I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story

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 metier) 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.

‘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