Violet, you know, is troubled by a Little Voice. (I worried that the transmogrification would fuck with my clairvoyance, but it hasn’t substantially. I’ve noticed blips, the odd blind spot, but by and large I seem to have got away with it as carry-on.) Violet never listens to her Little Voice and she hears every word it says. Not that its range of words is wide. On the contrary. It repeats the same things, at irregular but increasingly frequent intervals. You’re not an actress. You don’t have any talent. You’ve knobbled your own auditions because you know you’re not up to it in the end. You’re a vain and talentless fraud.
It’s not me. Not all Little Voices are me, you know. Even my own Little Voice – did I mention that? – even my own Little Voice comes from a place I’m not sure I own. I have of late, it generally begins . . . I don’t quite ignore it.
Declan, of course, had a Little Voice of his own by the end, and should probably have gone to see someone. Hardly an astute diagnosis given the bath and razor blades, but one I can’t resist making. The odour of that sadness lingers, you see, in the rucks and runnels of his mortal flesh. Stretch marks of the soul, so to speak. It bothers me. In the absence of my angelic pain I feel it like an intimate and diffuse toothache.
I don’t much like the look of him, if you want the truth. If I was considering staying – staying for good, I mean – I’d be hitting a bank and forking out for state-of-the-art plastic surgery or a Californian bodyswap. Est hoc corpus meum. Maybe so, but it leaves a lot to be desired. When I confront the mirror I see a simian forehead, dolorous eyes and thinning eyebrows. His skin’s beige, greasy and porous. The hairline’s not exactly struggling to conceal its upcoming recession, and the pot belly (too much booze, too much fat, zero exercise – the corporeal side of the basic adult human story) doesn’t help at all. The flesh on the nose is thickening and the slightest dropping of the head reveals a putative double chin. He looks, all in all, like an under-the-weather chimp. I doubt very much he’s washed his ears since childhood. At seventeen, eighteen, he might have taken you in with his Navajo granddad story (supported by the usual nonsense: long hair, silver and turquoise jewellery, beads); you see him at thirty-five and look for a much less glamorous explanation: spic-mix, wog-cocktail, decaf wop. Truth is: Irish Roman Catholic mum boozily knocked up in a moment of weakness (I thank you) by a saucy Sikh from Sacramento at a friend’s birthday party in Manchester. Ships in the night, bun in the oven, he’s gone, she’s Catholic: enter beige Gunn, fatherless and feeble at five pounds, six ounces. She brings him up on her own. He loves her and hates himself for blighting her young life. Grows up with bog-standard Virgin-Whore dichotomy as far as women go (with which I’m now lumbered, thank you very much); rabid Oedipus complex replaced during teen years by terrifying phase of homoerotic fantasies (I’ll find a use for them before I’m done, you watch), before sexual imagination stabilizes around mild heterosexual sado-masochism in early twenties, concomitant with discovery of some effeminacy of body, a loathing for manual labour, a penchant for the arts and a much mauled but still virulent belief in the Old Fellah and yours truly.
I’m not wild about his wardrobe, either. I wish there was a more exciting way of telling you it’s dull, but there isn’t: Declan Gunn’s wardrobe is dull. Two pairs of jeans, one black, one blue. The baggy charity shop strides to which I had recourse after my debut wankathon. Half a dozen t-shirts, a couple of woolly jumpers, a beige (!?) fleece, a greatcoat, a pair of brandless trainers and a pair of DM shoes. I look like a tramp. Doesn’t even own a suit. They’ve done this deliberately, to assault my dignity, to wound my much-talked-about pride. Gunn, needless to say after the extravagance of his unsellable and suicide-inspiring opus, A Grace of Storms, can’t afford new clothes, what with the first two books now out of print and his agent, Betsy Galvez, only ever seeing his name because he’s immediately after Guiseppe’s Pizzeria in her Rolodex. He should have stolen some money. Should’ve mugged a pensioner. Pensioners are loaded. Tartan shopping trolleys? Full of gold ingots. Why do you think they move so slowly? They die of hypothermia and no one mentions all the loot they’ve saved by never eating or turning the heating on. I love old people. Seven or eight decades of me whispering to them about all the faggots and coons (it turns out they fought for!) and by the time death comes calling they’re oozing malice and hawking-up spleen. The souls of old people are ten a penny in Hell. Honestly. We’ve got a slush-pile.
Gunn lives alone in a second-floor one-bedroom excouncil flat in Clerkenwell. One small bedroom, one small living room, a small kitchen and a small bathroom. (I looked for other adjectives.) Outside, a courtyard. The surrounding buildings go up six floors so Gunn’s place is starved of light. He had dreams of moving in with Violet. Violet didn’t. Violet had dreams of Gunn using the money from the sale of his then-in-progress masterpiece to tart the Clerkenwell place up and sell it so that they could move to Notting Hill. From the sale of his . . . Yes. There’s the rub. All things considered, I can’t honestly say I’m surprised our boy had settled on suicide. Some humans survive concentration camps, others are driven over the edge by a broken fingernail, a forgotten birthday, an unpayable phone bill. Gunn’s somewhere in-between. Somewhere in-between’s where I do much of my finest work.
His mother died of drink two years ago and left him the flat. Me, drink and loneliness, we finished Gunn’s mother off. Drink wolfed down her liver, me and loneliness gobbled up her heart. Liver and heart, my vital organs of choice. She didn’t come down, mind you. Must be cooling her heels in Purgatory. Last Rites. Gunn called in crapulous Father Mulvaney (sherry-breath, brogue blarney, red knuckles he couldn’t leave off cracking, and eczema; I’ll have his liver too, the old hypocrite) and that was me robbed of another tenant. There’s no justice, you know. Angela Gunn. I wanted her. Some souls – you can’t explain it – they’ve got quality written all over them. She had guilt over Gunn, having brought him dadless into the world (thought the fact that he nearly throttled himself with his own umbilical an indictment of her motherhood); but it wasn’t the guilt that did for her, it was the loneliness. A tawdry smattering of affairs with men vastly her inferior. Her disgust because she couldn’t leave the idea of a grand passion alone. In the small hours she’d observe them (after the grumpy wrestling, the loveless gymnastics) naked and sprawled as if taken down mid-crucifixion. Grimly, she’d force herself to absorb the unpleasant details: fatty shoulders; dirty nails; brittle hair; faded tattoos; pimples; stupidity; greed; hatred of women; pretentiousness; arrogance. In the small hours she’d sit bitter with tears and humming with drink and look down at his body, whoever he was, some Tony or Mike or Trevor or Doug, forcing her mouth into a rictus as the sordid replays ran in her head. The absurdity of it, she thought, this quest for the love of a man who was her equal. She loathed herself for it. She thought of her life (and herself) as a missed opportunity. Somewhere, back there, she had missed something. What was it? When was it? The worse horror beneath: that she hadn’t missed anything, that her life was merely the sum of her choices and that her choices had led her to this: another truncated encounter; the carcinogenic belief in the idea of a Great Love; clammy sex; loneliness in the small hours.
She had loved Gunn, but his education distanced them. She craved his visits then couldn’t bear that he was embarrassed by her malapropisms and too-young skirts. She was intelligent but inarticulate. Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world. Gunn knew all this. Went every time armed with the noblest filial intentions, then felt them evaporate when she talked of ‘broadening her horoscopes’. Her drinking was a spectral third with them, Gunn not quite taking it in. Knowing and hoping. (Jesus, you humans and your knowing; you humans and your hoping.) Her belief in his writing. Gunn suspected she prayed for it. She did. She prayed to God He’d find a publisher for her son’s book. Idiot ex-altar boy Gunn worried, then, that it wouldn’t feel like a clean achievement. Soiled by the Hand of God, so to speak.
But then liver failure, hospital, his avalanche of guilt and shame. Her only fifty-five, looking seventy. Mulvaney of the red raw scalp hadn’t seen her for three years, but they cut to the chase when he arrived, smelling of wet London and Cockburn’s Port. Gunn shuffled, miserable, by the bed. Holding her hand (for the first time in a long time) he discovered with a shock its onion skin and Saturnalian revel of veins. Horror because he remembered it soft and firm and smelling of Nivea. These were the memories that jumped him over the months after she died, heartless muggers bent on the redistribution of the mind’s buried wealth –
Bugger. You see what happens? I only mentioned the woman because I meant to tell you that’s how Gunn got the flat. Now my screen’s ambushed by maudlin guff.
Salutary should other demonic presences pass this way: manifestly you can’t squat in someone’s body without some of their life filtering through to yours. It’s been the toughest part of the whole trip, so far, accommodating Gunn’s leftovers; approximate omniscience notwithstanding, I never quite know which unfortunate tic or nasty habit of his I’m going to run into next. Couldn’t they have picked someone else? Some rock star with an entourage of sycophants? Some sheikh with a hooker habit? Some coke-fiend with a yacht? Anyone would’ve been better than this noncer with his objective correlatives and his Earl Grey and his sorry-ass bank balance.
On the subject of Gunn’s bank balance – two words: Oh dear.
Mrs Karp is Declan Gunn’s Account Supervisor at the NatWest. The day our boy bought the razor blades a letter arrived from Mrs Karp. Its tone was stern but regretful (the next was just stern) and it requested the return of Gunn’s cheque book and cheque card, cut in half, immediately. It pointed out, regretfully, that Gunn was upwards of £3,500 overdrawn (£2,500 over his limit) and that despite repeated efforts on her part to get him to come in and discuss the situation he had been unwilling to do anything but continue spending money he didn’t have. Which left her no alternative, etc.
Which left me no alternative to a bit of hands-on, you’ll be delighted to hear: get out of Gunn’s body for an hour or so, nip round to Mrs Karp’s semi in Chiswick, scare the living rectum out of her and get her to do something creative with Gunn’s balance. But if there’s a flaw in a simple plan it’s usually fundamental, and the flaw in this simple plan was no exception: it hurt so bad the minute I exited Gunn’s flesh that I shot straight back in without even leaving the flat.
You can see Someone’s thinking behind this, can’t you? I get so used to the absence of angelic pain that even living out my days in Gunn’s flatulent corpus is preferable to the flames and nukes of disembodiment. God’s coup: Lucifer’s voluntary demotion to the life of a penniless pen-pusher in Clerkenwell; maybe the Old Fruit’s developing a sense of irony after all. One of the things I never tire of (it’s a problem, for eternal superbeings, tiring of things) is my own astonishment at how stupid He must think I am. Is He arrogant enough to think that a brief sojourn in the dank and clunking rucksack of Gunn’s body . . .?
Relax, fans. Come August I’ll slip into that pain like Biggles into his flying jacket. Meantime, I’ll find ways around things.
‘My Lord, I didn’t recognize you.’
Nelchael. There aren’t many you can trust. Nelchael’s one of them. My numbers man. Most of the world’s numbers are bound by God to make sense. Occasionally there are glitches. It’s Nelchael’s job – when it suits us – to exploit them.
‘Account number 44500217336. See what you can do. Doesn’t have to be millions. Fifty grand should do it. Got that?’
‘My Lord Lucifer, I –’
‘You remember, Nelchael, what I told you before I left?’ Not easy to maintain dictatorial dignity when you’re sitting on a moth-eaten couch smoking a Silk Cut and biting your nails, looking for all the world like that sallow chimpanzee, Declan Gunn.
‘That this mission was top secret, my Lord.’
‘Top fucking secret, Nelks,’ I said. ‘And that’s the way it’s going to stay. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yes, my Lord.’
‘Apart from you, no one else knows of my business here on earth. If I returned to Hell to find that word had spread –’
‘To find that idle tongues were wagging, then my reasoning, Nelchael, would lead me to conclude that you had betrayed my trust, would it not?’
‘My Lord I exist to do your bidding.’
‘Yes, that’s right. Keep in mind Gabreel.’
Gabreel disobeyed my ruling placing a moratorium on incubism back in Ancient Egypt. Disobeyed it royally, you might say. He fucked Cleopatra. (Gabreel was an inveterate letch, of course, and Cleo couldn’t keep her femurs crossed for five minutes at a time – it was inevitable.) I had to make an example of him. Ugly. I know gentle Nelchael has nightmares to this day. Gabreel himself got over it centuries ago. Besides, I made it up to him in the fifteenth: a long weekend with Lucrezia Borgia.
I should explain. It’s been a problem, this business of angels having sex with mortal women. Not that all angels are straight: Usiel’s queer as a cat-fart; so are Busasejal and Ezequeel, or Eezaqueen as we call him, to mention but three of thousands. Most of us, when it comes down to it, will enjoy carnal congress with the ladies and the gents. Same goes for you, really – boarding school, stir, Navy – just needs the right conditions to bring it out. Plus, queer consorting has one huge advantage over straight action: no issue.
. . . the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose . . .
says Genesis 6:2. The ‘sons of God’ were angels. My lot (His lot acquired neither the taste nor the opportunity); the ‘daughters of men’ were, naturally, mortal women. What you’re looking at here – though no one seems to notice – is crazy copulation between renegade angels and up-for-it earth girls. A pack of trouble. There are two ways of having it off with mortals. The first is incubism (a word you haven’t invented yet but certainly should have, given the amount of humping we’ve done), the second possession. With incubism, the angel stays an angel; with possession, the angel slips into a human host to get the job done. Incubism’s decaf, possession’s full roast. You lot do it with each other and half the time barely feel a thing. When we get involved . . . wah. Gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. But as I’ve said, possession’s no mean trick. Incubism, on the other hand, was something most of the fallen could turn their hands to, and was still popular despite its want of salt. The girls seemed to enjoy it, too, though they went through the whole business somnambulistically, waking flushed and guilty – ‘you wouldn’t believe the dream I had last night, Marj . . .’ – not to mention the risk they ran of being burned at the stake if word got out.
But there were two big problems with inter-being highjinx. The first was what became known as carnal dementia. An angel in this condition would become obsessed with his earthly squeeze, at best to the point of neglecting his proper functions and at worst to the point of leaving his post altogether to moon around the beloved, pining to become human himself. Unacceptable, obviously. It’s one thing to dip your angelic wick, it’s quite another to start dreaming of settling down in a two-bedroomed wattle and daub in Ur. That would have been grounds for a ban sooner or later, even without the second problem, the Nephilim. Genesis 6:4:
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the Sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bear children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown . . .
Rubbish. There were no giants in the earth in those or any other days, and the idea that the Nephilim, the fruit of spiritflesh coupling, became ‘mighty men’ is one of the most preposterous distortions in the Old Testament. Through some occult law governing congress between the Seen and the Unseen realms, the Nephilim were dreary, whinging, neurotic, useless, ugly little cretins. It’s one of the few remaining mysteries for me, why those kids turned out so utterly without merit and aesthetic appeal. If they’d been morally good, I’d have allowed them to survive in the hope of corrupting them. If they’d been morally bad, I’d have allowed them to live on the basis of their contribution to fucking up the world. But they were so utterly, solipsistically miserable and boring that they were, frankly, an embarrassment. It’s amazing, isn’t it: you think you’re beyond embarrassment, what with being Purely Evil and all that. Then these farking whining, self-obsessed freaks turn up as the issue of your lust and it just makes you . . . ugh. Never mind. Point is I wiped them out. One Mr Sheen-style sweep across the surface of the earth, and the excrescent offences were gone . . .
Or so I thought. I’ve no conclusive proof, but I’ve long suspected that some of my brethren – no more than a handful – somehow managed to snaffle their wretched offspring away, concealed in some cranny from the scythe of my wrath. Every now and then I’ll spot someone (a Fleetwod Mac documentary, an Elton John special – the music industry does seem suspiciously fertile in this respect) and wonder whether Nephilim blood doesn’t still course through human veins. I keep thinking I should do something about it, but, you know, I’m so busy all the time . . .
‘Now, Nelchael. What of your other charge?’
‘Charge, my Lord?’
I rolled Gunn’s eyes. (I’m getting the hang of these gestures. That Gallic shrug-with-downturned mouth’s one of my favourites just now. That and the tut-with-eye-roll I’d just delivered to my servant.) ‘Give me strength,’ I said, under my breath. ‘Your other task, idiot. Your other errand.’
‘Of course, my Lord. Forgive me. I see, I see what you –’
‘Have you found it yet?’
‘Alas, my Lord, Limbo is deceptively large. The . . . the unbaptised infants alone number –’
‘Yes yes, I know all that. Time, Nelkers, is most definitely not on our side. Keep looking. And bring me word immediately you find it. Understood?’
‘Understood, Sire.’
‘One more thing.’
‘My Lord?’
‘Keep an eye on Astaroth. I want names and rank of all those closest to him. Now go.’
I checked the balance the following morning. £79,666.00. Nice touch, that. Made me smile. I celebrated with a fry-up at a Leather Lane greasy before hitting Oxford Street for a sartorial shopping spree and a bit of how’s your father.