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

looks (although I was always a sucker for beauty, and your pre-lapsarian progenitors make you lot look like a posse of anthraxed Quazzies), it was your potential. I looked on (from the lowest bough of a laburnum tree that had burst into blinding yellow bloom almost with an air of embarrassment at the spectacle of itself) as Himself coaxed and worried Adam from the dust. I watched the arrival of bone, the wet birth of blood, the woven tissues, the threaded capillaries, the shocking bag of skin (less Michelangelo than Giger meets Bacon meets Bosch). Those lungs would turn out to be a design flaw, mind you, with all the breathable nastiness I was going to inspire you to invent. Ah, and the genitals. Where the smart money was going. It was, one has to admit, mesmerizing, a gory wattle-and- daub masterpiece. Give the Maker His due, He knew how to Make. The nipples and hair were sweet touches, though you could see from the outset what the wear-and-tear spots were going to be, where the mileage was going to be racked-up: teeth; heart; scalp; bum. Still, you really were a piece of work. I lay on my laburnum bough (I was a feral cat at the time, as yet unnamed) rapt and, I must confess, a tad jealous. Angels had pure spirit and a one- dimensional existence blowing smoke up the Divine Bottom morning noon and night. Man, apparently, was going to have the entire natural world, sentience, reason, imagination, five juicy senses and, according to the development leaked before the war, a get out of jail free card courtesy of Jimmeny Christmas to be phased in not long before the fall of the Roman Empire with limitless retroaction.

You’ll excuse my flippancy. This is difficult for me. I’d been feeling peaky ever since I found out about Creation. On the one hand it gave me a superabundance of material to work with. On the other . . . What am I trying to say? On the other, it had about it the noxious whiff of finality. Once the world was up and running, once Man was abroad, rife with desires and garrotted by those dos and don’ts, my role was pretty much set for . . . well, for ever. You pause for reflection at these moments. And while we are pausing (Adam finished now, toenails, eyelashes, earlobes, fingerprints – that was forward planning, that, fingerprints) let’s not forget that I, Lucifer, was still in the first agonizing age of pain. Imagine having all your skin flayed off. Whilst having all your teeth drilled. Whilst having your knackers or vadge nailed to a fridge. Imagine your head being on fire all the time. That’s the tip of my iceberg of my pain.

With the pain, curiously, had come the conviction that I could bear it. Later (much later) by degrees (a lot of degrees) the conviction proved justified; I found I could shear off a wafer of myself, the thinnest, flimsiest wafer (not unlike the sliced ginger accompanying sushi) and lift it above and beyond the infernal pain. I’ve seen exceptional humans do it under torture. Enormously irritating to me and my torturers of course, but, you know, credit where credit’s due and all that.

So I was, let me repeat, in terrible pain. But I couldn’t keep away. Lying there on my bough watching the shadows crawling over Adam’s loins, I had an intimation of the rage and loneliness I’d be signing on for from these beginnings, a glimpse of the appalling waste and destruction, a first gutgrowl of what would be an eternally unsatisfied hunger – a moment, all in all, of doubt.

Night had crept into the garden. Crocuses and snowdrops were throbbing quills and pearly stars in the dark grass. The rustle of water and the sibilance of the wakeful trees. Ink-shadowed stones and the moon a chalky hoof print. The whole place attended to me with a Lawrentian intensity. My head sank forward on to my paws and I felt my breath moist in my nostrils. The bones in my body were heavy, and for the briefest moment – looking down at sleeping Adam’s brand new limbs and unopened face – for the briefest moment I must confess . . . I must confess . . . I did wonder, despite all that had gone before, despite rebellion, despite expulsion, despite the battlements and cesspits of Hell, despite my legion cohorts and their chorus of rage, despite everything, whether there might not be a chance to –

‘Lucifer.’

From which shameful reverie His voice woke me. The sound of it annihilated all the time between the last time I’d heard it (consigning me to . . . to . . .) and now. Then was now and now was then and there was no going back, no punishment disguised as forgiveness, no shamble back into the fetters of obedience. Wondering if I could escape the pain was worse than knowing I couldn’t. He knew that. The whole speculation had been a plant. Jimmeny’s idea. Well fuck the Pair – sorry, the Trio of Them.

So, incarnation. The angelic drug of choice. Unlike cocaine, not to be sniffed at. I look back on my first hours here much as the mature artist looks back at his youthful creations: with a teary mixture of embarrassment and nostalgia. I was, I’m afraid (is this the admission of an Archangel consumed by pride?) in a shocking state of hypersensitivity and gaucheness. You’ve got to laugh, really. (Which, incidentally, is how I’d thought of opening what turned out to be my ‘Hail horrors’ speech, until a more scrupulous examination of the chances of actually getting a laugh changed my mind.) I do laugh, in hindsight, at the rattlebag of schizophrenia, Tourette’s and satyriasis I must have seemed during those debut hours.

I have, as I said, tried it before, but never with licence. (Adolescents and pre-menstruals are useful. The mentally ill. Anyone stricken with grief or love. Your ideal possession candidate’s a thirteen-year-old recently orphaned schizophrenic girl three days away from her period on her way to see the shrink with whom she’s romantically besotted.) Former takeovers, then, have left me dressed in a set of clothes and shoes two sizes too small in a room the dimensions of which forbid ever standing or lying unbent, with laryngitis, heat rash, mumps, scrofula, gonorrhoea – you get the picture. This, on the other hand, this taking of a body without force or fear, wrapped me in a stole of material luxury the like of which I’d never imagined – and believe me, I’ve imagined quite a bit.

I entered where Gunn had exited: reclining in a tepid bath.

The feeling of entry . . . let me see . . . sinking upwards. Think of a gradual congregation of spiritual atoms, the adherence of each to each a contained ecstasy, the completed amalgam – me, entered in the Flesh – a throbbing and protracted orgasm that believe it or not had me oooohing and aaaahing and not quite knowing what to do with my newly acquired limbs, the way one of Betjeman’s tennis girls – bountiful Pam or whoever – would have carried on, I imagine, had you ever got her away from the court, prised her fingers from the Wilson’s damp grip, and stormed those rhododendron-like tennis knickers. It felt like (that ‘like’ again. Maddeningly not the thing itself . . .) breathing a heavy aphrodisiac gas. A terrible comfort, a saturation with both pleasure and endless desire. Welcome, Lucifer, to the concussive world of matter.

I’m delighted to say I’ve calmed down since then, but in those first hours I was my own worst enemy. Gunn’s bathroom, I’ve subsequently discovered, is really a quite dreary place (why he went in there for his frappery when he had the entire flat – not to say city – at his disposal is a mystery to me. Actually that’s not true; I know why: sheer habit, inaugurated in childhood, ingrained in adolescence, and obeyed without question in adulthood) but you should have tried telling me that when those first five buds of perception opened to its mouldy ceiling and sock-scented air, its taste of iron and drains, its greasy tub and brown water, its disconsolate soliloquy of plips and clanks. Five senses might not get you very far when it comes to perceiving Ultimate Reality, but by Beelzebub’s blistered buttocks this quintet will keep a body busy down here on earth.

A lawless horde of smells: soap, chalk, rotting wood, limescale, sweat, semen, vaginal juice, toothpaste, ammonia, stale tea, vomit, linoleum, rust, chlorine – a stampede of whiffs, a roistering cavalcade of reeks, stinks and perfumes in Bacchanalian cahoots . . . all are weeyulcum . . . all are weeyulcum . . . Yes, they certainly were, though they fairly gang-banged my virgin nostrils. I sniffed, recklessly, draughts long and deep; in went Gunn’s Pantene for fine or flyaway, wreathed with his shit’s ghost-odour, veined, too, with faded frangipani and sandalwood from ex-girlfriend Penelope’s incense sticks he burns bathside as pungent accompaniment to the pain of remembering her. In went the salt and apricots, the piscine smack and poached pears of current girlfriend Violet’s healthy and well-tended vadge, escorted by the U-bend’s verdigris and jollied along by Matey bathfoam, which self-indulgent Declan had insisted on as a holy relic from childhood, until my quiet voice and his fatal string of choices led him to his last, bubbleless dip . . .

And that was just the smells. Opening my newly acquired eyes, I found myself assaulted by a depthless wall of colour. I believe I actually flinched, tried to retreat – a little panic attack until I worked it out, that distance operated, that the entire world was not in fact plastered to the front of my