And thanks to this incarnate sojourn, I’m going to miss . . . damn, man, I’m gonna miss handshakes, ya know? The honest comfort of flesh and blood. This flesh and blood, it’s honest, isn’t it? It tells the truth, doesn’t it? The wind in your hair, rain on your face, sun-warmth between your shoulder-blades – perception’s straight-up. Kissing. Stretching. Blowing off. Forget René: the senses don’t lie, not about the big things, not about what it’s like to be here.
I took a break from the script and went to Church. St Paul’s. Call it a hunch, an intuition, an inkling, something pulled me there. (The dreams are knocking me out, by the way. Repeatedly, I’m trapped in tiny, vast spaces. Does that make sense to you? Do you dream paradoxes? Woke up this morning, couldn’t even face Buck’s Fizz. Harriet’s suggested I see a doctor. Harriet’s suggested I see a shrink. Pot, kettle and black, Harriet, I thought, pot, kettle and fucking black. The film – the film’s racing along. Harriet hasn’t left the bed for two days. She sits cross-legged amid the pillows talking on the phone, moving money, telling lies, having things brought to her, half-consuming them, having them taken away. I’ve told her: slow down, you’ll make yourself ill. You think she takes any notice of me? Trent was miffed about the no-sequel nature of the project. He’s been depressed since I pointed out that there was no scope for a prequel, either. Meanwhile, I’m anxious about the third act . . .)
St Paul’s. Well if you’re going to do it, do it large. It still takes me a while to get to places, and this afternoon’s jaunt to the cathedral was no exception, what with London’s oven-baked asphalt and disreputable trees, what with its brew of stinks and perfumes, what with the wide-angle sunlight and the stratosphere’s ghostly cirrus. I was straight, too, more or less, if you don’t count the coke-hangover and three Lucifer Risings I took to knock it on the head. Admittedly there’s a more or less permanent residue of chemicals and booze around Gunn’s cowering brain these days, but, you know, relatively, I was sharp.
Which was just as well. Given who turned up.
I only just got out of Gunn’s carcass in time. Up in the Whispering Gallery, under the great, ribbed belly of the dome, I couldn’t shake it, that sense of being watched that had been troubling me since . . . I don’t know. A while. However long it had been smouldering, it caught fire up there among the scurrying sibilants. Dangerous, too, what with Gunn’s fear of heights kicking in without warning, what with me swaying, precariously at the gallery’s rail. The presence – for there was no mistaking it by then – coalesced just before the rising tide of tinnitus which announced it would have sent me literally and metaphorically over the edge. With a nauseous wrench (think of a femur being pulled from its groin) I tore myself from Gunn’s body, which, not surprisingly, collapsed, buttocks-first, into that indecorous sitting position adopted by abandoned cloth dollies.
‘And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan,’ Michael droned, with a kind of rich boredom, ‘which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him . . . hasatan, have you forgotten, my friend?’
Pain? Well, you could say that. Can’t tell you what it cost me to keep it together, up there in the dome’s shadow, with you dear things scuttling like roaches below. Corporeally, I would have talked of deep internal haemorrhaging. I would have talked of head trauma. I would have talked of the immediate need for intensive care. Leaving the body was bad enough – the dreadful reunion with my default angelic rage and pain – but to be forced into it so suddenly and to have him to deal with . . . Well. I mean be fair.
Not that I let on, obviously, no more than he did, and I can assure you my presence was no cakewalk for him, either.
‘Michael,’ I said. ‘Dear old thing. It’s been simply ages.’
I wondered, peripherally, how on earth this bit of the material world could contain us without radical signs of stress – I half-expected the dome to split or implode – until I realised what should have been obvious: Divine dispensation. It was, after all, St Paul’s Cathedral. Sometimes I’m so slow.
‘You’re afraid,’ he said, quietly.
I smiled. ‘It’s extraordinary,’ I said, ‘how much you chaps consider it your duty to tell me that. I had Gabriel at it the other day. I wonder why you think it’s so important? Sceptics, I dare say, would mutter of wishful thinking.’
He returned the smile. ‘His advice to the mortals, you know,’ he said, ‘that they should love their enemies, I pity them that they should require such instruction.’
‘Have you seen The Empire Strikes Back?’ I asked him.
‘Because for us it is natural to love our enemies in proportion to their proximity to ourselves. We’re so very alike, satan. We’re so very close to one another.’
It did rankle a wee bit, the ‘satan’ with small s. Means just ‘one who obstructs’. Not the name-calling itself, but his not being able to rise above it. He’s mighty fond of his own name, needless to say, which he translates at parties as ‘who is like God’. I wonder the Old Bugger lets him get away with it, since the correct – and far less flattering – translation, is a rhetorical question: ‘Who is like God?’ Used to piss him off no end in the old days. Every time someone said, ‘Er, Michael?’ I used to cut in straight away with, ‘Me.’
‘So near and yet so far,’ I said. ‘How are things in the bowing-and-scraping business? I’m thinking Bob Hoskins for you in the movie, by the way. How does that sit with you? I’m sure you could talk me into Joe Pesci.’
Between you and me, I really was in the most excruciating discomfort. I glanced down at the gallery, where Gunn’s impersonation of a passed-out wino or junkie had attracted the attention of two small children, who, ignored by their whispering parents, were tearing up the tinfoil wrappers of their Kit-Kats and dropping the pieces into Gunn’s hair. I wondered, glumly, what would happen when the security guard was called.
‘You’ve surprised us,’ he said. He’s never quite grasped that conversation isn’t actually the other person making some unattended-to noises while you think of the next bit of your monologue.
‘Oh I have have I? What were you thinking? Harrison Ford?’
‘With the shortness of your attention span, we thought you’d be at middle-aged melancholy by now. And yet you’ve managed to . . . hold yourself, more or less, at adolescent egotism.’
‘Don’t underrate adolescent egotism, old stick. With adolescent egotism and a lot of money one can pretty much rule the world – redundant, obviously, when one already does rule the world.’
Oh I felt awful, I did. You know how it is when you come home trenchantly, comprehensively, authentically drunk, turn the light out, lie down, and feel the waltzer room’s nauseating spin? Yes? Well this was galaxies worse than that.
‘I realise this might sound rude, my dear, but why are you here, exactly, umm?’
‘To help you,’ he said.
Had I a face, just then, it would have been no mean trick to have kept it straight. ‘Aha?’ I said. ‘Um-hm? Yah?’
‘Have you not, of late, Lucifer –’
‘Look why don’t you spit it out, there’s a good chap, eh? Then perhaps we can get on digging our respective scenes. In case it escaped your attention, I had come for a quiet halfhour in Church.’