I, Lucifer Read online

  I took the one month ‘trial’ and sent Gabbers back Upstairs with a new set of terms and conditions. Not with any hope that they’d be accommodated, obviously – but to let them know that I’m taking the proposition – ahem – seriously.

  Now. I’ve got some moves – but even if I didn’t, there’s no reason to pass up a month’s vacation in the Land of Matter and Perception.

  You know what Eden was? I’ll tell you. Edenic. Susurrating trees reached out fingers of frothy foliage to catch the languid landings of turquoise birds. Opalescent streams exhaled the sweet scent of sewage-free water. Red and silver fish jewelled obsidian meres. Succulent grass appeared and let green really show itself. (That grass and that green, they were made for each other.) Gentle rains fell from time to time and the earth lifted its face up to receive them. Colours debuted daily in the sky: aquamarine, mauve, pewter, violet, tangerine, scarlet, indigo, puce. Colours were textures in Eden. You wanted to roll around naked in ’em. The material world, it was apparent from the get-go, was my kind of place.

  Yes, Eden was beautiful – and if I had to squeeze through corporeal keyholes to crash it – so be it. (Hasn’t it bothered you, this part of the story, my being there, I mean? What was I doing there? ‘Presume not the ways of God to scan,’ you’ve been told in umpteen variations, ‘the proper study of Mankind is Man.’ Maybe so, but what, excuse me, was the Devil doing in Eden?) I took the forms of animals. I found I could. (That’s generally my reason for doing something, by the way, because I find I can.) I hung around the gates for quite a while; I made several slow passes at the material boundaries until I sensed – my hunches are infallible – that flesh and blood would open to me, that angelic spirit could cleave and inhabit the body, drawing form around itself in a meaty cloak. It’s claustrophobic, at first, taking on a form. Your spirit instinct screams against it. Incarnation requires a strong will and a cool head – well, a cool mind, until an actual head is available. Imagine you suddenly realised you could breathe underwater. Imagine you could take water into your lungs, ditch the hydrogen and hang on to the oxygen. Taking that first breath wouldn’t be easy, would it? Your reflex would be to kick for the surface and wolf down air as nature intended. Well, it’s the same with corporeal habitation. Only the single-minded overcome that reflex panic and yield to the body’s fit. And as if you needed reminding: I am one of the single-minded. So I took the forms of animals. Birds were the obvious first choice, what with their bird’s-eye view of things. And flying’s hardly to be sniffed at, when you consider it. (One of your most irresistible traits, by the way, is the speed with which you exhaust novelty. I was on a red-eye from JFK to Heathrow the other day, working on a rapper who’s this close to stabbing his model girlfriend to death, when I noticed how utterly indifferent the passengers were to what they were doing, namely, flying through the air. A glance out of the window would have revealed furrowed fields of cloud stained smokeblue and violet as night and morning changed shifts – but how were they passing the time in First, Business and Coach? Crosswords. In-flight movies. Computer games. Email. Creation sprawls like a dewed and willing maiden outside your window awaiting only the lechery of your senses – and what do you do? Complain about the dwarf cutlery. Plug your ears. Blind your eyes. Discuss Julia Roberts’s hair. Ah, me. Sometimes I think my work is done.) Yes, I thoroughly enjoyed flying. And flying at night? Oy. Like butter. Ask the owls. I bathed in the darkness and basked in the light. You’re poor on basking, you lot. With the exception of white girls from the northern hemisphere’s urban pits, who, supine on southern beaches quite naturally allow the sun to strip from them the last tissues of sentience, humans have everything to learn from lizards. The only animal from which humans have nothing to learn, in fact, is the sheep. Humans have already learned everything the sheep’s got to teach.

  The animals shied away from me, even when I was one of them. They just . . . sensed. They drew away and that was that. Me and animals would never be friends. I’ve made use of them from time to time down the millennia, but there’s never going to be a relationship. Three things: they don’t have souls, they can’t choose, and they’re dependent on God – ergo they’re of no consequence to me. The absence of a soul, by the way, makes it easy to inhabit a body. (Therefore, why is Elton John still pudging around unpossessed? I hear you ask.) Conversely, the presence of a soul is an absolute bugger to get around. I manage it, periodically, but it’s not like falling off a log.

  However, again I digress.

  He knew I was there. God the Holy Spirit knew first and blabbed to the Other Two, who knew in any case. Who’d known all along. He let me stay. He created Eden and let the Devil in. Got that? What else do you need to know about Him? I mean do I need, actually, to go on?

  A word about humankind – and I’m . . . you know . . . shooting from the hip here: I was hooked on you, instantly. The hundred billion galaxies, the stars, the moons, the cosmic dust, the wrinkles, the loops, the black holes, the worm-holes . . . It was nice stuff, spectacular in a remote, high-art way. But you lot? Oh, man. Should I say that you were right up my street? You were right up my street, in the front door and sitting in the comfy chair with your shoes off smoking a huge spliff while I made us both a cup of PG. It wasn’t your looks (although I was always a sucker for beauty, and your pre-lapsarian progenitors make you lot look like a posse of anthraxed Quazzies), it was your potential. I looked on (from the lowest bough of a laburnum tree that had burst into blinding yellow bloom almost with an air of embarrassment at the spectacle of itself) as Himself coaxed and worried Adam from the dust. I watched the arrival of bone, the wet birth of blood, the woven tissues, the threaded capillaries, the shocking bag of skin (less Michelangelo than Giger meets Bacon meets Bosch). Those lungs would turn out to be a design flaw, mind you, with all the breathable nastiness I was going to inspire you to invent. Ah, and the genitals. Where the smart money was going. It was, one has to admit, mesmerizing, a gory wattle-and-daub masterpiece. Give the Maker His due, He knew how to Make. The nipples and hair were sweet touches, though you could see from the outset what the wear-and-tear spots were going to be, where the mileage was going to be racked-up: teeth; heart; scalp; bum. Still, you really were a piece of work. I lay on my laburnum bough (I was a feral cat at the time, as yet unnamed) rapt and, I must confess, a tad jealous. Angels had pure spirit and a one-dimensional existence blowing smoke up the Divine Bottom morning noon and night. Man, apparently, was going to have the entire natural world, sentience, reason, imagination, five juicy senses and, according to the development leaked before the war, a get out of jail free card courtesy of Jimmeny Christmas to be phased in not long before the fall of the Roman Empire with limitless retroaction.

  You’ll excuse my flippancy. This is difficult for me. I’d been feeling peaky ever since I found out about Creation. On the one hand it gave me a superabundance of material to work with. On the other . . . What am I trying to say? On the other, it had about it the noxious whiff of finality. Once the world was up and running, once Man was abroad, rife with desires and garrotted by those dos and don’ts, my role was pretty much set for . . . well, for ever. You pause for reflection at these moments. And while we are pausing (Adam finished now, toenails, eyelashes, earlobes, fingerprints – that was forward planning, that, fingerprints) let’s not forget that I, Lucifer, was still in the first agonizing age of pain. Imagine having all your skin flayed off. Whilst having all your teeth drilled. Whilst having your knackers or vadge nailed to a fridge. Imagine your head being on fire all the time. That’s the tip of my iceberg of my pain.

  With the pain, curiously, had come the conviction that I could bear it. Later (much later) by degrees (a lot of degrees) the conviction proved justified; I found I could shear off a wafer of myself, the thinnest, flimsiest wafer (not unlike the sliced ginger accompanying sushi) and lift it above and beyond the infernal pain. I’ve seen exceptional humans do it under torture. Enormously irritating to me and my torturers of course, but, you know, credit w
here credit’s due and all that.

  So I was, let me repeat, in terrible pain. But I couldn’t keep away. Lying there on my bough watching the shadows crawling over Adam’s loins, I had an intimation of the rage and loneliness I’d be signing on for from these beginnings, a glimpse of the appalling waste and destruction, a first gutgrowl of what would be an eternally unsatisfied hunger – a moment, all in all, of doubt.

  Night had crept into the garden. Crocuses and snowdrops were throbbing quills and pearly stars in the dark grass. The rustle of water and the sibilance of the wakeful trees. Ink-shadowed stones and the moon a chalky hoof print. The whole place attended to me with a Lawrentian intensity. My head sank forward on to my paws and I felt my breath moist in my nostrils. The bones in my body were heavy, and for the briefest moment – looking down at sleeping Adam’s brand new limbs and unopened face – for the briefest moment I must confess . . . I must confess . . . I did wonder, despite all that had gone before, despite rebellion, despite expulsion, despite the battlements and cesspits of Hell, despite my legion cohorts and their chorus of rage, despite everything, whether there might not be a chance to –

  ‘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 be 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 Pam 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 Declan 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 gurns and Fontainesque pointwork, oh, oh, oooohhhh), 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-the-art toy. Damn this thing. What’ll they come up with 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 be 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.