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

Somewhere in-between's where I do much of
my finest work.
    His mother died of drink two years ago and left him the
flat. Me, drink and loneliness, we finished Gunn's mother
off. Drink wolfed down her liver, me and loneliness gobbled
up her heart. Liver and heart, my vital organs of choice. She didn't come down, mind you. Must be cooling her heels
in Purgatory. Last Rites. Gunn called in crapulous Father
Mulvaney (sherry-breath, brogue blarney, red knuckles he
couldn't leave off cracking, and eczema; I'll have his liver too,
the old hypocrite) and that was me robbed of another tenant.
There's no justice, you know. Angela Gunn. I wanted her.
Some souls - you can't explain it - they've got quality written all over them. She had guilt over Gunn, having brought
him dadless into the world (thought the fact that he nearly
throttled himself with his own umbilical an indictment of
her motherhood); but it wasn't the guilt that did for her, it
was the loneliness. A tawdry smattering of affairs with men
vastly her inferior. Her disgust because she couldn't leave the
idea of a grand passion alone. In the small hours she'd
observe them (after the grumpy wrestling, the loveless gymnastics) naked and sprawled as if taken down
mid-crucifixion. Grimly, she'd force herself to absorb the
unpleasant details: fatty shoulders; dirty nails; brittle hair;
faded tattoos; pimples; stupidity; greed; hatred of women;
pretentiousness; arrogance. In the small hours she'd sit bitter
with tears and humming with drink and look down at his
body, whoever he was, some Tony or Mike or Trevor or
Doug, forcing her mouth into a rictus as the sordid replays
ran in her head. The absurdity of it, she thought, this quest
for the love of a man who was her equal. She loathed herself
for it. She thought of her life (and herself) as a missed opportunity. Somewhere, back there, she had missed something.
What was it? When was it? The worse horror beneath: that
she hadn't missed anything, that her life was merely the sum
of her choices and that her choices had led her to this:
another truncated encounter; the carcinogenic belief in the
idea of a Great Love; clammy sex; loneliness in the small
hours.

    She had loved Gunn, but his education distanced them.
She craved his visits then couldn't bear that he was embarrassed by her malapropisms and too-young skirts. She was
intelligent but inarticulate. Words betrayed her: beautiful
butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her
mouth for their release into the world. Gunn knew all this.
Went every time armed with the noblest filial intentions,
then felt them evaporate when she talked of `broadening
her horoscopes'. Her drinking was a spectral third with
them, Gunn not quite taking it in. Knowing and hoping.
(Jesus, you humans and your knowing; you humans and
your hoping.) Her belief in his writing. Gunn suspected she
prayed for it. She did. She prayed to God He'd find a publisher for her son's book. Idiot ex-altar boy Gunn worried,
then, that it wouldn't feel like a clean achievement. Soiled by
the Hand of God, so to speak.
    But then liver failure, hospital, his avalanche of guilt and
shame. Her only fifty-five, looking seventy. Mulvaney of the
red raw scalp hadn't seen her for three years, but they cut to
the chase when he arrived, smelling of wet London and
Cockburn's Port. Gunn shuffled, miserable, by the bed.
Holding her hand (for the first time in a long time) he discovered with a shock its onion skin and Saturnalian revel of
veins. Horror because he remembered it soft and firm and
smelling of Nivea. These were the memories that jumped
him over the months after she died, heartless muggers bent
on the redistribution of the mind's buried wealth -
    Bugger. You see what happens, I only mentioned the
woman because I meant to tell you that's how Gunn got the
flat. Now my screen's ambushed by maudlin guff.
    Salutary should other demonic presences pass this way: