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

I’m mad, I am. Absolutely mad. Honestly. I should be on telly. You won’t believe what I did yesterday. Truly you won’t. Shall I tell you? Shall I? I went to see Penelope.

Gossip columnists must be depressed. Deeply depressed. For in a state of profound depression I opened my mouth to tell the tale – well, I mean switched on and addressed my quicksilver fingertips to Gunn’s keys – and lo! The above idiom sprang fully formed into being, like Athena from Zeus’s thunderous forehead. It’s inappropriate. The only thing to do with atrocity, it’s been said, is to chronicle it. There’s no working it, shaping it, making art of it. Just history’s obligation to document the facts. Well then, let me list the facts of atrocity. I went to see Penelope.

There are idiots among you, I daresay, so wedded to the love story that some preposterous and epoch-making affair of the heart between me and her is already taking shape in your imagination. You’re the punters for whom Hollywood producers like Harriet’s chum Frank Gatz exist: ‘You got a story where the Devil comes to earth, right? Takes over this writer prick’s body, right? Okay. Now whatever the fuck else happens in the story, what’s got to happen is that he falls in love. With the writer prick’s girl. Then you go with it. She get’s shot, whatever. Hospital. Toobs. Life-support. Our guy’s got to make a deal with God. Her life in exchange for his. Boom. You see this? And when he croaks, the scaly wings and shit are gone. Pure white feathers. “He thought he’d fallen from Heaven. It was worse than that. He’d fallen in love.” That’s your tag-line. You seeing this? Get me Pitt’s guy on the phone. He’ll be all over it . . .’

I don’t quite know where the idea came from. (It’s one of the few questions I’d still like answered. I mean I know where your ideas come from. But what about mine?) Horribly curious, I must admit, to meet her in the flesh – my flesh as much as hers. Gunn’s flesh, anyway. I even had a harmless plan. One that would set the cat among Gunn’s pigeons when he returns (if he returns, that is, misery guts that he was before he left) without incurring the tiresome prohibitions of Charlie’s Angels from Above. And before you get all political on me – I wasn’t going to do anything to her. Not in that way. Just a bit of innocent mischief. I was going to – well . . . You’ll see presently.

I took the 12.00 from Euston, due in at Manchester Piccadilly at 14.35 (useless Gunn can’t drive, and I was hanged if I was going to waste a day stealing a vehicle and teaching myself). It was a heartbreakingly beautiful day. Londoners haven’t seen a summer like this since ’76. Heat rippled the city. I had four 99s and a Strawberry Split on the way to the station. Ice cream. Oh, man: your mouth’s a volcanic orifice; in goes Mister Softee – and lo! thou art filled with bliss. Or I am, at any rate. It’s the hot/cold thing, I know. Hardly surprising when you think about it. I’ve been troughing for England since I got here (lamb jalfrezi; anchovies by the pound; green olives slathered in oil and flecked with raw garlic; glacé cherries; chargrilled salmon steaks; Toblerone; iced radishes dipped in sea salt and fresh ground pepper; pickled herrings; After Eights . . .) but I’ve yet to come across anything to match the delights of Mister Softee’s aerated icecream, spiralled into a 99 cornet, garlanded – nay, bejewelled with the glutinous sauce of the noble raspberry and accented with an ingenuine and vastly overpriced Flake. I tell you solemnly: ice-cream’s so delicious and bad for you I can’t believe I had nothing to do with its invention.

However. I walked to Euston. I find I still adore walking. Absurd, obviously, what with it being merely a case of putting one foot in front of the other and so on – but there you are. The sky was distant, madly blue, ethereally marbled with altocumulus clouds. My shadow wobbled and jogged alongside me like a retarded or palsied companion. Dear, pan-fried London gave out the reek of its traffic and waste – you can smell the nineteenth century in London, the eighteenth, the seventeenth, the sixteenth; its odours shuffle the ages, lace KFC with ancient sewage, diesel with velum and dust. (I’ve come a long way since first opening my eyes in Gunn’s bathroom. With an effort, I can remain calm in the presence of myriad colours; with an effort I can hold back the swoon or the rabid assault; with an effort I can – as they say Stateside – deal.) No, I can’t deny the merits of wandering about, nor those of doing nothing. I cancelled Harriet the other evening, you know. Just like that, cancelled her. I was sitting in my room at the Ritz, having just inhaled a judiciously measured line of Bolivia’s finest when the scent-tendrils of Green Park’s recently mown grass drew me, snout-first, like a nose-ringed bull, to the open window, where I looked out. That’s all – just looked out. The sky all furrowed mauve and indigo splashed from below by a preposterously bloody sunset; meanwhile the bruise-coloured park exhaled its day’s stored heat; the trees crackled, softly; the air had a parched or purged taste, as if a fire had charged through it . . . I called her mobile and told her I was sick. You can’t believe it, can you? Trading Harriet’s mesmerizing monologues for an evening’s quiet contemplation of twilight’s gentle passage into night. I can hardly believe it myself. My mature phase, perhaps. Beauty and sadness. I got so melancholy (what was it it all reminded me of?), so blues & country lonesome, that it was all I could do to rustle up Leo for a midnight rub. (Did I mention Leo? As in ‘Man-2-Man Leo, genuine 10” cut offering full body work/role play dom or sub, TVs o.k., no TS, no women’? I didn’t? Well, my dear Declan, I’m afraid I’ve got some rather startling news for you . . .)

Anyway. (Do you prefer Anyway or Some? This title-hunting’s a bitch. I spent an hour or two toying with calling it Huh.) Anyway, Penelope’s back in Manchester. She moved back there after her and our Declan went their separate ways. She’s unresolved about it, mind you, the move up North. (It kills me, you know, all you humans lying on the couch talking about being unresolved. I’m unresolved. Oh, really? You don’t say? You mean, you’re actually . . . not . . . resolved?)

Stalling. Sorry. Pitiful.

I’ve seen photos, obviously. She hasn’t changed much. The hair’s still warm golden and prone to tangles, but shoulder-length now, not the spine-long treasure that drove Gunn potty. The green eyes still have it. Beauty, of course, but life, time, history, thinking, pain. Less curiosity than the Gunn Penelope. Less curiosity, more life.

She lectures. There’s a one-bedroomed garden flat. A cat called Norris and two unchristened goldfish. There are men, when she feels like it: illicitly indulged-in post-grads from time to time; these or wild cards picked up during assaults on the city’s nightlife (her and her debauched mate Susan); but since Gunn she’s treasured her own space, a burrow to which she can retreat and brood; a smouldering Marlboro, a bottle of plonk, the garden at evening, its anarchy of birdsong. There’s been a woman, too (footage Gunn would have paid cash money to see), a PhD third-year with feisty black eyes and wet-gelled hair who wore tan leather strides and what must have been cripplingly expensive silk shirts. Laura. Smelled of lemons and Impulse Musk. Deeply exciting for Penelope, initially, her adventure at the Looking Glass. Ultimately no more manageable than the half-dozen straight lovers since Gunn.

The green leather jacket hangs on the back of the kitchen door. She sits opposite me at the stripped oak dining table, in profile, her arms around her knees, her bare feet up on the chair next to her. The kitchen’s door opens directly onto the bright garden. I’m tempted to giggle, glimpsing it, remembering my unseemly moments back at St Anne’s. She’s opened the wine I brought – not plonk, but an extortionately expensive Rioja – but both of us take our first gulps without the bother of a (to what, exactly?) cheers.

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ I say.

She swallows, takes another quick sip. Swallows again. I know what she’s thinking. I’m about to tell her that: Penelope, my darling, I know what you’re thinking, I’m about to say, when she turns, suddenly, and faces me.

‘Declan,’ she says. ‘Don’t think – please don’t think the scale of it’s diminished. Please don’t think I’ve just comfortably assimilated it, what I’ve done. What I did. I know you think that.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘And don’t think that I expect you to have stopped hating me, because I haven’t. I know what a fucking vile and ugly thing it was. I know. I know. You wrong someone . . . When you wrong someone, in the old-fashioned way . . .’

Astonishing. Tears. Jumping Jimmeny Christmas. She moves fast, this girl. It’s been two-and-a-half years, going on. Gunn turns up, they open a bottle of wine, he tells her he wants to talk to her and zappo – the heart opens its wound and starts to bleed all over the place. (It is, you must concede, unpleasantly messy, this business of having feelings, this mattering to each other. I’ve always thought of it as gory, a sort of perpetually occurring road accident – everyone going too fast, too close, without due care and attention, or with too much . . .)

This is sweet, I’m thinking. Gunn, who despises her for having made him love her then betraying him, would want my guts for garters if he were here – which wouldn’t be a good idea, since they’re his guts, too – if he had the faintest inkling of what I’m about to do.

‘It was a fucking hideous thing,’ Penelope says. ‘It was. I know it was.’

‘Would you mind if I had one of those?’ I say, indicating the open-flapped pack of Marlboro next to her hand. She’s blank in response, a ravaged tissue held to her suddenly reddened nose. I see I’ve switched to the wrong level. (Damned impulsive desires, you see? How do you cope? I mean it just came over me, right then, that I really wanted a cigarette. I’d left my Silk Cut on the blasted train.) She’s so deep in her own feeling awful that it barely even grazes her, that I’m bothering about things like cigarettes. I take one anyway and light up.

‘What I mean is . . . Declan please don’t tell me you hate me. I know you do. And you’ve the right. Just please, please don’t say it here, now. I promise you I hate myself enough for both of us.’

I’m tempted to let her run on. I mean come on, it is rather charming, her misery, her guilt, finally, especially since her entire identity’s been built on knowing the right thing to do – then doing it. Not that she’s been perfect, of course. There have been slips, stumbles, days of laziness or existential ennui – but there hasn’t been a fall, not like the one precipitated by Declan’s unfortunately swollen head. She’s hard on herself. She remembers the past. Susan tells her, invariably, on their splurges: Your fucking trouble is you can’t let go of the past. Her cider-and-black flavoured breath beats against Penelope’s face. How can you expect to live if you’ve still got your head buried in the past? It’s not my head, Penelope’s wanted to groan. It’s my heart.

Now, here, I’m afraid, is where the atrocities begin. (My fingers hesitate at Gunn’s greasy keys. I’ve already stalled myself with three cups of Earl Grey and six cigarettes. If it weren’t for your language being so blatantly designed for deception, all this telling the truth would have me worried. Professional reputation and all that. However . . .) The most extraordinary thing. How to say this? I . . . I find myself . . .

Look I’m no fool. I’ve got used to bits and bobs of Gunn cropping up in my behaviour, the odd fingerprint here and there. I knew it was never going to be a clean distinction (the body has its limits on how many things you can let pass through – don’t I know from previous possessions? All that rot and stench? Involuntary snatches of nursery rhymes or surprise waves of tenderness at the appearance of a favourite teddy? Goes with the territory); but this. . . this is something entirely different. What we’re talking about here is the . . . the wholesale import of a particular feeling that I didn’t have to start with, suddenly, directly from Gunn’s past into my present. I open my mouth to begin what I’ve come here to begin – and find myself in an agony of hatred and pain. (Don’t get me wrong. If I’m familiar with anything I’m familiar with hatred and pain. Hatred and pain are my blood and bones, so to speak, my spirit’s dress, my odours, my shape, my – well, we’ve covered this. The point is that’s fine with me because it’s my hatred, my pain. I mean they affirm the continuity of my identity if nothing else. This, on the other hand, pitches up in me like an obstreperous and lightning-quick gatecrasher. One minute it isn’t there, the next it is – and I find myself – get this – hating Penelope. (There’s an exclamation mark on this keyboard which shares tab-space with the number one. Shift+1=! It’s insufficient. Radically inadequate as the denotation of my surprise. Even in bold. Even in underlined bold italic. I need something else, some punctuation mark not yet invented.) I sit there with my mouth open filled with human pain and human anger. She was there, a voice is saying (Gunn’s presumably), all naked and warm with her hair spread around her in the bed that we’d . . . In the bed . . . How could she and think of it think of it go on her sucking his cock and swallowing his come and go on THINK OF IT HER FUCKING TONGUE IN HIS MOUTH AND HIS FACE HIS FACE AND HER FACE AND SHE WAS SHE WAS YOU KNEW WHAT SHE LOOKED LIKE AND NOW HE DOES TOO YOU THINK OF IT YOU MISERABLE FUCKING SHIT WRETCH AND YOU’VE DONE NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING EXCEPT WANT TO FUCKING DIE.

In hindsight, gentle reader, I think even then I felt a bit sorry for Gunn, having so much rage and pain and so paltry a medium for its expression. I mean compared to me he’s in fetters. I’ve got the whole earth and everyone in it to give tongue to my grievances. What’s he got? English. I don’t know what I must look like, sitting there, fuming. A children’s cartoon steam train, perhaps, red-faced, pulling and puffing in a foul temper up a punishing hill. Whatever I look like, the important thing is what I feel like. And I feel – I can only assume – like Gunn. Drenched afresh in all that vivid moment’s rich treachery. The slowly opened door introducing the scene like an amoral master of ceremonies. Penelope on the bed. That . . . that (what? Bastard? Fucker? Cunt? Cocksucker? Nothing adequately labels the object of Gunn’s rage . . .), that man up on his elbows above her; his look of mild surprise; hers, turning to the yawning door, of death.

The need to hurt her, now, sitting in distress across the table from me, is overwhelming. Not physically – Gunn hasn’t got it in him, whatever his fantasy life might think – but with the mouth’s unstinted repertoire, the complete arsenal, the maximum yield.

Her face is a map of remembered trouble and absorbed guilt. The green eyes look broken, as if their glass has shattered. A motorway pile-up of wrecked mascara. Lashes jewelled with tears. She holds her own mouth on a tight rein. Remembering – it makes a frightful mess of the human face. I’ve seen it a billion times.

Now Penelope.

And the overwhelming desire and need is to hurt her. The words – Gunn’s words – swarm on my tongue as if some inner smoke is driving them from the head’s hive. But – (oh yes, but) – when I’ve got a plan I stick to it. Unlike some. If this is Limbo’d Gunn’s distant broadcast (note to self: summon bloody Nelchael for a long overdue progress report), he’s reckoned on too passive an audience. This isn’t about what cuckolded Declan wants – no matter how loud and clear his carcass shouts its absent soul’s mass of demands. It’s about what I want. Thus, stepping around it, so to speak, as one might a sensitively alarmed sculpture in a narrow gallery space, I reach out and take Penelope’s hot, tissue-clutching hand by its knuckles. She’s a good, strong, guilty girl, so she looks me in the eye.

‘That’s not what I came here for,’ I say, imagining Gunn tearing his incorporeal hair out, wherever he is. Penelope looks tired and all but irresistibly human – but I’m determined, now. (Besides, if I decide to stay – ha-ha – I might want her to be the mother of my children . . .) ‘I came here,’ I continue, dropping my glance to the mug-ringed table top in the manner of a person who, through a great and near-fatal struggle, has learned the virtue of kindness and humility, ‘to tell you . . . to tell you . . .’

‘Yes?’ The air-speech of the grief-ravaged larynx.

‘To tell you that . . . I . . . forgive you,’ (the words come with a strange ease once I’ve got that ‘forgive’ out), ‘without expectation of any kind. It was a betrayal, yes, but I’d betrayed you first. My fucking vanity. My idiotic, deluded vanity. If you wronged me, my love, it was because you were provoked by my wrong. I’m sorry for what I did, for what I became, for how ugly and false.’

I look back up at her. Her eyebrows have gone up in the middle and her lips are pursed. She doesn’t know what to do, what’s going on, whether she loves Gunn all over again, whether, even, this might not be a ruse, the opening device in an emotional booby trap. She’s (I like this word) flabbergasted.

‘I’m asking for nothing,’ I say, getting slowly to my feet and unwrapping my jacket (it’s been a wrench, I don’t mind telling you, slipping out of the Armani, the Gucci, the Versace, the Rolex, back into Gunn’s excruciatingly dull threads – but there was no point in complicating things) from the back of the chair. ‘This isn’t a request, or a plea, or a gesture that requires response. It’s just that I want you to live the rest of your life knowing that as far as I’m concerned you’re forgiven, and loved. The whole thing was my fucking fault.’

‘Declan . . . Oh, God, Declan I –’

‘Don’t say anything now. I just want to feel clean and right for once. We’re not stupid; there’s no point in talking about being friends or anything. I think we were too much to each other to be satisfied with that, now.’

I’m in two minds about the next bit – but it feels right, so I turn her hand over in mine and bend forward to leave a chaste kiss in its palm. She’s utterly astonished. (And would you believe it? A thought breaks through in her like a sunbeam: My God, I was right. My instincts were sound. He’s grown – but you have to have the potential for growth . . . Maybe . . . maybe . . .) But I’m gone. Out of the kitchen and down the hall while she’s still scraping her chair in getting up from the table. I deal with the front door myself (’Wait . . . Declan please wait . . .’) pull it shut behind me, then stride briskly away down the street. I feel her, of course. She comes to the door, opens it, looks out, sees the purposefulness and speed of my step, understands that now it must be left to germinate, that more words will ruin it. (Indeed they’ve ruined things enough for me, already, one way or another – but I’ll come to that in a moment.) Nothing has prepared me for how I feel. I flag a cab and fling myself into its gloom, barely capable of muttering a destination (’. . . station . . . Piccadilly . . .’) before feeling overwhelms me and I pass away into a terrible dream.

The first terrible part of this terrible dream was a merciless assault on my body. The train journey was bad enough (the train journey’s bad enough even if you’re tickety-boo in the health department, I’ll grant you): shivering, cold sweats, hot sweats, tommy-gun teeth, blood flecked with peppercorns and glass fragments, the fever taking and releasing me like an equivocating molester, every bone a bruise, flesh as if stripped of its dermis – you wouldn’t think, would you, that a mere seat cushion . . . A murmur in my ears like a Wimbledon crowd between games. Mere consciousness a terrible interrogation. By the time I staggered into my room at the Ritz it was all I could do to chug down a fifth of Jameson’s and collapse onto the imperial bed. I believe I tried to speak. Not English, you understand. No. My own language. A very bad idea. I was seized with convulsions. My tongue swelled and burned. I hurled myself from the mattress with the intention of crawling (slithering would have been more likely, ha very bloody ha) to the enormous bathroom with its cooling spirits of basin, bowl, bidet and bath. Another bad idea. I hit the deck to discover I was paralysed. My tongue detumesced and my guts fired out a spectacular arc of sulphurous vomit. Now I’m familiar with this sort of thing – you don’t get through the average possession without the odd gastric fiesta – but previous chunderings were picnics compared to the . . . the surrealist free-for-all to which I gave myself over that evening in my bathroom. I tried getting out of the body altogether: nothing doing. A wave of panic that sent through me, you can imagine. (S’all right. I’ve done it since. Must’ve been a temporary blockage on account of my . . . on account of what I was going through.) Things progressed. A chain-gang of fevers. Me babbling, incomprehensibly. I wouldn’t’ve believed myself capable of moving – let alone writing – but, since I have the sheet of Ritz stationery to prove it . . . Not that it makes any sense. Handwriting’s pretty atrocious, too. I can barely decipher it. 5%ityas 3insevvse££3 666666666theyiii ho yo hurthurtyoulove6$$$and evenb thetgloryisn’t you!!!!1youthought isn’tyouisn’you%$$was te of????y ou£££rexis 10sveig rof3”1””””!t ogoh$£$£ome

That’s my best guess.

It stopped as suddenly as it had started. The madness, I mean, the terrible dream. Or rather, switched its assault from the body to the mind. In actuality, no doubt, I was lying supine in a state of unflattering partial dress on the unjudgemental bathroom floor. In the terrible dream, however, I was back at Penelope’s gaff in Manchester with the words ‘forgive you’ opening me – how can I describe this? – separating my ribs and filling them with unbounded, mentholated space. Space. Can you be filled with space? Is it just me? I could see the inside of my head. It was an area big enough to seat every being in the universe, an infinite amphitheatre overarched by . . . well, a sky, I suppose, one of icy and sunlit blue, going on, as you might expect, forever. Vertigo? Sort of. The vertigo of bliss. (Gunn should make a note of that for a title. The Vertigo of Bliss. That’s got to be a title for something. Not this, obviously, but something.) In any case nothing I’ve felt before, angelically or otherwise. Still at the Manchester table, still observing the concrete particulars – Penelope’s bare feet up on the chair next to her; the coffee rings and half-done Guardian quick crossword (14 Down: To forgive? (6); she’d fill it in later, no doubt); the open back door with its colour-riot and smell-festival; the buzz of a passing bluebottle; my own hand, the Marlboro with inch-long ash smouldering between first and index – still, as I say, there. But released, too, simultaneously, as it were, into a realm from which it was possible to both feel what I was feeling and observe myself feeling it. And what I was feeling is water to this language’s net, evidently. Hugeness. Internal hugeness. Room inside for . . . well, one hesitates to say this, but, for everything. Is there any other way of saying it? Bear with me, I’m searching . . . Searching . . . Nope. Room inside for everything. The discovery of infinite inner space, belonging to me and in which I ceased to matter. In this terrible dream my fingers grip Penelope’s table edge, my feet hook around its mock Queen Anne legs – I’m convinced that without such precautions my own infinite lightness will see me carried up, up, passing immaterially through Penelope’s ceiling and the floors and ceilings of the three flats above, up, up into the blue, filled with space, emptied of all but terrible bliss, permeated with the knowledge that I am both nothing and everything, a minute speck with the capacity for infinite expansion . . .

Wearing, isn’t it. And that’s just hearing about it. Meanwhile, back at the actuality ranch, I was very much regretting having turned the bathroom’s lights on. Inset halogens surrounded prone me with interrogative stares of piercing brightness. It would have been lovely – it would have been absolutely the thing – to have got up and crawled or staggered back to the unlit bedroom with its forgiving shadows and soccer-pitch sized window filled with London’s dusk. It would have been just what the doctor ordered. Instead, wide-eyed and inert, I lay on the bathroom like a mute patient unable to tell the approaching surgeon that the anaesthetic hadn’t worked, that when the buzzing blade entered, I would, actually, feel it.

Nor was that the end of it. Oh dear me no. Betsy – yes, Betsy Galvez – stands in her bathroom gripping the rim of the sink and staring into its large, bulb-rimmed mirror. Her eyes are raw and her make-up is fractured. Tears, you see. Every now and then a part of her rises up and looks at the other parts with contemptuous clarity. Downstairs, her eighty-three-year-old mother sits in her chair with bits of her mind abandoning her by the hour. There’s a home help during the day – but Betsy handles the evenings and the nights. And it is evening now. Mr Galvez wants the old girl out and in a home. Ridiculous, he says (the smell of piss and medicine, the deteriorating mind, the ice cream in the handbag, the idiotic and impotent rages), since they have the money to pay for the best. But Betsy (would you believe it, our Betsy) is wedded to caring for the old woman because . . . Because . . .? I don’t know.

‘I don’t know!’ I believe I screeched out at the bathroom’s brilliant eyeballs, trying, at the same time, to get to my knees – failing.

In any case, there’s Betsy at the mirror. Her mother has just slapped her across the face. Betsy doesn’t know why. ‘Why’ is a concept sliding into irrelevance in relation to her mother’s behaviour. The old woman, Maud, had dropped dessert all over her blouse. They’ve tried getting her to wear a bib, but she won’t have it. Therefore these mealtime messes. Banana mashed with clotted cream and sprinkled with pungent ginger. The old woman will eat virtually nothing else. (Betsy gags, these days, preparing it, having seen it far too many times in other form at the end of its journey through her mother’s bowels. Mr Galvez won’t even be in the room when the old woman tucks in. Betsy understands. . .) Anyway. Bending to mop-up her mother’s blouse, Betsy received a stinging slap across her mouth and a look of purest hatred from the still piercing octogenarian eyes. I hate you. Maud had said. You’re a dirty thief. You think I don’t know where all this money comes from? You’re nothing but a thief. You’re wearing my cardigan. D’you think I’m blind? And Betsy, for once, had been unable to bear it. Unable, for a moment, that moment, with her mouth bloody from Maud’s in-turned garnet and diamond cluster, to bear it. She had run upstairs, on fire with hurt and choking on unswallowable knots of tears, until, safe behind the bathroom’s locked door, she had taken her place before the mirror and let herself weep.

Without much surprise, by the way, I found that I was weeping myself, right there on the bathroom floor. No flailing or wailing, just strangely cooling and continuous tears. Somewhere in the back of myself, I remember, panic was politely trying to get the rest of my attention.

‘As long as I have strength,’ I find myself saying, in Betsy’s wobbling voice. ‘As long as I . . . Oh, Mummy . . .’

‘Who on earth are you talking to you insane man?’

Harriet to the rescue. Thank Hell.

‘You’re sick’ she said. ‘Your head’s on fire. We should call the doctor. Let me call the doctor.’

‘No doctor,’ I said. ‘I don’t need a doctor.’ Get her to take her clothes off, I thought, as a fresh wave of fever broke over my bad-tempered flesh. Get her to strip and – and – just anything to blot this rubbish out.

‘Is this what it’s going to be like?’ I said to those blazing bathroom bulbs. ‘Things you didn’t know? The three faces of Eve and so on? Sybil?’

‘What?’ Harriet asked. We’d made it to the bed and she’d managed to get my bespattered trousers off. ‘Declan darling I’m afraid you’re rambling.’

Indeed. Each image opened yet more space in the already limitless arena. The blue sky doming it stretched on, endlessly clear. A sudden flash – something that should have been entirely subliminal: One naked man and one naked woman standing in a warm evening mist looking up into the boughs of a fruit-heavy tree; a look at each other; a hand squeeze; a grin . . . I wanted it to stop. Oh I wanted it to stop.

But there’s Violet (it’ll be Harriet next, I thought, with dread and fascination) in sudden hot tears because on a crowded and sullen Northern Line tube she’s just bought a stupid keyring from a deaf-and-dumb woman every other passenger in the carriage has stonily ignored. The tears because when the deaf-and-dumb woman (sixties, watery blue eyes, a furred mole above her top lip, the anorak and old butter smell of the poor) has smiled and said something incomprehensible, Violet, not wanting to engage beyond the mechanical charity, has responded with a look of puzzlement and okay-I’ve-bought-your-shit-now-please-go-away-and-leave-me-alone. Then, the woman turning away with a look of threadbare weariness, Violet’s realisation that the garbled phrase was ‘God bless you’. It holds her for a moment, this translation, poised on the brink of a shocking grief. The woman’s last look: You can’t understand me because I can’t talk properly; you don’t want me to talk to you because you’re afraid that I’m going to want something more from you – money, love, time, your life; you just want me to leave you alone; that’s all right, I know, but I was just saying thank you. All Vi’s childhood rushes up into her heart – the kids they made fun of, the tiny cruelties, the horrible guilt – all her adult excesses too, and thus with her heart full she looks down at the mute’s keyring. Its gimmick is a little sign language chart in clear plastic. On the reverse, it says: Learn my language and we can be friends! And this, this more than anything hitherto pitches her over the edge and she finds herself in tears, publicly – not discreet weeping, either, but audible boo-hooing and visible, body-shaking sobs . . .

We’re going to show you a familiar object seen from an unfamiliar angle. For ten points we’d like you to name the object . . .

I didn’t want to name any of them, believe me. The mixture of expansive bliss and barely contained panic had me flipping and flopping around on the bed like a landed fish until Harriet – Hell preserve her – got me still by climbing on the bed and lying on top of me.

At which point – shshsh, she kept saying, its all right, shshsh – at which point I’m afraid I capped the entire performance by shitting my pants and bursting into tears.