Read Online I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story by Glen Duncan - Free Book Online

aches, indigestion, colic, near-perpetual cystitis
and PMT that doesn't hold with all that old-fashioned nonsense about only showing up just before menstruation. If
you're her boyfriend, really quite a lot of things get on her
nerves. Chiefly, it seems, if you're her boyfriend, being with
you gets on her nerves. Being Violet's boyfriend means
spending quite a lot of your time listening to Violet itemizing (while you rub her shoulders, massage her feet, run her
a Radox bath or prepare her a hot water bottle) the many
ways in which you get on her nerves.
    Like all women who think they're actresses, Violet's ferociously untidy. The West Hampstead studio flat looks like the
Nazgul have just thundered through it - an appearance I had
considerable time to note, waiting firstly for Violet to finish
her pre-coital bathroom routine, and secondly, fruitlessly
(tossing and turning in the bed's swamp) for the arrival of an
erection.
    `Fucking hell,' Violet said, tactfully, backing away from me
as if at the discovery of a noxious smell. `What's wrong with
it?'

    Oh well go on, get your chuckles over with now if you
must. Yes. Hilarious, isn't it. Let's all have a jolly good
wheeze.
    `Sometimes, Declan, honestly, I can't ... I mean what is
it?'
    `Perhaps I don't fancy you any more,' I said in an undertone. Undertone or not, it summoned up a Vi-silence of
formidable charge and mass. Then, with a compressed artfulness that, actually, made me proud, she drew the sheet
slowly up over her breasts and turned away from me in a
foetal curl.
    `Oh come here,' I said, like a successfully soft-soaped
uncle - and she did, too (rifling through her memory files,
wishing she hadn't lied to Gunn about having read his novel,
wishing she knew immediately which part was hers, hers,
hers!) - but it was no good. It was no damned good, I tell
you. Gunn's penis might as well have been a tomato sandwich for all the impact it was going to make. On the other
hand, it did give Violet an opportunity for some of her best
work to date.
    `Never mind, honey,' she said, huskily. `It's no big deal. It
happens. You're probably just overtired. Did you drink a lot
last night?'
    I might have been mistaken, but I thought I detected a
slight American accent.

    Violet, you know, is troubled by a Little Voice. (I worried
that the transmogrification would fuck with my clairvoyance, but it hasn't substantially. I've noticed blips, the odd
blind spot, but by and large I seem to have got away with it
as carry-on.) Violet never listens to her Little Voice and she hears every word it says. Not that its range of words is wide.
On the contrary. It repeats the same things, at irregular but
increasingly frequent intervals. You're not an actress. You don't
have any talent. You've knobbled your oivn auditions because you
knot' you're not up to it in the end. You're a vain and talentless
fraud.

    It's not me. Not all Little Voices are me, you know. Even
my own Little Voice - did I mention that? - even my own
Little Voice conies from a place I'm not sure I own. I have of
late, it generally begins ... I don't quite ignore it.
    I)eclan, of course, had a Little Voice of his own by the
end, and should probably have gone to see someone. Hardly
an astute diagnosis given the bath and razor blades, but one
I can't resist making. The odour of that sadness lingers, you
see, in the rucks and runnels of his mortal flesh. Stretch
marks of the soul, so to speak. It bothers me. In the absence
of my angelic pain I feel it like an intimate and diffuse
toothache.
    I don't much like the look of him, if you want the truth.
If I was considering staying - staying for good, I mean - I'd
be hitting a bank and forking out for state-of-the-art plastic
surgery or a Californian bodyswap. Est hoc corpus nieutn.
Maybe so, but it leaves a lot to be desired. When I confront
the mirror I see a simian forehead, dolorous eyes and thinning eyebrows. His skin's beige, greasy and