I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (32 page)

We're going to show you a familiar object seen from an unfamiliar angle. For ten points we'd like you to name the object ...

I didn't want to name any of them, believe me. The mixture of expansive bliss and barely contained panic had me
flipping and flopping around on the bed like a landed fish
until Harriet - Hell preserve her - got me still by climbing
on the bed and lying on top of me.

At which point - shshsh, she kept saying, its all right,
shshsli - at which point I'm afraid I capped the entire performance by shitting my pants and bursting into tears.

Hydra is a small island in the Aegean, south of Poros, northeast of Spetses, three hours out by thudding ferry from the
sun-and-diesel headache of Piraeus. No cars on the island.
No motorized traffic of any kind, in fact; just long-eyelashed donkeys and seen-better-days nags, standing patiently
or in existential nullity in the sun by the dock, or clopping
in no rush up the pink and silver cobbles, carrying deliveries, tourists, luggage, their burnished haunches sexy as an
oiled stripper's, thin shadows tacked and rippling at their
hooves.

You get there, you've entered a different time zone. Local
population's less than 2,000. The harbour's a long crescent
inlaid with a single row of jewellery shops and restaurants,
with a museum fort at one end and a sprawling cocktail bar
at the other. Boats wobble and nod in their moorings.
Sunlight bounces off the water and marbles their hulls. The
sky is a high, stretched skin of pure ultramarine.
Occasionally, stratos clouds. Very rarely, hilarious thunderstorms. In summer the heat and the silence form a tangible
conspiracy in the air around you; you can close your eyes and lean on them, drift into blankness or dream. Nothing is
required of you. One nightclub in the hills serves touring
youngsters and desperate local teens (trapped in paradise,
dying to get out), but in the harbour it's gentle bars with
elastic hours and capricious prices where you can talk without ever having to raise your voice. They go in for complex
cocktails served like desserts in glasses the size of soup bowls.
There's an open air cinema - a roofless yard with a rattling
projector and roll-down screen, where, under the wings of
Cygnus and the skirts of the Pleiades, you can watch
Hollywood's spectacles six years after the rest of the world's
stopped talking about them. Intermission's an indecorous
halt at the film's guessed mid-point (mid-scene, mid-sentence, mid-syllable); then coffee as thick as mercury in plastic
thimble cups, a leg-stretch, a Marlboro. All the kids here run
around unsupervised into the small hours. Unfortunately,
nothing happens to them.

Unsuccessful and inevitably priapic painters (Panamas,
nicotine fingertips, boozy breath and artfully uncared-for
hair) emigrate here to become big fish in Hydra's tiny pond.
Their skin goes brown, their pleasures simplify, they let
themselves go - scribbles of white chest hair over Tiresian
dugs, sun-oiled pot-bellies like dark tureens, scrawny knees,
languid affairs, the occasional pilgrimage to Athens for
worldlier revels. They let the old life of irritated ambition
slide away, discover it was an unnecessary encumbrance.
Tourists buy their work because they have no idea who they
are. It keeps them in silk shirts, cigarettes, whisky.

Hydrofoils come bouncing in as if from outer space every
couple of hours, deposit and retrieve their posse of visitors.
Or the slower, heftier ferry rolls up with its gradually opening maw and endless disgorgement of gabbling passengers:
this is the sort of place tourists stop at for an hour or two, Brummies with attention span deficits - `Ent much in the
woiya shops, iz there, Rodge?' - or proprietal New Yorkers
with laconic tips on how to reorganize the menus, the donkeys, the language, the island. Tabacs are run, alcoholically,
by moustached dads and their chirpy, white-frocked daughters; the dads spend the day smoking, reading the papers,
drinking, lifting their grogged heads now and then to bawl
or bellow at their girls, who pay not the slightest attention to
them, knowing it's all bluff and bluster, knowing, in fact, that
they've got these old soaks at their mercy. The dads are no
less resigned. Moments of magisterial bullying in front of the
customers (whom they suspect aren't fooled in any case) but
what they really want is to stay just as they are, hammocked
in afternoon booze, rocked now and then by the brush of a
passing daughter's hip.

And this is what, exactly? A commission from Let's Go?

Oh boy, I wish it was. I wish it was as simple as that.
Listen to this.

`What time is it?'

`Seven twenty-three. Calm down.'

`Yes, I must, mustn't I. God. Fucking God. How's your
headache?'

`Coming along nicely.'

`Are you sure you told them you were bringing me?'

Violet was sitting next to me at the hotel bar on a high
stool with her little legs crossed. Short black cocktail dress,
black stockings, black high heels, one of which she let hang
on her toes. (She's still not sure whether letting a shoe hang
like that is stylish or slutty. She's still experimenting.) She
was so resentful. Resentment hummed around her like a
force field, creating - it must be admitted - a terrible sex appeal when it surrounded the milky and generously freckled shoulders, the avocado-sized breasts, the flinty blue eyes
and pre-Raph hair. Again, you see, like my darling unmolested Tracy, not at all gorc'eous, but irresistibly human,
dappled with physical imperfections (the Pricker would
have had a field day with Vi's beige moles and carnelian
nodules) and riddled with psychic ones. I couldn't - I could
iiot - quite shake the image of her in tears on the Tube, nor
disentangle it from the one of her endless narcissism before
the mirror on the back of her bathroom door. No wonder
my head ached.

Which rationalization notwithstanding, I still suspected
something darker afoot, some twitch on the perceptual
periphery, some edge, some conspiracy, some chill ...

`Oh Jesus Christ. Jesus Jesus Jesus Christ. 1)eclan that's .. .
Declan?'

Trent, Harriet, and A.N. Other. Someone you might
describe as an exceptionally famous and good-looking movie
star. Someone you might describe like that. Me, I'm a bit
harder to impress.

`Did you know? Fucking lull Declan did you know?'

I hadn't, as it turned out, known he was in town. Violet,
bless her, could only contain her understandable excitement
by translating it into force and expressing it in a grip on my
thigh which, had the next thing not happened, might have
seen me publicly unmanned.

As the hairs on the back of my neck rose, and a faint
echo of perhaps my host's voice said this is the way this is the
way this is the ... someone tapped me gently on the shoulder and a voice on the edge of my recognition said: `A
minute of your time, Mr Gunn?'

I turned. Odd, that turn. An agonizingly slow swivel;
seemed to smudge and drag the images - tables, chairs, glasses, faces. Then it was done and I was facing him: a slender, olive-skinned gentleman with a long face,
plum-coloured eyes and a sensual mouth, wearing a cream
linen suit, blood-red tie, and invested with a presence I
hadn't felt since ... since ...

Gunn's voice surprised me with its smallness and fracture
when it crept out into the world. `Raphael,' I said. I felt
something funny going on inside, some cramped orchid
awkwardly opening. Mild panic, I suppose.

He cleared his throat, smiled over my shoulder at the still
apnoeal Violet, then looked back at me and said, `Do you
think we might have a word in private, old friend?'

`You've got to be kidding.'

`No, my dear, I'm not kidding.'

`Stop it with the "my dear" rubbish for a start. The
assumption then, these days, is that I'm suffering from some
sort of galloping credulity, is it?'

`Will you at least consider what I'm saying?'

`It's a joke. You know what this is? It's funny, that's what
this is. Hill fucking hairious. And from you of all people.
Honestly.'

Poor old Violet. I suppose she exhaled eventually.
Catching sight of the Very Famous Movie Star didn't help,
Trent's shout of `Declan!' across the bar followed by a mined
tipple that gave every indication they were about to join us.
Not that I stuck around to find out. I glanced back at Violet
from the exit. She'd uncrossed her legs and now sat with her
palms gripping her own kneecaps. The shoe that had been
hanging - stylishly, sluttishly, howeverishly - had fallen off.
The bar steward kept his head down, ostensibly lost in the
languid polishing of a champagne flute, but I could see
he'd noted my sudden departure and was wondering where that left him re. the shoeless minx with the taut tits and
spectacular hair.

Then Piccadilly's humid night and cavalcade of coughing
traffic, Green Park's gently breathing trees and a high, ravaged and star-pooled canopy of quick-moving cloud. 'I've
got something to tell you and something to show you,' he'd
said. `taut I can do neither here. Will you come with me?'

'Come with you where for heaven's sake:

'The airport.'

I'd never seen him like this. I'd never seen him like this,
dressed in flesh and blood - but that's not what I mean.
What I mean is I'd never seen him assertive. In the old days
he'd been ... Well I mean he was a follower. He wouldn't
elaborate. Only insisted I could trust him. That I could trust
his love. That lie was alone and unarmed. That it would be
a short flight. That there was nothing I needed to bring. He
had Gunn's passport in his inside pocket. 'You've put on
weight since that was taken,' he'd said, catching sight of its
photo at check-in. If it hadn't been for a ruthlessly piqued
curiosity I'd have ditched him in Duty Free and headed back
to the Ritz. But there you are. Me and curiosity.

So the night flight to Athens, the meandering cab-ride
down to Piraeus, the last hydrofoil, the island, the sleeping
streets, the eucalyptus trees and clutter of hills, the villa.
Raphael, blessed archangel of the Throne and ruler with
Zachariel of the Second Heaven, is now Theo Mandros -
restaurateur, philanthropist, widower, Greek.

'Jesus Jesus Jesus,' I said, between cackles.

'Lucifer please. Some consideration. That's still painful to
me.'

'You know, obviously, that you're wasting your time.'

His villa looks east over the Aegean. We sat with tall ouzos and our feet bare against the freshly swept stone of the
veranda. Dawn was an hour away. I lit a Silk Cut and wolfed
down a chestful of smoke. You do need a cigarette when a
transmogrified archangel you haven't seen for several billion
years has just told you that your number's about to be called.

`Oh please.'

`It's true.'

`Well, it's about time.'

`Lucifer, you don't understand.'

`By the book, that's what I understand. God wins and I go
to Hell forever. Big deal. In case anyone's not been paying
attention: I've been there. You know? I live there. I can hack
it.!

The first sliver of sun was making a moody furnace of distant cloud. The sea waited like a wedding night bride.
Raphael moved his feet gently against the floor. The ice in
his glass tinkled.

'It's not the Hell you know.'

`Oh right. A different Hell. How many are there?'

`Lucifer listen to me. Haven't you been wondering what's
wrong with you?'

`There's absolutely nothing wrong with me, my darling.
Nothing apart from Everything, obviously. I assume you
don't mean "wrong" in that sense? In the sense of "as
opposed to Right" with a capital R?F

`Have you not, of late -'

'Oh don't start with that, will you?'

`If you knew how hard I had to fight to be allowed to tell
you this -'

`I wouldn't take such a devil-may-care tone?'

`You would do me at least the fraternal courtesy of listening to what I have to say. Your existence in eternity depends
on it.'

`Okay, I'm listening,' I said. I was listening, I suppose -
and yet a good deal of my still traumatized consciousness
was away with the fairies, as you say. The wrinkled Med's
gentle sway; the bittersweet scent of the olive groves; the
stone and cool dust beneath my bare feet; the icy aniseed;
the incessant rasping of cicadas; the stirring of a dawn
breeze ...

`It's never been you,' Raphael said - and just for the
splittest second, the entire earth and everyone in it seemed to
stop breathing. I looked down into my drink. The ice had
almost melted. A sparrow appeared out of nowhere and
alighted on the balcony. It put its head on one side, examined me, briefly, then whizzed away.

`I assume you're going to explain?' I said.

`It's never been you,' he repeated. `Everything you've
thought you've been responsible for ... Well. You haven't.'

I thought, How weird to be plunged into darkness every
night, to have to wait again for sunrise. Not a wholly
unpleasing rhythm to it, though. I chuckled to myself.