down the centuries, so I shouldn’t complain I suppose. Ill wind and all that.) What happened was that they told the crowd one thing; God made sure the crowd heard another. I mean ‘release Barabbas’ doesn’t sound anything like ‘release Jesus’, does it? Nor does ‘crucify him’ sound much like ‘let him go’. Not the sort of thing you’d accidentally mishear. At the time I thought the lads just weren’t pulling their weight. Pilate’s psyche was still wobbling like a blancmange, preoccupied – flabbergasted, as a matter of fact – by its own reluctance to do what it would normally do and seek the path of least political resistance. The sensation was both seductive and nauseating – and somewhere between the two he ordered the prisoner scourged.
I didn’t like it. Not the scourging per se, obviously, but the line of physical contact having been crossed. Wife batterers around the world will tell you: the primary effect of hitting your wife for the first time (assuming she doesn’t leave you immediately or cut your cock off while you’re asleep) is that it makes it much easier to hit her – harder – a second time. Then a third, then a fourth, and so on, until hitting’s nowhere near enough and you’ve got to start getting creative. Although he didn’t wield the whip himself, Pilate had now got his hands dirty with action; more importantly, he had seen that he could draw the man’s blood, and that it was red, just like any other man’s. It lowered the stakes. That wasn’t good for me. If he could scourge him as a man, he could crucify him as one – although it was after all somewhat diverting to see Arthur having such a terrible time of it, I admit. Then the message from Procula arrived, via a redrobed flunkey with a face in which all the dark little features seemed to huddle in the middle as if in fear of being shot. Have nothing to do with that just man. I’ve suffered many things this day in a dream because of him.
Well, it was a bit late for having nothing to do with him, since he was hanging from the post in bloody ribbons, thorn-crowned, dripping with sweat and glazed with the spit of Pilate’s soldiery. But not too late, perhaps (that’s right, go on!) to avoid nailing him to a cross on Calvary. Assuming my boys had by now swayed the crowd, I put it into the procurate’s seasick head (why did the floor keep pitching like that?) that he should take the prisoner out with him, let the morons see what a harmless and indeed pitiable spectacle the so-called ‘King of the Jews’ made against the backdrop of Imperial pomp and order; get him off, in other words, on the sympathy ticket. I didn’t know, I repeat, that God had already been at it among them. Neither, obviously, did Caiaphas, who’d sent cronies into the throng to buy shouts with coin. All redundant. God had released the force of the brain-dead righteous collective. They didn’t know why it seemed imperative to crucify the fellow – only that in some way he was Them and they were Us. It could have been the terraces of Old Trafford or the swaying Anfield Kop. I could see my angelic brethren among them like fragments of a smashed rainbow. Lack of results was plainly not due to lack of effort; they blazed and swarmed and whispered – and achieved precisely nothing. And this is where my earlier boasting about the importance of the right remark at the right moment comes back to haunt me, because Caiaphas leaned in close for the delivery of the one that clinched it: ‘Caesar’s subjects are united in their condemnation of this blasphemer and instigator against Rome. I’m sure the Emperor wouldn’t like to hear that his governor in Judea suffers such an individual to live and spread his lies. Rome, after all, gets to hear of everything sooner or later.’
Pilate closed and opened his eyes very slowly and wearily. Not as slowly or as wearily as Jesus, mind you, who was already having trouble staying on his feet.
‘This round to you then,’ I said, slipping alongside him. ‘Still, that business with the nails isn’t going to be a picnic, is it?’
You know, I’m going to miss you lot, when you’re gone. I’m going to miss our . . . our thing, our working relationship. I’m going to miss you listening to me, seeing sense, taking my advice. I’m going to miss your candour (the inner candour, I mean, the one that’s camouflaged by all that external duplicity, omission and pretence). I’m going to miss your self-love, your sense of humour, your crippling weakness for doing what makes you feel good. Makes you feel good initially, I mean. Soon, now, it’ll be gone, all gone. What’ll I do with myself when you’re gone?
And thanks to this incarnate sojourn, I’m going to miss . . . damn, man, I’m gonna miss handshakes, ya know? The honest comfort of flesh and blood. This flesh and blood, it’s honest, isn’t it? It tells the truth, doesn’t it? The wind in your hair, rain on your face, sun-warmth between your shoulder-blades – perception’s straight-up. Kissing. Stretching. Blowing off. Forget Rene: the senses don’t lie, not about the big things, not about what it’s like to be here.
I took a break from the script and went to Church. St Paul’s. Call it a hunch, an intuition, an inkling, something pulled me there. (The dreams are knocking me out, by the way. Repeatedly, I’m trapped in tiny, vast spaces. Does that make sense to you? Do you dream paradoxes? Woke up this morning, couldn’t even face Buck’s Fizz. Harriet’s suggested I see a doctor. Harriet’s suggested I see a shrink. Pot, kettle and black, Harriet, I thought, pot, kettle and fucking black. The film – the film’s racing along. Harriet hasn’t left the bed for two days. She sits cross-legged amid the pillows talking on the phone, moving money, telling lies, having things brought to her, half-consuming them, having them taken away. I’ve told her: slow down, you’ll make yourself ill. You think she takes any notice of me? Trent was miffed about the no-sequel nature of the project. He’s been depressed since I pointed out that there was no scope for a prequel, either. Meanwhile, I’m anxious about the third act . . .)
St Paul’s. Well if you’re going to do it, do it large. It still takes me a while to get to places, and this afternoon’s jaunt to the cathedral was no exception, what with London’s oven-baked asphalt and disreputable trees, what with its brew of stinks and perfumes, what with the wide-angle sunlight and the stratosphere’s ghostly cirrus. I was straight, too, more or less, if you don’t count the coke-hangover and three Lucifer Risings I took to knock it on the head. Admittedly there’s a more or less permanent residue of chemicals and booze around Gunn’s cowering brain these days, but, you know, relatively, I was sharp.
Which was just as well. Given who turned up.
I only just got out of Gunn’s carcass in time. Up in the Whispering Gallery, under the great, ribbed belly of the dome, I couldn’t shake it, that sense of being watched that had been troubling me since . . . I don’t know. A while. However long it had been smouldering, it caught fire up there among the scurrying sibilants. Dangerous, too, what with Gunn’s fear of heights kicking in without warning, what with me swaying, precariously at the gallery’s rail. The presence – for there was no mistaking it by then – coalesced just before the rising tide of tinnitus which announced it would have sent me literally and metaphorically over the edge. With a nauseous wrench (think of a femur being pulled from its groin) I tore myself from Gunn’s body, which, not surprisingly, collapsed, buttocks-first, into that indecorous sitting position adopted by abandoned cloth dollies.
‘And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan,’ Michael droned, with a kind of rich boredom, ‘which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him . . . hasatan, have you forgotten, my friend?’
Pain? Well, you could say that. Can’t tell you what it cost me to keep it together, up there in the dome’s shadow, with you dear things scuttling like roaches below. Corporeally, I would have talked of deep internal haemorrhaging. I would have talked of head trauma. I would have talked of the immediate need for intensive care. Leaving the body was bad enough – the dreadful reunion with my default angelic rage and pain – but to be forced into it so suddenly and to have him to deal with . . . Well. I mean be fair.
Not that I let on, obviously, no more than he did, and I can assure you my presence was no cakewalk for him, either.
‘Michael,’ I said. ‘Dear old thing. It’s been simply ages.’
I wondered, peripherally, how on earth this bit of the material world could contain us without radical signs of stress – I half-expected the dome to split or implode – until I realised what should have been obvious: Divine dispensation. It was, after all, St Paul’s Cathedral. Sometimes I’m so slow.
‘You’re afraid,’ he said, quietly.
I smiled. ‘It’s extraordinary,’ I said, ‘how much you chaps consider it your duty to tell me that. I had Gabriel at it the other day. I wonder why you think it’s so important? Sceptics, I dare say, would mutter of wishful
