I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (8 page)

`You're ... Declan you're having me on. Tell me you're
having me on.'

`Chimera Films is a UK unit owned by Nexus,' I said.
`They trawl novels here looking for stuff. You know, seventy
per cent of all films made are adapted from novels or short
stories. Nexus, as you know, isn't a UK unit.'

`Nexus as in ... Nexus?' Violet asked.

`As in Hollywood Nexus,' I said.

`Oh my God, Declan. Oh my fucking God.'

I didn't bother trying to conceal my grin. Violet thought
I was grinning with glee - and so I was - but only at my
own chutzpah. At the last, the very last moment, I'd resisted
christening my phantom optioner Julian Amis. `Martin
Mailer was the guy behind Top Lolly, Bottom Dollar.'

`Oh my fucking God,' Violet said.

`I'm having casting consultation written into the contract.'

`You are not.'

`I am.'

`You are not.'

`I am. Oh yes. I am.'

Violet thinks of herself as stunning. She is stunning, too, in
her self-absorption verging on autism. She's got a retrousse
nose and expressive eyes and breasts like fresh little apples.
There are freckles she'd be better off without, an arse on the
low side, reddish heels and elbows, but on the whole you'd
definitely say she was attractive. Not that it doesn't come at
a price. To say she's high-maintenance would be to murder
her with understatement. She gets headaches, back aches, leg
aches, eye aches, indigestion, colic, near-perpetual cystitis
and PMT that doesn't hold with all that old-fashioned nonsense about only showing up just before menstruation. If
you're her boyfriend, really quite a lot of things get on her
nerves. Chiefly, it seems, if you're her boyfriend, being with
you gets on her nerves. Being Violet's boyfriend means
spending quite a lot of your time listening to Violet itemizing (while you rub her shoulders, massage her feet, run her
a Radox bath or prepare her a hot water bottle) the many
ways in which you get on her nerves.

Like all women who think they're actresses, Violet's ferociously untidy. The West Hampstead studio flat looks like the
Nazgul have just thundered through it - an appearance I had
considerable time to note, waiting firstly for Violet to finish
her pre-coital bathroom routine, and secondly, fruitlessly
(tossing and turning in the bed's swamp) for the arrival of an
erection.

`Fucking hell,' Violet said, tactfully, backing away from me
as if at the discovery of a noxious smell. `What's wrong with
it?'

Oh well go on, get your chuckles over with now if you
must. Yes. Hilarious, isn't it. Let's all have a jolly good
wheeze.

`Sometimes, Declan, honestly, I can't ... I mean what is
it?'

`Perhaps I don't fancy you any more,' I said in an undertone. Undertone or not, it summoned up a Vi-silence of
formidable charge and mass. Then, with a compressed artfulness that, actually, made me proud, she drew the sheet
slowly up over her breasts and turned away from me in a
foetal curl.

`Oh come here,' I said, like a successfully soft-soaped
uncle - and she did, too (rifling through her memory files,
wishing she hadn't lied to Gunn about having read his novel,
wishing she knew immediately which part was hers, hers,
hers!) - but it was no good. It was no damned good, I tell
you. Gunn's penis might as well have been a tomato sandwich for all the impact it was going to make. On the other
hand, it did give Violet an opportunity for some of her best
work to date.

`Never mind, honey,' she said, huskily. `It's no big deal. It
happens. You're probably just overtired. Did you drink a lot
last night?'

I might have been mistaken, but I thought I detected a
slight American accent.

Violet, you know, is troubled by a Little Voice. (I worried
that the transmogrification would fuck with my clairvoyance, but it hasn't substantially. I've noticed blips, the odd
blind spot, but by and large I seem to have got away with it
as carry-on.) Violet never listens to her Little Voice and she hears every word it says. Not that its range of words is wide.
On the contrary. It repeats the same things, at irregular but
increasingly frequent intervals. You're not an actress. You don't
have any talent. You've knobbled your oivn auditions because you
knot' you're not up to it in the end. You're a vain and talentless
fraud.

It's not me. Not all Little Voices are me, you know. Even
my own Little Voice - did I mention that? - even my own
Little Voice conies from a place I'm not sure I own. I have of
late, it generally begins ... I don't quite ignore it.

I)eclan, of course, had a Little Voice of his own by the
end, and should probably have gone to see someone. Hardly
an astute diagnosis given the bath and razor blades, but one
I can't resist making. The odour of that sadness lingers, you
see, in the rucks and runnels of his mortal flesh. Stretch
marks of the soul, so to speak. It bothers me. In the absence
of my angelic pain I feel it like an intimate and diffuse
toothache.

I don't much like the look of him, if you want the truth.
If I was considering staying - staying for good, I mean - I'd
be hitting a bank and forking out for state-of-the-art plastic
surgery or a Californian bodyswap. Est hoc corpus nieutn.
Maybe so, but it leaves a lot to be desired. When I confront
the mirror I see a simian forehead, dolorous eyes and thinning eyebrows. His skin's beige, greasy and porous. The
hairline's not exactly struggling to conceal its upcoming
recession, and the pot belly (too much booze, too much fat,
zero exercise - the corporeal side of the basic adult human
story) doesn't help at all. The flesh on the nose is thickening
and the slightest dropping of the head reveals a putative
double chin. He looks, all in all, like an under-the-weather
chimp. I doubt very much he's washed his ears since childhood. At seventeen, eighteen, he might have taken you in with his Navajo granddad story (supported by the usual nonsense: long hair, silver and turquoise jewellery, beads); you see
him at thirty-five and look for a much less glamorous explanation: spic-mix, wog-cocktail, decaf wop. Truth is: Irish
Roman Catholic mum boozily knocked up in a moment of
weakness (I thank you) by a saucy Sikh from Sacramento at
a friend's birthday party in Manchester. Ships in the night,
bun in the oven, he's gone, she's Catholic: enter beige Gunn,
fatherless and feeble at five pounds, six ounces. She brings
him up on her own. He loves her and hates himself for
blighting her young life. Grows up with bog-standard
Virgin-Whore dichotomy as far as women go (with which
I'm now lumbered, thank you very much); rabid Oedipus
complex replaced during teen years by terrifying phase of
homoerotic fantasies (I'll find a use for them before I'm
done, you watch), before sexual imagination stabilizes
around mild heterosexual sado-masochism in early twenties,
concomitant with discovery of some effeminacy of body, a
loathing for manual labour, a penchant for the arts and a
much mauled but still virulent belief in the Old Fellah and
yours truly.

I'ni not wild about his wardrobe, either. I wish there was
a more exciting way of telling you it's dull, but there
isn't: Declan Gunn's wardrobe is dull. Two pairs of jeans,
one black, one blue. The baggy charity shop strides to
which I had recourse after my debut wankathon. Half a
dozen t-shirts, a couple of woolly jumpers, a beige (!?)
fleece, a greatcoat, a pair of brandless trainers and a pair of
DM shoes. I look like a tramp. Doesn't even own a suit.
They've done this deliberately, to assault my dignity, to
wound my much-talked-about pride. Gunn, needless to say
after the extravagance of his unsellable and suicide-inspiring
opus, A Grace of Storms, can't afford new clothes, what with the first two books now out of print and his agent, Betsy
Galvez, only ever seeing his name because he's immediately
after Guiseppe's Pizzeria in her Rolodex. He should have
stolen some money. Should've mugged a pensioner.
Pensioners are loaded. Tartan shopping trolleys? Full of gold
ingots. Why do you think they move so slowly? They die of
hypothermia and no one mentions all the loot they've saved
by never eating or turning the heating on. I love old people.
Seven or eight decades of me whispering to them about all
the faggots and coons (it turns out they fought for!) and by
the time death comes calling they're oozing malice and
hawking-up spleen. The souls of old people are ten a penny
in Hell. Honestly. We've got a slush-pile.

Gunn lives alone in a second-floor one-bedroom excouncil flat in Clerkenwell. One small bedroom, one small
living room, a small kitchen and a small bathroom. (I looked
for other adjectives.) Outside, a courtyard. The surrounding
buildings go up six floors so Gunn's place is starved of light.
He had dreams of moving in with Violet. Violet didn't.
Violet had dreams of Gunn using the money from the sale of
his then-in-progress masterpiece to tart the Clerkenwell
place up and sell it so that they could move to Notting Hill.
From the sale of his ... Yes. There's the rub. All things considered, I can't honestly say I'm surprised our boy had settled
on suicide. Some humans survive concentration camps,
others are driven over the edge by a broken fingernail, a forgotten birthday, an unpayable phone bill. Gunn's somewhere
in-between. Somewhere in-between's where I do much of
my finest work.

His mother died of drink two years ago and left him the
flat. Me, drink and loneliness, we finished Gunn's mother
off. Drink wolfed down her liver, me and loneliness gobbled
up her heart. Liver and heart, my vital organs of choice. She didn't come down, mind you. Must be cooling her heels
in Purgatory. Last Rites. Gunn called in crapulous Father
Mulvaney (sherry-breath, brogue blarney, red knuckles he
couldn't leave off cracking, and eczema; I'll have his liver too,
the old hypocrite) and that was me robbed of another tenant.
There's no justice, you know. Angela Gunn. I wanted her.
Some souls - you can't explain it - they've got quality written all over them. She had guilt over Gunn, having brought
him dadless into the world (thought the fact that he nearly
throttled himself with his own umbilical an indictment of
her motherhood); but it wasn't the guilt that did for her, it
was the loneliness. A tawdry smattering of affairs with men
vastly her inferior. Her disgust because she couldn't leave the
idea of a grand passion alone. In the small hours she'd
observe them (after the grumpy wrestling, the loveless gymnastics) naked and sprawled as if taken down
mid-crucifixion. Grimly, she'd force herself to absorb the
unpleasant details: fatty shoulders; dirty nails; brittle hair;
faded tattoos; pimples; stupidity; greed; hatred of women;
pretentiousness; arrogance. In the small hours she'd sit bitter
with tears and humming with drink and look down at his
body, whoever he was, some Tony or Mike or Trevor or
Doug, forcing her mouth into a rictus as the sordid replays
ran in her head. The absurdity of it, she thought, this quest
for the love of a man who was her equal. She loathed herself
for it. She thought of her life (and herself) as a missed opportunity. Somewhere, back there, she had missed something.
What was it? When was it? The worse horror beneath: that
she hadn't missed anything, that her life was merely the sum
of her choices and that her choices had led her to this:
another truncated encounter; the carcinogenic belief in the
idea of a Great Love; clammy sex; loneliness in the small
hours.

She had loved Gunn, but his education distanced them.
She craved his visits then couldn't bear that he was embarrassed by her malapropisms and too-young skirts. She was
intelligent but inarticulate. Words betrayed her: beautiful
butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her
mouth for their release into the world. Gunn knew all this.
Went every time armed with the noblest filial intentions,
then felt them evaporate when she talked of `broadening
her horoscopes'. Her drinking was a spectral third with
them, Gunn not quite taking it in. Knowing and hoping.
(Jesus, you humans and your knowing; you humans and
your hoping.) Her belief in his writing. Gunn suspected she
prayed for it. She did. She prayed to God He'd find a publisher for her son's book. Idiot ex-altar boy Gunn worried,
then, that it wouldn't feel like a clean achievement. Soiled by
the Hand of God, so to speak.

But then liver failure, hospital, his avalanche of guilt and
shame. Her only fifty-five, looking seventy. Mulvaney of the
red raw scalp hadn't seen her for three years, but they cut to
the chase when he arrived, smelling of wet London and
Cockburn's Port. Gunn shuffled, miserable, by the bed.
Holding her hand (for the first time in a long time) he discovered with a shock its onion skin and Saturnalian revel of
veins. Horror because he remembered it soft and firm and
smelling of Nivea. These were the memories that jumped
him over the months after she died, heartless muggers bent
on the redistribution of the mind's buried wealth -