Harriet looked sad as hell when it was all over. Sad as hell that it was all over. Sad as hell that time had started again, with its all ticks and all its tocks, all its excruciating reminders of who she was, where she’d been, what she’d done, and where, in the end, she was going.
‘You’re worried about going to Hell,’ I said to her, flexing Gunn’s breasts (I almost typed ’pecs’, but I don’t want to insult you) in front of the mirror, whilst smoking a cigarette. ‘Don’t be. I’ve made some changes down there. All that fire and brimstone, all that agony? History. No point. Plus, my fuel bills... I’m kidding. But seriously, can you give me one good reason why I should waste my time making my guests suffer? This whole . . . this whole line about me making souls suffer – it’s so stupid.’
‘Please stop talking.’
‘My feeling is, hey, mi casa su casa. As long as you’re not with the Old Man upstairs, my job’s done. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be civilized about it. No reason we shouldn’t be comfortable.’
‘It’s a nice gimmick, darling, but one needs to know when to stop.’
‘No one gets it. Which do you think would annoy Him more? Souls in Hell suffering and wishing they’d been Good? Or souls in Hell partying and thinking, ‘Thank fuck I didn’t bother with all that morally sound behaviour crap?’ You see the logic, surely?’
‘There’s no comfort in logic,’ Harriet said, picking up the phone and punching the stud for Room Service. ‘Suite 419. Bollinger. Three. No. I don’t give a fuck.’
Click. Wealth’s economical idiom. Not needing to say please or thank you. If parents hadn’t scolded their children for forgetting please and thank you, I’d never have got capitalism off the ground.
‘Harriet,’ I said. ‘I feel like a million bucks. Why don’t you let me pitch you a story?’
She rolled over onto her belly and let one arm hang over the edge of the bed. Her hair was a mad old lady catastrophe, now. Astounding: looking at the elderly elbow, the troubled capillaries of the wrist, I felt Gunn’s bollock blood thickening again. Who’d a thunkit? All Vi’s charms on offer and I can’t raise an eyebrow. Then Harriet, who – ah, the penny drops – is the age his mother would’ve been if she hadn’t croaked . . .
‘There’s no point,’ Harriet said. ‘I’ll have heard it before. The world ran out of stories centuries ago.’
‘I couldn’t agree with you more, Harriet,’ I said, lighting a fresh Silk Cut off the butt of the one I’d just smoked down to the cork. ‘I couldn’t agree with you more. And this story, let me tell you, this story’s the oldest story of ’em all. . .’
The story of my – ahem – downfall.
Hoooo . . . mamma what a downfall that was. I’d go so far as to say there’s never been another like it. Semyaza, Sammael, Azazel, Ariel, Ramiel . . . from Heaven’s lip they pitched and flared in radiant rebellion. Mulciber, Thammuz, Appollonya, Carnivean, Turel . . . one by one a third of Paradise yanked into the void on the leash of my charisma. Somewhere on the way down I realised what I’d done. It. . . ah . . . hit me. You know what I thought? I thought: Oh. Fuck. Fucking . . . hell. Apposite, really, come to think of it. But I’m getting ahead of myself . . .
Central conflict, obviously, my tiff with Junior. God the Son, to give Him His full title. Jumping Jesus Arthur Christ. Jimmeny Christmas. Number One Son. Sonny.
Where do I begin? The regrettable goatee? The humour-lessness? The Oedipal transference? The anorexia? He cast seven of my best friends out of Mary Magdalene and enjoyed every minute of it. Not that I blame Him. The Magdalene was a piece of ass even after her conversion; writhing around mid-exorcism like that she looked . . . Well. I’ve got it on DVD. We’ll splice some footage into the film.
I’d long wondered about the Son. When GodVoid had created us to prise God from Void He had self-revealed a tripartite nature, a 3-for-1 deal that rocked the entire non-world of ontology. I’m not sure it didn’t come as a bit of a shock even to Him, to discover not only that He was the Supreme Being, but that He’d had a kid and a ghostly PR officer all this non-time without even knowing it. He’d missed the best non-years, too, apparently – the milk-teeth, the evening bath, the bedtime story – since it was apparent that Junior was all grown-up already, poised eternally somewhere between the wanked-out end of adolescence and the onset of thirty-something melancholia.
The Son was the side of Himself He kept most oft’ occluded, as if He suspected it might cause trouble among the rank and file, as if He knew (He did know) that freedom was also the freedom to want more of His love than you had, to want to be loved as much as Someone Else was loved, for example. We glimpsed young Arthur, from time to time, practising His twinkly look of dolorous compassion. It was embarrassing.
We suffered quiet intimations. The rumour of creation. A mode different from the one we knew, a form of being so fundamentally strange to our own that many of us buckled and all but broke trying to get our heads around it.
Raphael let the cat out of the bag. Some Seraphs had been allowed to cotton on quicker than others. Raphael – that donkey – Raphael’s mind was an open book to me. ‘Is this coming to pass?’ I asked him.
‘Yes.’
‘What’s my part?’
‘Gabriel’s part is –’
‘What’s my part?’
‘Michael will be –’
‘What is my part, Raphael?’ Or words to that effect.
‘We’re to be messengers,’ Uriel said.
‘Messengers?’
‘To the New Ones.’
‘What New Ones?’
‘The Secondborn. The Mortals.’
Matter. Matter, apparently, was the high concept. It dizzied us to think of it. We couldn’t think of it. And what was all this gobbledygook about mortals?
Indulge my litotes: I didn’t like it.
Meanwhile Junior gave me that look every time our eyes met. It wasn’t the enmity that got to me. It was the condescension. A thousand times it was on the tip of my tongue (unforked in those days) to ask Him, What the fuck? Something always stopped me. His applehood in the eye of the Father. And now that we’re on the subject, let me settle this ‘God’s favourite’ thing once and for all. It was never me. The truth is . . . ah, the truth . . . the truth is God never really . . . He never really listened to me. For years, for years almost immediately after my birth I tried to . . . to put something special into the Gloria, something unique, a communiqué from me to Him, a signal that I was . . . that I wanted to . . . that I understood the way He . . . That . . .
Anyway the point is, fucking Michael (do please pardon my French) was always His favourite. Michael.
Some presences have their own gravity, their own radiation. So it was with Creation. No hard evidence, but slowly, one by one, each of us came to understand that it was there, somewhere, elsewhere. Elsewhere! Our minds fairly boggled. Was it possible to conceive of an elsewhere in a nowhere? (A ticklish question. In the angelic realm there’s no concept of place. It’s meaningless, actually, to talk about the angelic ‘realm’ at all.) Therefore we weren’t anywhere; we were nowhere. And yet, as Old Time passed . . .