Damned If You Do

by Gordon Houghton

  * * *

  In the corridor below, the door to the stairwell opened and the pushbutton timer clicked on. I turned off the computer, stood up quickly, and tipped the chair backwards. It struck the column of document wallets, which toppled over. Some files spread over the carpet; others slid close to the fire. I panicked and scrabbled around trying to reconstruct the pile, ignorant of the original order, but indifferent to the possibility of replacing documents in the wrong wallets.

  Steps tapped heavily on the iron spiral staircase.

  One of the wallets was smoking. I had to decide quickly whether to place it back on the pile and face the consequences, or to trash it. I threw it into the embers and poked it until it caught fire. I couldn’t tell what was inside – I had no way of knowing whether it contained my contract, or a Life File, or the Chief’s shopping list – but I took the risk and did it anyway. The destruction of information gave me an immense, and surprising, sense of relief.

  The footsteps stopped at the top of the stairs.

  I heaped the remaining documents onto the column, keeping only the Life File. I studied it casually as the door opened.

  ‘Hello,’ said Death, surveying the desk, the column of files, the now blazing fire. ‘Where’s the Chief?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Have you finished?’

  I nodded. ‘But nothing here makes any sense.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ he said flatly.

  Crackers

  Amy returned the video (but not the equipment) a couple of weeks after I’d set the whole thing up. By this time I’d already discovered and documented enough evidence against Ralph to complete the case. It was possible that he saw me a couple of times – one afternoon I’d noticed him casually looking around as he turned a corner, and on the previous weekend he’d used his rear-view mirror far too frequently – but in less than a month I’d recorded or photographed bullying, blackmail, a mistress, a lot of unfriendly persuasion, and that little spot of torture down by the railway. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

  But it was the video I was really interested in. My desire repelled and excited me in equal measure, but could not be resisted. It gave me back some of the control I’d lost during the breakdown; and I wanted to see how Amy had changed in the last seven years, whether her tastes were still the same. I wanted to know, too, if she had found the excitement she was looking for. I had so many questions.

  She sent me the answers in a brown padded bag, unbroken, unedited, uncensored.

  * * *

  White noise, a blurred pink-and-white image, then her hand retreats from the lens. Her face is pale but her expression is neutral. The fear only shows in her eyes, which are wide and black. She is fully clothed.

  ‘What the fuck are you doin’?’

  She turns around and walks slowly to the bed.

  ‘Get lyin’ down, you dizzy cow.’

  It’s a four-poster bed. The curtains at the foot are drawn back. Red curtains. They look to me like labia. She climbs onto the bed, as if penetrating her own genitals, and lies on her back with her crown pointing towards the camera.

  ‘You wannit this way round tonight, doll? ‘S’fine by me. Whichever.’

  She lies motionless for several minutes, not even turning her head to see what Ralph is doing. But I can see. I see a small, muscular man stripped to the waist, revealing a chest covered in coils of black hair. His face is not unattractive, but it’s unbalanced by the long scar and twisted nose. His voice is strong. I watch as he admires himself in the mirror, combing his black hair, scratching his chest. I see him take four lengths of rope from his pocket and toss them onto the bed.

  She flinches, slightly.

  ‘’Ang on. Forgot the fuckin’ tape.’

  ‘Don’t,’ she says as he leaves the room; and she lets the word hang there, as if to say any more might bring him back.

  But he returns anyway, and sits on the bed next to her, and strokes her face. Then he produces a roll of white insulating tape from behind his back, and grins, and she says for the benefit of the camera or simply for herself,

  ‘You don’t have to do this. I don’t want you to do this.’

  And he says nothing as he takes the rope and ties each of her limbs to the four posts, and tears off a length of tape and winds it three times around her head, covering her mouth, lifting her crown gently each time. When the work is finished, he takes her cheeks in his hands and says quietly,

  ‘I’ll do what I fuckin’ like.’

  She moans as he exits again; but then falls silent, stays still.

  Five minutes pass. Nothing happens. Another five. She remains motionless. After a quarter of an hour she turns her head, so slightly that the camera barely registers it.

  ‘Keep fuckin’ still. If I want you to fuckin’ look, I’ll tell you.’

  He waits for another minute, then returns and sits at the foot of the bed, level with her shoulders. He kisses the tape over her mouth with short, stabbing movements like a bird pecking at seed. He repeats the action on her wrists and ankles, where the rope bonds are tightest. The blood rushes to her arms and legs as though he’s transmitting some disease through his lips, through the tape, and she writhes a little, and he notices, and he stops.

  ‘Fuckin’ bitch.’

  Another fifteen minutes pass, maybe more. Sometimes he approaches her but doesn’t touch. Sometimes he places his hand on her face, or her breasts, or her legs. When she responds with any sound or movement, he interprets it as desire. You wannit, don’t you? You like it. When she doesn’t respond he calls her fuckin’ cold bitch, and he says who else is fuckin’ you? and Not good enough for you? You won’t get better while I’m still breathin’, and he presses a little harder against her face, or breasts, or legs, until she moans with pain. Then he stops, and strokes her hair over and over, and says robotically, Sorry, doll, sorry, doll, you know I don’t mean it. And he leaves the room like a little boy, with shoulders slumped and head bowed. She wriggles against the bonds when he’s gone.

  When he returns, he is carrying a small, white plate. The plate contains crackers and butter, and a sharp knife. He sits on the right edge of the bed and eats the crackers greedily, spilling the crumbs on her clothes, stopping only to abuse her verbally, or to pat her on the arms and legs, like a man joking with his friends in the locker room. Sometimes he breaks a biscuit over her body and rubs the crumbs into her clothes, laughing, telling her how stupid she looks; but when she writhes or moans or shakes her head, he stops again and repeats the mantra of apology.

  When the crackers are finished he uses the knife.

  ‘I don’t love no-one but you,’ he says. ‘I mean it. No-one else.’

  And he runs the blade of the knife around her breasts and down to her crotch, pausing at places that suit him; then along her legs and arms, slowly, carefully. And I can’t see if the edge makes contact with her skin, or if he holds it a millimetre above her, the millimetre that denies her the relief of safe contact and threatens her with visions of short, downward stabbing movements. At last he holds the knife to her face, and now I see that the blade doesn’t touch her skin, but is suspended an inch above her eyes.

  ‘If you leave me, I’ll fuckin’ kill you … You say anythin’ to anyone—’

  He waves the blade over her mouth, the point close to her nostrils. One brief contact, and the blood will flow. But he doesn’t touch her. He waves it more violently, to demonstrate his intention, then flicks the knife up in the air like a baton, and catches it by the handle.

  ‘You’re a fuckin’ borin’ cow anyway. No bloke on earth could get a stiffy lookin’ at you. An’ if you leave, I’ll make sure no bloke does look at you.’

  And it might all be over. He cuts the cords tying her to the posts, and she curls up into a ball, her body shaking with inaudible sobs. After a while, when she considers it safe, she gently removes the insulating tape from her mouth, whining with pain when it tugs at her hair. But he has one final desire to
fulfil. He pulls down his tracksuit pants to reveal a pair of black Y-fronts, then takes out his flaccid lump of flesh and waggles it at her shivering back, taunting her like a child: It’s your last chance to see it. Won’t get another. And when she continues to ignore him, he shrugs his shoulders and starts to piss on the bed by her head, so that the drops splash against her hair, onto her neck.

  She pulls away violently and stands up, enraged.

  ‘You’re fucking mental.’

  ‘’S’way you like it, doll.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘When I want to.’

  ‘Fuck off now.’

  He recognizes that he’s lost control of her, of the situation, and the humiliation prevents him from apologizing or remaining. He directs the rest of his stream onto the carpet, tucks away his penis, pulls up his pants, and leaves – pausing briefly in the doorway to reassert his authority.

  ‘Get a cleaner to sort it out. Tomorrow.’

  As soon as he’s left the room, she dry-retches against the bed, gathers up the sheet and uses it as a towel to dry her hair. She scrubs her head for a long time, but is never satisfied, trying again and again to remove the stain and the smell. Then, as if she has suddenly remembered she is being watched, she drops the sheet and walks quickly towards the camera. Her eyes are red, her face sags with disgust, but her mouth is twisted into a peculiar smile.

  Her hand approaches the lens, becomes a blurred pink-and-white image, then white noise.

  The rattling cyborg

  It took fifteen minutes to walk from the Agency to the fair at St Giles, retracing the course we’d taken on Monday morning. The difference was, today we were dressed as paramedics. Death had selected two pairs of bright green overalls from the Stock Room and filled a small black medical bag with a variety of non-medical equipment. As we turned onto the road leading to my old burial ground, I revealed my feelings about some of the things I’d seen in the Chief’s office.

  ‘All those people reduced to forms and files and numbers…’ I began. ‘It’s so depersonalizing. If everyone is reduced to a set of facts, and you can’t distinguish one set of facts from another, then life means nothing.’ Death studied me intensely, and I felt uncomfortable and embarrassed, so I wound up the speech quickly. ‘I don’t remember much about who I was when I was alive – but those memories I do have still mean something to me, even now. I’m more than a statistic.’

  ‘I agree,’ he said, nodding in sympathy. ‘What’s more, I find the detail of what we do to our clients increasingly repellent … Tonight’s client is a perfect example. His termination just seems unnecessarily gruesome.’

  * * *

  A yellow glow hung over the houses as we approached the graveyard, and grew brighter as the crowd grew denser. People jostled for space or gathered in clumps of conversation, but all were sucked into the strobe-lit vortex possessing the main square; and we were dragged helplessly along with them. At the corner, the helter skelter loomed ahead of us like the spire of a sunken church. The wooden slide coiled from heaven to hell, carrying its helpless human freight endlessly downward. The owner, a walnut-faced, liver-spotted old man, innocently entreated passers-by to have a spin.

  ‘Keep your eyes open,’ Death advised. ‘He could be anywhere.’

  I scanned hundreds of unfamiliar faces in the hope of recognizing only one. Some disappeared into The Famous Rotor-Disco, a two-storey mincer which processed individuals into a single writhing unit of flesh. Up on the viewing gallery, a circle of abusers – made devilish by multicoloured lights, thick puffs of steam and a hammering disco beat – gathered to bray at the bouncing bodies below. Other people were kidnapped by the scooping buckets of the big wheel, spinning and arcing away into the evening sky. Their desperate screams were softened by the juddering whine of an old generator, the murmur of the crowd, the incessant music. Still more were sucked into the Waltzer, a dizzying, shuddering maelstrom of light and sound. Hired hands whirled the seats at random, snapping necks, squeezing lovers together, making people sick with pleasure.

  And at last, in the chaos, I saw him. A tall, tub-bellied, bearded man in a pink T-shirt and floppy green shorts, standing by a mobile snack bar, exercising his mouth on a steaming hot dog.

  And the data from his file came to life in my imagination.

  * * *

  It’s 1969. He is two years old. He is resting, half-asleep, on his father’s lap, watching black-and-white images flicker on the television screen. The pictures show a space ship that looks like a metal octopus, and two snowmen running in slow motion over a dark grey desert. The snowmen are talking, but their lips don’t move and their voices are unclear, like when the boy’s father speaks to him on the telephone from a long way away.

  But he is not interested in the pictures, or the sounds they make. He is not even interested in the thought that two men are walking on the bright circle that shines in the night sky. He just likes to stay up so late, and to lie half-asleep on his father’s lap.

  * * *

  ‘That’s him,’ I said, watching the father stroke the boy’s head, as my mother had once stroked mine.

  ‘What’s the recommended pursuit distance?’

  ‘Between two-point-one and nine-point-eight metres.’

  ‘Minimal intervention?’

  ‘So I’m told.’

  The snack bar adjoined a huge diesel-powered wind organ, decorated with rough representations of square-jawed heroes, Amazon women, giants, unicorns, elephants, centaurs – all protected by a thick, yellow coat of varnish. The organ grinder stood idly by, as old and yellow as his whining machine, grinning toothlessly at his audience; a grizzled black bull mastiff guarded his feet, its body bloated by scraps from passers-by. As the music wheezed and groaned, animated toy soldiers crashed cymbals and bashed drums out of time. Our client and his hot dog had come to rest here, listening, watching.

  Death instructed me to wait and observe, then headed for the snack bar himself, barging his way through the crowd and giving dissenters the evil eye. He disappeared briefly, and the next time I saw him he was standing at the front of the queue. The assistant who served him was dressed in a mauve and white striped blazer with matching straw boater. He stood out like a rat at a cat convention.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ll have one of those.’ Death indicated something behind the counter.

  ‘A doughnut?’

  ‘No. The round thing on a stick.’

  ‘Toffee apple?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Pound-fifty.’

  Death patted the pockets of his paramedic overalls before producing a ragged note, then left before the bewildered assistant could hand over his change. When he returned, I asked him why he had bought the apple, suspecting that it would play some vital role in the success of our mission.

  ‘I was hungry,’ he replied.

  * * *

  He is twenty-one years old. He is tall and handsome and proud of his new wife sleeping in the hotel bed next to him. She is already pregnant with their first child, a girl who will live for five years before leukaemia wrenches her from their lives. He strokes his wife’s belly as she sleeps, as his father had stroked his hair on the night of the moon landing, and he thinks of the child growing inside whose sex he does not know, whose future he has already planned, who will one day grow up to be as tall and handsome as him.

  * * *

  He strayed from the wind organ, paused at a prize booth, then slipped into the crowd. We caught up with him again at the ghost train – a giant, black shed, drably decorated with puny fluorescent ghosts, pathetic pastel-coloured monsters and grandmotherly witches. The sidecar-sized carriages that clattered through the exit doors invariably carried laughing customers, and as the trains rolled to a halt on the narrow track a skinny actor in a black-and-white skeleton suit hammed his way through a moans-of-the-undead routine. He began to lose heart even as we waited, his shrill whines and violent gesticulations downgraded to disconsolate murmurs and a li
stless shaking of the arms.

  The bearded man passed through the entrance and climbed into the front carriage of the next train. Death bought a couple of tickets from a man whose face resembled an Arcimboldo painting, and we pushed through the turnstile and settled at the rear. A sharp jolt set us in motion: I turned around to see the skeletal actor recovering from the push. He stepped backwards casually, then set about disturbing his audience once more. The train rolled forwards and banged through a pair of black wooden doors, which pincered the carriage as we passed.

  Light snuffed out, sound muffled. Faint, strange echoes of music and voices, wheels rumbling and screeching. I’d anticipated rubber skeletons rattling in cages, severed heads dripping fake blood, Frankenstein’s monster, leering vampires, howling wolves, revolving tunnels – even the odd joke corpse. But I saw only this emptiness, heard only this stifling silence broken by the train wheels and the far-off fairground attractions.

  I waited for something to happen.

  The train snaked to the right, turned left, rumbled straight ahead, turned left again, rolled right – then squealed to a halt. I heard nervous laughter from the carriages ahead.

  Silence.

  Quick footsteps in the darkness. A hand slapped my cheek, then something soft, stringy and damp brushed against my forehead. I flinched, but it was over as soon as it had begun. The train moved forwards, squeaking, grumbling and twisting along the track towards the exit. The leading carriage banged into a second set of doors and forced its way into the light. I turned towards Death to avoid the glare.

  His seat was empty.

  Travelling from light to light through darkness. Waiting for something to happen. Muffled echoes of life.

  This is what it means to be dead.

  * * *

  A terrifying scream rose from inside the ghost train. Our client, who had been climbing out of the front carriage, stopped and turned around. He and the other passengers left slowly, turned sporadically, gazed quizzically at the swinging exit doors. They watched, half-hoping that the source of the scream would reveal itself, until they were absorbed into the body of the crowd. I followed them, still wondering about Death.