by Glen Duncan
So what am I? Perverse?
Well, some might think so. The point, my dears, is not good nor evil – but freedom. For an angel there is only one true freedom, and that, I’m honestly sad to say, is freedom from God. Freedom is the cause and the effect. In this particular Creation, if freedom from God (worship of God, dependency on God, obedience to God) is what you’re after, then I’m afraid evil’s really the only game in town. What I’d like, what I’d love, is to have been given a nature that didn’t even know God – the fish in the pond who doesn’t know life beyond it: the lawn, the house, the city, the country, the world . . .
Your thinkers wrestle with this notion of pure evil or, as they’re so fond of calling it, evil for its own sake. I’ve no idea why. There’s no such thing as evil for its own sake. All evil is motivated – even mine. The torturer, the tyrant, the murderer, the consummate fabricator of fibs – they’re all doing it for something, even if all they’re doing it for is pleasure. (The problem your thinkers have is understanding quite how the evildoer gets pleasure from his evil, but that’s a different question.) Evil for its own sake is – or would be if it existed – madness; and even the barmy do what they do for some barmy reason. What pains the Old Boy most is not that I do evil, but that I do what causes me excruciating pain. What pains Him is that even perpetual and excruciating pain is a price worth paying for disentangling myself from Him. That’s the crux of it. That’s what He can’t stand.
If He’d just do the simple thing and go away, I could stop all this tempting and seducing and blaspheming and lying and so on, and just get on, freely, with being me. It’s a terribly burning question, you know, this question of who, outside of my relationship to You Know Who, I actually am. I mean I’m sure I’m someone. I wonder what I’m like? I wonder if I’m . . . well . . . all right?
I’m supposed to be guilty of all sorts of crimes and misdemeanours, but when you get right down to it, I’m really only guilty of one: wondering. The road to Hell, you say, is paved with good intentions. Charming. But actually it’s paved with intriguing questions. You want to know. Man do you want to know! I wonder what it’d be like to stick this breadknife into his throat? Whose question do you think that is? You’d be surprised. It’s the young mother’s, slicing through the still warm loaf while her under-two sits facing her in his highchair, gurgling, a mauled and sodden Jammy Dodger clutched in his tiny mit. She’s not going to, obviously, ninetynine times out of a hundred, but you know, it’s there, the wonder, the beautiful, abstract curiosity. It’s there because I put it there. Try it. Pick up a knife, a hatchet, a club, a loaded gun when there’s anyone else around – put an instrument of potential destruction in your hand and tell me that nowhere, nowhere in your mind is the question: I wonder what it would feel like to use this?
Proximal vice, of course, stirs curiosity like nothing else. Ask the plod who work with sex offenders, the paedophile police, the rape detectives. Ask them how long it takes before that wondering takes hold. Try it. Go and visit your local Dahmer, your Sutcliffe, your Hindley. Come away and tell me truthfully that you weren’t in the least disturbed by the feeling that they knew something vital that you didn’t. The tonnage of True Crime, all that astonishing testimony, all those frank black-and-whites – why does it race off the shelf, the newsstand, the web? Titillation, yes of course (bloodlust and sadism in the camouflage fatigues of what-makes-these-monsters-tick?-And-thank-God-they’ve-got-that-evil-bastard; you’d be surprised, I dare say, at the suburban boudoir impact some of your century’s shockers have had), but more than that, the desire to know. Except of course you can’t, vicariously, not really. Some kinds of knowing (you know this anyway, but you kid yourselves along) demand a rigorously empirical approach.
I’ve wondered – as I know you must have – why, exactly, I’m doing this. Not the movie. Not the month-in-Gunn’s body thing (it should be obvious by now that I’m doing that for . . . Well, for ice cream, for bare feet on warm concrete, for kisses, for the dawn chorus, for leaf-shadows, for strawberries on the breath, for the sheer rock and roll of the Flesh and Its Feelings); no, I mean this thing, this writing thing. Why, you might reasonably ask, spend so much time and energy writing when you could be out there every second of the waking day?
Gunn would have absolutely no difficulty in explaining this – but that’s not the point.
The point is . . .
Oh it’s embarrassing. Honestly it is.
Jimmeny went among you and spoke to you in your own tongues, He left a book behind him – one so ambiguous and paradoxical that it can be made to fit any weak or credulous mind’s needs – which made it categorically clear where donations, thanks and praise should be directed whenever your bread fell butter-side up. (The butter-sidedown stuff they’re not so keen to hear about.) He had all the publicity because he had all the language. Publicity is language. What publicity have I had, me with the allegedly beyond measure pride? A proud being would have been driven mad by this invisibility aeons ago. How long have I felt like the genius playwright barred forever from sharing encore glories – the thunderous applause, the hurled bouquets – with his frequently spoon-fed or second-rate cast? Have I complained?
Uncomplaining I would have remained, too, had this absurd new deal not been tossed (contemptuously in my opinion) on the table. Unvoiced, unseen, unheard, uncredited. Enough merely never to have surrendered. (Never surrender. My motto long, long before it left the mouth of your erstwhile PM.) Enough, it would have been, merely to have remained . . . myself, in silence, unwritten into your history’s lively pages. But what with the clock ticking and everything . . .
I’ve been so close to you, after all. I’m not entirely without . . . What I mean is, I know it’s been . . . difficult, at times – a love-hate relationship, you might say – but I have always . . . you know . . . been there for you, haven’t I?
Plus, I do type now at around 400 words a minute.
I’m mad, I am. Absolutely mad. Honestly. I should be on telly. You won’t believe what I did yesterday. Truly you won’t. Shall I tell you? Shall I? I went to see Penelope.
Gossip columnists must be depressed. Deeply depressed. For in a state of profound depression I opened my mouth to tell the tale – well, I mean switched on and addressed my quicksilver fingertips to Gunn’s keys – and lo! The above idiom sprang fully formed into being, like Athena from Zeus’s thunderous forehead. It’s inappropriate. The only thing to do with atrocity, it’s been said, is to chronicle it. There’s no working it, shaping it, making art of it. Just history’s obligation to document the facts. Well then, let me list the facts of atrocity. I went to see Penelope.
There are idiots among you, I daresay, so wedded to the love story that some preposterous and epoch-making affair of the heart between me and her is already taking shape in your imagination. You’re the punters for whom Hollywood producers like Harriet’s chum Frank Gatz exist: ‘You got a story where the Devil comes to earth, right? Takes over this writer prick’s body, right? Okay. Now whatever the fuck else happens in the story, what’s got to happen is that he falls in love. With the writer prick’s girl. Then you go with it. She get’s shot, whatever. Hospital. Toobs. Life-support. Our guy’s got to make a deal with God. Her life in exchange for his. Boom. You see this? And when he croaks, the scaly wings and shit are gone. Pure white feathers. “He thought he’d fallen from Heaven. It was worse than that. He’d fallen in love.” That’s your tag-line. You seeing this? Get me Pitt’s guy on the phone. He’ll be all over it . . .’
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 four 99s and a Strawberry Split on the way to the station. Ice cream. Oh, man: your mouth’s a volcanic orifice; in goes Mister Softee – and lo! thou art filled 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; glacé 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 wandering 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 PhD 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 mattering 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 . . . Declan 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 Declan’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+1=! 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 AND HIS FACE HIS FACE AND HER FACE AND SHE WAS SHE WAS YOU KNEW WHAT SHE LOOKED LIKE AND NOW HE DOES TOO YOU THINK OF IT YOU MISERABLE FUCKING SHIT WRETCH AND YOU’VE DONE NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING EXCEPT WANT TO FUCKING DIE.
