The Satanic Verses (28 page)

           
No survivors
. And in the middle of the night, Jumpy the idiot and his
stupid false alarm. She was so shaken up by it that she hadn't even got round
to being shaken up by having gone to bed with Jumpy and made love in what
admit
it
had been a pretty satisfying fashion,
spare me your nonchalance,
she rebuked herself,
when did you last have so much fun
. She had a lot
to deal with and so here she was, dealing with it by running away as fast as
she could go. A few days of pampering oneself in an expensive country hotel and
the world may begin to seem less like a fucking hellhole. Therapy by luxury:
okayokay, she allowed, I know: I'm
reverting to class
. Fuck it; watch me
go. If you've got any objections, blow them out of your ass. Arse. Ass.

           
One hundred miles an hour past Swindon, and the weather turned nasty. Sudden,
dark clouds, lightning, heavy rain; she kept her foot on the accelerator.
No
survivors
. People were always dying on her, leaving her with a mouth full
of words and nobody to spit them at. Her father the classical scholar who could
make puns in ancient Greek and from whom she inherited the Voice, her legacy
and curse; and her mother who pined for him during the War, when he was a
Pathfinder pilot, obliged to fly home from Germany one hundred and eleven times
in a slow aeroplane through a night which his own flares had just illuminated
for the benefit of the bombers,―and who vowed, when he returned with the
noise of the ack-ack in his ears, that she would never leave him,―and so
followed him everywhere, into the slow hollow of depression from which he never
really emerged,―and into debt, because he didn't have the face for poker
and used her money when he ran out of his own,―and at last to the top of
a tall building, where they found their way at last. Pamela never forgave them,
especially for making it impossible for her to tell them of her unforgiveness.
To get her own back, she set about rejecting everything of them that remained
within her. Her brains, for example: she refused to go to college. And because
she could not shake off her voice, she made it speak ideas which her
conservative suicides of parents would have anathematized. She married an
Indian. And, because he turned out to be too much like them, would have left
him. Had decided to leave. When, once again, she was cheated by a death.

           
She was overtaking a frozen-food road train, blinded by the spray kicked up by
its wheels, when she hit the expanse of water that had been waiting for her in
a slight declivity, and then the M G was aquaplaning at terrifying speed,
swerving out of the fast lane and spinning round so that she saw the headlights
of the road train staring at her like the eyes of the exterminating angel,
Azrael. "Curtains," she thought; but her car swung and skidded out of
the path of the juggernaut, slewing right across all three lanes of the
motorway, all of them miraculously empty, and coming to rest with rather less
of a thump than one might have expected against the crash barrier at the edge
of the hard shoulder, after spinning through a further one hundred and eighty
degrees to face, once again, into the west, where with all the corny timing of
real life, the sun was breaking up the storm.

           
* * * * *

           
The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one. That night, in an
oak-panelled dining-room decorated with medieval flags, Pamela Chamcha in her
most dazzling gown ate venison and drank a bottle of Chateau Talbot at a table
heavy with silver and crystal, celebrating a new beginning, an escape from the
jaws of, a fresh start, to be born again first you have to: well, almost,
anyway. Under the lascivious eyes of Americans and salesmen she ate and drank
alone, retiring early to a princess's bedroom in a stone tower to take a long
bath and watch old movies on television. In the aftermath of her brush with
death she felt the past dropping away from her: her adolescence, for example,
in the care of her wicked uncle Harry Higham, who lived in a
seventeenth-century manor house once owned by a distant relative, Matthew
Hopkins, the Witchfinder-General, who had named it Gremlins in, no doubt, a
macabre attempt at humour. Remembering Mr. Justice Higham in order to forget
him, she murmured to the absent Jumpy that she, too, had her Vietnam story.
After the first big Grosvenor Square demonstration at which many people threw
marbles under the feet of charging police horses, there occurred the one and
only instance in British law in which the marble was deemed to be a lethal
weapon, and young persons were jailed, even deported, for possessing the small
glass spheres. The presiding judge in the case of the Grosvenor Marbles was
this same Henry (thereafter known as "Hang'em") Higham, and to be his
niece had been a further burden for a young woman already weighed down by her
right-wing voice. Now, warm in bed in her temporary castle, Pamela Chamcha rid
herself of this old demon,
goodbye, Hang'em, I've no more time for you
;
and of her parents' ghosts; and prepared to be free of the most recent ghost of
all.

           
Sipping cognac, Pamela watched vampires on TV and allowed herself to take
pleasure in, well, in herself. Had she not invented herself in her own image? I
am that I am, she toasted herself in Napoleon brandy. I work in a community
relations council in the borough of Brickhall, London, NET; deputy community relations
officer and damn good at it, ifisaysomyself. Cheers! We just elected our first
black Chair and all the votes cast against him were white. Down the hatch! Last
week a respected Asian street trader, for whom M Ps of all parties had
interceded, was deported after eighteen years in Britain because, fifteen years
ago, he posted a certain form forty-eight hours late. Chin-chin! Next week in
Brickhall Magistrates' Court the police will be trying to fit up a
fifty-year-old Nigerian woman, accusing her of assault, having previously
beaten her senseless. Skol! This is my head: see it? What I call my job:
bashing my head against Brickhall.

           
Saladin was dead and she was alive.

           
She drank to that. There were things I was waiting to tell you, Saladin. Some
big things: about the new high-rise office building in Brickhall High Street,
across from McDonald's;―they built it to be perfectly sound-proof, but
the workers were so disturbed by the silence that now they play tapes of white
noise on the tannoy system.―You'd have liked that, eh?―And about
this Parsi woman I know, Bapsy, that's her name, she lived in Germany for a
while and fell in love with a Turk.―Trouble was, the only language they
had in common was German; now Bapsy has forgotten almost all she knew, while
his gets better and better; he writes her increasingly poetic letters and she
can hardly reply in nursery rhyme.―Love dying, because of an inequality
of language, what do you think of that?―Love dying. There's a subject for
us, eh? Saladin? What do you say?

           
And a couple of tiny little things. There's a killer on the loose in my patch,
specializes in killing old women; so don't worry, I'm safe. Plenty older than
me.

           
One more thing: I'm leaving you. It's over. We're through.

           
I could never say anything to you, not really, not the least thing. If I said
you were putting on weight you'd yell for an hour, as if it would change what
you saw in the mirror, what the tightness of your own trousers was telling you.
You interrupted me in public. People noticed it, what you thought of me. I
forgave you, that was my fault; I could see the centre of you, that question so
frightful that you had to protect it with all that posturing certainty. That
empty space.

           
Goodbye, Saladin. She drained her glass and set it down beside her. The
returning rain knocked at her leaded windows; she drew her curtains shut and
turned out the light.

           
Lying there, drifting towards sleep, she thought of the last thing she needed
to tell her late husband. "In bed," the words came, "you never
seemed interested in me; not in my pleasure, what I needed, not really ever. I
came to think you wanted, not a lover. A servant." There. Now rest in
peace.

           
She dreamed of him, his face, filling the dream. "Things are ending,"
he told her. "This civilization; things are closing in on it. It has been
quite a culture, brilliant and foul, cannibal and Christian, the glory of the
world. We should celebrate it while we can; until night falls."

           
She didn't agree, not even in the dream, but she knew, as she dreamed, that
there was no point telling him now.

           
* * * * *

           
After Pamela Chamcha threw him out, Jumpy Joshi went over to Mr. Sufyan's Shaandaar
Cafe in Brickhall High Street and sat there trying to decide if he was a fool.
It was early in the day, so the place was almost empty, apart from a fat lady
buying a box of pista barfi and jalebis, a couple of bachelor garment workers
drinking chaloo chai and an elderly Polish woman from the old days when it was
the Jews who ran the sweatshops round here, who sat all day in a corner with
two vegetable samosas, one pun and a glass of milk, announcing to everyone who
came in that she was only there because "it was next best to kosher and
today you must do the best you can". Jumpy sat down with his coffee
beneath the lurid painting of a bare-breasted myth-woman with several heads and
wisps of clouds obscuring her nipples, done life-size in salmon pink, neon-green
and gold, and because the rush hadn't started yet Mr. Sufyan noticed he was
down in the dumps.

           
"Hey, Saint Jumpy," he sang out, "why you bringing your bad
weather into my place? This country isn't full enough of clouds?"

           
Jumpy blushed as Sufyan bounced over to him, his little white cap of devotion
pinned in place as usual, the moustache-less beard hennaed red after its
owner's recent pilgrimage to Mecca. Muhammad Sufyan was a burly,
thick-forearmed fellow with a belly on him, as godly and as unfanatic a
believer as you could meet, and Joshi thought of himas a sort of elder
relative. "Listen, Uncle," he said when the cafe proprietor was
standing over him, "you think I'm a real idiot or what?"

           
"You ever make any money?" Sufyan asked.

           
"Not me, Uncle."

           
"Ever do any business? Import-export? Off-licence? Corner shop?"

           
"I never understood figures."

           
"And where your family members are?"

           
"I've got no family, Uncle. There's only me."

           
"Then you must be praying to God continually for guidance in your
loneliness?"

           
"You know me, Uncle. I don't pray."

           
"No question about it," Sufyan concluded. "You're an even bigger
fool than you know."

           
"Thanks, Uncle," Jumpy said, finishing his coffee. "You've been
a great help."

           
Sufyan, knowing that the affection in his teasing was cheering the other man up
in spite of his long face, called across to the light-skinned, blue-eyed Asian
man who had just come in wearing a snappy check overcoat with extra-wide
lapels. "You, Hanif Johnson," he called out, "come here and
solve a mystery. "Johnson, a smart lawyer and local boy made good, who
maintained an office above the Shaandaar Cafe, tore himself away from Sufyan's
two beautiful daughters and headed over to Jumpy's table. "You explain
this fellow," Sufyan said. "Beats me. Doesn't drink, thinks of money
like a disease, owns maybe two shirts and no V C R, forty years old and isn't
married, works for two pice in the sports centre teaching martial arts and
what-all, lives on air, behaves like a rishi or pir but doesn't have any faith,
going nowhere but looks like he knows some secret. All this and a college
education, you work it out."

           
Hanif Johnson punched Jumpy on the shoulder. "He hears voices," he
said. Sufyan threw up his hands in mock amazement. "Voices, oop-baba!
Voices from where? Telephone? Sky? Sony Walkman hidden in his coat?"

           
"Inner voices," Hanif said solemnly. "Upstairs on his desk
there's a piece of paper with some verses written on it. And a title:
The
River of Blood
."

           
Jumpy jumped, knocking over his empty cup. "I'll kill you," he
shouted at Hanif, who skipped quickly across the room, singing out, "We
got a poet in our midst, Sufyan Sahib. Treat with respect. Handle with care. He
says a street is a river and we are the flow; humanity is a river of blood,
that's the poet's point. Also the individual human being," he broke off to
run around to the far side of an eight-seater table as Jumpy came after him,
blushing furiously, flapping his arms. "In our very bodies, does the river
of blood not flow?"
Like the Roman
, the ferrety Enoch Powell had
said,
I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood
. Reclaim the
metaphor, Jumpy Joshi had told himself. Turn it; make it a thing we can use.
"This is like rape," he pleaded with Hanif. "For God's sake,
stop."

           
"Voices that one hears are outside, but," the cafe proprietor was
musing. "Joan of Arc, na. Or that what's his name with the cat: Turn-again
Whittington. But with such voices one becomes great, or rich at least. This one
however is not great, and poor."