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

Now this might come as a shock, so pour yourself a double and drop your buttocks into a beanbag.

Ready?

Okay. Sexual intercourse was not Original Sin.

Truth is Adam and Eve had had sex a few times (how else were they supposed to multiply, my dear Butthead?); it just hadn’t been much fun. It hadn’t been unpleasant, but it hadn’t been sex as you know it. It had been the expression of a design feature, that’s all, like folding one’s arms or hiccupping. Adam’s tool worked – that is, achieved tumescence now and again – but of its own accord. He had no feelings about it one way or the other. Eve, for her part, felt much the same. She didn’t mind. It was just another thing they did because that was the way they were made. Edenic sex didn’t feel good and didn’t feel bad. How times have changed, n’est-ce pas? Now it feels so gerd. Now it feels so bayered. Yes? No, really, you’re too kind.

‘You know you want it you dirty little bitch.’

What astonished both of us was that it came out not as a sequence of hisses (snakeskin looked good on me, I’d decided; slithering was my corporeal métier) but as a perfectly intelligible articulation. For several moments we remained in surprised silence, Eve lying on the grass looking up at the glowing fruit, me corkscrewed around the upper trunk with my neck and head resting close to one of the golden globes.

‘A bitch is a female dog,’ Eve said, quite sensibly. ‘And dirty is before bathing in the river.’

Appalled that I’d wasted the chance for a subtle opening gambit (don’t try that one in the health club bar), I said: ‘Do you remember the time before Adam?’

Eve wasn’t one of those people who say ‘What?’ when they’ve heard you perfectly clearly. She lay blotched with leaf-shadows, blinking slowly and thinking about it. One hand ran its fingers through the grass, the other idled on her midriff.

‘Sometimes I think I remember,’ she said, not quite looking at me. ‘But then it evaporates.’

I can’t take any credit for foresight or planning, but I can and will for consummate opportunism. (Did I say I was omniscient? Not strictly true – but I am a hell of an opportunist.) I didn’t know what precisely she’d be getting from that first wet bite and swallow, but I knew generally. Generally she’d be getting a milder version of the thermonuclear toot I got when I first recognized myself as free to stand apart from God. Generally she’d be getting proof that she was her own woman. Generally she’d be introduced – not before time I might add – to the superlatively delicious pleasure of disobedience.

It was a long, eloquent seduction. I outdid myself. She couldn’t get over my being able to speak. That, really, was the thing. The intelligent voice, soliciting her opinion. Neither God nor Adam had ever bothered. She’d been trying for some time to get her head – and thereby her tongue – around the . . . the . . . I helped her: the inherent appeal of an arbitrarily proscribed activity? Yes, she agreed, with charmingly widened eyes and the relief of one Mervyn Peake fan chancing upon another in an otherwise friendless place. Yes that’s it exactly . . . Words opened like flowers between us, each one releasing the scent of her doubt. Adam’s plodding, unreflexive nature, God’s latent disapproval of her body – oh yes, she’d seen Him curling His lip – her longing for someone to talk to, and not just any old talk, but talk informed with imagination and . . . she struggled again – a sense of ambiguity, a sense of humour, talk that reached out beyond the names of things and praise of God, talk which let you grow as you talked it, that uncovered, that . . . explored what was unknown . . . ‘All the words seem to belong only to God,’ she said, dreamily twirling a sprig of blossom under her chin. ‘But perhaps, they belong to me, too?’

(Tell me I wasn’t born for this. It bothered me, peripherally, back then, as it’s bothered me since: Was I born for it? Was that all it was? Was rebellion just part of the . . . just . . . oh never mind.)

She hung on to that ‘perhaps’ for quite some time. I remember there was a point (I’d placed the fruit in her palm) at which both of us knew she was going to capitulate, but also that she wanted to spin out the posture of resistance a while longer. Between us we invented foreplay and playing hard-to-get. ‘Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field’, says the King James version. You bet your granny’s Horlicks he was, with me inside him. I used everything I had. Temptation’s less about wearing someone down with repetition than it is about finding the right phrase and dropping it in at the right time.

‘You’re awfully . . .’

‘Articulate?’

‘Articulate. You’re awfully articulate, serpent.’

‘You’re so kind, my Lady. But if the fruit of that tree has given subtlety to the tongue of the serpent, a mere reptile, just think what wisdom your exquisite lips will find within their grasp.’ (That was ghastly, I know, that lips and grasp thing, but she really did have the most engaging ones – lips I mean, mouth and mons.)

‘That is fl . . . fl . . .’

‘Flattery? Not at all, Queen of Eden. Simply the truth. Does it surprise you that He forbids you that which would make you His equal, if not His superior?’

An idiom, I knew, within which we could both enjoy the self-consciousness of my flattery (she was a quick learner, Eve, there’s no denying it) – and though she laughed there was no concealing the blush of satisfaction that spread across her throat and breasts. It was, I must confess, so pleasurable to me to sit and play this game with her (I was the spoilyourself-you-deserve-it barkeep, she the office slave letting the margaritas one by one rub out the boundary of her lunch hour until – oh dear – there was the whole working day sipped and swallowed away) I almost forgot where I was going with it.

And when, finally, with scarlet cheeks and fiery eyes she sank those pretty teeth in and the juice cartoonishly spurted out, I, in an intuitive leap I’m not sure I’ve ever since surpassed, delivered the coup de grâce – and slid my . . . What I mean to say is there was a certain spatial compatibility between my . . . It turned out that her . . . Oh listen to me going all shy, will you? But anyway: there. You know what I mean, don’t you? One should make an effort to avoid unnecessary vulgarity, I believe. Pure evil needn’t entail having a mouth like an open drain. I am, after all, a man of wealth and taste. And I do know that there’s an understanding growing between us. I . . . think we can fill in each other’s blanks?

It was my good fortune or honed instinct that one of the first things (one of many) the fruit delivered was – you know it – sensuality. Foremost was the pleasure in having knowingly disobeyed. I saw that the headiness of this rocked her, eyes half-closed, jugular risen, the colour of smoke; I saw the first taste of selfhood and that it almost destroyed her, as might an unschooled vampire’s first draught of blood. (But oh, should the vampire novice survive that first concussive ingestion, what then? Her thirst awakens and increases tenfold!) Ever after, I thought (having discovered inverted aversion therapy), ever after will wrongdoing and sensual pleasure go hand in hand. Lucifer, I said to myself, noting with satisfaction the co-operative hips, the flared nostrils, the raised eyebrows of carnal transport, Lucifer my son you are an absolute bona fide genius. Liberation, subversion, power, rebellion, bestiality, pride – you wouldn’t think even God could cram that lot into a Golden Delicious. I could see her, suffused with all that new fruity knowledge (that she could speak for herself, that disobedience sensitized the flesh, that there would never be any going back now, that if the only thing available to the human being struggling to slip the yoke of service was wrongdoing then wrongdoing she would choose, that she was, against all former suspicions, free), considering through the bruise of concupiscence what she’d done. In their wake ecstasy and crime had left a faint frown of perplexity, the mark of her astonishment that she could feel such things, the face’s opening posture for self-interrogation – how could I? – that would never go further, because she knew how she could. Oh yes, didn’t she just. She knew.

You are grateful aren’t you, that I shackled sex to knowledge and sensual pleasure? Or would you prefer coitus to have remained in the same physiological league as, say, noseblowing? And while we’re at it, you might as well credit me for getting art off the ground. With our girl’s first bold bite and precocious peristalsis the universe was transformed into a representable phenomenon, subject separate from object: represent all of it and there’d be nothing God knew and you didn’t. Nothing worth knowing, anyway. Since that day in Eden sex and knowledge have formed the double helix of your souls’ DNA.

‘When you come, time stops,’ Eve said. ‘It’s a tremendous relief, isn’t it, serpent? Do you suppose that’s what divinity feels like all the time?’

In the green grass she was rose-gold and glowing, fabulously drunk and stone cold sober. I saw her mentally pulling shame around herself like a sumptuous Russian mink. For a moment she held the fruit away from her lips and glared at it as if it had betrayed her of its own free will. But after a moment’s hesitation she returned it to her mouth and sank her teeth into it again. The decision had been made the first time. Just in case there was any doubt, she made it again.

‘This is just the beginning,’ I said. ‘Now if you’d consider turning your . . . What I mean is if you could just grab your – ah. You’re ahead of me, my dear. How very charming.’

‘I’ll tell you something,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I ever really liked him.’

‘Adam?’ I said. ‘I don’t blame you.’

‘Not Adam,’ she said, struggling to swallow a greedily chomped chunk. ‘God.’