Damned If You Do (14 page)

Cerberus sniffed at the gravel car park.

Death crouched down next to the dog, stroked its head and whispered something into its ear. It grinned with all three jaws and raced away up the hill.

‘What did you say to it?'

‘Woof. Woof woof
woof.
Woof woof,' said Death.

*   *   *

We left the cemetery and crossed the road to the funeral parlour, which occupied two houses at the end of a long terrace. A collection of rough stone blocks and carved headstones lay in the paved front gardens, with a few crude tags indicating prices and possible inscriptions. The left-hand building was dominated by a large plate-glass window, through which I dimly saw a display of coffins, a few of them as opulent as the one I'd been buried in. On the right, the house front was relatively normal, with a living room, a kitchen and a couple of windows upstairs. The narrow concrete path leading to the front door on this side was stained with a thick and greasy patch of engine oil, in which heavy drops of rain were creating multicoloured eddies.

‘Looks like he's a home mechanic,' I observed.

‘
He
isn't,' Death replied. ‘But his neighbours are.' He rapped his knuckle against a green water-butt to the left of the path. ‘Full. That's good.' He walked to the front door, turned around and scanned the horizon. ‘No obstacles, no people.
Very
good.'

‘What happens now?'

‘We go inside.'

In the distance, Cerberus barked.

*   *   *

Death produced a ring of skeleton keys from his overcoat pocket, selected one, unlocked the door – and noticed my hesitation.

‘It's fine. He's not due back for another five minutes.'

I followed him in. A long, narrow hallway ran the length of the house. Immediately to our right was a small kitchen, to our left a flight of stairs.

‘Come and look at this.'

I went into the kitchen where Death was bending over the hob and sniffing. ‘It's gas, just as the Chief said it would be. And there's a telephone in the hall. Did you see it? There should be another one upstairs.' He pressed his heel into the linoleum, about a yard away from the sink. ‘The floorboards are soft here. Very soft. A little pressure and they'll give way. We shouldn't need them, of course – but if Plan A fails…' He looked up. ‘And they're directly below the smoke alarm.' He clapped his hands, pleased by the preparation even if the execution itself held little appeal. ‘I think it's going to work.'

‘What's he like?' I interrupted.

‘Who?'

‘Our client.'

He paused. ‘Short, bald, glasses—'

‘No, I mean: what's he like
inside?
'

‘All I know is what I read in the Life File this morning. He's forty-nine years old. He's an undertaker.'

‘Nothing else?'

‘Nothing very relevant. He's gloomy, a loner, an outsider. He smokes thirty cigarettes a day. He's poor company, on the whole. And he's accident prone – which is why we're here.'

‘What kind of accidents?'

‘Oh, dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe.' He puffed out his cheeks. ‘For example, he wears glasses because he suffered from trachoma as a child. It's extremely rare in this climate, but he managed to catch it.
Very
bad luck. Between the ages of three and fifteen he fell and cut his head nine times. You'd think he was cursed. He's broken his left arm three times, his right arm once, and both legs twice. He's been knocked down by cars on six separate occasions. He's caught three colds every winter for the past forty years. But that's not the end of it. He was once struck by lightning twice in the same evening, and on his way to the hospital the ambulance was hit by a truck. Yesterday morning he narrowly missed being electrocuted in his bath. The first time he went ice skating he broke his nose. He was dropped on his head as a baby.' He sighed. ‘The list goes on and on.'

I looked through the kitchen window. A small, bald man in a funereal suit slowly approached the house from the adjoining street. He was carrying two shopping bags filled with food. He rolled along the pavement like a huge, sad, marble.

‘Is that him?'

Death glanced through the window and nodded.

‘Shouldn't we find somewhere to hide?'

He shook his head. ‘He's extremely short-sighted. The Chief said if we stay at this end of the kitchen, he won't even notice us. I'll believe
that
when I see it.'

*   *   *

In the couple of minutes before his arrival, Death told me that our client's major concern was whether or not he had led a good or a bad life to this point. Specifically, he only had three concrete reasons for considering himself good:

He experienced sporadic bouts of affection towards strangers. Sometimes this resulted in resentment and rejection, but mostly it made him feel happy to be alive.

His professional life was a success. He always paid due respect to the solemnity, formality and ritual of burial, and was often thanked by relatives of the deceased for his care and attention.

As an adult, he had never killed anything.

Against this, there were five reasons why he considered himself to be truly evil:

As a child, he had separated frogs from their legs, flies from their wings, ants from their heads, fish from their fins; and newts, gerbils, tadpoles, rabbits and cats from their tails.

He drank, smoked, gambled and ate too much.

He had used what he called the
f-word
as a limited-strike weapon against the following people: his mother and father, his aunts and uncles, both of his friends, his landlord, his underlings, people in the street, churchmen, door-to-door salesmen, tramps, farmers, bankers, lawyers, and almost everyone who appeared on television. He had also once severely abused a rock that had caused him to stumble, on a walk with a woman he admired.

He was notoriously avaricious. He had only ever bought a drink for his colleagues on one occasion, and that was due to a verbal misunderstanding. He often sat in his car in public car parks to use up the time remaining on his ticket. He refused to give money to any charity. Unless he was indulging his vices, he withdrew a maximum of ten pounds from cash tills.

He lied often and without good cause.

‘And this rather minor Good-to-Evil Ratio of 3:5', Death continued, ‘has been enough to convince him that he leads a life of sin second only to Satan. As a result, he regards his accidents as just punishment.'

Our client ambled along the path to the front door, narrowly avoiding the oil patch but bouncing off the water-butt. The rain had stopped but his suit still glistened and steamed, and his glasses were spotted with raindrops. He put down his shopping bags and searched for his keys. He found the front-door key but dropped the whole bunch as he lifted it to the lock. They landed an inch away from the drain. Trying to pick them up he edged them closer to the grate. Realizing that disaster was about to strike, he carefully plucked the keys from their precarious resting-place and cautiously opened the front door. He tripped as he entered the house.

‘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.

‘Hell
fire.
'

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.