‘Shouldn’t you be out murdering people?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘If you’re the Devil, I mean. Shouldn’t you be a bit, you know, busier?’
‘I am busy,’ I said. It was three in the morning and I was with Harriet in the Rolls on our way from a very private party in Russell Square to a very private party in Mayfair. We passed a cinema hoarding that said Little Voice. I lit another Silk Cut. ‘I am busy, for Heaven’s sake. Have you any idea how much of the script I’ve already got down? That Pilate scene is going to have them dancing in the aisles.’
‘What I mean is,’ Harriet said, sipping, ‘shouldn’t you be a bit more hands-on in the criminal department? “A murderer from the first”, or whatever, isn’t it? I’d’ve thought New Scotland Yard’s finest would’ve been picking their way through a litter of corpses by now.’
It’s hard not to like Harriet. She’s so bored and so mad and so bad. She’s such a piece of work. It makes sense to like her, too: if you’re alive in the Western world at the moment, something you buy probably puts money into Harriet’s pocket, and there’s no sense in putting money into the pockets of those you dislike, is there? Multinational Parent Companies (one of which boasts Harriet Marsh among its senior executives) were my invention. (But do you see me clamouring for credit for the idea? Do you hear me boasting?) The beauty of the concept is that it takes the wind out of so many would-be ethical sails: the company that owns the porn-mag owns the company that makes the washing powder. The company that owns the munitions plants owns the company that makes the budgerigar food. The company that owns the nuclear waste owns the company that picks up your trash. These days, thanks to me, unless you pack up and go and live in a cave, you’re putting money into evil and shit. And let’s be realistic, if the cost of ethics is life in a cave . . .
‘I’ll tell you something, Harriet,’ I said, pouring myself another, ‘I’ve always objected to that nonsense about me being a murderer. It’s nothing but a bare-faced lie.’
‘I think Jack’s right, you know. You should have a show. After the film. After the Oscars.’
Little Voice, apparently, was on everywhere. I suppose He thinks that’s funny. I suppose He thinks that’s droll.
‘“. . . [A] murderer from the beginning . . .” says Jesus in John 8:44,’ I said, topping up, as the National Gallery loomed up on our left. ‘Moreover, a murderer who “. . . abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.” Charming. And, I might add, a pack of lies. Who, exactly, am I supposed to have murdered?’
Harriet, averting her cadaverous face so that her breath fogged the Rolls’s tinted pane, undid my flies and groped, with a sigh of weariness, for my cock.
‘Find me a stiff,’ I said, ‘– ahem – just one, and you can have my hooves for paperweights. Talking someone into murder, obviously yes, absolutely, mea culpa, and so on – but it’s hardly the same thing. (Talk a writer into a successful novel and see how far you get trying to pick up the royalties.) And if we’re agreed I’m not a murderer, that makes Sonny a liar.’
‘Doesn’t seem to be working, darling,’ Harriet said, abandoning my member with an abruptness a more sensitive soul might have found . . . well, a bit hurtful.
‘The point here is that I’ve never murdered, nor manslaughtered, nor caused the death of by misadventure, anyone,’ I said. ‘Mind you. I’ve seen the state it puts humans into.’
Harriet pressed a stud in the door panel.
‘M’am?’
‘What?’
‘You pressed the com. button, M’am.’
‘Did I? Oh. Never mind. Switch it off permanently, will you.’
‘Switching off, M’am. Rap on the glass if you need me.’
‘Who is this guy?’ I asked. ‘Parker?’
‘You were saying?’
‘Was I?’
‘The state. It puts humans into.’
Do you think this was ringing any bells for Harriet? Are you beginning to get an inkling of the lengths to which boredom drives the rich?
‘I’ve seen the state it puts the murderer into often enough,’ I said. I have, too. The singing blood, the hypersensitive flesh. I’ve seen wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly faces transformed in the act; gone the dome-head and comb-over, the bi-focals and the overbite, the cowlick, the nose-hair, the sticking-out ears; here instead the rapt gargoyle, the beauty of ugliness, the ugliness of beauty, the breathtaking purity and singularity of the human being transported by crime. Dear old Cain, who really wouldn’t have set hearts a-flutter in his unmurderous state, was a different proposition when his blood was up: all cheekbones and smouldering eyes. Kneeling over whacked Abel, a wind ruffled his dark hair (much in the way that strategically placed cooling fans unfurl the locks of onstage rock stars) and his normally nondescript lips swelled to an engorged pout Sophia Loren would have envied. How like a god indeed. ‘Call me an old flatterer,’ I continued, ‘but murder definitely looks good on you. Murder’s got you written all over it. Humans, I mean. It really is the ultimate makeover. Elton John would look wildly sexy if he could just pluck up the nerve to off some poor bugger.’
It’s all right, Harriet was thinking. He’s harmless. If he knew, he wouldn’t go on like such an idiot.
She kept her face averted, with no outward sign of anything but profound boredom. But then, I don’t need outward signs. That’s another of the perks of being me.
The Mayfair party (Rock Legend, formerly epicene guitar guru with whipcord body and waifish good looks, now resembling a troubled transsexual, with permanent mumps, Buddha gut, scorched hair and skin like congealed porridge) has turned out rather dull, and Harriet, myself, Jack, Lysette, Todd, Trent and a handful of other enervated revellers have retired with opium to one of the maestro’s mockCasablancan dens. The house is huge, naturally; a snip at eight-and-a-half, according to Harriet, who’s thinking of making him an offer for it herself, should she ever encounter him in a state of sustained clear-headedness. Rooms and rooms and rooms, with, here and there, these windowless smoke-nests, kitted out with all the trappings of Moorish indulgence. Everyone wants in on the film. Everyone wants to give us money. Even the multi-mill muso upstairs struggled out of his bulimia fever or coke-doze to offer us a stupid wedge. Harriet, among her many other talents (most of which were nurtured in her tender years by yours truly) certainly knows how to send hot gossip down wealth’s healthy grapevine.
‘I’ve racked my brains, but I don’t know from what passing zephyr I plucked the Eight Out of Ten idea. As with all my previous inspired ideas, I knew it was a cracker.’
Yes, me holding forth again, I’m afraid, though my heart isn’t really in it. I’ve got chronic gut-rot, to tell you the truth, and a slight but deeply personal headache behind my eyeballs. I’ve been feeling . . . off . . . ever since the journey in the Rolls with Harriet. Ever since . . . Well.
‘Eight Out of Ten,’ I continue, as something happens in Gunn’s guts, some sour faecal fish does a somersault. ‘A resonant proportion, verified, as I know you’ll remember, by the long-running and highly successful Whiskas campaign. Eight out of every ten human beings, I thought. I’ll settle for that. I’m not a perfectionist.’