I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (6 page)

The sky. For Heaven's sake the sky. I looked up at it and
had to look down again since the ... well, frankly, the blueness of it threatened to swallow my brand new consciousness
whole. My progress was the jerk-shuffle of the funhouse
punter on the moving staircase. I suppose it doesn't strike
you, particularly, that sunlight races ninety-three million
miles to smash itself to smithereens on Clerkenwell's concrete, transforming tarmac into a rollered trail of gem-shards?
Or that a slate wall will cool your blood's throb when you
hold your cheek against it. Or that sunmier-heated brick,
porous and glittering, has a taste unlike anything else on
earth? Or that inhaling the smell of a dog's paw-pads tells
your nose the animal's crammed and lolloping history? (I've
rubbed my nose in a good many places since then, but I'm
damned if I've found much to compare with the honk of a
dog's foot. It's the smell of idiotic and inexhaustible optimism.)

Do you know what I thought? I thought, Something's
wrong. I've OD'd. This can't be what it's like for them. If
this is what it's like for them how do they ...? How on earth
can they ...?

A group of bronzed and artfully stubbled labourers in
orange hard hats and lime-green plastic tank tops were
engaged in digging a hole in Rosebery Avenue. Four men in
dark suits walked past me, smoking and talking about money.
A black bus driver whose bus appeared to have died of a
broken heart sat in his cab reading the Mirror. Surely, I remember thinking in my innocence, surely it can't be like
this for them? How do they get anything done?

Quite, I thought, looking at Gunn's watch. That's the
thing with New Time: before you know it, you've spent it.
Before you know it, it's gone. It kills us in Hell, you know,
the number of your deathbedders who, despite all the wristwatches and desk calendars, despite their life's tally of ticks
and torn-off pages, look around them in their last moments
with an expression of sheer disbelief. Surely I've only just ,c,'ot
here, they want to say. Surely I've only just be'iun? To which,
smiling and warming our palms around the arrivals hall
blaze, we reply: 1'ope.

I must ,het on, I thought, having just finished my third 99
from the confection-coloured Super Swirl ice-cream van
which, after a jangling version of Three Blind Mice, had
stopped not thirty yards from I)enholm Mansions. That
friendly stray (mongrel, bit of German Shepherd, possibly a
bit of Border Collie, but mainly rubbish) had eaten up two
hours all on its own, what with its damned irresistible pawpads, what with its frowsty dreads, baroque breath and
try-anything-for-a-laugh tongue. (It hadn't occurred to me
that dealing with animals would be so different from inhabiting them. It hadn't occurred to me that in Gunn's skin they
might actually like me.) It had been a mistake to sit down
and share one of my 99s with him. Took the Flake in one
uninvited chomp, too, greedy hugger. Someone had walked
past and dropped 50p into my lap. Someone else had walked
past and said: 'Get a fucking job you scrounging cunt.' Well,
I thought, that's dear old London Town for you.

Stopping at St Anne's lopped another half-hour off my
clock. Couldn't resist. You get so used to seeing churches
from the incorporeal side (I do a deal, a great deal of my
work in churches, usually during the homily, when all but the most besotted acolytes are in a state of surreal boredom
verging on hallucination) that the temptation to take a peek
from the material perspective was overwhelming. A quick
glance inside revealed thirty dark and uninhabited pews, an
iron-grilled aisle, a modernist altar in granite and oak, and,
crouched with Pledge and Jaycloth at the Communion rail,
floss-headed and strabismal Mrs Cunliffe (I kid you not),
the translation of whose galloping sexual desire for Lee
Marvin look-a-like Father Tubbs into obsessive church
cleaning leaves St Anne's spotless and the good padre unmolested. (I've got someone on her, don't worry. She's already
brought herself off against one of Jimmeny's nailed marble
feet, ostensibly dusting the statue's armpits, thinking of
Tubbs's dark-haired hands and piercing green eyes.
Suppressed the entire thing, obviously. You could ask her
and she'd dash you across the mouth with her Jaycloth for
giving utterance to such blasphemous filth. As far as she's
concerned it never happened. Not that you can blame her,
since it never happened, not in actuality, if you want to split
hairs; but it's there, believe me, in potentia. Say what you like
about me but don't say I can't spot sleeping talent, a star
waiting to be born.) I didn't go in. Daren't. Couldn't trust
myself with the ... perceptual stimuli. As it was the glimpsed
interior offered an all but irresistible contrast to outdoor
London's riot heat and traffic clamour - cool stone and
incense-flavoured wood, not to mention the glass-stained
light poking in like the legs of the Old Man's compasses,
dividing the lilac gloom with beams of rose and gold, nor the
soft-flamed candles, nor the chilled, smoke-scented air, nor
the resonance that would attend any blasphemy bellowed
up into the fluting ...

I retreated. Backed out on tiptoe, actually, like someone in
a cartoon. The heat outside took me back, no questions asked. One of those freak bubbles in the traffic's flow. Up and
down Rosebery Avenue not a vehicle in sight. One knows,
of course, that such fluked peace must shatter momentarily -
the slow gargle of a crawling back loader, the rattlecrash of a
flogged transit - but for a few seconds it's as if the city's
been swept clean; now there's just the sound of trees, the
heat's blare, the gravid cognition of tarmac and brick. I stood
still and listened. Perception's incessant craving made a sound
like the flare of a match in my ears. There was ... there was
so much ... I reeled, somewhat. (Another first, that, reeling.)
I reeled, steadied myself - laughing a little, a moment of
Raskolnikovian lightness amid the shifting bergs of body
and blood - and caught a whiff of the garden at the back of
the church.

You'd better be carefill, Lucifer, nw sensible auntie voice said.
You'd better wait until you're got u;e to -

Pornography, that's what it was, a wild pornography of
colour and form, the shameless posturing, the brazen succulence and flaunted curves, the pouting petals and pendulous
bulbs. Fronds of things. The soft core of a giant rose. I was
unprepared. Glory to God for dappled things ... Well, fair
enough, hats off and all that, but in small doses, yes? My eyes
roved, madly - a messy explosion of lilac, a manic brushstroke of mauve ... The scents ripped-off the lacy delicates
of my nostrils and ravished 'em, front and hack, upside down
and 'angin from the bloomin' chandelier, me dear. You've
seen, I'm sure, the time tunnel, the vortex, the black hole,
the rapidly swirling and expanding niaw into which, irresistibly, the hero astronaut is sucked? So Lucifer in the
garden, spun around by colours and concussed by smells.
Weak as a kitten, I heard and saw myself as if from a distance
emitting a series of feeble noises and gesticulating like an
imbecile. Meanwhile the bloody reds and corona] golds bedevilled me like circling sprites; greens of olive, lime and
pea spiralled around me, flaming yellows of saffron and primrose ... Hard to tell whether I was about to pass through
into some other dimension or simply vomit onto the
seething lawn. I made a feeble warding-off gesture with my
arms, sank to my hands and knees, then froze, so curiously
balanced between ecstasy and nausea that remaining still and
breathing gently took their rightful places in the vanguard of
luminously good ideas, where they remained for the next
few minutes, until, laughing a little once more at my ... my
precociousness, I staggered to my feet and headed back towards
the street.

One does tell you, Lucifer, auntie Me said, sighing. One
does at least attempt to forewarn you ...

Naming the animals was pretty much the high point of
Adam's career. Took a while, as you can imagine, but he
stuck at it, plodder that he was. Not that he couldn't pull
some corkers out of the air when the mood took him.
Platypus, for example. Iguana. Gerbil. Vole. Ostrich.

He didn't know I was there. Whatever gifts the Maker had
given him, ESP wasn't one of them. Either that or God put
a wall between us. In any case Adam couldn't hear me when
I tried to reach him with my mind, and when I tried going
through the various animal larynxes I got the predictable
range of grunts, squeaks, barks and twitters. I got terribly
bored. Even a cursory headcount (we were bogged down at
the tail-end of Chondrichthyes) revealed it was going to
take a while. The only interesting development was the
emergence of a strange and humbly beautiful new sapling in
the centre of the garden, a modest specimen - certainly without the maidenly grace of the silver birch or the nielo-
dranma of the weeping willow - but with the air of becoming
a sure-fire bearer of succulent fruit come spring ...

Blake's Elohim Creatit ' Adam has one thing going for it.
God looks - thanks to the Feldmanesque eyeballs and
Braille-reader's averted gaze - like He knows it's all going to
end in tears. Which of course He does. Did. Blakey managed to get something of it into his image; something, too,
of his other preoccupation with opposites: `without contraries is no progression ...' Stubbornly flexible phrase, that.
(Comes in handy at my rare moments of existential doubt.)
Applied to the image of Elohim myopically touch-typing
Adam into existence the contraries that spring to mind are
God's, His nasty habit of banging free will and determinists
together in His head. Don't eat that fruit you're going to eat,
okay? Don't eat that fruit you've already eaten! What was Eden
if not an exercise in Divine ambivalence? Another point in
my favour, history agrees: at least I'm consistent ...

When I see gurgling retarded children (that's God's doing,
by the way, not mine) happily styling their hair with their
own stinking mards, I think of Adam in those pre-marital
days. I know he's your great-to-the-nth-degree-granddad
and all - but I'm afraid he was rather an imbecile. He strolled
around Eden wearing a beatific grin, content with an
Everything so undeserved it amounted to Nothing, so filled
with unreflective bliss that he might as well have been completely empty. He picked flowers. He paddled. He listened to
birdsong. He rolled naked in the lush grass like a bare baby
on a sheepskin rug. He slept nights with his limbs thrown
wide and his head unrummaged by dreams. When the sun
shone, he rejoiced. When the rain fell, he rejoiced. When
neither sun shone nor rain fell, he rejoiced. He was a onespeed kind of guy, Adani, until Eve came along.

Now this is going to be hard for you, but I'm afraid you're
going to have to forget the story of Adam getting lonely and
asking God for an help meet and God putting him to sleep
and forming Eve out of one of his ribs. You're going to
have to forget it for one simple reason (cheer up girls!): it's
flan. The truth is that God had already created Eve - for all
I know before He created Adam - and she'd been living
quite self-sufficiently in another part of the garden as
unknown to her future spouse as he was to her. You've got
Eden in your heads as some in-need-of-a-trim public garden
in Cheltenham. But Eden, not to put too fine a point on it,
was fucking huge. Keeping one man and one woman apart
wasn't difficult, and that - `presume not the mind of' etc -
was the Old Man's initial desire.

The first thing to say about Eve is that she was a big
improvement on the Adam design, or that Adam was an
extremely misguided variation on the Eve design. (Consider
testicles. Two concentrated nuclei of absolute vulnerability.
Where? Dangling between the legs. I rest my case.) But I'm
not just talking about the boobs and the bum, inspired
though those innovations were, I'm sure we're all agreed.
She had something Adam didn't. Curiosity. First step to
growth - and if it wasn't for Eve's Adam would still be sitting
by the side of the pool picking his nose and scratching his
scalp, bamboozled by his own reflection. Off in her part of
Eden, Eve hadn't bothered naming the animals. On the
other hand she'd discovered how to milk some of them and
how best to eat the eggs of others. She'd decided she wasn't
overly keen on torrential rain and had built a shelter from
bamboo and banana leaves, into which she'd retire when
the heavens opened, having set out coconut shells to catch
the rainwater with a view to saving herself the schlep down
to the spring every time she wanted a drink. The only thing you won't be surprised to hear about her is that she'd already
domesticated a cat and called it Misty.

There was a strange psychic timbre to Eve, sometimes, as
if she sensed herself not entirely pleasing to her Maker.
There were moments when, in some narrow tunnel of her
being, she felt God's presence as if she were looking at the
back of His head, as if His attention was engaged emphatically and judgementally elsewhere. It made her feel curiously
separate.