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

There’s a photograph of Gunn’s mother depressed me, this afternoon at the Clerkenwell writing den. (Jimmeny’s plums, this writing game, eh? The script’s a fucking doddle next to these meanderings. Of all the earthly seductions in all the towns in all the world . . .) Anyway the photograph. From the late sixties, when Gunn must have just started school. She was working afternoons in a Market Street café. The chef was in love with her. She liked him as a friend but after the scarpering Sikh she’d shut up the shop of her heart, not to mention the vaginal premises. (This was in the days before drink and I seduced her, those chaste days before loneliness drove her into the pulpy embraces of hamfisted cabbies and bad-breathed reps.) Anyway the photograph. You can tell someone just said ‘Angela’ then click-flashed as she turned. The moment captures her unschooled look, the face she gave to the world when it hadn’t given her time to prepare, the face without art or protection. You can tell that a splitsecond later, blinking away the magnesium’s after-image, she’d have said, ‘Bloody hell, Dez,’ (or Frank, or Ronnie, or whoever) ‘get away with you.’ But in the moment, she’s absolutely, unguardedly herself.

It gets to Gunn, this picture, because there’s no sign of himself in her eyes. He’s at school, or his gran’s, or Mrs Sharples’s or wherever (lot of women in Gunn’s childhood, not enough men; no wonder he turned out such a sissy). Sure, immediately the shutter and flash have snapped her, her history and motherhood return; but just for that instant Gunn’s seeing a version of his mother that’s nothing to do with himself. He remembers her, that she had much to forgive him. Chiefly, that he never once thought of her as a person in her own right. Instead he measured her by her aesthetic near-misses and hair-raising mispronunciations – measured her, that is, solely in relation to himself. She knew. He knew she knew. Time after time his resolution to rise above himself. Time after time his failure to honour it.

In any case it depressed the hell out of me when I found it, blistered at one corner, dog-eared at another, in Gunn’s desk drawer this morning. I was supposed to be drafting the film version of my Hail horrors speech. I ended up just sitting with a foully reeking Silk Cut, chin in palm, face as perky as a flat tyre. Could barely drag myself back to the Ritz for supper. If I hadn’t remembered that I was due to eat supper off XXX-Quisite Miranda’s mouth-watering arse, in fact . . .

I ask you. I, Lucifer, ask you: Is this any way for the King of Hell to be spending his earthly days?

‘What I’m seeing?’ Trent Bintock said to me, after supper (do you want the supper details? I don’t think you do). ‘What I’m seeing is a hugely fucking extended tracking shot from Lucifer’s viewpoint, as if . . .’ he struggled . . . ‘as if he’s going down a rollercoaster facing the wrong way, you know? He’s looking back and seeing Heaven getting further and further away. He’s on this fucking unreal downward gradient. Except it’s not a fucking rollercoaster, man, it’s space, it’s anti-space, and it’s empty.’ His blue hawk eyes were glittering with childish delight; he was possessed, I observed, of cocaine’s dreary and inexhaustible confidence.

‘Except it wouldn’t be empty,’ I said – and left a pause for him to figure it out for himself. This is always a mistake with Trent. Ten seconds of his sparkling bemusement. I was discovering (at this late stage of the game, for fuck’s sake) impatience. ‘It would be occupied, actually, by my followers. Fully one third of the bene ’elöhïm came with me, you’re forgetting, dear boy.’

‘Benny what?’

‘Sons of God. Angels. You know, Trent, there’s some background reading you could do if you’re . . . What I mean is, there’s some crazy fucking shit in this story, you know? Might be useful to check out a library sometime before we start shooting.’

For some two minutes – I kid you not – Trent’s face retained its expression of impervious joy. Such was the glitter of his eyes you could have been forgiven for assuming he was on the verge of tears. And even then, there was only the merest suggestion of a flicker, when he said: ‘You fucking condescending to me, man?’

‘Trent,’ I said, laughing and fondling his chest in a way he’s not quite sure what to do with. ‘Dear, dear, adorable Trent. Why don’t I just tell you the way it was? Why don’t I just tell you what I remember?’

‘What I remember,’ I said – not to Trent, who had to take a call from New York, but much later, to Harriet in bed, after aborted high-jinx – ‘is how it looked looking back. It’s hard to get this across, obviously, given that we’re not talking about a place, a material thing. Not even an idea, really.’

I didn’t know if she was awake or asleep. The curtains were open, displaying a dashing pre-dawn vista of London’s lights under a clear, smoke-coloured sky. The last scatter of stars was still visible. Sunrise was a vast and magnanimous presence below the horizon, a furious benevolence with an inexhaustible wealth of heat. (Except of course it’s not inexhaustible. Except of course it’s burning itself out.) I thought of the planet’s atmospheric gradations: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, exosphere. I thought of how far away from home you’d feel out there, looking back. You’d think that was homesickness. You’d think that was exile . . .

‘If I was confined to one metaphor,’ I continued, as a plane came in, winking, rhythmically, ‘I suppose it would be . . . I suppose it would be blue.’

I waited for Harriet to say, ‘Blue?’ But she didn’t say anything. She always falls asleep (if indeed she was asleep then) in the same position: lying on her front with her face turned to the right, towards the window, and her right arm hanging over the side of the bed. She looks like a Cindy Sherman. You’d expect to see pills scattered near the dangling hand, an empty glass, crumpled money. And who could blame you? Most nights, next to the dangling fingertips, you can find scattered pills, an empty glass or two, crumpled notes and bills . . .

‘Blue,’ I repeated, quietly. The hotel’s low hum of comfort, the city’s troubled breathing and weary intelligence, the one within the other. ‘I remember, looking back along the plunging cavalcade, the flaming torrent of my rebel brothers . . . Harriet? . . . I remember seeing what you lot would think of, what you lot might represent perceptually – you do know perception’s the oldest metaphor in town, don’t you? – what you might see as blueness and space. A special kind of space, a special kind of blueness, not the blue of an arctic sky, you see, nor the lapis blue in Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid . . . certainly not the midnight blue of the Virgin’s mantle, nor the charming cobalt of these tiny hours . . . Well. Harriet? The point is I’m having trouble seeing how we could do this in the film. The blueness is going to be trouble enough, but the space, that space that was infinite and not really space at all, more a feeling. More a feeling of . . . a feeling of . . .’

Bah, I thought. And thought, simultaneously: What is all this, Lucifer?

I got up, raided the minibar for a thrown-together Long Island Ice Tea, then stood for a while, butt-naked at the window, looking out at the moody sky. The trouble was, I reasoned, I was so dashed busy all the time. Activity . . . yes, activity was taking its toll. This was, after all, the sorry-ass big-ears-and-tub-gut body of Declan Jesus Christing Gunn. What, in the light of the limitations that arrangement imposed, did I expect? There were, obviously, going to be physical noises of complaint. (As if in confirmation of this, Gunn’s anus released a painful and protracted fart with the voiceless interdental quality of a stammerer beginning the word thin and never getting beyond the th. If Harriet remained unmoved by the smell that accompanied it, I thought, she wasn’t asleep, she was dead.) I had backache, did I not, most mornings? My pee-pee-time tears were hardly an indication of a chipper urinary tract, and it was only by supreme effort of will that I managed to ignore the more or less perpetual headache and dehydration that had set in a week ago. If I thought of Gunn’s liver I thought of a dried chilli. Attending to his lungs conjured the smell of tarmac and the sound of the desert’s abrasive wheeze. No, it had to be admitted, the body has its parameters, the flesh and blood would rebel if pushed.

Except, the Little Voice said, it’s not the flesh and blood that’s giving you trouble, is it?

‘What are you doing?’ Harriet’s voice said, out of the bed’s palely lit swamp.

‘Drinking a Long Island Ice Tea. Go back to sleep.’

‘You come here and lie down next to me.’

‘It’s no good. I can’t sleep.’

‘I don’t want you to sleep. I just want you to – oh never mind.’

I let quite a while pass after this, feeling pretty miserable if you want the truth. It was an effort just to keep sipping the drink and chain-smoking. The city’s smog, furious at the sun’s rising, had turned its first band of light into a long, purplish scar. Piccadilly’s traffic was thickening.

‘Do you ever have those dreams,’ Harriet rasped, slowly, ‘where you’ve done something, something terrible and irreversible? Something horrific, and no matter how much you’re sorry it’s no good? It’s indelible?’

‘No.’

I didn’t look at her. Didn’t need to. I knew what she’d look like, lying on her side, face to the window, the city’s lights minutely captured in the glossy convexities of her tired eyes. I knew she’d be unblinking, her cheek squashed in the deep pillow, her mouth dripping a single strand of spittle. I knew she’d look sad as hell.

‘I have that dream all the time,’ she said. ‘Except when I’m asleep.’