I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (30 page)

I don't quite know where the idea came from. (It's one of
the few questions I'd still like answered. I mean I know
where your ideas come from. But what about mine?)
Horribly curious, I must admit, to meet her in the flesh -
my flesh as much as hers. Gunn's flesh, anyway. I even had a
harmless plan. One that would set the cat among Gunn's
pigeons when he returns (if he returns, that is, misery guts
that he was before he left) without incurring the tiresome
prohibitions of Charlie's Angels from Above. And before
you get all political on me - I wasn't going to do anything to
her. Not in that way. Just a bit of innocent mischief. I was
going to - well ... You'll see presently.

I took the 12.00 from Euston, due in at Manchester
Piccadilly at 14.35 (useless Gunn can't drive, and I was hanged
if I was going to waste a day stealing a vehicle and teaching myself). It was a heartbreakingly beautiful day. Londoners
haven't seen a summer like this since '76. Heat rippled the city.
I had tour 99s and a Strawberry Split on the way to the
station. Ice cream. Oh, man: your mouths a volcanic orifice;
in goes Mister Sottee - and lo! thou art tilled with bliss. Or I
am, at any rate. It's the hot/cold thing, I know. Hardly surprising when you think about it. I've been troughing for
England since I got here (lamb jalfrezi; anchovies by the
pound; green olives slathered in oil and flecked with raw
garlic; glace cherries; chargrilled salmon steaks; Toblerone;
iced radishes dipped in sea salt and fresh ground pepper; pickled herrings; After Eights ...) but I've yet to come across
anything to match the delights of Mister Softee's aerated icecream, spiralled into a 99 cornet, garlanded - nay, bejewelled
with the glutinous sauce of the noble raspberry and accented
with an ingenuine and vastly overpriced Flake. I tell you
solemnly: ice-cream's so delicious and bad for you I can't
believe I had nothing to do with its invention.

However. I walked to Euston. I find I still adore walking.
Absurd, obviously, what with it being merely a case of putting
one foot in front of the other and so on - but there you are. The
sky was distant, madly blue, ethereally marbled with altocumulus clouds. My shadow wobbled and jogged alongside
me like a retarded or palsied companion. Dear, pan-fried
London gave out the reek of its traffic and waste - you can
smell the nineteenth century in London, the eighteenth,
the seventeenth, the sixteenth; its odours shuffle the ages,
lace KFC with ancient sewage, diesel with velum and dust.
(I've come a long way since first opening my eyes in Gunn's
bathroom. With an effort, I can remain calm in the presence
of myriad colours; with an effort I can hold back the swoon
or the rabid assault; with an effort I can - as they say
Stateside - deal.) No, I can't deny the merits of inanderin,~ about, nor those of doing nothing. I cancelled Harriet the
other evening, you know. Just like that, cancelled her. I was
sitting in my room at the Ritz, having just inhaled a judiciously measured line of Bolivia's finest when the
scent-tendrils of Green Park's recently mown grass drew me,
snout-first, like a nose-ringed bull, to the open window,
where I looked out. That's all - just looked out. The sky all
furrowed mauve and indigo splashed from below by a preposterously bloody sunset; meanwhile the bruise-coloured
park exhaled its day's stored heat; the trees crackled, softly;
the air had a parched or purged taste, as if a fire had charged
through it ... I called her mobile and told her I was sick.
You can't believe it, can you? Trading Harriet's mesmerizing
monologues for an evening's quiet contemplation of twilight's gentle passage into night. I can hardly believe it myself.
My mature phase, perhaps. Beauty and sadness. I got so
melancholy (what was it it all reminded me of?), so blues &
country lonesome, that it was all I could do to rustle up Leo
for a midnight rub. (Did I mention Leo? As in `Man-2-Man
Leo, genuine 10" cut offering full body work/role play dom
or sub, TVs o.k., no TS, no women'? I didn't? Well, my dear
Declan, I'm afraid I've got some rather startling news for
you...)

Anyway. (Do you prefer Anyway or Some? This title-hunting's a bitch. I spent an hour or two toying with calling it
Huh.) Anyway, Penelope's back in Manchester. She moved
back there after her and our Declan went their separate ways.
She's unresolved about it, mind you, the move up North. (It
kills me, you know, all you humans lying on the couch talking about being unresolved. I'm unresolved. Oh, really? You
don't say? You mean, you're actually ... not ... resolved?)

Stalling. Sorry. Pitiful.

I've seen photos, obviously. She hasn't changed much. The hair's still warm golden and prone to tangles, but shoulder-length now, not the spine-long treasure that drove Gunn
potty. The green eyes still have it. Beauty, of course, but life,
time, history, thinking, pain. Less curiosity than the Gunn
Penelope. Less curiosity more life.

She lectures. There's a one-bedroomed garden flat. A cat
called Norris and two unchristened goldfish. There are men,
when she feels like it: illicitly indulged-in post-grads from
time to time; these or wild cards picked up during assaults on
the city's nightlife (her and her debauched mate Susan); but
since Gunn she's treasured her own space, a burrow to which
she can retreat and brood; a smouldering Marlboro, a bottle
of plonk, the garden at evening, its anarchy of Birdsong.
There's been a woman, too (footage Gunn would have paid
cash money to see), a Phl) third-year with feisty black eyes
and wet-gelled hair who wore tan leather strides and what
must have been cripplingly expensive silk shirts. Laura.
Smelled of lemons and Impulse Musk. Deeply exciting for
Penelope, initially, her adventure at the Looking Glass.
Ultimately no more manageable than the half-dozen straight
lovers since Gunn.

The green leather jacket hangs on the back of the kitchen
door. She sits opposite me at the stripped oak dining table, in
profile, her arms around her knees, her bare feet up on the
chair next to her. The kitchen's door opens directly onto the
bright garden. I'm tempted to giggle, glimpsing it, remembering my unseemly moments back at St Anne's. She's
opened the wine I brought - not plonk, but an extortionately expensive Rioja - but both of us take our first gulps
without the bother of a (to what, exactly?) cheers.

`I wanted to talk to you,' I say.

She swallows, takes another quick sip. Swallows again. I
know what she's thinking. I'm about to tell her that: Penelope, my darling, I know what you're thinking, I'm about to
say, when she turns, suddenly, and faces me.

`Declan,' she says. `Don't think - please don't think the
scale of it's diminished. Please don't think I've just comfortably assimilated it, what I've done. What I did. I know you
think that.'

`No, I don't.'

`And don't think that I expect you to have stopped hating
me, because I haven't. I know what a fucking vile and ugly
thing it was. I know. I know. You wrong someone. . . When
you wrong someone, in the old-fashioned way ..

Astonishing. Tears. Jumping Jimmeny Christmas. She moves
fast, this girl. It's been two-and-a-half years, going on. Gunn
turns up, they open a bottle of wine, he tells her he wants to
talk to her and zappo - the heart opens its wound and starts to
bleed all over the place. (It is, you must concede, unpleasantly
messy, this business of having feelings, this nattering to each
other. I've always thought of it as gory, a sort of perpetually
occurring road accident - everyone going too fast, too close,
without due care and attention, or with too much ...)

This is sweet, I'm thinking. Gunn, who despises her for
having made him love her then betraying him, would want
my guts for garters if he were here - which wouldn't be a
good idea, since they're his guts, too - if he had the faintest
inkling of what I'm about to do.

`It was a fucking hideous thing,' Penelope says. `It was. I
know it was.'

`Would you mind if I had one of those?' I say, indicating the
open-flapped pack of Marlboro next to her hand. She's blank
in response, a ravaged tissue held to her suddenly reddened
nose. I see I've switched to the wrong level. (Damned impulsive desires, you see? How do you cope? I mean it just came
over me, right then, that I really wanted a cigarette. I'd left my Silk Cut on the blasted train.) She's so deep in her own feeling awful that it barely even grazes her, that I'm bothering
about things like cigarettes. I take one anyway and light up.

`What I mean is ... lleclan please don't tell me you hate
me. I know you do. And you've the right. Just please, please
don't say it here, now. I promise you I hate myself enough
for both of us.'

I'm tempted to let her run on. I mean come on, it is
rather charming, her misery, her guilt, finally, especially since
her entire identity's been built on knowing the right thing to
do - then doing it. Not that she's been perfect, of course.
There have been slips, stumbles, days of laziness or existential ennui - but there hasn't been a fall, not like the one
precipitated by I)eclan's unfortunately swollen head. She's
hard on herself. She remembers the past. Susan tells her,
invariably, on their splurges: Your fucking trouble is you can't let
go of the past. Her cider-and-black flavoured breath beats
against Penelope's face. How can you expect to live if you've still
got your head buried in the past? It's not my head, Penelope's
wanted to groan. It's my heart.

Now, here, I'm afraid, is where the atrocities begin. (My
fingers hesitate at Gunn's greasy keys. I've already stalled
myself with three cups of Earl Grey and six cigarettes. If it
weren't for your language being so blatantly designed for
deception, all this telling the truth would have me worried.
Professional reputation and all that. However ...) The most
extraordinary thing. How to say this', I ... I find myself ...

Look I'm no fool. I've got used to bits and bobs of Gunn
cropping up in my behaviour, the odd fingerprint here and
there. I knew it was never going to be a clean distinction (the
body has its limits on how many things you can let pass
through - don't I know from previous possessions? All that rot
and stench? Involuntary snatches of nursery rhymes or surprise waves of tenderness at the appearance of a favourite teddy?
Goes with the territory); but this ... this is something entirely
different. What we're talking about here is the ... the wholesale import of a particular feeling that I didn't have to start
with, suddenly, directly from Gunn's past into my present. I
open my mouth to begin what I've come here to begin - and
find myself in an agony of hatred and pain. (Don't get me
wrong. If I'm familiar with anything I'm familiar with hatred
and pain. Hatred and pain are my blood and bones, so to
speak, my spirit's dress, my odours, my shape, my - well,
we've covered this. The point is that's fine with me because it's
my hatred, my pain. I mean they affirm the continuity of my
identity if nothing else. This, on the other hand, pitches up in
me like an obstreperous and lightning-quick gatecrasher. One
minute it isn't there, the next it is - and I find myself - get
this - hating Penelope. (There's an exclamation mark on this
keyboard which shares tab-space with the number one.
Shift+l=! It's insufficient. Radically inadequate as the denotation of my surprise. Even in bold. Even in underlined bold
italic. I need something else, some punctuation mark not yet
invented.) I sit there with my mouth open filled with human
pain and human anger. She was there, a voice is saying (Gunn's
presumably), all naked and warm with her hair spread around her in
the bed that we'd ... In the bed ... How could she and think of it
think of it go on her sucking his cock and swallowing his come and go
on THINK OF IT HER FUCKING TONGUE IN HIS MOUTH A .11;D HIS FACE
HIS FACE. AND HER FACE AND SHE BAS SHE I AS YOU KNEW WHAT SHE
LOOKED LIKE AND NOII" IIE DOES TOO YOU THINK OF IT YOU MISERABLE FUCKING SHIT WRETCH AND YOU'VE DONE NOTHING
NOTHING NOTHING EXCEPT WANT TO FUCKING DIE.

In hindsight, gentle reader, I think even then I felt a bit
sorry for Gunn, having so much rage and pain and so paltry a medium for its expression. I mean compared to me he's in
fetters. I've got the whole earth and everyone in it to give
tongue to my grievances. What's he got? En lisp. I don't
know what I must look like, sitting there, fuming. A children's cartoon steam train, perhaps, red-faced, pulling and
puffing in a foul temper up a punishing hill. Whatever I
look like, the important thing is what I feel like. And I feel -
I can only assume - like Gunn. Drenched afresh in all that
vivid moment's rich treachery. The slowly opened door
introducing the scene like an amoral master of ceremonies.
Penelope on the bed. That ... that (what? Bastard? Fucker?
Cunt? Cocksucker? Nothing adequately labels the object of
Gunn's rage ...), that man up on his elbows above her; his
look of mild surprise; hers, turning to the yawning door, of
death.

The need to hurt her, now, sitting in distress across the
table from me, is overwhelming. Not physically - Gunn
hasn't got it in him, whatever his fantasy life might think -
but with the mouth's unstinted repertoire, the complete
arsenal, the maximum yield.

Her face is a map of remembered trouble and absorbed
guilt. The green eyes look broken, as if their glass has shattered. A motorway pile-up of wrecked mascara. Lashes
jewelled with tears. She holds her own mouth on a tight
rein. Remembering - it makes a frightful mess of the human
face. I've seen it a billion times.

Now Penelope.

And the overwhelming desire and need is to hurt her. The
words - Gunn's words - swarm on my tongue as if some
inner smoke is driving them from the head's hive. But - (oh
yes, but) - when I've got a plan I stick to it. Unlike some. If
this is Limbo'd Gunn's distant broadcast (note to self:
suninion bloody Nelchael for a long overdue progress report), he's reckoned on too passive an audience. This isn't
about what cuckolded Declan wants - no matter how loud
and clear his carcass shouts its absent soul's mass of demands.
It's about what I want. Thus, stepping around it, so to speak,
as one might a sensitively alarmed sculpture in a narrow
gallery space, I reach out and take Penelope's hot, tissueclutching hand by its knuckles. She's a good, strong, guilty
girl, so she looks me in the eye.