I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (19 page)

Well. The magnitude of this utterance and the closefitting silence it engenders surprises both of them. Doesn't
sound like much of an accusation, does it? None the less,
Gunn lies absolutely still, filled with either fire or ice, he
can't tell which. Penelope lies on her back with all her limbs
gone cold and dead.

This, though he doesn't know it, is the time for Gunn to
turn to her and say: `You're right. You're absolutely right. It
was false, the product of ego and vanity and disgusting selfflattery and phoniness. I'm weak, that's all. I'll try to grow
beyond it. Forgive me.' But he's so embarrassed and enraged that she's seen him, shown him himself from an angle he
would always have ignored, he's so unmanned by this that he
too lies prone and inert. Though he's lying next to her, he
has the strangest feeling of the bed's sudden pitch and roll, an
LSD-esque distortion of proximity which shows him
Penelope receding over an infinitely expanding vastness of
mattress to a point beyond reach or vision ... He's thinking
that there was, after all, a chance for him to have owned up,
that even now, even as he falls away from her, from the possibility of love, thinking (without any desire to sound like a
writer) that this is the way this is the way this is the way the
fucking cunting bastard world ends ...

`Shouldn't you be out murdering people?'

`I beg your pardon?'

'If you're the Devil, I mean. Shouldn't you be a bit, you
know, busier?'

`I am busy,' I said. It was three in the morning and I was
with Harriet in the Rolls on our way from a very private
party in Russell Square to a very private party in Mayfair.
We passed a cinema hoarding that said Little Voice. I lit
another Silk Cut. `I am busy, for Heaven's sake. Have you any
idea how much of the script I've already got down? That
Pilate scene is going to have them dancing in the aisles.'

`What I mean is,' Harriet said, sipping, `shouldn't you be
a bit more hands-on in the criminal department? "A murderer from the first", or whatever, isn't it? I'd've thought
New Scotland Yard's finest would've been picking their way
through a litter of corpses by now.'

It's hard not to like Harriet. She's so bored and so mad and
so bad. She's such a piece of work. It makes sense to like her, too: if you're alive in the Western world at the moment,
something you buy probably puts money into Harriet's
pocket, and there's no sense in putting money into the pockets of those you dislike, is there? Multinational Parent
Companies (one of which boasts Harriet Marsh among its
senior executives) were my invention. (But do you see me
clamouring for credit for the idea? Do you hear me boasting?)
The beauty of the concept is that it takes the wind out of so
many would-be ethical sails: the company that owns the
porn-mag owns the company that makes the washing
powder. The company that owns the munitions plants owns
the company that makes the budgerigar food. The company
that owns the nuclear waste owns the company that picks up
your trash. These days, thanks to me, unless you pack up and
go and live in a cave, you're putting money into evil and shit.
And let's be realistic, if the cost of ethics is life in a cave ...

`I'll tell you something, Harriet,' I said, pouring myself
another, `I've always objected to that nonsense about me
being a murderer. It's nothing but a bare-faced lie.'

`I think Jack's right, you know. You should have a show.
After the film. After the Oscars.'

Little Voice, apparently, was on everywhere. I suppose He
thinks that's funny. I suppose He thinks that's droll.

"`... [A] murderer from the beginning ..." says Jesus in
John 8:44,' I said, topping up, as the National Gallery
loomed up on our left. `Moreover, a murderer who
... abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him.
When he speaketh a lie he speaketh of his own: for he is a
liar, and the father of it." Charming. And, I might add, a
pack of lies. Who, exactly, am I supposed to have murdered?'

Harriet, averting her cadaverous face so that her breath
fogged the Rolls's tinted pane, undid my flies and groped,
with a sigh of weariness, for my cock.

'Find me a stiff,' I said, 'ahem - just one, and you can
have my hooves for paperweights. Talking someone into
murder, obviously yes, absolutely, ►nea culpa, and so on - but
it's hardly the same thing. (Talk a writer into a successful
novel and see how far you get trying to pick up the royalties.) And if we're agreed I'm not a murderer, that makes
Sonny a liar.'

'Doesn't seem to be working, darling,' Harriet said, abandoning my member with an abruptness a more sensitive soul
might have found ... well, a bit hurtful.

'The point here is that I've never murdered, nor
manslaughtered, nor caused the death of by misadventure,
anyone,' I said. 'Mind you. I've seen the state it puts humans
into.

Harriet pressed a stud in the door panel.

'M'ain?'

'What?'

You pressed the coin. button, M'arn.'

'Did I? Oh. Never mind. Switch it off permanently, will
you.'

Switching off, M'am. Rap on the glass if you need me.'

`Who is this guy?' I asked. `Parker?'

'You were saying?'

Was I?'

'The state. It puts humans into.'

Do you think this was ringing any bells for Harriet? Are
you beginning to get an inkling of the lengths to which
boredom drives the rich?

'I've seen the state it puts the murderer into often enough,'
I said. I have, too. The singing blood, the hypersensitive
flesh. I've seen wouldn't-hurt-a-fly faces transformed in the
act; gone the donee-head and comb-over, the bi-focals and
the overbite, the cowlick, the nose-hair, the sticking-out ears; here instead the rapt gargoyle, the beauty of ugliness,
the ugliness of beauty, the breathtaking purity and singularity of the human being transported by crime. Dear old Cain,
who really wouldn't have set hearts a-flutter in his unmur-
derous state, was a different proposition when his blood was
up: all cheekbones and smouldering eyes. Kneeling over
whacked Abel, a wind ruffled his dark hair (much in the way
that strategically placed cooling fans unfurl the locks of onstage rock stars) and his normally nondescript lips swelled to
an engorged pout Sophia Loren would have envied. How
like a god indeed. `Call me an old flatterer,' I continued, `but
murder definitely looks good on you. Murder's got you
written all over it. Humans, I mean. It really is the ultimate
makeover. Elton John would look wildly sexy if he could just
pluck up the nerve to off some poor bugger.'

It's all right, Harriet was thinking. He's harmless. If he knew,
he wouldn't go on like such an idiot.

She kept her face averted, with no outward sign of anything but profound boredom. But then, I don't need
outward signs. That's another of the perks of being me.

The Mayfair party (Rock Legend, formerly epicene guitar
guru with whipcord body and waifish good looks, now
resembling a troubled transsexual, with permanent mumps,
Buddha gut, scorched hair and skin like congealed porridge)
has turned out rather dull, and Harriet, myself, Jack, Lysette,
Todd, Trent and a handful of other enervated revellers have
retired with opium to one of the maestro's mock-
Casablancan dens. The house is huge, naturally; a snip at
eight-and-a-half, according to Harriet, who's thinking of
making him an offer for it herself, should she ever encounter
him in a state of sustained clear-headedness. Rooms and
rooms and rooms, with, here and there, these windowless smoke-nests, kitted out with all the trappings of Moorish
indulgence. Everyone wants in on the film. Everyone wants
to give us money. Even the multi-mill nlUSO upstairs struggled out of his bulimia fever or coke-doze to offer us a
stupid wedge. Harriet, among her many other talents (most
of which were nurtured in her tender years by yours truly)
certainly knows how to send hot gossip down wealth's
healthy grapevine.

`I've racked my brains, but I don't know from what passing zephyr I plucked the Eight Out of Ten idea. As with all
my previous inspired ideas, I knew it was a cracker.'

Yes, nie holding forth again, I'm afraid, though my heart
isn't really in it. I've got chronic gut-rot, to tell you the
truth, and a slight but deeply personal headache behind niy
eyeballs. I've been feeling ... off ... ever since the journey
in the Rolls with Harriet. Ever since ... Well.

'Eight Out of Ten,' I continue, as something happens in
Gunn's guts, some sour faecal fish does a somersault. 'A resonant proportion, verified, as I know you'll remember, by
the long-running and highly successful Whiskas campaign.
Eight out of every ten human beings, I thought. I'll settle for
that. I'm not a perfectionist.'

They're not here for this, the Lucifer shtick; they're here
for the clairvoyance, though they feign interest and chuckle
in all the right places. I'm just about to pluck something
from the privacy of the English poet sitting cross-legged in
the room's darkest corner, when Gunn's partying bowels and
quivering hoop send me an urgent neural telegram: Get to a
john now, or forget socializing for the rest of the month.
Original Apostate and Ruler of Hell you may be, Bub, but
dump this load in your pants in public, and you're going
straight off the A-list into celeb Coventry.

All that rich food, I'm thinking - much in the way you lot do, consigning all the fags, drink and drugs (not to mention
quite a quantity of hygienically suspect XXX-Quisite rimming) to the irrelevance category. Must be all that dreadfully
rich food.

`I'm terribly sorry,' I say. `Would you excuse me for a
moment? I'm afraid there's something ... yes. I'll be back
momentarily.'

`Oh God,' I hear Lysette say, as I exit, clutching my solar
plexus, `are we really being expected to talk amongst ourselves?'

It's touch and go, even then. Half-a-dozen broom closets
and walk-in wardrobes later, at a point where my anus is
engaged in some kind of voodoo salsa or go-go shimmy all
of its own, I finally find a door that opens into the forgiving
whites of a bathroom, where, after a much-haste-no-speed
conflict with the suddenly arcane fastenings of my trousers,
I launch myself at the crapper.

There's a good deal of ooohing and aaahing from me,
not surprisingly, a good many cartoon faces. I discover cold
sweats, tears, shivers, clenchings, and a vocal palette that
might belong to a senile animal impersonator. Oh you'd be
tickled pink if you saw me there on the can, puffing and
blowing at both ends, the false finales, the triple-endings, the
beatific relief cruelly betrayed by the bowels' wicked
whimsy ... Oh yes, I do look a sight, slumped like a
depressed and molested orang - but that's not what I mind.
I've signed on for that, I know. Do unto your body as you would
have your body do unto you. Fair enough. No, what bothers me
is the feeling of ... I don't know ... There's something,
some nagging suspicion that I'm being watched, as, decently
dressed once more I lean at the sink on the heels of my
hands, peering with mischievous penitence at my mortal
reflection in the Guitar God's mirror. Maybe he's got closed circuit cameras in the joint, I'm thinking, but even thinking it I
know I'm having myself on. That's not the kind of Being
Watched I'm talking about.

`You have of late - wherefore you know not ...'

As I spin on my Guccis I'm almost sure I catch, peripherally, a quick shudder in the mirror's glass, a warp, a wobble,
some bulge or bruise from a passing incorporeal presence.

The bathroom's empty, but for me and the olfactory fallout from my thermonuclear bum-blast. Call inc overly
imaginative, but I'm sure I hear the rustle of ...

'That's very funny,' I say, aloud, returning to the mirror,
the taps, the Camay. 'That is really, really hil-tucking-hairy-
arse ..

The English poet (whose publishing house the Axe Wizard
has just bought so that he, the Axe Wizard, can publish his,
the Axe Wizard's, poetry - and may God have mercy on
your souls) is troubled. He's troubled by the suspicion that he
would do terrible things in certain hypothetical carte blanche
situations.

'But if it's a choice between torturing some poor bastard
because you're following orders,' Trent Bintock is saying as I
return, 'I mean what if you're going to be tortured if you
don't do it He gnashes his way through all this with relish
and a brilliant smile. He's thinking it would make a better
dramatic dilemma if it wasn't simply that you -

`No no,' the poet says. `This is a situation where you're in
control, totally. You are the camp commandant, you see'

'But I wouldn't be the camp commandant,' Lysette says.
She's not kidding and she's not lying, either. She'd be too
busy managing the government's publicity. She'd be too busy
securing political endorsements from attractive female tennis
stars.

'But how can you say you'd never get to be camp commandant?' the generously smiling Trent wants to know, as
the pipe comes his way. `How can you be so sure?'