by Glen Duncan
I didn’t like it. Not the scourging per se, obviously, but the line of physical contact having been crossed. Wife batterers around the world will tell you: the primary effect of hitting your wife for the first time (assuming she doesn’t leave you immediately or cut your cock off while you’re asleep) is that it makes it much easier to hit her – harder – a second time. Then a third, then a fourth, and so on, until hitting’s nowhere near enough and you’ve got to start getting creative. Although he didn’t wield the whip himself, Pilate had now got his hands dirty with action; more importantly, he had seen that he could draw the man’s blood, and that it was red, just like any other man’s. It lowered the stakes. That wasn’t good for me. If he could scourge him as a man, he could crucify him as one – although it was after all somewhat diverting to see Arthur having such a terrible time of it, I admit. Then the message from Procula arrived, via a redrobed flunkey with a face in which all the dark little features seemed to huddle in the middle as if in fear of being shot. Have nothing to do with that just man. I’ve suffered many things this day in a dream because of him.
Well, it was a bit late for having nothing to do with him, since he was hanging from the post in bloody ribbons, thorn-crowned, dripping with sweat and glazed with the spit of Pilate’s soldiery. But not too late, perhaps (that’s right, go on!) to avoid nailing him to a cross on Calvary. Assuming my boys had by now swayed the crowd, I put it into the procurate’s seasick head (why did the floor keep pitching like that?) that he should take the prisoner out with him, let the morons see what a harmless and indeed pitiable spectacle the so-called ‘King of the Jews’ made against the backdrop of Imperial pomp and order; get him off, in other words, on the sympathy ticket. I didn’t know, I repeat, that God had already been at it among them. Neither, obviously, did Caiaphas, who’d sent cronies into the throng to buy shouts with coin. All redundant. God had released the force of the brain-dead righteous collective. They didn’t know why it seemed imperative to crucify the fellow – only that in some way he was Them and they were Us. It could have been the terraces of Old Trafford or the swaying Anfield Kop. I could see my angelic brethren among them like fragments of a smashed rainbow. Lack of results was plainly not due to lack of effort; they blazed and swarmed and whispered – and achieved precisely nothing. And this is where my earlier boasting about the importance of the right remark at the right moment comes back to haunt me, because Caiaphas leaned in close for the delivery of the one that clinched it: ‘Caesar’s subjects are united in their condemnation of this blasphemer and instigator against Rome. I’m sure the Emperor wouldn’t like to hear that his governor in Judea suffers such an individual to live and spread his lies. Rome, after all, gets to hear of everything sooner or later.’
Pilate closed and opened his eyes very slowly and wearily. Not as slowly or as wearily as Jesus, mind you, who was already having trouble staying on his feet.
‘This round to you then,’ I said, slipping alongside him. ‘Still, that business with the nails isn’t going to be a picnic, is it?’
You know, I’m going to miss you lot, when you’re gone. I’m going to miss our . . . our thing, our working relationship. I’m going to miss you listening to me, seeing sense, taking my advice. I’m going to miss your candour (the inner candour, I mean, the one that’s camouflaged by all that external duplicity, omission and pretence). I’m going to miss your self-love, your sense of humour, your crippling weakness for doing what makes you feel good. Makes you feel good initially, I mean. Soon, now, it’ll be gone, all gone. What’ll I do with myself when you’re gone?
And thanks to this incarnate sojourn, I’m going to miss . . . damn, man, I’m gonna miss handshakes, ya know? The honest comfort of flesh and blood. This flesh and blood, it’s honest, isn’t it? It tells the truth, doesn’t it? The wind in your hair, rain on your face, sun-warmth between your shoulder-blades – perception’s straight-up. Kissing. Stretching. Blowing off. Forget René: the senses don’t lie, not about the big things, not about what it’s like to be here.
I took a break from the script and went to Church. St Paul’s. Call it a hunch, an intuition, an inkling, something pulled me there. (The dreams are knocking me out, by the way. Repeatedly, I’m trapped in tiny, vast spaces. Does that make sense to you? Do you dream paradoxes? Woke up this morning, couldn’t even face Buck’s Fizz. Harriet’s suggested I see a doctor. Harriet’s suggested I see a shrink. Pot, kettle and black, Harriet, I thought, pot, kettle and fucking black. The film – the film’s racing along. Harriet hasn’t left the bed for two days. She sits cross-legged amid the pillows talking on the phone, moving money, telling lies, having things brought to her, half-consuming them, having them taken away. I’ve told her: slow down, you’ll make yourself ill. You think she takes any notice of me? Trent was miffed about the no-sequel nature of the project. He’s been depressed since I pointed out that there was no scope for a prequel, either. Meanwhile, I’m anxious about the third act . . .)
St Paul’s. Well if you’re going to do it, do it large. It still takes me a while to get to places, and this afternoon’s jaunt to the cathedral was no exception, what with London’s oven-baked asphalt and disreputable trees, what with its brew of stinks and perfumes, what with the wide-angle sunlight and the stratosphere’s ghostly cirrus. I was straight, too, more or less, if you don’t count the coke-hangover and three Lucifer Risings I took to knock it on the head. Admittedly there’s a more or less permanent residue of chemicals and booze around Gunn’s cowering brain these days, but, you know, relatively, I was sharp.
Which was just as well. Given who turned up.
I only just got out of Gunn’s carcass in time. Up in the Whispering Gallery, under the great, ribbed belly of the dome, I couldn’t shake it, that sense of being watched that had been troubling me since . . . I don’t know. A while. However long it had been smouldering, it caught fire up there among the scurrying sibilants. Dangerous, too, what with Gunn’s fear of heights kicking in without warning, what with me swaying, precariously at the gallery’s rail. The presence – for there was no mistaking it by then – coalesced just before the rising tide of tinnitus which announced it would have sent me literally and metaphorically over the edge. With a nauseous wrench (think of a femur being pulled from its groin) I tore myself from Gunn’s body, which, not surprisingly, collapsed, buttocks-first, into that indecorous sitting position adopted by abandoned cloth dollies.
‘And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan,’ Michael droned, with a kind of rich boredom, ‘which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him . . . hasatan, have you forgotten, my friend?’
Pain? Well, you could say that. Can’t tell you what it cost me to keep it together, up there in the dome’s shadow, with you dear things scuttling like roaches below. Corporeally, I would have talked of deep internal haemorrhaging. I would have talked of head trauma. I would have talked of the immediate need for intensive care. Leaving the body was bad enough – the dreadful reunion with my default angelic rage and pain – but to be forced into it so suddenly and to have him to deal with . . . Well. I mean be fair.
Not that I let on, obviously, no more than he did, and I can assure you my presence was no cakewalk for him, either.
‘Michael,’ I said. ‘Dear old thing. It’s been simply ages.’
I wondered, peripherally, how on earth this bit of the material world could contain us without radical signs of stress – I half-expected the dome to split or implode – until I realised what should have been obvious: Divine dispensation. It was, after all, St Paul’s Cathedral. Sometimes I’m so slow.
‘You’re afraid,’ he said, quietly.
I smiled. ‘It’s extraordinary,’ I said, ‘how much you chaps consider it your duty to tell me that. I had Gabriel at it the other day. I wonder why you think it’s so important? Sceptics, I dare say, would mutter of wishful thinking.’
He returned the smile. ‘His advic
e to the mortals, you know,’ he said, ‘that they should love their enemies, I pity them that they should require such instruction.’
‘Have you seen The Empire Strikes Back?’ I asked him.
‘Because for us it is natural to love our enemies in proportion to their proximity to ourselves. We’re so very alike, satan. We’re so very close to one another.’
It did rankle a wee bit, the ‘satan’ with small s. Means just ‘one who obstructs’. Not the name-calling itself, but his not being able to rise above it. He’s mighty fond of his own name, needless to say, which he translates at parties as ‘who is like God’. I wonder the Old Bugger lets him get away with it, since the correct – and far less flattering – translation, is a rhetorical question: ‘Who is like God?’ Used to piss him off no end in the old days. Every time someone said, ‘Er, Michael?’ I used to cut in straight away with, ‘Me.’
‘So near and yet so far,’ I said. ‘How are things in the bowing-and-scraping business? I’m thinking Bob Hoskins for you in the movie, by the way. How does that sit with you? I’m sure you could talk me into Joe Pesci.’
Between you and me, I really was in the most excruciating discomfort. I glanced down at the gallery, where Gunn’s impersonation of a passed-out wino or junkie had attracted the attention of two small children, who, ignored by their whispering parents, were tearing up the tinfoil wrappers of their Kit-Kats and dropping the pieces into Gunn’s hair. I wondered, glumly, what would happen when the security guard was called.
‘You’ve surprised us,’ he said. He’s never quite grasped that conversation isn’t actually the other person making some unattended-to noises while you think of the next bit of your monologue.
‘Oh I have have I? What were you thinking? Harrison Ford?’
‘With the shortness of your attention span, we thought you’d be at middle-aged melancholy by now. And yet you’ve managed to . . . hold yourself, more or less, at adolescent egotism.’
‘Don’t underrate adolescent egotism, old stick. With adolescent egotism and a lot of money one can pretty much rule the world – redundant, obviously, when one already does rule the world.’
Oh I felt awful, I did. You know how it is when you come home trenchantly, comprehensively, authentically drunk, turn the light out, lie down, and feel the waltzer room’s nauseating spin? Yes? Well this was galaxies worse than that.
‘I realise this might sound rude, my dear, but why are you here, exactly, umm?’
‘To help you,’ he said.
Had I a face, just then, it would have been no mean trick to have kept it straight. ‘Aha?’ I said. ‘Um-hm? Yah?’
‘Have you not, of late, Lucifer –’
‘Look why don’t you spit it out, there’s a good chap, eh? Then perhaps we can get on digging our respective scenes. In case it escaped your attention, I had come for a quiet halfhour in Church.’
‘You came because you were called.’
‘Oh dear this is really so uncivilized. I had hoped – you know, from you, Michael, I had hoped for a certain standard of –’
‘You’re afraid.’ He said it this time with the air of someone genuinely in possession of a mighty truth. If he hadn’t continued, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have begun Apocalypse there and then. ‘You’re afraid of what you most desire. You desire that of which you’re most afraid. Think on this, brother.’
‘I’ll be sure to.’
‘Think on it.’
‘I’ll be sure to.’
To give him his due, he didn’t have the look of a gloater. Nor, to give him further credit, did he stick around for vacuous chit-chat.
‘I’ll see you soon, Lucifer,’ he said.
‘Not if I see you first, Michael,’ I replied.
Didn’t fancy the walk back to the Ritz after that. I cellphoned Harriet and she sent Parker – whose real name is Nigel – round with the Rolls. We’ve bonded, Nigel and I. Got chatting one small-hours whisk through the city (Harriet passed out on the back seat) and I recognized him as one of my own. I needed him now like you need an escapist film when there’s an exam to revise for.
‘The point,’ I said, as I collapsed into the Rolls’s generous rear, and the upholstery gave its welcoming gasp, ‘is that in calling it multiculturalism or diversity or ebony and ivory or we are the fucking world or whatever, they’re missing something much more fundamental. They’re missing the deliberate eradication of one race by another. For which, in the twentieth century, we’ve got a word: genocide. It seems to me, Nigel, that your concern – and thank fuck you’re not alone in this – your fiercely and rightly felt concern is to stop the genocide that is happening in this country right here and right now.’
‘You all right, boss?’ Nigel said, with a blue-eyed glance in the rear-view. ‘You look a bit peaky.’ (A homely idiom, Nigel’s, though peppered with the Party for the Preservation of British Nationalism’s staples : Rights, Decent People, Honour, Difference, the White Race, Patriotism, Homeland, Relocation.)
‘What does it say about a Christian country, Nigel,’ I continued, pocket-patting for Silk Cut and Zippo, ‘that its churches – its churches – can be sold to Muslims and converted into mosques? I mean correct me if I’m wrong, you know, correct me if my history’s faulty here – but wasn’t there, some years back, a little operation known as the Crusades? Was that an academic exercise, then, was it? Eh?’ (I put a bit of bark in to my rhetorical questions for Nigel. It gets him going. It delights him, actually, though he experiences the delight as political disgust.) ‘Do you know, Nigel, that in parts of Britain now, children under ten years old – Christian children, this is, English, Christian children – are being forced to study the Koran? You know, you tell people this stuff, they think you’re making it up.’
‘Tories have got a coon Lord.’
‘I know, Nigel, I know. You know, when I think of the . . . the . . .’
I faltered. (So long since I’ve seen Michael. New Time hadn’t changed him. Still the over-earnestness, the show-offy angelic physique, the irritating air of privy intelligence. No doubt he believes there’s a great deal he knows that I don’t. He’s welcome to it. There is, after all, something I know that he doesn’t . . .) ‘When I think of the role this country of yours used to play on the global stage,’ I went on, ‘when I think of the notion that the sun never set on the British Empire, when I think of this country bringing the light of civilization to dark places, bringing technology, learning, industry, imports and exports – you know, educating the less intelligent nations on how to make use of natural resources – sometimes resources they didn’t even know they had, Nigel – when I think of that, in the light of the cultural and linguistic genocide now being encouraged in your schools, churches, hospitals, legal system . . . I think of that and I wonder: Is this how the countries of Empire repay their erstwhile sovereign?’
Your country. I’ve softened Nigel’s initial suspicions: told him I’m half Italian. Don’t live here. Passing through. And a member of the PPNI (Partita per la Preservazione di Nazionalismo Italiano), the fictional guinea equivalent of the PPBN. If I say things like ‘erstwhile sovereign’ I usually regret it, since Nigel’s own vocabulary needs very little room to stretch its legs – but that’s me again, you know? Baroque. Got to do it with knobs on. Honestly, sometimes I’m my own worst enemy.
‘It’s the fucking newsreaders piss me off,’ Nigel said, as we swung into Trafalgar Square. ‘Sanjit fucking this and Mustapha fucking that. There’s a fucking Paki doing the weather on BBC1.’
West End façades, a troupe of rattling pigeons, the lights turning green. ‘Nigel,’ I said, ‘there are going to have to be some significant changes in the world. Changes are long, long overdue . . .’
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 p
hotograph. From the late sixties, when Gunn must have just started school. She was working afternoons in a Market Street café. 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 bad-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, Dez,’ (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.