The Satanic Verses (28 page)

His nose informed him that the sanatorium, or whatever the place called itself, was also beginning to stink to the heavens; jungle and farmyard odours mingled with a rich aroma similar to that of exotic spices sizzling in clarified butter – coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, cardamoms, cloves. ‘This is too much,’ he thought firmly. ‘Time to get a few things sorted out.’ He swung his legs out of bed, tried to stand up, and promptly fell to the floor, being utterly unaccustomed to his new legs. It took him around an hour to overcome this problem – learning to walk by
holding on to the bed and stumbling around it until his confidence grew. At length, and not a little unsteadily, he made his way to the nearest screen; whereupon the face of the immigration officer Stein appeared, Cheshire-Cat-like, between two of the screens to his left, followed rapidly by the rest of the fellow, who drew the screens together behind him with suspicious rapidity.

‘Doing all right?’ Stein asked, his smile remaining wide.

‘When can I see the doctor? When can I go to the toilet? When can I leave?’ Chamcha asked in a rush. Stein answered equably: the doctor would be round presently; Nurse Phillips would bring him a bedpan; he could leave as soon as he was well. ‘Damn decent of you to come down with the lung thing,’ Stein added, with the gratitude of an author whose character had unexpectedly solved a ticklish technical problem. ‘Makes the story much more convincing. Seems you were that sick, you did pass out on us after all. Nine of us remember it well. Thanks.’ Chamcha could not find any words. ‘And another thing,’ Stein went on. ‘The old burd, Mrs Diamond. Turns out to be dead in her bed, cold as mutton, and the other gentleman vanished clear away. The possibility of foul play has no as yet been eliminated.’

‘In conclusion,’ he said before disappearing forever from Saladin’s new life, ‘I suggest, Mr Citizen Saladin, that you dinna trouble with a complaint. You’ll forgive me for speaking plain, but with your wee horns and your great hoofs you wouldna look the most reliable of witnesses. Good day to you now.’

Saladin Chamcha closed his eyes and when he opened them his tormentor had turned into the nurse and physiotherapist, Hyacinth Phillips. ‘Why you wan go walking?’ she asked. ‘Whatever your heart desires, you jus ask me, Hyacinth, and we’ll see what we can fix.’

‘Ssst.’

That night, in the greeny light of the mysterious institution, Saladin was awakened by a hiss out of an Indian bazaar.

‘Ssst. You, Beelzebub. Wake up.’

Standing in front of him was a figure so impossible that Chamcha wanted to bury his head under the sheets; yet could not, for was not he himself …? ‘That’s right,’ the creature said. ‘You see, you’re not alone.’

It had an entirely human body, but its head was that of a ferocious tiger, with three rows of teeth. ‘The night guards often doze off,’ it explained. ‘That’s how we manage to get to talk.’

Just then a voice from one of the other beds – each bed, as Chamcha now knew, was protected by its own ring of screens – wailed loudly: ‘Oh, if ever a body suffered!’ and the man-tiger, or manticore, as it called itself, gave an exasperated growl. ‘That Moaner Lisa,’ it exclaimed. ‘All they did to him was make him blind.’

‘Who did what?’ Chamcha was confused.

‘The point is,’ the manticore continued, ‘are you going to put up with it?’

Saladin was still puzzled. The other seemed to be suggesting that these mutations were the responsibility of – of whom? How could they be? – ‘I don’t see,’ he ventured, ‘who can be blamed …’

The manticore ground its three rows of teeth in evident frustration. ‘There’s a woman over that way,’ it said, ‘who is now mostly water-buffalo. There are businessmen from Nigeria who have grown sturdy tails. There is a group of holidaymakers from Senegal who were doing no more than changing planes when they were turned into slippery snakes. I myself am in the rag trade; for some years now I have been a highly paid male model, based in Bombay, wearing a wide range of suitings and shirtings also. But who will employ me now?’ he burst into sudden and unexpected tears. ‘There, there,’ said Saladin Chamcha, automatically. ‘Everything will be all right, I’m sure of it. Have courage.’

The creature composed itself. ‘The point is,’ it said fiercely, ‘some of us aren’t going to stand for it. We’re going to bust out of here before they turn us into anything worse. Every night I feel a
different piece of me beginning to change. I’ve started, for example, to break wind continually … I beg your pardon … you see what I mean? By the way, try these,’ he slipped Chamcha a packet of extra-strength peppermints. ‘They’ll help your breath. I’ve bribed one of the guards to bring in a supply.’

‘But how do they do it?’ Chamcha wanted to know.

‘They describe us,’ the other whispered solemnly. ‘That’s all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct.’

‘It’s hard to believe,’ Chamcha argued. ‘I’ve lived here for many years and it never happened before …’ His words dried up because he saw the manticore looking at him through narrow, distrustful eyes. ‘Many years?’ it asked. ‘How could that be? – Maybe you’re an informer? – Yes, that’s it, a spy?’

Just then a wail came from a far corner of the ward. ‘Lemme go,’ a woman’s voice howled. ‘O Jesus I want to go. Jesus Mary I gotta go, lemme go, O God, O Jesus God.’ A very lecherous-looking wolf put its head through Saladin’s screens and spoke urgently to the manticore. ‘The guards’ll be here soon,’ it hissed. ‘It’s her again, Glass Bertha.’

‘Glass …?’ Saladin began. ‘Her skin turned to glass,’ the manticore explained impatiently, not knowing that he was bringing Chamcha’s worst dream to life. ‘And the bastards smashed it up for her. Now she can’t even walk to the toilet.’

A new voice hissed out across the greeny night. ‘For God’s sake, woman. Go in the fucking bedpan.’

The wolf was pulling the manticore away. ‘Is he with us or not?’ it wanted to know. The manticore shrugged. ‘He can’t make up his mind,’ it answered. ‘Can’t believe his own eyes, that’s his trouble.’

They fled, hearing the approaching crunch of the guards’ heavy boots.

The next day there was no sign of a doctor, or of Pamela, and Chamcha in his utter bewilderment woke and slept as if the two
conditions no longer required to be thought of as opposites, but as states that flowed into and out of one another to create a kind of unending delirium of the senses … he found himself dreaming of the Queen, of making tender love to the Monarch. She was the body of Britain, the avatar of the State, and he had chosen her, joined with her; she was his Beloved, the moon of his delight.

Hyacinth came at the appointed times to ride and pummel him, and he submitted without any fuss. But when she finished she whispered into his ear: ‘You in with the rest?’ and he understood that she was involved in the great conspiracy, too. ‘If you are,’ he heard himself saying, ‘then you can count me in.’ She nodded, looking pleased. Chamcha felt a warmth filling him up, and he began to wonder about taking hold of one of the physiotherapist’s exceedingly dainty, albeit powerful, little fists; but just then a shout came from the direction of the blind man: ‘My stick, I’ve lost my stick.’

‘Poor old bugger,’ said Hyacinth, and hopping off Chamcha she darted across to the sightless fellow, picked up the fallen stick, restored it to its owner, and came back to Saladin. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you this pm; okay, no problems?’

He wanted her to stay, but she acted brisk. ‘I’m a busy woman, Mr Chamcha. Things to do, people to see.’

When she had gone he lay back and smiled for the first time in a long while. It did not occur to him that his metamorphosis must be continuing, because he was actually entertaining romantic notions about a black woman; and before he had time to think such complex thoughts, the blind man next door began, once again, to speak.

‘I have noticed you,’ Chamcha heard him say, ‘I have noticed you, and come to appreciate your kindness and understanding.’ Saladin realized that he was making a formal speech of thanks to the empty space where he clearly believed the physiotherapist was still standing. ‘I am not a man who forgets a kindness. One day, perhaps, I may be able to repay it, but for the moment, please know that it is remembered, and fondly, too …’ Chamcha did not have the courage to call out,
she isn’t there, old man, she left some
time back
. He listened unhappily until at length the blind man asked the thin air a question: ‘I hope, perhaps, you may also remember me? A little? On occasion?’ Then came a silence; a dry laugh; the sound of a man sitting down, heavily, all of a sudden. And finally, after an unbearable pause, bathos: ‘Oh,’ the soliloquist bellowed, ‘oh, if ever a body suffered …!’

We strive for the heights but our natures betray us, Chamcha thought; clowns in search of crowns. The bitterness overcame him.
Once I was lighter, happier, warm. Now the black water is in my veins
.

Still no Pamela.
What the hell
. That night, he told the manticore and the wolf that he was with them, all the way.

The great escape took place some nights later, when Saladin’s lungs had been all but emptied of slime by the ministrations of Miss Hyacinth Phillips. It turned out to be a well-organized affair on a pretty large scale, involving not only the inmates of the sanatorium but also the
detenus
, as the manticore called them, held behind wire fences in the Detention Centre nearby. Not being one of the grand strategists of the escape, Chamcha simply waited by his bed as instructed until Hyacinth brought him word, and then they ran out of that ward of nightmares into the clarity of a cold, moonlit sky, past several bound, gagged men: their former guards. There were many shadowy figures running through the glowing night, and Chamcha glimpsed beings he could never have imagined, men and women who were also partially plants, or giant insects, or even, on occasion, built partly of brick or stone; there were men with rhinoceros horns instead of noses and women with necks as long as any giraffe. The monsters ran quickly, silently, to the edge of the Detention Centre compound, where the manticore and other sharp-toothed mutants were waiting by the large holes they had bitten into the fabric of the containing fence, and then they were out, free, going their separate ways, without hope, but also
without shame. Saladin Chamcha and Hyacinth Phillips ran side by side, his goat-hoofs clip-clopping on the hard pavements:
east
she told him, as he heard his own footsteps replace the tinnitus in his ears, east east east they ran, taking the low roads to London town.

J
umpy Joshi had become Pamela Chamcha’s lover by what she afterwards called ‘sheer chance’ on the night she learned of her husband’s death in the
Bostan
explosion, so that the sound of his old college friend Saladin’s voice speaking from beyond the grave in the middle of the night, uttering the five gnomic words
sorry, excuse please, wrong number, –
speaking, moreover, less than two hours after Jumpy and Pamela had made, with the assistance of two bottles of whisky, the two-backed beast, – put him in a tight spot. ‘Who was
that
?’ Pamela, still mostly asleep, with a blackout mask over her eyes, rolled over to inquire, and he decided to reply, ‘Just a breather, don’t worry about it,’ which was all very well, except then he had to do the worrying all by himself, sitting up in bed, naked, and sucking, for comfort, as he had all his life, the thumb on his right hand.