I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (26 page)

They keep the bogs spick and span at Swansong, but on a
tile just to the left of the cistern a markered line had been
incompletely erased. `For nothing' it said.

'At the Ritz,' I said, a little wearily. 'Where else"

The day went from bad to worse after that.

I'd no plan to end up passed out on Declan's kitchen
table, yet that Heinz-flecked and mug-ringed board was
where I woke, at the slaked end of the city's afternoon,
packed full of treats and delicacies - those 99s, man, can one
ever have too many? - and woozy from hourly pub-halts,
where single malts and fortified wines followed rowdy
bloody Marys and chilled pilsners down my broadminded
gullet. That afternoon drinking thing. And in such heat,
too. Well, you know how it is. I )id I feel terrible? I felt terrible. The body's queasy lurch and roil, sure - but chiefly the
mind's curious deflation. Chiefly my irritation with myself.
It's a long time - really a very long time indeed, since I've
felt irritated with myself. And why, in a month of Hadean
Sundays, I thought of visiting Angela Gunn's grave I've no
idea. Did I think that was going to help?

None the less don't laugh, because that is what I did.

There are of late these urges, peculiar blips that are taking
nle into all sorts of sudden and absurd gestures. Words like
'irreducible' and 'occult' nudge at the back of my brain.
Wordsworth's blank misgivings, fallings from us, vanishings ... You've got to laugh, actually. One minute I'nl
sprawled on Gunn's formica observing through the window
the sky's slow-nlo parade of whipped and beaten clouds, the next I'm back in the stewed streets heading for St Anne's, a
heart murmur, an insistence laid against Gunn's backbone
like an icy palm. Images fluttered in and out: Angela's face in
the photograph. Mourners like dark menhirs around the
raw grave. Gunn's face - the pocked mirror in the loo at the
funeral directors' to which he'd adjourned niid-sentence,
ambushed by the thuggish gang of his unspoken filial
endearments. All this while I kicked my way through the
remains of Value Meals and footprinted tabloids with my
hands in my pockets and my guts gone heavy. Well, you've
got to laugh. They'd piss themselves, Downstairs. I'm practically pissing myself now, just thinking of it. Teeny
cemetery. No blue left in the sky by the time I got there.
Less than a hundred headstones like ... like what? Terrible
teeth? Victory Vees? Damn and blast this language tries my
patience. Anyway the little beds of the dead, some crisp and
white, others gone to leprous ruin. Blurred dates. Even New
Time's got the clout to smudge the lines of who and when.
Doesn't take long. There was no one else there. The small,
dark, and insensitively renovated church threw its shadow at
my back. I did contemplate, briefly, popping in to see Mrs
Cunliffe of the strabismal leer and compulsive polishing -
but thought better of it in the end. She's in capable hands.
She's tiettiI c.' worse. I felt chilly. I felt dreadful, actually, if you
must know, what with the bare flesh of my throat turned
tender and Gunn's ticker doing its broken-winged bird thing
in his chest, what with my bunch of bright daffs held headsdown, what with the dropped wind and suddenly attentive
trees, what with being slowly flooded by the sense of how
seldom Gunn can bring himself to come here.

])'you know what I did? I cried. Oh yes indeed. Cried my
eyes out. Right there by her headstone. ANGELA MARY
GUNN, 1941-1997, E I FRNAL REST. You can laugh now. It was the eternal rest did for Inc. Not my fault. Gunn's. He's
noticed in himself of late a vulnerability to venerable abstract
nouns and hallowed phrases. Duty. Grace. Honour. Peace.
Eternal Rest. Tears start. The bottom lip wobbles in that way
that always makes an observer - no matter how compassionate - want to giggle. Grief Home. R(,tiret. He lives in mortal
fear of Love. A child of his times, he buried these things away
in some cellar of himself under sprawling cobwebs and drifts
of dust. They lay there, the holy relics his sceptic had outgrown. Then his mother's death, with, not long after, the
discovery that even the most casual utterances of such words
in the world he'd thought debunked could wake their awful
magic. British Airways TV commercials, country and western songs, Hallmark birthday cards, hymns. Only two weeks
before I arrived he was unmanned outside a church, arrested
by the tune he knew.

Be there at our sleeping and give us, we pray
Your peace in our hearts Lord at the end of the day ...

Dreadful. He's tried caution. Steers clear of poetry on the
Underground, with its things of beauty being joys for ever
and cycle clips removed in awkward reverence. He's invariably undone. Once a laryngitic busker's mechanical yet
strangely desperate version of `Wish You Were Here'. Once
(oh please) a speech by Tony Blair. It's not the self-congratulatory comfort of mere sentimentality. More a queer surge
of bowel and soul, a twist or wrench of feeling as liable to
have him hurling his dinner as breaking his heart. Whatever
it is it messes him up - and I don't balk at telling you that it
messed me up, too, good and proper there by old Angle's
rotting remains.

Debilitating, that's what. Had to go and sort Myself out with a quadruple Jameson's in a nearby Knave of Cups. (I
mean how do you bear it, this being suddenly overcome by
feeling? Isn't it just an almighty jumping Jesus Christing
drag?) I felt mighty peculiar afterwards, when the Irish had
kicked-in. Faint, you night say. And yet, I must confess, not
wholly dreadful. There was, it must be admitted (must it?
Well, yes, perhaps it must ...) a slight . . . a sort of... How
is one to put this? An internal breathability. A space around
the alarmed heart. The feeling that someone, somewhere (I
know, I know, I know) was quietly, simply, without a concealed agenda, telling me that it was all right, that stillness
would come, that peace is purchased in the currency of
loss ...

At which point (having called for another Jameson's
family of four, sparked-up a Silk Cut, sneezed, and cracked
my knuckles), I found myself laughing, to myself, at what an
unpredictable wheeze this caper was turning out to be.

Took me an awfully long time to get home. I seemed to
think it a terrific hoot to take buses and tubes at random.
Hardly surprising, I suppose, that I ended up in the arms of
a nineteen-year-old young-man-of-the-night in the anonymous yet surprisingly trim and lavender-scented boudoir
above Vivid Videos, just off Gray's Inn Road - though,
having rather foolishly succumbed to the honeyed tongue of
a hallucinogens salesman not an hour before, I can't be
absolutely sure of the location.

I had ... paused at King's Cross. Intriguing to see one of
my little urban kernels of vice (and misery, and regret, and
shame, and guilt, and violence, and greed, and hatred, and
rage, and confusion) from the other side, so to speak, from
down on the ground. Theory in practice. The abstracted
boffin down among the engine-room grunts. My brothers
were busy in the ether, I knew, the ticklish temptations and purred prompts; I was a bit taken aback, however, at being
able to see them, flowing around the multitudes in gorgeous
streams - until I realised that I was in fact hallucinating.
Extraordinary, let me repeat, to see the fruits of our labours
from the material end. Normally, you understand, my brothers and I `see' only the spiritual correlates of physical actions,
not the physical actions themselves. There's an entire realm
(again `realm' is very misleading, but it's the best you've got)
in which the spiritual dynamics of this mortal coil have their
home. We know when an operation's been a success, of
course - not because we see the bodies but because we feel
the effects (the rips, the rucks) in the fabric of the spiritual
realm.

I had paused, as I say, at King's Cross, leaning against a
lamp-post with what must have been an expression of near
obscene carnal happiness, when young Lewis had caught
my eye, I his, and with an exchange of raised eyebrows and
a couple of smirks, passed from the vulgarity of his price list
to the charm of the room above the shop.

Slender lad. Elfin eyes of yellowish hazel; bones and lips
that must have passed through the Caribbean at some stage,
though his skin was barely the darkness of a Pret-a-Manger
latte. Delicate (and slightly grimy on closer inspection) hands
with long and pearly fingernails, and a dark dong of surprising proportions for one so otherwise slightly built. Talented,
too, from what I can recall, though for all the impact his
attentions had on Gunn's treacherous member he might as
well have been reciting the Highway Code. Oh those drugs.
Cockroaches by the hundred hurrying out from the legs of
my discarded trousers; the curtains' burgundy roses nmorph-
ing into tiny, sack-carrying dwarves; my hand the size of a
double bed; a stadium of whispers; hot flushes; me expelling
geysers of nonsense that did nothing for Lewis's peace of mind. Worst of all (don't relax too deeply, Monsieur Gunn,
I'll right this wrong before I go!), a penis that might as well
have been a Brillo pad for all the sensitivity it retained.

`I don't think this is going to work, you dear beautiful
boy,' I heard myself saying, as if from a great distance, after
forty minutes of fruitless fondling. `No reflection on
your ... your fitness for the task in hand, I hope you understand?'

`Yeah well there's no fuckin' refund, babe,' my companion
replied, surprising me, somewhat, with the speed of his shift
from cheeky mincer to no-dice businessman.

`Delightful,' I said. `Just the tack that's likely to get your
darling head cracked open one of these days - although not
by me, of course.' Not that it hadn't occurred to me, especially given the sudden appearance of an enormous
twin-headed battleaxe propped up against the mantelpiece,
looking very much the part with both its edges sporting
coagulated blood and the odd wisp of human hair. Lewis,
meanwhile, got dressed as if the drawing on of each garment
expressed a distinct and unique contempt. I was wondering
how to reach the battleaxe - given the howling and bottomless chasm that had just opened in the floor between
myself and the mantelpiece - when the door opened and a
meaty-headed man with a very black beard and very blue
eyes entered. He surveyed the scene with his knuckles on his
hips and his chest thrust out - not entirely unlike the posture
of a pantomime dame - an expression of mildly displeased
boredom on his face.

`Oh yeah?' he said, rather non sequiturially, I thought, to
no one in particular. `Oh yeah? Oh yeah? Oh yeah?'

It was taking me an age to shake those damned devil's
coach-horses from the legs of Gunn's jeans, distracted, as I
was, by the regularly rising urge to vomit and by the erratic flight of the room's previously unnoticed white hot bats that
whizzed hither and thither weaving a cat's cradle of phosphorescence around the three of us.

`Yeah, well, Gordon okayed it, babe,' Lewis said.

`Oh yeah?' the bearded man repeated.

`I do think, old sport -' I began.

`And you, sunshine, can fuck right off out of it,' he said.

Well that tickled me beyond reason, I must say. Having
finally managed to get Gunn's de-bugged jeans and shoes
back on, I staggered over to where our hirsute observer
stood with both eyebrows raised and both lips joined in a
curled expression of distaste.

'I'd leave it, babe, if I were you,' Lewis murmured.

Wisely, as it turned out, though I took no notice at the
time. (I mean there's no surer recipe for getting me to do
something than the one warning me not to ...) Besides, for
hours - days, actually - a part of me had been busy decoding the body's potential, its unreleased violence and bottled
energy. Crystal clear that a good punch-up now and again
would've done our Declan the world of good. Would probably have staved off suicide. (It's shocking, really, this neglect
of violence, your oft' fatal ignorance of its therapeutic heft.)
No chance of it with hini living in his carcass, obviously, what
with him being yellower than a canary in custard - strangely,
specifically terrified of having his teeth knocked out
(strangely, I mean, given what all else might happen to him
in a brawl: spleen ruptured, kneecaps smashed, eyes gouged
out, fingers broken, eardrums punctured, goolies crunched,
nipples torn off and so on) - but it was all still available to
me, the pent potential, its lively aesthetics of blows, gnash-
ings, kicks, butts, throttlings, forkings and swipes - and I do
quite clearly remember thinking how joyful his body was
going to feel, how much it was going to thank me for finally releasing its stoppered talent into the world ... I do quite
clearly remember a fantasy vision of myself, post-fisticuffs,
floating in a seratonin haze (I think I was reclining in a vast
red leather armchair, actually, in this image), just before the
guy with the beard took umbrage at my hands on his lapels
and headbutted me with astonishing speed and accuracy,
sending me - with similar speed and inevitable accuracy -
down onto my buttocks, which, whether by his design or
otherwise, turned out to be the perfect position for my face
to receive his kneecap, a bit of down-to-earth physics with
all the subtlety of a cannon-ball landing in a rum baba. I'm
assuming, given the bruises, given this body's new collection
of aches and pains, that other things were done to me after
that. Assumption is required, since an unequivocal blackness
swallowed my consciousness a split second beyond impact,
and did not regurgitate it until several hours later, when I
found myself quite comfortably wedged between a recycling bin and a mountain of shredded paper in an alley at
the back of the shop. Fleeced, I believe, is your word. Stiffed.
Done over. Fucked. Teach me, I suppose, to walk around
drunk and on drugs with 1,500 pounds sterling in my pockets. Nice team, those two, Lewis and his guy. I made a
mental note to find out which of the boys is working with
them and give him a raise ...