I’ve always had a soft spot for London, the patched and tattered cloak of its history (some of my best work, obviously; I felt the same about old Byzantium), its dog-eared wisdom and inky humour. You know – you provincial British humans know – what it’s like when you crack under the weight of lost love or ingested desire and Move to London: the city’s ready for you. You take your precious miseries there and unpack them – only to find that the city’s already assimilated them, centuries ago, along with grand Elizabethan passions and mortal Victorian sins. The assimilation’s encoded now – in the chemistry lab colours of the Underground map, in Trafalgar’s punk pigeons, in the thousands of ticking stilettos and caffeine yawns and downed pints and adulterous snogs. You turn up on a rainy Monday afternoon proud of all your woeful particulars – and London humbles you with its wealth of generals. You’ve seen your life. London, it turns out, has seen Life.
Paris is snooty, and owns its sins like a liberated mademoiselle owns her velvet diaphragm case and Jackhammer Deluxe vibrator; but London, London noses its heaps of sin like a ropy mongrel among the bins, partly embarrassed, partly excited, partly disgusted, partly sad . . .
But this isn’t to the point. (This is supererogatory, Gunn would say.) The point is I’ve chosen East End bawn an’ bred Tracy Smith (the romantic in me prefers to think that she chose me) for the latest consummation of angelic desire on earth. Violet’s signal failure to generate the requisite . . . Not that there isn’t ample empirical evidence (ask Eve, Nefertiti, Helen, Herodias, Lucrezia, Marie-Antoinette, Debbie Harry . . .) of my knocker know-how and twat-talent; it’s just that . . . taking a look in the mirror . . . I’m not sure what Gunn’s mortal frame can support. When I’ve ravished before I’ve chosen my fleshly hosts carefully – everyone goes home satisfied – but I haven’t been able to avoid noticing Gunn’s deficiencies: not particularly well-endowed, or physically co-ordinated, or gifted with stamina. It came as a horrid shock to me – for the fiftieth time – when I stubbed my toe on the edge of the kitchen unit, for the fiftieth time. I’ve bitten the inside of my mouth so often there’s now a swelling on one inner cheek the size of a Jaffa orange segment. So I think I can be forgiven a wee bit of, ah, performance anxiety, if you don’t mind, as Tracy and I duck underground at Holborn for the Central Line to Mile End.
The London Underground depresses God. The Paris Metro’s rescued by bubbles of romance and intellectual flimflam (He can tune in for ten minutes and get something); the New York subway’s a toilet, obviously, but it looks like the movies, you know, it looks hip, famous, cool; Rome’s Metropolitana – well, Rome’s got a special dispensation, not surprisingly – but London, Christmas Jimmeny the London Underground gets Him down. The Lloyd-Webber ads; the cadaverous drivers with their deep-sea eyeballs and miles of unfulfilled dreams; the Lloyd-Webber ads; the puking office juniors and passed-out temps; the death’s-door beggars with their raw ankles and shat pants; the Lloyd-Webber ads; the buskers; the evening’s fractured make-up and the morning’s frowsty breath; all this and more – but chiefly the surrender to despair or vacancy the rattling tube demands, chiefly the tendency of London’s human beings to collapse into a seat or hang from a rail in a state of bitter capitulation to the sadness and boredom and loneliness and excruciating glamourlessness of their lives. The only thing He sees on the Underground that cheers Him up is blind people who have friendly relationships with their guide dogs. (There are a handful of blind people I’ve been working on in an attempt to radically alter the relationships they have with their dogs. So far, nada. Be nice if I could get one in before the end of time.)
Tracy plonks herself down and takes out her Evening Standard already opened at the telly pages. No point in consulting those, Trace, I think, as the train thunders into the first of many tunnels.
I know what you would have thought, you bored-with-the-world humans. You would have thought: Christ what a fucking uncomfortable evening. A pall of cloud, warm drizzle, windblown litter, London’s dull smell of exhaust and damp brick, the stupid, stupid heat.
Not me. I’ve got Gunn’s five senses working overtime. Every car horn, hot-dog stand, burp, breeze, sunbeam and shitswipe – you get the picture. I’m in love, truly, madly, deeply in love with perception.
And, manifestly, digression.
Tracy’s flat is in the basement of a four-storey Victorian terrace in Mile End. I’ve considered tackling my turtle dove as she pushes open the front door, at that quaint meridian where outside meets inside and the mat says welcome; but there’s too much human traffic in the street and an overly enthusiastic porch light above the lintel. I’d be spotted for sure. So it’s round the back and listen for the sound of the shower, diddle the window, hop over the sill into the kitchen, with just time for a scotch and a glance at the headlines before my girl emerges buffed and lotioned and it’s time to get down to business.
There’s no scotch so I settle for a gin and fizzless tonic. The flat’s a dark living room, an untidy bedroom, a tiny blue-and-white kitchen, and the bathroom, behind the closed door of which Tracy’s gasping and sighing under the jets as the water’s heat by degrees soothes away the day’s annoyances. I crack my knuckles and light a Silk Cut. Julia Sommerville’s round-up of world events reassures me that the boys are hard at it in my absence, but reminds me, too (another flood in India, another earthquake in Japan, another egg-headed astronomer not quite categorically denying that the comet is on a collision course with earth) that time, New Time, I mean, your time, is running out. You get one month to try it out. Your chance, Lucifer. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? As if. But I don’t care for this kind of inner dialogue (increasingly frequent sensation that there are two of me in my own – I mean Gunn’s – head, which I definitely don’t like) and besides, the shower’s hiss has ceased and I can hear Tracy – bent double, I conjecture, plump boobs bobbing as she dries between her rosy toes – singing surprisingly tuneful snatches of Britney’s ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’, which, in the way of inexplicable aphrodisiacs, has me up out of the couch with loins aflame, resolved in a twinkling on a full-frontal assault in the bathroom – up against the heated towel rail, perhaps (tsssss – ouch!) – for openers.
But some things never change.
As I cross the threshold of the kitchen the ether shudders and a trident of unbearable light strikes me full in the face. I collapse and cover my eyes.
‘Too much,’ Gabriel’s voice says. ‘Turn down.’
‘No permanent damage. Come on, Luce, get up. Long time no see.’
Uriel.
‘If you’ve damaged these eyeballs, you’ll regret it.’
‘Why doesn’t he leave the body?’
Zaphiel. Three of the big boys. I’m thinking: Is Tracy dedicated to The Holy Virgin or what? But Zaphiel’s right. Quaking on the lino like that – intolerable. Therefore leaving Gunn’s miserable carcass positioned as if for prayer to Allah, and with a deep breath in preparation for the excruciating pain of disembodiment (Jimmeny that hurts) I return to the bodiless realm to confront my angelic brethren. I can’t say it’s all bad, either, to expand into my non-dimensional dimensions again, easing the joints of power, opening the pinions of pain. The rage takes all but Gabriel, who’s tasted it recently, by surprise. Sissy Zaphiel backs-off. Uriel – I catch the look of admiring horror at what I’ve let myself become – turns his own dial up into the red, reflexively, and all four panes in Tracy’s kitchen window explode.