by Glen Duncan
His mother died of drink two years ago and left him the flat. Me, drink and loneliness, we finished Gunn’s mother off. Drink wolfed down her liver, me and loneliness gobbled up her heart. Liver and heart, my vital organs of choice. She didn’t come down, mind you. Must be cooling her heels in Purgatory. Last Rites. Gunn called in crapulous Father Mulvaney (sherry-breath, brogue blarney, red knuckles he couldn’t leave off cracking, and eczema; I’ll have his liver too, the old hypocrite) and that was me robbed of another tenant. There’s no justice, you know. Angela Gunn. I wanted her. Some souls – you can’t explain it – they’ve got quality written all over them. She had guilt over Gunn, having brought him dadless into the world (thought the fact that he nearly throttled himself with his own umbilical an indictment of her motherhood); but it wasn’t the guilt that did for her, it was the loneliness. A tawdry smattering of affairs with men vastly her inferior. Her disgust because she couldn’t leave the idea of a grand passion alone. In the small hours she’d observe them (after the grumpy wrestling, the loveless gymnastics) naked and sprawled as if taken down mid-crucifixion. Grimly, she’d force herself to absorb the unpleasant details: fatty shoulders; dirty nails; brittle hair; faded tattoos; pimples; stupidity; greed; hatred of women; pretentiousness; arrogance. In the small hours she’d sit bitter with tears and humming with drink and look down at his body, whoever he was, some Tony or Mike or Trevor or Doug, forcing her mouth into a rictus as the sordid replays ran in her head. The absurdity of it, she thought, this quest for the love of a man who was her equal. She loathed herself for it. She thought of her life (and herself) as a missed opportunity. Somewhere, back there, she had missed something. What was it? When was it? The worse horror beneath: that she hadn’t missed anything, that her life was merely the sum of her choices and that her choices had led her to this: another truncated encounter; the carcinogenic belief in the idea of a Great Love; clammy sex; loneliness in the small hours.
She had loved Gunn, but his education distanced them. She craved his visits then couldn’t bear that he was embarrassed by her malapropisms and too-young skirts. She was intelligent but inarticulate. Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world. Gunn knew all this. Went every time armed with the noblest filial intentions, then felt them evaporate when she talked of ‘broadening her horoscopes’. Her drinking was a spectral third with them, Gunn not quite taking it in. Knowing and hoping. (Jesus, you humans and your knowing; you humans and your hoping.) Her belief in his writing. Gunn suspected she prayed for it. She did. She prayed to God He’d find a publisher for her son’s book. Idiot ex-altar boy Gunn worried, then, that it wouldn’t feel like a clean achievement. Soiled by the Hand of God, so to speak.
But then liver failure, hospital, his avalanche of guilt and shame. Her only fifty-five, looking seventy. Mulvaney of the red raw scalp hadn’t seen her for three years, but they cut to the chase when he arrived, smelling of wet London and Cockburn’s Port. Gunn shuffled, miserable, by the bed. Holding her hand (for the first time in a long time) he discovered with a shock its onion skin and Saturnalian revel of veins. Horror because he remembered it soft and firm and smelling of Nivea. These were the memories that jumped him over the months after she died, heartless muggers bent on the redistribution of the mind’s buried wealth –
Bugger. You see what happens? I only mentioned the woman because I meant to tell you that’s how Gunn got the flat. Now my screen’s ambushed by maudlin guff.
Salutary should other demonic presences pass this way: manifestly you can’t squat in someone’s body without some of their life filtering through to yours. It’s been the toughest part of the whole trip, so far, accommodating Gunn’s leftovers; approximate omniscience notwithstanding, I never quite know which unfortunate tic or nasty habit of his I’m going to run into next. Couldn’t they have picked someone else? Some rock star with an entourage of sycophants? Some sheikh with a hooker habit? Some coke-fiend with a yacht? Anyone would’ve been better than this noncer with his objective correlatives and his Earl Grey and his sorry-ass bank balance.
On the subject of Gunn’s bank balance – two words: Oh dear.
Mrs Karp is Declan Gunn’s Account Supervisor at the NatWest. The day our boy bought the razor blades a letter arrived from Mrs Karp. Its tone was stern but regretful (the next was just stern) and it requested the return of Gunn’s cheque book and cheque card, cut in half, immediately. It pointed out, regretfully, that Gunn was upwards of £3,500 overdrawn (£2,500 over his limit) and that despite repeated efforts on her part to get him to come in and discuss the situation he had been unwilling to do anything but continue spending money he didn’t have. Which left her no alternative, etc.
Which left me no alternative to a bit of hands-on, you’ll be delighted to hear: get out of Gunn’s body for an hour or so, nip round to Mrs Karp’s semi in Chiswick, scare the living rectum out of her and get her to do something creative with Gunn’s balance. But if there’s a flaw in a simple plan it’s usually fundamental, and the flaw in this simple plan was no exception: it hurt so bad the minute I exited Gunn’s flesh that I shot straight back in without even leaving the flat.
You can see Someone’s thinking behind this, can’t you? I get so used to the absence of angelic pain that even living out my days in Gunn’s flatulent corpus is preferable to the flames and nukes of disembodiment. God’s coup: Lucifer’s voluntary demotion to the life of a penniless pen-pusher in Clerkenwell; maybe the Old Fruit’s developing a sense of irony after all. One of the things I never tire of (it’s a problem, for eternal superbeings, tiring of things) is my own astonishment at how stupid He must think I am. Is He arrogant enough to think that a brief sojourn in the dank and clunking rucksack of Gunn’s body . . .?
Relax, fans. Come August I’ll slip into that pain like Biggles into his flying jacket. Meantime, I’ll find ways around things.
‘My Lord, I didn’t recognize you.’
Nelchael. There aren’t many you can trust. Nelchael’s one of them. My numbers man. Most of the world’s numbers are bound by God to make sense. Occasionally there are glitches. It’s Nelchael’s job – when it suits us – to exploit them.
‘Account number 44500217336. See what you can do. Doesn’t have to be millions. Fifty grand should do it. Got that?’
‘My Lord Lucifer, I –’
‘You remember, Nelchael, what I told you before I left?’ Not easy to maintain dictatorial dignity when you’re sitting on a moth-eaten couch smoking a Silk Cut and biting your nails, looking for all the world like that sallow chimpanzee, Declan Gunn.
‘That this mission was top secret, my Lord.’
‘Top fucking secret, Nelks,’ I said. ‘And that’s the way it’s going to stay. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yes, my Lord.’
‘Apart from you, no one else knows of my business here on earth. If I returned to Hell to find that word had spread –’
‘My Lord, I assure you –’
‘To find that idle tongues were wagging, then my reasoning, Nelchael, would lead me to conclude that you had betrayed my trust, would it not?’
‘My Lord I exist to do your bidding.’
‘Yes, that’s right. Keep in mind Gabreel.’
Gabreel disobeyed my ruling placing a moratorium on incubism back in Ancient Egypt. Disobeyed it royally, you might say. He fucked Cleopatra. (Gabreel was an inveterate letch, of course, and Cleo couldn’t keep her femurs crossed for five minutes at a time – it was inevitable.) I had to make an example of him. Ugly. I know gentle Nelchael has nightmares to this day. Gabreel himself got over it centuries ago. Besides, I made it up to him in the fifteenth: a long weekend with Lucrezia Borgia.
I should explain. It’s been a problem, this business of angels having sex with mortal women. Not that all angels are straight: Usiel’s queer as a cat-fart; so are Busasejal and Ezequeel, or Eezaqueen as we call him, to mention but three of thousands. Most of us, when it comes dow
n to it, will enjoy carnal congress with the ladies and the gents. Same goes for you, really – boarding school, stir, Navy – just needs the right conditions to bring it out. Plus, queer consorting has one huge advantage over straight action: no issue.
. . . the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose . . .
says Genesis 6:2. The ‘sons of God’ were angels. My lot (His lot acquired neither the taste nor the opportunity); the ‘daughters of men’ were, naturally, mortal women. What you’re looking at here – though no one seems to notice – is crazy copulation between renegade angels and up-for-it earth girls. A pack of trouble. There are two ways of having it off with mortals. The first is incubism (a word you haven’t invented yet but certainly should have, given the amount of humping we’ve done), the second possession. With incubism, the angel stays an angel; with possession, the angel slips into a human host to get the job done. Incubism’s decaf, possession’s full roast. You lot do it with each other and half the time barely feel a thing. When we get involved . . . wah. Gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. But as I’ve said, possession’s no mean trick. Incubism, on the other hand, was something most of the fallen could turn their hands to, and was still popular despite its want of salt. The girls seemed to enjoy it, too, though they went through the whole business somnambulistically, waking flushed and guilty – ‘you wouldn’t believe the dream I had last night, Marj . . .’ – not to mention the risk they ran of being burned at the stake if word got out.
But there were two big problems with inter-being highjinx. The first was what became known as carnal dementia. An angel in this condition would become obsessed with his earthly squeeze, at best to the point of neglecting his proper functions and at worst to the point of leaving his post altogether to moon around the beloved, pining to become human himself. Unacceptable, obviously. It’s one thing to dip your angelic wick, it’s quite another to start dreaming of settling down in a two-bedroomed wattle and daub in Ur. That would have been grounds for a ban sooner or later, even without the second problem, the Nephilim. Genesis 6:4:
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the Sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bear children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown . . .
Rubbish. There were no giants in the earth in those or any other days, and the idea that the Nephilim, the fruit of spiritflesh coupling, became ‘mighty men’ is one of the most preposterous distortions in the Old Testament. Through some occult law governing congress between the Seen and the Unseen realms, the Nephilim were dreary, whinging, neurotic, useless, ugly little cretins. It’s one of the few remaining mysteries for me, why those kids turned out so utterly without merit and aesthetic appeal. If they’d been morally good, I’d have allowed them to survive in the hope of corrupting them. If they’d been morally bad, I’d have allowed them to live on the basis of their contribution to fucking up the world. But they were so utterly, solipsistically miserable and boring that they were, frankly, an embarrassment. It’s amazing, isn’t it: you think you’re beyond embarrassment, what with being Purely Evil and all that. Then these farking whining, self-obsessed freaks turn up as the issue of your lust and it just makes you . . . ugh. Never mind. Point is I wiped them out. One Mr Sheen-style sweep across the surface of the earth, and the excrescent offences were gone . . .
Or so I thought. I’ve no conclusive proof, but I’ve long suspected that some of my brethren – no more than a handful – somehow managed to snaffle their wretched offspring away, concealed in some cranny from the scythe of my wrath. Every now and then I’ll spot someone (a Fleetwod Mac documentary, an Elton John special – the music industry does seem suspiciously fertile in this respect) and wonder whether Nephilim blood doesn’t still course through human veins. I keep thinking I should do something about it, but, you know, I’m so busy all the time . . .
‘Now, Nelchael. What of your other charge?’
‘Charge, my Lord?’
I rolled Gunn’s eyes. (I’m getting the hang of these gestures. That Gallic shrug-with-downturned mouth’s one of my favourites just now. That and the tut-with-eye-roll I’d just delivered to my servant.) ‘Give me strength,’ I said, under my breath. ‘Your other task, idiot. Your other errand.’
‘Of course, my Lord. Forgive me. I see, I see what you –’
‘Have you found it yet?’
‘Alas, my Lord, Limbo is deceptively large. The . . . the unbaptised infants alone number –’
‘Yes yes, I know all that. Time, Nelkers, is most definitely not on our side. Keep looking. And bring me word immediately you find it. Understood?’
‘Understood, Sire.’
‘One more thing.’
‘My Lord?’
‘Keep an eye on Astaroth. I want names and rank of all those closest to him. Now go.’
I checked the balance the following morning. £79,666.00. Nice touch, that. Made me smile. I celebrated with a fry-up at a Leather Lane greasy before hitting Oxford Street for a sartorial shopping spree and a bit of how’s your father.
Now this might come as a shock, so pour yourself a double and drop your buttocks into a beanbag.
Ready?
Okay. Sexual intercourse was not Original Sin.
Truth is Adam and Eve had had sex a few times (how else were they supposed to multiply, my dear Butthead?); it just hadn’t been much fun. It hadn’t been unpleasant, but it hadn’t been sex as you know it. It had been the expression of a design feature, that’s all, like folding one’s arms or hiccupping. Adam’s tool worked – that is, achieved tumescence now and again – but of its own accord. He had no feelings about it one way or the other. Eve, for her part, felt much the same. She didn’t mind. It was just another thing they did because that was the way they were made. Edenic sex didn’t feel good and didn’t feel bad. How times have changed, n’est-ce pas? Now it feels so gerd. Now it feels so bayered. Yes? No, really, you’re too kind.
‘You know you want it you dirty little bitch.’
What astonished both of us was that it came out not as a sequence of hisses (snakeskin looked good on me, I’d decided; slithering was my corporeal métier) but as a perfectly intelligible articulation. For several moments we remained in surprised silence, Eve lying on the grass looking up at the glowing fruit, me corkscrewed around the upper trunk with my neck and head resting close to one of the golden globes.
‘A bitch is a female dog,’ Eve said, quite sensibly. ‘And dirty is before bathing in the river.’
Appalled that I’d wasted the chance for a subtle opening gambit (don’t try that one in the health club bar), I said: ‘Do you remember the time before Adam?’
Eve wasn’t one of those people who say ‘What?’ when they’ve heard you perfectly clearly. She lay blotched with leaf-shadows, blinking slowly and thinking about it. One hand ran its fingers through the grass, the other idled on her midriff.
‘Sometimes I think I remember,’ she said, not quite looking at me. ‘But then it evaporates.’
I can’t take any credit for foresight or planning, but I can and will for consummate opportunism. (Did I say I was omniscient? Not strictly true – but I am a hell of an opportunist.) I didn’t know what precisely she’d be getting from that first wet bite and swallow, but I knew generally. Generally she’d be getting a milder version of the thermonuclear toot I got when I first recognized myself as free to stand apart from God. Generally she’d be getting proof that she was her own woman. Generally she’d be introduced – not before time I might add – to the superlatively delicious pleasure of disobedience.
It was a long, eloquent seduction. I outdid myself. She couldn’t get over my being able to speak. That, really, was the thing. The intelligent voice, soliciting her opinion. Neither God nor Adam had ever bothered. She’d been trying for some time to get her head – and thereby her tongue – around the . . . the . . . I helped her: the inherent appeal of
an arbitrarily proscribed activity? Yes, she agreed, with charmingly widened eyes and the relief of one Mervyn Peake fan chancing upon another in an otherwise friendless place. Yes that’s it exactly . . . Words opened like flowers between us, each one releasing the scent of her doubt. Adam’s plodding, unreflexive nature, God’s latent disapproval of her body – oh yes, she’d seen Him curling His lip – her longing for someone to talk to, and not just any old talk, but talk informed with imagination and . . . she struggled again – a sense of ambiguity, a sense of humour, talk that reached out beyond the names of things and praise of God, talk which let you grow as you talked it, that uncovered, that . . . explored what was unknown . . . ‘All the words seem to belong only to God,’ she said, dreamily twirling a sprig of blossom under her chin. ‘But perhaps, they belong to me, too?’
(Tell me I wasn’t born for this. It bothered me, peripherally, back then, as it’s bothered me since: Was I born for it? Was that all it was? Was rebellion just part of the . . . just . . . oh never mind.)
She hung on to that ‘perhaps’ for quite some time. I remember there was a point (I’d placed the fruit in her palm) at which both of us knew she was going to capitulate, but also that she wanted to spin out the posture of resistance a while longer. Between us we invented foreplay and playing hard-to-get. ‘Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field’, says the King James version. You bet your granny’s Horlicks he was, with me inside him. I used everything I had. Temptation’s less about wearing someone down with repetition than it is about finding the right phrase and dropping it in at the right time.