I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (16 page)

Heavens how this tongue runs on. I have no knack for
brevity. And you none for patience, no doubt - so forward
ho! (Besides which, there's the Temptation in the Desert
Scene to write this afternoon. Harriet laughs when I show
her the material. Candy from babies, she knows. Criminally,
candy from babies.) He is the bow of burning gold and these are his arrows of despair - but still we're no nearer the why
or how.

If Gunn were writing of Penelope he would perfect her,
since he never got beyond their romance and into their reality. So let me, at least, be clear. She wasn't a saint. (If only she
had been. Saints, they're a barrel of laughs, they are, perpetually on the verge of conversion to sin. They can't help it.
Extremes always nudge their opposites in the small hours.)
She was pretty enough, but not so much that you'd still have
shagged her if she was completely bald. She was lucky, actually that she hadn't turned out astonishingly gorgeous, because
she wouldn't have been quite strong enough to resist living
off the benefits that condition confers. (Astonishingly gorgeous people are rarely good, for the simple reason that they
don't need to be. Hell's absolutely stuffed with the souls of
ex-stunnas and hunks, whereas Heaven's been in a more or
less perpetual state of talent-famine since human beings first
started biting the dust.) Anyway, Penelope. (You see what
happens when an angelic intelligence starts telling the stories
of human beings? One needs parentheses of virtually infinite
regress; one of those Russian dolls - only an unimaginably
fertile one, with not half-a-dozen versions of herself within
but several billion - such an enormously long time before
you get to the last, the first, the point of origin or expiry ...
Remember, Lucifer, we are concerned here only with
Gunn's decision to end his life ...)

Penelope's gone down to university in London (with her
tangled tawny hair and her green leather jacket and her
chipped maroon nail varnish) to study Literature and to Fall
in Love. And she's met black-eyed and tea-coloured Declan
Gunn.

`I like your forehead,' he says, when she opens her eyes one morning. Six months in they've arrived at the speech of
lovers - cockily tangential and thriving on apparent non
sequiturs. `It's sometimes like a cat's. And your hair comes
out of it in exactly the way it did when you were five.'

`I want a tomato and some honey and some yoghurt,' she
says. `In my dream, I thought I'd had a baby, but when I
looked down at it in my arms, it was an almond slice.'

`And when you were at primary school,' he says, `the
teacher would be aware of you staring out through the
window at the playing field, and he would know absolutely
that you weren't listening to a word he was saying, and the
surface part of him would be irritated, but the deeper, aesthetic part of him would love you for your cat forehead and
your absolute indifference to where you were and what he
was trying to teach you.'

`What's the most important thing?' she says, changing
again.

`Angel Delight,' Gunn says.

`Truth,' Penelope says, moving her fingertips over him,
mapping her ownership, guiltlessly avaricious. `Truth is the
most important thing. Being true. Not being false.'

`I know.'

`But really.'

`I know.'

`Then Angel Delight'

He can't quite believe it, of course, his good fortune, his
utterly undeserved luck in having found her. They delight in
telling the truth to each other about the world. They're only
nineteen, so it's not much of a world.

`We must have babies,' Penelope says, clambering on to
him, easing herself down.

`Eh?'

`Not this minute,' she says, feeling him inside her. `But eventually. Because if we don't, then ugly, stupid, unkind
people will, and the forces of evil and meanness will win.'

Gunn's in a state of near mesmerism: his body's rich
torpor, the late morning's heat. Their window is an ingot of
warm gold. I don't deserve this, he's thinking, watching the
light jangling in her hair, feeling the precise amount of her
bodyweight she's holding back - an appallingly erotic
restraint - This will all have to be paid for.

He's right.

Now - good gracious me look at the time! I only even mentioned Penelope because she's part of what drove our Gunn to
the blades and the bath. This is the way of it down here, I
perceive, the frightful drudgery of finding the causes - then
worse, finding the words. The immeasurably long time it all
takes. Had Gunn stopped talking years ago he might have
started living. It even occurred to him; predictably, when it
did, he went away and wrote about it.

My dears, we've wandered from our course here. My
fault, I know. And now I'm afraid the pull of the world
draws me from this. I have, as you know, got places to go. I
have, as you know, got people to see.

It wasn't a fair fight. That's what I'm trying to bring out of
the story, you know? Trent's keen on playing this angle up.
And why not? It wasn't a fair fight. Left to his own devices
I'm not sure junior would have made it to Golgotha. I'm not
just talking about the stuff that's on record - the warning to
supercuckold Joseph that Herod was furious and that Egypt
was lovely that time of year, for example - I'm talking about
stuff you don't even know about, stuff that came later, when the Little Baby Jesus was all grown up, when, if the Old Man
had had any decency about Him He would have stayed out
and left the two of us to it, head-to-head, gloves off, winner
takes all, and so on. But what, I ask rhetorically, does God
know about fair fighting?

Consider the temptation in the wilderness.

Redundantly, let me begin by saying it was hot. Really
aufully hot. The sky was bone white and deserted, sunlight
a static explosion on the sand. Not kingfishers but lizards
caught fire; the place was jewelled with them. Desert plants
revolved their shadows, slowly. He'd gone into an emptiness
only occasionally whipped through by a babbling Essene or
hair-shirted freak. He looked rough when I came to him,
beard matted, eyes stied and reddened, cheeks hollow, fingernails torn, lips cracked and blistered. Yes, fasting for forty
days and nights manifestly had not been a blast. When I
found him he was sitting hunched in the mouth of a cave,
knees up to his chin, bony fingers laced around his lengthy
shins. Very black was the cool mouth of the cave and very
white the scorched land around it.

`Hungry, lovey?' I said. It's been a weakness of mine - yes,
definitely a weakness - that ever since the days of the parted
robes and the punctured heart I've found it all but impossible to control my irritation in his presence. Soon as I see him
something in me just clicks and it's all barbed jibes and
leaden sarcasm. So annoying. I'm sure that if I could just have
got beyond it and let the charm flow ...

`Oh,' he said. `It's you.'

`You know those crash-diets are a trap, don't you?'

`You're wasting your time, Satan.'

`Not if it gives me pleasure to be here. Lucifer, by the
way.

'Go away.'

`Look, you know the drill. Would I be here if your Dad
didn't want me to be?'

He sighed. I had him there. He'd come out here to be
tested.

`Get on with it then, will you?' he said.

So on with it I got. Now obviously the versions you've
inherited are way off. Matthew's got me trying to get him to
turn stones into bread (prompting all the not by bread alone
blarney), to throw himself off a mountain and precipitate an
angelic rescue (provoking all the don't test the Lord thy God
baloney), and to bow down and worship me in return for all
the kingdoms of the earth (eliciting the now world-famous
get thee behind me claptrap.) Luke agrees, but cocks up the order
and substitutes a building (in the desert) for the mountain.

Now I ask you: do you really think that's the best I could
come up with? I mean I'll just remind everyone in case
everyone's forgotten: I'm ... the Devil. And even if I wasn't,
I'd have to have been a complete dunderhead to think he'd
go for any of that nonsense. You're not even capable of eating
bread after forty days' and nights' starvation. Having angels
come to his rescue - what would that prove? It would, I suppose, have given him an opportunity to show me just how
important he was, an opportunity for the gratification of
ego or pride, but pride wasn't his weakness. You're going to
tempt someone, you find their weakness. All the kingdoms
of the earth? Might as well have offered him the complete
Pokemon collection. The Evangelists tell you what they
would have been tempted by. Jimbo wasnt interested in that sort
of thing. It doesn't bother me that the Gospels are skewed, but
it bothers me that I come out looking so narrow, so myopic.

Apart from sanctimoniousness and impenetrable parabling
Arthur really only had one weak spot. Doubt. Very occasional, and invariably mastered by faith - but it was there. (I got to him in Gethsemane, right before the fin and games
started, and almost had him at the very last on the cross,
when, after I'd niggled him with that `told you you can't
trust Him' remark he panicked and went all lama sabachthani
on us.) Yes, he was now and then wont to wonder whether
it was all strictly necessary, the being betrayed and spat on
and mocked and flogged and thorn-crowned and nailed to a
cross for hours of agony and more mocking and jeering and
so on. He was wont to wonder, quite reasonably, whether it
was all going to he worth it.

So I took him to a place where the dunes dropped to a
bed of rock blazing pink in the sun.

`You're doing this to save the world, right?' I asked him.
He just stared down, saying nothing. `Okay,' I continued.
`This is what the world will look like after you've done your
thing. I'll just give you the headlines, but stop me any time
if there's something you want a closer look at.'

An unpalatable but not dishonest (honestly) preview of the
next 2,00(I years screened as il-by mgV'r on the stony plateau
beneath us, complete with names, dates, places, soundeffects and statistics. There was some fantastic stuff in there -
well, you know that, now - holocausts, tyrannies, massacres,
technology, biotechnology, wars, ideologies, atheism, starvation, money, disease, Elton John . . . He didn't like the look
of it, you could tell. Nor did he think I was making it up. He
didn't think I was making it up because he knew I wasn't
making it up. He stood next to me and swayed. Maybe it was
the hunger, the heat, the hallucinations, the headaches.
Maybe it was the effect of the subliminals I'd sneaked in - Xrated flashes of him with a thonged and baby-oiled Mary
Mags (or Dirty Mags, as I used to call her, much to
Jimmeny's chagrin) making the beast with two backs (bit
cheeky of me, I know, but you've gorr'ave a larf at work narn'again, intcha?); maybe it was just that he was feeling
dreadfully lonely after more than a month with only scorpions and bugs to talk to - who knows? What I do know is
that he wavered. Rocked. Wobbled. Turned to me, lifted an
unsteady hand as if to grab my non-existent lapel. At which
point, typically - typically - the Old Man dropped a black
cloud over the sun and a thunderbolt straight into the middle
of my screen, scaring the hoop out of me and bringing
Charlie Brown rudely to his senses.

`I'm going through with it,' he said. `Now fuck off, will
you?'

Like I said: not a fair fight.

The hotel is filled with echoes, the ghostly resonance of torturous trysts and bad business. Deals, betrayals, cramped
passions and sudden deaths - each room holds its after-image
composite of the beings who've passed through. The hotel is
a great London valve, through which the lifeblood of the city's
wealth - the planet's wealth - has passed, now with dalliance,
now in haste. Beauty and boredom form its unjudgemental
mood. I'm at home there. I'm so ... at home there.

Scale fucks with my head. Angelic scale with human
head, human scale with angelic head - oy. You go dizzy.
What does one do - having been immaterially present at the
Divine ejaculation that brought matter into being - what
does one do with ... a daisy? How is consciousness - especially the troubled hybrid I'm walking around with at the
moment - to reconcile these extremities? Having observed
newborn galaxies tossed prodigally, milkily, into the void,
having straddled event horizons and strolled bodilessly 'twixt
time's wrinkles and matter's loops - how, exactly, am I to accommodate the crenulations of Harriet's toenails? Am I to
apprehend seconds and caraway seeds that have called aeons
trifles and held gas-giants baubles fit for a Heavenly whore?