I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (11 page)

Tracy plonks herself down and takes out her Evening
Standard already opened at the telly pages. N 'o point in con-
sultint those, Trace, I think, as the train thunders into the first
of many tunnels.

I know what you would have thought, you bored-withthe-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 Uiminct:y 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 of 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?F

'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 and today by gainsaying His will. What's He
going to do? Go to war again over an East End tart?'

`If need be. Igo you think Michael sleeps, Lucifer? Or that
Heaven's armour is gone to rust

'Old Thing I really must ask you: ftliy are you talkiu,~ Tike
such a sa►ctinionious 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 cloth 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 nian 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 threequarter 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 nie to the Ritz.'

`You mine me arskin what you do for a livin', chief?'
when we pulled up at the yellow-lit facade.

`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 su'alloivi,
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-uptwo-down in Hackney, the dodgy dad and threadbare munm,
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. Nov - oh,
honestly, I'm gifted, I am - she owns thirty per cent of Nexus
Films.