The Satanic Verses (43 page)

           
"It just happened," she said. "One must not rule out the
possibility that I have been bewitched."

           
He wasn't standing for that. "Or the notion of a reaction, however
delayed, to the news of your husband's altered, but extant, state."

           
She swung to face him, halfway up the stairs to the bedroom, and pointed
dramatically towards the open sitting-room door. "In that case," she
triumphed, "why did it also happen to the dog?"

           
* * * * *

           
He might have told her, that night, that he wanted to end it, that his
conscience no longer permitted,―he might have been willing to face her
rage, and to live with the paradox that a decision could be simultaneously
conscientious and immoral (because cruel, unilateral, selfish); but when he
entered the bedroom she grabbed his face with both hands, and watching closely
to see how he took the news she confessed to having lied about contraceptive
precautions. She was pregnant. It turned out she was better at making
unilateral decisions than he, and had simply taken from him the child Saladin
Chamcha had been unable to provide. "I wanted it," she cried
defiantly, and at close range. "And now I'm going to have it."

           
Her selfishness had pre-empted his. He discovered that he felt relieved;
absolved of the responsibility for making and acting upon moral
choices,―because how could he leave her now?―he put such notions
out of his head and allowed her, gently but with unmistakable intent, to push
him backwards on to the bed.

           
* * * * *

           
Whether the slowly transmogrifying Saladin Chamcha was turning into some sort
of science-fiction or horror-video mutey, some random mutation shortly to be
naturally selected out of existence,―or whether he was evolving into an
avatar of the Master of Hell,―or whatever was the case, the fact is (and
it will be as well in the present matter to proceed cautiously, stepping from
established fact to established fact, leaping to no conclusion until our
yellowbrick lane of things-incontrovertibly-so has led us to within an inch or
two of our destination) that the two daughters of Haji Sufyan had taken him
under their wing, caring for the Beast as only Beauties can; and that, as time
passed, he came to be extremely fond of the pair of them himself. For a long
while Mishal and Anahita struck him as inseparable, fist and shadow, shot and
echo, the younger girl seeking always to emulate her tall, feisty sibling,
practising karate kicks and Wing Chun forearm smashes in flattering imitation of
Mishal's uncompromising ways. More recently, however, he had noted the growth
of a saddening hostility between the sisters. One evening at his attic window
Mishal was pointing out some of the Street's characters,―there, a Sikh
ancient shocked by a racial attack into complete silence; he had not spoken, it
was said, for nigh on seven years, before which he had been one of the city's
few "black" justices of the peace . . . now, however, he pronounced
no sentences, and was accompanied everywhere by a crotchety wife who treated
him with dismissive exasperation,
O, ignore him, he never says a dicky bird
;―and
over there, a perfectly ordinary-looking "accountant type" (Mishal's
term) on his way home with briefcase and box of sweetmeats; this one was known
in the Street to have developed the strange need to rearrange his sitting-room
furniture for half an hour each evening, placing chairs in rows interrupted by
an aisle and pretending to be the conductor of a single-decker bus on its way
to Bangladesh, an obsessive fantasy in which all his family were obliged to
participate, a
nd after ha if an hour precisely he snaps out of it, and the
rest of the time he's the dullest guy you could meet
;―and after some
moments of this, fifteen-year-old Anahita broke in spitefully: "What she
means is, you're not the only casualty, round here the freaks are two a penny,
you only have to look."

           
Mishal had developed the habit of talking about the Street as if it were a
mythological battleground and she, on high at Chamcha's attic window, the
recording angel and the exterminator, too. From her Chamcha learned the fables
of the new Kurus and Pandavas, the white racists and black
"self-help" or vigilante posses starring in this modern
Mahabharata
,
or, more accurately,
Mahavila yet
. Up there, under the railway bridge,
the National Front used to do battle with the fearless radicals of the
Socialist Workers Party, "every Sunday from closing time to opening
time," she sneered, "leaving us lot to clear up the wreckage the rest
of the sodding week."―Down that alley was where the Brickhall Three
were done over by the police and then fitted up, verballed, framed; up that
side-street he'd find the scene of the murder of the Jamaican, Ulysses E. Lee,
and in that public house the stain on the carpet marking where Jatinder Singh
Mehta breathed his last. "Thatcherism has its effect," she declaimed,
while Chamcha, who no longer had the will or the words to argue with her, to
speak of justice and the rule of law, watched Anahita's mounting rage.―"No
pitched battles these days," Mishal elucidated. "The emphasis is on
small-scale enterprises and the cult of the individual, right? In other words,
five or six white bastards murdering us, one individual at a time." These
days the posses roamed the nocturnal Street, ready for aggravation. "It's
our turf," said Mishal Sufyan of that Street without a blade of grass in
sight. "Let 'em come and get it if they can."

           
"Look at her," Anahita burst out. "So ladylike, in'she? So
refined. Imagine what Mum'd say if she knew."―"If she knew
what, you little grass -?" But Anahita wasn't to be cowed: "O,
yes," she wailed. "O, yes, we know, don't think we don't. How she
goes to the bhangra beat shows on Sunday mornings and changes in the ladies
into those tarty-farty clothes―who she wiggles with and jiggles with at
the Hot Wax daytime disco that she thinks I never heard of before―what
went on at that bluesdance she crept off to with Mister You-know-who
Cockybugger―some big sister," she produced her grandstand finish,
"she'll probably wind up dead of wossname
ignorance
." Meaning,
as Chamcha and Mishal well knew,―those cinema commercials, expressionist
tombstones rising from earth and sea, had left the residue of their slogan well
implanted, no doubt of that―
Aids
.

           
Mishal fell upon her sister, pulling her hair,―Anahita, in pain, was
nevertheless able to get in another dig, "Least I didn't cut my hair into
any weirdo pincushion, must be a flutter who fancies
that
," and the
two departed, leaving Chamcha to wonder at Anahita's sudden and absolute
espousal of her mother's ethic of femininity.
Trouble brewing
, he
concluded.

           
Trouble came: soon enough.

           
* * * * *

           
More and more, when he was alone, he felt the slow heaviness pushing him down,
until he fell out of consciousness, running down like a wind-up toy, and in
those passages of stasis that always ended just before the arrival of visitors
his body would emit alarming noises, the howlings of infernal wahwah pedals, the
snare-drum cracking of satanic bones. These were the periods in which, little
by little, he grew. And as he grew, so too did the rumours of his presence; you
can't keep a devil locked up in the attic and expect to keep it to yourself
forever.

           
How the news got out (for the people in the know remained tight-lipped, the
Sufyans because they feared loss of business, the temporary beings because
their feeling of evanescence had rendered them unable, for the moment, to
act,―and all parties because of the fear of the arrival of the police,
never exactly reluctant to enter such establishments, bump accidentally into a
little furniture and step by chance on a few arms legs necks): he began to
appear to the locals in their dreams. The mullahs at the Jamme Masjid which
used to be the Machzikel HaDath synagogue which had in its turn replaced the
Huguenots' Calvinist church;―and Dr. Uhuru Simba the man-mountain in
African pill-box hat and red-yellow-black poncho who had led the successful protest
against
The Aliens Show
and whom Mishal Sufyan hated more than any other
black man on account of his tendency to punch uppity women in the mouth,
herself for example, in public, at a meeting, plenty of witnesses, but it
didn't stop the Doctor,
he's a crazy bastard, that one
, she told Chamcha
when she pointed him out from the attic one day,
capable of anything; he
could've killed me, and all because I told everybody he wasn't no African, I knew
him when he was plain Sylvester Roberts from down New Cross way; fucking witch
doctor, if you ask me
;―and Mishal herself, and Jumpy, and
Hanif;―and the Bus Conductor, too, they all dreamed him, rising up in the
Street like Apocalypse and burning the town like toast. And in every one of the
thousand and one dreams he, Saladin Chamcha, gigantic of limb and horn-turbaned
of head, was singing, in a voice so diabolically ghastly and guttural that it
proved impossible to identify the verses, even though the dreams turned out to
have the terrifying quality of being serial, each one following on from the one
the night before, and so on, night after night, until even the Silent Man, that
former justice of the peace who had not spoken since the night in an Indian
restaurant when a young drunk stuck a knife under his nose, threatened to cut
him, and then committed the far more shocking offence of spitting all over his
food,―until this mild gentleman astounded his wife by sitting upright in
his sleep, ducking his neck forwards like a pigeon's, clapping the insides of
his wrists together beside his right ear, and roaring out a song at the top of
his voice, which sounded so alien and full of static that she couldn't make out
a word.

           
Very quickly, because nothing takes a long time any more, the image of the
dream-devil started catching on, becoming popular, it should be said, only
amongst what Hal Valance had described as the
tinted persuasion
. While
non-tint neo-Georgians dreamed of a sulphurous enemy crushing their perfectly
restored residences beneath his smoking heel, nocturnal browns-and-blacks found
themselves cheering, in their sleep, this what-else-after-all-but- black-man,
maybe a little twisted up by fate class race history, all that, but getting off
his behind, bad and mad, to kick a little ass.

           
At first these dreams were private matters, but pretty soon they started
leaking into the waking hours, as Asian retailers and manufacturers of
button-badges sweatshirts posters understood the power of the dream, and then
all of a sudden he was everywhere, on the chests of young girls and in the
windows protected against bricks by metal grilles, he was a defiance and a
warning. Sympathy for the Devil: a new lease of life for an old tune. The kids
in the Street started wearing rubber devil-horns on their heads, the way they
used to wear pink-and-green balls jiggling on the ends of stiff wires a few
years previously, when they preferred to imitate spacemen. The symbol of the
Goatman, his fist raised in might, began to crop up on banners at political
demonstrations, Save the Six, Free the Four, Eat the Heinz FiftySeven.
Pleasechu
meechu
, the radios sang,
hopeyu guessma nayym
. Police community
relations officers pointed to the "growing devil-cult among young blacks
and Asians" as a "deplorable tendency", using this
"Satanist revival" to fight back against the allegations of Ms Pamela
Chamcha and the local CRC: "Who are the witches now?"
"Chamcha," Mishal said excitedly, "you're a hero. I mean, people
can really identify with you. It's an image white society has rejected for so
long that we can really take it, you know, occupy it, inhabit it, reclaim it
and make it our own. It's time you considered action."

           
"Go away," cried Saladin, in his bewilderment. "This isn't what
I wanted. This is not what I meant, at all."

           
"You're growing out of the attic, anyhow," rejoined Mishal, miffed.
"It won't be big enough for you in not too long a while."

           
Things were certainly coming to a head.

           
* * * * *

           
"Another old lady get slice las' night," announced Hanif Johnson,
affecting a Trinidadian accent in the way he had. "No mo soshaal security
for she." Anahita Sufyan, on duty behind the counter of the Shaandaar Cafe,
banged cups and plates. "I don't know why you do that," she
complained. "Sends me spare." Hanif ignored her, sat down beside
Jumpy, who muttered absently: "What're they
saying?"―Approaching fatherhood was weighing on Jumpy Joshi, but
Hanif slapped him on the back. "The ol' poetry not goin great, bra,"
he commiserated. "Look like that river of blood get coagulate." A
look from Jumpy changed his tune. "They sayin what they say," he
answered. "Look out for coloureds cruisin in cars. Now if she was black,
man, it'd be 'No grounds fi suspec racial motive.' I tell you," he went
on, dropping the accent, "sometimes the level of aggression bubbling just
under the skin of this town gets me really scared. It's not just the damn
Granny Ripper. It's everywhere. You bump into a guy's newspaper in a rush-hour
train and you can get your face broken. Everybody's so goddamn angry, seems
like to me. Including, old friend, you," he finished, noticing. Jumpy
stood, excused himself, and walked out without an explanation. Hanif spread his
arms, gave Anahita his most winsome smile: "What'd I do?"