I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (18 page)

Neither will Declan after the script I'm going to deliver.

I myself have no feelings about this Lamb cocksucker,
one way or another. I approve of him, obviously, since he's
(a) perpetually distracting himself from God, and (b) heading
for Hollywood, where his dedication to making money and
inflating his own ego will see him contributing productively
to an industry that distracts whole populations from God.
Other than that he's of no interest to me. There's no murder
in him, and only a very predictable dribble of lust. His soul,
and billions like it, provide the cosmos with its muzak.

Betsy and Tony looked up as Elspeth crashed into my
heels then squeezed past me into the office.

`l)eclan,' Betsy said.

`I told him you were with someone, Betsy.'

`I)eclan, I'm ... ah . . .' Betsy said - but I was already
bored. Besides, this wasn't something Gunn wouldn't have
done himself, on a good day. So I moved fast. Over to the
couch, where I smiled, brightly, at Tony Lamb before grabbing him by his black lapels and yanking him to his feet.

`What the fuck -'

I looked at him. I looked at him, through Gunn. (Which
is just as well, since Gunn's frightening look wouldn't
frighten a callipered octogenarian.) I thought, briefly, about
lifting him this feet, but Gunn's equipment - the work-shy
radials and biceps, the dole-hardened triceps and scrounging
quads - really wasn't up to it. Amazing what I can put into
a look, even through human eyes. Amazing how I can make
you see all the time I've lived and you haven't.

`Your books are dogshit, Tony,' I said, very quietly, then
waited just a moment before spinning and shoving him (I'm
thinking: don't fuck it up, Luce; don't trip) violently towards the door. Elspeth, arms folded, hooked her midriff to one
side as he went stumbling past to collide with the wheelie
chair. Protracted clattering. He didn't utter a sound. I walked
over to Elspeth, put my hand around the base of her neck
and steered her to the door.

`Betsy I -'

`Shshsh,' I said. `Go and help Tony pick himself up, there's
a good girl. Do as you're told now, darling, or I'll break
your moody little spine.'

She opened and closed her mouth a few times, staring
straight ahead, but I got her through the door and closed it
softly behind her. `There,' I said to Betsy Galvez. `That's
better. Now we can talk.'

You've got to hand it to Betsy: grace under pressure. She
sat back in her chair (already mentally composing the
stunned and apologetic call to Tony Lanib: He's been under a
lot of stress ... Truth is, I think the medication ...) and crossed
her blue stockinged legs in a whisper of electrified nylon.
The mannish hands (liver spots coming soon; already a
phthisic look) came to rest together on the plump yani of her
belly, and her head rested back so that she could regard me
as if from a position of unruffled superiority. She's very good
at pretending to be unruffled, is Betsy. She lets her mouth,
that wry old orifice so charmingly radialled with its hundred
fine lines, perform little smirky manoeuvres to show you
she's well aware that this is all tremendously meaningless fun
and that she's going along with it like an indulgent auntie.
For all that, I knew she wasn't quite unruffled. A part of her
saw this whole spectacle as confirmation that the business
with A Grace of Storms had, as she'd suspected it might, sent
Gunn completely off his rocker.

I rushed across the room, knelt before her and put my
hands on her knees. The knees were the size of babies' skulls.

`You need to get one hand up to my chin, darling, if this
is a Classically inspired entreaty,' she said. `What on earth do
you think you're playing at?'

I pushed my face into her lap and held it there for a
moment. Delicious aroma: laundered wool, Opium, the
noon tuna-salad, Laphroaig single malt, fagsmoke and ah,
yes, surely a trace of Betsy's sly and seasoned vadge. I leaped
to my feet, crossed the Persian rug and threw myself into the
leather couch so lately and ingloriously vacated by Tony
Lamb. Betsy - with more amdram suppression of girlish collusion - took a Dunhills from her silver case and lit up from
a hideous malachite and gold desk lighter. I followed suit
with a Silk Cut and a Swan Vesta.

'It's very simple, Betsy,' I said. `It's really unbelievably
simple. I wanted to see you, so here I am.'

Dunhill smoke exhaled nasally in twin plumes. Slowblinking heavy-lidded eyes. `Ah,' she said - gravelly
monosyllable -'A newly discovered allergy to the telephone?'

'A newly discovered knack for spontaneity.'

`And violence, apparently.'

I gave her a lickerish grin. `A talentless cunt with a head
like a dead lightbulb, and you know it.'

`Of course I know it, Declan. That doesn't give you the
right to assault the poor chap. Besides, Villiers are going to
cough up a quarter of a million for his next book if I've got
anything to do with it.'

`Who said anything about rights,' I said. `I want to come
back over there and put my hand up your skirt.'

`Oh I shouldn't if I were you.' Deeply blushing throat
despite the aplomb. `Why don't you tell me what all this is in
aid of, umm%'

I smoked for a couple of drags in silence. It felt remarkably
pleasant to be sprawled in Betsy's couch, one leg hooked over the back, one arm trailing on the floor. The late afternoon light was fading and I knew that any moment Betsy
would turn her desk lamp on (a charming art nouveau
doodle in pewter with a green glass shade) creating a weird
grotto of light around her heavy face. Our cigarette smoke
hung in skeins above us. A Covent Garden audience stuttered into applause outside. Children cheered, tinnily. Betsy's
dark wall clock clucked, softly, and I thought: I'll be sorry to
leave all this behind.

`Betsy,' I said, then blew a succession of fat and shivering
smoke rings. `Betsy, I've got a book for you. It's not finished
yet, but it very nearly is. I have absolutely no idea whether
you'll like it, nor do I care. All I want you to do is get the
fucking thing published.'

`I wrote it because it just seemed really clear to me that this
whole debate between men and women ... the sex war, the
politics of gender ... that entire dialectic was starting to
stagnate.'

Thus Gunn on Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest. I was there.
(Yes, I was there. I'm everywhere, I am. Not quite
omnipresent - but busy. Really busy.) `There' was a flyblown
and nicotine-coloured studio at Cult Radio. Gunn and
Barry Rimmington, a moth-eaten and perennially soused
jock so thin it looked as though he could barely support the
weight of the headphones, who chain-smoked Rothmans
and sat in the Joycean manner with legs not crossed but
plaited, as if any looser posture would let his entire body
unravel and fall apart.

`You know, it just struck me that for a lot of guys in my -
well, not my generation ... but my ... demograp{uc ... that we're walking around with the sort of behavioural costumery
of reconstructed men.' He was pleased with that phrase,
having devised it on the train up from London. He left a
pause after its delivery, in which he expected Barry to say
something like, `How d'you mean, exactly?' Unfortunately,
Barry, lighting one Rothmans off another with all the
alacrity of a doped slow loris, wasn't listening. (He'd had
quite a few foul-ups on the air, had Barry, invariably as a
result of letting his mind wander, having left the interview in
the radically incapable hands of his professional autopilot.
`Margaret, you say you've always had this ambition. Tell nee,
have you always had this ambition?') So Gunn just went on:
`By which I mean that, I suppose, there's a number of men
who've learned to speak feminist - we've read our Andrea
Dworkin and our Germaine Greer and what have you, and
we've got a handle on what's cool and what's not - but the
question remains to what extent has the inner psychological
mechanism actually changed? In other words, are we genuine? I wanted to write a novel that asked that question - of
myself, naturally - I think it was Trollope who said that
every writer is his own first reader - but also of men and
women generally. That, at any rate was the starting point . . '

Penelope stands with her arms elbow deep in Fairy Liquid
bubbles. She's staring out of the window (grotty ground
floor one-bedroom flat in Kilburn, but it's been the arena of
their young love and therefore radiates an untranslatable
beauty) into the haggard back garden with its rusted milk
crate and neurotic tree. She had stopped to listen with a
smile on her wide lips. Now she's just still. The bubbles
proceed with their quiet, continuous bursting around her
arms.

`So,' Declan says that night on the phone. `Did you hear
it?'

`Yes, I did.'

`And?'

`You sounded nervous.'

`I was nervous. You should've seen the fucking DJ.
Looked like an imperfectly reanimated zombie.'

`Umm.,

'Are you all right?'

`What? Yeah, yeah. I've had bad guts all day, that's all.
You all right?'

`Yeah. It's absurd, you know, you spend your entire life
trying to get people to listen to you, then when it finally happens and someone shoves a microphone in front of you -'

`Gunn - ?'

- you just end up speaking in platitudes - eh?'

`I've got something on the stove.'

`Oh. Okay. Are you sure you're all right, love?'

`Yeah, yeah I'm fine. Just. I should go and get this thing.'

`Okay. Go on then, I'll wait.'

`No I'll call you later. Is that all right? I'm just -'

`What?ff

`I think I might need to go and have an enormous poo.'

'Oh, okay.'

`I'll call you later then. About eleven?'

`Okay. All right. I love you.'

`I love you, too, 1)eckalino'

And she is dumb to tell the crooked rose (for there is
one, pathetic and miraculous, crept through from next door's
bush) how at her heart (oh you humans and your hearts)
goes the sense, the certainty, that it's changed between them,
been forked and twisted by the dishonesty of his radio voice.
It's upon her, our Penelope, like the horror in the dream
she's had now more than once that Gunn's asleep and snoring next to her, but when she shakes his shoulder and he turns towards her it's not him at all, but someone completely
different - not a monster, nothing in itself terrifying -
just ... horribly ... not him ...

`I)eclan?'

`Utnm?,

`Why did you say that on the radio?'

`Say what on the radio?'

A week later Penelope's got a horrible feeling of emptiness
about this conversation. That all conclusions here are foregone.

`All that stuff about having a thematic agenda - wanting to
ask yourself how much men in general had really changed?'

`I don't know what you mean. What do you mean?'

They're had in bed, of course, these conversations, under
cover of darkness. That way you're spared seeing each other
lying - as I)eclan is (can't quite recall who was working
with him at that time ... Asbeel, possibly ...) in the matter
of not knowing what she's talking about.

Penelope knows he's lying and she knows why he's lying.
She jams her jaws together for a few moments, riding the
wave of desperation, butching out the need to scream at
him that he's changing and betraying her.

`Well, I was wondering, you see, because I remember that
conversation we had about how much you thought it was
bogus, all that talk about starting with a theme and then
grafting a story onto it. You said it was pretentious revisionism, and that any writer being honest would admit that you
start with a character, or a situation, or a place, or an event,
or - I remember you said this, you see - even a snatch of
overheard talk.'

`Hang on a -'

`You said it was all bullshit, and that if there really was a something there then it would be "about" something. But
you said that to start with the "about" and try'n' get to the
story was an invention of academic criticism.!

`Penelope, what on earth is all this about?'

'Whereas on the radio, you see, you said quite clearly that
you started with a theme and then devised the story.'

`I didn't say that. Did I say that?'

`And I remember the conversation we had about this
because you were so animated. We were sitting at a fucking
plastic table with a lopsided sun-shade outside the cafeteria.'

'Penny, wait. Just -'

`And I remember, you were so excited, talking about it all.
It was absolutely nothing to do with trying to impress me. I
remember because it was then that I realised I was in -'

`Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ!

`And how could you - how could you say that thing
about Trollope?'

`What?'

"`I think it was Trollope who said that every writer is his
own first reader."'

`Well, it was Trollope, wasn't it?'

`You were trying to sound like a fucking writer.'