share to be held in trust until she attained the age of eighteen. The lawyer reminded Nathan and Georgia that the house on Mahogany Drive already belonged to them since, as they doubtless knew, their mother had died intestate and, when their mother’s mother died some years later, the house, deemed to be two-thirds of her estate, became legally theirs. (Yvonne, the other beneficiary, had received a cash settlement.) Now their father was dead, the house was theirs to do with as they wished.

‘As for the manner of burial,’ the lawyer said, ‘it appears that your father wishes to be buried in the same place as his first wife. In other words, a sea burial in Coral Pastures. Just in case there’s any confusion,’ and he smiled, ‘he’s written down the exact co-ordinates.’

‘Harriet’s not going to like that,’ Georgia said.

‘Harriet?’ The lawyer’s eyebrows lifted.

‘Our father’s second wife,’ Nathan explained. ‘Our stepmother.’

‘Of course,’ the lawyer said. ‘I met her once.’ And then he drew his eyebrows down again. ‘Is she,’ and he hesitated, looking for the most delicate statement of his question, ‘involved in the proceedings?’

‘She’s staying with us,’ Georgia said. ‘In the house.’

‘Ah,’ the lawyer said. ‘Yes, I can see how that might be awkward.’ He leaned forwards. ‘It will require,’ and he paused, ‘a certain amount of tact.’

On the way home Nathan turned to Georgia in the car and said, ‘It will require,’ and he paused, and then they both shouted, ‘a certain amount of tact.’

They laughed so hard that Nathan had to pull off the road. Later, when they were over it, Georgia said, ‘I never knew death would be so funny.’

It was the morning of the funeral. Almost twelve o’clock. From where Nathan was sitting, in a chapel adjacent to the altar, he could hear the cathedral filling up. Looking along the pew, he saw Georgia, Harriet, Yvonne, all three in profile, stern as the heads on coins.

He realised suddenly that he had to go to the bathroom. He checked the watch on Georgia’s wrist. Five minutes till the service began. There was still time. Just.

He slipped out of the pew and hurried back down the aisle. He was surprised at how crowded the cathedral was. He hadn’t realised that Dad knew so many people.

Once outside he paused. He was standing in a square paved with dark-grey stone. There were statues on pedestals, angels or statesmen, he couldn’t tell. A great many people sat at the feet of the statues or stood about in groups near by. They were all dressed in black. They were all crying. Some dabbed at their eyes with handkerchiefs, others covered their faces and wept into their hands. One man stood alone, his breeches held up with string, his arms pinned to his sides. He shed tears the way a flower sheds petals, they fell to the ground, lay scattered round his feet. It struck Nathan that these were all people who had been unable to get in.

But the pressure in his bladder was growing, and he set off across the square in search of a public toilet. He turned down the first street he came to, turned left, right, left again, he walked down a hill, along an alley, through a deserted square, but still he couldn’t find one anywhere. He noticed a clock on the top of a building. The two gold hands were almost one. He had to get back. And then, looking around him, he realised that he no longer knew where he was. He began to run in what he thought was the right direction, but he didn’t recognise any of the buildings. I was born here, he thought. Surely I’ll see something familiar soon. He could hardly hear his thoughts above the rasping of his breath.

He saw an elderly couple approaching.

‘The cathedral?’ They consulted each other, they disagreed, they changed their minds. At last they pointed back up the street, nodding and smiling.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ they chorused gaily. ‘Yes, we’re sure.’

He ran off up the street, turned a corner, then another, and stopped. Still no sign of the cathedral. The elderly couple must have been mistaken.

He teetered on the brink of panic now. One step forwards and he would fall headlong. He looked one way, then he looked the other. Sweat seeped into his eyes. Thoughts came from all directions and collided. He felt he might be going mad.

A car came towards him. He stepped out into the road and waved his arms. The man behind the wheel was only too willing to oblige. ‘Of course, of course,’ he said. ‘Jump in.’ He seemed to think that Nathan was new to the city. Every now and then he lifted a finger off the wheel and pointed out some famous bridge or statue or museum. Nathan was about to free the man from his illusion when the man braked and, leaning across Nathan, opened the door for him.

‘There you are,’ he said.

Nathan got out and looked around. ‘But the cathedral.’

‘You’re welcome,’ the man said. And, shifting into gear, he drove away.

Nathan looked round. Scrapyards, jetties, railway tracks. The sun was setting. He felt no sense of urgency now. Waves were pages turning. Railway trucks were edged in gold.

When he woke he was lying in Dad’s bed. Georgia was bent over the basin, throwing up. It was the morning of the funeral.

The day proved awkward from the beginning, like a knife you can’t pick up without cutting yourself. Harriet slipped on the stairs and twisted her ankle. Yvonne couldn’t find the fish brooch that she always wore for funerals. She lit a cheroot to calm herself, and promptly burned a hole in her dress. Georgia had taken pills to settle her stomach, but she was still throwing up every hour.

The car arrived at two. The funeral director had a cold; he had to keep reaching into the back for tissues. ‘Usually, of course, these are for clients,’ he said, ‘but in this case, if you don’t mind,’ and he blew his nose again, and sighed.

Nathan glanced at Georgia.

She summoned up the makings of a smile. ‘I think the pills are beginning to work,’ she said.

He pushed the hair back from her forehead. ‘One thing about a sea burial,’ he said. ‘If you want to throw up, at least you can just do it over the side.’

They arrived at the Y Street wharf. The chartered boat was already moored by the quay. The traditional awning, white canvas with black edges, fluttered in the breeze. A modest congregation sat underneath on benches.

As they waited for the casket to be hoisted on to the boat, Nathan noticed a preacher on the other side of the quay. You could tell he was a preacher. He had a microphone in his hand and his eyes were set way back in his head, as if he’d seen the Lord once too often. Nathan watched him step on to a crate. There was a crackle and a whine from the microphone.

‘This is God’s distant early-warning system.’

A drunk lay slumped against an oil drum, a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag beside him. At the sound of the preacher’s voice he twitched, wiped one eye with the back of his hand, and looked up, moistening his lips.

‘Heaven is a real place,’ the preacher said. ‘There are people up there right now, enjoying themselves.’

The drunk lifted his bottle and shook the last few drops into his throat. ‘Well, how about that,’ he said and, turning his head in the direction of the preacher, he shouted, ‘Hallelujah,’ then he winked at Nathan, as if they were in this together, and fell back in a heap and shut his eyes.

The preacher turned his volume up. His voice now carried across the quay to the boat, interfering with the sombre piped music. Several members of the congregation looked round.

‘Seven years ago,’ the preacher informed them, ‘I was a useless person.’ He pointed at the drunk. ‘Seven years ago I was like him, but then Jesus,’ and his voice rose and wavered, and his eyes lifted to the sky, ‘yes, Jesus, he came to me and he planted the seeds of truth in me —’

A black woman stood below the preacher. She tilted her head on one side as if she was trying very hard to understand.

Then she must’ve said something.

The preacher levelled a finger at her. ‘You’ve got a filthy mouth.’ His eyes scoured the small audience for support. ‘You see? This here’s what —’

Suddenly Yvonne was standing below him. She reached up, snatched the microphone out of his hands. With two brisk movements she wrenched the wire loose and tossed the microphone into the water. It was so brutal, and yet so matter of fact. It was like watching somebody wring a chicken’s neck.

‘Someone had to do it,’ she hissed through her black veil as she passed Nathan on the way back.

They followed the coffin on to the boat and took their seats in the front row. The engines shuddered, the ropes were loosed; the quay slid backwards like a piece of moving scenery. Nathan could still see the preacher standing, shocked and speechless, on his box. The earthquakes in people’s heads, half the city’s population was cracked, a rabble of doom-merchants, psychos, ghouls. They could smell a funeral a mile off, and out they crawled, out of the woodwork. A funeral lit them up, it was like fuel, it kept them burning for days. It wasn’t just the old and the rich who moved to Moon Beach. The city was like a dangerous bend in a road. If you sat on that bend for long enough you’d be sure to see something.

A shadow passed the length of the boat and Nathan looked up. The bridge arched high above. This was where the harbour ended and the ocean began. The boat lurched as the first real waves lifted the bow and dropped it again. He glanced at Georgia. Though pale, she seemed to be holding up.

She put her head close to his. ‘Everything’s going wrong.’

He squeezed her hand.

‘It’s so quiet,’ she whispered. ‘I hate it.’

He nodded. Then he nudged her. ‘Dad would’ve liked it.’

She smiled at that.

It was quieter still when they reached the place. They passed between two floating pedestals, the gateway to the cemetery.

YOU ARE NOW ENTERING CORAL PASTURES.

The engines cut out, some kind of anchor dropped. Then only the slapping of waves against the hull, the creak and whine of timbers straining, the screech of gulls.

The priest rose to his feet and began to speak. He talked of Dad’s faith. His courage and resilience in the face of adversity. His sense of humour.

Nathan’s mind wandered. His mood seemed like a distillation of his dream. The panic, then the calm. His eyes drifted over the side. They were such queer, still patches of water, the ocean cemeteries. The sites had been chosen carefully, between the main shipping lanes and north of the gulfstream, so they were free of disturbance, both from boats and from currents. The ocean bed was a maze of fissures and ravines. Nobody knew how deep they went. There was a story about an oil tanker that had veered off course and steamed right through Heaven Sound. That was the last anyone heard of it. Helicopters were sent out, teams of divers too, but the water yielded nothing, not a single body, not a trace of oil.

There was a crash. He turned just in time to see the coffin sink below the surface of the waves. The engines spluttered, churned. The congregation shifted on their benches, moved their feet. Somebody coughed. The boat swung round, cutting a neat sickle of white water on the ocean, and Nathan saw the city on the horizon, twelve miles away. It must be a long time, he thought, since Dad had travelled this far.

The wake took place at the house on Mahogany Drive. No more than a dozen people came. Nathan moved among the guests, offering drinks, accepting condolences. His dream came to him in flashes. The packed cathedral. All those people weeping. How sarcastic that now seemed.

After an hour most people had left. Yvonne looked round, assembling a courageous smile. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘at least they’re together now.’

Harriet was standing right behind her. ‘Who’s together?’

And suddenly the air seemed deadened, as if there’d been an explosion. The few guests that remained stood about in small, shocked groups.

It will require, Nathan thought, a certain amount of tact.

‘Who’s together?’ Harriet asked again.

Nathan spoke gently. ‘Dad asked to be buried with our mother. It was in the will.’

Harriet put her glass on the table and left the room. In the hush that followed they heard the back door slam. Through the window Nathan saw Harriet stumbling down the garden.

‘I didn’t mean —’ Yvonne began.

Nathan put an arm around her. ‘I know you didn’t.’

‘Go after her,’ Yvonne said. ‘Make sure she’s all right.’ She turned away. ‘I just wasn’t thinking.’

Nathan left the house by the french windows. He crossed the lawn and passed through a covered archway. The vegetable garden beyond had been allowed to run wild. He walked between rows of fruit trees. The fruit lay rotting, unwanted, in the long grass. He passed through a second archway. The wooden hoop supporting the foliage had almost collapsed beneath its weight. He had to bend double to get through. Once on the other side he stood still and looked around. This was the part of the garden they used to call the Jungle. There was something about the Jungle. It wasn’t big enough to get lost in, but almost. When you stood in the Jungle, the house seemed dimensions away, as if, in order to get back indoors, you had to alter the way your mind worked, you had to think your way back in. How foreign their names sounded when they heard them called. How eerie. And suddenly he remembered standing here, it was dark-green all around him, but the sky above was blue, the sun must’ve been setting, it was quiet, just the creak of a tree, the whir of an insect’s wing, he’d been standing motionless, as if in a trance, and then he heard a voice, his mother’s voice. ‘Nathan?’ she called, and he called back, ‘Yes?’ but there was no second call, and he turned round, and there was nobody there, not a sound, and he felt strange then, he felt as if he’d been visited. It couldn’t have been far from where he was standing now, though he wouldn’t have been able to say where exactly.

‘Harriet?’

He’d almost forgotten that he was looking for her. If she was still in the garden, there was only one place she could be, and that was the summerhouse. As he bent down and began to force his way through the undergrowth he could taste alcohol in his mouth. It was a stale taste, musty, pale-grey.

‘Harriet?’

His voice only seemed to travel a few feet, then it stopped dead. As if it had been swallowed up. That was how that voice had sounded to him all those years ago. Dead. But near. Against his ear. That was why he’d turned round. And then, when he saw there was nothing there, he ran. He burst over the threshold and into the house, his right arm ripped open from the wrist to the elbow. It must’ve caught on something, a thorn, a bramble, a sharp branch. He hadn’t noticed. The blood ran down the inside of his arm, where the skin was pale, and collected in the palm of his hand as he held the wound out for Dad to look at. He still had the scar now, twenty years later, a long thin groove down the inside of his right forearm, as if he was made of candlewax and someone had run their fingernail the length of it.

‘Harriet?’

He saw her as he called her name for the third time. She was sitting on the steps of the summerhouse. He was seeing small things with such clarity now. A green leaf in her hair. Part of a spider’s web. The whites of her eyes clouded with red. She’d been crying, but she wasn’t crying now.

When she saw him she attempted a smile. It didn’t quite work. Her face was like a plate on a stick. Spinning. Balanced. But only for so long. The edges of her mouth were flickering, as if miniature hearts beat there. He sat down beside her, put an arm round her shoulders. He wanted to comfort her. She turned and pressed her face against his chest. She cried into the air below his chin.

He felt her shaking all the way through her bones and into his. He looked up through the branches into the sky, waiting for her tears to pass. The sun coloured the high branches a deep burnt orange. Down below, where they were sitting, the air softened, became almost visible, as if shaded in with charcoal, closer to smoke than air. A bird sang four notes and stopped. The first three notes were identical. The fourth started out the same way, then it stretched and lifted an octave. It was as if the bird had asked a question in whatever language it spoke.

She looked up at him and her mouth, already close to his, moved closer, seemed to falter, then moved closer and they kissed. He kept his mind completely still, it was like something preserved, like something in a jar in a laboratory, but his body came undone and shook, there was a sound inside him like the sound tracks make when a train’s coming, that hiss and crack the length of his veins, that shudder in his blood.

He couldn’t speak. He knew this was something that had been happening slowly for a long time, something that had to happen or he was lost, but it was such a brittle structure they were building, one word would topple it, shatter it, one word would be enough to jerk them back into that ordinary daylight where nothing could be changed or righted, nothing could unravel.

He took her hand and led her up the steps. It was the past inside, it was long ago. A tennis racket, a pair of flippers, a garden hose. The window with its barricade of foliage. The light barely filtered through. The smell of old dry rubber and dead grass. The smell of the wooden handles of spades. Two buttons of her blouse had come unfastened. He could see her breasts tilting against the black silk. She was sitting on his lap. They kissed again. He didn’t need to see her face. It was printed in his head, his memory. His knees between the insides of her thighs, she drew him sliding into her. He bit her neck, that muscle at the back. A gasp. Her hair swung against his face, and something metal fell. He heard himself, it sounded like a door opening somewhere inside him, it was an old door, it had been stuck for years, you had to heave on it, you needed all your strength, and then it gave a few inches, and cried out as it gave.

He felt silence descend and press on him. He looked at her. She was squatting on the floor, some distance from him.

‘Colours everywhere,’ he said.

She found a tissue, wiped between her legs.

‘You said that was what it was like,’ he said, ‘remember?’

She straightened her skirt. ‘We should go back.’

He watched her merge with the undergrowth until only her calves showed, pale as milk in the shadows.

It was done, she was gone; he was alone.

Skull Candy

Now that Jed was driving, and the lines were feeding into the front of his car like white candy, piece after piece after piece, he thought of himself as others thought of him. He thought of himself as a parasite, a leech. No sense pretending otherwise. He knew whose blood he wanted too. Though he’d known that for six years.

It had happened soon after his drive out to to the lake. One night he was standing outside the back of the ice-cream parlour, washing the stainless-steel vats, when he heard voices coming from the manager’s office across the yard. It was so quiet out there. Turn around and there was desert clear to the horizon. Just wind plucking at the scrub and the soft electrical humming of the stars. He had no trouble picking up the conversation.

‘That guy Jed,’ Celia’s uncle said, his voice sloppy with alcohol, ‘you know the guy I mean?’

‘Yeah, I seen him.’ The second man had his back turned. Jed could only see a piece of blue shirt and one thick forearm. He didn’t recognise the voice.

‘That guy, there’s something about him —’

‘Makes your skin go cold just looking at him.’

‘Yeah. I don’t know why I hired him. Stranger like that, shit. There’s something about him, that’s for sure.’

One of the two men crushed a beer can.

‘It’s like you look at him and he’s sucking you dry,’ the second man said. ‘It’s like he’s a leech or something.’

Celia’s uncle let out a high cackling laugh. ‘You hit it there. We oughter call him that. We oughter call him the leech.’

When Jed heard that cackling laugh again, the stars went out. There was just the night and that lit window and his white fury. He wanted to kill them both.

Then later, stretched out on his bed at Mrs O’Neill’s, he let the name sink down through him like a stone, he watched it go, and by the time he saw it settle on the bottom he decided he liked it. The name began to grow on him, he began to feel it in his fingertips and in his blood, and in his love of blood, he began to see it as his power, his future.

A road sign loomed, snapped by. Four hundred miles to go. If he drove all night he might make Moon Beach by morning. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a cream toffee, stuck it in his mouth. The wrapper joined a heap of identical wrappers on the seat beside him. Your pockets crackle when you move. That was Carol’s voice in the car with him. He saw her standing outside the Starlite Bar, her mouth tilted upwards, stitched. He saw her stumble down the steps of the cathedral. He saw the barbed wire of her scar. You take kindness where you find it, she’d said to him once, because most of this world’s cruelty. We know that, Jed, don’t we? We know that. Some nights he’d felt such scorn for her, Don’t put me in the same coffin as you, it may be your time, but it isn’t mine. Other nights he’d almost cried. Most of this world’s cruelty.

They’d come for him. He’d known they were going to come, it was part of his initiation, he couldn’t leave until it happened. He heard their boots in the hall and up the stairs. He heard their voices pushing at the flimsy, chipboard walls. Celia’s uncle, that man in the blue shirt, a couple of the power-station boys. No shortage of men for the job. He waited on the edge of his bed. He watched their boots trample across his orange carpet. Steel toecaps, steel heels. Cracks in the leather red with dust.

‘Pack his stuff.’

The important packing was already done. It had been done for days. The sheet, the hat, the tape. They were all locked in the car. The rest didn’t matter.

They threw his clothes into a case and wedged it shut. Part of a shirt poked out of the side. It was like a sandwich. The lettuce leaves never quite fit. Celia would’ve liked that. She always liked it when he brought food into it. Ever since their first night. The night of the chicken. But there was nobody here who’d understand.

They pinned his arms behind his back and hauled him down the stairs. It was difficult. The landing was narrow, and the stairs were steep. The men were wide, they didn’t fit. For the first time he really liked the place. For the first time he felt as if he belonged.

‘You going out, Matt?’ Mrs O’Neill called out. ‘Bring me a Rocky Road, would you?’ Until one of the men pulled the door shut in her face. Goodbye, Jesus. Goodbye, Donald Duck.

He was going out. Out into the dark. But still orange. The street lamps. Hotel windows. A passing truck. They pushed him up against a fence. It was someplace near the railway tracks. He could smell that corroded metal on the wind.

‘Celia says you been bothering her.’

She’d said something. Good. He supposed he must’ve been relying on her. If she hadn’t said something, none of this would be happening. And it had to happen.

‘Celia says you been,’ a pause, ‘messing with her.’

They were obedient men. They had their orders, they were only doing what they were told. The rain, his christening, and now these men. It was right. Thinking about it, you might almost say that he had given the orders. He nodded. Yes, the orders had originally sprung from him.

The first blows didn’t hurt. They were just surprises, even though he’d been expecting them. The streetlamp leaned over, then it blew, a yellow flower with long tapering petals, petals snapping off and dropping through the gloom, dropping on his body, on his eyes. Then a sudden white flash of pain in his ribs and his own voice crying out.

And then another voice: ‘Don’t break anything. He’s got to drive out of here.’

Still following orders. That was good.

They must’ve put him in his car. He woke at nine minutes past one. He pushed the door open and was sick.

Afterwards he sat with his head against the window. At ten to two he was sick again. Initiation always hurt, it had to.

When he looked out through the windshield he couldn’t see anything at all. He glanced in the mirror. A few scattered lights, the slant of a roof, a gas pump. They’d driven him to the edge of town. They’d pointed him in the right direction. The rest was up to him.

He drove all night. It wasn’t fear, it was completion. As the light spilled back over the hills, as the sun came up in a strange place, he pulled over to the side of the road and cried. That was normal, he supposed.

Now it was three days later, and the bruises were sunset colours: yellow, purple, brown. He’d been beaten like metal, like the edge of a scythe. He was sharp. All doubts, all fears, all hesitation, beaten out of him. He’d left them behind, along with that job in the ice-cream parlour and that rented room with its bright-green walls and its bedbugs and its carpet tangled with other people’s hair and nails. They were outlived, redundant. More dead skin for the carpet, more ghosts for the cemetery. He coasted down the centre lane, and the darkness seemed to cushion him. He felt as if he was tunnelling, as if he was going to strike it rich. The lights of other cars swung across his face, glinted on his glasses’ steel frames, glinted on the battered satin of his black top hat. He was smiling.

In two hours he’d be switching to Highway 12 because he wanted to enter the city from the west. It would be about five in the morning by then. At that time, just minutes before dawn, the tall buildings looked like piles of ashes. The place would feel like his then, his for the taking. He squeezed the gas pedal and reached into his pocket for another piece of candy. These were new ones. He’d found them earlier that day. They were called Peppermint Surprises and they were very good. He wondered how he could’ve stood that ice-cream parlour for so long. He’d always had a sweet tooth. Maybe it was something to do with that.

In the end he timed it all wrong. It was after sunrise when he passed the famous billboard that marked the city limits. A girl in a bikini about to lob a multicoloured beach ball. The ocean, palm trees, white hotels. WELCOME TO MOON BEACH, it said. SUNTRAP OF THE SOUTH. He shook his head. There were more doctors in Moon Beach than anywhere else. More lawyers. More grief therapists. More rest homes. More obituaries. It was a place where people went to die. And yet, year after year, it went on pretending to be a beach resort. He remembered the time someone climbed the billboard scaffolding. They sprayed a line through the word SUN and sprayed the word DEATH above it in black: WELCOME TO MOON BEACH. DEATHTRAP OF THE SOUTH. For several days the famous billboard actually told the truth. It was after Vasco’s time, but it was exactly the kind of action he would’ve taken.

He sensed the first stirrings of rush-hour, bright cars speeding past, as if by starting early and driving fast they could reach the weekend quicker. The wheel gripped tight between his fists, he released a few sarcastic words. He wanted candy now, he wanted to feel it splinter against his teeth, but when he checked his pockets he found nothing. He must’ve eaten them all. He glanced in anger at the empty wrappers piled on the seat beside him. They shifted, hissed. They looked like scales, he thought. As if, somewhere in the car, there had to be a naked fish.

CITY CENTRE 8.

Steam was lifting from the waterways. The moored launches glared in the early sun. He waited for a stoplight, then he pushed his glasses up and rolled the bones in the back of his wrists against his eyes.

He stopped at Diana’s Gourmet Diner. The air outside the car smelt hot and damp, as if the world was sweating. He clipped his sun lenses over his glasses, sighed as he descended into cool, deep green. He took one step and his leg buckled. Maybe those power-station bastards hadn’t broken anything, but Christ, they’d certainly come close.

He pushed through the door and took a stool at the counter. The waitress set a cup of coffee in front of him. He drank it right down. He asked her for a second cup, then he ordered eggs, wheat toast, and orange juice. A rustle next to him and an old guy in baby clothes sat down. Yellow towel shirt with blue stripes. Pale-blue shorts. A gurgle every now and then. These old Moon Beach guys, they were all the same. They’d lost their wives, they drove big cars too slowly, they talked about gambling and operations. His focus shifted from the old guy to the old guy’s morning paper: WIDOW SUES FUNERAL PARLOUR. GANG-SLAYING IN RIALTO. HYDRO-CARBONS POLLUTING CITY AIR. It didn’t seem like much had changed.

The old guy snapped him a look. Pretty fast, considering. ‘You got a problem?’

‘Just tired, that’s all. Been driving all night.’

The old guy looked Jed over. His head flicked up and down a couple of times. It was like someone painting a wall. ‘You’re one of them funeral guys,’ the old guy said, ‘ent yer?’

‘Used to be.’

‘You ent gonna get me, young fella.’

Jed smiled. ‘I wouldn’t count on it.’

‘Oh no, you ent gonna get me. I’m gonna live for ever, I am.’

Jed eyed the old guy carefully. ‘I’d say you’ve got about another eighteen months.’

It would’ve been hard to say which way the old guy was going to tip. At last his mouth cracked open and all this dry laughter came rustling past his teeth. Old newspaper, the shed skin of snakes, fallen leaves.

‘Another eighteen months,’ the old guy said, ‘I like that. Hey,’ and he flapped a hand at the waitress. ‘What’s yer name?’

‘Alice.’

‘Alice?’

‘Alice. Like in Wonderland.’

‘You hear what he said, Alice? He said I’ve got another eighteen months.’

Alice eyed him. ‘I’d say he was being kinda generous.’

The old guy had so much laughter in him, he couldn’t get it out. He was looking at Jed and tilting a thumb at Alice and making a noise like a needle stuck at the end of a record.

You ought to be careful, Jed thought, or you’re going to do something in those baby clothes of yours.

Turning back to his coffee, he dipped his long neck down to the cup and sipped. He traced the veins on the formica, the dents in the silver sugar bowl. He studied their flaws with silent ferocity. He could feel a smile spreading through his insides. OK, OK, so maybe he was crazy to come back. But being here was such defiance. Just being here.

‘Hey,’ the old guy said, ‘you know what day it is today?’ Jed had to think. ‘It’s Thursday.’

The old guy shook his head like a rattle. ‘Today is the Day of the Dead.’

Jed glanced at the calendar. Christ, the old guy wasn’t kidding. He thought of Celia and her omens. If this wasn’t an omen, nothing was. The smile reached his face and spread.

He turned and saw the old guy standing at the cash desk with his check. The woman gave the old guy the wrong change and the old guy noticed. The woman had to apologise.

‘That’s quite all right,’ the old guy said. ‘I’m glad you make mistakes. Know why?’

The woman didn’t have a clue.

‘Dead people don’t make them.’

The woman just stared at the old guy.

‘Mistakes,’ the old guy said. ‘Dead people don’t make them. See?’ And he turned to Jed and opened hs mouth. And there it was, the needle at the end of the record again. And the woman with a smile like a swallowed yawn.

Jed tipped the rest of his coffee down his throat. He paid up and left. No time for jokes. Leave that to the old guys in baby clothes.

At the first set of lights a black woman pulled alongside him in a yellow Plymouth. A holy bible sat on the dash. A twist of black lace hung from the mirror. She beat him away from the green light, and he saw the sticker on her bumper: BEAM ME UP, JESUS. He’d driven all night, mile after mile sliding beneath his wheels, and now he was back in the place where death was part of the scenery, as much as houses were, or trees. They spoke a different language in Moon Beach, and he’d forgotten that. It had been six years. He’d have to learn it all over again. Though there’d be some, he was sure, who’d tell him he’d been gone too long.

He thought of driving to his mother’s house, but then he decided against it. She was like static. She would fuzz his signals. He drove south instead, over the old swing bridge and down into Rialto. There were more bars open than there used to be, there were more closed churches. He slowed as he passed Mitch’s tattoo parlour. It looked closed too. He parked further up the street and walked back. The door was locked. He hoped Mitch hadn’t taken off on another trip. He’d kind of been relying on Mitch.

He thought of Sharon next. It was a holiday. She ought to be home. As he drove across the Moon River bridge he couldn’t help remembering that night. The cop car in the safety zone. The rain bouncing two feet off the road. Rising back into the air, thick as mist and full of shapes, like raw material for ghosts. Some nights all the bad things networked. Though it was 85 degrees and six years later, he found that he was shivering.

He took the first exit after the bridge. It swept him round in a long curve, then he was under the expressway, heading south. The tenement blocks of Baker Park held the sun on their scarred red-brick façades, their windows dark as blind men’s glasses. He’d had this feeling all day. He was doing the rounds, but nobody could see. He was here, but he wasn’t here. It was partly the city itself. It seemed to face the ocean, face away from the land. Driving in from the west, you felt as if you were doing something behind its back, as if you were creeping up on it. He’d had the same feeling all day: the city’s blind.

He reached the street where Sharon lived. The washeteria on the corner, caged in wire-mesh. The stunted dusty trees. He rang the doorbell. A shadow moved behind the panes of frosted glass. The door opened six inches, shackled by a chain. Sharon eyed him through the gap.

She’d put on weight. He could tell just from the thin slice of her that he could see. Her skin looked drier, dustier than he remembered. The years; but also, he suspected, kids. She’d told him once that she’d had five abortions. You couldn’t keep that up. Sooner or later a child would slip through. One that really wanted to.

‘Sharon,’ he said. ‘How’ve you been?’

She was still staring, she was like those windows up the street. ‘My Christ,’ she said. ‘Jed.’ Her surprise quickly turned to wariness. ‘You can’t stay here.’

‘Who said anything about staying?’

‘It’s just it’s lunchtime. Max’ll be back soon. What are you doing here, anyway?’

‘Max?’ he said. ‘That the guy you married?’

‘How do you know that?’

He shrugged.

She unhitched the security chain. The house smelt of pepper and sweat. He remembered her sweet nothings, her sour breath. He remembered her flesh, blue at the edges and flickering, like gas.

She saw him looking beyond her. ‘Don’t even think about it.’

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I just came back to see the place, that’s all. Memories, you know. To see you too.’ Not the truth, maybe, but lies never hurt.

‘Bullshit. Not a word out of you for six years.’

He smiled. ‘Didn’t you get my card?’

‘One card. Right. That made all the difference.’

‘I had to leave town.’

‘Sure.’ She fitted one hand on her hip. Copied his smile, made it sarcastic. ‘Sure you did.’

He said nothing.

‘So where’ve you been?’ The way she said it, she was getting ready for a tall story. It didn’t matter what he said.

‘In the desert.’

‘Which one?’

He told her. She’d never heard of it.

‘Not a word for six years,’ she said. ‘And what about the last time you were here?’

He hadn’t seen her for weeks and then he’d gone round at one in the morning. It was only a day or two after Creed had told him what he had to do. He had to take a break from that. He wanted to see her and forget the rest. But she’d been drinking, rye straight up and sweet white wine, and she had started right in on him. He was never around, he lied to her, he didn’t care. It was true, most of it, but he hadn’t come to her for that. She began to push him in the ehest. He had to shove her away. She fell and hit her head. It didn’t knock her out, it just slowed her down a bit. He left soon afterwards. That was the last time.

‘I was edgy that night,’ he told her.

‘Edgy?’ She looked at him. He’d have to do better than that. But he couldn’t. ‘Yeah, well.’ He took a step backwards. ‘Max’ll be back soon. I’d better get going.’

She seemed to be about to say something, but he didn’t wait. He reached the gate and she still hadn’t said it.

‘See you around,’ he said.

He saw her in the mirror as he pulled away. She was standing on her doorstep, one hand still welded to her hip.

Driving back across the bridge, he smiled. The way he’d cut that meeting short. He was on the edge now, and when you were on the edge, you had to sharpen up. His thoughts were sparks leaping off a blade.

He drove to a diner on V Street. A waitress flipped him a menu. ‘Coffee?’

He remembered her from six years ago, but she didn’t remember him. She didn’t even give him a second glance. The city was blind.

He looked out of the window. V Street. The wrong end of the alphabet. To the west lay downtown: hotels, banks, the crescent of white sand that was Moon Beach. East of here were the grit and cigarette-butt streets of Mangrove, and then Moon River, wider than a mile, its waters laced with oil and chemicals.

He knew these streets, knew every crack. He’d grown up watching cars cruise the promenade, skulls dangling from their mirrors, numberplates like 998 DIE and a bumper sticker to match: ROOM FOR ONE MORE. (He’d bought his first plate three blocks south of here: CREAM 8. He still had it now. In Moon Beach people understood it right away. Drive somewhere else, they thought you were in the dairy business.) Then, when he worked for the Paradise Corporation, he drove V Street almost every day. The city morgue was two blocks away, Central Avenue and X Street (X marks the spot, as Maxie Carlo used to say). The most respected coffin-maker had set up in a warehouse just round the corner. People who worked in the business were everywhere, and people who didn’t looked as if they did. Down on V Street even the bums wore dark suits. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see himself through the glass. He’d passed this way so many times, surely he must’ve left his echo on the street. After all, if ever there was a city of ghosts, this was it. No, he wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see himself walk by. He might even have waved.

‘You stay here any longer, sir,’ the waitress said, ‘I’ll have to charge you lunch.’

‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll have lunch.’

‘What can I get you?’

‘Spaghetti,’ he said. ‘With Meatball.’

He was going to eat the past.

After lunch he felt tired. He drove south to the ocean and parked on Pier 22. He leaned his head back, closed his eyes. The sun landed on the windshield in dusty yellow blocks. Hundreds of people were out strolling. Their footsteps jumbled up, made a curiously wooden sound. He could hear the car’s engine cooling, ticking, like a dog’s paws on the sidewalk.

A loose rumble and he saw a plane lift above the rooftops. The car shook. The ignition key chinked once. He blinked, stretched. His teeth felt numb and fat in his head. He slowly pulled himself upright, found his face in the mirror. His eyes were pinned wide open, they’d seen everything and it had been too much, Now who’s the astronaut? He had stomachache. The past obviously hadn’t agreed with him. He checked the clock. It was five. He’d been asleep for almost three hours. In another three it would be dark.

He drove into Mangrove South and stopped at the first bar he saw. Polystyrene skulls hung from the ceiling. The Day of the Dead ceremony was being broadcast on TV. There was a phone in the back. He called Mitch. No answer. He drank a beer, watched TV.

Half an hour later he called Mitch again. Still no answer. He tried Carol instead. Lady Dobson answered. Carol had moved out, she said. She gave him Carol’s new number. He called the new number and Carol was home. Well, kind of home anyway. She used his name, but it didn’t seem to mean anything to her. He imagined her surrounded by hundreds of special shoes. None of the shoes made pairs.

‘This weekend’s no good,’ she was saying. ‘Can you do Monday?’

Monday? Every day was so big at the moment, Monday seemed like someone else’s life.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘OK.’

She gave him a time and place, but he was still thinking about Monday. He just couldn’t picture it.

At last she realised. ‘Are you OK, Jed? Where are you?’

But it was too late, he was already hanging up.

Back in his car, he began to drive. He was only one of thousands who’d arrived in the city during the last twenty-four hours, and people were beginning to mass in the streets, some in blue body-paint, some in skull masks, some in luminous skeleton suits. There was a man lying on the bottom of a glass tank that was filled with water. A placard above him read PLAY DEAD! ONLY $1.25!. As he passed Jed by he opened one eye and winked. It was the Day of the Dead all right. Part fairground, part nightmare. Jed took comfort in the thought that he could hide in all this chaos and hysteria, that he could wear the carnival like a disguise. There was no way he’d be able to stay downtown, though. He’d passed a few hotels, and it was the same story all over: SORRY WE’RE FULL. He’d have to resort to the perimeters. Newtown, Austin, Normandy. No SORRY WE’RE FULL signs out there. It didn’t matter how eager tourism was, it never quite reached that far.

Then, as he crossed the bridge for the third time that day, he saw lights on the west bank, high above the river. That row of grey houses. He had lived there once. With Vasco and his uncles. Last time he’d seen the uncles (though he’d never actually seen Reg, of course) was fifteen years ago. They’d been senile then. They could be dead by now. The house might be standing empty …

In five minutes he was pulling up outside. Though the sun had almost set, no lights showed in the windows. That didn’t prove anything, of course. The uncles had always been tight. He climbed the steps to the verandah. Two punctured flyscreens lay on the bleached wooden boards. He thought of afternoons spent here with Vasco. Tins of beer and talk of war. He looked back down the garden. From here you could see clear across the river to the Crumbles in the distance. He turned away from the memory, the view. He pushed on the front door and it swung open.

It was dark inside except for one thin bar of orange light that had found its way into the hall and now stood propped against the wall. Dust dropped slowly through the air, as if settling in water. He began to move towards the stairs then, noticing the door to the elevator, hesitated. He punched the button, thinking nothing would happen. There was a clunk from somewhere up above. A snap as metal gates slid shut. Through a glass panel he watched the thick black cables loop in the empty shaft as the car dropped down.

The gates slid apart. Jed opened the door and then let out a gasp. In the elevator was Mario, sitting in his wheelchair. His head had fallen sideways, so he appeared to be listening to his shoulder.

‘Mario?’

Jed took one step forwards. Large black flies rose from Mario’s eyes and lips.

When Jed could look again, it was the wheelchair he noticed. The leather upholstery had started to decay. In some places it had lost its lustre and worn thin. In other places it had torn. Underneath the leather Jed could see bright paper. He moved closer, trying not to breathe. He reached into a gash behind the dead man’s back. His hand closed round several hundred-dollar bills.

Listen. Hear that? Money.

Jed felt a queer, crooked smile appear on his face. Everybody used to think that Mario was senile. Everybody used to wonder what he’d done with all his millions.

Listen. Hear that?

Every time he moved he must’ve heard it. He’d been sitting on it. He’d been wheeling himself around in his own mobile bank.

Jed was still smiling when he parked outside the Lucky Strike Motel an hour later. He’d chosen the Lucky Strike because it was in Newtown. The bleak north-western edge of the city. Even so, he knew he was running a risk. Vultures had always favoured motels. Motels were low-life information banks. They were ideal places to hold meetings, do deals. Skull McGowan used to run a team of vultures out of the Ocean Bed Motel on Highway 12. One night, Jed decided. Then he’d move on. He hid his car in the darkest corner of the parking-lot, and checked in under the name Matt Leech.

It was still early, just after eight. There was a liquor lounge next to the motel. He walked in, sat down at the bar. There were only two other guys in there. Just old guys from the neighbourhood, drinking beer and shots, watching the service of remembrance on TV. Jed said it was his first day back in the city after being away. He said he’d like to buy them both a drink. The barman too.

Jed turned his eyes to the TV. The first boats were just reaching Angel Meadows. He raised his glass.

‘One day it’ll be us,’ he said, ‘but not yet.’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ one of the guys said.

They all drank to it.

‘So here we are,’ the TV presenter said, the sun setting behind him, the breeze toying with his fringe, ‘coming to you live from Moon Beach —’

‘Live,’ the barman said. ‘That’s a joke.’

They all chuckled.

The boats were dropping anchor. They’d reached the Angels of Memory, the most famous of the cemetery gateways. Two white angels watched over the cemetery. They were both standing on pedestals, their wings spread wide against the sky, their hands folded modestly in prayer.

An aerial view.

From the helicopter the fleet of boats was a loose collection of lights on a great dark surface. They had gathered round the two floodlit angels. The service was about to begin.

Then the cameras swooped down. Closed in on the bridge of one of the larger boats. Froze on a man in a dark suit. Still face, still hair.

‘— Mr Neville Creed,’ the presenter’s voice was hushed and reverential, ‘chairman of the Paradise Corporation —’

Jed’s hand jerked and his whisky spilled.

‘Something wrong?’ the barman asked.

Jed shook his head.

Later that night he lay on his back in bed and watched small blocks of light move along the top of the wall above the window. It worried him and then he worked it out: it was just cars passing. It was late now, past midnight, but there was a highway outside. Those small blocks of light would cross the wall all night.

He closed his eyes, but couldn’t stop the image forming. That still face on the boat. That still face slowly turned towards him. Those still lips began to speak.

Here I am.

It was as if Creed had known that he’d be watching. As if Creed knew everything. As if Creed was some kind of god.

Jed switched the light on. He hauled himself upright, leaned against the headboard. Remember what you came here for. He lifted his wrist and checked his tattoo, the way you might check a watch, and it reminded him, as time does, that he was locked in a process that was irreversible, inescapable. He wouldn’t be used again. He wouldn’t be outwitted, or double-crossed. This time the boot was on the other foot. He had the power now. He had the initiative, the surprise. And there were people who would help him, people who knew. Carol. Mitch. Even Vasco, maybe, when he learned the truth. The boot was on the other foot and, when he kicked with it, it was going to hurt.

The truth.

He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the tape. He didn’t need to play it. He knew it word for word.

His own voice first: ‘You want me to kill Vasco’s brother?’

And then Creed’s: ‘That’s right.’

His own voice again: ‘How?’

Then Creed’s: ‘Don’t worry about that — it’s taken care of — it’s nice —’

Jed lay back down again. Blackmail would be his instrument. He would make a demand. For money. But this wasn’t about money. He knew that for certain now. Mario had appeared in his wheelchair. Mario had frightened the fucking daylights out of him. Mario had made things clear. He saw the brown envelope of bills bounce off Creed’s chest and flutter to the ground. This had never been about money. Remember what you came here for. That face on the boat, it was just skin and bone. It could wear fear on it, it could die. It was just skull candy for his sweet tooth.

His eyes drifted shut.

Towards three, it began to rain. And suddenly he was back in Adam’s Creek. Waiting in the alley behind the restaurant. Celia was late. A sound that could’ve been paper in the wind and he looked round. She was standing next to him. Her face lit up as if the sun was setting on it. Her blonde hair hung against her collarbone like frayed rope.

He took the key out of his pocket, unlocked the back door. Through the kitchens, out into the restaurant. It was dark, but he knew the layout blindfold. She followed, one hand on his belt.

‘It smells in here,’ she whispered.

‘It’s chicken,’ he whispered back. ‘It’s a number 42.’

When he switched on the lights in the grotto, she was already sitting on a rock with her head thrown back and her arms behind her, supporting her. Her long, coarse hair just touched the backs of her elbows. She was naked from the waist up.

‘Hey, Jed,’ she whispered across the restaurant. ‘Do I look like one of those kind of mermaids?’

He smiled and flicked another switch. There was a distant rumble of thunder. He made his way through the empty tables towards her. When he reached her, it was just beginning to rain for the first time.

‘We’re going to get soaked,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ and she tipped her head back, ‘yeah, I know.’

Each storm lasted five minutes, then the coloured lights came on. Cicadas chattered in the palm trees, wet leaves dripped. After Celia had come for the first time she turned her head and looked out into the restaurant. ‘I’ve sat out there so many times,’ she said, ‘eating that shitty Chinese food.’

One of her breasts was red, the other one green. Her nipples had darkened, tightened. Her wet hair straggled across a bed of plastic lilies.

She turned to him. ‘I never thought I’d be lying here like this.’

‘Yes, you did,’ he said.

‘I wanted to, but I never thought it would happen.’

Then it began to rain again and she bit her bottom lip and reached for him and whispered, ‘Put it inside me again and let’s pretend we’re somewhere like a desert island.’

The drizzle on his back as he moved in and out of her. A shiver of lightning against the sky. Her long ribbony cries were lost as thunder unloaded on the roof like rocks. They fucked until they were cold.

The next evening she waited for him in the alley.

‘You know last night?’ she said.

He grinned at her. ‘I know last night.’

‘You know how long we fucked?’

He shrugged.

‘Three thunderstorms,’ she said.

The storm had moved away. He turned in his motel bed and pulled the cover over him.

He could hear cars on the highway, like someone sweeping floors. One small block of light edged along the top of the wall and stopped halfway, but he was already sinking back, sinking into sleep.