He saw her twice more. Once from a distance – he stood at the top of a valley looking down to the river hundreds of feet below, where, having discovered that wood floated, Eve sat straight-backed astride three or four vined-together saplings she’d uprooted, drifting gently on the current – and once at unsettling proximity, when, having slept late before emerging from a cataract-curtained cave he saw her fresh from a dip, supine on a large flat stone, eyes closed, sunlight resting on pubes and eyelashes like tiny spirits. He considered throwing a rock at her, but bottled out and slunk away.
The anxiety – who the fuck? – worsened. He went off his food (she’d spoiled elderberries for him for good) and developed a rash on his ankle. It was a frustrating time for me. I couldn’t believe he couldn’t hear my suggestion that he sneak up on her while she was asleep and bash her head in. I still think what a coup that would have been: Murder in Eden – but it was no good. An appalling waste of paranoia, that period of Adam’s angst. I’ve got subsequent genocide started with less. I tried Eve, too, needless to say. Same deal. Adam lost weight and invented nailbiting. Finally, God took a hand. (Why ‘finally’? What had He been waiting for?) One night He caused Adam to fall into a deep sleep. During this sleep He did three things. First, He brought Eve in a trance to where Adam lay and caused her to fall into a deep sleep by the man’s side. Second, He erased from both their minds all memory of each other. Third, He gave Adam a dream (the first dream, ever, and one which Adam would later remember as a real event) in which he asked God for an help meet and in which God delivered by forming Eve out of Adam’s rib.
You know what I did? I spent the entire night hovering over Eve whispering: ‘Rubbish. Don’t believe it. It’s a story. You’re being brainwashed. It’s lies, lies, lies.’ I concentrated all my energy, every ounce of angelic clout, on that fine filament of her, that faint strand I’d sensed before; I addressed myself only to that.
In the morning – the world’s first conjugal lie-in – it seemed I might as well have addressed myself to the fish in the lake. She woke with her head on his chest and his arms wrapped around her. They looked into each other’s eyes and smiled. ‘Man,’ she said to him. ‘Woman,’ he said to her. ‘My children,’ God said to them both. ‘Oh, please,’ I said (well, hissed, actually, having opted that morning for the body of a python) before slithering away in search of somewhere private where I could hurl my ophidian guts.
It seemed, I said.
Language duly arrived. Proper language, not Adam’s moo-cow and bow-wow rubbish. Verbs, prepositions, adjectives. Grammar. Abstraction. God dropped in on them from time to time, usually with some critter Adam had missed. Tiny, fluttering, multicoloured thing. ‘Butterfly,’ Eve said, while Adam stood pleasantly stumped.
‘Yes,’ Adam said. ‘Butterfly. That’s what I was going to say.’
But Eve’s unease lingered. The post-brainwashing residue of self-sufficiency from the days before Adam’s dream. If me and humankind had a future together I knew it lay in these vestiges of Eve’s independence. Literalist yes-man Adam fed the parrots and sang songs with nerve-jangling tunelessness to God. If Fall II: The Next Generation was ever going to make it out of development and into production, if humans were ever going to be anything more than monkeys on the Divine Grinder’s organ (excuse me again) then it was going to be down to the lady and the tramp.
And therein, my dears, lies the answer to that nagging question: What was I doing in Eden in the first place? God’s got the big martyr death scene written in for Jimmeny. The infinitely self-sacrificing part of His nature demands it, just as the infinitely generative part of His nature demanded the creation of Everything out of Nothing, and just as the infinitely unjust part of His nature demanded the creation of an infinite Hell for finite transgressions. The boy’s motivation for self-sacrifice is the redemption of His Father’s world. The infinitely filial part of His nature demands it. But for redemption there must be freely chosen transgression. Therefore – ta-da! – transgression must feel, at least temporarily, good.
Now ask yourself: Was there anyone better qualified for the job?
He was kidding Himself with Adam and He knew it. Certainly He’d created him free – but in the letter of the law, not its spirit. The infinitely insecure part of His nature had baulked at it, when it came down to it. The infinitely deluded part of His nature had allowed the creation of a role the designated actor would never have the spine to play. The infinitely paradoxical part of His nature had demanded Man’s free choice of sin over obedience whilst creating a man who’d never be man enough to sin. Enter Eve.
And boy did I.
Violet, Gunn’s Penelope-replacement, lives in a studio flat in West Hampstead.
‘You do, actually, expect me not to be annoyed, do you?’ she said, having let me in, turned, and stormed up the stairs to her living room. Neglectful of me, I know, not to have offered an explanation for my tardiness, but I was still in a state from the garden.
‘I don’t imagine you stayed in waiting for me,’ I said, following.
‘No I bloody did not. No, Declan, I bloody, thank God, did not.’
‘Well then,’ I said. ‘No harm done, eh?’
She stood with her arms folded and her weight on one sharp leg, lips parted, eyebrows raised. ‘Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘You’ve completely lost your mind. Right. I thought it was just partial. I mean – are you . . .? I mean what are you?’
Violet thinks of herself as an actress and is almost wholly unacquainted with talent and has a great froth of dark red hair she pretends to be perpetually irritated by and at war with (the legion clips and scrunchies, the barrettes, the ties, the pins, the sticks, the bands) but which she secretly thinks of as her pre-Raphaelite crowning glory and under the glow of which she poses, endlessly, in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door after narcissistic, unguent-heavy baths on her many unemployed afternoons. She can’t make her mind up whether she’s at her sexiest as chin-upholding Boadicea or dimpled and cleavaged Nell Gwyn – but either way she’s baffled and chagrined that not one BBC period drama casting director has so far had the good sense to be instantly at the mercy of her hair’s splendour.
She waited, still with her weight on one leg.
‘I thought perhaps Italian,’ I said, after a sudden twinge in my salivary glands. (Me the bemused amnesiac, Gunn’s preferences my forgotten family and friends, introducing themselves, willy-nilly.) ‘What do you think?’