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

thinking.’

He returned the smile. ‘His advice to the mortals, you know,’ he said, ‘that they should love their enemies, I pity them that they should require such instruction.’

‘Have you seen The Empire Strikes Back?’ I asked him.

‘Because for us it is natural to love our enemies in proportion to their proximity to ourselves. We’re so very alike, satan. We’re so very close to one another.’

It did rankle a wee bit, the ‘satan’ with small s. Means just ‘one who obstructs’. Not the name-calling itself, but his not being able to rise above it. He’s mighty fond of his own name, needless to say, which he translates at parties as ‘who is like God’. I wonder the Old Bugger lets him get away with it, since the correct – and far less flattering – translation, is a rhetorical question: ‘Who is like God?’ Used to piss him off no end in the old days. Every time someone said, ‘Er, Michael?’ I used to cut in straight away with, ‘Me.’

‘So near and yet so far,’ I said. ‘How are things in the bowing-and-scraping business? I’m thinking Bob Hoskins for you in the movie, by the way. How does that sit with you? I’m sure you could talk me into Joe Pesci.’

Between you and me, I really was in the most excruciating discomfort. I glanced down at the gallery, where Gunn’s impersonation of a passed-out wino or junkie had attracted the attention of two small children, who, ignored by their whispering parents, were tearing up the tinfoil wrappers of their Kit-Kats and dropping the pieces into Gunn’s hair. I wondered, glumly, what would happen when the security guard was called.

‘You’ve surprised us,’ he said. He’s never quite grasped that conversation isn’t actually the other person making some unattended-to noises while you think of the next bit of your monologue.

‘Oh I have have I? What were you thinking? Harrison Ford?’

‘With the shortness of your attention span, we thought you’d be at middle-aged melancholy by now. And yet you’ve managed to . . . hold yourself, more or less, at adolescent egotism.’

‘Don’t underrate adolescent egotism, old stick. With adolescent egotism and a lot of money one can pretty much rule the world – redundant, obviously, when one already does rule the world.’

Oh I felt awful, I did. You know how it is when you come home trenchantly, comprehensively, authentically drunk, turn the light out, lie down, and feel the waltzer room’s nauseating spin? Yes? Well this was galaxies worse than that.

‘I realise this might sound rude, my dear, but why are you here, exactly, umm?’

‘To help you,’ he said.

Had I a face, just then, it would have been no mean trick to have kept it straight. ‘Aha?’ I said. ‘Um-hm? Yah?’

‘Have you not, of late, Lucifer –’

‘Look why don’t you spit it out, there’s a good chap, eh? Then perhaps we can get on digging our respective scenes. In case it escaped your attention, I had come for a quiet halfhour in Church.’

‘You came because you were called.’

‘Oh dear this is really so uncivilized. I had hoped – you know, from you, Michael, I had hoped for a certain standard of –’

‘You’re afraid.’ He said it this time with the air of someone genuinely in possession of a mighty truth. If he hadn’t continued, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have begun Apocalypse there and then. ‘You’re afraid of what you most desire. You desire that of which you’re most afraid. Think on this, brother.’

‘I’ll be sure to.’

‘Think on it.’

‘I’ll be sure to.’

To give him his due, he didn’t have the look of a gloater. Nor, to give him further credit, did he stick around for vacuous chit-chat.

‘I’ll see you soon, Lucifer,’ he said.

‘Not if I see you first, Michael,’ I replied.

Didn’t fancy the walk back to the Ritz after that. I cellphoned Harriet and she sent Parker – whose real name is Nigel – round with the Rolls. We’ve bonded, Nigel and I. Got chatting one small-hours whisk through the city (Harriet passed out on the back seat) and I recognized him as one of my own. I needed him now like you need an escapist film when there’s an exam to revise for.

‘The point,’ I said, as I collapsed into the Rolls’s generous rear, and the upholstery gave its welcoming gasp, ‘is that in calling it multiculturalism or diversity or ebony and ivory or we are the fucking world or whatever, they’re missing something much more fundamental. They’re missing the deliberate eradication of one race by another. For which, in the twentieth century, we’ve got a word: genocide. It seems to me, Nigel, that your concern – and thank fuck you’re not alone in this – your fiercely and rightly felt concern is to stop the genocide that is happening in this country right here and right now.’

‘You all right, boss?’ Nigel said, with a blue-eyed glance in the rear-view. ‘You look a bit peaky.’ (A homely idiom, Nigel’s, though peppered with the Party for the Preservation of British Nationalism’s staples : Rights, Decent People, Honour, Difference, the White Race, Patriotism, Homeland, Relocation.)

‘What does it say about a Christian country, Nigel,’ I continued, pocket-patting for Silk Cut and Zippo, ‘that its churches – its churches – can be sold to Muslims and converted into mosques? I mean correct me if I’m wrong, you know, correct me if my history’s faulty here – but wasn’t there, some years back, a little operation known as the Crusades? Was that an academic exercise, then, was it? Eh?’ (I put a bit of bark in to my rhetorical questions for Nigel. It gets him going. It delights him, actually, though he experiences the delight as political disgust.) ‘Do you know, Nigel, that in parts of Britain now, children under ten years old – Christian children, this is, English, Christian children – are being forced to study the Koran? You know, you tell people this stuff, they think you’re making it up.’

‘Tories have got a coon Lord.’

‘I know, Nigel, I know. You know, when I think of the . . . the . . .’

I faltered. (So long since I’ve seen Michael. New Time hadn’t changed him. Still the over-earnestness, the show-offy angelic physique, the irritating air of privy intelligence. No doubt he believes there’s a great deal he knows that I don’t. He’s welcome to it. There is, after all, something I know that he doesn’t . . .) ‘When I think of the role this country of yours used to play on the global stage,’ I went on, ‘when I think of the notion that the sun never set on the British Empire, when I think of this country bringing the light of civilization to dark places, bringing technology, learning, industry, imports and exports – you know, educating the less intelligent nations on how to make use of natural resources – sometimes resources they didn’t even know they had, Nigel – when I think of that, in the light of the cultural and linguistic genocide now being encouraged in your schools, churches, hospitals, legal system . . . I think of that and I wonder: Is this how the countries of Empire repay their erstwhile sovereign?’

Your country. I’ve softened Nigel’s initial suspicions: told him I’m half Italian. Don’t live here. Passing through. And a member of the PPNI (Partita per la Preservazione di Nazionalismo Italiano), the fictional guinea equivalent of the PPBN. If I say things like ‘erstwhile sovereign’ I usually regret it, since Nigel’s own vocabulary needs very little room to stretch its legs – but that’s me again, you know? Baroque. Got to do it with knobs on. Honestly, sometimes I’m my own worst enemy.

‘It’s the fucking newsreaders piss me off,’ Nigel said, as we swung into Trafalgar Square. ‘Sanjit fucking this and Mustapha fucking that. There’s a fucking Paki doing the weather on BBC1.’

West End facades, a troupe of rattling pigeons, the lights turning green. ‘Nigel,’ I said, ‘there are going to have to be some significant changes in the world. Changes are long, long overdue . . .’

There’s a photograph of Gunn’s mother depressed me, this afternoon at the Clerkenwell writing den. (Jimmeny’s plums, this writing game, eh? The script’s a fucking doddle next to these meanderings. Of all the earthly seductions in all the towns in all the world . . .) Anyway the photograph. From the late sixties, when Gunn must have just started school. She was