I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (5 page)

`Lucifer.'

From which shameful reverie His voice woke me. The
sound of it annihilated all the time between the last time I'd
heard it (consigning me to ... to ...) and now. Then was
now and now was then and there was no going back, no
punishment disguised as forgiveness, no shamble back into
the fetters of obedience. Wondering if I could escape the
pain was worse than knowing I couldn't. He knew that. The whole speculation had been a plant. Jimmeny's idea.
Well fuck the Pair - sorry, the Trio of Them.

So, incarnation. The angelic drug of choice. Unlike cocaine,
not to be sniffed at. I look back on my first hours here much
as the mature artist looks back at his youthful creations: with
a teary mixture of embarrassment and nostalgia. I was, I'm
afraid (is this the admission of an Archangel consumed by
pride?) in a shocking state of hypersensitivity and gaucheness.
You've got to laugh, really. (Which, incidentally, is how I'd
thought of opening what turned out to he my `Hail horrors'
speech, until a more scrupulous examination of the chances
of actually getting a laugh changed my mind.) I do laugh, in
hindsight, at the rattlebag of schizophrenia, Tourette's and
satyriasis I must have seemed during those debut hours.

I have, as I said, tried it before, but never with licence.
(Adolescents and pre-menstruals are useful. The mentally
ill. Anyone stricken with grief or love. Your ideal possession
candidate's a thirteen-year-old recently orphaned schizophrenic girl three days away from her period on her way to
see the shrink with whom she's romantically besotted.)
Former takeovers, then, have left me dressed in a set of
clothes and shoes two sizes too small in a room the dimensions of which forbid ever standing or lying unbent, with
laryngitis, heat rash, mumps, scrofula, gonorrhoea - you get
the picture. This, on the other hand, this taking of a body
without force or fear, wrapped me in a stole of material
luxury the like of which I'd never imagined - and believe
me, I've imagined quite a bit.

I entered where Gunn had exited: reclining in a tepid
bath.

The feeling of entry ... let me see ... sinking upwards.
Think of a gradual congregation of spiritual atoms, the
adherence of each to each a contained ecstasy, the completed amalgam - me, entered in the Flesh - a throbbing and
protracted orgasm that believe it or not had me oooohing
and aaaahing and not quite knowing what to do with my
newly acquired limbs, the way one of Betjeman's tennis
girls - bountiful Patti or whoever - would have carried on, I
imagine, had you ever got her away from the court, prised
her fingers from the Wilson's damp grip, and stormed those
rhododendron-like tennis knickers. It felt like (that `like'
again. Maddeningly not the thing itself ...) breathing a
heavy aphrodisiac gas. A terrible comfort, a saturation with
both pleasure and endless desire. Welcome, Lucifer, to the
concussive world of matter.

I'm delighted to say I've calmed down since then, but in
those first hours I was my own worst enemy. Gunn's bathroom, I've subsequently discovered, is really a quite dreary
place (why he went in there for his frappery when he had
the entire flat - not to say city - at his disposal is a mystery to
me. Actually that's not true; I know why: sheer habit, inaugurated in childhood, ingrained in adolescence, and obeyed
without question in adulthood) but you should have tried
telling me that when those first five buds of perception
opened to its mouldy ceiling and sock-scented air, its taste of
iron and drains, its greasy tub and brown water, its disconsolate soliloquy of plips and clanks. Five senses might not get
you very far when it comes to perceiving Ultimate Reality,
but by Beelzebub's blistered buttocks this quintet will keep a
body busy down here on earth.

A lawless horde of smells: soap, chalk, rotting wood,
limescale, sweat, semen, vaginal juice, toothpaste, ammonia,
stale tea, vomit, linoleum, rust, chlorine - a stampede of whiffs, a roistering cavalcade of reeks, stinks and perfumes in
Bacchanalian cahoots . . . all are weeyulcum . . . all are
weeyulcum ... Yes, they certainly were, though they fairly
gang-banged my virgin nostrils. I sniffed, recklessly, draughts
long and deep; in went Gunn's Pantene for fine or flyaway,
wreathed with his shit's ghost-odour, veined, too, with faded
frangipani and sandalwood from ex-girlfriend Penelope's
incense sticks he burns bathside as pungent accompaniment
to the pain of remembering her. In went the salt and apricots, the piscine smack and poached pears of current
girlfriend Violet's healthy and well-tended vadge, escorted by
the U-bend's verdigris and jollied along by Matey bathfoam,
which self-indulgent lleclan had insisted on as a holy relic
from childhood, until my quiet voice and his fatal string of
choices led him to his last, bubbleless dip ...

And that was just the smells. Opening my newly acquired
eyes, I found myself assaulted by a depthless wall of colour. I
believe I actually flinched, tried to retreat - a little panic
attack until I worked it out, that distance operated, that the
entire world was not in fact plastered to the front of my
eyeballs. The white flames on the silver taps, the blinding sky
of the mirror (facing the window, you see) the turbid water's
mercurial meniscus - bright fires and brilliant serpents all
around me. A lesser angel would have ... Well, one
needs ... poise at such moments. A cool head. Overall, a
sense of entitlement. Mine, mine, mine all mine. Prince of
this World, as the Good Book says; just how hitherto
unearned a moniker those first seconds revealed. I counted
seventy-three shades of grey in an eight-by-ten room.

That whiner, Larkin, once wrote a poem to his skin. An
apology for having failed to bring it within range of the
sensuous or the tender, for having, all in all, let his skin
down. Do you monkeys underrate anything more than you do skin? Granted, you've got to be careful with taste - trial
and error being no way to work your way around the
flavours of a bathroom (as I found after swallowing a dab of
what turned out to be Gunn's verruca gel) - but with the
exception of the dangerously hot or riskily cold you should
be rubbing and dragging yourselves up against pretty much
everything. I spent an hour playing with the water in the
tub. Another two adding hot and watching my thighs go red.
Don't get me started on Gunn's towels. Nor the deliciously
cool thorax or throat of his bog, nor the boiler's lagging, nor
the velvet throw in the cupboard, nor the slick lino, nor the
warmed enamel of the tub after its water had spiralled away,
nor - I could go on, obviously.

And in spite of all this, I still believe I would have made it
outdoors that first day had I not been ambushed by the most
horribly engorged erection I'll wager Gunn's pesky little
penis has ever entertained. Rather embarrassing to admit,
but there you are: a rod-on like the Unholy Poker of
Antioch.

Naturally I got better at it, over the fourteen hours that
followed. It's in my nature, getting better at things. A
stunned and ham-handed debut it might have been (oh, I
found myself saying, between Popeye gurus and
Fontainesque pointwork, oh, oh, ooool hhh), but I've had all
sorts of wanks since: breathless, businesslike, vicious, enervated, feisty, playful, lingering, nuanced, crude, nasty,
hysterical, sly ... I don't believe I'm boasting when I say I've
had ironic, perhaps even satirical wanks. Shameful, the speed
of that particular assimilation. Dad hooked by state-of-theart toy. Dami this thin. What'll they conic up u'itli next?

Let me be honest: I knew I'd have myself to contend with
in those first hours of incarnation. I knew I'd have my ...
appetite to deal with. You want to be cool. You want to he selective. You want - if you're possessed of even a shred of
dignity - to avoid the temptation to rush around perception
like a Sunderland lottery winner in Harrods. I remember
thinking, just prior to taking ecstatic possession of Gunn's
bathing corpse: What I really must avoid is making an
absolute pig of myself. On the other hand, that's quite difficult given that I intend to make an absolute pig of myself.

The handjobs took me on a tour of the porn closet that
is Gunn's head. I'd expected to meet Great Lost Love
Penelope in there, naturally, since he spent so much of his
time remembering Her Voice and Her Smell and Her Eyes
and Her Soul and so on - but au contraire. Violet. It's heavily Violet. Violet being Penelope's problematic successor.
Quality grist to Gunn's fantasy mill in that, unlike Penelope,
she's not in the least interested in having sex with him -
chief aphrodisiac to our boy's libido. Violet's better-looking
than Penelope. That is to say, she looks less like a real
woman and more like a pornographic model.
(Pornographic models, Gunn knows from lengthy study,
have mastered the arousing art of looking like they're doing
it for money. One of the reasons he sticks (ahem) to magazines rather than videos is that too many of the women in
the videos seem bent on convincing the viewer that they're
doing it because they enjoy it; worse still, not a few of them
actually do seem to be enjoying it. Post-Penelope, anything
that focuses on the genuine rather than the fraudulent condemns Gunn to a depressing detumescence.) Therefore
Violet, who certainly isn't doing it because she likes it. So
much so that Gunn can't quite believe she lets him have sex
with her. Not that she often does, these days. Her sexual
availability has declined as her initial conviction that Gunn
was someone who'd be rubbing shoulders with useful
people has waned.

I should take this opportunity to thank my host for providing the wank-addicted Lucifer of those embarrassing early
hours not just with Vi's short-limbed, shampoo'd, bodysprayed, lipsticked, varnished, stilettoed, hot and
foul-tempered little bod, but with a gallery, a slew, a
plethora, a glut, a truly appalling superabundance of fantasy
femmes, from the professional snarlers and pouters of
American porn to the unsuspecting ladies of Gunn's everyday life. You've got to hand it to my boy. It's carnage in there.
It's common knowledge 'round my way, the deadly damage
you can do to Catholics just by persuading them (and what
am I if not persuasive%) to own up in their fantasies to what
turns them on. Doesn't have to be anything drastic - no
sodomizing chickens or money-shooting thalidomide tots -
because the bare experience of being turned on is saturated
with guilt to start with. I've taken Caths all the way from
handjobs to homicides just by getting them used to doing the
thing that makes them feel guilty. My boys brought Declan's suicidal depression along nicely with regular top-ups to his
sense of his own enslavement to lust. He made it easy, not
least thanks to his own ready swallowing of my sneaky story
that surrendered-to filth was both an imaginative catalyst
(he started writing round about the time he started whacking-off) and a source of mighty self-knowledge. But that's by
the by. The point is Violet loomed large those inaugural
hours, so much so that by the morning of the second day
paying the little cracker a visit was all but at the top of my list
of Things To Do. Besides, I thought, with a sheepish-cumwolfish grin at my new reflection in the mottled mirror of
Gunn's dark wardrobe door, it really was obscene to have
spent so long indoors.

You'll be wondering about the agenda. You've got a
month on earth: what do you do: Granted, you're trying with no intention of buying, but that's no reason not to
have some fun, no reason not to... put flesh and blood
through its paces ...

I can now get from Gunn's front door to the tube station at
Farringdon in six minutes, but it took me rather longer that
first morning. Four hours, actually, and that's if you don't
count the forty minutes I spent in 1)enholm Mansions' stairwell - mesmerizing graffiti and rubbery echoes, one
stunning front door in canary yellow, odours of disembowelled bin bags, fried bacon, stale sweat, mossed brick, burnt
toast, marijuana, bike oil, wet newspapers, drains, cardboard,
coffee and cat piss. An ecstatic nasal dalliance it was. Funny
look from the postman when he passed me on the stairs (a
letter for Gunn from his bank manager, but more of that
later). Then I stepped outside.

I'm not sure what I expected. Whatever it was, it was
surpassed by what I got. I remember thinking, That's air.
That's air, moving, slightly, against the exposed bits of me,
wrists, hands, throat, face ... The breath of the world, the
spirit that wanders gathering germs and flavours from
Guadalajara to Guangzhou, from Pawnee to Pizzarra, from
Zuni to Zanzibar. There are tiny hairs ... tiny hairs that ...
oh my word. I'm tickled to say that without a second's hesitation I unzipped Gunn's trousers and gently manhandled
his - sorry my - tender todge and sizzling scrote out to
where the air could caress them. Not a sexual thing. Just to
take the smart off. When I quit this carcass at the end of the
month Declan's going to have some trouble repairing his
reputation with Mrs Corey, the round-hipped, long-eyelashed and depressingly good-natured Jamaican seamstress
who lives above him and with whom he's been known to
exchange stairwell pleasantries. No such pleasantries when she caught sight of me that morning, standing with eyes
half-closed, lips and legs parted, trousers down, shirt-tails
fluttering, and throbbing goolies cupped in my tender
palms. I did smile at her as she hurried by, but she didn't
reciprocate. With great reluctance, I put myself delicately
back in order.