The Satanic Verses (47 page)

           
She heard about her sister's end from a newsstand billboard, MODEL"S
"ACID BATH" DEATH. You're not even safe from puns when you die, was
her first reaction. Then she found she was unable to weep.

           
"I kept seeing her in magazines for months," she told Gibreel.
"On account of the glossies' long lead times." Elena's corpse danced
across Moroccan deserts, clad only in diaphanous veils; or it was sighted in
the Sea of Shadows on the moon, naked except for spaceman's helmet and half a
dozen silk ties knotted around breasts and groin. Allie took to drawing
moustaches on the pictures, to the outrage of newsagents; she ripped her late
sister out of the journals of her zombie-like undeath and crumpled her up.
Haunted by Elena's periodical ghost, Allie reflected on the dangers of
attempting to
fly
; what flaming falls, what macabre hells were reserved
for such Icarus types! She came to think of Elena as a soul in torment, to
believe that this captivity in an immobile world of girlie calendars in which
she wore black breasts of moulded plastic, three sizes larger than her own; of
pseudo-erotic snarls; of advertising messages printed across her navel, was no
less than Elena's personal hell. Allie began to see the scream in her sister's
eyes, the anguish of being trapped forever in those fashion spreads. Elena was
being tortured by demons, consumed in fires, and she couldn't even move. . .
after a time Allie had to avoid the shops in which her sister could be found
staring from the racks. She lost the ability to open magazines, and hid all the
pictures of Elena she owned. "Goodbye, Yel," she told her sister's
memory, using her old nursery name. "I've got to look away from you."

           
"But I turned out to be like her, after all." Mountains had begun to
sing to her; whereupon she, too, had risked brain cells in search of
exaltation. Eminent physicians expert in the problems facing mountaineers had
frequently proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that human beings could not survive
without breathing apparatus much above eight thousand metres. The eyes would
haemorrhage beyond hope of repair, and the brain, too, would start to explode,
losing cells by the billion, too many and too fast, resulting in the permanent
damage known as High Altitude Deterioration, followed in quick time by death.
Blind corpses would remain preserved in the permafrost of those highest slopes.
But Allie and Sherpa Pemba went up and came down to tell the talc. Cells from
the brain's deposit boxes replaced the current- account casualties. Nor did her
eyes blow out. Why had the scientists been wrong? "Prejudice,
mostly," Allie said, lying curled around Gibreel beneath parachute silk.
"They can't quantify the will, so they leave it out of their calculations.
But it's will that gets you up Everest, will and anger, and it can bend any law
of nature you care to mention, at least in the short term, gravity not
excluded. If you don't push your luck, anyway."

           
There had been some damage. She had been suffering unaccountable lapses of
memory: small, unpredictable things. Once at the fishmonger's she had forgotten
the word
fish
. Another morning she found herself in her bathroom picking
up a toothbrush blankly, quite unable to work out its purpose. And one morning,
waking up beside the sleeping Gibreel, she had been on the verge of shaking him
awake to demand, "Who the hell are you? How did you get in my
bed?"―when, just in time, the memory returned. "I'm hoping it's
temporary," she told him. But kept to herself, even now, the appearances
of Maurice Wilson's ghost on the rooftops surrounding the Fields, waving his
inviting arm.

           
* * * * *

           
She was a competent woman, formidable in many ways: very much the professional
sportswoman of the 1980s, a client of the giant MacMurray public relations
agency, sponsored to the gills. Nowadays she, too, appeared in advertisements,
promoting her own range of outdoor products and leisurewear, aimed at
holidaymakers and amateurs more than pro climbers, to maximize what Hal Valance
would have called the universe. She was the golden girl from the roof of the
world, the survivor of "my Teutonic twosome", as Otto Cone had been
fond of calling his daughters.
Once again, Yel, I follow in your footsteps
.
To be an attractive woman in a sport dominated by, well, hairy men was to be
saleable, and the "icequeen" image didn't hurt either. There was
money in it, and now that she was old enough to compromise her old, fiery
ideals with no more than a shrug and a laugh, she was ready to make it, ready,
even, to appear on TV talk-shows to fend off, with risque hints, the inevitable
and unchanging questions about life with the boys at twenty-odd thousand feet.
Such high-profile capers sat uneasily alongside the view of herself to which
she still fiercely clung: the idea that she was a natural solitary, the most
private of women, and that the demands of her business life were ripping her in
half. She had her first fight with Gibreel over this, because he said, in his
unvarnished way: "I guess it's okay to run from the cameras as long as you
know they're chasing after you. But suppose they stop? My guess is you'd turn
and run the other way." Later, when they'd made up, she teased him with
her growing stardom (since she became the first sexually attractive blonde to
conquer Everest, the noise had increased considerably, she received photographs
of gorgeous hunks in the mail, also invitations to high life soirees and a
quantity of insane abuse): "I could be in movies myself now that you've
retired. Who knows? Maybe I will." To which he responded, shocking her by
the force of his words, "Over my goddamn dead body."

           
In spite of her pragmatic willingness to enter the polluted waters of the real
and swim in the general direction of the current, she never lost the sense that
some awful disaster was lurking just around the corner―a legacy, this, of
her father's and sister's sudden deaths. This hairs-on-neck prickliness had
made her a cautious climber, a "real percentage man", as the lads
would have it, and as admired friends died on various mountains her caution
increased. Away from mountaineering, it gave her, at times, an unrelaxed look,
a jumpiness; she acquired the heavily defended air of a fortress preparing for
an inevitable assault. This added to her reputation as a frosty berg of a
woman; people kept their distance, and, to hear her tell it, she accepted
loneliness as the price of solitude.―But there were more contradictions
here, for she had, after all, only recently thrown caution overboard when she
chose to make the final assault on Everest without oxygen. "Aside from all
the other implications," the agency assured her in its formal letter of
congratulations, "this humanizes you, it shows you've got that
what-the-hell streak, and that's a positive new dimension." They were
working on it. In the meantime, Allie thought, smiling at Gibreel in tired
encouragement as he slipped down towards her lower depths, There's now you.
Almost a total stranger and here you've gone and moved right in. God, I even
carried you across the threshold, near as makes no difference. Can't blame you
for accepting the lift.

           
He wasn't housetrained. Used to servants, he left clothes, crumbs, used
tea-bags where they fell. Worse: he
dropped
them, actually let them fall
where they would need picking up; perfectly, richly unconscious of what he was
doing, he went on proving to himself that he, the poor boy from the streets, no
longer needed to tidy up after himself. It wasn't the only thing about him that
drove her crazy. She'd pour glasses of wine; he'd drink his fast and then, when
she wasn't looking, grab hers, placating her with an angelic-faced,
ultra-innocent "Plenty more, isn't it?" His bad behaviour around the
house. He liked to fart. He complained―actually complained, after she'd
literally scooped him out of the snow!―about the smallness of the
accommodations. "Every time I take two steps my face hits a wall." He
was rude to telephone callers,
really
rude, without bothering to find
out who they were: automatically, the way film stars were in Bombay when, by
some chance, there wasn't a flunkey available to protect them from such
intrusions. After Alicja had weathered one such volley of obscene abuse, she
said (when her daughter finally got on the end of the phone): "Excuse me
for mentioning, darling, but your boyfriend is in my opinion a case."

           
"A case, mother?" This drew out Alicja's grandest voice. She was
still capable of grandeur, had a gift for it, in spite of her post-Otto
decision to disguise herself as a bag-lady. "A case," she announced,
taking into consideration the fact that Gibreel was an Indian import, "of
cashew and monkey nuts."

           
Allie didn't argue with her mother, being by no means certain that she could
continue to live with Gibreel, even if he had crossed the earth, even if he had
fallen from the sky. The long term was hard to predict; even the medium term
looked cloudy. For the moment, she concentrated on trying to get to know this
man who had just assumed, right off, that he was the great love of her life,
with a lack of doubt that meant he was either right or off his head. There were
plenty of difficult moments. She didn't know what he knew, what she could take
for granted: she tried, once, referring to Nabokov's doomed chess-player
Luzhin, who came to feel that in life as in chess there were certain
combinations that would inevitably arise to defeat him, as a way of explaining
by analogy her own (in fact somewhat different) sense of impending catastrophe
(which had to do not with recurring patterns but with the inescapability of the
unforeseeable), but he fixed her with a hurt stare that told her he'd never
heard of the writer, let alone The Defence. Conversely, he surprised her by
asking, out of the blue, "Why Picabia?" Adding that it was peculiar,
was it not, for Otto Cohen, a veteran of the terror camps, to go in for all
that neo-Fascistic love of machinery, brute power, dehumanization glorified.
"Anybody who's spent any time with machines at all," he added,
"and baby, that's us all, knows first and foremost there's only one thing
certain about them, computer or bicycle. They go wrong." Where did you
find out about, she began, and faltered because she didn't like the patronizing
note she was striking, but he answered without vanity. The first time he'd
heard about Marinetti, he said, he'd got the wrong end of the stick and thought
Futurism was something to do with puppets. "Marionettes, kathputli, at
that time I was keen to use advanced puppetry techniques in a picture, maybe to
depict demons or other supernormal beings. So I got a book."
I got a
book
: Gibreel the autodidact made it sound like an injection. To a girl
from a house that revered books―her father had made them all kiss any
volume that fell by chance to the floor―and who had reacted by treating
them badly, ripping out pages she wanted or didn't like, scribbling and
scratching at them to show them who was boss, Gibreel's form of irreverence,
non-abusive, taking books for what they offered without feeling the need to
genuflect or destroy, was something new; and, she accepted, pleasing. She
learned from him. He, however, seemed impervious to any wisdom she might wish
to impart, about, for example, the correct place in which to dispose of dirty
socks. When she attempted to suggest he "did his share", he went into
a profound, injured sulk, expecting to be cajoled back into a good humour.
Which, to her disgust, she found herself willing, for the moment at any rate,
to do.

           
The worst thing about him, she tentatively concluded, was his genius for
thinking himself slighted, belittled, under attack. It became almost impossible
to mention anything to him, no matter how reasonable, no matter how gently put.
"Go, go, eat air," he'd shout, and retire into the tent of his
wounded pride.―And the most seductive thing about him was the way he knew
instinctively what she wanted, how when he chose he could become the agent of
her secret heart. As a result, their sex was literally electric. That first
tiny spark, on the occasion of their inaugural kiss, wasn't any one-off. It
went on happening, and sometimes while they made love she was convinced she
could hear the crackle of electricity all around them; she felt, at times, her
hair standing on end. "It reminds me of the electric dildo in my father's
study," she told Gibreel, and they laughed. "Am I the love of your
life?" she asked quickly, and he answered, just as quickly: "Of
course."

           
She admitted to him early on that the rumours about her unattainability, even
frigidity, had some basis in fact. "After Yel died, I took on that side of
her as well." She hadn't needed, any more, to hurl lovers into her
sister's face. "Plus I really wasn't enjoying it any more. It was mostly
revolutionary socialists at the time, making do with me while they dreamed
about the heroic women they'd seen on their three-week trips to Cuba. Never
touched them, of course; the combat fatigues and ideological purity scared them
silly. They came home humming 'Guantanamera' and rang me up." She opted
out. "I thought, let the best minds of my generation soliloquize about power
over some other poor woman's body, I'm off." She began climbing mountains,
she used to say when she began, "because I knew they'd never follow me up
there. But then I thought, bullshit. I didn't do it for them; I did it for
me."

           
For an hour every evening she would run barefoot up and down the stairs to the
street, on her toes, for the sake of her fallen arches. Then she'd collapse
into a heap of cushions, looking enraged, and he'd flap helplessly around,
usually ending up pouring her a stiff drink: Irish whiskey, mostly. She had
begun drinking a fair bit as the reality of her foot problem sank in.
("For Christ's sake keep the feet quiet," a voice from the PR agency
told her surreally on the phone. "If they get out it's finito, curtains,
sayonara, go home, goodnight.") On their twenty-first night together, when
she had worked her way through five doubles of Jameson's, she said: "Why I
really went up there. Don't laugh: to escape from good and evil." He
didn't laugh. "Are mountains above morality, in your estimation?" he
asked seriously. "This's what I learned in the revolution," she went
on. "This thing: information got abolished sometime in the twentieth
century, can't say just when; stands to reason, that's part of the information that
got abolsh, abo
lished
. Since then we've been living in a fairy-story.
Got me? Everything happens by magic. Us fairies haven't a fucking notion what's
going on. So how do we know if it's right or wrong? We don't even know what it
is. So what I thought was, you can either break your heart trying to work it
all out, or you can go sit on a mountain, because that's where all the truth
went, believe it or not, it just upped and ran away from these cities where
even the stuff under our feet is all made up, a lie, and it hid up there in the
thin thin air where the liars don't dare come after it in case their brains
explode. It's up there all right. I've been there. Ask me." She fell
asleep; he carried her to the bed.