by Glen Duncan
‘You’re awfully . . .’
‘Articulate?’
‘Articulate. You’re awfully articulate, serpent.’
‘You’re so kind, my Lady. But if the fruit of that tree has given subtlety to the tongue of the serpent, a mere reptile, just think what wisdom your exquisite lips will find within their grasp.’ (That was ghastly, I know, that lips and grasp thing, but she really did have the most engaging ones – lips I mean, mouth and mons.)
‘That is fl . . . fl . . .’
‘Flattery? Not at all, Queen of Eden. Simply the truth. Does it surprise you that He forbids you that which would make you His equal, if not His superior?’
An idiom, I knew, within which we could both enjoy the self-consciousness of my flattery (she was a quick learner, Eve, there’s no denying it) – and though she laughed there was no concealing the blush of satisfaction that spread across her throat and breasts. It was, I must confess, so pleasurable to me to sit and play this game with her (I was the spoilyourself-you-deserve-it barkeep, she the office slave letting the margaritas one by one rub out the boundary of her lunch hour until – oh dear – there was the whole working day sipped and swallowed away) I almost forgot where I was going with it.
And when, finally, with scarlet cheeks and fiery eyes she sank those pretty teeth in and the juice cartoonishly spurted out, I, in an intuitive leap I’m not sure I’ve ever since surpassed, delivered the coup de grâce – and slid my . . . What I mean to say is there was a certain spatial compatibility between my . . . It turned out that her . . . Oh listen to me going all shy, will you? But anyway: there. You know what I mean, don’t you? One should make an effort to avoid unnecessary vulgarity, I believe. Pure evil needn’t entail having a mouth like an open drain. I am, after all, a man of wealth and taste. And I do know that there’s an understanding growing between us. I . . . think we can fill in each other’s blanks?
It was my good fortune or honed instinct that one of the first things (one of many) the fruit delivered was – you know it – sensuality. Foremost was the pleasure in having knowingly disobeyed. I saw that the headiness of this rocked her, eyes half-closed, jugular risen, the colour of smoke; I saw the first taste of selfhood and that it almost destroyed her, as might an unschooled vampire’s first draught of blood. (But oh, should the vampire novice survive that first concussive ingestion, what then? Her thirst awakens and increases tenfold!) Ever after, I thought (having discovered inverted aversion therapy), ever after will wrongdoing and sensual pleasure go hand in hand. Lucifer, I said to myself, noting with satisfaction the co-operative hips, the flared nostrils, the raised eyebrows of carnal transport, Lucifer my son you are an absolute bona fide genius. Liberation, subversion, power, rebellion, bestiality, pride – you wouldn’t think even God could cram that lot into a Golden Delicious. I could see her, suffused with all that new fruity knowledge (that she could speak for herself, that disobedience sensitized the flesh, that there would never be any going back now, that if the only thing available to the human being struggling to slip the yoke of service was wrongdoing then wrongdoing she would choose, that she was, against all former suspicions, free), considering through the bruise of concupiscence what she’d done. In their wake ecstasy and crime had left a faint frown of perplexity, the mark of her astonishment that she could feel such things, the face’s opening posture for self-interrogation – how could I? – that would never go further, because she knew how she could. Oh yes, didn’t she just. She knew.
You are grateful aren’t you, that I shackled sex to knowledge and sensual pleasure? Or would you prefer coitus to have remained in the same physiological league as, say, noseblowing? And while we’re at it, you might as well credit me for getting art off the ground. With our girl’s first bold bite and precocious peristalsis the universe was transformed into a representable phenomenon, subject separate from object: represent all of it and there’d be nothing God knew and you didn’t. Nothing worth knowing, anyway. Since that day in Eden sex and knowledge have formed the double helix of your souls’ DNA.
‘When you come, time stops,’ Eve said. ‘It’s a tremendous relief, isn’t it, serpent? Do you suppose that’s what divinity feels like all the time?’
In the green grass she was rose-gold and glowing, fabulously drunk and stone cold sober. I saw her mentally pulling shame around herself like a sumptuous Russian mink. For a moment she held the fruit away from her lips and glared at it as if it had betrayed her of its own free will. But after a moment’s hesitation she returned it to her mouth and sank her teeth into it again. The decision had been made the first time. Just in case there was any doubt, she made it again.
‘This is just the beginning,’ I said. ‘Now if you’d consider turning your . . . What I mean is if you could just grab your – ah. You’re ahead of me, my dear. How very charming.’
‘I’ll tell you something,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I ever really liked him.’
‘Adam?’ I said. ‘I don’t blame you.’
‘Not Adam,’ she said, struggling to swallow a greedily chomped chunk. ‘God.’
And so to the present, gentle reader, and the preposterous sequence of events that brought me here in the first place. (The specific ‘here’ of Gunn’s cramped crib and dusty PC on Day Seven, I mean.) It’s been some first week, let me tell you. This not quite knowing what tomorrow will bring game’s not for the fainthearted, is it? I’m half tempted to start seeing you monkeys in a new light.
Some chronology, Lucifer, for shame. You’re tired, yes, but you’ll feel better for having got it down while it’s still fresh.
Well I wouldn’t say ‘fresh’, what with me still stinking of quality quim and French fagsmoke – but I’m jumping the gun. Let’s start, as the autobiographer’s shadow or doppelgänger voice suggests (does this happen to all writers?), at the beginning.
The Violet debacle rocked me, I’ll admit, and an evening of furious boozing followed. (I started smoking, too. I’m looking forward to stopping, obviously, since the real pleasure is starting again, but in the meantime I’ve found my rhythm at about fifty a day.) Not without the profit of insight. Force, I decided, was the missing aphrodisiac. Against her will the crucial ingredient. Made sense: the logical extension of Gunn’s post-Penelope delight in having sex with women who don’t really want to have sex with him. He’d be bug-eyed, no doubt, to see where such predilections point. But that’s me, you see: no nonsense. Call ’em like you see ’em. Besides, what was the alternative? A month on earth – impotent? Do me a favour.
Therefore, having resolved on the kill-or-cure approach, yesterday’s late afternoon found me strolling down High Holborn in the promising slipstream of one Tracy Smith, who though we had yet to be introduced, was destined to play a part in the urgent matter of my sexual rehabilitation.
A good working class Anglo-Saxon maid, our Tracy, with a middleweight backside and chicken skin calves, puddinglike breasts wonderbra’d up to the salivating world and ash-blonde hair scraped into a tortoiseshell barrette, revealing a nacreous neck and two fiercely pink little ears. One glimpse of that pork-coloured and Wrigley’s-flavoured mouth and this bad boy was hooked. Tracy Smith. Head awash with telly and Radio One, the dim echo of school (make-up, gossip, lads), the Pitmans, the Pimms, the package hols brochure – what else would Tracy Smith be called? Actually, she’s thinking of changing her name. Not the Tracy, the Smith. To Fox. Tracy Fox. Page Three Girl, children’s television presenter, Blankety Blank guest. She’s looked into it. It’s not as difficult as she thought it would be. Only problem is, she knows her mum and dad will flip. And since it was their deposit anchored the flat (cabby dad, care assistant mum) she’s got to keep them sweet.
So it’s Tracy Smith, for now, for me, as she steps out of the Holborn building’s main entrance into the gun-coloured evening light and the smoked door swings her handsome rear reflection into my view. Silver puffer jacket, navy pinstripe skirt, ivory tights and black, pinchy-looking high heels. That’s my girl. A red do
uble-decker roars past with Kate Moss on its flank – but you can keep the mannequins, the angle-poise anaemics and mantis-waifs; give me human Tracy Smith, Nescafé breath, pink M&S knickers, the lone skidmark like the scar of a struck match, celebrity dreams, crashing grammar and hunger, hunger, hunger for money. The bus passes with the sound of a dinosaur’s yawn and I slide into my girl’s wake, surrounded by scurrying Londoners whose faces float before me like waxy lanterns in the city’s gloom.
I’ve always had a soft spot for London, the patched and tattered cloak of its history (some of my best work, obviously; I felt the same about old Byzantium), its dog-eared wisdom and inky humour. You know – you provincial British humans know – what it’s like when you crack under the weight of lost love or ingested desire and Move to London: the city’s ready for you. You take your precious miseries there and unpack them – only to find that the city’s already assimilated them, centuries ago, along with grand Elizabethan passions and mortal Victorian sins. The assimilation’s encoded now – in the chemistry lab colours of the Underground map, in Trafalgar’s punk pigeons, in the thousands of ticking stilettos and caffeine yawns and downed pints and adulterous snogs. You turn up on a rainy Monday afternoon proud of all your woeful particulars – and London humbles you with its wealth of generals. You’ve seen your life. London, it turns out, has seen Life.
Paris is snooty, and owns its sins like a liberated mademoiselle owns her velvet diaphragm case and Jackhammer Deluxe vibrator; but London, London noses its heaps of sin like a ropy mongrel among the bins, partly embarrassed, partly excited, partly disgusted, partly sad . . .
But this isn’t to the point. (This is supererogatory, Gunn would say.) The point is I’ve chosen East End bawn an’ bred Tracy Smith (the romantic in me prefers to think that she chose me) for the latest consummation of angelic desire on earth. Violet’s signal failure to generate the requisite . . . Not that there isn’t ample empirical evidence (ask Eve, Nefertiti, Helen, Herodias, Lucrezia, Marie-Antoinette, Debbie Harry . . .) of my knocker know-how and twat-talent; it’s just that . . . taking a look in the mirror . . . I’m not sure what Gunn’s mortal frame can support. When I’ve ravished before I’ve chosen my fleshly hosts carefully – everyone goes home satisfied – but I haven’t been able to avoid noticing Gunn’s deficiencies: not particularly well-endowed, or physically co-ordinated, or gifted with stamina. It came as a horrid shock to me – for the fiftieth time – when I stubbed my toe on the edge of the kitchen unit, for the fiftieth time. I’ve bitten the inside of my mouth so often there’s now a swelling on one inner cheek the size of a Jaffa orange segment. So I think I can be forgiven a wee bit of, ah, performance anxiety, if you don’t mind, as Tracy and I duck underground at Holborn for the Central Line to Mile End.
The London Underground depresses God. The Paris Metro’s rescued by bubbles of romance and intellectual flimflam (He can tune in for ten minutes and get something); the New York subway’s a toilet, obviously, but it looks like the movies, you know, it looks hip, famous, cool; Rome’s Metropolitana – well, Rome’s got a special dispensation, not surprisingly – but London, Christmas Jimmeny the London Underground gets Him down. The Lloyd-Webber ads; the cadaverous drivers with their deep-sea eyeballs and miles of unfulfilled dreams; the Lloyd-Webber ads; the puking office juniors and passed-out temps; the death’s-door beggars with their raw ankles and shat pants; the Lloyd-Webber ads; the buskers; the evening’s fractured make-up and the morning’s frowsty breath; all this and more – but chiefly the surrender to despair or vacancy the rattling tube demands, chiefly the tendency of London’s human beings to collapse into a seat or hang from a rail in a state of bitter capitulation to the sadness and boredom and loneliness and excruciating glamourlessness of their lives. The only thing He sees on the Underground that cheers Him up is blind people who have friendly relationships with their guide dogs. (There are a handful of blind people I’ve been working on in an attempt to radically alter the relationships they have with their dogs. So far, nada. Be nice if I could get one in before the end of time.)
Tracy plonks herself down and takes out her Evening Standard already opened at the telly pages. No point in consulting those, Trace, I think, as the train thunders into the first of many tunnels.
I know what you would have thought, you bored-with-the-world humans. You would have thought: Christ what a fucking uncomfortable evening. A pall of cloud, warm drizzle, windblown litter, London’s dull smell of exhaust and damp brick, the stupid, stupid heat.
Not me. I’ve got Gunn’s five senses working overtime. Every car horn, hot-dog stand, burp, breeze, sunbeam and shitswipe – you get the picture. I’m in love, truly, madly, deeply in love with perception.
And, manifestly, digression.
Tracy’s flat is in the basement of a four-storey Victorian terrace in Mile End. I’ve considered tackling my turtle dove as she pushes open the front door, at that quaint meridian where outside meets inside and the mat says welcome; but there’s too much human traffic in the street and an overly enthusiastic porch light above the lintel. I’d be spotted for sure. So it’s round the back and listen for the sound of the shower, diddle the window, hop over the sill into the kitchen, with just time for a scotch and a glance at the headlines before my girl emerges buffed and lotioned and it’s time to get down to business.
There’s no scotch so I settle for a gin and fizzless tonic. The flat’s a dark living room, an untidy bedroom, a tiny blue-and-white kitchen, and the bathroom, behind the closed door of which Tracy’s gasping and sighing under the jets as the water’s heat by degrees soothes away the day’s annoyances. I crack my knuckles and light a Silk Cut. Julia Sommerville’s round-up of world events reassures me that the boys are hard at it in my absence, but reminds me, too (another flood in India, another earthquake in Japan, another egg-headed astronomer not quite categorically denying that the comet is on a collision course with earth) that time, New Time, I mean, your time, is running out. You get one month to try it out. Your chance, Lucifer. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? As if. But I don’t care for this kind of inner dialogue (increasingly frequent sensation that there are two of me in my own – I mean Gunn’s – head, which I definitely don’t like) and besides, the shower’s hiss has ceased and I can hear Tracy – bent double, I conjecture, plump boobs bobbing as she dries between her rosy toes – singing surprisingly tuneful snatches of Britney’s ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’, which, in the way of inexplicable aphrodisiacs, has me up out of the couch with loins aflame, resolved in a twinkling on a full-frontal assault in the bathroom – up against the heated towel rail, perhaps (tsssss – ouch!) – for openers.
But some things never change.
As I cross the threshold of the kitchen the ether shudders and a trident of unbearable light strikes me full in the face. I collapse and cover my eyes.
‘Too much,’ Gabriel’s voice says. ‘Turn down.’
‘No permanent damage. Come on, Luce, get up. Long time no see.’
Uriel.
‘If you’ve damaged these eyeballs, you’ll regret it.’
‘Why doesn’t he leave the body?’
Zaphiel. Three of the big boys. I’m thinking: Is Tracy dedicated to The Holy Virgin or what? But Zaphiel’s right. Quaking on the lino like that – intolerable. Therefore leaving Gunn’s miserable carcass positioned as if for prayer to Allah, and with a deep breath in preparation for the excruciating pain of disembodiment (Jimmeny that hurts) I return to the bodiless realm to confront my angelic brethren. I can’t say it’s all bad, either, to expand into my non-dimensional dimensions again, easing the joints of power, opening the pinions of pain. The rage takes all but Gabriel, who’s tasted it recently, by surprise. Sissy Zaphiel backs-off. Uriel – I catch the look of admiring horror at what I’ve let myself become – turns his own dial up into the red, reflexively, and all four panes in Tracy’s kitchen window explode.
‘Easy there, boy, easy,’ I say. ‘You don’t get out much, do you?’ It’s a minor but sw
eet satisfaction to me that Tracy, back in the stopped time of the material world, is indeed as I’d pictured her, bent drying her tootsies, bulbous breasts arrested mid-swing, haunches still pink from the water’s heat. I’ve got a lousy feeling I’m never going to get any nearer to her than this.
‘That’s right,’ Uriel says, turning down again. ‘You’re not.’
‘There are rules,’ Gabriel says.
I regard them, coldly, with a smile. The smell of Heaven is overpowering; it forces itself against me calling up something like nausea. ‘It may have escaped your notice,’ I say, ’but me and rules don’t have what you’d call a happy history. Me and rules haven’t been known for wildly hitting it off, if you see what I mean.’
‘Should you elect to leave the host’s body and not return,’ Uriel says, ‘then the consequences of your actions will be consequences to the body’s original occupant.’
This has occurred to me. To be honest, the thought of slapping a rape and murder rap on Gunn just before checking-out rather appeals. ‘If I leave his body and he returns,’ I counter, ‘consequences aren’t going to get a look-in. In case you’ve forgotten – you sillies – Mr Gunn’s first action on returning to the land of the living will be to exit it, by his own mortally sinning hand. Not much point in arresting the dear fellow if he’s dead, is there?’
‘It’s not a foregone conclusion that he will take his own life,’ Gabriel says.
‘Well it was pretty foregone when the Old Man decided to pull the plug and pack the poor bastard off to Limbo,’ I said.
‘He moves in mysterious ways, Lucifer. You know this.’ Uriel again. There’s something about his inflection. That stint guarding Eden left him too much time for solitary thought.