Damned If You Do

by Gordon Houghton

  The whole experience left me feeling useless, stupid, and vulnerable. I believed that I had failed my parents and myself. I believed that I would fail at everything I did from now on.

  In the same year that I quit, my first love ended. Life slaps everyone hard, but it reserves special tortures for the naive; and I simply couldn’t cope when my lover moved out of the flat. So I didn’t: I cancelled the lease, sold everything I owned, and lost contact with my family. My mind went into meltdown soon after.

  I became a zombie long before my death. For six months I drank and begged my way through existence, unseen and unacknowledged. I existed in a world of voluntary amnesia: I couldn’t remember who I was, where I came from, what I wanted. I forgot how to feel and how to speak. All I recall are the words of others, disconnected from time and place. Get a fucking job … He must be so cold … Sponger … Cheer up – it might never happen … Do you need help? And I still don’t know how I crawled out of that nightmare. I must have had assistance – you don’t escape from quicksand without a branch, or the firm grip of somebody’s hand.

  But the experience had changed me irreversibly: I had shrivelled to one small knot of despair. This knot was all I had to offer, so I protected it with all my strength. And it made me feel too ashamed and too worthless to return home.

  For the next half-decade I took jobs which provided me with anonymity. I was a lavatory attendant for a while, cleaning up an unending trail of shit and piss, gratified to have work which mirrored the feelings in my gut. I became a road-sweeper, patrolling the streets at night, disconnected from living, breathing people, but still cleaning, still trying to wipe away the unending stains. I was an office cleaner for two years, picking up the unwanted fragments of other people’s lives, digesting them, disposing of them … And gradually, agonizingly, the knot of despair unravelled, and I inched away from the darkness back into the light. For the first time in many years, I made a positive decision: I found a job as a waiter in a restaurant my parents used to visit. I chose it in the hope that a miracle would happen: that they would find me and accept the shrivelled husk I had become.

  And in the month of my twenty-sixth birthday, at the end of a long, slow evening, I heard my mother shout my name. I glanced across the room and saw her approaching cautiously. I was terrified. The grief which I had imprisoned in my stomach flooded into my veins, sending a spasm through my whole body. I stood paralysed as I wondered whether to stay or run – but a violent storm blew from the frozen wastes of my past and knocked me to the ground. I lay on the floor of the restaurant and wept, for the first time in many years; and my mother sat by me, and grabbed my hand, and gently rubbed my thumb.

  When I finally summoned the strength to look up, there was a mixture of such anger and compassion in her eyes that I couldn’t speak, and I waited for her to break the long silence between us. My father stood behind her, so much older now, his face a hard, emotionless mask.

  ‘I thought you were dead,’ she said at last.

  My father’s face softened.

  ‘I’ve just … been away,’ I said.

  They didn’t judge or condemn me, as I had often feared they would. They simply brought me back home and promised me a small amount of money to do anything I desired. I felt obliged to repay their generosity with action, so I took advantage of it immediately. I used some of my father’s contacts, rented an office with a frosted glass door, placed an advert in the Yellow Pages, and waited for the phone to ring. I tried to tell myself that I was still cleaning up the shit, and patrolling the streets, and helping people. I convinced myself that my choice had been a logical one, and that I could still hide when I needed to. But, as with many of my decisions, I had simply decided to try something on a whim, and because I could think of nothing better.

  I became a private detective.

  * * *

  Few people tell the truth, so I was rarely unemployed. I was hired by husbands to spy on their lying wives, by wives to spy on their cheating husbands, by bosses to spy on their swindling employees, by executives to spy on the rivals that were spying on them – and by solicitors to spy on everyone. It was an ideal career for someone who needed to be alone.

  Some cases were about money, but most were about sex. This was fine by me because, as I’ve already said, I liked to watch. What did I see? I saw people shag in showers, screw in shopping malls, make love in lavatories, hump in hay-lofts, grind in graveyards, fornicate in forests, fuck on fake fur rugs, copulate in car parks, and bang in bed.

  I felt like a character from a Jerzy Kosinsky novel. Of course, I was nothing more than a voyeur, albeit with a licence. But don’t knock voyeurism until you’ve seen it for yourself.

  And I grew familiar with sex again, both in my personal life and at work – so familiar that it became nothing more than a dry catalogue of desire whose contents were like a mantra. Analingus, bestiality, bondage, buggery, coprophilia, cunnilingus, ejaculation, fellatio, fisting, masturbation, necrophilia, paedophilia, sado-masochism, scatophagy, urolagnia. Some of these acts were illegal in practice, others could not be legitimately portrayed in films, books and digital form. The inability or unwillingness to differentiate proved incriminating for many of my clients.

  * * *

  So. Sometimes it was money, sometimes sex – and occasionally, as with the last case I investigated, it was both.

  This is the scene.

  It was a windy Friday in September. I can still see the leaves blowing on the pavement beneath my window. I was in my first-floor office on the High Street, leaning back on the swivel chair, alternating between reading my favourite trivia encyclopedia and firing elastic bands at the coat rack. No-one had requested my services in four days, and I was regularly hitting each hook in sequence and setting all kinds of records, when the telephone rang. I was on such a streak that I briefly considered leaving it on answerphone.

  I picked up the receiver. It was a woman’s voice, and we exchanged the usual pleasantries. Her tone was familiar, but I had buried the memory of it so deep that I couldn’t attach a name or a face. She didn’t sound distressed or alarmed, but she refused to discuss any details whatsoever over the phone. This was unusual. Normally a potential client would at least say It’s my husband or I think she’s cheating, or whatever, and you’d have some idea. But all she gave me was a description of herself, and a place and time to meet that same evening.

  Our rendezvous point was a corner café in the new bus station square, and out of habit I arrived late. She was later – and since it was evening, and still warm enough to sit outside, I took a table beneath the green-and-white striped awning, ordered a coffee, and waited. I briefly tried to recall where I’d heard her voice before, but the information refused to crawl from the black pit of memory. So I just carried on waiting for almost an hour, staring out into the square. I drank two more cups of coffee, the sun’s red glow faded to dark purple, the air grew cold. At last, realizing that she wasn’t going to turn up, I picked up my document wallet and prepared to leave.

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘Sorry I’m late … Remember me?’

  I dropped the wallet. I turned. I saw the half-moon reflected in her eyes.

  Nightmare on Walton Street

  ‘What I like about disease,’ said Pestilence, ‘is that you don’t know what’s happening until it’s too late. It sneaks up on you, takes hold and won’t let go. It doesn’t apologize. It says: this is what I am, take it or leave it. It’s both an honest and a dishonest method of termination.’

  We were standing on the pavement in front of the Agency. It was a bright, warm morning with a few faint streaks of white cloud. The Revels were safely stored in my inner jacket pocket. Pestilence was applying a great deal of make-up to my face, and frowning periodically. He was having difficulty disguising my features to his satisfaction.

  ‘The end result is still the same,’ Death replied.

  ‘But the approach is different. It has style, and stamina. Lif
ers continue to treat it with drugs, machines, immunization. But the disease will always win because it can adapt.’

  Death rubbed his beard between forefinger and thumb. ‘Don’t you ever question what you’re doing?’

  ‘Of course not. I’m far too busy,’ said Pestilence, brushing a final touch of rouge into my cheeks.

  Famine emerged from the Agency’s front entrance and descended the steps, carrying a mixed basket of fresh and cooked food: fruit, raw chicken, vegetables, a couple of pork chops, and two bottles of water. My stomach churned with hunger.

  ‘Is any of that for me?’

  He looked at the basket with horror, his watery fish-eyes revolving in their scaly sockets. ‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘No. Everything’s been modified. Powerful emetic. Designed so that the more you eat the more you want, and the more you want the more you throw up. In the end, the body rejects more than it’s consumed.’

  I fell silent, and we looked at each other with embarrassment until he staggered off towards his black Fiesta. He rested the basket on the rear bumper, shaking his head.

  Death asked me if I still had the package, I said yes, Pestilence repeated the question, I repeated the answer, and we all climbed into the Metro. I sat in the rear seat as we sped away, the Metro’s tyres squealing and spitting gravel. Death raced out of the side street without looking, roared away up the hill, and overtook three cars at 60mph in a 30mph zone. We shot along the back road towards town at 80mph, ski-jumping three sleeping policemen, before Death slammed on the brakes and executed a perfectly controlled skid into a No Parking zone outside a coffee house. We had travelled less than half a mile from the Agency.

  As he stepped out of the car, I asked him why he always drove so dangerously.

  ‘I’m immortal,’ he said.

  * * *

  The Jericho Café, on Walton Street, held many memories for me. It was where my first love ended after three short years, and it was the setting for all the important moments in the relationships which followed my breakdown.

  These later affairs always began, for me, from a position of security, inside a carapace of humour and small talk. We shared trivia over cups of coffee, and talked about everything but our feelings for each other. Without emotions, we were safe. We had a future.

  But emotions can’t be contained – and the drips of feeling which seeped into our conversations became a trickle, and then a flood. This was the second stage: a time of risk. We competed with each other to protest our mutual love and admiration, using words of all shapes, ideas of all sizes, statements and declarations and intentions of all kinds. These feelings were so powerful that nuances of behaviour were magnified until they became reasons to live and die; and our most indulgent fantasies became a test of our love.

  But I soon felt vulnerable outside my shell. I knew that the more I exposed myself to feeling, the more painful the final separation would be. So I moved quickly into the third phase: I encouraged situations which would allow me to retreat. I began to find the trivia irritating, I made my fantasies too demanding, I ran out of friendly words. The air between us grew stagnant, and I withdrew into the safety of my carapace again.

  My life became a repeating nightmare.

  * * *

  The interior of the café was much as I had remembered it. A dozen polished wooden tables neatly arranged in a narrow space around the service area. Areas of gloom offset by powerful spot-lighting. Pictures by local artists hanging on the walls. I had sat at the table by the window a thousand times it seemed, maybe more. In the two years before my death, I had passed an hour here on many evenings after work. No-one recognized me now, of course. The living hardly ever notice the dead, and a zombie is not much more remarkable than his cousins in the soil. We make nothing, achieve nothing, inspire nothing – so we are safely ignored.

  Death ordered a black coffee at the bar which I imagined still held the imprints of my elbows.

  ‘Did anyone bring the Life File?’ he asked.

  ‘We don’t need it,’ Pestilence reassured him. ‘I had a look last night. I have all the details here.’ He tapped his forefinger against his temple.

  ‘Who are we looking for?’

  ‘A couple. He’s twenty, medium height, dark hair, glasses. A pseudo-intellectual student. She’s a year older, shorter, unnatural blonde, and for some reason she hangs on his every word. No accounting for taste … We give him the disease, he infects her, they both spread it around.’ He smiled. ‘And, thank you, I’ll have an espresso.’

  They both turned towards me, as if driven by remote control.

  ‘Cappucino,’ I said.

  * * *

  I sat at my favourite table without prompting. Pestilence took the seat opposite, completely silent, evidently considering something weighty as Death waited for the drinks. Outside, the pavement was alive with dozens of people, a sea of soft bodies criss-crossing each other’s paths, ant-like in their whirling motion. As I watched them I felt an overwhelming nostalgia. I yearned for their health and the colour in their cheeks. I felt a flashing memory of the novelty and freshness of their existence. I envied their life, their wholeness, even their mortality … But not for long. Pestilence interrupted my thoughts in his usual oily manner.

  ‘You know,’ he began, ‘you should really be in Diseases. There’s always work to be done. Plagues, random illnesses, minor ailments. And you get the pleasure of creating your own workload.’ He smiled smugly. ‘You get the highest return, too. Of course, some of us just deal with individual cases’ – he waved a hand dismissively at Death – ‘but with a disease you start at the bottom and can’t go anywhere but up. The figures speak for themselves.’

  A fat, bearded man looked through the window and smiled at a woman inside. He entered, sat down, placed his hand on her shoulder. Pestilence waved his arms with increasing animation.

  ‘The key is planning. Achieving maximum impact with minimal resources. Look at the Black Death. Pasturella pestis was designed specifically for fleas, so that the plague could be transported across continents on the backs of rats. We thought about it. When we released it in China we knew that all we had to do was sit back and watch it spread. It found its way to Europe and in one year’ – he held up his right finger to emphasize the point – ‘it had wiped out half of England. Three centuries later, the population of London is still down by a quarter. It had a mortality rate of ninety-nine-point-nine-nine per cent. Now that’s success.’

  The woman kissed the bearded man, and pulled a photograph from her bag. The photograph showed two children at a swimming pool.

  ‘We’re hoping that today’s release will be just as effective. A new style of disease.’ He laughed shrilly. ‘The Chief wants a time-bomb for the new millennium. One of those coincidences that convinces Lifers there’s something more to existence than existence itself.’ He pressed his hand against mine. It was cold and greasy. ‘But high-infection, high-fatality, high-profile illnesses are just the leading edge. We’re discovering new methods to promote mutation or recreate favourable environments for the established diseases, too. Malaria has been a success for years, but we’re also working on smallpox, diphtheria, cholera, tuberculosis, and so on. The point is variety. Apart from the killers, we’re constantly experimenting with non-contagious diseases and non-fatal contagious diseases. Gingivitis, pinworm, the cold, neurotic disorders – they all need careful planning and expert execution—’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ I interrupted.

  He removed his hand and glanced over his shoulder. Death was trying to fit three cups into two hands. ‘Because you’re not the first apprentice to fill Hades’ oversized boots, and you won’t be the last. You should consider a transfer before it’s too late.’ He leaned over and added in a whisper, ‘But keep away from Famine.’

  I was about to ask him who Hades was, and why I should keep away from Famine, when Death returned with our drinks. For a few seconds, the questions fizzed around the inside of my skull. But my brain jus
t couldn’t make the connection between desire and action – and before I knew it the moment had passed, and the conversation had whirled away from me.

  * * *

  An hour slid by, in much the same manner as it might have done when I was alive. With nothing to distract me, I ate most of an Emmenthal, tomato and mayonnaise sandwich. Pestilence selected a ripe Cheddar which he repeatedly maintained was ‘too fresh’. Death requested half a pound of roadkill as a joke, but settled for another juicy steak – this time bleeding between the two halves of a crisp, white baguette. Between mouthfuls he passed comment on everyone who entered and left the café, identifying precisely how long they had left to live, why they had to die, and which Agency department would be responsible.

  ‘That one, for example, is our client on Thursday evening.’

  He indicated the bearded man, who was leaving hand-in-hand with his friend. They were both laughing.

  I pushed the rest of my sandwich to the side of the plate.

  Pestilence dominated the conversation for the remainder of lunch, pontificating through a second hour about ‘the illusion of choice’, and using the bag of Revels (which I was required to produce) as an example. He pointed out that although every chocolate was different in shape and content, and each one appeared to offer something different, they all carried the same, equally deadly virus. His elliptical metaphorical excursions only ended when Death abruptly announced that he had spotted today’s clients. I turned and followed his gaze. Through a dense crowd of cars and pedestrians, I glimpsed two people queuing outside a cinema. They fitted Pestilence’s description perfectly.

  The Seventh Seal

  Death barged his way through the queue, not from habitual impatience, but because he had already reserved tickets for the matinée by phone. After paying for them in cash, he bought a half litre of Cola and a large tub of toffee popcorn, into which he greedily stuck his long, white fingers at irregular intervals. The three of us waited by the entrance as the crowd flowed slowly through the foyer.