must . . . cleanse the soil or it will never bear fruit. It will be a great burden for me to bear . . .
Yet still it bothers him, later that night under the lights and the blood red banner with the stage wings like two dark beckonings into eternity, that the after-image of languid Kreiger and Hoffman’s hungry ghost are slipping away from him, their meaning, these unique bookends to the danger . . . and on the run, ad libitum, so to speak, he takes a risky detour from his belaboured and beloved script:
. . . must be accomplished without our leaders and their men suffering any damage in their minds and souls. The danger is great indeed, for only the narrowest way stands between the Scylla of their becoming cold-hearted brutes unable any longer to treasure life where it must be treasured (he thinks of Willie, the chignon, the Certificate of Excellence, the five boisterous nippers that will now never be) where it must be treasured, gentlemen, and the Charybdis of their becoming soft, enfeebled, nervously debilitated, or in danger of mental breakdown . . .
You lose even your golden earthly students, eventually. As I did Heinrich to suicide (after continual problems with nausea, stomach convulsions, tics and a whole range of physical and psychological irritations, bearing witness that even the Reichsfuhrer had difficulty quite practising what he preached) in 1945. But you’ve got to appreciate the sheer effort he made to hold on. You’ve got to appreciate the commitment to civilizing brutality. Nothing fucks the Old Man off more, believe me. He can forgive the animal in you dragging you down to the trough. He can’t forgive you inviting the animal up for afternoon tea.
But the system petered out, you’ll say. The death camps were liberated. The fucking Nazis lost.
Well, yes, my darlings, they did. But their victory wasn’t my goal. (Obviously it was their goal, the morons.) Their victory, ultimately, was neither here nor there, as long as, after they’d done their thing, millions of people could no longer sustain the preposterous fallacy that the Old Man loved the world.
Heinrich, by the way, was awfully surprised to find himself screaming in agony – I mean sipping his complimentary arrivals cocktail – in Hell.
I have of late – wherefore I know not . . .
Evening in Clerkenwell. I’ve been writing for hours. Apathetic rain and London’s sky like a tarry lung. The City’s gone home, exhausted, with aching feet and sour skin. It’s gone home to seek the relief of diversion. It’s gone home to consume, to drink, to masturbate, to babble, to smoke, to watch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? It’s gone home to an ordinariness only occasionally punctuated by the awful intimation that despite everything, despite Coronation Street, Silk Cut, chat rooms, Sainsbury’s, Christmas and the Wimbledon fortnight, despite all these and infinitely more, one day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death. I sat at Gunn’s window and watched the offices and banks exhale, the systole and diastole of rushhour traffic. I saw what I always see, what I’ve made it my business to make sure any ethereal observer would see: human beings avoiding God. How beautiful you are to me still, after all these years! Eyes – I’ve never quite got used to the beauty of human eyes, so transparently enslaved by the soul, so ready to show me how much I’ve achieved.
Hard to calculate the things that brought me here. I’ll tell you one of them.
Not long ago, having been lengthily busy in the corporate world, I decided to put some time back into the meat and potatoes of the operation and get down amongst the plebs for a bit of slap and tickle. You need to keep your hand in. Senior style consultants in elite hair salons around the world will tell you: every now and then you need to just give someone a haircut. So you find me in a wood at the northern edge of Salisbury Plain (Stonehenge? Me again. Ritual rape, torture, murder. Calendars? These boffins kill me) with Eddie and Jane. Eddie’s been hearing voices – Baraquel, Arioc, Ezekeel, Jequon and Shamshiel to be precise, whispering words of wisdom in the small hours. In any case, up until a few hours ago Jane and Eddie were strangers – or rather, Eddie was a stranger to Jane; Jane was no stranger to Eddie, who’d been observing her for some time. Eddie’s a thirtyeight-year-old telecommunications engineer with a tankard-shaped head, small brown eyes and one permanently blackened thumbnail. Jane’s a twenty-four-year-old brunette of no special features but nothing wrong with her either who works as one of two receptionists in a small van hire office on an industrial estate at the edge of the city.
Serial potential written all over Eddie. Topple this domino and there’s no telling how many (look out girls!) will fall after it. Plus, his mother’s a rabid Catholic, which is icing on any cake. The boys have put in some time, but confessed that ultimately and against their expectations they need His Master’s Voice to clinch it. This happens to me a lot. I delegate, but sooner or later they shuffle in, sheepish, cap-fingering, wondering if I might find time to . . . ah . . . etc. Needless to say it’s a piece of Battenberg to me, the old Blade Runner. ‘Eddie,’ I said to him in his mother’s voice. ‘It’s okay, you know. You won’t get caught.’ (That’s pretty much all you lot need to hear, not that it’s morally defensible, but that it’s covered.) Did the trick. Downloaded the recommended chloroform dosage from the web (eeeeyup: me again) and off he went.
Most of you probably want the abduction, the rape, the murder, all the Thomas Harris palaver with the corpse, and believe me if this were Gunn I’m sure you’d get it; some pseudo-poetic cladding, some poignant details about cloud-shadows or the vividness of an empty Coke can by her knee, some watch-the-birdie writing to distract your attention from the possibility that the entire thing’s titillating to him (and you) – but even baldly listed facts will be enough to delight others among you, as they often do Gunn, decaf and gutless sadist that he is. My hands were tied and I was forced to perform oral sex. These are just impersonal newspaper details, but still lights wink, bells ring. He comforts himself with the belief that it’s the writer’s job to tell the truth unselectively, be that the truth of motherhood or the truth of murder. ‘Go ahead,’ Penelope barked at him. ‘You’ll be joining a venerable list of male writers who’ve written about men committing violence against women. Men killing women is a fucking genre all on its own. Of course I realise it’s your obligation to write about it, if it’s at all a part of the world (as is friendship and honour and simple kindness and people dying for their beliefs – but maybe none of those is creatively interesting) but it’s also your obligation to understand what it means to you and why you’re doing it. At which point, Declan, don’t come fucking crying to me if it turns out you’re doing it because you like it.’ As you can see, Penelope’s critical faculties were not to be engaged lightly – a lesson I’m not sure boneheaded Gunn ever learned.
But this isn’t Gunn, Hell be praised, nor is the business of Eddie and Jane the point. The point is that in the middle of everything a dog dragged itself past.
A black one, too. This dog had seen better days. This dog was dog tired. I don’t know where this wretched dog came from, but if he’d ever had his day it was a long time ago. To say that something had happened to this dog is to say that Hiroshima suffered a slight disturbance back in August ’45. Everything had happened to this dog. He’d been hit by something, some vehicle, an incident which had amputated a front leg and broken a back one, so that forward motion was a curious combination of hopping and dragging. But this was only his most recent bit of hard cheese. One eye was cataracted. His mouth (broken jaw, too, by the way) was rotting with a suppurating infection and most of his hair was gone. The exposed flesh revealed the wounds of a beating, all of which had gone bad. His arse was bleeding and his semi-exposed phallus unhealthily inflamed.
That wasn’t it. You didn’t think that was it, did you? Hello? I’ve presided over the torture and deaths of millions of human beings with as much emotional engagement as a nail-filing receptionist on a Friday afternoon. You think an injured hound is going to break my heart?
No, that wasn’t it. What was it was that moments from death this dog stopped to sniff and tentatively lick another dog’s turd that just happened to be coiled and glistening nearby. I watched him. I thought, State he’s in there’s no way; state he’s in he’s not going to be capable. A part of me even then was thinking (not knowing why): I do sincerely hope he doesn’t. I hope being this close to expiry finally releases him from the cage of his dumb instincts. I hope he just fucking dies, now.
But he didn’t. (He did less than a minute later.) He drag-hopped, bent his hideous head, sniffed and licked – and my voice inside me said: That’s you, Lucifer.
