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

And so to the present, gentle reader, and the preposterous sequence of events that brought me here in the first place. (The specific ‘here’ of Gunn’s cramped crib and dusty PC on Day Seven, I mean.) It’s been some first week, let me tell you. This not quite knowing what tomorrow will bring game’s not for the fainthearted, is it? I’m half tempted to start seeing you monkeys in a new light.

Some chronology, Lucifer, for shame. You’re tired, yes, but you’ll feel better for having got it down while it’s still fresh.

Well I wouldn’t say ‘fresh’, what with me still stinking of quality quim and French fagsmoke – but I’m jumping the gun. Let’s start, as the autobiographer’s shadow or doppelgänger voice suggests (does this happen to all writers?), at the beginning.

The Violet debacle rocked me, I’ll admit, and an evening of furious boozing followed. (I started smoking, too. I’m looking forward to stopping, obviously, since the real pleasure is starting again, but in the meantime I’ve found my rhythm at about fifty a day.) Not without the profit of insight. Force, I decided, was the missing aphrodisiac. Against her will the crucial ingredient. Made sense: the logical extension of Gunn’s post-Penelope delight in having sex with women who don’t really want to have sex with him. He’d be bug-eyed, no doubt, to see where such predilections point. But that’s me, you see: no nonsense. Call ’em like you see ’em. Besides, what was the alternative? A month on earth – impotent? Do me a favour.

Therefore, having resolved on the kill-or-cure approach, yesterday’s late afternoon found me strolling down High Holborn in the promising slipstream of one Tracy Smith, who though we had yet to be introduced, was destined to play a part in the urgent matter of my sexual rehabilitation.

A good working class Anglo-Saxon maid, our Tracy, with a middleweight backside and chicken skin calves, puddinglike breasts wonderbra’d up to the salivating world and ash-blonde hair scraped into a tortoiseshell barrette, revealing a nacreous neck and two fiercely pink little ears. One glimpse of that pork-coloured and Wrigley’s-flavoured mouth and this bad boy was hooked. Tracy Smith. Head awash with telly and Radio One, the dim echo of school (make-up, gossip, lads), the Pitmans, the Pimms, the package hols brochure – what else would Tracy Smith be called? Actually, she’s thinking of changing her name. Not the Tracy, the Smith. To Fox. Tracy Fox. Page Three Girl, children’s television presenter, Blankety Blank guest. She’s looked into it. It’s not as difficult as she thought it would be. Only problem is, she knows her mum and dad will flip. And since it was their deposit anchored the flat (cabby dad, care assistant mum) she’s got to keep them sweet.

So it’s Tracy Smith, for now, for me, as she steps out of the Holborn building’s main entrance into the gun-coloured evening light and the smoked door swings her handsome rear reflection into my view. Silver puffer jacket, navy pinstripe skirt, ivory tights and black, pinchy-looking high heels. That’s my girl. A red double-decker roars past with Kate Moss on its flank – but you can keep the mannequins, the angle-poise anaemics and mantis-waifs; give me human Tracy Smith, Nescafé breath, pink M&S knickers, the lone skidmark like the scar of a struck match, celebrity dreams, crashing grammar and hunger, hunger, hunger for money. The bus passes with the sound of a dinosaur’s yawn and I slide into my girl’s wake, surrounded by scurrying Londoners whose faces float before me like waxy lanterns in the city’s gloom.

I’ve always had a soft spot for London, the patched and tattered cloak of its history (some of my best work, obviously; I felt the same about old Byzantium), its dog-eared wisdom and inky humour. You know – you provincial British humans know – what it’s like when you crack under the weight of lost love or ingested desire and Move to London: the city’s ready for you. You take your precious miseries there and unpack them – only to find that the city’s already assimilated them, centuries ago, along with grand Elizabethan passions and mortal Victorian sins. The assimilation’s encoded now – in the chemistry lab colours of the Underground map, in Trafalgar’s punk pigeons, in the thousands of ticking stilettos and caffeine yawns and downed pints and adulterous snogs. You turn up on a rainy Monday afternoon proud of all your woeful particulars – and London humbles you with its wealth of generals. You’ve seen your life. London, it turns out, has seen Life.

Paris is snooty, and owns its sins like a liberated mademoiselle owns her velvet diaphragm case and Jackhammer Deluxe vibrator; but London, London noses its heaps of sin like a ropy mongrel among the bins, partly embarrassed, partly excited, partly disgusted, partly sad . . .

But this isn’t to the point. (This is supererogatory, Gunn would say.) The point is I’ve chosen East End bawn an’ bred Tracy Smith (the romantic in me prefers to think that she chose me) for the latest consummation of angelic desire on earth. Violet’s signal failure to generate the requisite . . . Not that there isn’t ample empirical evidence (ask Eve, Nefertiti, Helen, Herodias, Lucrezia, Marie-Antoinette, Debbie Harry . . .) of my knocker know-how and twat-talent; it’s just that . . . taking a look in the mirror . . . I’m not sure what Gunn’s mortal frame can support. When I’ve ravished before I’ve chosen my fleshly hosts carefully – everyone goes home satisfied – but I haven’t been able to avoid noticing Gunn’s deficiencies: not particularly well-endowed, or physically co-ordinated, or gifted with stamina. It came as a horrid shock to me – for the fiftieth time – when I stubbed my toe on the edge of the kitchen unit, for the fiftieth time. I’ve bitten the inside of my mouth so often there’s now a swelling on one inner cheek the size of a Jaffa orange segment. So I think I can be forgiven a wee bit of, ah, performance anxiety, if you don’t mind, as Tracy and I duck underground at Holborn for the Central Line to Mile End.

The London Underground depresses God. The Paris Metro’s rescued by bubbles of romance and intellectual flimflam (He can tune in for ten minutes and get something); the New York subway’s a toilet, obviously, but it looks like the movies, you know, it looks hip, famous, cool; Rome’s Metropolitana – well, Rome’s got a special dispensation, not surprisingly – but London, Christmas Jimmeny the London Underground gets Him down. The Lloyd-Webber ads; the cadaverous drivers with their deep-sea eyeballs and miles of unfulfilled dreams; the Lloyd-Webber ads; the puking office juniors and passed-out temps; the death’s-door beggars with their raw ankles and shat pants; the Lloyd-Webber ads; the buskers; the evening’s fractured make-up and the morning’s frowsty breath; all this and more – but chiefly the surrender to despair or vacancy the rattling tube demands, chiefly the tendency of London’s human beings to collapse into a seat or hang from a rail in a state of bitter capitulation to the sadness and boredom and loneliness and excruciating glamourlessness of their lives. The only thing He sees on the Underground that cheers Him up is blind people who have friendly relationships with their guide dogs. (There are a handful of blind people I’ve been working on in an attempt to radically alter the relationships they have with their dogs. So far, nada. Be nice if I could get one in before the end of time.)

Tracy plonks herself down and takes out her Evening Standard already opened at the telly pages. No point in consulting those, Trace, I think, as the train thunders into the first of many tunnels.

I know what you would have thought, you bored-with-the-world humans. You would have thought: Christ what a fucking uncomfortable evening. A pall of cloud, warm drizzle, windblown litter, London’s dull smell of exhaust and damp brick, the stupid, stupid heat.

Not me. I’ve got Gunn’s five senses working overtime. Every car horn, hot-dog stand, burp, breeze, sunbeam and shitswipe – you get the picture. I’m in love, truly, madly, deeply in love with perception.

And, manifestly, digression.

Tracy’s flat is in the basement of a four-storey Victorian terrace in Mile End. I’ve considered tackling my turtle dove as she pushes open the front door, at that quaint meridian where outside meets inside and the mat says welcome; but there’s too much human traffic in the street and an overly enthusiastic porch light above the lintel. I’d be spotted for sure. So it’s round the back and listen for the sound of the shower, diddle the window, hop over the sill into the kitchen, with just time for a scotch and a glance at the headlines before my girl emerges buffed and lotioned and it’s time to get down to business.

There’s no scotch so I settle for a gin and fizzless tonic. The flat’s a dark living room, an untidy bedroom, a tiny blue-and-white kitchen, and the bathroom, behind the closed door of which Tracy’s gasping and sighing under the jets as the water’s heat by degrees soothes away the day’s annoyances. I crack my knuckles and light a Silk Cut. Julia Sommerville’s round-up of world events reassures me that the boys are hard at it in my absence, but reminds me, too (another flood in India, another earthquake in Japan, another egg-headed astronomer not quite categorically denying that the comet is on a collision course with earth) that time, New Time, I mean, your time, is running out. You get one month to try it out. Your chance, Lucifer. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? As if. But I don’t care for this kind of inner dialogue (increasingly frequent sensation that there are two of me in my own – I mean Gunn’s – head, which I definitely don’t like) and besides, the shower’s hiss has ceased and I can hear Tracy – bent double, I conjecture, plump boobs bobbing as she dries between her rosy toes – singing surprisingly tuneful snatches of Britney’s ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’, which, in the way of inexplicable aphrodisiacs, has me up out of the couch with loins aflame, resolved in a twinkling on a full-frontal assault in the bathroom – up against the heated towel rail, perhaps (tsssss – ouch!) – for openers.

But some things never change.

As I cross the threshold of the kitchen the ether shudders and a trident of unbearable light strikes me full in the face. I collapse and cover my eyes.

‘Too much,’ Gabriel’s voice says. ‘Turn down.’

‘No permanent damage. Come on, Luce, get up. Long time no see.’

Uriel.

‘If you’ve damaged these eyeballs, you’ll regret it.’

‘Why doesn’t he leave the body?’

Zaphiel. Three of the big boys. I’m thinking: Is Tracy dedicated to The Holy Virgin or what? But Zaphiel’s right. Quaking on the lino like that – intolerable. Therefore leaving Gunn’s miserable carcass positioned as if for prayer to Allah, and with a deep breath in preparation for the excruciating pain of disembodiment (Jimmeny that hurts) I return to the bodiless realm to confront my angelic brethren. I can’t say it’s all bad, either, to expand into my non-dimensional dimensions again, easing the joints of power, opening the pinions of pain. The rage takes all but Gabriel, who’s tasted it recently, by surprise. Sissy Zaphiel backs-off. Uriel – I catch the look of admiring horror at what I’ve let myself become – turns his own dial up into the red, reflexively, and all four panes in Tracy’s kitchen window explode.

‘Easy there, boy, easy,’ I say. ‘You don’t get out much, do you?’ It’s a minor but sweet satisfaction to me that Tracy, back in the stopped time of the material world, is indeed as I’d pictured her, bent drying her tootsies, bulbous breasts arrested mid-swing, haunches still pink from the water’s heat. I’ve got a lousy feeling I’m never going to get any nearer to her than this.

‘That’s right,’ Uriel says, turning down again. ‘You’re not.’

‘There are rules,’ Gabriel says.

I regard them, coldly, with a smile. The smell of Heaven is overpowering; it forces itself against me calling up something like nausea. ‘It may have escaped your notice,’ I say, ’but me and rules don’t have what you’d call a happy history. Me and rules haven’t been known for wildly hitting it off, if you see what I mean.’

‘Should you elect to leave the host’s body and not return,’ Uriel says, ‘then the consequences of your actions will be consequences to the body’s original occupant.’

This has occurred to me. To be honest, the thought of slapping a rape and murder rap on Gunn just before checking-out rather appeals. ‘If I leave his body and he returns,’ I counter, ‘consequences aren’t going to get a look-in. In case you’ve forgotten – you sillies – Mr Gunn’s first action on returning to the land of the living will be to exit it, by his own mortally sinning hand. Not much point in arresting the dear fellow if he’s dead, is there?’

‘It’s not a foregone conclusion that he will take his own life,’ Gabriel says.

‘Well it was pretty foregone when the Old Man decided to pull the plug and pack the poor bastard off to Limbo,’ I said.

‘He moves in mysterious ways, Lucifer. You know this.’ Uriel again. There’s something about his inflection. That stint guarding Eden left him too much time for solitary thought.

‘You’re going to have to behave within parameters that will leave Gunn’s liberty intact should his body be returned to him,’ Gabriel says. ‘If, after your trial period, you decide to stay, you may then behave entirely as you choose.’

‘And suffer the mortal consequences,’ Zaphiel adds, having recovered his composure.

Unfortunately for Tracy the handle of her frying pan has melted and run down the front of her cooker. Four angelic presences is a bit of a strain for a material kitchen in Mile End.

‘And suppose,’ I say, ‘without putting too fine a point on it, I tell you to kiss my mephitic ring-piece?’

Again there’s the possibility of a smirk from Uriel, but wooden Gabriel sticks to the facts. ‘You know, Lucifer, that in these matters there is no gainsaying His will.’

‘Dearest Gabrielala – aren’t you forgetting your histoire? I got where I am today by gainsaying His will. What’s He going to do? Go to war again over an East End tart?’

‘If need be. Do you think Michael sleeps, Lucifer? Or that Heaven’s armour is gone to rust?’

‘Old Thing I really must ask you: Why are you talking like such a sanctimonious ponce?’

‘He cannot truly want to come home,’ Zaphiel says. ‘If he wanted to come home he wouldn’t say these things.’

‘“He” is here, if you don’t mind. Of course I’m not coming home. Does any of you seriously think that this is anything more than a vacation for me? Do you know what hot buttered toast tastes like? Chocolate?’

‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much,’ Uriel says, and I nearly smack the cheeky rascal in the mouth. (If he and I hadn’t . . . If we weren’t . . . Well.) None the less it’s clear they’re ready to hang around indefinitely – poor Tracy still bent and half dry in the bathroom’s stopped steam – and since I don’t doubt they’re prepared to make an issue out of it I slip into Gunn’s Mecca-facing carcass (instant cessation of pain), give them the earthly finger and, as you say in Albion, fack orf aaad of it.

Now, Babs, any man will tell you: there’s nothing quite as simultaneously dispiriting and infuriating as getting yourself all ready to rape and murder someone only to be turned away by an unforeseen intercession at the last minute. It’s enough to make you want to rape and murder someone. (Bit rich, too, don’t you think, that He never bothers interceding with regular rapists, this charming old God who only wants the best for you?) But sometimes it takes a setback to clear your vision.

It actually broke me up. I sat in the back of the cab and grabbed my knees and laughed my slow-on-the-uptake head damn near clean off. Eighty grand in the bank and I’m living in a City ex-council with no cable or power shower and a kitchen the size of a teabag. Oh I laughed, I did. So funny I could have gouged Gunn’s eyeballs out and tossed them into the road.

Cabby didn’t appreciate it, mind you. One too many rearview checks till I took out a slender wad of fifties and waved them at him. He was . . . well, he was a London taxi driver: double-chinned with a dark grey comb-over, ear-fluff, jowls like past-it potatoes, Popeye forearms and a boil like a ruby on the back of his neck. Further down I knew there’d be the no-surrender gut, the fat bollock bulge, the waxy bum crack and haemorrhoidal punnet . . . but I preferred not to dwell on it. My threads had confused him (I’ve revolutionized Gunn’s wardrobe: Armani black single-breasted pinstripe, white silk shirt, red paisley tie, Gucci Royalles and three-quarter black leather overcoat from Versace); it was hard for him to believe that you could be dressed like that and still be a giggling nutter – but the sterling calmed him. ‘Fuck Clerkenwell,’ I told him, sliding a crisp note through the vent. ‘Take me to the Ritz.’

‘You mine me arskin what you do for a livin’, chief?’ when we pulled up at the yellow-lit façade.

‘I tempt people to do the wrong thing,’ I said.

He seemed happy with this. Tight-lipped, he closed his eyes and nodded, vigorously, as if I’d confirmed his intuition (advertising, politics, the law). And well might he, since it was only by a miracle of self-control that I didn’t add: Your wife, Sheila, for example, who is at this very moment swallowing the hot and curdy jism of your brother Terry, with whom she’s been enjoying gladiatorial carnal relations for the past eighteen months, my son. Wasn’t mercy (naturally) held me back. Just the vision of him following me into reception and making a scene.

No bags. They love that. Suggestion of whim, flight, drama or verboten coupling. (Which, illicit or otherwise, was still very much at the forefront of my mind, Julia Sommerville’s plummy voice and Tracy’s rendition of ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ having between them got my blood up awfully, at long last.)

At my suite’s snooker table-sized mirror I stood and opened my arms with a smile, the Vegas crooner’s gesture of wordless love in the face of his standing ovation. Spoiled it, somewhat, I admit, by saying aloud: ‘Now this, my son, is a bit more fucking like it,’ but I could hardly blame myself, overwhelmed, as I was, with a deep sense of homecoming.

I sent my threads down to housekeeping for a wash and brush up, then eased myself into an excessively foamed, oiled and salted bath, congratulating myself on having invented money in the first place. Wealth breeds boredom and boredom breeds vice; poverty breeds anger and anger breeds vice. More than enough of the angelic me endured to feel it in the hotel’s costly air; more than enough of the corporeal me to sniff – in the way of charming perceptual correlates – its practitioners’ scents of perfume and aftershave, breath and broken wind laced with the tang and spice of pricey ingestions. (Money calibrates society’s scale of smells, and naturally the folks I’d glimpsed about the place were loaded. I haven’t had to touch most of them (professionally) with a barge pole, since they’ve had money from birth. That’s the beauty of money: the only graft I’ve got to put in is getting people to acquire it. Once they have acquired it, and the freedom it brings, most of them (and their beneficiaries) will go straight off the rails without so much as a bitten nail.) Money was my leap out of the Dark Ages.

Humans and human needs lay hid in night.

I said: ‘Let money be!’ and all was light.

The key to evil? Freedom. The key to freedom? Money. For you, my darlings, freedom to do what you like is the discovery of how unlikable what you like to do makes you. Not that that stops you doing what you like, since you like doing what you like more than you like liking what you do . . .

Not entirely inappropriate then that when, having decided on a tall Tom Collins in the bar (beverage to augment deliberation over how many escorts – okay, rape and murder were off but for Christ’s sake I was damned if I wasn’t going to put my lately acquired love-truncheon to some use), an exhausted posh female voice should say, from two stools away: ‘You don’t look like you do anything for a living.’

I turned. Recognized her straight away. Harriet Marsh. Lady Harriet Marsh, you’d think, what with the bevelled vowels and Susanna-York-on-smack looks. Sixty years old now (quite a while since I’d last seen her) with a freckled body of complicated wiriness under a black halter-neck cocktail dress. Magnificently bored green eyes. Hair dyed a colour between platinum and pale pink, pinned up, with wispy bits dangling. The odd liver spot. Brazenly crafted Los Angeles teeth. Lady Harriet, you’d think – but you’d be wrong. It’s not blood, it’s money. Harriet plucked from a glittering clutch of possibles forty years ago, bedded and betrothed in that order to Texan Leonard ‘Lube’ Whallen (no blood, either, obviously, but a large family of hyperactive oil wells) who, thanks to some colourful experiences with an early years nanny from Dorset, had a crippling weakness for English gals who knew how to boss him about in the sack. The thing to do, I’d murmured to Harriet at the time, is make him earn it. I told him it would take him to the deepest knowledge of himself, to give himself over to her completely. He believed me, looking at his own porous and moustached face in the morning mirror, astonished and grimly delighted. One by one family members written out of the will. Harriet wasn’t going back: the beery two-up-two-down in Hackney, the dodgy dad and threadbare mum, the wireless, the Woodbines . . . She’d been in for the long haul with Leonard, but he’d surprised her in 1972 by dying of a heart-attack (four Jack Daniels, devilled prawns, three injudicious Monte Christos and a dash across the baked apron to make the private jet’s take-off slot), leaving her more or less sole inheritor. I let her go after that. She wouldn’t need me. She worked well on her own. Now – oh, honestly, I’m gifted, I am – she owns thirty per cent of Nexus Films.

‘You don’t look like you do anything for a living.’ Yes. The blunt gambit entitlement of the rich and the beautiful. Candour a match for my own.

‘I do something for a living,’ I said.

‘Really? What?’

‘I’m the Devil.’

‘How nice for you.’

‘Currently in possession of a mortal frame, as you see.’

‘I do see.’

‘And you’re Harriet Marsh, widow of Leonard Whallen.’

‘And you’re not clairvoyant. My name generally precedes me.’

‘But other information does not.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as that you’re currently wearing peach-coloured cami-knickers from Helene’s in Paris. Such as that you were thinking several things a moment ago: that the English are in love with failure and loss; that there’s no pleasure for you now like the pleasure of being driven through capital cities in the last hour before dawn; that my cock would be small and that it’s been a long time since you’ve even known what you like; that there should be another dimension or place for the filthy rich when this world’s fruits have been sucked dry; that there’s nothing you’d like more than a long stay in a white-walled and chilly hospital where nothing was demanded of you; that you’d need to get drunk if you were going to fuck me.’

‘My mistake,’ she said, after a sip of her champagne. ‘How charming.’

‘Goes with the territory.’

Raised eyebrows. Tired, our Harriet, tired of life, tired of having done everything – but willing to be seduced by curiosity. ‘Territory?’

‘Being a fallen angel,’ I said. ‘Being the fallen angel.’

Another exhausted smile. Another sip. It wasn’t much, this, but it was, at least, something.

‘Tell me what I’m thinking now,’ she said.

I gave her a devilishly nonchalant smile of my own. ‘You’re thinking about how little you get for six million in South Kensington, and that in any case you won’t keep it for more than a year, since London houses are filled with sadness. You’re wondering whether I’ll fuck you because I’ve got a thing for older women, some dreary oedipal tumour, or because I’m the sort of young man who believes that self-degradation elevates him to some kind of divine knowledge.’

‘You’re really rather good at this, aren’t you?’

‘The best.’

‘There must be a story to tell.’ She sounded weary at the prospect.

‘After.’

‘After what?’

‘You know what.’

Oh my angel, my bad angel – well that pressed a few buttons, obviously – Oh my angel master, fuck me, fuck your little pigbitch, mmnyesss, stick your filthy fucking cock up my filthy fucking arse, all the filthy fucking way, all the way, um-hmn? Nn-hmn. You know I’m your filthy little cocksucking whore, don’t you? Fuck your little Virgin Mary whore –

Lost my head a bit at that point, I’m afraid. Curiously though, this monologue (yours truly too busy with the miracle of his own restored and restive rod to bother responding) all delivered in a robotic monotone, like a somnambulist bishop reciting the Athanasian Creed. It’s become one of Harriet’s tools for submergence, has sex; it takes her to some depth of consciousness far from the surface of her life. The pornologue’s mantric (as is the Athanasian Creed, for that matter) sucking her down to a level of herself where no questions are asked, where her history evaporates, where her self bleeds painlessly into the void.

And though I kept shtum myself, there was no denying the effect of such saucy language on Gunn’s tackle. Even from Harriet’s passionless lips they effected a startling transformation. (And ferried in the memory that Penelope couldn’t, simply could not talk dirty without cracking-up; whereas Violet’s dyspepsia lurks so close to the surface that in a few heady encounters it’s come out in a mild dominatrix shtick that’s had Gunn spunking like a hound-dog.) It’s been that way for him ever since he learned to read. Indeed, his childhood proficiency as a reader was driven almost exclusively by desire for the sexual knowledge books contained. Even as an adult his balls tingle at fuschia, fucivorous, cunning, cuneiform, cochlea and cockatoo – for no better reason than that they’re dictionary neighbours to fuck, cunt and cock. An absurd way for a grown man to behave, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Harriet looked sad as hell when it was all over. Sad as hell that it was all over. Sad as hell that time had started again, with its all ticks and all its tocks, all its excruciating reminders of who she was, where she’d been, what she’d done, and where, in the end, she was going.

‘You’re worried about going to Hell,’ I said to her, flexing Gunn’s breasts (I almost typed ’pecs’, but I don’t want to insult you) in front of the mirror, whilst smoking a cigarette. ‘Don’t be. I’ve made some changes down there. All that fire and brimstone, all that agony? History. No point. Plus, my fuel bills... I’m kidding. But seriously, can you give me one good reason why I should waste my time making my guests suffer? This whole . . . this whole line about me making souls suffer – it’s so stupid.’

‘Please stop talking.’

‘My feeling is, hey, mi casa su casa. As long as you’re not with the Old Man upstairs, my job’s done. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be civilized about it. No reason we shouldn’t be comfortable.’

‘It’s a nice gimmick, darling, but one needs to know when to stop.’

‘No one gets it. Which do you think would annoy Him more? Souls in Hell suffering and wishing they’d been Good? Or souls in Hell partying and thinking, ‘Thank fuck I didn’t bother with all that morally sound behaviour crap?’ You see the logic, surely?’

‘There’s no comfort in logic,’ Harriet said, picking up the phone and punching the stud for Room Service. ‘Suite 419. Bollinger. Three. No. I don’t give a fuck.’

Click. Wealth’s economical idiom. Not needing to say please or thank you. If parents hadn’t scolded their children for forgetting please and thank you, I’d never have got capitalism off the ground.

‘Harriet,’ I said. ‘I feel like a million bucks. Why don’t you let me pitch you a story?’

She rolled over onto her belly and let one arm hang over the edge of the bed. Her hair was a mad old lady catastrophe, now. Astounding: looking at the elderly elbow, the troubled capillaries of the wrist, I felt Gunn’s bollock blood thickening again. Who’d a thunkit? All Vi’s charms on offer and I can’t raise an eyebrow. Then Harriet, who – ah, the penny drops – is the age his mother would’ve been if she hadn’t croaked . . .

‘There’s no point,’ Harriet said. ‘I’ll have heard it before. The world ran out of stories centuries ago.’

‘I couldn’t agree with you more, Harriet,’ I said, lighting a fresh Silk Cut off the butt of the one I’d just smoked down to the cork. ‘I couldn’t agree with you more. And this story, let me tell you, this story’s the oldest story of ’em all. . .’