Free The Five Gates of Hell by Rupert Thomson

record it when it happens,’ he was saying, ‘won’t you, Jed?’

Tombstone Tattoos
    Dad was lying in bed, propped on his seven pillows, when Nathan walked in. A bottle of eucalyptus oil stood in a basin of hot water in the corner of the room.
    â€˜It should be ready by now,’ Dad said, ‘but you’d better test it first.’
    Nathan moved over to the washbasin. It was one of the holy objects, this bottle of oil. It was ancient, made of ribbed green glass, green as seaweed. It had six sides and a cork stopper. Dad must’ve lost the original top. He’d found a cork that almost fitted and then he’d whittled it down. Now, years later, it looked as if it belonged.
    The oil was fine: not too hot, not too cold. He let the water out of the basin and brought the bottle over to the bed. Dad took off his nightclothes, the blue sweater with the holes in, the torn pyjama jacket, and lay face down, his head turned sideways on the pillows. He flinched as the oil ran across his back, then he relaxed and said, ‘It’s all right.’
    It had been hard to touch Dad the first time. Everything looked so injured that he couldn’t work out where to start. Dad had sensed his hesitation. ‘Just be gentle,’ he said. ‘Do the shoulders first.’ That was a good thing to say. There was nothing wrong with his shoulders. The damage only began further down. One side of his body sagged where the ribs had been cut away, so his spine seemed strangely marooned. The scars shone like pink wax. You could still see the holes left by the hypodermic needles when they’d drained the fluid out of his lungs. The needles were so big, Dad had told him once, that you could actually see the ends.
    The funny thing was, he didn’t
look
disabled. If you’d seen him walking along the street you wouldn’t’ve noticed anything unusual. There were no obvious signs or clues. No crutches, for instance. No wheelchair. No, it wasn’t until you saw him naked that you realised the full extent of the damage. Perhaps not even then. You still couldn’t see the lungs. If you watched him closely you could see that he breathed a bit quicker than most people, like a bird, Nathan hadalways thought, but how many people looked that closely? Dad only had half of one lung and a third of the other. Something like that, anyway. He couldn’t fly in planes or swim underwater. He had to avoid elevators, phone booths, cellars. All those places could kill him. Even bad weather could kill him. That was why everything was so dangerous. That was why he had to be so careful.
    Dad sighed. ‘That’s good. Just there.’
    Nathan worked the warm oil into the shoulders.
    â€˜You’ve got the same touch as your mother.’
    Your mother. He always said that. It made her sound so far away, so high up. It was like your excellency, your honour. Your mother.
    But Dad’s thoughts had taken a different turning. ‘Did I ever tell you how we came to live here?’
    â€˜No.’
    Nathan smiled to himself. He knew how much Dad looked forward to having his back done, how much it helped, but he also sometimes suspected that it was just an excuse, a chance for Dad to talk to him.
    â€˜Your grandmother had just gone into hospital and I’d just come out.’ Dad paused, remembering. ‘She told us we could have her house. She said she wouldn’t be needing it any more.’
    Nathan knew this part of the story. His grandmother had put herself in a mental home, that whole side of the family were a bit mad, apparently, and she’d given them the house for nothing. He prompted Dad. ‘Then what happened?’
    â€˜It was spring,’ Dad began, and his voice turned dreamy as he reached back into the past.
    He drove up the coast with Kay, his wife of seven months, beside him. Such happiness: he felt it so acutely, it had almost seemed like pain. There was no highway in those