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

I have of late – wherefore I know not . . .

Evening in Clerkenwell. I’ve been writing for hours. Apathetic rain and London’s sky like a tarry lung. The City’s gone home, exhausted, with aching feet and sour skin. It’s gone home to seek the relief of diversion. It’s gone home to consume, to drink, to masturbate, to babble, to smoke, to watch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? It’s gone home to an ordinariness only occasionally punctuated by the awful intimation that despite everything, despite Coronation Street, Silk Cut, chat rooms, Sainsbury’s, Christmas and the Wimbledon fortnight, despite all these and infinitely more, one day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death. I sat at Gunn’s window and watched the offices and banks exhale, the systole and diastole of rushhour traffic. I saw what I always see, what I’ve made it my business to make sure any ethereal observer would see: human beings avoiding God. How beautiful you are to me still, after all these years! Eyes – I’ve never quite got used to the beauty of human eyes, so transparently enslaved by the soul, so ready to show me how much I’ve achieved.

Hard to calculate the things that brought me here. I’ll tell you one of them.

Not long ago, having been lengthily busy in the corporate world, I decided to put some time back into the meat and potatoes of the operation and get down amongst the plebs for a bit of slap and tickle. You need to keep your hand in. Senior style consultants in elite hair salons around the world will tell you: every now and then you need to just give someone a haircut. So you find me in a wood at the northern edge of Salisbury Plain (Stonehenge? Me again. Ritual rape, torture, murder. Calendars? These boffins kill me) with Eddie and Jane. Eddie’s been hearing voices – Baraquel, Arioc, Ezekeel, Jequon and Shamshiel to be precise, whispering words of wisdom in the small hours. In any case, up until a few hours ago Jane and Eddie were strangers – or rather, Eddie was a stranger to Jane; Jane was no stranger to Eddie, who’d been observing her for some time. Eddie’s a thirtyeight-year-old telecommunications engineer with a tankard-shaped head, small brown eyes and one permanently blackened thumbnail. Jane’s a twenty-four-year-old brunette of no special features but nothing wrong with her either who works as one of two receptionists in a small van hire office on an industrial estate at the edge of the city.

Serial potential written all over Eddie. Topple this domino and there’s no telling how many (look out girls!) will fall after it. Plus, his mother’s a rabid Catholic, which is icing on any cake. The boys have put in some time, but confessed that ultimately and against their expectations they need His Master’s Voice to clinch it. This happens to me a lot. I delegate, but sooner or later they shuffle in, sheepish, cap-fingering, wondering if I might find time to . . . ah . . . etc. Needless to say it’s a piece of Battenberg to me, the old Blade Runner. ‘Eddie,’ I said to him in his mother’s voice. ‘It’s okay, you know. You won’t get caught.’ (That’s pretty much all you lot need to hear, not that it’s morally defensible, but that it’s covered.) Did the trick. Downloaded the recommended chloroform dosage from the web (eeeeyup: me again) and off he went.

Most of you probably want the abduction, the rape, the murder, all the Thomas Harris palaver with the corpse, and believe me if this were Gunn I’m sure you’d get it; some pseudo-poetic cladding, some poignant details about cloud-shadows or the vividness of an empty Coke can by her knee, some watch-the-birdie writing to distract your attention from the possibility that the entire thing’s titillating to him (and you) – but even baldly listed facts will be enough to delight others among you, as they often do Gunn, decaf and gutless sadist that he is. My hands were tied and I was forced to perform oral sex. These are just impersonal newspaper details, but still lights wink, bells ring. He comforts himself with the belief that it’s the writer’s job to tell the truth unselectively, be that the truth of motherhood or the truth of murder. ‘Go ahead,’ Penelope barked at him. ‘You’ll be joining a venerable list of male writers who’ve written about men committing violence against women. Men killing women is a fucking genre all on its own. Of course I realise it’s your obligation to write about it, if it’s at all a part of the world (as is friendship and honour and simple kindness and people dying for their beliefs – but maybe none of those is creatively interesting) but it’s also your obligation to understand what it means to you and why you’re doing it. At which point, Declan, don’t come fucking crying to me if it turns out you’re doing it because you like it.’ As you can see, Penelope’s critical faculties were not to be engaged lightly – a lesson I’m not sure boneheaded Gunn ever learned.

But this isn’t Gunn, Hell be praised, nor is the business of Eddie and Jane the point. The point is that in the middle of everything a dog dragged itself past.

A black one, too. This dog had seen better days. This dog was dog tired. I don’t know where this wretched dog came from, but if he’d ever had his day it was a long time ago. To say that something had happened to this dog is to say that Hiroshima suffered a slight disturbance back in August ’45. Everything had happened to this dog. He’d been hit by something, some vehicle, an incident which had amputated a front leg and broken a back one, so that forward motion was a curious combination of hopping and dragging. But this was only his most recent bit of hard cheese. One eye was cataracted. His mouth (broken jaw, too, by the way) was rotting with a suppurating infection and most of his hair was gone. The exposed flesh revealed the wounds of a beating, all of which had gone bad. His arse was bleeding and his semi-exposed phallus unhealthily inflamed.

That wasn’t it. You didn’t think that was it, did you? Hello? I’ve presided over the torture and deaths of millions of human beings with as much emotional engagement as a nail-filing receptionist on a Friday afternoon. You think an injured hound is going to break my heart?

No, that wasn’t it. What was it was that moments from death this dog stopped to sniff and tentatively lick another dog’s turd that just happened to be coiled and glistening nearby. I watched him. I thought, State he’s in there’s no way; state he’s in he’s not going to be capable. A part of me even then was thinking (not knowing why): I do sincerely hope he doesn’t. I hope being this close to expiry finally releases him from the cage of his dumb instincts. I hope he just fucking dies, now.

But he didn’t. (He did less than a minute later.) He drag-hopped, bent his hideous head, sniffed and licked – and my voice inside me said: That’s you, Lucifer.

I never really wanted this job. (As all dictators whine.) Trouble was, when we found ourselves in Hell everyone looked at me. (How to describe Hell? Disembowelled landscape busy with suffering, incessant heat, permanent scarlet twilight, a swirling snowfall of ash, the stink of pain and the din of . . . If only. Hell is two things: the absence of God and the presence of time. Infinite variations on that theme. Doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Well, trust me.)

I didn’t want the job – the job, that is, of spending all that would remain of time working against God, the job of personifying evil – but look at it from my point of view: as far as Himself’s concerned it’s over between us. No conciliatory cappuccinos under the fat waiter’s benevolent presidency. No Relate. No saw this and thought of you, Love, Lucifer cards. You know the routine. You’ve Broken Up, yes? Locks changed, CDs divvied and boxed, ring returned, cuddly toy drawn and quartered?

Doesn’t matter that I felt lousy. Doesn’t matter that I realised I might have been a tad hasty. Doesn’t matter that I would have been willing (we all would) to turn over a new leaf. Doesn’t matter. You’re an angel, you fall, you don’t rise again, the end. (Or so one was led to believe, until this whimsical turn of events . . .) We could all have devoted ourselves there and then to cancer research or pet rescue – wouldn’t have made a dint, not in the infinitely hard heart, and certainly not in Arthur’s prima donna ticker, reserved as it was for Humanity. (Junior and that heart. Like a pregnant woman with her suddenly enlarged mams: Get off. These are for the baby.) We all knew the score. The score was, God: a lot, Fallen Angels: nil. And everyone’s looking at me. If I’d bottled then they would have massacred me. And so to the Hail horrors! Hail infernal world speech, which, despite my virtually inhabiting his quill, Milton sheared of its Angelspeak glory (as well as wreaking nomenclatural havoc among the angelic host). Whatever else I’d lost I still had the gift of the gab. You should have seen how it stirred them up. Had myself going by the end of it. But I still felt dismal inside. I had an inkling of what being utterly evil would be like. I had an inkling it would be demanding. But I repeat: What choice did I have?

Evil be thou my Good. Well, yes, in a manner of speaking, but it’s a phrase (he was such an inveterate simplifier, was Milton) that’s too often been taken to mean something it doesn’t. Most commonly: that evil, in and of itself, actually feels good to me. Now, let me ask you – I’m sure you’re a reasonable human being with a functioning brain – do you seriously think that by sheer fiat an archangel (the Archangel – oh no really, you’re too kind . . .), that by sheer decree, I say, an archangel can invert his pleasures and pains like that? If only it were so simple!

No. I know this is going to be a stretch for you, but I might as well come right out and say it: I don’t like evil. It hurts. It absolutely kills, if you really want the truth. Where else do you think this outlandish pain of mine originates? Evil gives me pain. Pain. As much as it would have had it existed independently of me before I Fell. If only it were as simple as the traditions suggest. If only it genuinely seemed to me that evil was good and vice versa – but it doesn’t. Good is still good, evil still evil.

So what am I? Perverse?

Well, some might think so. The point, my dears, is not good nor evil – but freedom. For an angel there is only one true freedom, and that, I’m honestly sad to say, is freedom from God. Freedom is the cause and the effect. In this particular Creation, if freedom from God (worship of God, dependency on God, obedience to God) is what you’re after, then I’m afraid evil’s really the only game in town. What I’d like, what I’d love, is to have been given a nature that didn’t even know God – the fish in the pond who doesn’t know life beyond it: the lawn, the house, the city, the country, the world . . .

Your thinkers wrestle with this notion of pure evil or, as they’re so fond of calling it, evil for its own sake. I’ve no idea why. There’s no such thing as evil for its own sake. All evil is motivated – even mine. The torturer, the tyrant, the murderer, the consummate fabricator of fibs – they’re all doing it for something, even if all they’re doing it for is pleasure. (The problem your thinkers have is understanding quite how the evildoer gets pleasure from his evil, but that’s a different question.) Evil for its own sake is – or would be if it existed – madness; and even the barmy do what they do for some barmy reason. What pains the Old Boy most is not that I do evil, but that I do what causes me excruciating pain. What pains Him is that even perpetual and excruciating pain is a price worth paying for disentangling myself from Him. That’s the crux of it. That’s what He can’t stand.

If He’d just do the simple thing and go away, I could stop all this tempting and seducing and blaspheming and lying and so on, and just get on, freely, with being me. It’s a terribly burning question, you know, this question of who, outside of my relationship to You Know Who, I actually am. I mean I’m sure I’m someone. I wonder what I’m like? I wonder if I’m . . . well . . . all right?

I’m supposed to be guilty of all sorts of crimes and misdemeanours, but when you get right down to it, I’m really only guilty of one: wondering. The road to Hell, you say, is paved with good intentions. Charming. But actually it’s paved with intriguing questions. You want to know. Man do you want to know! I wonder what it’d be like to stick this breadknife into his throat? Whose question do you think that is? You’d be surprised. It’s the young mother’s, slicing through the still warm loaf while her under-two sits facing her in his highchair, gurgling, a mauled and sodden Jammy Dodger clutched in his tiny mit. She’s not going to, obviously, ninetynine times out of a hundred, but you know, it’s there, the wonder, the beautiful, abstract curiosity. It’s there because I put it there. Try it. Pick up a knife, a hatchet, a club, a loaded gun when there’s anyone else around – put an instrument of potential destruction in your hand and tell me that nowhere, nowhere in your mind is the question: I wonder what it would feel like to use this?

Proximal vice, of course, stirs curiosity like nothing else. Ask the plod who work with sex offenders, the paedophile police, the rape detectives. Ask them how long it takes before that wondering takes hold. Try it. Go and visit your local Dahmer, your Sutcliffe, your Hindley. Come away and tell me truthfully that you weren’t in the least disturbed by the feeling that they knew something vital that you didn’t. The tonnage of True Crime, all that astonishing testimony, all those frank black-and-whites – why does it race off the shelf, the newsstand, the web? Titillation, yes of course (bloodlust and sadism in the camouflage fatigues of what-makes-these-monsters-tick?-And-thank-God-they’ve-got-that-evil-bastard; you’d be surprised, I dare say, at the suburban boudoir impact some of your century’s shockers have had), but more than that, the desire to know. Except of course you can’t, vicariously, not really. Some kinds of knowing (you know this anyway, but you kid yourselves along) demand a rigorously empirical approach.

I’ve wondered – as I know you must have – why, exactly, I’m doing this. Not the movie. Not the month-in-Gunn’s body thing (it should be obvious by now that I’m doing that for . . . Well, for ice cream, for bare feet on warm concrete, for kisses, for the dawn chorus, for leaf-shadows, for strawberries on the breath, for the sheer rock and roll of the Flesh and Its Feelings); no, I mean this thing, this writing thing. Why, you might reasonably ask, spend so much time and energy writing when you could be out there every second of the waking day?

Gunn would have absolutely no difficulty in explaining this – but that’s not the point.

The point is . . .

Oh it’s embarrassing. Honestly it is.

Jimmeny went among you and spoke to you in your own tongues, He left a book behind him – one so ambiguous and paradoxical that it can be made to fit any weak or credulous mind’s needs – which made it categorically clear where donations, thanks and praise should be directed whenever your bread fell butter-side up. (The butter-sidedown stuff they’re not so keen to hear about.) He had all the publicity because he had all the language. Publicity is language. What publicity have I had, me with the allegedly beyond measure pride? A proud being would have been driven mad by this invisibility aeons ago. How long have I felt like the genius playwright barred forever from sharing encore glories – the thunderous applause, the hurled bouquets – with his frequently spoon-fed or second-rate cast? Have I complained?

Uncomplaining I would have remained, too, had this absurd new deal not been tossed (contemptuously in my opinion) on the table. Unvoiced, unseen, unheard, uncredited. Enough merely never to have surrendered. (Never surrender. My motto long, long before it left the mouth of your erstwhile PM.) Enough, it would have been, merely to have remained . . . myself, in silence, unwritten into your history’s lively pages. But what with the clock ticking and everything . . .

I’ve been so close to you, after all. I’m not entirely without . . . What I mean is, I know it’s been . . . difficult, at times – a love-hate relationship, you might say – but I have always . . . you know . . . been there for you, haven’t I?

Plus, I do type now at around 400 words a minute.