You know what Eden was? I’ll tell you. Edenic. Susurrating trees reached out fingers of frothy foliage to catch the languid landings of turquoise birds. Opalescent streams exhaled the sweet scent of sewage-free water. Red and silver fish jewelled obsidian meres. Succulent grass appeared and let green really show itself. (That grass and that green, they were made for each other.) Gentle rains fell from time to time and the earth lifted its face up to receive them. Colours debuted daily in the sky: aquamarine, mauve, pewter, violet, tangerine, scarlet, indigo, puce. Colours were textures in Eden. You wanted to roll around naked in ’em. The material world, it was apparent from the get-go, was my kind of place.

Yes, Eden was beautiful – and if I had to squeeze through corporeal keyholes to crash it – so be it. (Hasn’t it bothered you, this part of the story, my being there, I mean? What was I doing there? ‘Presume not the ways of God to scan,’ you’ve been told in umpteen variations, ‘the proper study of Mankind is Man.’ Maybe so, but what, excuse me, was the Devil doing in Eden?) I took the forms of animals. I found I could. (That’s generally my reason for doing something, by the way, because I find I can.) I hung around the gates for quite a while; I made several slow passes at the material boundaries until I sensed – my hunches are infallible – that flesh and blood would open to me, that angelic spirit could cleave and inhabit the body, drawing form around itself in a meaty cloak. It’s claustrophobic, at first, taking on a form. Your spirit instinct screams against it. Incarnation requires a strong will and a cool head – well, a cool mind, until an actual head is available. Imagine you suddenly realised you could breathe underwater. Imagine you could take water into your lungs, ditch the hydrogen and hang on to the oxygen. Taking that first breath wouldn’t be easy, would it? Your reflex would be to kick for the surface and wolf down air as nature intended. Well, it’s the same with corporeal habitation. Only the single-minded overcome that reflex panic and yield to the body’s fit. And as if you needed reminding: I am one of the single-minded. So I took the forms of animals. Birds were the obvious first choice, what with their bird’s-eye view of things. And flying’s hardly to be sniffed at, when you consider it. (One of your most irresistible traits, by the way, is the speed with which you exhaust novelty. I was on a red-eye from JFK to Heathrow the other day, working on a rapper who’s this close to stabbing his model girlfriend to death, when I noticed how utterly indifferent the passengers were to what they were doing, namely, flying through the air. A glance out of the window would have revealed furrowed fields of cloud stained smokeblue and violet as night and morning changed shifts – but how were they passing the time in First, Business and Coach? Crosswords. In-flight movies. Computer games. Email. Creation sprawls like a dewed and willing maiden outside your window awaiting only the lechery of your senses – and what do you do? Complain about the dwarf cutlery. Plug your ears. Blind your eyes. Discuss Julia Roberts’s hair. Ah, me. Sometimes I think my work is done.) Yes, I thoroughly enjoyed flying. And flying at night? Oy. Like butter. Ask the owls. I bathed in the darkness and basked in the light. You’re poor on basking, you lot. With the exception of white girls from the northern hemisphere’s urban pits, who, supine on southern beaches quite naturally allow the sun to strip from them the last tissues of sentience, humans have everything to learn from lizards. The only animal from which humans have nothing to learn, in fact, is the sheep. Humans have already learned everything the sheep’s got to teach.

The animals shied away from me, even when I was one of them. They just . . . sensed. They drew away and that was that. Me and animals would never be friends. I’ve made use of them from time to time down the millennia, but there’s never going to be a relationship. Three things: they don’t have souls, they can’t choose, and they’re dependent on God – ergo they’re of no consequence to me. The absence of a soul, by the way, makes it easy to inhabit a body. (Therefore, why is Elton John still pudging around unpossessed? I hear you ask.) Conversely, the presence of a soul is an absolute bugger to get around. I manage it, periodically, but it’s not like falling off a log.

However, again I digress.

He knew I was there. God the Holy Spirit knew first and blabbed to the Other Two, who knew in any case. Who’d known all along. He let me stay. He created Eden and let the Devil in. Got that? What else do you need to know about Him? I mean do I need, actually, to go on?

A word about humankind – and I’m . . . you know . . . shooting from the hip here: I was hooked on you, instantly. The hundred billion galaxies, the stars, the moons, the cosmic dust, the wrinkles, the loops, the black holes, the worm-holes . . . It was nice stuff, spectacular in a remote, high-art way. But you lot? Oh, man. Should I say that you were right up my street? You were right up my street, in the front door and sitting in the comfy chair with your shoes off smoking a huge spliff while I made us both a cup of PG. It wasn’t your looks (although I was always a sucker for beauty, and your pre-lapsarian progenitors make you lot look like a posse of anthraxed Quazzies), it was your potential. I looked on (from the lowest bough of a laburnum tree that had burst into blinding yellow bloom almost with an air of embarrassment at the spectacle of itself) as Himself coaxed and worried Adam from the dust. I watched the arrival of bone, the wet birth of blood, the woven tissues, the threaded capillaries, the shocking bag of skin (less Michelangelo than Giger meets Bacon meets Bosch). Those lungs would turn out to be a design flaw, mind you, with all the breathable nastiness I was going to inspire you to invent. Ah, and the genitals. Where the smart money was going. It was, one has to admit, mesmerizing, a gory wattle-and-daub masterpiece. Give the Maker His due, He knew how to Make. The nipples and hair were sweet touches, though you could see from the outset what the wear-and-tear spots were going to be, where the mileage was going to be racked-up: teeth; heart; scalp; bum. Still, you really were a piece of work. I lay on my laburnum bough (I was a feral cat at the time, as yet unnamed) rapt and, I must confess, a tad jealous. Angels had pure spirit and a one-dimensional existence blowing smoke up the Divine Bottom morning noon and night. Man, apparently, was going to have the entire natural world, sentience, reason, imagination, five juicy senses and, according to the development leaked before the war, a get out of jail free card courtesy of Jimmeny Christmas to be phased in not long before the fall of the Roman Empire with limitless retroaction.

You’ll excuse my flippancy. This is difficult for me. I’d been feeling peaky ever since I found out about Creation. On the one hand it gave me a superabundance of material to work with. On the other . . . What am I trying to say? On the other, it had about it the noxious whiff of finality. Once the world was up and running, once Man was abroad, rife with desires and garrotted by those dos and don’ts, my role was pretty much set for . . . well, for ever. You pause for reflection at these moments. And while we are pausing (Adam finished now, toenails, eyelashes, earlobes, fingerprints – that was forward planning, that, fingerprints) let’s not forget that I, Lucifer, was still in the first agonizing age of pain. Imagine having all your skin flayed off. Whilst having all your teeth drilled. Whilst having your knackers or vadge nailed to a fridge. Imagine your head being on fire all the time. That’s the tip of my iceberg of my pain.

With the pain, curiously, had come the conviction that I could bear it. Later (much later) by degrees (a lot of degrees) the conviction proved justified; I found I could shear off a wafer of myself, the thinnest, flimsiest wafer (not unlike the sliced ginger accompanying sushi) and lift it above and beyond the infernal pain. I’ve seen exceptional humans do it under torture. Enormously irritating to me and my torturers of course, but, you know, credit where credit’s due and all that.

So I was, let me repeat, in terrible pain. But I couldn’t keep away. Lying there on my bough watching the shadows crawling over Adam’s loins, I had an intimation of the rage and loneliness I’d be signing on for from these beginnings, a glimpse of the appalling waste and destruction, a first gutgrowl of what would be an eternally unsatisfied hunger – a moment, all in all, of doubt.

Night had crept into the garden. Crocuses and snowdrops were throbbing quills and pearly stars in the dark grass. The rustle of water and the sibilance of the wakeful trees. Ink-shadowed stones and the moon a chalky hoof print. The whole place attended to me with a Lawrentian intensity. My head sank forward on to my paws and I felt my breath moist in my nostrils. The bones in my body were heavy, and for the briefest moment – looking down at sleeping Adam’s brand new limbs and unopened face – for the briefest moment I must confess . . . I must confess . . . I did wonder, despite all that had gone before, despite rebellion, despite expulsion, despite the battlements and cesspits of Hell, despite my legion cohorts and their chorus of rage, despite everything, whether there might not be a chance to –

‘Lucifer.’

From which shameful reverie His voice woke me. The sound of it annihilated all the time between the last time I’d heard it (consigning me to . . . to . . .) and now. Then was now and now was then and there was no going back, no punishment disguised as forgiveness, no shamble back into the fetters of obedience. Wondering if I could escape the pain was worse than knowing I couldn’t. He knew that. The whole speculation had been a plant. Jimmeny’s idea. Well fuck the Pair – sorry, the Trio of Them.