Damned If You Do

by Gordon Houghton

  ‘There are other ratios you might be interested in,’ Death continued. ‘For instance, the ratio of the dead to the living is approximately 1:1. The ratio of people who lose their keys down a drain after dropping them to those who don’t is 1:343. The ratio of clients who die as a result of an incredible sequence of unfortunate accidents to those who die from natural causes is 1:2401.’

  The ratio of stories written by the living to those written by the undead is approximately 10,000,000:1. However, the advantage this tale has over its rivals shouldn’t be underestimated.

  It’s all true.

  The unluckiest man in the world

  He was an accident waiting to happen.

  He stumbled through the front door and swayed into the kitchen. Unbalanced by the shopping he narrowly avoided a collision with an open drawer, but managed to swing the bags high into the air and onto the work surface. Humming quietly to himself, he took a sheet of kitchen roll and cleaned his glasses. Replacing them on his face, the earpiece slipped through his fingers and the glasses fell to the floor, cracking the left lens.

  ‘Bugger sodding hell.’

  Undeterred, he removed a frying pan from a cupboard beneath the sink, poured oil into it and turned on the gas. The gas escaped as he searched for matches: I heard the hiss, smelled its sweetness. He rummaged through three drawers, looked on the dresser, lifted up a newspaper, tapped his chin, checked his jacket pockets. The gas escaped. He peered into a bread bin, looked vacantly at a couple of shelves, explored a recess by the washing machine, puffed out his cheeks, inspected a plant pot. The gas escaped. He searched the herb rack, examined the draining board, patted his trousers, tapped his teeth, studied the microwave oven. The gas escaped.

  He turned off the gas.

  His face was illuminated by a sudden recollection. He burrowed into the nearest shopping bag and removed a box of Swan Vestas. He struck a match, took it to the hob, turned on the gas and created a ring of cool blue flame. The oil began to heat. He removed a long string of sausages from the second bag and placed it on the work surface, then grabbed the first bag and carried it to the fridge.

  As he reached the fridge, he snagged the bag on one of the open drawers. Attempting to remove it, he tore a hole in the plastic. Frustrated, he pulled harder. The handle snapped.

  The contents fell to the floor.

  Eggs, cracked; bacon, soiled; milk, spilled. Broken glass from a jar of honey. Honey, spreading.

  ‘Christ.’

  He bent down to clean up the mess and banged his forehead on the open drawer.

  ‘Hellfire.’

  He leaned backwards and slipped on the milk and honey. Trying to soften his fall he caught his outstretched fingers on the broken glass. His other hand landed on the only unbroken egg.

  ‘Shit shit shit!’

  He disappeared from the room nursing his wounds, his suit smeared with dairy produce. I heard him running up the stairs.

  He hadn’t turned towards us once.

  ‘He’s gone for a bandage,’ Death explained. ‘I’m afraid we have to turn the heat up on the oil before he comes back.’

  ‘Isn’t that interfering?’

  ‘Of course it’s interfering. ‘We have to interfere.’

  ‘How can you just accept that?’

  ‘I have no choice.’

  He shrugged, and twisted the knob full on. The fat in the frying pan began to smoke.

  * * *

  Five minutes later our client wandered casually downstairs, his hand bandaged, his clothes changed. He was wearing black tracksuit trousers, a black sweatshirt and black sneakers with hooks instead of eyes. The laces were undone.

  As he crossed the threshold into the kitchen the snakes of smoke rising from the pan activated the smoke alarm.

  His curses were nullified by the shrill, repeating beep.

  He ran into the hallway and returned almost immediately with a stool, placing it directly beneath the alarm. He turned off the heat, scrambled onto the chair, tutted, hopped off again, grabbed a screwdriver from the open drawer and climbed back on. Leaning backwards, he removed the screws from the alarm casing, let the plastic fall into his hand and slowly levered the battery free from its housing.

  The beeping stopped. He sighed with relief and tried to turn around.

  He had been standing on his laces.

  He stumbled, pitched backwards towards the cooker, struck the frying pan handle with the back of his head and landed roughly on his buttocks. The fall knocked the wind from him. The frying pan, disturbed by the collision, flipped over and emptied hot smoking fat onto his bald crown.

  He screamed, leapt to his feet and raced for the doorway. His shoelaces were flapping – but, miraculously, he didn’t trip.

  ‘Follow him,’ said Death. ‘Intervene if you have to. But be careful.’

  I felt sorry for our client. It’s true that he was about to enter a more comfortable stage of existence, and he would find it much easier to fall into the coffin than to climb out of it – but I couldn’t help myself. I pursued him through the front door, ensuring I was behind him at all times, and if there was some hope within me that his ordeal would end soon, I tried not to let it interfere with my work. I simply watched as he swerved right, just missed the pool of black engine oil, and groped blindly for the water-butt.

  And I fought hard against the urge to guide him.

  His fingers thrashed against the edge. He seized the rim with both hands and plunged his stinging skull into the cold water. He shook his head wildly. The water churned and splashed onto a nearby tombstone. He pulled himself free and rapidly swallowed three lungfuls of air. His skin was spotted with small, pink blemishes, and his glasses were missing. I stepped quietly around him. He rubbed his eyes and staggered back towards the house.

  ‘Christ Jesus.’

  Still groggy from his encounter with the hot fat and myopic from losing his spectacles, he stepped on the oil patch, lost his grip, slipped sideways and landed heavily on his left arm. The oil soaked into his sweatshirt.

  He groaned and raised himself upright. I followed him as he shuffled through the front door and back into the kitchen.

  He was holding his arm and whining miserably.

  He gazed blindly at the chaos on the kitchen floor and cursed everyone he had ever known; then, calming himself, he opened a drawer by the fridge and removed a half-empty pack of cigarettes. He slipped one into his mouth, located the matchbox, withdrew a match, struck it, and lit the cigarette. He inhaled and surveyed the destruction surrounding him, cursing again. He covered his eyes with his hands, forgot that he was holding the match and singed his right eyebrow. He yelled and dropped the match. The lit cigarette, freed by his scream, fell onto his left arm.

  The oil-soaked sleeve slowly, but inevitably, caught fire.

  He ran from the kitchen again and repeated his flight to the water-butt. His arm blazed like a torch; the flames lapped at his head, licked his body, caressed him. Death watched him escape, grabbed the matches, opened the cupboard beneath the sink and tossed the box into the bin.

  I followed the man outside again. His arm was immersed up to the shoulder in the water-butt, his face contorted with pain and relief. His whole body shivered with fear, with cold. I felt a powerful urge to comfort him, as my mother had once comforted me when I was ill. But my duty dictated otherwise.

  * * *

  When we returned to the kitchen, Death had disappeared. Our client was weary. He sat down on the stool from which he had fallen only a few minutes earlier and rested his feet in the spreading pool of milk, eggs, honey and fat. Disgusted with his bad luck, he stripped off his sweatshirt, threw it aside and began to wash his arms, hands and head in the sink.

  Groping for the tea towel to dry his face, he made three fatal mistakes:

  He left the tap running.

  He accidentally turned the gas on.

  He knocked the long string of sausages to the floor.

  And the phone rang.


  ‘Who the fuck is that?’ he wailed.

  I watched him from the kitchen doorway.

  ‘Who is it…? Is anyone there…? Look, if this is your idea of a joke you’ve picked the wrong fucking time. Really … I’m putting the phone down in five seconds … Four, three, two—’

  He slammed down the receiver and returned to the kitchen. The smell of gas was already strong. He failed to notice it, his attention diverted by the running tap. He rushed over to turn it off before the water overflowed, slipping slightly in the pool of liquid food, and catching the hooks of his untied right shoe in the string of sausages.

  The sausages held fast to his foot and followed him until his death.

  The phone rang again.

  ‘For fuck’s sake—’

  The man and his trailing string of sausages hobbled to the phone together.

  ‘If it’s you again … Oh … Hello … No, I just thought you were— No, no problem … Yes … Uh-huh … Fifty quid on the three-thirty? Yes, of course … No, nothing … I’ve just had an accident, that’s all … Yes … Hold on, I think I can smell gas—’

  He hobbled back to the kitchen, the sausages thrashing in his wake like an enraged viper. He turned off the gas, left the kitchen door ajar and threw open the front door to assist ventilation.

  On the other side of the front door was Cerberus the dog.

  Cerberus was hungry. He liked sausages.

  Three red tongues dripped slobber.

  * * *

  Death descended the stairs in time to see his pet attacking a string of pork sausages with a small, fat, screaming man attached.

  ‘Who rang the second time?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘Who rang the first?’

  He allowed himself a melancholy smile.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ Our client was staring at both of us with a mixture of panic and terror. He shook his leg violently in a vain attempt to free his foot from the dog’s three sets of tightly clamped jaws.

  ‘I am Death,’ said Death, offering his hand.

  The man fled across the road, wailing. Cerberus followed him, growling ominously, signalling his determination to hold on. The meat, the innocent party in all of this, was trapped between the unlaced shoe and the dog’s slavering maws.

  * * *

  ‘Looks like rain again,’ Death observed. It was more of a summer shower, droplets spattering the gravel car park inside the cemetery gates, spraying our client’s battered head and his monstrous assailant alike, sprinkling the freshly mown grass, filling the shimmering air with thousands of glittering lights.

  At the cost of a sausage the man had finally freed himself from the dog’s death-grip and was streaking up the slope towards the graveyard. Cerberus decided that this was inadequate reward for his efforts and pursued him vigorously; they met again by a tomb at the summit. The leg-shaking and growling dance continued: a whirling, shuddering ritual punctuated by inhuman shrieks. We trailed them slowly in the rain.

  ‘Does he have to suffer so much?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t make the rules,’ said Death. ‘It’s the way things are.’

  ‘But this could have ended much earlier.’

  He turned aside. ‘He’s just unlucky, that’s all.’

  The trio of client, sausages and hellhound jigged and jerked and growled and cursed along the brow of the hill. A couple of times they retreated together and circled around us like planets caught in the gravity of twin suns; then, as if freed from our attraction, they sped off into space, chaotic bodies in constant motion. Death maintained a pensive silence until he saw that the man was pirouetting close to a fresh grave.

  ‘It’s time,’ he said.

  The open grave had no headstone, but a spade rested on the lip. Cerberus’ growls deepened as he employed one final, canine scheme to seize the sausages: he shook his heads vigorously from side to side. The strength of the movement unbalanced his opponent, who stumbled backwards towards the gaping hole in the earth. The excavated soil was greasy with rain.

  He slipped.

  He regained his balance by taking a step back.

  He tripped over the spade and tumbled earthwards, twisting.

  But there was no earth to support him – only a black pit six feet deep. He caught his head on the walls of the grave as he fell. His body landed with a soft squelch, spraying water out of the hole and onto his nemesis, the dog.

  Cerberus watched from the graveside, unperturbed. A pink string of pork sausages hung from his grinning mouths.

  ‘He slips, he trips, he dives, he dips,’ Death observed gloomily, patting the middle of the dog’s three heads. We perched, vulture-like, on the edge of the hole. Our client lay face down in the mud below, apparently unconscious.

  ‘Is he dead?’ I asked.

  ‘Soon. He’s drowning.’

  Cerberus guzzled two sausages in quick succession. Death teased the animal by threatening to remove the rest. Without knowing why, I buried my face in my hands.

  The apartment

  Amy rang ten days after our second meeting, and arranged for me to visit her the following Wednesday afternoon. This was about three weeks after the first phone call. Her apartment was located in the block directly above the bus station café where our initial discussions had taken place. More significantly, considering what was to happen a month later, it was the penthouse suite.

  In the intervening period I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her, with one memory in particular returning again and again:

  It’s snowing. We are walking by a river at the northern end of a meadow, on the fringes of a dark wood. Black trees burst from the white ground like the spikes inside an iron maiden. The snow is shallow and crisp underfoot, untrodden, untouched. Golden evening light dazzles in the gaps between the trunks, sparkles on the ice in the swollen river.

  ‘I just can’t see how it’s going to work,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t feel right. Not any more.’

  ‘How is it supposed to feel?’ I reply.

  ‘Better than this.’

  ‘We can change it.’

  ‘That’s not what I want.’

  Recently, we have begun to speak in code, avoiding words which might reveal precisely how we feel. At first it was a game, but the game has grown beyond our control and is smothering us.

  ‘What do you want?’ I ask her.

  ‘Anything but this.’

  We are on the edge of a dark wood by a swollen river. Her sharp features are frozen there in an expression of despair. Her teeth chatter, briefly, comically. Her black hair falls in front of her eyes and she brushes it aside.

  ‘Anything.’

  Her black hair falls, and she brushes it aside.

  She is young. She has medium-length hair the colour of a raven’s wing. She has a long, pointed nose that once belonged to a witch in a fairy tale, thin red lips open like a knife-cut, brown eyes piercing me, daring me to answer. But I turn around, and see a hole in the trees ahead where the snow rises in small drifts – and beyond it, a bridge. We need to return home and forget, but the path we are about to take will lead us back to the Jericho Café, where we will have a discussion that leads to our separation.

  And I’m still standing there now, frozen in time, watching again as her black hair falls across her face. She was twenty-one; we had lived together for twenty-eight months.

  She was beautiful in the snow.

  * * *

  I wondered how she had come from that moment to this; more specifically, what had induced her to marry Ralph. She was an only child from a poor family, but poverty and solitude are as much prerequisites to a lifetime commitment as they are to a career in ballroom dancing. I suppose I wasn’t surprised she’d ended up with a criminal: when she lived with me the uniform had a certain appeal, and it’s not so hard to make the switch to the other side of the law. But perhaps she never allowed herself to dwell on what he did. Perhaps he had been the wild lover who also sent her roses, the man who wanted ch
ildren but respected her independence, the caring, sensitive type who knew exactly when to behave like a shit.

  I had been none of these things. During our years together I had been little more than a clown. I had often made jokes to disguise my true feelings, laughed when I should have remained silent.

  I rang the buzzer, Amy replied with an ambiguous ‘Is that you?’, and I struggled with my equipment up fourteen flights of stairs to the seventh floor. I had a phobia about lifts. Amy met me at the door, smartly dressed as usual, and explained quickly that she only had half an hour to spare.

  The apartment was divided into seven areas. The short hallway led into a large, square living room, furnished in what the gossip magazines used to describe as palatial elegance, but which was equally identifiable as criminal ostentation. The remaining areas were satellites of the main living space. In clockwise order from the door: a coral bathroom decorated with a shell design, a narrow stone balcony overlooking the square, a round tower with a skylight and a collection of videos housed on a wide, free-standing bookshelf, a cramped kitchen and dining area, and a double bedroom with a four-poster. A thick black carpet clung to the floor throughout, like a stray oil slick.

  Amy spoke rapidly, nervously, pacing the living room like a trapped animal, checking that everything was safe, seeking reassurances that Ralph wouldn’t find out, that I was being careful. At length she led me into the bedroom and pointed to the dressing table.

  ‘He hardly ever goes near it. But I’ve taken some things out in the last couple of weeks so he won’t get suspicious.’

  I installed the miniature camera in a drawer from which she had removed the handle. The hole provided just enough space for the lens, and the rest of the drawer was large enough to accommodate the recording equipment. When I’d finished, and checked twice that everything worked, I gave her my usual speech.

  ‘It won’t be perfect, but it should do it. Give me a call when you’re ready to hand it back. Or stick the video in the post.’