I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (25 page)

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 cafe. 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
had-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, I)ez,' (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 l3intock 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 benmusenment. I was discovering (at this late stage of the game, for fuck's sake)
imnpatiem<<'. 'It would be ocnmpird, actually, by my followers.
Fully one third of the bens 'eh lmiin came with nme, you're forgetting, dear boy.'

'Benny u'lwt?'

'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 tucking 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?9

`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. . '

Bali, 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.'

Carry on like that, my son, I thought, the following morning, and you might as well move back to Clerkenwell.

I arranged drinks with Violet at Swansong. Violet, I
deemed, under a fateful delusion of wisdom, was just what I
needed.

'Look this is ridiculous,' she said. 'I think the least you
could do is introduce nle. I mean is that going to fucking
hurt?'

Pacific as ever. This is her mode, now: a curious oscillation between blunt impatience and cosy collusion with me.

`That's why I wanted to see you,' I said. `I think it's about
time I introduced you to Trent.'

I'd given it thought. Likely outcome was, of course, that
Violet wouldn't get a part. If that happened, it would leave
Gunn with the business of getting rid of her (that boy's
going to be trading up when he gets back into these boots)
and Violet with bitterness straining the seams of her soul's
pockets. Violet in that state - having come close enough to
fame to reach out and touch it, only to see it turn and whisk
glamorously away - will be promising material indeed. Truly,
there's no telling what Violet close-but-no-cigar'd will be
capable of. Certainly I'm seeing stalking. Certainly I'm
seeing rage. Certainly I'm seeing a tag-duo of self-loathing and self-love with potentially fatal psychic consequences.
Certainly I'm seeing a vast and hungry silence into which
any number of my voices might enter ...

`Oh Declan you are horrid,' she said, thumping Gunn's
humerus with what was intended as little-girl exasperation
but which in fact dead-armed me for the next ten minutes.
`Why do you let me? I mean why do you let me, eh?'

Alternatively, she might end up with a part. You never
know. She's not, after all, going to have to act that much. I'm
seeing her as one ofJimmeny's groupies or Pilate's bits on the
side. Maybe one of Dirty Mags's pre-conversion colleagues
(there's some obvious two-girl action there that I'd trust
Trent not to sidestep). Or maybe Salome, since she's got the
fleshy erotic puppyishness that would drive a dad mad. The
point is it's a win-win situation. What do you think Vi's
going to be like if she gets to Hollywood? What sort of a
couple do you think her and Gunn are going to make?

`Let's go,' I said.

`Where?'

`You need the loo.'

`I don't.'

`Yes you do.'

`No, Declan, honestly I don't. Oh I see. Oh.'

But damn me if Gunn's ... What I mean is despite
Violet's businesslike adoption of the requisite ... One stilettoed foot up on the seat of the can, both reddish hands
gripping the cistern, the Jane Morris froth tossed, as if with
petulance, aside ... Despite the charming attire of libertinage revealed under the hoiked-up skirt ('be prepared' is
Vi's new motto, apparently) I find once again that ... I find
myself ... Well.

`This is getting ridiculous,' I said, zipping, buttoning, tidying with compressed fury. `I mean this is -'

'I've told you never mind. You look a bit under the weather
if you want my opinion. Why don't we arrange it for Friday.'

`Friday?'

'Trent Bintock. Friday evening. Where's he staying