Quite, I thought, looking at Gunn’s watch. That’s the thing with New Time: before you know it, you’ve spent it. Before you know it, it’s gone. It kills us in Hell, you know, the number of your deathbedders who, despite all the wristwatches and desk calendars, despite their life’s tally of ticks and torn-off pages, look around them in their last moments with an expression of sheer disbelief. Surely I’ve only just got here, they want to say. Surely I’ve only just begun? To which, smiling and warming our palms around the arrivals hall blaze, we reply: Nope.
I must get on, I thought, having just finished my third 99 from the confection-coloured Super Swirl ice-cream van which, after a jangling version of Three Blind Mice, had stopped not thirty yards from Denholm Mansions. That friendly stray (mongrel, bit of German Shepherd, possibly a bit of Border Collie, but mainly rubbish) had eaten up two hours all on its own, what with its damned irresistible pawpads, what with its frowsty dreads, baroque breath and try-anything-for-a-laugh tongue. (It hadn’t occurred to me that dealing with animals would be so different from inhabiting them. It hadn’t occurred to me that in Gunn’s skin they might actually like me.) It had been a mistake to sit down and share one of my 99s with him. Took the Flake in one uninvited chomp, too, greedy bugger. Someone had walked past and dropped 50p into my lap. Someone else had walked past and said: ‘Get a fucking job you scrounging cunt.’ Well, I thought, that’s dear old London Town for you.
Stopping at St Anne’s lopped another half-hour off my clock. Couldn’t resist. You get so used to seeing churches from the incorporeal side (I do a deal, a great deal of my work in churches, usually during the homily, when all but the most besotted acolytes are in a state of surreal boredom verging on hallucination) that the temptation to take a peek from the material perspective was overwhelming. A quick glance inside revealed thirty dark and uninhabited pews, an iron-grilled aisle, a modernist altar in granite and oak, and, crouched with Pledge and Jaycloth at the Communion rail, floss-headed and strabismal Mrs Cunliffe (I kid you not), the translation of whose galloping sexual desire for Lee Marvin look-a-like Father Tubbs into obsessive church cleaning leaves St Anne’s spotless and the good padre unmolested. (I’ve got someone on her, don’t worry. She’s already brought herself off against one of Jimmeny’s nailed marble feet, ostensibly dusting the statue’s armpits, thinking of Tubbs’s dark-haired hands and piercing green eyes. Suppressed the entire thing, obviously. You could ask her and she’d dash you across the mouth with her Jaycloth for giving utterance to such blasphemous filth. As far as she’s concerned it never happened. Not that you can blame her, since it never happened, not in actuality, if you want to split hairs; but it’s there, believe me, in potentia. Say what you like about me but don’t say I can’t spot sleeping talent, a star waiting to be born.) I didn’t go in. Daren’t. Couldn’t trust myself with the . . . perceptual stimuli. As it was the glimpsed interior offered an all but irresistible contrast to outdoor London’s riot heat and traffic clamour – cool stone and incense-flavoured wood, not to mention the glass-stained light poking in like the legs of the Old Man’s compasses, dividing the lilac gloom with beams of rose and gold, nor the soft-flamed candles, nor the chilled, smoke-scented air, nor the resonance that would attend any blasphemy bellowed up into the fluting . . .
I retreated. Backed out on tiptoe, actually, like someone in a cartoon. The heat outside took me back, no questions asked. One of those freak bubbles in the traffic’s flow. Up and down Rosebery Avenue not a vehicle in sight. One knows, of course, that such fluked peace must shatter momentarily – the slow gargle of a crawling back loader, the rattlecrash of a flogged transit – but for a few seconds it’s as if the city’s been swept clean; now there’s just the sound of trees, the heat’s blare, the gravid cognition of tarmac and brick. I stood still and listened. Perception’s incessant craving made a sound like the flare of a match in my ears. There was . . . there was so much . . . I reeled, somewhat. (Another first, that, reeling.) I reeled, steadied myself – laughing a little, a moment of Raskolnikovian lightness amid the shifting bergs of body and blood – and caught a whiff of the garden at the back of the church.
You’d better be careful, Lucifer, my sensible auntie voice said. You’d better wait until you’ve got use to –
Pornography, that’s what it was, a wild pornography of colour and form, the shameless posturing, the brazen succulence and flaunted curves, the pouting petals and pendulous bulbs. Fronds of things. The soft core of a giant rose. I was unprepared. Glory to God for dappled things . . . Well, fair enough, hats off and all that, but in small doses, yes? My eyes roved, madly – a messy explosion of lilac, a manic brushstroke of mauve . . . The scents ripped-off the lacy delicates of my nostrils and ravished ’em, front and back, upside down and ’angin from the bloomin’ chandelier, me dear. You’ve seen, I’m sure, the time tunnel, the vortex, the black hole, the rapidly swirling and expanding maw into which, irresistibly, the hero astronaut is sucked? So Lucifer in the garden, spun around by colours and concussed by smells. Weak as a kitten, I heard and saw myself as if from a distance emitting a series of feeble noises and gesticulating like an imbecile. Meanwhile the bloody reds and coronal golds bedevilled me like circling sprites; greens of olive, lime and pea spiralled around me, flaming yellows of saffron and primrose . . . Hard to tell whether I was about to pass through into some other dimension or simply vomit onto the seething lawn. I made a feeble warding-off gesture with my arms, sank to my hands and knees, then froze, so curiously balanced between ecstasy and nausea that remaining still and breathing gently took their rightful places in the vanguard of luminously good ideas, where they remained for the next few minutes, until, laughing a little once more at my . . . my precociousness, I staggered to my feet and headed back towards the street.
One does tell you, Lucifer, auntie Me said, sighing. One does at least attempt to forewarn you . . .
Naming the animals was pretty much the high point of Adam’s career. Took a while, as you can imagine, but he stuck at it, plodder that he was. Not that he couldn’t pull some corkers out of the air when the mood took him. Platypus, for example. Iguana. Gerbil. Vole. Ostrich.
He didn’t know I was there. Whatever gifts the Maker had given him, ESP wasn’t one of them. Either that or God put a wall between us. In any case Adam couldn’t hear me when I tried to reach him with my mind, and when I tried going through the various animal larynxes I got the predictable range of grunts, squeaks, barks and twitters. I got terribly bored. Even a cursory headcount (we were bogged down at the tail-end of Chondrichthyes) revealed it was going to take a while. The only interesting development was the emergence of a strange and humbly beautiful new sapling in the centre of the garden, a modest specimen – certainly without the maidenly grace of the silver birch or the melodrama of the weeping willow – but with the air of becoming a sure-fire bearer of succulent fruit come spring . . .