The Devil and Temptation

“..and I shall give you power beyond your wildest imaginings!!” hissed Satan, flourishing his cape in what he probably thought was a dramatic manner. The gesture probably would have had more impact had it been timed better. Unfortunately, the lighting storm he’d spent all morning arranging had long dissipated by the time he reached the climax of what he referred to as his ‘patter’. At the dress rehearsal, back in hell, he’d looked great – a big imposing silhouette in front of a gothic picture window, lighting splitting the sky behind him. He was now stood in front of a rather grimy UPVC window that looked out on to the dilapidated streets of Bromley, the skies above now home only to a rainbow. In the distance, the chimes of an ice cream van could be heard. There was an air of sad kitsch about the whole scene. As temptations went, we weren’t really off to a good start.

The little man whose soul Lucifer sought looked nonplussed, and stayed silent – waiting for a climax that had already passed unnoticed. Satan coughed into his clenched fist, as if trying to stifle a giggle. I looked at my feet, whilst suppressing the urge to mutter something under my breath. It was all very well for the devil, he’d just turned up in a puff of brimstone, but I’d spent the last 40 minutes in a cramped carriage on the district line. The journey had been made worse by the fact that I’d had to carry an oversized ghetto blaster with me, something Satan insisted I bought with me in order to play what he termed his ‘temptation mega mix’. He frantically signalled that I should start the tape, and I complied. After a slight pause as the tape spooled through, the first track kicked into life, and immediately revealed one of the many flaws in the devil’s worldview.

In Satan’s mind, the mega mix was a fiendishly precise selection of songs designed to confound the mind of any mortal who might listen to it. As far as he was concerned, it was a playlist so seductive that the listener would gladly succumb to their darkest desires, and accept the terms of whatever bargain he offered them. To the ears of any normal mortal, it was six songs recorded from the radio, with lyrical content that even the most desperate of horny teenage boys would consider unsubtle. I mean, take track one – ‘Temptation’ by Heaven 17. An 80’s pop classic perhaps, but hardly a stealth attack on the subconscious mind. The intended victim was now clearly smirking, which was hardly surprising considering that Satan had resorted to cavorting around the room in a pathetic attempt to raise the man’s excitement levels and force him into a quick deal. I too would have been amused, had I not been so complicit in the whole affair. The combination of a poor quality recording and poor quality equipment meant that the song’s high end had almost been lost entirely. As a result, I was forced to fill in for the female vocals. I couldn’t have hit the high notes as a prepubescent boy, let alone as the twenty five year old smoker I was now. I sounded like a terrier being squashed under a paving slab, and it was my discordant yelping that finally elicited outright laughter from our target. Satan shot me a look of utter venom before disappearing from the room. I stopped the tape, nodded apologetically at the little man, and silently let myself out of his home.

The Devil and Mrs Devil

Despite my protests, we ended up at the supermarket. Whenever Mrs. Devil's birthday rolled around, that's inevitably where I'd find myself. There was just no convincing Lucifer that there were better places to buy a gift.

There are a number of things I’ve never really understood about Satan’s relationship with his wife. The first of which being; why he only ever referred to her as ‘Mrs. Devil’. I found that a bit weird, to be honest. As I’m sure you know, he himself is known by many names, so for her to only have one never quite sat right with me. I had a suspicion that her real names were all really long and complicated, probably unpronounceable using a mortal tongue, but I didn’t ever press the issue for fear that it’d expose another one of Satan’s little hang ups. Namely, that he’d married a lady way above his station. I wasn’t about to inflame his acute sense of class consciousness by enquiring whether she had the otherworldly equivalent of a double barreled name, and I was never alone with her long enough to ask her directly. In any case, what would I gain by knowing her names, anyway? The only likely result would be to open a marital can of worms that had been sitting quietly undisturbed in Chez Diablo for many happy years. No, as a friend I knew that some questions were best left unanswered.

Sometimes however, you really do need to let a friend know when they’re making a mistake. As with every year, I was trying my best to convince Lucifer that a mistake was just what he was making. No matter how big or well stocked a supermarket might be, it is rarely an appropriate place to buy a gift for your significant other. Not the main present, anyway. I mean, sure, you can use it to pad things out with a bottle of wine or some nice chocolates, but you shouldn’t seek to buy the main gift there. Of course, Beelzebub paid me no heed, and was instead eyeing up some oversized trays of vacuum packed beef. This was the crux of the problem – he didn’t appreciate that gift shopping was all about context. While he was perfectly correct in his belief that his wife loved a nice steak dinner, what he didn’t appreciate was that giving her a slab of uncooked, bloody meat for her birthday didn’t exactly scream ‘romance’. Luckily, a comment from me about how much water retailers pumped into meat these days was enough to steer him away from that disastrous path. Instead, we headed for the entertainment section of the store – safer ground by far. Well, so you’d think. Problem was, rather than buying her something she might possibly want, such as season one of The Wire, the new Charlene Spitteri album or a celebrity hardback, Satan’s love of a bargain drew him straight to the discount DVD bin. I stood flabbergasted as I watched him try and convince himself that Mrs. D would love some of the heavily discounted ‘classics’ on offer.

There was nothing for it – yet again, as with every year, I was going to have to buy her something myself, and covertly swap the gifts at an opportune moment. At no small cost to myself, of course. I’d been doing it for years – I couldn’t stand to see him embarrass himself and hurt her feelings. This year though, as we stood at the checkout, the truth hit me – the cheap bastard knew full well what I’d been doing. He deliberately bought her crap gifts, safe in the knowledge my misplaced sense of loyalty would save him both face and cash. Well, not this year, I decided. I’d do nothing to intervene. Part of me even wished I could see the look on Mrs. Devil’s face when she unwrapped a slightly shop soiled copy of Rory McGrath’s Own Goals and Gaffes.