The animals shied away from me, even when I was one of them. They just . . . sensed. They drew away and that was that. Me and animals would never be friends. I’ve made use of them from time to time down the millennia, but there’s never going to be a relationship. Three things: they don’t have souls, they can’t choose, and they’re dependent on God – ergo they’re of no consequence to me. The absence of a soul, by the way, makes it easy to inhabit a body. (Therefore, why is Elton John still pudging around unpossessed? I hear you ask.) Conversely, the presence of a soul is an absolute bugger to get around. I manage it, periodically, but it’s not like falling off a log.
However, again I digress.
He knew I was there. God the Holy Spirit knew first and blabbed to the Other Two, who knew in any case. Who’d known all along. He let me stay. He created Eden and let the Devil in. Got that? What else do you need to know about Him? I mean do I need, actually, to go on?
A word about humankind – and I’m . . . you know . . . shooting from the hip here: I was hooked on you, instantly. The hundred billion galaxies, the stars, the moons, the cosmic dust, the wrinkles, the loops, the black holes, the worm-holes . . . It was nice stuff, spectacular in a remote, high-art way. But you lot? Oh, man. Should I say that you were right up my street? You were right up my street, in the front door and sitting in the comfy chair with your shoes off smoking a huge spliff while I made us both a cup of PG. It wasn’t your looks (although I was always a sucker for beauty, and your pre-lapsarian progenitors make you lot look like a posse of anthraxed Quazzies), it was your potential. I looked on (from the lowest bough of a laburnum tree that had burst into blinding yellow bloom almost with an air of embarrassment at the spectacle of itself) as Himself coaxed and worried Adam from the dust. I watched the arrival of bone, the wet birth of blood, the woven tissues, the threaded capillaries, the shocking bag of skin (less Michelangelo than Giger meets Bacon meets Bosch). Those lungs would turn out to be a design flaw, mind you, with all the breathable nastiness I was going to inspire you to invent. Ah, and the genitals. Where the smart money was going. It was, one has to admit, mesmerizing, a gory wattle-and-daub masterpiece. Give the Maker His due, He knew how to Make. The nipples and hair were sweet touches, though you could see from the outset what the wear-and-tear spots were going to be, where the mileage was going to be racked-up: teeth; heart; scalp; bum. Still, you really were a piece of work. I lay on my laburnum bough (I was a feral cat at the time, as yet unnamed) rapt and, I must confess, a tad jealous. Angels had pure spirit and a one-dimensional existence blowing smoke up the Divine Bottom morning noon and night. Man, apparently, was going to have the entire natural world, sentience, reason, imagination, five juicy senses and, according to the development leaked before the war, a get out of jail free card courtesy of Jimmeny Christmas to be phased in not long before the fall of the Roman Empire with limitless retroaction.
You’ll excuse my flippancy. This is difficult for me. I’d been feeling peaky ever since I found out about Creation. On the one hand it gave me a superabundance of material to work with. On the other . . . What am I trying to say? On the other, it had about it the noxious whiff of finality. Once the world was up and running, once Man was abroad, rife with desires and garrotted by those dos and don’ts, my role was pretty much set for . . . well, for ever. You pause for reflection at these moments. And while we are pausing (Adam finished now, toenails, eyelashes, earlobes, fingerprints – that was forward planning, that, fingerprints) let’s not forget that I, Lucifer, was still in the first agonizing age of pain. Imagine having all your skin flayed off. Whilst having all your teeth drilled. Whilst having your knackers or vadge nailed to a fridge. Imagine your head being on fire all the time. That’s the tip of my iceberg of my pain.
With the pain, curiously, had come the conviction that I could bear it. Later (much later) by degrees (a lot of degrees) the conviction proved justified; I found I could shear off a wafer of myself, the thinnest, flimsiest wafer (not unlike the sliced ginger accompanying sushi) and lift it above and beyond the infernal pain. I’ve seen exceptional humans do it under torture. Enormously irritating to me and my torturers of course, but, you know, credit where credit’s due and all that.
So I was, let me repeat, in terrible pain. But I couldn’t keep away. Lying there on my bough watching the shadows crawling over Adam’s loins, I had an intimation of the rage and loneliness I’d be signing on for from these beginnings, a glimpse of the appalling waste and destruction, a first gutgrowl of what would be an eternally unsatisfied hunger – a moment, all in all, of doubt.
Night had crept into the garden. Crocuses and snowdrops were throbbing quills and pearly stars in the dark grass. The rustle of water and the sibilance of the wakeful trees. Ink-shadowed stones and the moon a chalky hoof print. The whole place attended to me with a Lawrentian intensity. My head sank forward on to my paws and I felt my breath moist in my nostrils. The bones in my body were heavy, and for the briefest moment – looking down at sleeping Adam’s brand new limbs and unopened face – for the briefest moment I must confess . . . I must confess . . . I did wonder, despite all that had gone before, despite rebellion, despite expulsion, despite the battlements and cesspits of Hell, despite my legion cohorts and their chorus of rage, despite everything, whether there might not be a chance to –