Damned If You Do

by Gordon Houghton

  ‘This is all very interesting,’ interrupted Pestilence, ‘but could we possibly move on? I’ve got some tests to run before lunch.’

  ‘Really?’ Death countered. ‘How is the bruise coming along?’

  ‘It’s almost disappeared. Why?’

  ‘So it didn’t work?’

  ‘I’m still at the trial stage. The initial results have been extremely positive. Better than any of us could have expected.’

  ‘But it didn’t work?’

  ‘The spread was very impressive. Almost total torso cover. And extremely painful.’

  ‘And then it disappeared?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So it didn’t work.’

  ‘Not in a final sense, no.’

  I turned away. The only trouble with eavesdropping is that, all too often, you hear nothing of any interest whatsoever.

  * * *

  I climbed the spiral staircase and entered the Chief’s office. The morning sun dazzled through the dormer windows, and the paper-white brightness of the room caused me to squint. I headed for the writing desk, which today contained only the computer, printer, and a green document wallet. The fire in the grate was long dead. The column of files had disappeared.

  The wallet contained the Life File. I opened it, studied three rows of figures, closed it again. I couldn’t face reading another two hundred pages of arid statistics. I placed the document back in the folder, then wandered around the office for a while, thinking about nothing much, happy just to be alone. I turned the handle on the tombola drum and listened to the rumble of the balls. I lowered and raised the blinds on the windows a dozen times. I sat down at the computer, but felt no great urge to discover any more information about myself or my employers. I couldn’t explain why. I felt listless and empty.

  This is how the dead feel all the time: empty. Sometimes they want to scream about it, to terrify the living, to tear the world apart. But no-one can hear them. So they just go on feeling empty.

  But this was different. It felt like the melancholy emptiness of being alive.

  I lay down in a warm patch of sunlight on the carpet, closed my eyes, and drifted in and out of consciousness. I imagined myself as the dreamer in ‘Pearl’, a seven-hundred-year-old poem I’d read in the school library, in which religious and philosophical truths are revealed in a vision. I recounted the story of Lazarus to myself, substituting Death for Jesus, and myself for the old man. I remembered a character called Billy Liar in a book of the same name, who protected himself against unbearable reality with a vivid imagination. And inevitably, the flotsam of my own personal shipwreck rose to the surface.

  I remembered the last occasion I had spoken to Amy as her lover. We were sixty-three miles apart at the time, because she had moved to London to take a job the details of which I no longer recall. We were talking on the telephone, and I hadn’t seen her for two months, not since our terminal discussion in the Jericho Café. At the end of the conversation, I told her that our enforced separation had left me with an emptiness inside. Attempting to fill some small part of that vacuum, I added that I loved her.

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  And I put the phone down, because I couldn’t think of an answer.

  I still can’t, even now.

  * * *

  More flotsam, as I travelled further back.

  Amy and I first spoke at a mutual friend’s house. There was a big party for people in our class, and everyone was invited – even me. I remember an old stereo, and plentiful supplies of alcohol, and vomit on the bathroom carpet. About halfway through the evening I saw her, sitting on the floor, cross-legged, facing away from me. She wore blue jeans and a white T-shirt. We had noticed each other at school, but I had been too reserved to speak to her, and she had never shown much interest. She turned around and caught me watching her.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘I’m Amy.’

  ‘And I’m … pleased to meet you.’

  She laughed, though I hadn’t intended to be funny.

  Her laughter saved my life, because the previous day I had been contemplating suicide. This happens so often to teenagers that it wouldn’t be worth mentioning, had it not been so serious this time. It wasn’t just an absence of purpose, and a feeling that my future was drifting into chaos, and a sense that all the defined elements of my life had fallen apart – these things are commonplace. Instead, it was a sudden and overwhelming realization that existence was not the cosy, narrow prospect which my parents’ example had encouraged me to believe in. I had a revelation: I saw my future not as the inevitable extension of my unconditionally happy childhood, with its clear moral boundaries and easy solutions, but as a terrifying hydra emerging from a thick fog. Responsibility, sexuality, self-consciousness, sophistication, power, self-determination, mortality: these words were no longer abstract concepts discussed in the books I’d read, but a single, vile creature with seven reptilian heads from which I would never escape. And the horror of it made me want to destroy myself. I remember walking to the bathroom, repeating This is too much … This is too much … I wanted to slash my wrists and melt into oblivion – in my mind I could already see the blood flowing. As it turned out, when I got to the bathroom I discovered my father had recently switched to an electric shaver, and I was forced to carry on living for one more day – a day which brought me Amy’s laughter, and then her friendship, and ultimately her love … But from that terrible moment of revelation onwards I was always aware of the hydra lurking in the fog, and my happiness was always conditional.

  I guess I was susceptible to suicidal tendencies because I was a loner. Throughout my teenage years I felt inadequate, inaudible, and invisible. I would often make jokes which nobody laughed at, get angry only to be mocked, make statements which no-one heard, wander in and out of rooms unseen. And I had no great talents. I was inquisitive and bookish, but not intellectually gifted; and because of my illnesses as a small child, I was never an outstanding physical specimen.

  Old flotsam now. I was ill as a small child because my mother kept me apart from other children. As a result I had a negligible immune system, and when I attended nursery school I caught every disease going. I was in hospital every other month, and I almost died only three years after I was born – twenty-five years too soon.

  And why was I born? the only answer that makes sense is: because my parents wanted me. Without that desire, I would never have been ill, or inquisitive, or suicidal, or numb, or happy. I would not have met Amy, or had lovers, or become an investigator. And I would not have been sliding down that wet rooftop in Oxford late one summer evening, screaming in terror.

  The final logic is inescapable: I was destined to die only because my mother and father wanted me to live.

  Is this all that existence means?

  Up on the roof

  I lurched forwards for the skylight, but my hands patted uselessly against the greasy paintwork. For the thousand moments contained within that single first second, I felt I could stop myself; but my body slithered down the roof with increasing speed, over the grey slates, the steep slope accelerating the slide, the wind and rain whipping into my face. I slapped my hands and feet against the wet tiles, hoping to gain a hold, trying to slow the descent, but the desperate ride continued.

  Until my trousers caught on a raised tile.

  My left knee jerked upwards as the trapped material ran up my leg. The edge of the tile scraped along my calf, grazing the skin; the rest of my body maintained its downward motion, forcing me into a crouch. I twisted sideways to avoid tumbling over, but this only caused me to spin around, until I was facing backwards down the slope. The tile came loose under the stress of my improvised gymnastics, and I felt myself sliding once more. This time headfirst, and on my back.

  I screamed.

  Even though I knew I was about to plunge eighty feet to the square below, my immediate instinct was to protect my head with my hands. I briefly strugg
led to create some friction with my heels, but the roof was too greasy, and my efforts only increased the feeling of falling, emphasized the helplessness. I closed my eyes and opened my mouth, like a baby – but no sound escaped.

  The slope began to level out: the lower part of the roof pressed against the top of my spine. By the time I realized what was happening, my whole body had slipped onto the shallower incline. Immediately, I pressed my hands and feet against the tiles, gripping as tightly as I could. For a brief moment I was hanging between life and certain death, between renewed hope and despair, as my progress towards the edge slowed. I lowered my head onto my chest and watched the peak of the roof cone receding, until gradually, gratefully I came to a halt with my shoulders resting on the rough, angled rim.

  I was so terrified I could hardly breathe. I saw the whiteness of my knuckles against the tiles, felt my feet arching inside my shoes. My clothes were drenched by the pouring rain, my thighs formed a black V against the sky. I relaxed a little, and lowered my head to ease a crick in my neck. But where I had expected to find the edge, there was only thin air; and a moment later, the tile I’d loosened with my trouser leg trailed me down the slope and struck me on the left shoe.

  I panicked.

  I cried out with surprise, and the effort loosened my body’s grip on the roof. A moment later the tile struck my hand, and instinctively I pulled it away. With no firm hold, I twisted and slid sideways, shouting for help. In a last desperate attempt to save myself, I flapped wildly with my arms, looking for something to support my shifting weight.

  I felt my whole body slipping over the edge. But the erratic swings of my arm saved me: my elbow caught in the gutter and provided just enough leverage to interrupt the fall. The pressure inside my chest and throat was so enormous, I felt it would crush me. Lowering my head again and looking down beyond my feet, I saw that if I had rolled another inch, I would have plunged to my death.

  I tried to move, but my courage had gone. I had to do something, but every muscle in my body felt like water, like paper soaked by the storm. I felt as if the first strong breeze would peel me from my fragile hold and whip me over the side. Nothing in my body would obey the feeble commands issuing from my brain.

  I closed my eyes and let the rain fall on my face, distantly aware that someone was watching me from the skylight, and laughing.

  X-ray vision

  It was the longest journey of the week. Only three or four miles – but to someone who’d been squeezed into a coffin for years, it might as well have been a trip to the moon. Death drove with the front windows wound down; Famine sat quietly in the passenger seat. I lay in the back daydreaming, thinking about my slumber in the Chief’s office. I looked up briefly, and saw the cemetery where Wednesday’s client had died.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Wytham Woods,’ Death replied cheerily. ‘A renowned local beauty spot. Personally, I prefer Boar’s Hill – where we went yesterday – but the Chief claims this is much more scenic.’

  Death was wearing a beige polo shirt with cream-coloured jeans and Caterpillar boots. Famine sported a moth-eaten black tank top with black jeans and pumps. Apart from my usual outerwear, I had chosen purple petunia boxer shorts, purple socks embroidered with sea-green starfish, and a purple top. Today’s slogan was: MY FAMILY WENT TO HELL AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT.

  As we headed west towards the ring road, I lapsed into a daydream again. Memories were colouring every waking moment now. I couldn’t stop them. Nor did I want to: they made me feel more alive than at any time since I’d been woken up inside the coffin. And my desire to live was growing stronger by the day.

  I closed my eyes and saw a line of thin, black trees.

  * * *

  Amy and I are walking in the snow on the west bank of the Thames, at the northern end of Port Meadow. Dark pines burst like huge porcupine quills from the white ground around us. 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. This is not what I want.’

  Once, we rose together like these trees, linking limbs, sharing light, spreading our roots until they coupled like clasped hands. When the wind blew, we were stronger. We were so firmly intertwined, nothing could touch us. But the trees grew taller and thicker, and their bark became old and gnarled, and the competition for sun and soil stifled their growth.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Anything but this. Anything.’

  On the edge of a black wood by the swollen Thames, we speak in a code created by our ancestors, without reference to words which might reveal precisely how we feel. I can still see Amy’s sharp features frozen there in an expression of despair. I still hear her teeth chatter, briefly, comically.

  I watch, as her black hair falls in front of her eyes.

  And she brushes it aside.

  * * *

  ‘What d’you know about our client?’ Famine said, turning around. With his tiny, bald head, bird-like body and scruffy black clothes, he resembled an ailing vulture. My mind was still full of snow, and I hesitated – before realizing that I didn’t actually have an answer.

  ‘Don’t bother him,’ Death interrupted. ‘He’s had a hard week.’

  I was grateful for his face-saving intervention. Half an hour earlier he had discovered me lying, half-asleep, beneath the dormer windows in the Chief’s office. He had been neither angry nor concerned, but had simply said:

  ‘Finished already?’

  I looked through the rear window and saw Amy in the shade of an elder tree.

  * * *

  We are standing together on wet grass at the southern end of the meadow, after a desperate dash to avoid the worst of a spring rainstorm. We are sheltering from the shower and laughing hysterically, uncontrollably, in great gasps and spurts.

  We watch rain splashing on the river in front of us. It makes the water seethe and boil. We feel the drops as they drip through the gaps in the leaves. We listen to the sweep of the storm on the trees. Anything we say at this moment will have meaning: whether it interests us, whether we know nothing about it, it’s all the same. We can fill the air with words of all shapes, ideas of all sizes, statements and declarations and intentions of all kinds.

  ‘I love you,’ I tell her, drawing her towards me.

  ‘Me too,’ she replies.

  We embrace, and time collapses, and the world shrinks to a kiss.

  We’re running back across the meadow towards town now; back through the side streets; back to the café. We still can’t stop laughing, and talking, and shouting, and people stare at us gloomily when we sit down. Amy sticks out her tongue at a scowling man as old as my father, then turns to me.

  ‘Do you really love me?’ she says.

  ‘Yes.’

  We watch the rain run down the window in rivulets, silent for the first time, as the light begins to fade.

  ‘Why don’t we live together?’ she says, adding: ‘Why don’t we just do it.’

  The rain has stopped, and we are back on the meadow, walking barefoot on the wet grass. We kiss again, more passionately, wrapping ourselves around each other, needing the electric shock of each other’s skin, wanting the pressure of atom against atom. And love infects us. It hijacks our blood cells, races to the extremities of our bodies, opens fire in the tips of our toes.

  I look up briefly, and see the sun sinking slowly behind her – one of a hundred different sunsets we will share, a thousand different skies.

  * * *

  The Metro whined as we pulled off the ring road and struggled up a small, steep hill. At the top, Death turned onto a gravel car park and switched off the engine. We were surrounded by sloping woodland, descending behind us, rising ahead. Clumps of deciduo
us trees hissed quietly in the gentle breeze.

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a long walk to the river – where we should find a small mound of earth with a thin air-pipe sticking out.’ We followed a short stony path over the brow of the hill and down a tree-covered slope, until the ground levelled by a line of weeping willows. ‘I’m afraid I can’t remember precisely where she’s buried,’ he announced, pacing back and forth on the path. ‘So it would save us some time if we split up.’

  He pushed his way through the willows towards the river. Famine struggled up the steep tree-lined slope for a better view. I headed along the path parallel to the bank for a while, then stopped. I finally realized what Skirmish had meant at breakfast when he’d referred to today’s client as a P.B. Given the description of our destination, it couldn’t have been anything other than a premature burial.

  I shivered as a cold blast of air ran through me.

  * * *

  The blanket of snow makes everything we once knew unrecognizable. There are no signposts or landmarks – just crisp, white earth, a delicate sheet of fallen flakes. The air is bitterly cold.

  ‘This was a stupid idea,’ Amy says. ‘I shouldn’t have listened to you.’

  ‘We can’t go back now.’ Behind us, the trees have moved together to form a wall of darkness.

  ‘Why not? We’re not getting anywhere.’

  ‘When we find the other side we’ll know where we are.’

  ‘You’re useless. You’ve never done anything right.’

  The snow crunches and squeaks beneath our boots. Pine trees burst from the white ground like bristles on a giant’s chin. Golden evening light dazzles through the trees like sunlight on water. We walk slowly forwards, unprotected, freezing in the face of an ice wind.