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

give you New York City, my Sistine Chapel, about to be – thanks to my left hand knowing perfectly well what my right one’s doing – in fruitful need of restoration. Some restoration job that’ll be, believe me.

Needless to say I laughed long and hard at dear Gabriel’s message, longer and harder than I’ve laughed since. . . I don’t know, Los Alamos, maybe. Po-faced Gabriel incapable of telling a lie. Incapable of telling a lie. Swear on the Holy Bible, I said to him. Go on, raise your right hand.

I threw myself into work for a while. You humans can throw yourselves into all sorts of things: chain- smoking, booze-bingeing, scabrous one-night-stands. I throw myself into work. Spread myself perilously thin, too, what with starting small wars and coaxing neuroses in the movers and shakers. A rash of peculiar migraines broke out among tinpot tyrants worldwide; torture cells groaned; the music of pulled teeth and cattle-prodded sex-parts comforted me; the odour of fag-burned breasts filled my nostrils like balsam, temporarily decongesting me of doubt. I put some time into technology (there’s a lot of never-need-to-leave-the-house gizmology coming your way soon) and bio-engineering. The boffins were waking up in the middle of the night wondering how on earth they’d never thought of it before. I even found time for the little things, the it’s-the-thought-that-counts gimmicks I’ve built a reputation on: the thefts, the assaults, the batteries, the lies, the lusts. One espresso-breathed old duffer in Bologna sodomized his Jack Russell, then went to look at himself in the bathroom mirror, astonished that for so many years they’d been just good friends.

But it was useless. The seed had been sown. Some things don’t change. The necessity of Gabriel’s honesty is one of them. Incapable of telling a lie. Besides, as Der Fuhrer of Fibs, Il Duce of Deceptions, I do know when someone’s pulling my leg.

He was waiting for me in a rainswept Paris.

‘I want a dry-run,’ I said.

Pigalle, I’d insisted, knowing how he hates these little pornucopias. Insomniac neons blinked colours on and off the wet streets. I couldn’t smell the crepes, the coffee, the croques monsieurs, the panini, the Galoises, but I could certainly smell the ripe stink of my work, the briny whiff of illicit fornication and ravenous disease. (This thing about AIDS being God’s punishment kills me. It’s mine, you sillies. It’s a nosethumb to Himself: Look, even when it’s killing them they can’t stop.) Violence, too. Wherever there’s guilt there’s violence, and if guilt is a smell then violence is a taste: strawberries and formaldehyde and ironish blood . . .

‘One earth month,’ Gabriel said.

We looked at each other then (self-consciously on my part) for a painful moment. It hurt like buggery (I was going to say it hurt like Hell – but actually nothing hurts quite like Hell) but I wasn’t going to let him know that. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. Being in my presence was no picnic for him, either, you can be sure, but he was coming on all Mr Spock and pain-is-only-in-the-mind.

‘I don’t want February,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Twenty-eight days. It’s not a leap year.’

‘It’s July. Thirty-one days.’

‘Great. Peak rates on the 18–30 Benidorm package.’

‘Laughter is the reflex response to fear. You know this. You hear yourself laughing, we hear you screaming.’

‘“And if I laugh ’tis that I may not weep” would’ve been so much better. Still not much time for reading up there then?’

‘There’s nothing I lack that I want, Lucifer. You cannot say the same. You will know where to go.’

‘Yes yes yes. Now do clear off, old fruit, would you? Oh and Gabriel?’

‘Yes?’

‘Your mother sucks cocks in hell.’

He didn’t do anything. He held still, aureoled in the Old Man’s icy protection. Unprotected I know I can take him. He knows it too. If he’d had Doubt – if he’d had Doubt – it would have burgeoned there on the edge of Pigalle’s little Babylon. If he’d had Doubt he would have wondered if God was about to drop the shield and test his strength. It’s the sort of thing God would do, whimsical old Kettle that He is. If Gabriel’s faith wasn’t utterly intact it would have occurred to him that if God chose to withdraw His power he would be facing certain defeat. Why? Well, actually, because, not to put too fine a point on it, I’m the meanest, baddest, deadliest angelic motherfucker in the seen and unseen universe, that’s why. But it didn’t occur to him. We just faced each other, the wall of nothingness shivering between us. Humans passed and said: Someone walked on my grave.

So. There’s a turn-up for the Book of Revelation. ‘And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night forever . . .’ Oh cheers, I thought, when I heard that. Oh thanks. But now they’re putting it out that Jonny Flashback was on a need-to-know basis. He’ll be narked about that. (He’s never been right, you know. Stands under a silver tree in Paradise with unwashed dreads and a beard the size of a sheep, muttering and doing those mad tramp things with his hands. It’s the Kerouac trajectory from beat guru to stumbling bum. You see it a million times.)

You know what all this is about, don’t you, assuming, for a moment, He’s serious? Divine Anxiety. Create the unforgivable and you compromise infinite mercy. Forgive the unforgivable and you compromise infinite justice. Mercy, justice, mercy, justice, yada yada yada, until you’re so dizzy from chasing Bugs Logic around in circles that you fall on your cosmic arse and put your cosmic head in your cosmic hands and wish you’d never created anything.

Therefore this preposterous new deal, before time comes to an end. Actually The End.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to just drop that on you. Forget I said it. Time’s not coming to an end. There’s loads of time left. For a reason that’s nothing to do with the end of the world being nigh I get a shot at redemption. There’s a catch. (Where would He be without those catches?) I’ve got to live as a human being. One month’s trial period then I sign-up for a lifetime of earwax and flu. I, Lucifer, get the chance to go home – provided I don’t make an utter pig’s pizzle of living out the rest of Declan Gunn’s life.

Now, there are a lot of machinations and computations to be gone through when confronted with this type of offer. I’ve been through them (took about three earth seconds) and I’ll bring you up to speed presently. But why, in the meantime, Gunn?

Well, as you’ll remember, having fallen on harder times than he thought he could bear our scribe was about to take his own tediously predictable life. Razor blades, bath, Joni Mitchell in the tape deck. Suicide’s a mortal sin. I get the suicides. Look, if you’re thinking of killing yourself, don’t. You won’t go to Heaven. (Kidding. Kidding. Honestly. Go ahead.) Now God’s got a soft spot for this Gunn. Some vestigial Catholicism the Old Man can’t bear to see go to waste, some good deed when he was a nipper, maybe the afterlife intercession of his dear deceased mother, Baal only knows – so God pulls Gunn’s soul (which, technically, is cheating, I might add) before Gunn tops himself and puts it on ice in Limbo. (The Vatican will tell you they’ve done away with Limbo – don’t you believe it. Limbo’s still rammed with idiots and stillborns. Not a fun place. I mean even in Hell you can have a conversation.) If carcass life grabs me, I stay and Gunn goes via Purgatory (think windowless dentist’s waiting room: bawling toddlers, heaped ashtrays, the sense that you’ve brought it on yourself) to Heaven. If it doesn’t, Gunn’s back in his bones and taking his chances with suicide. Can you believe this stuff? I mean you can’t believe it, obviously – but can you believe it?

Any seasoned deal maker will tell you that spontaneous negotiation’s a bad strategy; the ad hoc approach will leave you ripped-off, busted, conned, stiffed, outsmarted and generally holding the shitty end of the stick. The advantage of being me is that I know where I’m going with a deal from the get-go. I always know. Fact is there’s really no dealing with me. Dealing’s so inappropriate a