by Glen Duncan
In any case it depressed the hell out of me when I found it, blistered at one corner, dog-eared at another, in Gunn’s desk drawer this morning. I was supposed to be drafting the film version of my Hail horrors speech. I ended up just sitting with a foully reeking Silk Cut, chin in palm, face as perky as a flat tyre. Could barely drag myself back to the Ritz for supper. If I hadn’t remembered that I was due to eat supper off XXX-Quisite Miranda’s mouth-watering arse, in fact . . .
I ask you. I, Lucifer, ask you: Is this any way for the King of Hell to be spending his earthly days?
‘What I’m seeing?’ Trent Bintock said to me, after supper (do you want the supper details? I don’t think you do). ‘What I’m seeing is a hugely fucking extended tracking shot from Lucifer’s viewpoint, as if . . .’ he struggled . . . ‘as if he’s going down a rollercoaster facing the wrong way, you know? He’s looking back and seeing Heaven getting further and further away. He’s on this fucking unreal downward gradient. Except it’s not a fucking rollercoaster, man, it’s space, it’s anti-space, and it’s empty.’ His blue hawk eyes were glittering with childish delight; he was possessed, I observed, of cocaine’s dreary and inexhaustible confidence.
‘Except it wouldn’t be empty,’ I said – and left a pause for him to figure it out for himself. This is always a mistake with Trent. Ten seconds of his sparkling bemusement. I was discovering (at this late stage of the game, for fuck’s sake) impatience. ‘It would be occupied, actually, by my followers. Fully one third of the bene ’elöhïm came with me, you’re forgetting, dear boy.’
‘Benny what?’
‘Sons of God. Angels. You know, Trent, there’s some background reading you could do if you’re . . . What I mean is, there’s some crazy fucking shit in this story, you know? Might be useful to check out a library sometime before we start shooting.’
For some two minutes – I kid you not – Trent’s face retained its expression of impervious joy. Such was the glitter of his eyes you could have been forgiven for assuming he was on the verge of tears. And even then, there was only the merest suggestion of a flicker, when he said: ‘You fucking condescending to me, man?’
‘Trent,’ I said, laughing and fondling his chest in a way he’s not quite sure what to do with. ‘Dear, dear, adorable Trent. Why don’t I just tell you the way it was? Why don’t I just tell you what I remember?’
‘What I remember,’ I said – not to Trent, who had to take a call from New York, but much later, to Harriet in bed, after aborted high-jinx – ‘is how it looked looking back. It’s hard to get this across, obviously, given that we’re not talking about a place, a material thing. Not even an idea, really.’
I didn’t know if she was awake or asleep. The curtains were open, displaying a dashing pre-dawn vista of London’s lights under a clear, smoke-coloured sky. The last scatter of stars was still visible. Sunrise was a vast and magnanimous presence below the horizon, a furious benevolence with an inexhaustible wealth of heat. (Except of course it’s not inexhaustible. Except of course it’s burning itself out.) I thought of the planet’s atmospheric gradations: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, exosphere. I thought of how far away from home you’d feel out there, looking back. You’d think that was homesickness. You’d think that was exile . . .
‘If I was confined to one metaphor,’ I continued, as a plane came in, winking, rhythmically, ‘I suppose it would be . . . I suppose it would be blue.’
I waited for Harriet to say, ‘Blue?’ But she didn’t say anything. She always falls asleep (if indeed she was asleep then) in the same position: lying on her front with her face turned to the right, towards the window, and her right arm hanging over the side of the bed. She looks like a Cindy Sherman. You’d expect to see pills scattered near the dangling hand, an empty glass, crumpled money. And who could blame you? Most nights, next to the dangling fingertips, you can find scattered pills, an empty glass or two, crumpled notes and bills . . .
‘Blue,’ I repeated, quietly. The hotel’s low hum of comfort, the city’s troubled breathing and weary intelligence, the one within the other. ‘I remember, looking back along the plunging cavalcade, the flaming torrent of my rebel brothers . . . Harriet? . . . I remember seeing what you lot would think of, what you lot might represent perceptually – you do know perception’s the oldest metaphor in town, don’t you? – what you might see as blueness and space. A special kind of space, a special kind of blueness, not the blue of an arctic sky, you see, nor the lapis blue in Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid . . . certainly not the midnight blue of the Virgin’s mantle, nor the charming cobalt of these tiny hours . . . Well. Harriet? The point is I’m having trouble seeing how we could do this in the film. The blueness is going to be trouble enough, but the space, that space that was infinite and not really space at all, more a feeling. More a feeling of . . . a feeling of . . .’
Bah, I thought. And thought, simultaneously: What is all this, Lucifer?
I got up, raided the minibar for a thrown-together Long Island Ice Tea, then stood for a while, butt-naked at the window, looking out at the moody sky. The trouble was, I reasoned, I was so dashed busy all the time. Activity . . . yes, activity was taking its toll. This was, after all, the sorry-ass big-ears-and-tub-gut body of Declan Jesus Christing Gunn. What, in the light of the limitations that arrangement imposed, did I expect? There were, obviously, going to be physical noises of complaint. (As if in confirmation of this, Gunn’s anus released a painful and protracted fart with the voiceless interdental quality of a stammerer beginning the word thin and never getting beyond the th. If Harriet remained unmoved by the smell that accompanied it, I thought, she wasn’t asleep, she was dead.) I had backache, did I not, most mornings? My pee-pee-time tears were hardly an indication of a chipper urinary tract, and it was only by supreme effort of will that I managed to ignore the more or less perpetual headache and dehydration that had set in a week ago. If I thought of Gunn’s liver I thought of a dried chilli. Attending to his lungs conjured the smell of tarmac and the sound of the desert’s abrasive wheeze. No, it had to be admitted, the body has its parameters, the flesh and blood would rebel if pushed.
Except, the Little Voice said, it’s not the flesh and blood that’s giving you trouble, is it?
‘What are you doing?’ Harriet’s voice said, out of the bed’s palely lit swamp.
‘Drinking a Long Island Ice Tea. Go back to sleep.’
‘You come here and lie down next to me.’
‘It’s no good. I can’t sleep.’
‘I don’t want you to sleep. I just want you to – oh never mind.’
I let quite a while pass after this, feeling pretty miserable if you want the truth. It was an effort just to keep sipping the drink and chain-smoking. The city’s smog, furious at the sun’s rising, had turned its first band of light into a long, purplish scar. Piccadilly’s traffic was thickening.
‘Do you ever have those dreams,’ Harriet rasped, slowly, ‘where you’ve done something, something terrible and irreversible? Something horrific, and no matter how much you’re sorry it’s no good? It’s indelible?’
‘No.’
I didn’t look at her. Didn’t need to. I knew what she’d look like, lying on her side, face to the window, the city’s lights minutely captured in the glossy convexities of her tired eyes. I knew she’d be unblinking, her cheek squashed in the deep pillow, her mouth dripping a single strand of spittle. I knew she’d look sad as hell.
‘I have that dream all the time,’ she said. ‘Except when I’m asleep.’
Carry on like that, my son, I thought, the following morning, and you might as well move back to Clerkenwell.
I arranged drinks with Violet at Swansong. Violet, I deemed, under a fateful delusion of wisdom, was just what I needed.
‘Look this is ridiculous,’ she said. ‘I think the least you could do is introduce me. I mean is that going to fucking hurt?’
Pacific as ever. This is her mode, now: a curious osci
llation between blunt impatience and cosy collusion with me.
‘That’s why I wanted to see you,’ I said. ‘I think it’s about time I introduced you to Trent.’
I’d given it thought. Likely outcome was, of course, that Violet wouldn’t get a part. If that happened, it would leave Gunn with the business of getting rid of her (that boy’s going to be trading up when he gets back into these boots) and Violet with bitterness straining the seams of her soul’s pockets. Violet in that state – having come close enough to fame to reach out and touch it, only to see it turn and whisk glamorously away – will be promising material indeed. Truly, there’s no telling what Violet close-but-no-cigar’d will be capable of. Certainly I’m seeing stalking. Certainly I’m seeing rage. Certainly I’m seeing a tag-duo of self-loathing and self-love with potentially fatal psychic consequences. Certainly I’m seeing a vast and hungry silence into which any number of my voices might enter . . .
‘Oh Declan you are horrid,’ she said, thumping Gunn’s humerus with what was intended as little-girl exasperation but which in fact dead-armed me for the next ten minutes. ‘Why do you let me? I mean why do you let me, eh?’
Alternatively, she might end up with a part. You never know. She’s not, after all, going to have to act that much. I’m seeing her as one of Jimmeny’s groupies or Pilate’s bits on the side. Maybe one of Dirty Mags’s pre-conversion colleagues (there’s some obvious two-girl action there that I’d trust Trent not to sidestep). Or maybe Salome, since she’s got the fleshy erotic puppyishness that would drive a dad mad. The point is it’s a win-win situation. What do you think Vi’s going to be like if she gets to Hollywood? What sort of a couple do you think her and Gunn are going to make?
‘Let’s go,’ I said.
‘Where?’
‘You need the loo.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Yes you do.’
‘No, Declan, honestly I don’t. Oh I see. Oh.’
But damn me if Gunn’s . . . What I mean is despite Violet’s businesslike adoption of the requisite . . . One stilettoed foot up on the seat of the can, both reddish hands gripping the cistern, the Jane Morris froth tossed, as if with petulance, aside . . . Despite the charming attire of libertinage revealed under the hoiked-up skirt (’be prepared’ is Vi’s new motto, apparently) I find once again that . . . I find myself . . . Well.
‘This is getting ridiculous,’ I said, zipping, buttoning, tidying with compressed fury. ‘I mean this is –’
‘I’ve told you never mind. You look a bit under the weather if you want my opinion. Why don’t we arrange it for Friday.’
‘Friday?’
‘Trent Bintock. Friday evening. Where’s he staying?’
They keep the bogs spick and span at Swansong, but on a tile just to the left of the cistern a markered line had been incompletely erased. ‘For nothing’ it said.
‘At the Ritz,’ I said, a little wearily. ‘Where else?’
The day went from bad to worse after that.
I’d no plan to end up passed out on Declan’s kitchen table, yet that Heinz-flecked and mug-ringed board was where I woke, at the slaked end of the city’s afternoon, packed full of treats and delicacies – those 99s, man, can one ever have too many? – and woozy from hourly pub-halts, where single malts and fortified wines followed rowdy bloody Marys and chilled pilsners down my broadminded gullet. That afternoon drinking thing. And in such heat, too. Well, you know how it is. Did I feel terrible? I felt terrible. The body’s queasy lurch and roil, sure – but chiefly the mind’s curious deflation. Chiefly my irritation with myself. It’s a long time – really a very long time indeed, since I’ve felt irritated with myself. And why, in a month of Hadean Sundays, I thought of visiting Angela Gunn’s grave I’ve no idea. Did I think that was going to help?
None the less don’t laugh, because that is what I did.
There are of late these urges, peculiar blips that are taking me into all sorts of sudden and absurd gestures. Words like ‘irreducible’ and ‘occult’ nudge at the back of my brain. Wordsworth’s blank misgivings, fallings from us, vanishings . . . You’ve got to laugh, actually. One minute I’m sprawled on Gunn’s formica observing through the window the sky’s slow-mo parade of whipped and beaten clouds, the next I’m back in the stewed streets heading for St Anne’s, a heart murmur, an insistence laid against Gunn’s backbone like an icy palm. Images fluttered in and out: Angela’s face in the photograph. Mourners like dark menhirs around the raw grave. Gunn’s face – the pocked mirror in the loo at the funeral directors’ to which he’d adjourned mid-sentence, ambushed by the thuggish gang of his unspoken filial endearments. All this while I kicked my way through the remains of Value Meals and footprinted tabloids with my hands in my pockets and my guts gone heavy. Well, you’ve got to laugh. They’d piss themselves, Downstairs. I’m practically pissing myself now, just thinking of it. Teeny cemetery. No blue left in the sky by the time I got there. Less than a hundred headstones like . . . like what? Terrible teeth? Victory Vees? Damn and blast this language tries my patience. Anyway the little beds of the dead, some crisp and white, others gone to leprous ruin. Blurred dates. Even New Time’s got the clout to smudge the lines of who and when. Doesn’t take long. There was no one else there. The small, dark, and insensitively renovated church threw its shadow at my back. I did contemplate, briefly, popping in to see Mrs Cunliffe of the strabismal leer and compulsive polishing – but thought better of it in the end. She’s in capable hands. She’s getting worse. I felt chilly. I felt dreadful, actually, if you must know, what with the bare flesh of my throat turned tender and Gunn’s ticker doing its broken-winged bird thing in his chest, what with my bunch of bright daffs held headsdown, what with the dropped wind and suddenly attentive trees, what with being slowly flooded by the sense of how seldom Gunn can bring himself to come here.
D’you know what I did? I cried. Oh yes indeed. Cried my eyes out. Right there by her headstone. ANGELA MARY GUNN, 1941–1997, ETERNAL REST. You can laugh now. It was the eternal rest did for me. Not my fault. Gunn’s. He’s noticed in himself of late a vulnerability to venerable abstract nouns and hallowed phrases. Duty. Grace. Honour. Peace. Eternal Rest. Tears start. The bottom lip wobbles in that way that always makes an observer – no matter how compassionate – want to giggle. Grief. Home. Regret. He lives in mortal fear of Love. A child of his times, he buried these things away in some cellar of himself under sprawling cobwebs and drifts of dust. They lay there, the holy relics his sceptic had outgrown. Then his mother’s death, with, not long after, the discovery that even the most casual utterances of such words in the world he’d thought debunked could wake their awful magic. British Airways TV commercials, country and western songs, Hallmark birthday cards, hymns. Only two weeks before I arrived he was unmanned outside a church, arrested by the tune he knew.
Be there at our sleeping and give us, we pray
Your peace in our hearts Lord at the end of the day . . .
Dreadful. He’s tried caution. Steers clear of poetry on the Underground, with its things of beauty being joys for ever and cycle clips removed in awkward reverence. He’s invariably undone. Once a laryngitic busker’s mechanical yet strangely desperate version of ‘Wish You Were Here’. Once (oh please) a speech by Tony Blair. It’s not the self-congratulatory comfort of mere sentimentality. More a queer surge of bowel and soul, a twist or wrench of feeling as liable to have him hurling his dinner as breaking his heart. Whatever it is it messes him up – and I don’t balk at telling you that it messed me up, too, good and proper there by old Angie’s rotting remains.
Debilitating, that’s what. Had to go and sort myself out with a quadruple Jameson’s in a nearby Knave of Cups. (I mean how do you bear it, this being suddenly overcome by feeling? Isn’t it just an almighty jumping Jesus Christing drag?) I felt mighty peculiar afterwards, when the Irish had kicked-in. Faint, you might say. And yet, I must confess, not wholly dreadful. There was, it must be admitted (must it? Well, yes, perhaps it
must . . .) a slight . . . a sort of . . . How is one to put this? An internal breathability. A space around the alarmed heart. The feeling that someone, somewhere (I know, I know, I know) was quietly, simply, without a concealed agenda, telling me that it was all right, that stillness would come, that peace is purchased in the currency of loss . . .
At which point (having called for another Jameson’s family of four, sparked-up a Silk Cut, sneezed, and cracked my knuckles), I found myself laughing, to myself, at what an unpredictable wheeze this caper was turning out to be.
Took me an awfully long time to get home. I seemed to think it a terrific hoot to take buses and tubes at random. Hardly surprising, I suppose, that I ended up in the arms of a nineteen-year-old young-man-of-the-night in the anonymous yet surprisingly trim and lavender-scented boudoir above Vivid Videos, just off Gray’s Inn Road – though, having rather foolishly succumbed to the honeyed tongue of a hallucinogens salesman not an hour before, I can’t be absolutely sure of the location.
I had . . . paused at King’s Cross. Intriguing to see one of my little urban kernels of vice (and misery, and regret, and shame, and guilt, and violence, and greed, and hatred, and rage, and confusion) from the other side, so to speak, from down on the ground. Theory in practice. The abstracted boffin down among the engine-room grunts. My brothers were busy in the ether, I knew, the ticklish temptations and purred prompts; I was a bit taken aback, however, at being able to see them, flowing around the multitudes in gorgeous streams – until I realised that I was in fact hallucinating. Extraordinary, let me repeat, to see the fruits of our labours from the material end. Normally, you understand, my brothers and I ‘see’ only the spiritual correlates of physical actions, not the physical actions themselves. There’s an entire realm (again ‘realm’ is very misleading, but it’s the best you’ve got) in which the spiritual dynamics of this mortal coil have their home. We know when an operation’s been a success, of course – not because we see the bodies but because we feel the effects (the rips, the rucks) in the fabric of the spiritual realm.