I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (31 page)

`That's not what I came here for,' I say, imagining Gunn
tearing his incorporeal hair out, wherever he is. Penelope
looks tired and all but irresistibly human - but I'm determined, now. (Besides, if I decide to stay - ha-ha - I might
want her to be the mother of my children ...) `I came here,'
I continue, dropping my glance to the mug-ringed table top
in the manner of a person who, through a great and nearfatal struggle, has learned the virtue of kindness and humility,
`to tell you ... to tell you ...'

`Yes?' The air-speech of the grief-ravaged larynx.

To tell you that ... I ... forgive you,' (the words come
with a strange ease once I've got that `forgive' out), `without
expectation of any kind. It was a betrayal, yes, but I'd
betrayed you first. My fucking vanity. My idiotic, deluded
vanity. If you wronged me, my love, it was because you were
provoked by my wrong. I'm sorry for what I did, for what I
became, for how ugly and false.'

I look back up at her. Her eyebrows have gone up in the
middle and her lips are pursed. She doesn't know what to do,
what's going on, whether she loves Gunn all over again,
whether, even, this might not be a ruse, the opening device in
an emotional booby trap. She's (I like this word) flabbergasted.

`I'm asking for nothing,' I say, getting slowly to my feet and
unwrapping my jacket (it's been a wrench, I don't mind
telling you, slipping out of the Armani, the Gucci, the Versace, the Rolex, back into Gunn's excruciatingly dull
threads - but there was no point in complicating things) from
the back of the chair. `This isn't a request, or a plea, or a gesture that requires response. It's just that I want you to live the
rest of your life knowing that as far as I'm concerned you're
forgiven, and loved. The whole thing was my fucking fault'

`Declan ... Oh, God, Declan I -'

`Don't say anything now. I just want to feel clean and
right for once. We're not stupid; there's no point in talking
about being friends or anything. I think we were too much
to each other to be satisfied with that, now.'

I'm in two minds about the next bit - but it feels right, so
I turn her hand over in mine and bend forward to leave a
chaste kiss in its palm. She's utterly astonished. (And would
you believe it? A thought breaks through in her like a sunbeam: My God, I ivas ritht.My instincts Ivere sound. He'sgrounn -
but you have to have the potential for grou'th ... .'Maybe ...
maybe ...) But I'm gone. Out of the kitchen and down the
hall while she's still scraping her chair in getting up from the
table. I deal with the front door myself ('Wait ... Declan
please wait ..') pull it shut behind me, then stride briskly
away down the street. I feel her, of course. She comes to the
door, opens it, looks out, sees the purposefulness and speed
of my step, understands that now it must be left to germinate,
that more words will ruin it. (Indeed they've ruined things
enough for me, already, one way or another - but I'll come to
that in a moment.) Nothing has prepared me for how I feel. I
flag a cab and fling myself into its gloom, barely capable of
muttering a destination (`... station ... Piccadilly . . .') before
feeling overwhelms me and I pass away into a terrible dream.

The first terrible part of this terrible dream was a merciless
assault on my body. The train journey was bad enough (the train journey's bad enough even if you're tickety-boo in the
health department, I'll grant you): shivering, cold sweats,
hot sweats, tommy-gun teeth, blood flecked with peppercorns and glass fragments, the fever taking and releasing me
like an equivocating molester, every bone a bruise, flesh as if
stripped of its dermis - you wouldn't think, would you, that
a mere seat cushion ... A murmur in my ears like a
Wimbledon crowd between games. Mere consciousness a
terrible interrogation. By the time I staggered into my room
at the Ritz it was all I could do to chug down a fifth of
Jameson's and collapse onto the imperial bed. I believe I
tried to speak. Not English, you understand. No. My own
language. A very bad idea. I was seized with convulsions. My
tongue swelled and burned. I hurled myself from the mattress with the intention of crawling (slithering would have
been more likely, ha very bloody ha) to the enormous bathroom with its cooling spirits of basin, bowl, bidet and bath.
Another bad idea. I hit the deck to discover I was paralysed.
My tongue detumesced and my guts fired out a spectacular
arc of sulphurous vomit. Now I'm familiar with this sort of
thing - you don't get through the average possession without
the odd gastric fiesta - but previous chunderings were picnics compared to the ... the surrealist free-for-all to which
I gave myself over that evening in my bathroom. I tried getting out of the body altogether: nothing doing. A wave of
panic that sent through me, you can imagine. (S'all right. I've
done it since. Must've been a temporary blockage on
account of my ... on account of what I was going through.)
Things progressed. A chain-gang of fevers. Me babbling,
incomprehensibly. I wouldn't've believed myself capable of
moving - let alone writing - but, since I have the sheet of
Ritz stationery to prove it ... Not that it makes any sense.
Handwriting's pretty atrocious, too. I can barely decipher it.

5%ityas 3insevvseLL3 666666666theyiii ho yo
hurthurtyoulove6$$$and evenb thetgloryisn't
you!!!! 1 youthought isn'tyouisn'youYo$$was to of????y
ouLL.rexis IOsveig rof3" 1 """"!t ogoh$£$ome

That's my best guess.

It stopped as suddenly as it had started. The madness, I
mean, the terrible dream. Or rather, switched its assault from
the body to the mind. In actuality, no doubt, I was lying
supine in a state of unflattering partial dress on the
unjudgemental bathroom floor. In the terrible dream, however, I was back at Penelope's gaff in Manchester with the
words `forgive you, opening me - how can I describe this', -
separating my ribs and filling them with unbounded, mentholated space. Space. Can you be filled with space? Is it just
tie? I could see the inside of my head. It was an area big
enough to seat every being in the universe, an infinite
amphitheatre overarched by ... well, a sky, I suppose, one
of icy and sunlit blue, going on, as you might expect, forever. Vertigo? Sort of. The vertigo of bliss. (Gunn should
make a note of that for a title. The Vertigo c f Bliss. That's got
to be a title for something. Not this, obviously, but something.) In any case nothing I've felt before, angelically or
otherwise. Still at the Manchester table, still observing the
concrete particulars - Penelope's bare feet up on the chair
next to her; the coffee rings and half-done Guardian quick
crossword (14 Down: To forgive? (6); she'd fill it in later, no
doubt); the open back door with its colour-riot and smellfestival; the buzz of a passing bluebottle; my own hand, the
Marlboro with inch-long ash smouldering between first and
index - still, as I say, there. But released, too, simultaneously, as it were, into a realm from which it was possible to
both feel what I was feeling and observe myself feeling it.

And what I was feeling is water to this language's net, evidently. Hugeness. Internal hugeness. Room inside for ...
well, one hesitates to say this, but, for everything. Is there any
other way of saying it? Bear with me, I'm searching ...
Searching ... Nope. Room inside for everything. The discovery of infinite inner space, belonging to me and in
which I ceased to matter. In this terrible dream my fingers
grip Penelope's table edge, my feet hook around its mock
Queen Anne legs - I'm convinced that without such precautions my own infinite lightness will see me carried up,
up, passing immaterially through Penelope's ceiling and the
floors and ceilings of the three flats above, up, up into the
blue, filled with space, emptied of all but terrible bliss, permeated with the knowledge that I am both nothing and
everything, a minute speck with the capacity for infinite
expansion ...

Wearing, isn't it. And that's just hearing about it.
Meanwhile, back at the actuality ranch, I was very much
regretting having turned the bathroom's lights on. Inset halogens surrounded prone me with interrogative stares of
piercing brightness. It would have been lovely - it would
have been absolutely the thing - to have got up and crawled
or staggered back to the unlit bedroom with its forgiving
shadows and soccer-pitch sized window filled with London's
dusk. It would have been just what the doctor ordered.
Instead, wide-eyed and inert, I lay on the bathroom like a
mute patient unable to tell the approaching surgeon that the
anaesthetic hadn't worked, that when the buzzing blade
entered, I would, actually, feel it.

Nor was that the end of it. Oh dear me no. Betsy - yes,
Betsy Galvez - stands in her bathroom gripping the rim of
the sink and staring into its large, bulb-rimmed mirror. Her
eyes are raw and her make-up is fractured. Tears, you see.

Every now and then a part of her rises up and looks at the
other parts with contemptuous clarity. Downstairs, her
eighty-three-year-old mother sits in her chair with bits of
her mind abandoning her by the hour. There's a home help
during the day - but Betsy handles the evenings and the
nights. And it is evening now. Mr Galvez wants the old girl
out and in a home. Ridiculous, he says (the smell of piss and
medicine, the deteriorating mind, the ice cream in the handbag, the idiotic and impotent rages), since they have the
money to pay for the best. But Betsy (would you believe it,
our Betsy) is wedded to caring for the old woman
because ... Because ...? I don't know.

`I don't know,!' I believe I screeched out at the bathroom's
brilliant eyeballs, trying, at the same time, to get to my
knees - failing.

In any case, there's Betsy at the mirror. Her mother has
just slapped her across the face. Betsy doesn't know why.
`Why' is a concept sliding into irrelevance in relation to her
mother's behaviour. The old woman, Maud, had dropped
dessert all over her blouse. They've tried getting her to wear
a bib, but she won't have it. Therefore these mealtime
messes. Banana mashed with clotted cream and sprinkled
with pungent ginger. The old woman will eat virtually
nothing else. (Betsy gags, these days, preparing it, having
seen it far too many times in other form at the end of
its journey through her mother's bowels. Mr Galvez won't
even be in the room when the old woman tucks in. Betsy
understands...) Anyway. Bending to mop-up her mother's
blouse, Betsy received a stinging slap across her mouth and a
look of purest hatred from the still piercing octogenarian
eyes. I hate you. Maud had said. You're a dirty thief You think
I don't know inhere all this money comes From? You're nothing but
a thief You're wearing my cardigan. D'you think I'm blind? And Betsy, for once, had been unable to bear it. Unable, for a
moment, that moment, with her mouth bloody from Maud's
in-turned garnet and diamond cluster, to bear it. She had
run upstairs, on fire with hurt and choking on unswallow-
able knots of tears, until, safe behind the bathroom's locked
door, she had taken her place before the mirror and let herself weep.

Without much surprise, by the way, I found that I was
weeping myself, right there on the bathroom floor. No flailing or wailing, just strangely cooling and continuous tears.
Somewhere in the back of myself, I remember, panic was
politely trying to get the rest of my attention.

`As long as I have strength,' I find myself saying, in Betsy's
wobbling voice. `As long as I ... Oh, Murumy . .

`Who on earth are you talking to you insane man?'

Harriet to the rescue. Thank Hell.

`You're sick' she said. `Your head's on fire. We should call
the doctor. Let me call the doctor.'

`No doctor,' I said. `I don't need a doctor.' Get her to take
her clothes off, I thought, as a fresh wave of fever broke over
my bad-tempered flesh. Get her to strip and - and - just
anything to blot this rubbish out.

`Is this what it's going to be like?' I said to those blazing
bathroom bulbs. `Things you didn't know? The three faces
of Eve and so on? Sybil?'

`What?' Harriet asked. We'd made it to the bed and she'd
managed to get my bespattered trousers off. `Declan darling
I'm afraid you're rambling.'

Indeed. Each image opened yet more space in the already
limitless arena. The blue sky doming it stretched on, endlessly clear. A sudden flash - something that should have
been entirely subliminal: One naked man and one naked woman standing in a warm evening mist looking up into the
boughs of a fruit-heavy tree; a look at each other; a hand
squeeze; a grin ... I wanted it to stop. Oh I wanted it to
stop.

But there's Violet (it'll be Harriet next, I thought, with dread
and fascination) in sudden hot tears because on a crowded and
sullen Northern Line tube she's just bought a stupid keyring
from a deaf-and-dumb woman every other passenger in the
carriage has stonily ignored. The tears because when the deafand-dumb woman (sixties, watery blue eyes, a furred mole
above her top lip, the anorak and old butter smell of the poor)
has smiled and said something incomprehensible, Violet, not
wanting to engage beyond the mechanical charity, has
responded with a look of puzzlement and okay-I've-boughtyour-shit-now-please-go-away-and-leave-me-alone. Then,
the woman turning away with a look of threadbare weariness, Violet's realisation that the garbled phrase was `God
bless you'. It holds her for a moment, this translation, poised
on the brink of a shocking grief. The woman's last look: You
can't understand me because I can't talk properly; you don't want
me to talk to you because you're afraid that I'm going to want
something more from you - money, love, time, your life; you just
want me to leave you alone; that's all right, I know; but I was just
saying thank you. All Vi's childhood rushes up into her
heart - the kids they made fun of, the tiny cruelties, the
horrible guilt - all her adult excesses too, and thus with her
heart full she looks down at the mute's keyring. Its gimmick
is a little sign language chart in clear plastic. On the reverse,
it says: Learn my language and we can befriends! And this, this
more than anything hitherto pitches her over the edge and
she finds herself in tears, publicly - not discreet weeping,
either, but audible boo-booing and visible, body-shaking
sobs ...