But, Hell be praised, Penelope can’t lip-read. We need to meet somewhere, she supposes he’s saying. Fucking girlfriend’s here. Give me your address.
‘Tell Declan I’ve gone home, will you?’ she says to Sylvia. ‘I’ve got a stinking headache and I don’t want to spoil his fun.’
Which is where I go to work. By getting her to punish God by degrading herself. Convoluted? No no no no heavens no. How many of you haven’t heard that voice, the no-nonsense, call-a-spade-a-spade friend who emerges when the world’s shat on you? So, this is how much He cares about you, is it? Cares about you enough to let you fail fucking Human Biology/drop the mortgage/lose a leg/miss the bus/stub your toe/get the sack/crack your tooth/fluff your line/get to the booth only to discover that the bastard in front of you got the last ticket . . . That’s how much He cares. Yes. Well. Fuck You, God. Two can play at that game. Watch THIS. And off you go to the tobacconist’s, or the boozer, or the Adult Video retailer, or the knocking shop, or the casino. Look at your precious creation now, Mister. Don’t like it, do you, taking a bit of your own medicine. And if I get lung cancer, or liver failure, or fucking AIDS, Matey, we know whose fault it’ll be, don’t we, eh? Should’ve thought of that when you let Claire FINISH WITH ME!
Penelope’s is a secular version, more or less. So I don’t speak to her of God or the friability of His love, but rather of the long, grinding, endless punishment the world dishes out if you try to live in accordance with truth and decency. I speak to her, bitterly, of how daily she struggles with the idea that her stand is hopeless, that everything turns to shit in the end, that evil invariably wins, that people . . . people aren’t any damned good, that her own horror of falsehood is nothing more than a pitiful delusion of grandeur, and that the best thing she can do now is give herself a good, strong, vinegared slap in the face . . .
She resists for quite some time. Had I not been around so long – so very long – it would astonish me, somewhat, the strength of her resistance. It doesn’t, however. In boredom, I persist. Time for Bad Cop. You fucking stupid bitch. You knew, didn’t you, it’d come to this. There’s shit everywhere, it’s all shit, you pathetic, deluded idiot. Get down on your hands and knees and rub your stupid, trusting, high and fucking mighty face in it . . . Go on. There’s medicine! Until, with what feels like an icy fracture down the centre of her chest, knowing full well and having no clue about what she’s going to do, she halts the cab at the bar that’s just opened not three blocks from the flat she shares with Declan Gunn. I remember my last words to her. Not the first time I’ve used them. And certainly not the last. I gave them to her in a long, slow whisper. Embrace it . . .
I’ve heard some theological guff in my time, but one of the most idiotic theories I’ve ever come across is the one suggesting that I possessed Judas Iscariot in order to bring about Jimmeny’s betrayal. Can anyone explain this to me? Actually don’t bother. I know the explanation. (I know all the explanations.) The explanation is that millions of people all over the world, despite being in full possession of a functioning cerebrum, think I wanted Christ crucified. Now if you’ll allow me to be blunt for a moment: Are these people retarded? Christ’s crucifixion was the fulfilment of the Old Testament’s prophecies. Christ’s crucifixion was going to restart the mechanism for the forgiveness of sins. Which would mean? No one has to go to Hell.
So, could you please tell me why I would do anything to help bring that about?
I was, however, at the Last Supper. Thirteen guys in sourleathered sandals, all with tropical underarms and honking butt-cracks; a tiny room (Leonardo’s way off), poor ventilation, the smoke of badly trimmed lamps, the odd discreet but sulphurous apostolic brap, the tang of burped plonk . . . You know what I spent the evening doing? I spent it loading Judas with guilt. You miserable bastard. You know you’re doing the wrong thing. Thirty fucking pieces of silver? You cheap sonofabitch. Don’t do it, man. Listen to me. Listen to the voice of your conscience! The Enemy has led you astray but it’s not too late to change your mind and save your soul. Listen to the voice of God, Judas Iscariot. This is a mighty hour for you. You’re on the verge of consigning yourself to Hell for eternity – and for what? Thirty fucking pieces of silver! Don’t do it, Judas!
The man was made of stone. Hanging was too good for him if you ask me. Actually that’s not fair. Not fair to give Judas credit for his own resistance, I mean. It was, as in the desert, the Old Bugger’s hand at work. God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. . . Yes, He did (He’s hardened a lot of hearts over the years) and He hardened Judas’s, too.
In spite of all that, in spite of the unfair nature of the fight, in spite of His cheating, I almost nailed the fucker (pardon the pun) with Pilate and Procula.
What I have written, I have written. My general disappointment in Judea’s then governor notwithstanding, I’ve long had an aesthetic soft spot for the poised ambivalence of his infamous dictum. The lonely pregnancy of the pause, its shadowy implications: What I have written is not what I wanted to write. What I have written is the truth. What I have written is what I shall be judged by. What I have written seemed to write itself. What I have written was not for me to write . . . Quad scripsi, scripsi. The tautological conclusion with its gravitas and idiocy. He wrote it at the end of a morning the length and drain of which couldn’t be measured in hours. He’d been abused by forces beyond his control, boxed and flirted with as if by fevers and flues. His thigh-bones had felt thin, his ankles weak, his flesh hot and cold, as if embraced and abandoned by a sodden shroud in the heat of the sun. His blood whistled and thumped; deafness descended, periodically, leaving him only the sound of the heart in his chest; his vision seemed to narrow into a dark tunnel, haunted at its distant end by incandescent spirits. I didn’t give him up without a fight, I can tell you.
Pilate’s side of the bed was long cold by the time Claudia Procula woke with electric suddenness, sheened in sweat, sitting bolt upright and astonished that the loud lamentations on the other side of sleep translated to mere whimpering in the waking world. She wasn’t bad looking, Pilate’s missus, and became increasingly appealing in somnambulistic agitation, but that really isn’t relevant, at all, Lucifer. What’s relevant is that Pilate trusted her dreams. He wasn’t overly superstitious (although you wouldn’t find many military men who didn’t at the very least go through the motions of pagan propitiation), but his wife’s dream-inspired prognostications had several times proved useful, and had once literally saved his neck, back in Rome not long after their marriage, when she’d dissuaded him on the strength of a nightmare from keeping a horse he’d bought for recreational riding, which beast a week later threw and broke the neck of its next owner. She’d never actually seen Jesus, though she’d heard of him, and, via slaves’ gossip the night before, of his arrest and detention in the hands of Caiaphas & Co. She’d never actually set her dark eyes on him, so I’m not altogether sure why I bothered impersonating him so carefully in her dream; I could have appeared to her as Groucho Marx and she’d have been none the wiser. But I’d be fibbing if I didn’t admit that there was a profane titillation in taking on his looks and mien. Made me feel . . . I’m almost embarrassed to say . . . You know: what might have been. Anyway. I entered the tapestry of Procula’s sleep and crucified myself in her dream. It was funny, hanging there in her mind with the stigmata flowering and the sky darkening at my back. I worried that I’d overdone it with the blood – her and her husband mired and flailing, shin-deep and red-handed – but time (New Time) was passing (Caiaphas’s envy glowed around him like baby’s breath while the real J.C. stood barefoot with his head on one side and an infuriating patience in the stilled line of his mouth) and I wanted the message writ large, so to speak: PILATE & WIFE MURDER INNOCENT MAN – ‘WE’LL BURN IN HELL FOR THIS’ GOVERNOR ADMITS. In any case it had done the trick. The legs kicked, the neatly plucked eyebrows drew down (one grave, one acute), the plum-coloured lips twitched and pursed, the perspiring palms opened and closed. Have nothing to do with this innocent man . . . Have nothing to do with this innocent man . . . Have nothing . . . I stayed till she woke, charmingly dishevelled (flushed and hyperventilating, one mango-sized breast free of the nightgown – if I hadn’t been in such a Godawful hurry . . .) and called reedily for her maid.