The funk, the jive, the boogie, the rock and roll .. . . the weight of the body draws it down, to the dirge of the dark cortège. This won’t do, for you or for me. Tomorrow is clocking-off day, and after a week of extremes, I find myself strangely drawn to the predictable smallness of the Clerkenwell flat. There are unique comforts, it seems, in the most lifeless crannies of life: the tinkle of the spoon in the cup; the kettle-fogged pane; the floor’s worn poem of ticks and groans; the PC’s unjudgemental hum; the fan’s feeble campaign against London’s summer of bruisers and thugs. (I don’t think Gunn’s body’s very well at the moment. The whites of his eyes contain startled capillaries and spooked pupils. His back’s killing me and his teeth itch. The skull’s ducts rattle and creak with mucus and even Harriet would think twice before letting this mossed and maculate tongue anywhere near her sensitive parts.) Besides, I need somewhere quiet to think, and to finish this at least.
Think if it were true. It isn’t true, obviously, but there’s a masochist in here that will have his fifteen minutes. Can’t. . . cannot be true. But think if it were true. A comfortable life – Mr Mandros would do as a decompression chamber, a comfort zone, a kind of arrivals lounge facility – no real theoretical objection to living it with moderate ethical decency; plenty to enjoy in the perceptual realm that wouldn’t land me in jail or send me to the chair – you know: tulips; kissing; snow; sunsets; journeys; and so to death, the obligatory purgative stint, then home. Home.
Home? How long has that word meant anything other than Hell? Which reminds me, there is still the matter of. . . ah . . . There is still, vividly, the memory of what the incorporeal version of my existence felt like last week. In other words how much it fucking killed. Can’t help thinking that’s left me in a bit of a corner. Should have seen that coming sooner. Should have kept myself in shape with regular nights off from the body. Should have done shifts.
Course I’m going on like this as if I’m even considering it. Considering staying on, I mean. Considering being Declan Gunn. Course I’m going on like this as if there won’t shortly be wheels of a very different kind in cacophonous motion. Course I’m . . .
Well.
I’m not turning any of the lights on in the flat. The hot gloom and steady rain comfort me. Like Hydra’s sunlight and silence, they let me drift into dream. Thunderstorms since the early hours. Never really seen storms from your end. Don’t they make you doubt what you learned at school? Don’t you hear thunder and think: all that atmosphere stuff, it’s cobblers; the sky’s made of iron that sometimes shifts and grumbles, billion-ton slabs and plates forced through the same tectonic trials as earth, yielding this, this skyquake. Oh yes, it’s been up to spectacular tricks since the small hours has the weather. I watched the lightning revealed in glimpses, the sky’s shocking varicosis. The rain’s been racing earthwards as if with some religious or political fanaticism. The clouds have the look of dark internal bleeding. Surely you lot look up from Cosmo while this sort of thing’s going on? Surely you take a Playstation break?
I forget myself. Of course you don’t. Of course you don’t. I’ve put a lifetime’s work into making sure you don’t. How could I possibly forget?
In the summertime, when the weather is . . . How these minutes fly! Six minutes past six, the fifth second morphing digitally into the sixth just as my eyes focused. Little red numbers in the darkness. Is somebody pulling my leg here? Betsy’s going to have to cut this. I don’t have the time to
Here ends the writing of my brother, Lucifer, and here I begin the fulfilment of my duty.
Too formal, Raphael. His voice even now finds time for admonishment. Try not to sound like such a tight-arsed ponce.
I can’t help smiling. He must be busy, but still he finds the time to criticize my style. Well, I must try to oblige him.
I interrupted his last sentence. Despite everything he’d said on Hydra I couldn’t let him confront his dilemma alone. I came back to England on a flight that had to skirt thunderstorms all the way to Heathrow. Thunderstorms everywhere, according to the co-pilot; a phenomenon. My fellow passengers’ fear of death filled the cabin like smoke from a smouldering fire. God didn’t have His hand over us, but the pilot was skilful, and brought us down in safety. I took a taxi straight to the Clerkenwell flat. Sheet lightning flickered.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Look, I’m busy’
‘You have a decision to make,’ I said to him. He didn’t look well. His colour was bad, sallow, and his right eye was blackened. A scatter of pimples around the corners of his mouth. ‘You’ve been abusing your host,’ I said to him. ‘You can’t get away with that sort of thing indefinitely, you know, my dear.’
‘We’re back to the “my dear” are we? Look, Raphael, I know you mean well but –’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘What?’
‘You heard me,’ I said – I know him enough to know the tone he best responds to. ‘What are you going to do? Are you going to stay, or are you going to go?’
He placed his hands together at the base of his spine and straightened his back, the way pregnant women do.
Better, cloth-head. Now you’re getting the hang of it. That smouldering fire simile was lame, though.
‘I’m going to run a bath, that’s what I’m going to do,’ he said. ‘A huge, deep, hot bath. Feel free to watch if you like, although this Gunn’s not much to shout about in the cock and balls department. Then again, as my dear XXX-Quisite Immaculata says, with the frequency of a mantra: “Iss wha’ joo doo with it. Thass what counts”.’
I waited half an hour, taking stock, meanwhile, of the condition of the flat. His inhabitancy, sporadic though it had been, had devastated the place: litter, broken bottles, dirty laundry, spilled food, manuscript pages, overloaded ashtrays, the kitchen bin overturned, not a dish washed . . . Who could be in the least surprised? How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, Son of the morning –
Er . . . Excuse me . . .
But I was wasting time. Worse, I was pandering to his wasting time. In less than five hours he would have to decide. In less than five hours they’d come for his answer. This was no time for idling in the bathtub. With a cursory knock, I entered.
‘Couldn’t keep away, could you? Thought you’d catch me at it, did you? Having a bit of a bathtime lube?’
He must have just added more hot water, because the tiny room was filled with steam. ‘Well, as you can see, here I am chastely bathing and sensibly reflecting. Close the door will you, for Baal’s sake.’
He was in fact smoking a cigar (not steam, smoke) and cradling in his palm a huge brandy balloon amply furnished with the golden liquor. There didn’t seem to be any sign of either chaste bathing or sensible reflection. He looked, as a matter of fact, like he’d just been woken from a nap.