Damned If You Do (26 page)

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 deciduous 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.

‘What's the point in going on?'

‘There's always a point.'

‘It doesn't
feel
right.'

‘How's it supposed to feel?'

I gaze at her, recording her face in memory. Raven's wing hair, knife-cut lips, witch's nose, brown dagger-eyes. Her teeth chatter. Her features are frozen. Her black hair falls.

I file the memory and turn around. I see a mound of snow through a break in the trees. It rises like a wave, like a dune.

‘A bridge.'

She follows my pointing finger and nods, but the despair remains. We are individuals divided by time and space. She was a lone candle in a dark room, she shone like starlight, she was a hurricane blowing, she was the sea and the shore, she was birdsong – and I was all of these things to her. And I am an extinguished candle, a black hole, a weakening breeze, a dried-up riverbed, and a long, loud wailing.

And she is all of these things to me.

*   *   *

Famine's pale, sickly shape strode quickly through the snow in my mind. Dry pine needles covered his tank top. The sight of him surprised me. I stepped backwards and tripped over a root on the upland slope.

‘Shouldn't be so jumpy,' he observed, offering me his hand.

‘You shouldn't sneak up on people,' I countered.

‘Found anything yet?'

‘No.'

‘Nor me.' He stopped and studied me briefly. Opened and closed his mouth like a fish. ‘Haven't read the Life File, have you?'

I shook my head.

‘No problem. Not really necessary anyway. It's a simple ransom job.' He smiled thinly. ‘We're here to make sure it goes wrong.'

‘I'm tired of all these deaths,' I complained.

‘Never easy … But you get used to it.' He gestured for me to accompany him along the path. ‘Today, for example, I have to supervise the starvation procedure. Ensure that the body has exhausted all stores of glycogen and fat. If client shows severe wasting, tissue proteins will be under attack. Good sign.' His yellow eyes rolled sideways, lizard-like, then flicked back. ‘And I need to make sure she doesn't have water … And that she really
feels
hunger.' He stopped. ‘Don't like any of it, don't
dis
like it – but have to do it. Chief's orders.'

‘Death seems to feel the same way,' I suggested.

‘Death's like me, perhaps worse. Tired of it all.' He paused, and sighed. We sat down on a patch of grass beneath a weeping willow. ‘Working for the Agency isn't easy. After the first thousand years you begin to recognize patterns. Patterns that repeat, and repeat, and repeat in millennia that follow. Difficult not to become very bored.' He sighed again. ‘All terminations different, but all essentially the same. Anything we achieve creatively is a bonus … But for Death, problem is more serious. Not just the detail of his job which bothers him, but the reason for it.' He scratched his hairless head with long, black nails. ‘Pes and War different. Always take pleasure in their work. Don't stop to think.'

‘What about Skirmish?'

‘New. Still enthusiastic. Big ideas.' He smiled. ‘Can be dangerous.'

We walked along the path, back towards where Death had disappeared.

‘The Chief tries to make our terminations more exciting … But lacks compassion. No experience of dealing with Lifers face-to-face.' He frowned. ‘Had you read today's file, as I have, you would've seen that today's termination is totally inappropriate to the client. Has not lived her life in a manner which
deserves
a death such as this.' We stopped at a shaded viewpoint overlooking the sluggish grey river. ‘Feeling is that the Chief is
staging
terminations. Manipulating the data we've compiled to produce work which satisfies him on a personal level. Could have very serious consequences.'

‘Why don't you speak to him about it?'

‘Would like to. But have never spoken to him. Never even
seen
him.' He chuckled briefly. ‘Sometimes doubt that he exists.'

I heard a shout in the distance: ‘Over here.' Down the slope to our left, near the river.

Death was standing by an eroded stretch of bank, surrounded by trees. A slender, brown boomerang of silty water bent towards and away from us in a smooth arc, its ends disgorged and swallowed by the woodland. As we drew closer we saw the narrow, plastic air-pipe rising from a low mound of raw earth.