by Glen Duncan
They didn’t see each other again for quite some time. It was no skin off Eve’s nose – but Adam couldn’t get her out of his head. It wasn’t desire (micturition aside, the Edenic johnson was as useful as a burst balloon); it was anxiety. No other animal had ever (a) offered him elderberries (or anything else), or (b) looked so . . . so related to him. Not even the orangs, of whom he was especially fond. The memory of her tormented him in the weeks and months that followed – the dark eyes and long eyelashes, the swollen, berry-stained mouth, the incomprehensible arrangement between her legs; most of all the shocking fearlessness, the composure of the fruit-offering, as if he – he, Adam – was a beast to be propitiated or gulled. (Yes, girls, I know: good definition of a man.) He walked in the garden and called on God for reassurance, but God chose inscrutability. (He did that, from time to time, Adam had noticed. Until now he hadn’t questioned it.) His unease grew. He became obsessed with the idea that she’d already named the animals and that his own hard-thought-out monikers were redundant. Obsessed, too, with the notion that all those times God had withdrawn into silence He had in fact been with . . . with her, and this whole concept of his, Adam’s sovereignty was nothing but a . . . but surely that wasn’t possible? Surely he, Adam, was God’s first . . .
He saw her twice more. Once from a distance – he stood at the top of a valley looking down to the river hundreds of feet below, where, having discovered that wood floated, Eve sat straight-backed astride three or four vined-together saplings she’d uprooted, drifting gently on the current – and once at unsettling proximity, when, having slept late before emerging from a cataract-curtained cave he saw her fresh from a dip, supine on a large flat stone, eyes closed, sunlight resting on pubes and eyelashes like tiny spirits. He considered throwing a rock at her, but bottled out and slunk away.
The anxiety – who the fuck? – worsened. He went off his food (she’d spoiled elderberries for him for good) and developed a rash on his ankle. It was a frustrating time for me. I couldn’t believe he couldn’t hear my suggestion that he sneak up on her while she was asleep and bash her head in. I still think what a coup that would have been: Murder in Eden – but it was no good. An appalling waste of paranoia, that period of Adam’s angst. I’ve got subsequent genocide started with less. I tried Eve, too, needless to say. Same deal. Adam lost weight and invented nailbiting. Finally, God took a hand. (Why ‘finally’? What had He been waiting for?) One night He caused Adam to fall into a deep sleep. During this sleep He did three things. First, He brought Eve in a trance to where Adam lay and caused her to fall into a deep sleep by the man’s side. Second, He erased from both their minds all memory of each other. Third, He gave Adam a dream (the first dream, ever, and one which Adam would later remember as a real event) in which he asked God for an help meet and in which God delivered by forming Eve out of Adam’s rib.
You know what I did? I spent the entire night hovering over Eve whispering: ‘Rubbish. Don’t believe it. It’s a story. You’re being brainwashed. It’s lies, lies, lies.’ I concentrated all my energy, every ounce of angelic clout, on that fine filament of her, that faint strand I’d sensed before; I addressed myself only to that.
In the morning – the world’s first conjugal lie-in – it seemed I might as well have addressed myself to the fish in the lake. She woke with her head on his chest and his arms wrapped around her. They looked into each other’s eyes and smiled. ‘Man,’ she said to him. ‘Woman,’ he said to her. ‘My children,’ God said to them both. ‘Oh, please,’ I said (well, hissed, actually, having opted that morning for the body of a python) before slithering away in search of somewhere private where I could hurl my ophidian guts.
It seemed, I said.
Language duly arrived. Proper language, not Adam’s moo-cow and bow-wow rubbish. Verbs, prepositions, adjectives. Grammar. Abstraction. God dropped in on them from time to time, usually with some critter Adam had missed. Tiny, fluttering, multicoloured thing. ‘Butterfly,’ Eve said, while Adam stood pleasantly stumped.
‘Yes,’ Adam said. ‘Butterfly. That’s what I was going to say.’
But Eve’s unease lingered. The post-brainwashing residue of self-sufficiency from the days before Adam’s dream. If me and humankind had a future together I knew it lay in these vestiges of Eve’s independence. Literalist yes-man Adam fed the parrots and sang songs with nerve-jangling tunelessness to God. If Fall II: The Next Generation was ever going to make it out of development and into production, if humans were ever going to be anything more than monkeys on the Divine Grinder’s organ (excuse me again) then it was going to be down to the lady and the tramp.
And therein, my dears, lies the answer to that nagging question: What was I doing in Eden in the first place? God’s got the big martyr death scene written in for Jimmeny. The infinitely self-sacrificing part of His nature demands it, just as the infinitely generative part of His nature demanded the creation of Everything out of Nothing, and just as the infinitely unjust part of His nature demanded the creation of an infinite Hell for finite transgressions. The boy’s motivation for self-sacrifice is the redemption of His Father’s world. The infinitely filial part of His nature demands it. But for redemption there must be freely chosen transgression. Therefore – ta-da! – transgression must feel, at least temporarily, good.
Now ask yourself: Was there anyone better qualified for the job?
He was kidding Himself with Adam and He knew it. Certainly He’d created him free – but in the letter of the law, not its spirit. The infinitely insecure part of His nature had baulked at it, when it came down to it. The infinitely deluded part of His nature had allowed the creation of a role the designated actor would never have the spine to play. The infinitely paradoxical part of His nature had demanded Man’s free choice of sin over obedience whilst creating a man who’d never be man enough to sin. Enter Eve.
And boy did I.
Violet, Gunn’s Penelope-replacement, lives in a studio flat in West Hampstead.
‘You do, actually, expect me not to be annoyed, do you?’ she said, having let me in, turned, and stormed up the stairs to her living room. Neglectful of me, I know, not to have offered an explanation for my tardiness, but I was still in a state from the garden.
‘I don’t imagine you stayed in waiting for me,’ I said, following.
‘No I bloody did not. No, Declan, I bloody, thank God, did not.’
‘Well then,’ I said. ‘No harm done, eh?’
She stood with her arms folded and her weight on one sharp leg, lips parted, eyebrows raised. ‘Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘You’ve completely lost your mind. Right. I thought it was just partial. I mean – are you . . .? I mean what are you?’
Violet thinks of herself as an actress and is almost wholly unacquainted with talent and has a great froth of dark red hair she pretends to be perpetually irritated by and at war with (the legion clips and scrunchies, the barrettes, the ties, the pins, the sticks, the bands) but which she secretly thinks of as her pre-Raphaelite crowning glory and under the glow of which she poses, endlessly, in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door after narcissistic, unguent-heavy baths on her many unemployed afternoons. She can’t make her mind up whether she’s at her sexiest as chin-upholding Boadicea or dimpled and cleavaged Nell Gwyn – but either way she’s baffled and chagrined that not one BBC period drama casting director has so far had the good sense to be instantly at the mercy of her hair’s splendour.
She waited, still with her weight on one leg.
‘I thought perhaps Italian,’ I said, after a sudden twinge in my salivary glands. (Me the bemused amnesiac, Gunn’s preferences my forgotten family and friends, introducing themselves, willy-nilly.) ‘What do you think?’
She did something with her face then, a simultaneous smile-snort that lasted a third of a second. Then she put her head on one side like a perplexed kitten. ‘Let me just check something with you,’ she said. ‘Are you actually aware that you’re six hours late?’
&n
bsp; ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m dreadfully sorry.
‘Well perhaps, since you’re six hours late, and are dreadfully sorry, you wouldn’t mind fucking off?’ she said.
For a moment I held my tongue – which was difficult, given that I’d only seconds ago discovered the fascinating imprecisions entailed in letting it loose. (So quaint, too, that humble servitude paid by the organs of speech to the organ of cognition, all those cerebral constrictions eased by labials and glides, palatals and stops, the concerted efforts of wet little bits and pieces.) Then I very slowly and with excessive expansiveness installed myself in her one battered red leather armchair. ‘Chimera Films have commissioned me to adapt my novel, Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest, for the screen,’ I said, quietly. (To be fair to Gunn, he’s thought of this himself, some bogus incentive to keep her boudoir friendly. What he’s never come up with, what’s stopped him going through with the yarn, is the explanation necessary for the day of reckoning when Violet – money-shot, fisted, assbanged, lezzed-up, whatever carnal prices he would have tagged on to the starring role – discovered that there was no starring role, no supporting role, no bit part, no walk-on, no fucking movie.)
Violet stared. Then switched her weight from her left leg to her right. Then said, ‘What?’
‘Martin Mailer at Chimera Films has optioned Bodies for the screen and has asked me to write the screenplay.’ I fished out a Silk Cut and ignited it with a languidly struck Swan Vesta. The scent of sulphur reminded me of . . . ahhh.
‘You’re . . . Declan you’re having me on. Tell me you’re having me on.’
‘Chimera Films is a UK unit owned by Nexus,’ I said. ‘They trawl novels here looking for stuff. You know, seventy per cent of all films made are adapted from novels or short stories. Nexus, as you know, isn’t a UK unit.’
‘Nexus as in . . . Nexus?’ Violet asked.
‘As in Hollywood Nexus,’ I said.
‘Oh my God, Declan. Oh my fucking God.’
I didn’t bother trying to conceal my grin. Violet thought I was grinning with glee – and so I was – but only at my own chutzpah. At the last, the very last moment, I’d resisted christening my phantom optioner Julian Amis. ‘Martin Mailer was the guy behind Top Lolly, Bottom Dollar.’
‘Oh my fucking God,’ Violet said.
‘I’m having casting consultation written into the contract.’
‘You are not.’
‘I am.’
‘You are not.’
‘I am. Oh yes. I am.’
Violet thinks of herself as stunning. She is stunning, too, in her self-absorption verging on autism. She’s got a retroussé nose and expressive eyes and breasts like fresh little apples. There are freckles she’d be better off without, an arse on the low side, reddish heels and elbows, but on the whole you’d definitely say she was attractive. Not that it doesn’t come at a price. To say she’s high-maintenance would be to murder her with understatement. She gets headaches, back aches, leg aches, eye aches, indigestion, colic, near-perpetual cystitis and PMT that doesn’t hold with all that old-fashioned nonsense about only showing up just before menstruation. If you’re her boyfriend, really quite a lot of things get on her nerves. Chiefly, it seems, if you’re her boyfriend, being with you gets on her nerves. Being Violet’s boyfriend means spending quite a lot of your time listening to Violet itemizing (while you rub her shoulders, massage her feet, run her a Radox bath or prepare her a hot water bottle) the many ways in which you get on her nerves.
Like all women who think they’re actresses, Violet’s ferociously untidy. The West Hampstead studio flat looks like the Nazgul have just thundered through it – an appearance I had considerable time to note, waiting firstly for Violet to finish her pre-coital bathroom routine, and secondly, fruitlessly (tossing and turning in the bed’s swamp) for the arrival of an erection.
‘Fucking hell,’ Violet said, tactfully, backing away from me as if at the discovery of a noxious smell. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
Oh well go on, get your chuckles over with now if you must. Yes. Hilarious, isn’t it. Let’s all have a jolly good wheeze.
‘Sometimes, Declan, honestly, I can’t . . . I mean what is it?’
‘Perhaps I don’t fancy you any more,’ I said in an undertone. Undertone or not, it summoned up a Vi-silence of formidable charge and mass. Then, with a compressed artfulness that, actually, made me proud, she drew the sheet slowly up over her breasts and turned away from me in a foetal curl.
‘Oh come here,’ I said, like a successfully soft-soaped uncle – and she did, too (rifling through her memory files, wishing she hadn’t lied to Gunn about having read his novel, wishing she knew immediately which part was hers, hers, hers!) – but it was no good. It was no damned good, I tell you. Gunn’s penis might as well have been a tomato sandwich for all the impact it was going to make. On the other hand, it did give Violet an opportunity for some of her best work to date.
‘Never mind, honey,’ she said, huskily. ‘It’s no big deal. It happens. You’re probably just overtired. Did you drink a lot last night?’
I might have been mistaken, but I thought I detected a slight American accent.
Violet, you know, is troubled by a Little Voice. (I worried that the transmogrification would fuck with my clairvoyance, but it hasn’t substantially. I’ve noticed blips, the odd blind spot, but by and large I seem to have got away with it as carry-on.) Violet never listens to her Little Voice and she hears every word it says. Not that its range of words is wide. On the contrary. It repeats the same things, at irregular but increasingly frequent intervals. You’re not an actress. You don’t have any talent. You’ve knobbled your own auditions because you know you’re not up to it in the end. You’re a vain and talentless fraud.
It’s not me. Not all Little Voices are me, you know. Even my own Little Voice – did I mention that? – even my own Little Voice comes from a place I’m not sure I own. I have of late, it generally begins . . . I don’t quite ignore it.
Declan, of course, had a Little Voice of his own by the end, and should probably have gone to see someone. Hardly an astute diagnosis given the bath and razor blades, but one I can’t resist making. The odour of that sadness lingers, you see, in the rucks and runnels of his mortal flesh. Stretch marks of the soul, so to speak. It bothers me. In the absence of my angelic pain I feel it like an intimate and diffuse toothache.
I don’t much like the look of him, if you want the truth. If I was considering staying – staying for good, I mean – I’d be hitting a bank and forking out for state-of-the-art plastic surgery or a Californian bodyswap. Est hoc corpus meum. Maybe so, but it leaves a lot to be desired. When I confront the mirror I see a simian forehead, dolorous eyes and thinning eyebrows. His skin’s beige, greasy and porous. The hairline’s not exactly struggling to conceal its upcoming recession, and the pot belly (too much booze, too much fat, zero exercise – the corporeal side of the basic adult human story) doesn’t help at all. The flesh on the nose is thickening and the slightest dropping of the head reveals a putative double chin. He looks, all in all, like an under-the-weather chimp. I doubt very much he’s washed his ears since childhood. At seventeen, eighteen, he might have taken you in with his Navajo granddad story (supported by the usual nonsense: long hair, silver and turquoise jewellery, beads); you see him at thirty-five and look for a much less glamorous explanation: spic-mix, wog-cocktail, decaf wop. Truth is: Irish Roman Catholic mum boozily knocked up in a moment of weakness (I thank you) by a saucy Sikh from Sacramento at a friend’s birthday party in Manchester. Ships in the night, bun in the oven, he’s gone, she’s Catholic: enter beige Gunn, fatherless and feeble at five pounds, six ounces. She brings him up on her own. He loves her and hates himself for blighting her young life. Grows up with bog-standard Virgin-Whore dichotomy as far as women go (with which I’m now lumbered, thank you very much); rabid Oedipus complex replaced during teen years by terrifying phase of homoerotic fantasies (I’ll find a use for them before I’m done,
you watch), before sexual imagination stabilizes around mild heterosexual sado-masochism in early twenties, concomitant with discovery of some effeminacy of body, a loathing for manual labour, a penchant for the arts and a much mauled but still virulent belief in the Old Fellah and yours truly.
I’m not wild about his wardrobe, either. I wish there was a more exciting way of telling you it’s dull, but there isn’t: Declan Gunn’s wardrobe is dull. Two pairs of jeans, one black, one blue. The baggy charity shop strides to which I had recourse after my debut wankathon. Half a dozen t-shirts, a couple of woolly jumpers, a beige (!?) fleece, a greatcoat, a pair of brandless trainers and a pair of DM shoes. I look like a tramp. Doesn’t even own a suit. They’ve done this deliberately, to assault my dignity, to wound my much-talked-about pride. Gunn, needless to say after the extravagance of his unsellable and suicide-inspiring opus, A Grace of Storms, can’t afford new clothes, what with the first two books now out of print and his agent, Betsy Galvez, only ever seeing his name because he’s immediately after Guiseppe’s Pizzeria in her Rolodex. He should have stolen some money. Should’ve mugged a pensioner. Pensioners are loaded. Tartan shopping trolleys? Full of gold ingots. Why do you think they move so slowly? They die of hypothermia and no one mentions all the loot they’ve saved by never eating or turning the heating on. I love old people. Seven or eight decades of me whispering to them about all the faggots and coons (it turns out they fought for!) and by the time death comes calling they’re oozing malice and hawking-up spleen. The souls of old people are ten a penny in Hell. Honestly. We’ve got a slush-pile.
Gunn lives alone in a second-floor one-bedroom excouncil flat in Clerkenwell. One small bedroom, one small living room, a small kitchen and a small bathroom. (I looked for other adjectives.) Outside, a courtyard. The surrounding buildings go up six floors so Gunn’s place is starved of light. He had dreams of moving in with Violet. Violet didn’t. Violet had dreams of Gunn using the money from the sale of his then-in-progress masterpiece to tart the Clerkenwell place up and sell it so that they could move to Notting Hill. From the sale of his . . . Yes. There’s the rub. All things considered, I can’t honestly say I’m surprised our boy had settled on suicide. Some humans survive concentration camps, others are driven over the edge by a broken fingernail, a forgotten birthday, an unpayable phone bill. Gunn’s somewhere in-between. Somewhere in-between’s where I do much of my finest work.