I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 Patti 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 lleclan 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