I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story

by Glen Duncan

  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 Denholm 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.

  The sky. For Heaven’s sake the sky. I looked up at it and had to look down again since the . . . well, frankly, the blueness of it threatened to swallow my brand new consciousness whole. My progress was the jerk-shuffle of the funhouse punter on the moving staircase. I suppose it doesn’t strike you, particularly, that sunlight races ninety-three million miles to smash itself to smithereens on Clerkenwell’s concrete, transforming tarmac into a rollered trail of gem-shards? Or that a slate wall will cool your blood’s throb when you hold your cheek against it. Or that summer-heated brick, porous and glittering, has a taste unlike anything else on earth? Or that inhaling the smell of a dog’s paw-pads tells your nose the animal’s crammed and lolloping history? (I’ve rubbed my nose in a good many places since then, but I’m damned if I’ve found much to compare with the honk of a dog’s foot. It’s the smell of idiotic and inexhaustible optimism.)

  Do you know what I thought? I thought, Something’s wrong. I’ve OD’d. This can’t be what it’s like for them. If this is what it’s like for them how do they . . .? How on earth can they . . .?

  A group of bronzed and artfully stubbled labourers in orange hard hats and lime-green plastic tank tops were engaged in digging a hole in Rosebery Avenue. Four men in dark suits walked past me, smoking and talking about money. A black bus driver whose bus appeared to have died of a broken heart sat in his cab reading the Mirror. Surely, I remember thinking in my innocence, surely it can’t be like this for them? How do they get anything done?

  Quite, I thought, looking at Gunn’s watch. That’s the thing with New Time: before you know it, you’ve spent it. Before you know it, it’s gone. It kills us in Hell, you know, the number of your deathbedders who, despite all the wristwatches and desk calendars, despite their life’s tally of ticks and torn-off pages, look around them in their last moments with an expression of sheer disbelief. Surely I’ve only just got here, they want to say. Surely I’ve only just begun? To which, smiling and warming our palms around the arrivals hall blaze, we reply: Nope.

  I must get on, I thought, having just finished my third 99 from the confection-coloured Super Swirl ice-cream van which, after a jangling version of Three Blind Mice, had stopped not thirty yards from Denholm Mansions. That friendly stray (mongrel, bit of German Shepherd, possibly a bit of Border Collie, but mainly rubbish) had eaten up two hours all on its own, what with its damned irresistible pawpads, what with its frowsty dreads, baroque breath and try-anything-for-a-laugh tongue. (It hadn’t occurred to me that dealing with animals would be so different from inhabiting them. It hadn’t occurred to me that in Gunn’s skin they might actually like me.) It had been a mistake to sit down and share one of my 99s with him. Took the Flake in one uninvited chomp, too, greedy bugger. Someone had walked past and dropped 50p into my lap. Someone else had walked past and said: ‘Get a fucking job you scrounging cunt.’ Well, I thought, that’s dear old London Town for you.

  Stopping at St Anne’s lopped another half-hour off my clock. Couldn’t resist. You get so used to seeing churches from the incorporeal side (I do a deal, a great deal of my work in churches, usually during the homily, when all but the most besotted acolytes are in a state of surreal boredom verging on hallucination) that the temptation to take a peek from the material perspective was overwhelming. A quick glance inside revealed thirty dark and uninhabited pews, an iron-grilled aisle, a modernist altar in granite and oak, and, crouched with Pledge and Jaycloth at the Communion rail, floss-headed and strabismal Mrs Cunliffe (I kid you not), the translation of whose galloping sexual desire for Lee Marvin look-a-like Father Tubbs into obsessive church cleaning leaves St Anne’s spotless and the good padre unmolested. (I’ve got someone on her, don’t worry. She’s already brought herself off against one of Jimmeny’s nailed marble feet, ostensibly dusting the statue’s armpits, thinking of Tubbs’s dark-haired hands and piercing green eyes. Suppressed the entire thing, obviously. You could ask her and she’d dash you across the mouth with her Jaycloth for giving utterance to such blasphemous filth. As far as she’s concerned it never happened. Not that you can blame her, since it never happened, not in actuality, if you want to split hairs; but it’s there, believe me, in potentia. Say what you like about me but don’t say I can’t spot sleeping talent, a star waiting to be born.) I didn’t go in. Daren’t. Couldn’t trust myself with the . . . perceptual stimuli. As it was the glimpsed interior offered an all but irresistible contrast to outdoor London’s riot heat and traffic clamour – cool stone and incense-flavoured wood, not to mention the glass-stained light poking in like the legs of the Old Man’s compasses, dividing the lilac gloom with beams of rose and gold, nor the soft-flamed candles, nor the chilled, smoke-scented air, nor the resonance that would attend any blasphemy bellowed up into the fluting . . .

  I retreated. Backed out on tiptoe, actually, like someone in a cartoon. The heat outside took me back, no questions asked. One of those freak bubbles in the traffic’s flow. Up and down Rosebery Avenue not a vehicle in sight. One knows, of course, that such fluked peace must shatter momentarily – the slow gargle of a crawling back loader, the rattlecrash of a flogged transit – but for a few seconds it’s as if the city’s been swept clean; now there’s just the sound of trees, the heat’s blare, the gravid cognition of tarmac and brick. I stood still and listened. Perception’s incessant craving made a sound like the flare of a match in my ears. There was . . . there was so much . . . I reeled, somewhat. (Another first, that, reeling.) I reeled, steadied myself – laughing a little, a moment of Raskolnikovian lightness amid the shifting bergs of body and blood – and caught a whiff of the garden at the back of the church.

  You’d better be careful, Lucifer, my sensible auntie voice said. You’d better wait until you’ve got use to –

  Pornography, that’s what it was, a wild pornography of colour and form, the shameless posturing, the brazen succulence and flaunted curves, the pouting petals and pendulous bulbs. Fronds
of things. The soft core of a giant rose. I was unprepared. Glory to God for dappled things . . . Well, fair enough, hats off and all that, but in small doses, yes? My eyes roved, madly – a messy explosion of lilac, a manic brushstroke of mauve . . . The scents ripped-off the lacy delicates of my nostrils and ravished ’em, front and back, upside down and ’angin from the bloomin’ chandelier, me dear. You’ve seen, I’m sure, the time tunnel, the vortex, the black hole, the rapidly swirling and expanding maw into which, irresistibly, the hero astronaut is sucked? So Lucifer in the garden, spun around by colours and concussed by smells. Weak as a kitten, I heard and saw myself as if from a distance emitting a series of feeble noises and gesticulating like an imbecile. Meanwhile the bloody reds and coronal golds bedevilled me like circling sprites; greens of olive, lime and pea spiralled around me, flaming yellows of saffron and primrose . . . Hard to tell whether I was about to pass through into some other dimension or simply vomit onto the seething lawn. I made a feeble warding-off gesture with my arms, sank to my hands and knees, then froze, so curiously balanced between ecstasy and nausea that remaining still and breathing gently took their rightful places in the vanguard of luminously good ideas, where they remained for the next few minutes, until, laughing a little once more at my . . . my precociousness, I staggered to my feet and headed back towards the street.

  One does tell you, Lucifer, auntie Me said, sighing. One does at least attempt to forewarn you . . .

  Naming the animals was pretty much the high point of Adam’s career. Took a while, as you can imagine, but he stuck at it, plodder that he was. Not that he couldn’t pull some corkers out of the air when the mood took him. Platypus, for example. Iguana. Gerbil. Vole. Ostrich.

  He didn’t know I was there. Whatever gifts the Maker had given him, ESP wasn’t one of them. Either that or God put a wall between us. In any case Adam couldn’t hear me when I tried to reach him with my mind, and when I tried going through the various animal larynxes I got the predictable range of grunts, squeaks, barks and twitters. I got terribly bored. Even a cursory headcount (we were bogged down at the tail-end of Chondrichthyes) revealed it was going to take a while. The only interesting development was the emergence of a strange and humbly beautiful new sapling in the centre of the garden, a modest specimen – certainly without the maidenly grace of the silver birch or the melodrama of the weeping willow – but with the air of becoming a sure-fire bearer of succulent fruit come spring . . .

  Blake’s Elohim Creating Adam has one thing going for it. God looks – thanks to the Feldmanesque eyeballs and Braille-reader’s averted gaze – like He knows it’s all going to end in tears. Which of course He does. Did. Blakey managed to get something of it into his image; something, too, of his other preoccupation with opposites: ‘without contraries is no progression . . .’ Stubbornly flexible phrase, that. (Comes in handy at my rare moments of existential doubt.) Applied to the image of Elohim myopically touch-typing Adam into existence the contraries that spring to mind are God’s, His nasty habit of banging free will and determinism together in His head. Don’t eat that fruit you’re going to eat, okay? Don’t eat that fruit you’ve already eaten! What was Eden if not an exercise in Divine ambivalence? Another point in my favour, history agrees: at least I’m consistent . . .

  When I see gurgling retarded children (that’s God’s doing, by the way, not mine) happily styling their hair with their own stinking mards, I think of Adam in those pre-marital days. I know he’s your great-to-the-nth-degree-granddad and all – but I’m afraid he was rather an imbecile. He strolled around Eden wearing a beatific grin, content with an Everything so undeserved it amounted to Nothing, so filled with unreflective bliss that he might as well have been completely empty. He picked flowers. He paddled. He listened to birdsong. He rolled naked in the lush grass like a bare baby on a sheepskin rug. He slept nights with his limbs thrown wide and his head unrummaged by dreams. When the sun shone, he rejoiced. When the rain fell, he rejoiced. When neither sun shone nor rain fell, he rejoiced. He was a one-speed kind of guy, Adam, until Eve came along.

  Now this is going to be hard for you, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to forget the story of Adam getting lonely and asking God for an help meet and God putting him to sleep and forming Eve out of one of his ribs. You’re going to have to forget it for one simple reason (cheer up girls!): it’s flan. The truth is that God had already created Eve – for all I know before He created Adam – and she’d been living quite self-sufficiently in another part of the garden as unknown to her future spouse as he was to her. You’ve got Eden in your heads as some in-need-of-a-trim public garden in Cheltenham. But Eden, not to put too fine a point on it, was fucking huge. Keeping one man and one woman apart wasn’t difficult, and that – ‘presume not the mind of’ etc – was the Old Man’s initial desire.

  The first thing to say about Eve is that she was a big improvement on the Adam design, or that Adam was an extremely misguided variation on the Eve design. (Consider testicles. Two concentrated nuclei of absolute vulnerability. Where? Dangling between the legs. I rest my case.) But I’m not just talking about the boobs and the bum, inspired though those innovations were, I’m sure we’re all agreed. She had something Adam didn’t. Curiosity. First step to growth – and if it wasn’t for Eve’s Adam would still be sitting by the side of the pool picking his nose and scratching his scalp, bamboozled by his own reflection. Off in her part of Eden, Eve hadn’t bothered naming the animals. On the other hand she’d discovered how to milk some of them and how best to eat the eggs of others. She’d decided she wasn’t overly keen on torrential rain and had built a shelter from bamboo and banana leaves, into which she’d retire when the heavens opened, having set out coconut shells to catch the rainwater with a view to saving herself the schlep down to the spring every time she wanted a drink. The only thing you won’t be surprised to hear about her is that she’d already domesticated a cat and called it Misty.

  There was a strange psychic timbre to Eve, sometimes, as if she sensed herself not entirely pleasing to her Maker. There were moments when, in some narrow tunnel of her being, she felt God’s presence as if she were looking at the back of His head, as if His attention was engaged emphatically and judgementally elsewhere. It made her feel curiously separate.

  I – yea, even I, Lucifer – can’t quite explain this frond of selfhood that waved from time to time in the mistrals of Eve’s heart. It wasn’t that she didn’t love God; she did, for vast tracts of time as much as Adam did, constitutionally, reflexively, with all but no sense of being different from Him, penetrated (excuse me) and enfolded by Him almost to the point of dissolution. And yet. And yet, you see . . .? There was something in Eve I can only describe as the first cramped inkling of . . . well, of freedom.

  Now how can I put this, economically? She was beautiful. (Adam was no back end of a bus either – the sloe eyes and sculpted cheekbones, the tight buns and chiselled pecs, the abdominals like a cluster of golden eggs – but without Eve’s sliver of personality it was all just a pretty picture.) Perhaps you’ve got some post-Darwinian model in mind, lowbrowed and beefy, with an Amazonian vadge and knuckle-hair; maybe you’ve got some Neanderthalette with an overbite and Brillo bumfuzz. Forget it. All that came later, after expulsion, in the sweat of thy brow with multiplied pains, etc. The Edenic Eve was . . . Well, think Platonic Form. The Beautiful Woman. Another bone I’ve picked with Buonarotti, incidentally. Oh yes, we got Mike downstairs. In fact maybe now’s as good a time as any to tell you: if you’re gay, you go to Hell. Doesn’t matter what else you spend your time doing – painting the Sistine Chapel, for instance – knob-jockey? Down you go. (Lezzers are borderline; room for manoeuvres if they’ve done social work.) The entire masterpiece fuelled by the stiffened brush softened in the wrong pot. Another superb irony lost on His Lordship. Not a titter. Just consigned Michelangelo to my torturous care. Awful shame, really. (Had you going, didn’t I? Don’t, for heaven’s sake, take everything so seriously all the time. Heaven’s b
ulging with queer souls. Honestly.)

  But the bone I’ve had to pick with Mick (it . . . ah . . . hurts when I pick a bone with you, by the way) was over the Eve in his Original Sin. Personal tastes notwithstanding you’d think he’d have made a bit of an effort with the First Woman Ever Created. She makes Schwarzenegger look gym-shy. The actual Eve made today’s creatures (your Troys, your Monroes) crones by comparison. She was inevitable, tight as a Conrad novel, from the fortune of rippling hair to the calyx and corolla of the alert and sulky cunt, from the delta of the midriff to the sacrum’s golden slopes . . . I get carried away. The important thing about her wasn’t her body, it was her awakeness. (I’m sure when I started this passage I had some notion of the flesh functioning as metaphor for the soul’s irresistibility. Bit of a stretch. My apologies. Gunn’s penchant for oily lechery and oilier lyricism infecting me in equal measures. That fraud. How did women stand him?)

  It wasn’t love at first sight. They ran into each other one morning in a sunny clearing in the forest. A few moments of stunned silence. ‘Glockenspiel,’ Adam pronounced, thinking (but with terrible doubt) he’d found another animal in search of a name. When Eve approached him, proffering a handful of elderberries, he threw a stick at her and ran away.