The Satanic Verses (33 page)

What she did not tell the class was this: as Maurice Wilson’s ghost described, in patient detail, his own ascent, and also his posthumous discoveries, for example the slow, circuitous, infinitely delicate and invariably unproductive mating ritual of the yeti, which he had witnessed recently on the South Col, – so it occurred to her that her vision of the eccentric of 1934, the first human being ever to attempt to scale Everest on his own, a sort of abominable snowman himself, had been no accident, but a kind of signpost, a declaration of kinship. A prophecy of the future, perhaps, for it was at that moment that her secret dream was born, the impossible thing: the dream of the unaccompanied climb. It was possible, also, that Maurice Wilson was the angel of her death.

‘I wanted to talk about ghosts,’ she was saying, ‘because most mountaineers, when they come down from the peaks, grow embarrassed and leave these stories out of their accounts. But they do exist, I have to admit it, even though I’m the type who’s always kept her feet on solid ground.’

That was a laugh. Her feet. Even before the ascent of Everest she had begun to suffer from shooting pains, and was informed by her general practitioner, a no-nonsense Bombay woman called Dr Mistry, that she was suffering from fallen arches. ‘In common parlance, flat feet.’ Her arches, always weak, had been further weakened by years of wearing sneakers and other unsuitable shoes. Dr Mistry couldn’t recommend much: toe-clenching exercises, running upstairs barefoot, sensible footwear. ‘You’re young enough,’ she said. ‘If you take care, you’ll live. If not, you’ll be a cripple at forty.’ When Gibreel – damn it! – heard that she had climbed Everest with spears in her feet he took to calling her his silkie. He had read a Bumper Book of fairy-tales in which he found the story of the sea-woman who left the ocean and took on human form for the sake of the man she loved. She had feet instead of fins, but every step she took was an agony, as if she were walking over broken glass; yet she went on walking, forward, away from the sea
and over land. You did it for a bloody mountain, he said. Would you do it for a man?

She had concealed her foot-ache from her fellow-mountaineers because the lure of Everest had been so overwhelming. But these days the pain was still there, and growing, if anything, worse. Chance, a congenital weakness, was proving to be her footbinder. Adventure’s end, Allie thought; betrayed by my feet. The image of footbinding stayed with her.
Goddamn Chinese
, she mused, echoing Wilson’s ghost.

‘Life is so easy for some people,’ she had wept into Gibreel Farishta’s arms. ‘Why don’t
their
blasted feet give out?’ He had kissed her forehead. ‘For you, it may always be a struggle,’ he said. ‘You want it too damn much.’

The class was waiting for her, growing impatient with all this talk of phantoms. They wanted
the
story, her story. They wanted to stand on the mountain-top.
Do you know how it feels
, she wanted to ask them,
to have the whole of your life concentrated into one moment, a few hours long? Do you know what it’s like when the only direction is down
? ‘I was in the second pair with Sherpa Pemba,’ she said. ‘The weather was perfect, perfect. So clear you felt you could look right through the sky into whatever lay beyond. The first pair must have reached the summit by now, I said to Pemba. Conditions are holding and we can go. Pemba grew very serious, quite a change, because he was one of the expedition clowns. He had never been to the summit before, either. At that stage I had no plans to go without oxygen, but when I saw that Pemba intended it, I thought, okay, me too. It was a stupid whim, unprofessional, really, but I suddenly wanted to be a woman sitting on top of that bastard mountain, a human being, not a breathing machine. Pemba said, Allie Bibi, don’t do, but I just started up. In a while we passed the others coming down and I could see the wonderful thing in their eyes. They were so high, possessed of such an exaltation, that they didn’t even notice I wasn’t wearing the oxygen equipment. Be careful, they shouted over to us, Look out for the angels. Pemba had fallen into a good breathing pattern and I fell into step with it, breathing in with his in, out with his out. I could
feel something lifting off the top of my head and I was grinning, just grinning from ear to ear, and when Pemba looked my way I could see he was doing the same. It looked like a grimace, like pain, but it was just foolish joy.’ She was a woman who had been brought to transcendence, to the miracles of the soul, by the hard physical labour of hauling herself up an icebound height of rock. ‘At that moment,’ she told the girls, who were climbing beside her every step of the way, ‘I believed it all: that the universe has a sound, that you can lift a veil and see the face of God, everything. I saw the Himalayas stretching below me and that was God’s face, too. Pemba must have seen something in my expression that bothered him because he called across, Look out, Allie Bibi, the height. I recall sort of floating over the last overhang and up to the top, and then we were there, with the ground falling away on every side. Such light; the universe purified into light. I wanted to tear off my clothes and let it soak into my skin.’ Not a titter from the class; they were dancing naked with her on the roof of the world. ‘Then the visions began, the rainbows looping and dancing in the sky, the radiance pouring down like a waterfall from the sun, and there were angels, the others hadn’t been joking. I saw them and so did Sherpa Pemba. We were on our knees by then. His pupils looked pure white and so did mine, I’m sure. We would probably have died there, I’m sure, snow-blind and mountain-foolish, but then I heard a noise, a loud, sharp report, like a gun. That snapped me out of it. I had to yell at Pem until he, too, shook himself and we started down. The weather was changing rapidly; a blizzard was on the way. The air was heavy now, heaviness instead of that light, that lightness. We just made it to the meeting point and the four of us piled into the little tent at Camp Six, twenty-seven thousand feet. You don’t talk much up there. We all had our Everests to re-climb, over and over, all night. But at some point I asked: ‘What was that noise? Did anyone fire a gun?’ They looked at me as if I was touched. Who’d do such a damnfool thing at this altitude, they said, and anyway, Allie, you know damn well there isn’t a gun anywhere on the mountain. They were right, of course, but I heard it, I know that
much: wham bam, shot and echo. That’s it,’ she ended abruptly. ‘The end. Story of my life.’ She picked up a silver-headed cane and prepared to depart. The teacher, Mrs Bury, came forward to utter the usual platitudes. But the girls were not to be denied. ‘So what was it, then, Allie?’ they insisted; and she, looking suddenly ten years older than her thirty-three, shrugged. ‘Can’t say,’ she told them. ‘Maybe it was Maurice Wilson’s ghost.’

She left the classroom, leaning heavily on her stick.

The city – Proper London, yaar, no bloody
less
! – was dressed in white, like a mourner at a funeral. – Whose bloody funeral, mister, Gibreel Farishta asked himself wildly, not mine, I bloody
hope
and
trust
. When the train pulled into Victoria station he plunged out without waiting for it to come to a complete halt, turned his ankle and went sprawling beneath the baggage trolleys and sneers of the waiting Londoners, clinging, as he fell, on to his increasingly battered hat. Rekha Merchant was nowhere to be seen, and seizing the moment Gibreel ran through the scattering crowd like a man possessed, only to find her by the ticket barrier, floating patiently on her carpet, invisible to all eyes but his own, three feet off the ground.

‘What do you want,’ he burst out, ‘what’s your business with me?’ ‘To watch you fall,’ she instantly replied. ‘Look around,’ she added, ‘I’ve already made you look like a pretty big fool.’

People were clearing a space around Gibreel, the wild man in an outsize overcoat and trampy hat,
that man’s talking to himself
, a child’s voice said, and its mother answered
shh, dear, it’s wicked to mock the afflicted
. Welcome to London. Gibreel Farishta rushed towards the stairs leading down towards the Tube. Rekha on her carpet let him go.

But when he arrived in a great rush at the northbound platform of the Victoria Line he saw her again. This time she was a colour photograph in a 48-sheet advertising poster on the wall across the track, advertising the merits of the international direct-dialling system.
Send your voice on a magic-carpet ride to India
, she advised.
No
djinns or lamps required
. He gave a loud cry, once again causing his fellow-travellers to doubt his sanity, and fled over to the southbound platform, where a train was just pulling in. He leapt aboard, and there was Rekha Merchant facing him with her carpet rolled up and lying across her knees. The doors closed behind him with a bang.

That day Gibreel Farishta fled in every direction around the Underground of the city of London and Rekha Merchant found him wherever he went; she sat beside him on the endless up-escalator at Oxford Circus and in the tightly packed elevators of Tufnell Park she rubbed up against him from behind in a manner that she would have thought quite outrageous during her lifetime. On the outer reaches of the Metropolitan Line she hurled the phantoms of her children from the tops of claw-like trees, and when he came up for air outside the Bank of England she flung herself histrionically from the apex of its neo-classical pediment. And even though he did not have any idea of the true shape of that most protean and chameleon of cities he grew convinced that it kept changing shape as he ran around beneath it, so that the stations on the Underground changed lines and followed one another in apparently random sequence. More than once he emerged, suffocating, from that subterranean world in which the laws of space and time had ceased to operate, and tried to hail a taxi; not one was willing to stop, however, so he was obliged to plunge back into that hellish maze, that labyrinth without a solution, and continue his epic flight. At last, exhausted beyond hope, he surrendered to the fatal logic of his insanity and got out arbitrarily at what he conceded must be the last, meaningless station of his prolonged and futile journey in search of the chimera of renewal. He came out into the heartbreaking indifference of a litter-blown street by a lorry-infested roundabout. Darkness had already fallen as he walked unsteadily, using the last reserves of his optimism, into an unknown park made spectral by the ectoplasmic quality of the tungsten lamps. As he sank to his knees in the isolation of the winter night he saw the figure of a woman moving slowly towards him across the snow-shrouded grass, and surmised
that it must be his nemesis, Rekha Merchant, coming to deliver her death-kiss, to drag him down into a deeper underworld than the one in which she had broken his wounded spirit. He no longer cared, and by the time the woman reached him he had fallen forward on to his forearms, his coat dangling loosely about him and giving him the look of a large, dying beetle who was wearing, for obscure reasons, a dirty grey trilby hat.

As if from a great distance he heard a shocked cry escape the woman’s lips, a gasp in which disbelief, joy and a strange resentment were all mixed up, and just before his senses left him he understood that Rekha had permitted him, for the time being, to reach the illusion of a safe haven, so that her triumph over him could be the sweeter when it came at the last.

‘You’re alive,’ the woman said, repeating the first words she had ever spoken to his face. ‘You got your life back. That’s the point.’

Smiling, he fell asleep at Allie’s flat feet in the falling snow.