I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story by Glen Duncan Page A

myself only to that.
    In the morning - the world's first conjugal lie-in - it
seemed I might as well have addressed myself to the fish in
the lake. She woke with her head on his chest and his arms
wrapped around her. They looked into each other's eyes and
smiled. 'Man,' she said to him. 'Woman,' he said to her. 'My
children,' God said to them both. 'Oh, please,' I said (well,
hissed, actually, having opted that morning for the body of a
python) before slithering away in search of somewhere private where I could hurl my ophidian guts.

    It seemed, I said.
    Language duly arrived. Proper language, not Adam's
moo-cow and bow-wow rubbish. Verbs, prepositions, adjectives. Grammar. Abstraction. God dropped in on them from
time to time, usually with some critter Adam had missed.
Tiny, fluttering, multicoloured thing. `Butterfly,' Eve said,
while Adam stood pleasantly stumped.
    `Yes,' Adam said. 'Butterfly. That's what I was going to
say.
    But Eve's unease lingered. The post-brainwashing residue
of self-sufficiency from the days before Adam's dream. If nie
and humankind had a future together I knew it lay in these
vestiges of Eve's independence. Literalist yes-plan Adam fed
the parrots and sang songs with nerve jangling tunelessness
to God. If Fall II: The Next Get,eration was ever going to
make it out of development and into production, if humans
were ever going to be anything more than monkeys on the
Divine Grinder's organ (excuse nie again) then it was going
to be down to the lady and the tramp.
    And therein, my dears, lies the answer to that nagging
question: What was I doing in Eden in the first place? God's
got the big martyr death scene written in for Jimmeny. The
infinitely self-sacrificing part of His nature demands it, just as
the infinitely generative part of His nature demanded the
creation of Everything out of Nothing, and just as the infinitely unjust part of His nature demanded the creation of an
infinite Hell for finite transgressions. The boy's motivation for
self-sacrifice is the redemption of His Father's world. The
infinitely filial part of His nature demands it. But for redemption there must be freely chosen transgression. Therefore -
ta-da! - transgression must feel, at least temporarily, good.
    Now ask yourself: Was there anyone better qualified for
the job?

    He was kidding Himself with Adam and He knew it.
Certainly He'd created him free - but in the letter of the law,
not its spirit. The infinitely insecure part of His nature had
baulked at it, when it came down to it. The infinitely
deluded part of His nature had allowed the creation of a role
the designated actor would never have the spine to play. The
infinitely paradoxical part of His nature had demanded
Man's free choice of sin over obedience whilst creating a
man who'd never be man enough to sin. Enter Eve.
    And boy did I.

    Violet, Gunn's Penelope-replacement, lives in a studio flat in
West Hampstead.
    `You do, actually, expect me not to be annoyed, do you?'
she said, having let me in, turned, and stormed up the stairs
to her living room. Neglectful of me, I know, not to have
offered an explanation for my tardiness, but I was still in a
state from the garden.
    `I don't imagine you stayed in waiting for me,' I said, following.
    `No I bloody did not. No, Declan, I bloody, thank God,
did not.'
    `Well then,' I said. `No harm done, eh?'
    She stood with her arms folded and her weight on one
sharp leg, lips parted, eyebrows raised. `Oh, I see,' she said.
`You've completely lost your mind. Right. I thought it was just
partial. I mean - are you ...? I mean what are you?'
    Violet thinks of herself as an actress and is almost wholly
unacquainted with talent and has a great froth of dark red
hair she pretends to be perpetually irritated by and at war
with (the legion clips and scrunchies, the barrettes, the ties, the pins, the sticks, the bands) but which she secretly thinks
of as her pre-Raphaelite crowning