Quintin Jardine - On Honeymoon With Death

Ever fancy a quiet life? I did. I was stupid enough, at one time, to reckon that I could just coast it, that I could find a nice lifestyle business and work for as long as I had to, until I’d stuffed my pension full enough to retire to the golf course.

I grew up in the East Neuk of Fife, you see, and while I was switched on enough to realise that I had to broaden my horizons a bit, I never wanted to venture too far from home.

So where did it all go wrong? How the hell did I wind up being chased by seriously nasty people? How the hell did I get involved with a wrestling circus, of all things, and become a (minor) television star in the process? How the hell did I wind up in movies, with my name on posters outside cinemas and multiplexes all over the world? How the hell did I come up with those six lucky numbers that Saturday night, the ones that piled all that extra dough into an already fat bank account?

And after all that how did I manage to come face to face with myself, with the bloke I’ve really been all my life?

Some might say that God alone knows for sure. Not me, though: I have my own theory. I blame it on an occult power, an unseen malevolent hand which shapes the destiny of every one of us on the planet. The way I see it, God is a bit like me. . or like the person I always thought I wanted to be. He created the Heavens and the Earth in six days and six nights, took a rest on Sunday, and reckoned a lot more to that than He did to creating. So, satisfied that His pension fund was fat enough to keep Him flush for the foreseeable eternity, He made one last final adjustment to the celestial plan (the creation of the electric buggy), took unto Himself the name of Arnold Palmer, and pissed off to Augusta, Georgia, USA, to play some serious golf.

The actual running of this place, He left to one of His earlier creations, someone. . or something. . He’d put together in the Void, before He moved upon the surface of the waters — incidentally, I was taught as a child NEVER to do that!

That’s the trouble with architects the world over, and beyond in this instance. They’re great on the drawing board, and most of them see the job through to completion, but invariably they get rat-arsed at the opening ceremony then bugger off for good, leaving someone else to do the troubleshooting, and leaving the poor bloody clients to live with the consequences.

There are no exceptions to this rule: not even God.

In His case, when it came to delegating the after-sales service, His human resources department (sorry, His personnel department; this was, after all, a long time ago) got it badly wrong. Today the mistake would have been spotted at the first interview; or if not, then as soon as they gave the candidate a psychometric test, he, it, would have given the game away. The application form alone should have done it; the fact that his, its, works number was 666 ought to have made someone tumble to it even before they got to the name: surname, ‘Antichrist’; forenames, ‘Satan The’.

But no; the lucky Devil got the job, the middle-management post he had always hankered after, and had always been denied when God was focused and on the ball, as opposed to later, when he was fishing it out of Rae’s Creek. It wasn’t that his Creator had anything against him; One takes responsibility for One’s own mistakes, after all. It wasn’t his appearance that had held him back either: after all, a crimson-clad, twelve-foot-tall, eight-hundred-pound hunchback, with talons instead of fingers, a body temperature which could fire clay pots, and eyes which literally are red-hot coals, all topped off with a pair of horns that would give a fourteen-pointer stag a Bambi complex might look out of place in today’s sanitised, politically correct, beauty-obsessed society, but in the pre-dawn of creation he was just another bloke on the team-sheet. (In fact, I have always suspected that if Mr A could prove to the Scottish Football Association that he had as little as a single Channel Islander grandparent, he would be in our next World Cup squad. And I know for sure that England could have done with him in the centre of their defence in Euro 2000.)

It wasn’t his attitude to Good and Evil that was the problem either. (The notion that God is on the side of the former is completely fanciful anyway, as a quick read through selected parts of the Old Testament will prove beyond doubt.)

No, the thing that held him back was his sexuality. Satan is always represented as a bloke, which biologically he is. However, it’s not quite as simple as that, or as straight, one might say. For the truth is. . he’s gay. Yes, the Devil is a poof. Old Nick is a nine-pound note. Not, I rush to say, that this maketh him a bad perthon. The problem is that with it, he has acquired a quirky, mischievous sense of humour, the sort which in a smaller, less formidable personality is liable to result sooner or later in a good kicking. From the start, God perceived this flaw in His precious work. . the sexual clock wasn’t His work, it was one of the first examples of evolution. . and determined to keep him about the house, as it were.

But He didn’t and as a result, this cosmic Kenneth Williams has been inflicting his notion of fun on mankind since before our species could stand straight. Some of the most momentous events in our history have been his idea of a joke.

The parting of the Red Sea, for example, took place not because he had decided to lead God’s chosen people out of bondage in Egypt. (God has never heard of Moses, and, as He faces that intimidating tee shot across the water at Augusta National, wouldn’t give a bugger about him, even if He had.) No, the fact is that it was all set up because S. T. Antichrist did not approve of the formal dress of the pharaoh’s court. Too butch, he thought. On the other hand he was behind the toga. (The kilt was not his; he never messed with the Highland Scots.)

He had a great time in the Middle Ages too; there is a school of thought that the pan-European epidemic of witch-burning was no more than his revenge on a particularly terrifying primary-school teacher. Those of us who were educated in Scotland in the days of corporal punishment can understand that. The Dracula legend is another of his. A cover story, that’s all, to cover a sexual cult whose practices would attract the attention of even the Turkish police force. Far from being the model for the vampire count, Vlad the Impaler was no more than a convenient fall guy, if appropriately named in the circumstances.

His games are around us, for all to see, his quirks, his foibles, his gay little jests. Appropriately, many of them exist in the world of architecture. The Leaning Tower of Pisa? Sydney Opera House? The City of Birmingham? The Sagrada Familia? The Scottish Parliament Building??

These days he even dabbles in sport and the performing arts. Who else could have invented The Archers ? Or synchronised swimming? Or ice dancing? Or rhythmic gymnastics? Or Dennis Rodman? Or Gazza? Or the Sex Pistols? Or Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Or Coronation Street ? Look at the Rolling Stones and ask yourself this: did Mick and Keith write ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, or was it dictated?

All of these truths only came to me after many hours of alcohol-assisted meditation upon the many bizarre events which have turned my life upside down over the last few years, and which have come between me and my still-cherished ambition. I’m with God on this one; all I really want to do is play golf. Yet these days I can’t find half an hour to hit fifty balls on the driving range.

Satan has a thing about golf too. You see he really liked God; he looked up to Him as a Father. . which, in a non-biological sense He was. . and he was really hurt when He turned his back on him, created azaleas and went off to roam among them for ever. (Even if STA did land a good job as a result.)