The Satanic Verses (22 page)

– Once as a girl on Battle Hill, she was fond of recounting, always in the same time-polished words, – once as a solitary child, I found myself, quite suddenly and with no sense of strangeness, in the middle of a war. Longbows, maces, pikes. The flaxen-Saxon boys, cut down in their sweet youth. Harold Arroweye and William with his mouth full of sand. Yes, always the gift, the phantom-sight. – The story of the day on which the child Rosa had seen a vision of the battle of Hastings had become, for the old woman, one of the defining landmarks of her being, though it had been told so often that nobody, not even the teller, could confidently swear that it was true.
I long for them sometimes
, ran Rosa’s practised thoughts.
Les beaux jours: the dear, dead days
. She closed, once more, her reminiscent eyes. When she opened them, she saw, down by the water’s edge, no denying it, something beginning to move.

What she said aloud in her excitement: ‘I don’t believe it!’ – ‘It isn’t true!’ – ‘He’s never
here!’ –
On unsteady feet, with bumping chest, Rosa went for her hat, cloak, stick. While, on the winter seashore, Gibreel Farishta awoke with a mouth full of, no, not sand.

Snow.

Ptui!

Gibreel spat; leapt up, as if propelled by expectorated slush; wished Chamcha – as has been reported – many happy returns of the day; and commenced to beat the snow from sodden purple sleeves. ‘God, yaar,’ he shouted, hopping from foot to foot, ‘no wonder these people grow hearts of bloody ice.’

Then, however, the pure delight of being surrounded by such a quantity of snow quite overcame his first cynicism – for he was a tropical man – and he started capering about, saturnine and soggy, making snowballs and hurling them at his prone companion, envisioning a snowman, and singing a wild, swooping rendition of the carol ‘Jingle Bells.’ The first hint of light was in the sky, and on this cosy sea-coast danced Lucifer, the morning’s star.

His breath, it should be mentioned, had somehow or other wholly ceased to smell …

‘Come on, baby,’ cried invincible Gibreel, in whose behaviour the reader may, not unreasonably, perceive the delirious, dislocating effects of his recent fall. ‘Rise ’n’ shine! Let’s take this place by storm!’ Turning his back on the sea, blotting out the bad memory in order to make room for the next things, passionate as always for newness, he would have planted (had he owned one) a flag, to claim in the name of whoknowswho this white country, his new-found land. ‘Spoono,’ he pleaded, ‘shift, baba, or are you bloody dead?’ Which being uttered brought the speaker to (or at least towards) his senses. He bent over the other’s prostrate form, did not dare to touch. ‘Not now, old Chumch,’ he urged. ‘Not when we came so far.’

Saladin: was not dead, but weeping. The tears of shock freezing on his face. And all his body cased in a fine skin of ice, smooth
as glass, like a bad dream come true. In the miasmic semiconsciousness induced by his low body temperature he was possessed by the nightmare-fear of cracking, of seeing his blood bubbling up from the ice-breaks, of his flesh coming away with the shards. He was full of questions, did we truly, I mean, with your hands flapping, and then the waters, you don’t mean to tell me they
actually
, like in the movies, when Charlton Heston stretched out his staff, so that we could, across the ocean-floor, it never happened, couldn’t have, but if not then how, or did we in some way underwater, escorted by the mermaids, the sea passing through us as if we were fish or ghosts, was that the truth, yes or no, I need to have to … but when his eyes opened the questions acquired the indistinctness of dreams, so that he could no longer grasp them, their tails flicked before him and vanished like submarine fins. He was looking up at the sky, and noticed that it was the wrong colour entirely, blood-orange flecked with green, and the snow was blue as ink. He blinked hard but the colours refused to change, giving rise to the notion that he had fallen out of the sky into some wrongness, some other place, not England or perhaps not-England, some counterfeit zone, rotten borough, altered state. Maybe, he considered briefly: Hell? No, no, he reassured himself as unconsciousness threatened, that can’t be it, not yet, you aren’t dead yet; but dying.

Well then: a transit lounge.

He began to shiver; the vibration grew so intense that it occurred to him that he might break up under the stress, like a, like a, plane.

Then nothing existed. He was in a void, and if he were to survive he would have to construct everything from scratch, would have to invent the ground beneath his feet before he could take a step, only there was no need now to worry about such matters, because here in front of him was the inevitable: the tall, bony figure of Death, in a wide-brimmed straw hat, with a dark cloak flapping in the breeze. Death, leaning on a silver-headed cane, wearing olive-green Wellington boots.

‘What do you imagine yourselves to be doing here?’ Death wanted to know. ‘This is private property. There’s a sign.’ Said in
a woman’s voice that was somewhat tremulous and more than somewhat thrilled.

A few moments later, Death bent over him –
to kiss me
, he panicked silently.
To suck the breath from my body
. He made small, futile movements of protest.

‘He’s alive all right,’ Death remarked to, who was it, Gibreel. ‘But, my dear. His breath: what a
pong
. When did he last clean his teeth?’

One man’s breath was sweetened, while another’s, by an equal and opposite mystery, was soured. What did they expect? Falling like that out of the sky: did they imagine there would be no side-effects? Higher Powers had taken an interest, it should have been obvious to them both, and such Powers (I am, of course, speaking of myself) have a mischievous, almost a wanton attitude to tumbling flies. And another thing, let’s be clear: great falls change people. You think
they
fell a long way? In the matter of tumbles, I yield pride of place to no personage, whether mortal or im-. From clouds to ashes, down the chimney you might say, from heaven-light to hellfire … under the stress of a long plunge, I was saying, mutations are to be expected, not all of them random. Unnatural selections. Not much of a price to pay for survival, for being reborn, for becoming
new
, and at their age at that.

What? I should enumerate the changes?

Good breath/bad breath.

And around the edges of Gibreel Farishta’s head, as he stood with his back to the dawn, it seemed to Rosa Diamond that she discerned a faint, but distinctly golden,
glow
.

And were those bumps, at Chamcha’s temples, under his sodden and still-in-place bowler hat?

And, and, and.

When she laid eyes on the bizarre, satyrical figure of Gibreel Farishta prancing and dionysiac in the snow, Rosa Diamond did
not think of
say it
angels. Sighting him from her window, through salt-cloudy glass and age-clouded eyes, she felt her heart kick out, twice, so painfully that she feared it might stop; because in that indistinct form she seemed to discern the incarnation of her soul’s most deeply buried desire. She forgot the Norman invaders as if they had never been, and struggled down a slope of treacherous pebbles, too quickly for the safety of her not-quite-nonagenarian limbs, so that she could pretend to scold the impossible stranger for trespassing on her land.

Usually she was implacable in defence of her beloved fragment of the coast, and when summer weekenders strayed above the high tide line she descended upon them
like a wolf on the fold
, her phrase for it, to explain and to demand: – This is my garden, do you see. – And if they grew brazen, – getoutofitsillyoldmoo, itsthesoddingbeach, – she would return home to bring out a long green garden hose and turn it remorselessly upon their tartan blankets and plastic cricket bats and bottles of sun-tan lotion, she would smash their children’s sandcastles and soak their liver-sausage sandwiches, smiling sweetly all the while:
You won’t mind if I just water my lawn
? … O, she was a One, known in the village, they couldn’t lock her away in any old folks’ home, sent her whole family packing when they dared to suggest it, never darken her doorstep, she told them, cut the whole lot off without a penny or a by your leave. All on her own now, she was, never a visitor from week to blessed week, not even Dora Shufflebotham who went in and did for her all those years, Dora passed over September last, may she rest, still it’s a wonder at her age how the old trout manages, all those stairs, she may be a bit of a bee but give the devil her due, there’s many’s’d go barmy being that alone.

For Gibreel there was neither a hosepipe nor the
sharp end
of her tongue. Rosa uttered token words of reproof, held her nostrils while examining the fallen and newly sulphurous Saladin (who had not, at this point, removed his bowler hat), and then, with an access of shyness which she greeted with nostalgic astonishment, stammered an invitation, yyou bbetter bring your ffriend in out of the cccold, and stamped back up the shingle to put the kettle on,
grateful to the bite of the winter air for reddening her cheeks and
saving
, in the old comforting phrase,
her blushes
.

As a young man Saladin Chamcha had possessed a face of quite exceptional innocence, a face that did not seem ever to have encountered disillusion or evil, with skin as soft and smooth as a princess’s palm. It had served him well in his dealings with women, and had, in point of fact, been one of the first reasons his future wife Pamela Lovelace had given for falling in love with him. ‘So round and cherubic,’ she marvelled, cupping her hands under his chin. ‘Like a rubber ball.’

He was offended. ‘I’ve got bones,’ he protested. ‘Bone
structure
.’

‘Somewhere in there,’ she conceded. ‘Everybody does.’

After that he was haunted for a time by the notion that he looked like a featureless jellyfish, and it was in large part to assuage this feeling that he set about developing the narrow, haughty demeanour that was now second nature to him. It was, therefore, a matter of some consequence when, on arising from a long slumber racked by a series of intolerable dreams, prominent among which were images of Zeeny Vakil, transformed into a mermaid, singing to him from an iceberg in tones of agonizing sweetness, lamenting her inability to join him on dry land, calling him, calling; – but when he went to her she shut him up fast in the heart of her ice-mountain, and her song changed to one of triumph and revenge … it was, I say, a serious matter when Saladin Chamcha woke up, looked into a mirror framed in blue-and-gold Japonaiserie lacquer, and found that old cherubic face staring out at him once again; while, at his temples, he observed a brace of fearfully discoloured swellings, indications that he must have suffered, at some point in his recent adventures, a couple of mighty blows.