The Satanic Verses (20 page)

           
He has no devil to repudiate. Dreaming, he cannot wish them away.

           
I know what a ghost is, the old woman affirmed silently. Her name was Rosa
Diamond; she was eighty-eight years old; and she was squinting beakily through
her salt-caked bedroom windows, watching the full moon's sea. And I know what
it isn't, too, she nodded further, it isn't a scarification or a flapping
sheet, so pooh and pish to all
that
bunkum. What's a ghost? Unfinished
business, is what.―At which the old lady, six feet tall, straight-backed,
her hair hacked short as any man's, jerked the corners of her mouth downwards
in a satisfied, tragedy-mask pout,―pulled a knitted blue shawl tight
around bony shoulders,―and closed, for a moment, her sleepless eyes, to
pray for the past's return. Come on, you Norman ships, she begged: let's have
you, Willie-the-Conk.

           
Nine hundred years ago all this was under water, this portioned shore, this
private beach, its shingle rising steeply towards the little row of flaky-paint
villas with their peeling boathouses crammed full of deckchairs, empty picture
frames, ancient tuckboxes stuffed with bundles of letters tied up in ribbons,
mothballed silk-and-lace lingerie, the tearstained reading matter of once-young
girls, lacrosse sticks, stamp albums, and all the buried treasure-chests of
memories and lost time. The coastline had changed, had moved a mile or more out
to sea, leaving the first Norman castle stranded far from water, lapped now by
marshy land that afflicted with all manner of dank and boggy agues the poor who
lived there on their whatstheword
estates
. She, the old lady, saw the
castle as the ruin of a fish betrayed by an antique ebbing tide, as a
sea-monster petrified by time. Nine hundred years! Nine centuries past, the
Norman fleet had sailed right through this Englishwoman's home. On clear nights
when the moon was full, she waited for its shining, revenant ghost.

           
Best place to see 'em come, she reassured herself, grandstand view. Repetition
had become a comfort in her antiquity; the well-worn phrases,
unfinished
business, grandstand view
, made her feel solid, unchanging, sempiternal,
instead of the creature of cracks and absences she knew herself to
be.―When the full moon sets, the dark before the dawn, that's their
moment. Billow of sail, flash of oars, and the Conqueror himself at the flagship's
prow, sailing up the beach between the barnacled wooden breakwaters and a few
inverted sculls.―O, I've seen things in my time, always had the gift, the
phantom-sight.―The Conqueror in his pointy metal-nosed hat, passing
through her front door, gliding betwixt the cakestands and antimacassared
sofas, like an echo resounding faintly through that house of remembrances and
yearnings; then falling silent;
as the grave
.

           
- 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 and 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 semi-consciousness 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 silverheaded 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 heavenlight 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.