Humans and human needs lay hid in night.
I said: ‘Let money be!’ and all was light.
The key to evil? Freedom. The key to freedom? Money. For you, my darlings, freedom to do what you like is the discovery of how unlikable what you like to do makes you. Not that that stops you doing what you like, since you like doing what you like more than you like liking what you do . . .
Not entirely inappropriate then that when, having decided on a tall Tom Collins in the bar (beverage to augment deliberation over how many escorts – okay, rape and murder were off but for Christ’s sake I was damned if I wasn’t going to put my lately acquired love-truncheon to some use), an exhausted posh female voice should say, from two stools away: ‘You don’t look like you do anything for a living.’
I turned. Recognized her straight away. Harriet Marsh. Lady Harriet Marsh, you’d think, what with the bevelled vowels and Susanna-York-on-smack looks. Sixty years old now (quite a while since I’d last seen her) with a freckled body of complicated wiriness under a black halter-neck cocktail dress. Magnificently bored green eyes. Hair dyed a colour between platinum and pale pink, pinned up, with wispy bits dangling. The odd liver spot. Brazenly crafted Los Angeles teeth. Lady Harriet, you’d think – but you’d be wrong. It’s not blood, it’s money. Harriet plucked from a glittering clutch of possibles forty years ago, bedded and betrothed in that order to Texan Leonard ‘Lube’ Whallen (no blood, either, obviously, but a large family of hyperactive oil wells) who, thanks to some colourful experiences with an early years nanny from Dorset, had a crippling weakness for English gals who knew how to boss him about in the sack. The thing to do, I’d murmured to Harriet at the time, is make him earn it. I told him it would take him to the deepest knowledge of himself, to give himself over to her completely. He believed me, looking at his own porous and moustached face in the morning mirror, astonished and grimly delighted. One by one family members written out of the will. Harriet wasn’t going back: the beery two-up-two-down in Hackney, the dodgy dad and threadbare mum, the wireless, the Woodbines . . . She’d been in for the long haul with Leonard, but he’d surprised her in 1972 by dying of a heart-attack (four Jack Daniels, devilled prawns, three injudicious Monte Christos and a dash across the baked apron to make the private jet’s take-off slot), leaving her more or less sole inheritor. I let her go after that. She wouldn’t need me. She worked well on her own. Now – oh, honestly, I’m gifted, I am – she owns thirty per cent of Nexus Films.
‘You don’t look like you do anything for a living.’ Yes. The blunt gambit entitlement of the rich and the beautiful. Candour a match for my own.
‘I do something for a living,’ I said.
‘Really? What?’
‘I’m the Devil.’
‘How nice for you.’
‘Currently in possession of a mortal frame, as you see.’
‘I do see.’
‘And you’re Harriet Marsh, widow of Leonard Whallen.’
‘And you’re not clairvoyant. My name generally precedes me.’
‘But other information does not.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as that you’re currently wearing peach-coloured cami-knickers from Helene’s in Paris. Such as that you were thinking several things a moment ago: that the English are in love with failure and loss; that there’s no pleasure for you now like the pleasure of being driven through capital cities in the last hour before dawn; that my cock would be small and that it’s been a long time since you’ve even known what you like; that there should be another dimension or place for the filthy rich when this world’s fruits have been sucked dry; that there’s nothing you’d like more than a long stay in a white-walled and chilly hospital where nothing was demanded of you; that you’d need to get drunk if you were going to fuck me.’
‘My mistake,’ she said, after a sip of her champagne. ‘How charming.’
‘Goes with the territory.’
Raised eyebrows. Tired, our Harriet, tired of life, tired of having done everything – but willing to be seduced by curiosity. ‘Territory?’
‘Being a fallen angel,’ I said. ‘Being the fallen angel.’
Another exhausted smile. Another sip. It wasn’t much, this, but it was, at least, something.
‘Tell me what I’m thinking now,’ she said.
I gave her a devilishly nonchalant smile of my own. ‘You’re thinking about how little you get for six million in South Kensington, and that in any case you won’t keep it for more than a year, since London houses are filled with sadness. You’re wondering whether I’ll fuck you because I’ve got a thing for older women, some dreary oedipal tumour, or because I’m the sort of young man who believes that self-degradation elevates him to some kind of divine knowledge.’
‘You’re really rather good at this, aren’t you?’
‘The best.’
‘There must be a story to tell.’ She sounded weary at the prospect.
‘After.’
‘After what?’
‘You know what.’
Oh my angel, my bad angel – well that pressed a few buttons, obviously – Oh my angel master, fuck me, fuck your little pigbitch, mmnyesss, stick your filthy fucking cock up my filthy fucking arse, all the filthy fucking way, all the way, um-hmn? Nn-hmn. You know I’m your filthy little cocksucking whore, don’t you? Fuck your little Virgin Mary whore –
Lost my head a bit at that point, I’m afraid. Curiously though, this monologue (yours truly too busy with the miracle of his own restored and restive rod to bother responding) all delivered in a robotic monotone, like a somnambulist bishop reciting the Athanasian Creed. It’s become one of Harriet’s tools for submergence, has sex; it takes her to some depth of consciousness far from the surface of her life. The pornologue’s mantric (as is the Athanasian Creed, for that matter) sucking her down to a level of herself where no questions are asked, where her history evaporates, where her self bleeds painlessly into the void.
And though I kept shtum myself, there was no denying the effect of such saucy language on Gunn’s tackle. Even from Harriet’s passionless lips they effected a startling transformation. (And ferried in the memory that Penelope couldn’t, simply could not talk dirty without cracking-up; whereas Violet’s dyspepsia lurks so close to the surface that in a few heady encounters it’s come out in a mild dominatrix shtick that’s had Gunn spunking like a hound-dog.) It’s been that way for him ever since he learned to read. Indeed, his childhood proficiency as a reader was driven almost exclusively by desire for the sexual knowledge books contained. Even as an adult his balls tingle at fuschia, fucivorous, cunning, cuneiform, cochlea and cockatoo – for no better reason than that they’re dictionary neighbours to fuck, cunt and cock. An absurd way for a grown man to behave, I’m sure you’ll agree.