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

‘I wrote it because it just seemed really clear to me that this whole debate between men and women . . . the sex war, the politics of gender . . . that entire dialectic was starting to stagnate.’

Thus Gunn on Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest. I was there. (Yes, I was there. I’m everywhere, I am. Not quite omnipresent – but busy. Really busy.) ‘There’ was a flyblown and nicotine-coloured studio at Cult Radio. Gunn and Barry Rimmington, a moth-eaten and perennially soused jock so thin it looked as though he could barely support the weight of the headphones, who chain-smoked Rothmans and sat in the Joycean manner with legs not crossed but plaited, as if any looser posture would let his entire body unravel and fall apart.

‘You know, it just struck me that for a lot of guys in my – well, not my generation . . . but my . . . demographic . . . that we’re walking around with the sort of behavioural costumery of reconstructed men.’ He was pleased with that phrase, having devised it on the train up from London. He left a pause after its delivery, in which he expected Barry to say something like, ‘How d’you mean, exactly?’ Unfortunately, Barry, lighting one Rothmans off another with all the alacrity of a doped slow loris, wasn’t listening. (He’d had quite a few foul-ups on the air, had Barry, invariably as a result of letting his mind wander, having left the interview in the radically incapable hands of his professional autopilot. ‘Margaret, you say you’ve always had this ambition. Tell me, have you always had this ambition?’) So Gunn just went on: ‘By which I mean that, I suppose, there’s a number of men who’ve learned to speak feminist – we’ve read our Andrea Dworkin and our Germaine Greer and what have you, and we’ve got a handle on what’s cool and what’s not – but the question remains to what extent has the inner psychological mechanism actually changed? In other words, are we genuine? I wanted to write a novel that asked that question – of myself, naturally – I think it was Trollope who said that every writer is his own first reader – but also of men and women generally. That, at any rate was the starting point . . .’

Penelope stands with her arms elbow deep in Fairy Liquid bubbles. She’s staring out of the window (grotty ground floor one-bedroom flat in Kilburn, but it’s been the arena of their young love and therefore radiates an untranslatable beauty) into the haggard back garden with its rusted milk crate and neurotic tree. She had stopped to listen with a smile on her wide lips. Now she’s just still. The bubbles proceed with their quiet, continuous bursting around her arms.

‘So,’ Declan says that night on the phone. ‘Did you hear it?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘And?’

‘You sounded nervous.’

‘I was nervous. You should’ve seen the fucking DJ. Looked like an imperfectly reanimated zombie.’

‘Umm.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘What? Yeah, yeah. I’ve had bad guts all day, that’s all. You all right?’

‘Yeah. It’s absurd, you know, you spend your entire life trying to get people to listen to you, then when it finally happens and someone shoves a microphone in front of you –’

‘Gunn – ?’

‘– you just end up speaking in platitudes – eh?’

‘I’ve got something on the stove.’

‘Oh. Okay. Are you sure you’re all right, love?’

‘Yeah, yeah I’m fine. Just. I should go and get this thing.’

‘Okay. Go on then, I’ll wait.’

‘No I’ll call you later. Is that all right? I’m just –’

‘What?’

‘I think I might need to go and have an enormous poo.’

‘Oh, okay’

‘I’ll call you later then. About eleven?’

‘Okay. All right. I love you.’

‘I love you, too, Deckalino.’

And she is dumb to tell the crooked rose (for there is one, pathetic and miraculous, crept through from next door’s bush) how at her heart (oh you humans and your hearts) goes the sense, the certainty, that it’s changed between them, been forked and twisted by the dishonesty of his radio voice. It’s upon her, our Penelope, like the horror in the dream she’s had now more than once that Gunn’s asleep and snoring next to her, but when she shakes his shoulder and he turns towards her it’s not him at all, but someone completely different – not a monster, nothing in itself terrifying – just . . . horribly . . . not him . . .

‘Declan?’

‘Umm?’

‘Why did you say that on the radio?’

‘Say what on the radio?’

A week later Penelope’s got a horrible feeling of emptiness about this conversation. That all conclusions here are foregone.

‘All that stuff about having a thematic agenda – wanting to ask yourself how much men in general had really changed?’

‘I don’t know what you mean. What do you mean?’

They’re had in bed, of course, these conversations, under cover of darkness. That way you’re spared seeing each other lying – as Declan is (can’t quite recall who was working with him at that time . . . Asbeel, possibly . . .) in the matter of not knowing what she’s talking about.

Penelope knows he’s lying and she knows why he’s lying. She jams her jaws together for a few moments, riding the wave of desperation, butching out the need to scream at him that he’s changing and betraying her.

‘Well, I was wondering, you see, because I remember that conversation we had about how much you thought it was bogus, all that talk about starting with a theme and then grafting a story onto it. You said it was pretentious revisionism, and that any writer being honest would admit that you start with a character, or a situation, or a place, or an event, or – I remember you said this, you see – even a snatch of overheard talk.’

‘Hang on a –’

‘You said it was all bullshit, and that if there really was a something there then it would be “about” something. But you said that to start with the “about” and try’n’ get to the story was an invention of academic criticism.’

‘Penelope, what on earth is all this about?’

‘Whereas on the radio, you see, you said quite clearly that you started with a theme and then devised the story.’

‘I didn’t say that. Did I say that?’

‘And I remember the conversation we had about this because you were so animated. We were sitting at a fucking plastic table with a lopsided sun-shade outside the cafeteria.’

‘Penny, wait. Just –’

‘And I remember, you were so excited, talking about it all. It was absolutely nothing to do with trying to impress me. I remember because it was then that I realised I was in –’

‘Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.’

‘And how could you – how could you say that thing about Trollope?’

‘What?’

“‘I think it was Trollope who said that every writer is his own first reader.’”

‘Well, it was Trollope, wasn’t it?’

‘You were trying to sound like a fucking writer.’

Well. The magnitude of this utterance and the closefitting silence it engenders surprises both of them. Doesn’t sound like much of an accusation, does it? None the less, Gunn lies absolutely still, filled with either fire or ice, he can’t tell which. Penelope lies on her back with all her limbs gone cold and dead.

This, though he doesn’t know it, is the time for Gunn to turn to her and say: ‘You’re right. You’re absolutely right. It was false, the product of ego and vanity and disgusting selfflattery and phoniness. I’m weak, that’s all. I’ll try to grow beyond it. Forgive me.’ But he’s so embarrassed and enraged that she’s seen him, shown him himself from an angle he would always have ignored, he’s so unmanned by this that he too lies prone and inert. Though he’s lying next to her, he has the strangest feeling of the bed’s sudden pitch and roll, an LSD-esque distortion of proximity which shows him Penelope receding over an infinitely expanding vastness of mattress to a point beyond reach or vision . . . He’s thinking that there was, after all, a chance for him to have owned up, that even now, even as he falls away from her, from the possibility of love, thinking (without any desire to sound like a writer) that this is the way this is the way this is the way the fucking cunting bastard world ends . . .