concept it amounts to a Rylean category mistake.
I can tell you what wasn’t going to be the deal. The deal wasn’t going to be that I accepted. The most myopic, cataracted, boss-eyed, occluded and cursory glance at the proposal should make that obvious. But not taking the deal didn’t mean that I wasn’t going to have some fu –
Do you know something? I’m not being completely honest. I know: you’re shocked. There was – by the flaming nipples of Astarte – there was the briefest, tiniest, most fleeting sliver of a moment in which I thought (they move fast, angelic thoughts: you’ve got to be quick), in which I wondered whether, actually, thinking about it, you know . . . whether in the end it wouldn’t be worth –
But like I said: they move fast. They shift. I was laughing at myself, hysterically, on the inside, before I’d even finished considering whether it might not have been something to consider. It’s not even fair to describe the process as one of considering. It was more of a rogue or involuntary twitch of the spirit, analogous perhaps to those in the corporeal realm which shock you, inexplicably, in that state between being awake and falling asleep. (What’s the matter? Dunno. Just got a massive twitch. Well you frightened the bloody life out of me. Now that I come to think of it, not infrequently precipitated by half-dreams of falling, yes? That sudden yank or jolt just before you hit the ground?)
Anyway. The point is, moment of professional weakness, masochistic fantasy, psychodemonic tic – call it what you like, it was there one instant, gone the next. What it came down to was –
No no no no no. It won’t do. That’s not the whole story. That is not, Lucifer, the whole story. Very well. I hold up my hand. Economy with the truth. The truth is I had to take it seriously. Had to, d’you see? In no more or no less the way than the Old Boy has to take genuine human penitence seriously. It’s a condition of His Nature. One doesn’t have a choice about some things – even He’d admit that. Of course what one wants to do is laugh the whole thing off. ‘Me back in Heaven,’ one wants to muse aloud with trowelled-on facetiousness, ‘yes, I see. Capital idea. Can I roll you another Camberwell Carrot?’
How long before I’m reinstated with full angelic clout? I asked Gabriel.
Wholly at His discretion.
So you’re saying that even if I make it through the human life without running amok and get back in Upstairs, it’ll be as a human soul until His Lordship feels like returning me to my former status and station?
Angelic status, yes. No guarantee of rank.
And what happens, my dearest Gabrielala, should I fail to get through the scribe’s life without mortal sin?
He shrugged. (I was at a loss for how to describe what he did in corporeal terms until yesterday, when the joke fat man in the Leather Lane chippy said ‘Sawt’n’vinnigga, chief?’ and I found Gunn’s shoulders going up – then down. How on earth should I know?) Charming. So you get back in, but there’s no guarantee that you’re not going to be polishing some bubble-head’s bugle down on the forty-second level for fifty billion years.
I took the one month ‘trial’ and sent Gabbers back Upstairs with a new set of terms and conditions. Not with any hope that they’d be accommodated, obviously – but to let them know that I’m taking the proposition – ahem – seriously.
Now. I’ve got some moves – but even if I didn’t, there’s no reason to pass up a month’s vacation in the Land of Matter and Perception.
You know what Eden was? I’ll tell you. Edenic. Susurrating trees reached out fingers of frothy foliage to catch the languid landings of turquoise birds. Opalescent streams exhaled the sweet scent of sewage-free water. Red and silver fish jewelled obsidian meres. Succulent grass appeared and let green really show itself. (That grass and that green, they were made for each other.) Gentle rains fell from time to time and the earth lifted its face up to receive them. Colours debuted daily in the sky: aquamarine, mauve, pewter, violet, tangerine, scarlet, indigo, puce. Colours were textures in Eden. You wanted to roll around naked in ’em. The material world, it was apparent from the get-go, was my kind of place.
Yes, Eden was beautiful – and if I had to squeeze through corporeal keyholes to crash it – so be it. (Hasn’t it bothered you, this part of the story, my being there, I mean? What was I doing there? ‘Presume not the ways of God to scan,’ you’ve been told in umpteen variations, ‘the proper study of Mankind is Man.’ Maybe so, but what, excuse me, was the Devil doing in Eden?) I took the forms of animals. I found I could. (That’s generally my reason for doing something, by the way, because I find I can.) I hung around the gates for quite a while; I made several slow passes at the material boundaries until I sensed – my hunches are infallible – that flesh and blood would open to me, that angelic spirit could cleave and inhabit the body, drawing form around itself in a meaty cloak. It’s claustrophobic, at first, taking on a form. Your spirit instinct screams against it. Incarnation requires a strong will and a cool head – well, a cool mind, until an actual head is available. Imagine you suddenly realised you could breathe underwater. Imagine you could take water into your lungs, ditch the hydrogen and hang on to the oxygen. Taking that first breath wouldn’t be easy, would it? Your reflex would be to kick for the surface and wolf down air as nature intended. Well, it’s the same with corporeal habitation. Only the single-minded overcome that reflex panic and yield to the body’s fit. And as if you needed reminding: I am one of the single-minded. So I took the forms of animals. Birds were the obvious first choice, what with their bird’s-eye view of things. And flying’s hardly to be sniffed at, when you consider it. (One of your most irresistible traits, by the way, is the speed with which you exhaust novelty. I was on a red-eye from JFK to Heathrow the other day, working on a rapper who’s this close to stabbing his model girlfriend to death, when I noticed how utterly indifferent the passengers were to what they were doing, namely, flying through the air. A glance out of the window would have revealed furrowed fields of cloud stained smokeblue and violet as night and morning changed shifts – but how were they passing the time in First, Business and Coach? Crosswords. In-flight movies. Computer games. Email. Creation sprawls like a dewed and willing maiden outside your window awaiting only the lechery of your senses – and what do you do? Complain about the dwarf cutlery. Plug your ears. Blind your eyes. Discuss Julia Roberts’s hair. Ah, me. Sometimes I think my work is done.) Yes, I thoroughly enjoyed flying. And flying at night? Oy. Like butter. Ask the owls. I bathed in the darkness and basked in the light. You’re poor on basking, you lot. With the exception of white girls from the northern hemisphere’s urban pits, who, supine on southern beaches quite naturally allow the sun to strip from them the last tissues of sentience, humans have everything to learn from lizards. The only animal from which humans have nothing to learn, in fact, is the sheep. Humans have already learned everything the sheep’s got to teach.
The animals shied away from me, even when I was one of them. They just . . . sensed. They drew away and that was that. Me and animals would never be friends. I’ve made use of them from time to time down the millennia, but there’s never going to be a relationship. Three things: they don’t have souls, they can’t choose, and they’re dependent on God – ergo they’re of no consequence to me. The absence of a soul, by the way, makes it easy to inhabit a body. (Therefore, why is Elton John still pudging around unpossessed? I hear you ask.) Conversely, the presence of a soul is an absolute bugger to get around. I manage it, periodically, but it’s not like falling off a log.
However, again I digress.
He knew I was there. God the Holy Spirit knew first and blabbed to the Other Two, who knew in any case. Who’d known all along. He let me stay. He created Eden and let the Devil in. Got that? What else do you need to know about Him? I mean do I need, actually, to go on?
A word about humankind – and I’m . . . you know . . . shooting from the hip here: I was hooked on you, instantly. The hundred billion galaxies, the stars, the moons, the cosmic dust, the wrinkles, the loops, the black holes, the worm-holes . . . It was nice stuff, spectacular in a remote, high-art way. But you lot? Oh, man. Should I say that you were right up my street? You were right up my street, in the front door and sitting in the comfy chair with your shoes off smoking a huge spliff while I made us both a cup of PG. It wasn’t your
