by Glen Duncan
Amazing thing is – Gunn stumbles out of the Gents only to find Aurora awaiting him on the landing, barely has time to check his flies before she sweeps up to him, takes his surprised face in her white hands, and kisses him, softly on the mouth – amazing thing is that sheer luck has Penelope spot them on her own (arrested, obviously) way to the loo. I can’t take any credit for that. That – long live the angles of chance – is absolutely nothing to do with me. She stops and stares. They don’t see her and she doesn’t hear them. Thank you very much, Gunn is saying, holding Aurora by the elbows, but I can’t do this, I’m afraid. I’ve got a girlfriend. You’re very attractive, though. I’m really flattered. Sorry. And you really do look like Nicole Kidman.
But, Hell be praised, Penelope can’t lip-read. We need to meet somewhere, she supposes he’s saying. Fucking girlfriend’s here. Give me your address.
‘Tell Declan I’ve gone home, will you?’ she says to Sylvia. ‘I’ve got a stinking headache and I don’t want to spoil his fun.’
Which is where I go to work. By getting her to punish God by degrading herself. Convoluted? No no no no heavens no. How many of you haven’t heard that voice, the no-nonsense, call-a-spade-a-spade friend who emerges when the world’s shat on you? So, this is how much He cares about you, is it? Cares about you enough to let you fail fucking Human Biology/drop the mortgage/lose a leg/miss the bus/stub your toe/get the sack/crack your tooth/fluff your line/get to the booth only to discover that the bastard in front of you got the last ticket . . . That’s how much He cares. Yes. Well. Fuck You, God. Two can play at that game. Watch THIS. And off you go to the tobacconist’s, or the boozer, or the Adult Video retailer, or the knocking shop, or the casino. Look at your precious creation now, Mister. Don’t like it, do you, taking a bit of your own medicine. And if I get lung cancer, or liver failure, or fucking AIDS, Matey, we know whose fault it’ll be, don’t we, eh? Should’ve thought of that when you let Claire FINISH WITH ME!
Penelope’s is a secular version, more or less. So I don’t speak to her of God or the friability of His love, but rather of the long, grinding, endless punishment the world dishes out if you try to live in accordance with truth and decency. I speak to her, bitterly, of how daily she struggles with the idea that her stand is hopeless, that everything turns to shit in the end, that evil invariably wins, that people . . . people aren’t any damned good, that her own horror of falsehood is nothing more than a pitiful delusion of grandeur, and that the best thing she can do now is give herself a good, strong, vinegared slap in the face . . .
She resists for quite some time. Had I not been around so long – so very long – it would astonish me, somewhat, the strength of her resistance. It doesn’t, however. In boredom, I persist. Time for Bad Cop. You fucking stupid bitch. You knew, didn’t you, it’d come to this. There’s shit everywhere, it’s all shit, you pathetic, deluded idiot. Get down on your hands and knees and rub your stupid, trusting, high and fucking mighty face in it . . . Go on. There’s medicine! Until, with what feels like an icy fracture down the centre of her chest, knowing full well and having no clue about what she’s going to do, she halts the cab at the bar that’s just opened not three blocks from the flat she shares with Declan Gunn. I remember my last words to her. Not the first time I’ve used them. And certainly not the last. I gave them to her in a long, slow whisper. Embrace it . . .
I’ve heard some theological guff in my time, but one of the most idiotic theories I’ve ever come across is the one suggesting that I possessed Judas Iscariot in order to bring about Jimmeny’s betrayal. Can anyone explain this to me? Actually don’t bother. I know the explanation. (I know all the explanations.) The explanation is that millions of people all over the world, despite being in full possession of a functioning cerebrum, think I wanted Christ crucified. Now if you’ll allow me to be blunt for a moment: Are these people retarded? Christ’s crucifixion was the fulfilment of the Old Testament’s prophecies. Christ’s crucifixion was going to restart the mechanism for the forgiveness of sins. Which would mean? No one has to go to Hell.
So, could you please tell me why I would do anything to help bring that about?
I was, however, at the Last Supper. Thirteen guys in sourleathered sandals, all with tropical underarms and honking butt-cracks; a tiny room (Leonardo’s way off), poor ventilation, the smoke of badly trimmed lamps, the odd discreet but sulphurous apostolic brap, the tang of burped plonk . . . You know what I spent the evening doing? I spent it loading Judas with guilt. You miserable bastard. You know you’re doing the wrong thing. Thirty fucking pieces of silver? You cheap sonofabitch. Don’t do it, man. Listen to me. Listen to the voice of your conscience! The Enemy has led you astray but it’s not too late to change your mind and save your soul. Listen to the voice of God, Judas Iscariot. This is a mighty hour for you. You’re on the verge of consigning yourself to Hell for eternity – and for what? Thirty fucking pieces of silver! Don’t do it, Judas!
The man was made of stone. Hanging was too good for him if you ask me. Actually that’s not fair. Not fair to give Judas credit for his own resistance, I mean. It was, as in the desert, the Old Bugger’s hand at work. God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. . . Yes, He did (He’s hardened a lot of hearts over the years) and He hardened Judas’s, too.
In spite of all that, in spite of the unfair nature of the fight, in spite of His cheating, I almost nailed the fucker (pardon the pun) with Pilate and Procula.
What I have written, I have written. My general disappointment in Judea’s then governor notwithstanding, I’ve long had an aesthetic soft spot for the poised ambivalence of his infamous dictum. The lonely pregnancy of the pause, its shadowy implications: What I have written is not what I wanted to write. What I have written is the truth. What I have written is what I shall be judged by. What I have written seemed to write itself. What I have written was not for me to write . . . Quad scripsi, scripsi. The tautological conclusion with its gravitas and idiocy. He wrote it at the end of a morning the length and drain of which couldn’t be measured in hours. He’d been abused by forces beyond his control, boxed and flirted with as if by fevers and flues. His thigh-bones had felt thin, his ankles weak, his flesh hot and cold, as if embraced and abandoned by a sodden shroud in the heat of the sun. His blood whistled and thumped; deafness descended, periodically, leaving him only the sound of the heart in his chest; his vision seemed to narrow into a dark tunnel, haunted at its distant end by incandescent spirits. I didn’t give him up without a fight, I can tell you.
Pilate’s side of the bed was long cold by the time Claudia Procula woke with electric suddenness, sheened in sweat, sitting bolt upright and astonished that the loud lamentations on the other side of sleep translated to mere whimpering in the waking world. She wasn’t bad looking, Pilate’s missus, and became increasingly appealing in somnambulistic agitation, but that really isn’t relevant, at all, Lucifer. What’s relevant is that Pilate trusted her dreams. He wasn’t overly superstitious (although you wouldn’t find many military men who didn’t at the very least go through the motions of pagan propitiation), but his wife’s dream-inspired prognostications had several times proved useful, and had once literally saved his neck, back in Rome not long after their marriage, when she’d dissuaded him on the strength of a nightmare from keeping a horse he’d bought for recreational riding, which beast a week later threw and broke the neck of its next owner. She’d never actually seen Jesus, though she’d heard of him, and, via slaves’ gossip the night before, of his arrest and detention in the hands of Caiaphas & Co. She’d never actually set her dark eyes on him, so I’m not altogether sure why I bothered impersonating him so carefully in her dream; I could have appeared to her as Groucho Marx and she’d have been none the wiser. But I’d be fibbing if I didn’t admit that there was a profane titillation in taking on his looks and mien. Made me feel . . . I’m almost embarrassed to say . . . You know: what might have been. Anyway. I entered the tapestry of Procula’s sleep and crucified myself in her dream. It was
funny, hanging there in her mind with the stigmata flowering and the sky darkening at my back. I worried that I’d overdone it with the blood – her and her husband mired and flailing, shin-deep and red-handed – but time (New Time) was passing (Caiaphas’s envy glowed around him like baby’s breath while the real J.C. stood barefoot with his head on one side and an infuriating patience in the stilled line of his mouth) and I wanted the message writ large, so to speak: PILATE & WIFE MURDER INNOCENT MAN – ‘WE’LL BURN IN HELL FOR THIS’ GOVERNOR ADMITS. In any case it had done the trick. The legs kicked, the neatly plucked eyebrows drew down (one grave, one acute), the plum-coloured lips twitched and pursed, the perspiring palms opened and closed. Have nothing to do with this innocent man . . . Have nothing to do with this innocent man . . . Have nothing . . . I stayed till she woke, charmingly dishevelled (flushed and hyperventilating, one mango-sized breast free of the nightgown – if I hadn’t been in such a Godawful hurry . . .) and called reedily for her maid.
You want to get to the man, go through the woman. Eden seemed like ages ago (grainy Super-8 footage in ropy colour) but I hadn’t forgotten its lessons. Complacency’s never been my vice, and it certainly wasn’t that morning in Judea, but I felt, you know, optimistic.
But. Well.
Actually things got off to a good start, what with Pilate’s irritation at having to come out of the praetorium into the courtyard to meet the priests (Passover’s dictates for clean and unclean objects, food and places) exacerbated by narked Caiaphas’s response to the governor’s question about what the prisoner was accused of. ‘If he weren’t a malefactor, we wouldn’t have brought him to you, would we?’ I watched the furrows appearing in Pilate’s brow and practically rubbed my hands with glee. I think if they’d stayed outdoors I might have been in with a shout. But God was interfering. Goddammit God was interfering. I could see it in the governor’s occasional slight head-shakes (as if trying to clear a ringing from his ears) and fidgeting hands. The sun hammered the stones in the yard, and when Pilate looked up, briefly, the sky struck him like a cacophony.
Are you the King of the Jews?
You say it.
Not to mention Junior’s elliptical style. If he’d just said ‘you bet your skirt I am, Punchy’, the procurate could have dismissed him as just another Hebe nutter, but the tone was all wrong for that, suggesting at best fearlessness, at worst contempt. Don’t be insulted, I’m going. He doesn’t mean to be insolent. Don’t do anything hasty, man. Meanwhile the Sanhedrin’s bigwigs are chunnering and gabbling like a gang of speeding turkeys, and the sunlight’s playing havoc with its boomerangs and spears. Tell them it’s nothing to do with you. Tell them to crucify him themselves if he’s getting on their nerves so much.
Which would be illegal, as both Caiaphas and Pilate knew well enough.
‘It’s too fucking hot out here,’ to no one in particular. Then to the prisoner: ‘You. Come inside with me.’
It was time to call in reinforcements. I picked the crême de la crême from the fallen angelic host and gathered them over Jerusalem. It’s going to get ugly, I told them. I’m pretty sure He’s going to make use of the mob. I want you in there. Right in there, understand? I want you whispering so close you can taste their earwax – got it? At least three of you to every member of the crowd. Is that understood? Let’s go.
I did some work with Pilate in the praetorium. Really some of my best, warped though it was by the irony of its application. On any other day Sonny’s clipped ripostes and sheer non sequiturs would have exhausted his patience and had him signing the crucifixion chit with his mind elsewhere. As it was, he spent most of his time in the judgement hall vacillating between curious fraternity with this wastrel and a strangely detached conviction that his own destruction would follow if he failed to execute him. His hands and face grew hot. The lamps weren’t lit (what need amid the motefilled and Godspeaking shafts of light?) but his breathing was troubled by the stink of burning oil. Tonight he would get Claudia to mix him a draught. Thoughts rose and burst, emptily, like painless blisters. He had an overwhelming desire (courtesy of moi) to understand the riddles. My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight . . . But the language – kingdoms, servants, fighting – kept yanking him back to his own world, one in which he was Pontius Pilate, Roman Procurator of Judea, with a city swelled for the feast, a gossip-fattened crowd outside the palace and a phalanx of ecclesiastical thought-police all but breaking down his door. And still I worked, amazing him and the hall’s guards with his own tolerance. His face found hitherto unseen alignments, a grammar of expression his own mother wouldn’t have recognized, featuring improbable segues from anger to bliss, from peremptoriness to a patience that amounted almost to bonhomie. I find in him no fault at all. The words dropped like gentian petals. A sweating centurion exchanged a risky glance with a standard bearer. Are we dreaming, Marcus?
No we weren’t. I was horribly tired, I don’t mind telling you, and in more than my usual amount of excruciating pain. All the back-and-forthing was killing me. I know this is a rhetorical question, but have you any idea how difficult it is to tempt a human being away from his fate? You see the conceptual clash, yes? It was a strain for Pilate, too, you could see. He scratched his neck a lot. Started up violently – then sat down again after three or four paces. The very stones of the praetorium were warm with incredulity, as if blushing.
To this end I was born, and for this cause I came into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone that is of the truth hears my voice. I remember thinking, Yes, it’s all very well standing there with your slumped shoulders and risen veins talking about bearing witness to the truth, but what you’ve just said could have come quite as easily from me, mate, and no word of a lie would it be. Some of which sentiment plainly rubbed off on our beleaguered guv, who, getting quickly to his feet, spat out ‘What is truth?’, before turning on his sandaled heel and storming back out to the priests.
You know, it’s quite exhausting just talking about this. Come aside with me a moment. Trust me.
Paedophilia’s what I call a flexible gain investment. It yields profit in umpteen different ways. Most obviously there’s the immediate suffering of the children, followed by the shame, the guilt, the self-disgust, the not being believed, the hatred. Not least the now loudly ticking clock of their own desire, all those dream-rich hours and days before the early damage gestates and they start fiddling with youngsters themselves. Then there are the perpetrators. Again the shame, again the self-loathing, again the useless guilt. Useless to God, I mean. Guilt’s only useful to God as prologue to penitence and a change of ways. But based on guilt no paedophile’s ever going to change his ways. The desire for nippers is too strong. Guilt’s simply no match for it. It goes: desire-gratification-guilt-desire-gratification-guilt-desire-gratificationguilt and so on. It’s a mechanism, interrupted if they get caught by the cops and banged up by a judge, but otherwise unstoppable except via hard psychic and professional graft which neither the perp nor his world is remotely interested in investing in. Then there’s the suffering of the parents (in cases where it’s not actually the parents wots dunnit, I mean). The horror of being afraid of their own sullied child. The shame of having suspected and done nothing. The shame of having known and done nothing. But best of all, by far the best of all, is the opportunity it gives the selfrighteous mob.
Look closely the next time a paedophile comes via the media to the attention of his peers, look closely at the faces of the outraged mob. That’s where you’ll find me. Those pixelated tabloid stills of good mums and dads transformed by righteousness into grimacing beasts, bellowing for blood, teaching their children to hate first and ask questions later (or better still never), buoyed and inflated by the gobbled-up lie that they’re doing God’s work. This is paedophilia’s quality yield: the indignant mob bloodthirsty with decency, obscenely relieved of the burden of thought and the yoke of argument. EVIL PERVERTS SHOULD BE TORTURED
THEMSELVES. The bald leaders make me fizz with pride. You’ll have noticed, no doubt, how mum and dad’s first genuine expressions of grief and shock are telly-seduced and mob-lionized into studied outrage and the calculated stammers of disbelief. You’ll have noticed, I dare say, a dearly purchased and bitter confidence, now that their loss has excused them their own ethical failings and moral mediocrity. They’ve suffered the tragedy of poor Tommy and are thus absolved of further responsibilities. It is required of them now only that they exist as mascots for the mob. Please do look at the hangin’s-toogood-for-’em crowds in the tabloids – do look and tell me, if you can, that there’s any greater evil than the transformation of individuals into the lurching, self-congratulatory mob?
God taught me that. Yes, God Himself taught me the value of the mob a couple of thousand years ago in Jerusalem.
The boys told me afterwards they could barely believe what happened. What happened was nothing less than the mass scrambling of their myriad promptings in the ears of the crowd. (It wasn’t that big a crowd, by the way. Maybe a couple of hundred. Certainly no more than that. Still, the idea that there were fucking thousands of Jews of their own free will screaming for Jimmeny’s blood has come in awfully handy down the centuries, so I shouldn’t complain I suppose. Ill wind and all that.) What happened was that they told the crowd one thing; God made sure the crowd heard another. I mean ‘release Barabbas’ doesn’t sound anything like ‘release Jesus’, does it? Nor does ‘crucify him’ sound much like ‘let him go’. Not the sort of thing you’d accidentally mishear. At the time I thought the lads just weren’t pulling their weight. Pilate’s psyche was still wobbling like a blancmange, preoccupied – flabbergasted, as a matter of fact – by its own reluctance to do what it would normally do and seek the path of least political resistance. The sensation was both seductive and nauseating – and somewhere between the two he ordered the prisoner scourged.
