Say what you like about me, but don’t say I can’t wing it, will you? I mean, would you have thought of that? The Devil makes work for idle hands – even if they’re his own. I’m not overly ashamed to admit that until I met Harriet in the bar I had no higher agenda than the exhaustive expenditure of Gunn’s mortal resources on excess: I’ve got a shocking weakness for scrambled egg with smoked salmon, fresh dill and coarse ground black pepper, it turns out; I’m up to eighty Silk Cut a day, but I’m pretty sure I’ve hit a plateau with smoking; the bar staff . . . know me, shall we say, and have even officially added the Lucifer Rising – vodka, tequila, orange juice, tomato juice, Tabasco, Tio Pepe, Grand Marnier, cinnamon and a pepperoncino chilli – to the joint’s unadventurous cocktail menu. I’ve ridden the tiger ragged. That tiger, it’s rolled over on its blazing back and put up its paws and just asked me to stop. Cocaine (two lines of which form the tenth unofficial ingredient in a Lucifer Rising) has found its feisty way up both ports of my hungry hooter, and I’ve slogged (and whacked, and ploughed, and rootled, and slurped, and chomped) my way through a good half of the talent at XXX-Quisite Escorts – ’girls with personality and verve for the gentleman who demands excellence’. Do I demand excellence? Let me tell you, that excellence they’ve got on offer at XXX-Quisite, it’s excellent. I’m feeling . . . Well, I’m feeling good, you know? Violet-length bubble baths, oven-roasted quail, coke-dusted nipples and the odd vanilla-flavoured vulv, altered states, clairvoyant cachet (I’ve got a whole posse of admirers here now) and the strangely reliable lust inspired by Harriet’s past-it poop-chute – it’s not much compared to my Rwandan rumbles or Balkan brouha-has, you know, but it’s something, it’s stuff. What else does one do with one’s finite body, with one’s life on earth? I’ve been dreaming of a vacation like this for billennia. And now? – Oh glorious and bountiful serendipity! – Harriet, Nexus Films, and Trent Bintock.

Trent’s short film Including Everything won at Sundance this season. And Cannes. It won at Los Angeles, too. And Berlin. And everywhere else that mattered and everywhere else that didn’t. Trent, a twenty-five-year-old New Yorker of such gilt and chiselled good looks as to amount to a self-parody, is currently under contract to the remarkable Harriet Marsh of Nexus Films. He looks like a cross between an aerobic Apache and a Californian surf god. His fingernails and teeth appal with a whiteness that would shame the snows of Aspen. Trent, whose youthful brush with even modest celebrity has lifted him to heights of vanity that would make Gunn look shy, is what you might call ’poised’ for conquest. Harriet is going to launch him. Launching young men is one of Harriet’s pastimes; she considers herself a kind of watermark they’ll carry out into the world, visible in future only when the young man is held up against a strong light . . . The only thing missing from this picture is the picture. The feature that’s going to put Trent on Hollywood’s A-list and a planet-sized wedge into Nexus’s coffers. The feature, the picture, the movie, the film. The story. The one I pitched post-coitally to Harriet over three bottles of Bolly and eight lines of the Very Reverend Charles Cocaine.

Oh I know it’s frivolous. So deshed frivolous. But once Harriet took me seriously I couldn’t but run with it. She picked up the blower there and then. LA. Tokyo. Paris. Mumbai. Twenty-five words or less? Less. ’“Lucifer”,’ she said. ‘Creation. Fall. Eden – Julia – battle on Earth with Christ. Effects up the arse. Controversy.’ She capped the pitch with pure anti-logic. ‘The most expensive film ever made.’ They loved it. You can’t blame me, can you? Obviously set the record straight before the end of time, obviously unveil the Real Me – but think of the merchandising. That and we leak a story that now-reclusive scriptwriter Gunn was Actually Possessed by Lucifer to write the script. Bump off a couple of sour grapes critics to give the thing some momentum. Maybe decapitate Julia half-way through shooting and roll in Penelope Cruz. ’. . . members of the crew are beginning to believe the rumour that writer Declan Gunn made some Faustian pact. . .’ Lucifer’s going to be the pop culture icon for the final days of pop culture. And the final days of everything else, now that you mention it. Move over Madonna. The Caths, the Fundamentalists, the Baptists, Jumpin’ Jeehosophet’s Witnesses – Christ, anyone who’s anyone on the overlarge map of Christianity is going to be picketing movie theatres worldwide. And the kids? The kids are going to love it.

Honestly, I looked in the mirror this morning and thought: You know what you are, don’t you? You’re cocky. Your trouble, Lucifer, your irresistible and invidious trouble, is that you’ve always got to go the extra yard. Not content to accept Declan’s soul self-delivered by the mortal sin of suicide, you want to put him back into play with a new set of conditions that are going to freshen his appetite for life and lead him away from the Old Man all over again. ‘I had this soul already,’ you want to say to Him, between sips of Remy and insouciantly expelled smoke-rings, ‘I already had it, but I put it back. I’d like you to observe, Old Fruit, as, with his new lease of life, snatched from the very doorstep of certain Hell, your boy spends what remains of his liberty walking straight back into my arms . . .’ Confidence? This is meta-confidence, Toots.

So there you have it. Coming to a theatre near you. What kills me is this quaint business of me coming back here to Gunn’s hovel to write. Don’t laugh. Can’t squeeze a word out at the hotel. I’m not complaining, really: the poverty of Gunn’s former life provides a titillating counterpoint to the extravagant one I’m living on his behalf at the Ritz. A counterpoint in small doses, let me stress, in very, very small doses.

Life among the hotel’s loaded suits me. I’m a Name: the clairvoyant who pretends to be the Devil. Celebrity, you see, on a scale Declan could (and regularly did) only dream about. They’re used to celebs there, obviously. Staff are prohibited on pain of dismissal from making a fuss. I mean they’re polite, of course – they are supposed to recognize you – but none of that ‘Oh, Mr Cruise I just loved you in the one with the retard’ nonsense. Word of the Film Deal is out. There’s a whispery buzz about us, me, Trent and Harriet, when we park at the bar. The Lucifer Rising is the best-selling cocktail in the house. I wake up these mornings with a grin on my gob and pep in my prick. The sun comes in the window and embraces me. Those champagne breakfasts Harriet insists on practically guarantee a Feelin’ Groovy sort of day. Gunn’s bones seem finally to be coming into some kind of right alignment. I sing in the shower (Giddupah giddorn up – like a sex-machine – giddorn up) and take the stairs three at a time. This is how one should live. This, let me repeat, is how one should live.

(You know, it’s true. Work had really been getting me down latterly. Of late. The predictability. The routine. The absence of even the ghost of a challenge. With nice symmetry, my newly acquired corporeal threads provide material for the analogy: I’d felt heavy, sluggish, fevered now and then, stiff of joint, leaden of head, sour of guts, immaterially peaky and generally under the angelic weather. This getaway’s just what I needed. A change, as they say, is as good as a rest.)

The clairvoyance gimmick’s magnetic. Jack Eddington wants to give me my own show. Lysette Youngblood wants me on the road with Madonna. Gerry Zooney wants me to go head-to-head with Uri Geller. Todd Arbuthnot wants to hook me up with his contacts in Washington. Who are these people? They’re members of my Ritz coterie.

‘Do you have any idea, Declan, of the sort of money you could make with this?’ Todd Arbuthnot said to me last night, after I’d told him a thing or two about Dodi and Di that made his toenails curl.

‘Yes, Todd, I do have an idea,’ I said. ‘And do, dear boy, please, call me Lucifer.’

They don’t get it, the Devil thing. They write it off as permissible guru eccentricity. Needless to say, none of them has heard of Declan Gunn. None of them has read Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest. None of them has read Boneshadows. Not that the obscurity credentials didn’t come in handy with Trent, who’s a writing snob, when he’s not out of his box on drugs.

‘Okay,’ he said, coming up bleary-eyed from a toot in my suite, where, by mutual agreement, our ’development meetings’ take place. Harriet was out. Dining with microelectronics and pharmaceuticals. Outside the window lit London beckoned. I get terribly excited once it’s gone dark. I get terribly excited while it’s still light, too; but that darkness, those winking city lights . . . I’ve started going out, you see. Going out, in London, at night, with money, drugs, famous people, and extremely expensive prostitutes. (Whereas Gunn used to go out, at night, alone, with hardly any money, no drugs, no celebs, fail to pull, get denied sex even after the capitulation and retreat to Vi’s, then come home, have a hungover handjob, a sob, a vomit, a cigarette, and much mulling over just how close he was to having altogether given up hope before falling into a troubled and unregenerative sleep.)

‘Okay,’ Trent said, stretching his bottom jaw and widening then contracting his sapphire eyes. ‘We start with just a full black screen and a voiceover. No stars, right? I mean, there wouldn’t, would there, be actual stars?’

I rounded off my scheduling call to Elise at XXX-Quisite, and put the phone down. Your verbal engagement on the telephone – or in conversation with someone else, for that matter – presents no obstacle to Trent. ‘There weren’t stars,’ I said. ‘There wasn’t anything.’

He looked at me for a moment very much in the manner of a person about to pass into an inaccessible dimension of consciousness. Then he shook himself. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Right, right, right. You were there. I forget.’

‘What we’ve got to nail,’ I said, lighting up one of Harriet’s left-behind Gauloises,’ what we’ve really got to pin down – because everything else will flow from it, you know –’

‘I know, man. Christ I know . . .’

‘Is the moment I turn. The moment I rebel.’

‘Run with it. Run with it.’

‘Michael’s just laid down that infamous accusation of pride, right?’ I sprang up from the bed and let the city’s lights catch me on Gunn’s better side. ‘And I’m like . . . “Pride?” It’s a whisper at this stage, a Pacino whisper: “Pride?” But this is one of those whisper-builds-to-shout scenes. “Is it pride to want a place of your own? Is it pride to want to be independent?” Little by little louder, right? “Is it pride to want to do something in the universe?” Louder: “Is it pride to want to be somebody?” Louder still: “Is it pride to want to live with dignity?” Then full fucking throttle: “Is it pride to get sick of KISSING AN OLD MAN’S ASS?”’

Trent shook his head in ecstatic disbelief, like a sent musician. ‘Christ, man you should take the fucking part,’ he said.

I pointed at him with my cigarette. ‘You, dear boy,’ I admonished, ’are an appalling flatterer.’

I can’t tell you how good I was feeling. Looking at things like daffodils and clouds is wonderful. Looking at things like daffodils and clouds having just spent £372 on dinner and dropped two tabs of ecstasy in preparation for a five-hour shift with XXX-Quisite’s friendliest platinum blonde double-act, that’s really wonderful. I know what the majority of you think about all this. All this sex and money and drugs. You think: people who live like that never end up happy. You need to think that in just the way men with small penises need to think size doesn’t matter. It’s understandable. The rich, the famous, the big-dicked, the slim-and-gorgeous – they incite an envy so urgent that you can escape it only by translating it into pity. People who live like that never end up happy. Yes, you’re right. But neither do you. And in the meantime, they’ve had all the sex and drugs and money. (Gunn, I might add, retained his carious Catholicism largely because atheism would have forced him to accept that nothing terrible was going to happen to people like Jack Nicholson and Hugh Hefner and Bill Wyman after they died – a proposition he couldn’t have borne.)

‘How come no one’s done this movie?’ Trent asked. ‘I mean you’d think, right? Spielberg. Lucas. Cameron. Mind you, the FX budget’s gonna go through the fucking ozone layer.’

‘If we write it, they will pay,’ I said.

‘We do want effects, right?’ Trent said. ‘I mean, we’re not seeing this as some sort of Beckett existentialist struggle crap, are we?’

‘We want the biggest film since Titanic, Trent,’ I said.

‘And none of that “no big names” shit, either,’ Trent said, between toots from his own monogrammed spoon. ‘These film school assholes who think it’s a sin to use named talent. That’s so fucking uncool.’

‘Can I fuck your buns, Trent?’

‘I mean for Christ’s – what?’

‘Nothing. A verbal tick, dear boy. You’re right. So uncool. Harriet wants Julia Roberts for Eve.’ I said all this and managed to keep a straight face. I’d like some credit for that.

‘Too bad Bob De Niro already played Lucifer in Angel Heart’, Trent said, rubbing the tip of his nose, furiously, as if trying to erase it. ‘And Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick. Fuck, and Pacino just did Satan in that piece of shit with Keanu Reeves.’

(Shall I tell you what the list of actors who’ve turned down the chance to play me looks like? It looks short.)

‘Depp,’ I said. ‘Keanu’d jump at it like a gibbon – but we’ve got to have some fucking ability. We should think about lining up some cameos, too. Maybe some rock dinosaur with false teeth to play God. Robert Plant with a beard.’

‘Yeah, but do we even want a guy God?’ Trent asked. ‘I’m thinking more like hand-star-egg-eye-cosmic-dust-Giger-secretion stuff.’

‘I like the way you think, Trent,’ I said. ‘I like the way you think.’

All this has not been without effect on my relationship with Violet, naturally. (Here’s a question: do you think keeping Gunn attached to Violet will be a good thing for him?) Thanks to her never having read Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest, I’ve had little trouble ’reminding’ her that it was the story of Lucifer’s rebellion, fall, and battle with Christ on earth.

‘It’s going to be the biggest marketing campaign ever,’ I told her, over daiquiris at Swansong. I’ve kept quiet about the Ritz. As far as she knows I’m still living at the Clerkenwell pad. Essential, too, to keep her away from Harriet and Trent – essential if I’m to sustain the illusion that she’d get within remote imaging range of a part. So far the prodigal spending – my wallet’s attention deficit disorder – has kept her enthralled; but it’s only a matter of time before she starts to expect the meet-and-greets, the air kisses, the Midas touch handshake, the inevitable sack-negotiations. Everything, down here, is always just a matter of Time.

‘Harriet’s got one of her people talking to McDonald’s on Thursday. The McDevil. We’re getting the “Quake” team for the CD-Rom game. Oh yeah – and we’re going to do collectable cards – the Fallen Angels. Like Top Trumps.’

‘Top Trumps?’

‘Harriet’s already started cutting the smaller investors out of the picture. Prince Faquit’s just inked four-point-five over oysters at Non. You can’t believe how easy it is to get money from people for film. As long as it’s an incredibly large amount, that is. Indies can’t cover the grip’s fucking pizza.’

‘You did tell her about me, didn’t you, Declan?’ Violet asked, having assumed that for the last few seconds I’d decided to drop into an African language.

‘Yes.’

‘No, but I mean you did, didn’t you?’

‘I’ve told you. Eve.’

Violet, sitting with legs crossed and one stiletto hanging off her toes, just went very still. Very present.

‘Don’t fuck about with me, Declan,’ she said.

I put my hand on her knee. ‘It’s not my call,’ I said. ‘I mean I’m not the casting director. They’ve got Hagar Hefflefinger, you know. She’s very tough. Very good. Tough in a good way. Good in a tough way. The way casting directors have to be. So like I say, it’s not my call. But it is my script – how would you feel about Salome, by the way?’

‘Who?’

‘Herod’s daughter. A princess. Redhead, too, you know, so I was thinking, obviously.’

‘I knew you were lying.’

‘What?’

‘About the Eve part. You know I’m not a complete fucking idiot.’

Violet’s nothing if not a quick assimilator. Initially, news of my restored Rodge was greeted with a dimpled smile and a dash to the disgorged boudoir, where my girl administered fellatio of such froth and dalliance that my eyebrows, raised at its commencement, refused to come down until it was all over. (Watching in the mirror turned out to be a bad idea, what with Gunn’s wayward gut and hairy legs, what with his double chin, dugs, and jug-handle ears, what with his body being a sort of anti-aphrodisiac – until, that is, I started seeing the pornographic potential in our aesthetic discrepancies . . .) But she’s sharp. She’s already started rationing her favours. The splurge was to establish that her currency was still good. Already, in the absence of an Actual Meeting With the Producer and the Director, she’s reined in her spending.

‘Violet,’ I said. ‘Violet. If it was up to me – but listen. Listen. I’m not the casting director, but I am having that consultation clause written in. Harriet’s getting the contracts drafted this week. But casting director or not – Hagar fucking Hefflefinger or not – Trent Bintock is the director of this film and Trent Bintock thinks I’m a creative genius. If I tell him we need to look at you for Eve – if I tell him we need to look at you for Eve . . . Do you hear what I’m saying?’

There had almost been tears. The jewelled eyes had filled up. She closed them, now, for three, four, five seconds, breathing slowly through her nostrils.

‘Do you know who Harriet wants for Lucifer?’ I said. ‘Do you know who she was on the phone to last night?

Violet opened her eyes. We were in a familiar place now. I was the dad who’d frightened her – for her own good – and now, chastened, she was looking at me ready to be rescued from fear.

‘Johnny Depp,’ I said, quietly, then took a sip of my drink and looked out of the window.

She put her head down for a moment of introspective silence. When she looked up again, she wore a compact almost a bitter – smile.

‘We’ve earned this, Declan,’ she said. ‘D’you know what I mean? We’ve fucking earned this.’