I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (17 page)

Apparently, yes. And don't mistake me. If I sound confused it's only the happy confusion of the roll-over jackpot
winner, now that all his choices are choices between pleasures. I smile a lot, faced with these charming frictions.
Memories of the measureless deflagrations of home mix now
with the intimate passing of a pigeon's shadow, or the precise
dimensions of a full stop. Drugs or no, this gentle dissonance of cognition sends me through my time here in feisty
bliss ...

I've got fourteen scenes to write, I know, but how, may I ask,
do you handle dreams?

To start with: sleep. How did I ever do without it?
Actually not sleep itself, but Fallin asleep. How did I ever survive without this business of falling asleep? There are - Day
Twelve (Heavens how time flies when you're having fun) -
all sorts of things I'm wondering how I ever got along without. Israeli vine tomatoes. Campo Viejo Rioja. Heroin.
Burping. Bollinger. Cigarettes. The sting of aftershave.
Cocaine. Orgasm. Lucifer Risings. The aroma of coffee.
(Coffee justifies the existence of the word `aroma'.) There
are, naturally, plenty of things I don't know how you put up
with - disc jockeys, hangnails, trapped wind, All Bran - but
then I knew it was going to be a mixed bag.

Anyway sleep. Granted, the first time it took me I was
caught off-guard: one minute it was evening and I was lying
on Gunn's bunk with crossed ankles and a warm feeling in
my feet and shoulders - the next brilliant sunshine with
yours truly truck-horned awake with pants-shitting suddenness and a miniature identity crisis bringing on the first-morning-in-a-foreign-hotel-reconstruct-your-own-history routine. I was so startled (another first) I shot out of
Gunn's bones and back, bodilessly, into the ether. That
turned out (wearing, this business of things turning out) not to
be a good idea. Pain - the pain - returned, instantly, bright
and clamorous. (When I quit Gunn's carcass at the end of the
month, you know, that pain's going to hurt like ... You
wouldn't think, would you, it being only twelve days and all?
I mean still no sweat or anything, but ... well ... damn, man.
Ow, you know?) But sleep - falling asleep - I've got used to
it. Easy to see why you lot go for it in such a big way,
though why you choose to do it at night, the best part of the
day, is a mystery to me.

But this dreaming - whoa. It was one of Gunn's. (Yes, I'm
afraid so: on top of the drab threads and tiny todge I'm saddled with a good deal of the subconscious fluff, too.) Now as
you all know, other people's dreams are superlatively boring
unless you yourself are in them, so I won't burden you with
the details. ('I had the most amazing dream last night,' says
Peter. `Was I in it?' asks Jane? `No,' says Peter. `Me and Skip
were in this forest, you see, and ..: etc. Jane's not listening -
and who can blame her? Pretended interest in your partner's
dreams is one of the half-dozen glues holding the pitiful airfix
of monogamy together.) It's a dream Gunn's only had once or
twice before. An older, bearded man comes to take his
mother to the pictures. It's not a lover. (For the record, it's a
queen whose partner cancer's recently chomped its way
through, on whom Angela's taken pity.) Wee Gunn knows it's
not a lover - but he can't or won't trust this old fruit. `I'm just
your mother's friend,' the bewhiskered lips keep telling him.
`There's nothing to be afraid of. I'm not taking her away
from you. You can trust me. You know you can trust me.' (But
tight-shouldered Gunn's a compact little thunderstorm. His face is piping hot and his chest is busy with naked feelings still
waiting for their language hats and coats. His mother's friend
is sitting on the couch, Gunn standing in front of him holding in his left hand the new matchbox Mini Cooper in
electric green with opening boot, bonnet and doors - the
price of his mother's company, he assumes. The babysitter is
heating spaghetti hoops in the kitchen. Gunn hears the bhup
then steady exhalation of the gas ring. With all his ineffectual
might (when his mother's back is turned for a final mirror
check: beige mack, mauve chiffon scarf, coppery curls, green
eyeshadow) he balls his sweaty fist and clocks Mr Harmless a
wild hook in the bearded chops. He thinks, little Gunn, all
ablaze with pride and shame, that something big, some paradigm shift must follow. But the man on the couch just grins,
without lifting his palms from their rest on his kneecaps. `No
need for that, my friend,' he whispers, rising, ruffling Gunn's
warm hair. Then to Angela: `Your carriage awaits.' Angela
kisses our cheek and leaves a lipstick print. It's a thing
between them. He's allowed to go to bed without washing it
off. Her lips are warm and sticky. At the doorway she turns
and blows him another kiss. The bearded nian waves and
winks. Gunn waves back as the corridor stretches and the
doorway recedes, slowly. He waves, and smiles, and thinks: I
hate you, I hate you, I hate you ...

I was mumbling some untranslated version of this when I
woke. Terribly hot and bothered. Had the Ritz's costly
linens all tangled around my legs. Struggled up into consciousness with a lot of undignified lurching and warbling.
Then sat up puffing and blowing, astonished at the simple
endurance of the snaking world: the room, the braying traffic, the weather. Called down for a pot of Columbian full
roast and a half-dozen wee snifters with a tender - I'm
tempted to say humble - thankfulness that it was all still here. Incredible. And you lot have to deal with this sort of thing
night after night. Must take some getting used to ...

Out of mischief, really, I went to see Gunn's agent, Betsy
Galvez. Do you know, I've found it so difficult to stick to my
fourteen scenes. This writing malarkey should come with a
health warning: MAY CAUSE INCESSANT DEVIATION FROM ORIGINAL INTENTION. AND DROWSINESS. Obviously I've got a lot of
the script down - the big scenes, so to speak, and Trent
already thinks I'm God - but do you think I can stick to the
task in hand? I turn on Gunn's PC, I sit through the tedious
powering-up, the brief arrival of Penelope's gently smiling
mug as his desktop wallpaper, and am forced to acknowledge
the presence of an untitled file alongside `Lucifer Screenplay'
that's been variously titled Some, Anyway, Last Words,
Wherefore I Know Not, and Paradise Fucked, and which has
thus far proven a terrible distraction from my contractual
obligations. You know what's in it, don't you? You've been
reading it, haven't you? I wouldn't mind if it was just the narrative version of the blockbusting movie - the `novelization'
as such things are barbarously called - but as you know, it's
worse than that. I seem to be continuously struggling against
the temptation to write about Dedan Gunn.

I was just going to post it to Betsy, anonymously (I'm
tempted to deprive Gunn of credit for this bit of graft; I'm
tempted - oh I know I'm silly - to keep this as something I've
done for me, you know?) but then it occurred to me (it's
becoming annoying, this business of things occurring to me,
this habit I've developed in Gunn's skin of not knowing everything ahead of time) that there was a good chance it would
end up on a slush pile, or in the secretary's Deal With it Later
file, or worse, ignominiously in the bin. So I went to see her.
Gunn generally rings and makes an appointment. I didn't.

This weather ... Humans, how do you avoid spending all
your time just experiencing the weather? I walked from
Clerkenwell to Covent Garden in very mild, very slightly
moving air that touched the exposed bits of me like the
petals of cool roses. The sky (even I've got to take my hat of
to Himself when it comes to summer skies) was high and
beaten thin, the low sun softly exploding pale oranges and
watery greens into the upper margins of lilac and blue. The
whole thing had a distant, bleached quality to it that made
me in Gunn's body feel small and lonesome, not unlike the
way lie himself used to feel as a child, when his mother
would treat him to an extortionately priced helium balloon
which would invariably slip from his wet grasp and go sailing up into the vast and lonely distance, until Gunn,
nauseated by his relationship to something now so remote,
would begin to feel dizzy and afraid. (I've resigned myself, as
you can see, to bits of Gunn's life intruding. Manifestly, the
longer I'm here the more susceptible I ant. Extraordinary
what the body remembers. The bones loded with love, grief
silting the arteries, fear the bowels' recurring mould. Who
would have thought mere flesh and blood could hold so
much of psyche's ghostly script?)

The good old world smelled good and old and worldly:
fruity drains, diesel, caramelized nuts, fried onions, heatrotted litter, tyres, minty and decidedly unminty breath. A
suddenly opened pub door let a scent-bubble of beerflavoured carpet and fagsmoke out into the fresh air. I
inhaled (burped booze and bar snacks in there, too) as I
passed through, smiling. Women had touched themselves
up - cosmetically, thank you - and their features glowed and
gleamed: mouths like scimitars in claret, plum, sienna,
mimosa, pearl, burgundy and puce, smokily shadowed eyes
with diamond hints and sapphire glints, flecks of emerald and fragments of jade. Easy there, Luce, easy. This is what they
see every day. Doesn't mean anything to them. I know. I
can't help it. Like your man Rumi, I find myself `drenched
in being here, rambling drunk . . .' You don't know what it
is to me, this leisure (no priest in the taxi, no rabbi on the
stairs), Gunn's sensory quintet working overtime. One after
another: the wind's sudden swerve; someone's cinnamonish
aftershave; the flooded gutter's ribbon of sky; teen bodyheat
on a ram med Tube; marmalade breath and perfumed wrists.
Wears man's simidq e and shares man's smell, as dear old Hopkins
lamented. You don't find me lamenting it, do you? Eh? I say,
Missus, you don't find inc lamenting it.

It used to give Gunn tremendous pleasure to visit Betsy,
in her Covent Garden office. It was the sort of office he'd
always imagined a literary agent would have: gargantuan
oak desk, wafer-thin Persian rug in sky-blue and gold, fat
oxblood leather couch, books everywhere - simply everywhere - and, of course, manuscripts. Betsy, who, at fifty-six
has a well-lined face and sunken cheeks, chain-smoked
l)unhills and had shorthand or private language conversations on the phone that always made Gunn feel like part of
the select world of Literature, even though he hadn't a clue
what she was on about. (It was of course the select world of
Publishing, but Gunn was a hopeless romantic.) Over the
years our Betsy's perfected a very slightly sexually flirtatious
persona for her young male writers, one that's based on her
knowing that she's not physically attractive but that she is
socially and professionally powerful. Her eyes are a pellucid
blue, and are occasionally to be observed lingering a fraction
longer than necessary on the lineaments of her `boys'. (She
doesn't have young women writers because she doesn't like
young women.) She's had three long lunches with Gunn at
the end of which he's had the feeling - the odd double entendre, nothing disgusting - she might be about to offer
him money to fuck her - and lie can't say the thought doesn't
stimulate him. He imagines broad, deflated breasts with
wine gum nipples, old-woman flesh in the armpits, an arsehole with a history ... Since becoming `a writer' Gunn
believes such warped or distended liaisons are within his
scope (he's going to love Harriet), are part of his duty, in
fact, along with bowling around the West End drunk at
four in the morning and wearing overcoats that reek of
Oxfam.

Then, God help him, A Grace of Storms.

'I think you're making it awfully hard for yourself with a
book this long,' she said to him, at their last protracted but
emphatically unerotic lunch after she'd read the monstrous
tome.

`Yeah; Gunn said, `but when a book's ,mood you want it to
go on forever, don't you?F

This left Betsy in such an appalling position that she
surreptitiously dug her belt buckle's prong into her palm
to distract herself. She knew exactly the sort of reviews
Gunn thought the book would get. She knew exactly
(light another Dunhill) the sort of reviews the book would
get.

'Have you spoken to Sylvia?' Gunn asked. Sylvia Brawne,
the editor of Gunn's last novel. `Have you told her anything
about it?'

Weary Betsy blew a Gandalfian smoke-ring. How much
she wanted to say: `l)eclan, you're a good writer who does
what he does well - but you're not Anthony Burgess or
Lawrence l)urrell. You've got a nice line in understated
poetic observation but virtually no intellectual rigour. You've
bitten off more than you can chew and as a result this manuscript is a titanic failure.'

Instead, she said: `We'll go to Sylvia first and then see.'

They did see. A Grace of Storms was turned down. By
everyone.

The inner sanctum of Betsy's office is antechambered by a
smaller room with a varnished wooden floor, dark blue walls
and one very new-looking Ikea desk, behind which sits
Betsy's small and moody assistant, Elspeth.

`She's with somebody,' Elspeth said to me. 'Did you have
an appointment?'

I ignored her and strode across to the door. Unheard of,
to breach the adytum unmediated or unannounced. Elspeth's
bottom jaw went rapidly through a sequence of little adjustments. Then she pushed the wheelie chair away from her
desk and swivelled on it to face me. `She's with someone,
Declan,' she repeated.

One of the downsides of being nee is that I'm occasionally
rendered mute by the sheer number of acerbic ripostes teeming on my tongue. I glared at Elspeth and opened the door.

`... developing a much more ... muscular language,' was
the tail end of Betsy's compliment to the young man seated
with a confrontational expansiveness of body in the middle
of the oxblood couch. Tony Lamb. Gunn hates this person.
Secondarily for his chubby face, buzz-cut and habit of dressing all in black, but primarily for his ubiquity and the success
of his novels. Betsy despises Tony Lamb, too, certainly for his
commitment to black clothes, but mostly for the blandness
and flippancy of his language, the absence of ideas, the
absence of reading, and the presence of a raging desire to get
into Hollywood (which he will, within the year) and snort
coke and fuck aspiring starlets and throw-up in the bathrooms of very exclusive places. The very life `Declan' (bless)
is living right now. She knows that for Tony Lamb writing is a tool which, if used cannily, will mean he'll never have to
write again.