‘Lucifer.’
From which shameful reverie His voice woke me. The sound of it annihilated all the time between the last time I’d heard it (consigning me to . . . to . . .) and now. Then was now and now was then and there was no going back, no punishment disguised as forgiveness, no shamble back into the fetters of obedience. Wondering if I could escape the pain was worse than knowing I couldn’t. He knew that. The whole speculation had been a plant. Jimmeny’s idea. Well fuck the Pair – sorry, the Trio of Them.
So, incarnation. The angelic drug of choice. Unlike cocaine, not to be sniffed at. I look back on my first hours here much as the mature artist looks back at his youthful creations: with a teary mixture of embarrassment and nostalgia. I was, I’m afraid (is this the admission of an Archangel consumed by pride?) in a shocking state of hypersensitivity and gaucheness. You’ve got to laugh, really. (Which, incidentally, is how I’d thought of opening what turned out to be my ‘Hail horrors’ speech, until a more scrupulous examination of the chances of actually getting a laugh changed my mind.) I do laugh, in hindsight, at the rattlebag of schizophrenia, Tourette’s and satyriasis I must have seemed during those debut hours.
I have, as I said, tried it before, but never with licence. (Adolescents and pre-menstruals are useful. The mentally ill. Anyone stricken with grief or love. Your ideal possession candidate’s a thirteen-year-old recently orphaned schizophrenic girl three days away from her period on her way to see the shrink with whom she’s romantically besotted.) Former takeovers, then, have left me dressed in a set of clothes and shoes two sizes too small in a room the dimensions of which forbid ever standing or lying unbent, with laryngitis, heat rash, mumps, scrofula, gonorrhoea – you get the picture. This, on the other hand, this taking of a body without force or fear, wrapped me in a stole of material luxury the like of which I’d never imagined – and believe me, I’ve imagined quite a bit.
I entered where Gunn had exited: reclining in a tepid bath.
The feeling of entry . . . let me see . . . sinking upwards. Think of a gradual congregation of spiritual atoms, the adherence of each to each a contained ecstasy, the completed amalgam – me, entered in the Flesh – a throbbing and protracted orgasm that believe it or not had me oooohing and aaaahing and not quite knowing what to do with my newly acquired limbs, the way one of Betjeman’s tennis girls – bountiful Pam or whoever – would have carried on, I imagine, had you ever got her away from the court, prised her fingers from the Wilson’s damp grip, and stormed those rhododendron-like tennis knickers. It felt like (that ‘like’ again. Maddeningly not the thing itself . . .) breathing a heavy aphrodisiac gas. A terrible comfort, a saturation with both pleasure and endless desire. Welcome, Lucifer, to the concussive world of matter.
I’m delighted to say I’ve calmed down since then, but in those first hours I was my own worst enemy. Gunn’s bathroom, I’ve subsequently discovered, is really a quite dreary place (why he went in there for his frappery when he had the entire flat – not to say city – at his disposal is a mystery to me. Actually that’s not true; I know why: sheer habit, inaugurated in childhood, ingrained in adolescence, and obeyed without question in adulthood) but you should have tried telling me that when those first five buds of perception opened to its mouldy ceiling and sock-scented air, its taste of iron and drains, its greasy tub and brown water, its disconsolate soliloquy of plips and clanks. Five senses might not get you very far when it comes to perceiving Ultimate Reality, but by Beelzebub’s blistered buttocks this quintet will keep a body busy down here on earth.
A lawless horde of smells: soap, chalk, rotting wood, limescale, sweat, semen, vaginal juice, toothpaste, ammonia, stale tea, vomit, linoleum, rust, chlorine – a stampede of whiffs, a roistering cavalcade of reeks, stinks and perfumes in Bacchanalian cahoots . . . all are weeyulcum . . . all are weeyulcum . . . Yes, they certainly were, though they fairly gang-banged my virgin nostrils. I sniffed, recklessly, draughts long and deep; in went Gunn’s Pantene for fine or flyaway, wreathed with his shit’s ghost-odour, veined, too, with faded frangipani and sandalwood from ex-girlfriend Penelope’s incense sticks he burns bathside as pungent accompaniment to the pain of remembering her. In went the salt and apricots, the piscine smack and poached pears of current girlfriend Violet’s healthy and well-tended vadge, escorted by the U-bend’s verdigris and jollied along by Matey bathfoam, which self-indulgent Declan had insisted on as a holy relic from childhood, until my quiet voice and his fatal string of choices led him to his last, bubbleless dip . . .
And that was just the smells. Opening my newly acquired eyes, I found myself assaulted by a depthless wall of colour. I believe I actually flinched, tried to retreat – a little panic attack until I worked it out, that distance operated, that the entire world was not in fact plastered to the front of my eyeballs. The white flames on the silver taps, the blinding sky of the mirror (facing the window, you see) the turbid water’s mercurial meniscus – bright fires and brilliant serpents all around me. A lesser angel would have . . . Well, one needs . . . poise at such moments. A cool head. Overall, a sense of entitlement. Mine, mine, mine all mine. Prince of this World, as the Good Book says; just how hitherto unearned a moniker those first seconds revealed. I counted seventy-three shades of grey in an eight-by-ten room.
That whiner, Larkin, once wrote a poem to his skin. An apology for having failed to bring it within range of the sensuous or the tender, for having, all in all, let his skin down. Do you monkeys underrate anything more than you do skin? Granted, you’ve got to be careful with taste – trial and error being no way to work your way around the flavours of a bathroom (as I found after swallowing a dab of what turned out to be Gunn’s verruca gel) – but with the exception of the dangerously hot or riskily cold you should be rubbing and dragging yourselves up against pretty much everything. I spent an hour playing with the water in the tub. Another two adding hot and watching my thighs go red. Don’t get me started on Gunn’s towels. Nor the deliciously cool thorax or throat of his bog, nor the boiler’s lagging, nor the velvet throw in the cupboard, nor the slick lino, nor the warmed enamel of the tub after its water had spiralled away, nor – I could go on, obviously.
And in spite of all this, I still believe I would have made it outdoors that first day had I not been ambushed by the most horribly engorged erection I’ll wager Gunn’s pesky little penis has ever entertained. Rather embarrassing to admit, but there you are: a rod-on like the Unholy Poker of Antioch.
Naturally I got better at it, over the fourteen hours that followed. It’s in my nature, getting better at things. A stunned and ham-handed debut it might have been (oh, I found myself saying, between Popeye gurns and Fontainesque pointwork, oh, oh, oooohhhh), but I’ve had all sorts of wanks since: breathless, businesslike, vicious, enervated, feisty, playful, lingering, nuanced, crude, nasty, hysterical, sly . . . I don’t believe I’m boasting when I say I’ve had ironic, perhaps even satirical wanks. Shameful, the speed of that particular assimilation. Dad hooked by state-of-the-art toy. Damn this thing. What’ll they come up with next?