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

my gob and pep in my prick. The sun comes in the window and embraces me. Those champagne breakfasts Harriet insists on practically guarantee a Feelin’ Groovy sort of day. Gunn’s bones seem finally to be coming into some kind of right alignment. I sing in the shower (Giddupah giddorn up – like a sex-machine – giddorn up) and take the stairs three at a time. This is how one should live. This, let me repeat, is how one should live.

(You know, it’s true. Work had really been getting me down latterly. Of late. The predictability. The routine. The absence of even the ghost of a challenge. With nice symmetry, my newly acquired corporeal threads provide material for the analogy: I’d felt heavy, sluggish, fevered now and then, stiff of joint, leaden of head, sour of guts, immaterially peaky and generally under the angelic weather. This getaway’s just what I needed. A change, as they say, is as good as a rest.)

The clairvoyance gimmick’s magnetic. Jack Eddington wants to give me my own show. Lysette Youngblood wants me on the road with Madonna. Gerry Zooney wants me to go head-to-head with Uri Geller. Todd Arbuthnot wants to hook me up with his contacts in Washington. Who are these people? They’re members of my Ritz coterie.

‘Do you have any idea, Declan, of the sort of money you could make with this?’ Todd Arbuthnot said to me last night, after I’d told him a thing or two about Dodi and Di that made his toenails curl.

‘Yes, Todd, I do have an idea,’ I said. ‘And do, dear boy, please, call me Lucifer.’

They don’t get it, the Devil thing. They write it off as permissible guru eccentricity. Needless to say, none of them has heard of Declan Gunn. None of them has read Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest. None of them has read Boneshadows. Not that the obscurity credentials didn’t come in handy with Trent, who’s a writing snob, when he’s not out of his box on drugs.

‘Okay,’ he said, coming up bleary-eyed from a toot in my suite, where, by mutual agreement, our ’development meetings’ take place. Harriet was out. Dining with microelectronics and pharmaceuticals. Outside the window lit London beckoned. I get terribly excited once it’s gone dark. I get terribly excited while it’s still light, too; but that darkness, those winking city lights . . . I’ve started going out, you see. Going out, in London, at night, with money, drugs, famous people, and extremely expensive prostitutes. (Whereas Gunn used to go out, at night, alone, with hardly any money, no drugs, no celebs, fail to pull, get denied sex even after the capitulation and retreat to Vi’s, then come home, have a hungover handjob, a sob, a vomit, a cigarette, and much mulling over just how close he was to having altogether given up hope before falling into a troubled and unregenerative sleep.)

‘Okay,’ Trent said, stretching his bottom jaw and widening then contracting his sapphire eyes. ‘We start with just a full black screen and a voiceover. No stars, right? I mean, there wouldn’t, would there, be actual stars?’

I rounded off my scheduling call to Elise at XXX-Quisite, and put the phone down. Your verbal engagement on the telephone – or in conversation with someone else, for that matter – presents no obstacle to Trent. ‘There weren’t stars,’ I said. ‘There wasn’t anything.’

He looked at me for a moment very much in the manner of a person about to pass into an inaccessible dimension of consciousness. Then he shook himself. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Right, right, right. You were there. I forget.’

‘What we’ve got to nail,’ I said, lighting up one of Harriet’s left-behind Gauloises,’ what we’ve really got to pin down – because everything else will flow from it, you know –’

‘I know, man. Christ I know . . .’

‘Is the moment I turn. The moment I rebel.’

‘Run with it. Run with it.’

‘Michael’s just laid down that infamous accusation of pride, right?’ I sprang up from the bed and let the city’s lights catch me on Gunn’s better side. ‘And I’m like . . . “Pride?” It’s a whisper at this stage, a Pacino whisper: “Pride?” But this is one of those whisper-builds-to-shout scenes. “Is it pride to want a place of your own? Is it pride to want to be independent?” Little by little louder, right? “Is it pride to want to do something in the universe?” Louder: “Is it pride to want to be somebody?” Louder still: “Is it pride to want to live with dignity?” Then full fucking throttle: “Is it pride to get sick of KISSING AN OLD MAN’S ASS?”’

Trent shook his head in ecstatic disbelief, like a sent musician. ‘Christ, man you should take the fucking part,’ he said.

I pointed at him with my cigarette. ‘You, dear boy,’ I admonished, ’are an appalling flatterer.’

I can’t tell you how good I was feeling. Looking at things like daffodils and clouds is wonderful. Looking at things like daffodils and clouds having just spent ?372 on dinner and dropped two tabs of ecstasy in preparation for a five-hour shift with XXX-Quisite’s friendliest platinum blonde double-act, that’s really wonderful. I know what the majority of you think about all this. All this sex and money and drugs. You think: people who live like that never end up happy. You need to think that in just the way men with small penises need to think size doesn’t matter. It’s understandable. The rich, the famous, the big-dicked, the slim-and-gorgeous – they incite an envy so urgent that you can escape it only by translating it into pity. People who live like that never end up happy. Yes, you’re right. But neither do you. And in the meantime, they’ve had all the sex and drugs and money. (Gunn, I might add, retained his carious Catholicism largely because atheism would have forced him to accept that nothing terrible was going to happen to people like Jack Nicholson and Hugh Hefner and Bill Wyman after they died – a proposition he couldn’t have borne.)

‘How come no one’s done this movie?’ Trent asked. ‘I mean you’d think, right? Spielberg. Lucas. Cameron. Mind you, the FX budget’s gonna go through the fucking ozone layer.’

‘If we write it, they will pay,’ I said.

‘We do want effects, right?’ Trent said. ‘I mean, we’re not seeing this as some sort of Beckett existentialist struggle crap, are we?’

‘We want the biggest film since Titanic, Trent,’ I said.

‘And none of that “no big names” shit, either,’ Trent said, between toots from his own monogrammed spoon. ‘These film school assholes who think it’s a sin to use named talent. That’s so fucking uncool.’

‘Can I fuck your buns, Trent?’

‘I mean for Christ’s – what?’

‘Nothing. A verbal tick, dear boy. You’re right. So uncool. Harriet wants Julia Roberts for Eve.’ I said all this and managed to keep a straight face. I’d like some credit for that.

‘Too bad Bob De Niro already played Lucifer in Angel Heart’, Trent said, rubbing the tip of his nose, furiously, as if trying to erase it. ‘And Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick. Fuck, and Pacino just did Satan in that piece of shit with Keanu Reeves.’

(Shall I tell you what the list of actors who’ve turned down the chance to play me looks like? It looks short.)

‘Depp,’ I said. ‘Keanu’d jump at it like a gibbon – but we’ve got to have some fucking ability. We should think about lining up some cameos, too. Maybe some rock dinosaur with false teeth to play God. Robert Plant with a beard.’

‘Yeah, but do we even want a guy God?’ Trent asked. ‘I’m thinking more like hand-star-egg-eye-cosmic- dust-Giger-secretion stuff.’

‘I like the way you think, Trent,’ I said. ‘I like the way you think.’

All this has not been without effect on my relationship with Violet, naturally. (Here’s a question: do you think keeping Gunn attached to Violet will be a good thing for him?) Thanks to her never having read Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest, I’ve had little trouble ’reminding’ her that it was the story of Lucifer’s rebellion, fall, and battle with Christ on earth.

‘It’s going to be the biggest marketing campaign ever,’ I told her, over daiquiris at Swansong. I’ve kept quiet about the Ritz. As far as she knows I’m still living at the Clerkenwell pad. Essential, too, to keep her away from Harriet and Trent – essential if I’m to sustain the illusion that she’d get within remote imaging range of a part. So far the prodigal spending – my wallet’s attention deficit disorder – has kept her enthralled; but it’s only a matter of time before she starts to expect the meet-and-greets, the air kisses, the Midas touch handshake, the inevitable sack-negotiations. Everything, down here, is always just a matter of Time.

‘Harriet’s got one of her people talking to McDonald’s on Thursday. The McDevil. We’re getting the “Quake”