‘You came because you were called.’
‘Oh dear this is really so uncivilized. I had hoped – you know, from you, Michael, I had hoped for a certain standard of –’
‘You’re afraid.’ He said it this time with the air of someone genuinely in possession of a mighty truth. If he hadn’t continued, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have begun Apocalypse there and then. ‘You’re afraid of what you most desire. You desire that of which you’re most afraid. Think on this, brother.’
‘I’ll be sure to.’
‘Think on it.’
‘I’ll be sure to.’
To give him his due, he didn’t have the look of a gloater. Nor, to give him further credit, did he stick around for vacuous chit-chat.
‘I’ll see you soon, Lucifer,’ he said.
‘Not if I see you first, Michael,’ I replied.
Didn’t fancy the walk back to the Ritz after that. I cellphoned Harriet and she sent Parker – whose real name is Nigel – round with the Rolls. We’ve bonded, Nigel and I. Got chatting one small-hours whisk through the city (Harriet passed out on the back seat) and I recognized him as one of my own. I needed him now like you need an escapist film when there’s an exam to revise for.
‘The point,’ I said, as I collapsed into the Rolls’s generous rear, and the upholstery gave its welcoming gasp, ‘is that in calling it multiculturalism or diversity or ebony and ivory or we are the fucking world or whatever, they’re missing something much more fundamental. They’re missing the deliberate eradication of one race by another. For which, in the twentieth century, we’ve got a word: genocide. It seems to me, Nigel, that your concern – and thank fuck you’re not alone in this – your fiercely and rightly felt concern is to stop the genocide that is happening in this country right here and right now.’
‘You all right, boss?’ Nigel said, with a blue-eyed glance in the rear-view. ‘You look a bit peaky.’ (A homely idiom, Nigel’s, though peppered with the Party for the Preservation of British Nationalism’s staples : Rights, Decent People, Honour, Difference, the White Race, Patriotism, Homeland, Relocation.)
‘What does it say about a Christian country, Nigel,’ I continued, pocket-patting for Silk Cut and Zippo, ‘that its churches – its churches – can be sold to Muslims and converted into mosques? I mean correct me if I’m wrong, you know, correct me if my history’s faulty here – but wasn’t there, some years back, a little operation known as the Crusades? Was that an academic exercise, then, was it? Eh?’ (I put a bit of bark in to my rhetorical questions for Nigel. It gets him going. It delights him, actually, though he experiences the delight as political disgust.) ‘Do you know, Nigel, that in parts of Britain now, children under ten years old – Christian children, this is, English, Christian children – are being forced to study the Koran? You know, you tell people this stuff, they think you’re making it up.’
‘Tories have got a coon Lord.’
‘I know, Nigel, I know. You know, when I think of the . . . the . . .’
I faltered. (So long since I’ve seen Michael. New Time hadn’t changed him. Still the over-earnestness, the show-offy angelic physique, the irritating air of privy intelligence. No doubt he believes there’s a great deal he knows that I don’t. He’s welcome to it. There is, after all, something I know that he doesn’t . . .) ‘When I think of the role this country of yours used to play on the global stage,’ I went on, ‘when I think of the notion that the sun never set on the British Empire, when I think of this country bringing the light of civilization to dark places, bringing technology, learning, industry, imports and exports – you know, educating the less intelligent nations on how to make use of natural resources – sometimes resources they didn’t even know they had, Nigel – when I think of that, in the light of the cultural and linguistic genocide now being encouraged in your schools, churches, hospitals, legal system . . . I think of that and I wonder: Is this how the countries of Empire repay their erstwhile sovereign?’
Your country. I’ve softened Nigel’s initial suspicions: told him I’m half Italian. Don’t live here. Passing through. And a member of the PPNI (Partita per la Preservazione di Nazionalismo Italiano), the fictional guinea equivalent of the PPBN. If I say things like ‘erstwhile sovereign’ I usually regret it, since Nigel’s own vocabulary needs very little room to stretch its legs – but that’s me again, you know? Baroque. Got to do it with knobs on. Honestly, sometimes I’m my own worst enemy.
‘It’s the fucking newsreaders piss me off,’ Nigel said, as we swung into Trafalgar Square. ‘Sanjit fucking this and Mustapha fucking that. There’s a fucking Paki doing the weather on BBC1.’
West End façades, a troupe of rattling pigeons, the lights turning green. ‘Nigel,’ I said, ‘there are going to have to be some significant changes in the world. Changes are long, long overdue . . .’
There’s a photograph of Gunn’s mother depressed me, this afternoon at the Clerkenwell writing den. (Jimmeny’s plums, this writing game, eh? The script’s a fucking doddle next to these meanderings. Of all the earthly seductions in all the towns in all the world . . .) Anyway the photograph. From the late sixties, when Gunn must have just started school. She was working afternoons in a Market Street café. The chef was in love with her. She liked him as a friend but after the scarpering Sikh she’d shut up the shop of her heart, not to mention the vaginal premises. (This was in the days before drink and I seduced her, those chaste days before loneliness drove her into the pulpy embraces of hamfisted cabbies and bad-breathed reps.) Anyway the photograph. You can tell someone just said ‘Angela’ then click-flashed as she turned. The moment captures her unschooled look, the face she gave to the world when it hadn’t given her time to prepare, the face without art or protection. You can tell that a splitsecond later, blinking away the magnesium’s after-image, she’d have said, ‘Bloody hell, Dez,’ (or Frank, or Ronnie, or whoever) ‘get away with you.’ But in the moment, she’s absolutely, unguardedly herself.
It gets to Gunn, this picture, because there’s no sign of himself in her eyes. He’s at school, or his gran’s, or Mrs Sharples’s or wherever (lot of women in Gunn’s childhood, not enough men; no wonder he turned out such a sissy). Sure, immediately the shutter and flash have snapped her, her history and motherhood return; but just for that instant Gunn’s seeing a version of his mother that’s nothing to do with himself. He remembers her, that she had much to forgive him. Chiefly, that he never once thought of her as a person in her own right. Instead he measured her by her aesthetic near-misses and hair-raising mispronunciations – measured her, that is, solely in relation to himself. She knew. He knew she knew. Time after time his resolution to rise above himself. Time after time his failure to honour it.
In any case it depressed the hell out of me when I found it, blistered at one corner, dog-eared at another, in Gunn’s desk drawer this morning. I was supposed to be drafting the film version of my Hail horrors speech. I ended up just sitting with a foully reeking Silk Cut, chin in palm, face as perky as a flat tyre. Could barely drag myself back to the Ritz for supper. If I hadn’t remembered that I was due to eat supper off XXX-Quisite Miranda’s mouth-watering arse, in fact . . .
I ask you. I, Lucifer, ask you: Is this any way for the King of Hell to be spending his earthly days?