I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (12 page)

`You don't look like you do anything for a living.' Yes.
The blunt gambit entitlement of the rich and the beautiful.
Candour a match for my own.

`I do something for a living,' I said.

`Really? What?'

`I'm the Devil.'

`How nice for you.'

`Currently in possession of a mortal frame, as you see.'

`I no see.'

`And you're Harriet Marsh, widow of Leonard Whallen.'

`And you're not clairvoyant. My name generally precedes
me.

`But other information does not.!

'Such as?'

`Such as that you're currently wearing peach-coloured
cami-knickers from Helene's in Paris. Such as that you were
thinking several things a moment ago: that the English are in
love with failure and loss; that there's no pleasure for you now
like the pleasure of being driven through capital cities in the
last hour before dawn; that my cock would be small and that
it's been a long time since you've even known what you like;
that there should be another dimension or place for the filthy
rich when this world's fruits have been sucked dry; that there's
nothing you'd like more than a long stay in a white-walled
and chilly hospital where nothing was demanded of you; that
you'd need to get drunk if you were going to fuck me:

`My mistake,' she said, after a sip of her champagne. `How
charming.'

`Goes with the territory.'

Raised eyebrows. Tired, our Harriet, tired of life, tired of
having done everything - but willing to be seduced by
curiosity. `Territory?'

`Being a fallen angel,' I said. `Being the fallen angel.'

Another exhausted smile. Another sip. It wasn't much,
this, but it was, at least, something.

`Tell me what I'm thinking now,' she said.

I gave her a devilishly nonchalant smile of my own.
`You're thinking about how little you get for six million in
South Kensington, and that in any case you won't keep it for
more than a year, since London houses are filled with sadness. You're wondering whether I'll fuck you because I've got a thing for older women, some dreary oedipal tumour,
or because I'm the sort of young man who believes that
self-degradation elevates him to some kind of divine knowledge.'

`You're really rather good at this, aren't you?'

`The best.'

`There must be a story to tell.' She sounded weary at the
prospect.

'After.'

`After what?ff

'You know what.'

Oh my angel, my bad angel - well that pressed a few buttons,
obviously - Oh my angel master, fuck me, flck your little piE'bitch, mmnyesss, stick your filthy f 4cking cock up my f lthy f cking
arse, all the filthy fucking way, all the way, um-hmn? Nn-hmn. You
know I'm yourfilthy little cocksucking whore, don't you? Fuck your
little Virgin Mary whore -

Lost my head a bit at that point, I'm afraid. Curiously
though, this monologue (yours truly too busy with the miracle of his own restored and restive rod to bother
responding) all delivered in a robotic monotone, like a somnambulist bishop reciting the Athanasian Creed. It's become
one of Harriet's tools for submergence, has sex; it takes her
to some depth of consciousness far from the surface of her
life. The pornologue's mantric (as is the Athanasian Creed,
for that matter) sucking her down to a level of herself where
no questions are asked, where her history evaporates, where
her self bleeds painlessly into the void.

And though I kept shturn myself, there was no denying
the effect of such saucy language on Gunn's tackle. Even
from Harriet's passionless lips they effected a startling trans formation. (And ferried in the memory that Penelope
couldn't, simply could not talk dirty without cracking-up;
whereas Violet's dyspepsia lurks so close to the surface that in
a few heady encounters it's come out in a mild dominatrix
shtick that's had Gunn spunking like a hound-dog.) It's been
that way for him ever since he learned to read. Indeed, his
childhood proficiency as a reader was driven almost exclusively by desire for the sexual knowledge books contained.
Even as an adult his balls tingle at f uschia, f ucivorous, cunning,
cuneiform, cochlea and cockatoo - for no better reason than that
they're dictionary neighbours to .fuck, cunt and cock. An
absurd way for a grown man to behave, I'm sure you'll agree.

Harriet looked sad as hell when it was all over. Sad as hell
that it was all over. Sad as hell that time had started again,
with its all ticks and all its tocks, all its excruciating reminders
of who she was, where she'd been, what she'd done, and
where, in the end, she was going.

`You're worried about going to Hell,' I said to her, flexing
Gunn's breasts (I almost typed `pees', but I don't want to
insult you) in front of the mirror, whilst smoking a cigarette.
`Don't be. I've made some changes down there. All that fire
and brimstone, all that agony? History. No point. Plus, my
fuel bills ... I'm kidding. But seriously, can you give me one
good reason why I should waste my time making my guests
suffer? This whole ... this whole line about me making
souls suffer - it's so stupid.'

`Please stop talking.'

`My feeling is, hey, mi casa su casa. As long as you're not
with the Old Man upstairs, my job's done. There's no reason
we shouldn't be civilized about it. No reason we shouldn't be
comfortable.'

`It's a nice gimmick, darling, but one needs to know when
to stop.'

No one gets it. Which do you think would annoy Him
more% Souls in Hell suffering and wishing they'd been
Good? Or souls in Hell partying and thinking, `Thank fuck
I didn't bother with all that morally sound behaviour crap?'
You see the logic, surely?'

'There's no comfort in logic,' Harriet said, picking up the
phone and punching the stud for Room Service. 'Suite 419.
Bollinger. Three. No. I don't give a fuck.'

Click. Wealth's economical idiom. Not needing to say
please or thank you. If parents hadn't scolded their children
for forgetting please and thank you, I'd never have got capitalism off the ground.

'Harriet,' I said. 'I feel like a million bucks. Why don't
you let me pitch you a story?'

She rolled over onto her belly and let one arm hang over
the edge of the bed. Her hair was a mad old lady catastrophe,
now. Astounding: looking at the elderly elbow, the troubled
capillaries of the wrist, I felt Gunn's bollock blood thickening
again. Who'd a thunkit? All Vi's charms on offer and I can't
raise an eyebrow. Then Harriet, who - ah, the penny drops -
is the age his mother would've been if she hadn't croaked ...

'There's no point,' Harriet said. 'I'll have heard it before.
The world ran out of stories centuries ago.'

'I couldn't agree with you more, Harriet,' I said, lighting
a fresh Silk Cut off the butt of the one I'd just smoked down
to the cork. 'I couldn't agree with you more. And this story,
let me tell you, this story's the oldest story of 'em all . . '

The story of my - ahem - downfall.

Hoooo ... mamma what a downfall that was. I'd go so far
as to say there's never been another like it. Semyaza, Sammael, Azazel, Ariel, Ramiel ... from Heaven's lip they
pitched and flared in radiant rebellion. Mulciber, Thammuz,
Appollonya, Carnivean, Turel ... one by one a third of
Paradise yanked into the void on the leash of my charisma.
Somewhere on the way down I realised what I'd done. It ...
ah ... hit me. You know what I thought? I thought: Oh.
Fuck. Fucking ... hell. Apposite, really, come to think of it.
But I'm getting ahead of myself ...

Central conflict, obviously, my tiff with junior. God the
Son, to give Him His full title. Jumping Jesus Arthur Christ.
Jimmeny Christmas. Number One Son. Sonny.

Where do I begin? The regrettable goatee? The humour-
lessness? The Oedipal transference? The anorexia? He cast
seven of my best friends out of Mary Magdalene and enjoyed
every minute of it. Not that I blame Him. The Magdalene
was a piece of ass even after her conversion; writhing around
mid-exorcism like that she looked ... Well. I've got it on
DVD. We'll splice some footage into the film.

I'd long wondered about the Son. When GodVoid had
created us to prise God from Void He had self-revealed a tripartite nature, a 3-for-1 deal that rocked the entire
non-world of ontology. I'm not sure it didn't come as a bit of
a shock even to Him, to discover not only that He was the
Supreme Being, but that He'd had a kid and a ghostly PR
officer all this non-time without even knowing it. He'd
missed the best non-years, too, apparently - the milk-teeth,
the evening bath, the bedtime story - since it was apparent
that Junior was all grown-up already, poised eternally somewhere between the wanked-out end of adolescence and the
onset of thirty-something melancholia.

The Son was the side of Himself He kept most oft'
occluded, as if He suspected it might cause trouble among
the rank and file, as if He knew (He did know) that freedom was also the freedom to want more of His love than you had,
to want to be loved as much as Someone Else was loved, for
example. We glimpsed young Arthur, from time to time,
practising His twinkly look of dolorous compassion. It was
embarrassing.

We suffered quiet intimations. The rumour of creation. A
mode different from the one we knew, a form of being so
fundamentally strange to our own that many of us buckled
and all but broke trying to get our heads around it.

Raphael let the cat out of the bag. Some Seraphs had
been allowed to cotton on quicker than others. Raphael -
that donkey - Raphael's mind was an open book to nie. `Is
this coming to pass?' I asked him.

`Yes.'

`What's my part?F

'Gabriel's part is -'

'What's my part?'

`Michael will be -'

`What is my part, Raphael?' Or words to that effect.

`We're to be messengers,' Uriel said.

`Messengers?'

`To the New Ones.'

`What New Ones?'

`The Secondborn. The Mortals.'

Matter. Matter, apparently, was the high concept. It
dizzied us to think of it. We couldn't think of it. And what
was all this gobbledygook about mortals?

Indulge my litotes: I didn't like it.

Meanwhile junior gave me that look every time our eyes
met. It wasn't the enmity that got to me. It was the condescension. A thousand times it was on the tip of my tongue
(unforked in those days) to ask Him, What the fuck? Something always stopped me. His applehood in the eye of
the Father. And now that we're on the subject, let me settle
this `God's favourite' thing once and for all. It was never me.
The truth is ... ah, the truth ... the truth is God never
really ... He never really listened to me. For years, for years
almost immediately after my birth I tried to ... to put something special into the Gloria, something unique, a
communique from me to Him, a signal that I was ... that I
wanted to ... that I understood the way He ... That ...

Anyway the point is, fucking Michael (do please pardon
my French) was always His favourite. Michael.

Some presences have their own gravity, their own radiation.
So it was with Creation. No hard evidence, but slowly, one
by one, each of us came to understand that it was there,
somewhere, elsewhere. Elsewhere! Our minds fairly boggled. Was it possible to conceive of an elsewhere in a
nowhere? (A ticklish question. In the angelic realm there's no
concept of place. It's meaningless, actually, to talk about the
angelic `realm' at all.) Therefore we weren't anywhere; we
were nowhere. And yet, as Old Time passed ...

`I think it's started,' I said to Azazel.

'What has?'

`Creation.'

`What's that??

`It's different from this. It's to do with the Son. The Son
and the Mortals.'

`What are these Mortals?'

`They're not like us.'

`Not like us?'

`No.'

Quite a while passed between us in silence. Then Azazel
looked at me. `That doesn't sound too good, does it?' he said. 'We're supposed to take His Will to them,' Uriel insisted.

`Why?'

'They're His children.'

' [Ie're His children.'

'They're different. They've got something.'

'What?'

Him inside them.'

Rubbish.'

'It's true. They've got a bit of Him inside them.'

`So you're saying they're better than us?'

'I don't know.'

'Look - is it just me? Or does everyone else think this is
a bit ... ;nuch%'

It was a dismal time for us, that period when His
Lordship turned away from us and absorbed Himself in
making the Universe. The central heating .vent off. The
stalwarts kept the Gloria going, but my heart (and I wasn't
by any means alone) just wasn't in it. The Holy Spirit went
among us checking morale, but a good third (the bad third)
could barely summon a salute. Meanwhile Arthur was really
beginning to get - as you so evocatively have it - on my tits.
He developed a new gimmick. At first I found it merely
bizarre. Then I found it strangely crude. Finally I found it
downright insulting. (Merde alors, the labour of all this, this
hunt for things you can work with. Keep in mind all of this
pre-dates Matter or Form. Keep in mind all of this is being
patched together out of hopelessly inadequate metaphors.) The
new gimmick was this: He'd choose a moment when I was
absorbed in reflection or deep in conversation. I couldn't
ignore Him. (Prostration in His presence was customary.
Never explicitly requested - that would be vulgar - but fail
to comply and see the rashes and nosebleeds that followed.
It had become a chore for me.) Like a girl using her own innocence as a tool of seduction He'd reach up and part His
robes, revealing a terrible chest cavity around a pulpy and
thorn-crowned heart. Blood-droplets jewelled this ghastly
organ, complemented, I saw, by playing-card diamond
wounds in the hands and feet, and a nasty-looking gash just
above the kidneys. I had no idea why I was being called to
this obscene spectacle, nor what was expected of me -
although I must say I had a bad feeling about it. I had, even
then, a woeful intimation that it meant something ...