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

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 down 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