And when, finally, with scarlet cheeks and fiery eyes she sank those pretty teeth in and the juice cartoonishly spurted out, I, in an intuitive leap I’m not sure I’ve ever since surpassed, delivered the coup de grâce – and slid my . . . What I mean to say is there was a certain spatial compatibility between my . . . It turned out that her . . . Oh listen to me going all shy, will you? But anyway: there. You know what I mean, don’t you? One should make an effort to avoid unnecessary vulgarity, I believe. Pure evil needn’t entail having a mouth like an open drain. I am, after all, a man of wealth and taste. And I do know that there’s an understanding growing between us. I . . . think we can fill in each other’s blanks?
It was my good fortune or honed instinct that one of the first things (one of many) the fruit delivered was – you know it – sensuality. Foremost was the pleasure in having knowingly disobeyed. I saw that the headiness of this rocked her, eyes half-closed, jugular risen, the colour of smoke; I saw the first taste of selfhood and that it almost destroyed her, as might an unschooled vampire’s first draught of blood. (But oh, should the vampire novice survive that first concussive ingestion, what then? Her thirst awakens and increases tenfold!) Ever after, I thought (having discovered inverted aversion therapy), ever after will wrongdoing and sensual pleasure go hand in hand. Lucifer, I said to myself, noting with satisfaction the co-operative hips, the flared nostrils, the raised eyebrows of carnal transport, Lucifer my son you are an absolute bona fide genius. Liberation, subversion, power, rebellion, bestiality, pride – you wouldn’t think even God could cram that lot into a Golden Delicious. I could see her, suffused with all that new fruity knowledge (that she could speak for herself, that disobedience sensitized the flesh, that there would never be any going back now, that if the only thing available to the human being struggling to slip the yoke of service was wrongdoing then wrongdoing she would choose, that she was, against all former suspicions, free), considering through the bruise of concupiscence what she’d done. In their wake ecstasy and crime had left a faint frown of perplexity, the mark of her astonishment that she could feel such things, the face’s opening posture for self-interrogation – how could I? – that would never go further, because she knew how she could. Oh yes, didn’t she just. She knew.
You are grateful aren’t you, that I shackled sex to knowledge and sensual pleasure? Or would you prefer coitus to have remained in the same physiological league as, say, noseblowing? And while we’re at it, you might as well credit me for getting art off the ground. With our girl’s first bold bite and precocious peristalsis the universe was transformed into a representable phenomenon, subject separate from object: represent all of it and there’d be nothing God knew and you didn’t. Nothing worth knowing, anyway. Since that day in Eden sex and knowledge have formed the double helix of your souls’ DNA.
‘When you come, time stops,’ Eve said. ‘It’s a tremendous relief, isn’t it, serpent? Do you suppose that’s what divinity feels like all the time?’
In the green grass she was rose-gold and glowing, fabulously drunk and stone cold sober. I saw her mentally pulling shame around herself like a sumptuous Russian mink. For a moment she held the fruit away from her lips and glared at it as if it had betrayed her of its own free will. But after a moment’s hesitation she returned it to her mouth and sank her teeth into it again. The decision had been made the first time. Just in case there was any doubt, she made it again.
‘This is just the beginning,’ I said. ‘Now if you’d consider turning your . . . What I mean is if you could just grab your – ah. You’re ahead of me, my dear. How very charming.’
‘I’ll tell you something,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I ever really liked him.’
‘Adam?’ I said. ‘I don’t blame you.’
‘Not Adam,’ she said, struggling to swallow a greedily chomped chunk. ‘God.’
And so to the present, gentle reader, and the preposterous sequence of events that brought me here in the first place. (The specific ‘here’ of Gunn’s cramped crib and dusty PC on Day Seven, I mean.) It’s been some first week, let me tell you. This not quite knowing what tomorrow will bring game’s not for the fainthearted, is it? I’m half tempted to start seeing you monkeys in a new light.
Some chronology, Lucifer, for shame. You’re tired, yes, but you’ll feel better for having got it down while it’s still fresh.
Well I wouldn’t say ‘fresh’, what with me still stinking of quality quim and French fagsmoke – but I’m jumping the gun. Let’s start, as the autobiographer’s shadow or doppelgänger voice suggests (does this happen to all writers?), at the beginning.
The Violet debacle rocked me, I’ll admit, and an evening of furious boozing followed. (I started smoking, too. I’m looking forward to stopping, obviously, since the real pleasure is starting again, but in the meantime I’ve found my rhythm at about fifty a day.) Not without the profit of insight. Force, I decided, was the missing aphrodisiac. Against her will the crucial ingredient. Made sense: the logical extension of Gunn’s post-Penelope delight in having sex with women who don’t really want to have sex with him. He’d be bug-eyed, no doubt, to see where such predilections point. But that’s me, you see: no nonsense. Call ’em like you see ’em. Besides, what was the alternative? A month on earth – impotent? Do me a favour.
Therefore, having resolved on the kill-or-cure approach, yesterday’s late afternoon found me strolling down High Holborn in the promising slipstream of one Tracy Smith, who though we had yet to be introduced, was destined to play a part in the urgent matter of my sexual rehabilitation.
A good working class Anglo-Saxon maid, our Tracy, with a middleweight backside and chicken skin calves, puddinglike breasts wonderbra’d up to the salivating world and ash-blonde hair scraped into a tortoiseshell barrette, revealing a nacreous neck and two fiercely pink little ears. One glimpse of that pork-coloured and Wrigley’s-flavoured mouth and this bad boy was hooked. Tracy Smith. Head awash with telly and Radio One, the dim echo of school (make-up, gossip, lads), the Pitmans, the Pimms, the package hols brochure – what else would Tracy Smith be called? Actually, she’s thinking of changing her name. Not the Tracy, the Smith. To Fox. Tracy Fox. Page Three Girl, children’s television presenter, Blankety Blank guest. She’s looked into it. It’s not as difficult as she thought it would be. Only problem is, she knows her mum and dad will flip. And since it was their deposit anchored the flat (cabby dad, care assistant mum) she’s got to keep them sweet.
So it’s Tracy Smith, for now, for me, as she steps out of the Holborn building’s main entrance into the gun-coloured evening light and the smoked door swings her handsome rear reflection into my view. Silver puffer jacket, navy pinstripe skirt, ivory tights and black, pinchy-looking high heels. That’s my girl. A red double-decker roars past with Kate Moss on its flank – but you can keep the mannequins, the angle-poise anaemics and mantis-waifs; give me human Tracy Smith, Nescafé breath, pink M&S knickers, the lone skidmark like the scar of a struck match, celebrity dreams, crashing grammar and hunger, hunger, hunger for money. The bus passes with the sound of a dinosaur’s yawn and I slide into my girl’s wake, surrounded by scurrying Londoners whose faces float before me like waxy lanterns in the city’s gloom.