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

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.

I should take this opportunity to thank my host for providing the wank-addicted Lucifer of those embarrassing early hours not just with Vi’s short-limbed, shampoo’d, bodysprayed, lipsticked, varnished, stilettoed, hot and foul-tempered little bod, but with a gallery, a slew, a plethora, a glut, a truly appalling superabundance of fantasy femmes, from the professional snarlers and pouters of American porn to the unsuspecting ladies of Gunn’s everyday life. You’ve got to hand it to my boy. It’s carnage in there. It’s common knowledge ’round my way, the deadly damage you can do to Catholics just by persuading them (and what am I if not persuasive?) to own up in their fantasies to what turns them on. Doesn’t have to be anything drastic – no sodomizing chickens or money-shooting thalidomide tots – because the bare experience of being turned on is saturated with guilt to start with. I’ve taken Caths all the way from handjobs to homicides just by getting them used to doing the thing that makes them feel guilty. My boys brought Declan’s suicidal depression along nicely with regular top-ups to his sense of his own enslavement to lust. He made it easy, not least thanks to his own ready swallowing of my sneaky story that surrendered-to filth was both an imaginative catalyst (he started writing round about the time he started whacking-off) and a source of mighty self-knowledge. But that’s by the by. The point is Violet loomed large those inaugural hours, so much so that by the morning of the second day paying the little cracker a visit was all but at the top of my list of Things To Do. Besides, I thought, with a sheepish-cum-wolfish grin at my new reflection in the mottled mirror of Gunn’s dark wardrobe door, it really was obscene to have spent so long indoors.

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 . . .