‘We must have babies,’ Penelope says, clambering on to him, easing herself down.
‘Eh?’
‘Not this minute,’ she says, feeling him inside her. ‘But eventually. Because if we don’t, then ugly, stupid, unkind people will, and the forces of evil and meanness will win.’
Gunn’s in a state of near mesmerism: his body’s rich torpor, the late morning’s heat. Their window is an ingot of warm gold. I don’t deserve this, he’s thinking, watching the light jangling in her hair, feeling the precise amount of her bodyweight she’s holding back – an appallingly erotic restraint – This will all have to be paid for.
He’s right.
Now – good gracious me look at the time! I only even mentioned Penelope because she’s part of what drove our Gunn to the blades and the bath. This is the way of it down here, I perceive, the frightful drudgery of finding the causes – then worse, finding the words. The immeasurably long time it all takes. Had Gunn stopped talking years ago he might have started living. It even occurred to him; predictably, when it did, he went away and wrote about it.
My dears, we’ve wandered from our course here. My fault, I know. And now I’m afraid the pull of the world draws me from this. I have, as you know, got places to go. I have, as you know, got people to see.
It wasn’t a fair fight. That’s what I’m trying to bring out of the story, you know? Trent’s keen on playing this angle up. And why not? It wasn’t a fair fight. Left to his own devices I’m not sure Junior would have made it to Golgotha. I’m not just talking about the stuff that’s on record – the warning to supercuckold Joseph that Herod was furious and that Egypt was lovely that time of year, for example – I’m talking about stuff you don’t even know about, stuff that came later, when the Little Baby Jesus was all grown up, when, if the Old Man had had any decency about Him He would have stayed out and left the two of us to it, head-to-head, gloves off, winner takes all, and so on. But what, I ask rhetorically, does God know about fair fighting?
Consider the temptation in the wilderness.
Redundantly, let me begin by saying it was hot. Really awfully hot. The sky was bone white and deserted, sunlight a static explosion on the sand. Not kingfishers but lizards caught fire; the place was jewelled with them. Desert plants revolved their shadows, slowly. He’d gone into an emptiness only occasionally whipped through by a babbling Essene or hair-shirted freak. He looked rough when I came to him, beard matted, eyes stied and reddened, cheeks hollow, fingernails torn, lips cracked and blistered. Yes, fasting for forty days and nights manifestly had not been a blast. When I found him he was sitting hunched in the mouth of a cave, knees up to his chin, bony fingers laced around his lengthy shins. Very black was the cool mouth of the cave and very white the scorched land around it.
‘Hungry, lovey?’ I said. It’s been a weakness of mine – yes, definitely a weakness – that ever since the days of the parted robes and the punctured heart I’ve found it all but impossible to control my irritation in his presence. Soon as I see him something in me just clicks and it’s all barbed jibes and leaden sarcasm. So annoying. I’m sure that if I could just have got beyond it and let the charm flow . . .
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘It’s you.’
‘You know those crash-diets are a trap, don’t you?’
‘You’re wasting your time, Satan.’
‘Not if it gives me pleasure to be here. Lucifer, by the way.’
‘Go away.’
‘Look, you know the drill. Would I be here if your Dad didn’t want me to be?’
He sighed. I had him there. He’d come out here to be tested.
‘Get on with it then, will you?’ he said.
So on with it I got. Now obviously the versions you’ve inherited are way off. Matthew’s got me trying to get him to turn stones into bread (prompting all the not by bread alone blarney), to throw himself off a mountain and precipitate an angelic rescue (provoking all the don’t test the Lord thy God baloney), and to bow down and worship me in return for all the kingdoms of the earth (eliciting the now world-famous get thee behind me claptrap.) Luke agrees, but cocks up the order and substitutes a building (in the desert) for the mountain.
Now I ask you: do you really think that’s the best I could come up with? I mean I’ll just remind everyone in case everyone’s forgotten: I’m . . . the Devil. And even if I wasn’t, I’d have to have been a complete dunderhead to think he’d go for any of that nonsense. You’re not even capable of eating bread after forty days’ and nights’ starvation. Having angels come to his rescue – what would that prove? It would, I suppose, have given him an opportunity to show me just how important he was, an opportunity for the gratification of ego or pride, but pride wasn’t his weakness. You’re going to tempt someone, you find their weakness. All the kingdoms of the earth? Might as well have offered him the complete Pokémon collection. The Evangelists tell you what they would have been tempted by. Jimbo wasn’t interested in that sort of thing. It doesn’t bother me that the Gospels are skewed, but it bothers me that I come out looking so narrow, so myopic.
Apart from sanctimoniousness and impenetrable parabling Arthur really only had one weak spot. Doubt. Very occasional, and invariably mastered by faith – but it was there. (I got to him in Gethsemane, right before the fun and games started, and almost had him at the very last on the cross, when, after I’d niggled him with that ‘told you you can’t trust Him’ remark he panicked and went all lama sabachthani on us.) Yes, he was now and then wont to wonder whether it was all strictly necessary, the being betrayed and spat on and mocked and flogged and thorn-crowned and nailed to a cross for hours of agony and more mocking and jeering and so on. He was wont to wonder, quite reasonably, whether it was all going to be worth it.
So I took him to a place where the dunes dropped to a bed of rock blazing pink in the sun.
‘You’re doing this to save the world, right?’ I asked him. He just stared down, saying nothing. ‘Okay,’ I continued. ‘This is what the world will look like after you’ve done your thing. I’ll just give you the headlines, but stop me any time if there’s something you want a closer look at.’
An unpalatable but not dishonest (honestly) preview of the next 2,000 years screened as if by magic on the stony plateau beneath us, complete with names, dates, places, soundeffects and statistics. There was some fantastic stuff in there – well, you know that, now – holocausts, tyrannies, massacres, technology, biotechnology, wars, ideologies, atheism, starvation, money, disease, Elton John . . . He didn’t like the look of it, you could tell. Nor did he think I was making it up. He didn’t think I was making it up because he knew I wasn’t making it up. He stood next to me and swayed. Maybe it was the hunger, the heat, the hallucinations, the headaches. Maybe it was the effect of the subliminals I’d sneaked in – Xrated flashes of him with a thonged and baby-oiled Mary Mags (or Dirty Mags, as I used to call her, much to Jimmeny’s chagrin) making the beast with two backs (bit cheeky of me, I know, but you’ve gorr’ave a larf at work narn’again, intcha?); maybe it was just that he was feeling dreadfully lonely after more than a month with only scorpions and bugs to talk to – who knows? What I do know is that he wavered. Rocked. Wobbled. Turned to me, lifted an unsteady hand as if to grab my non-existent lapel. At which point, typically – typically – the Old Man dropped a black cloud over the sun and a thunderbolt straight into the middle of my screen, scaring the hoop out of me and bringing Charlie Brown rudely to his senses.