The Satanic Verses (66 page)

           
In the last light, the road rounded a spur of treeless, heather-covered hills.
Long ago, in another country, another twilight, Chamcha had rounded another
such spur and come into sight of the remains of Persepolis. Now, however, he
was heading for a human ruin; not to admire, and maybe even (for the decision
to do evil is never finally taken until the very instant of the deed; there is
always a last chance to withdraw) to vandalize. To scrawl his name in Gibreel's
flesh:
Saladin woz ear
. "Why stay with him?" he asked Allie,
and to his surprise she blushed. "Why not spare yourself the pain?"

           
"I don't really know you, not at all, really," she began, then paused
and made a choice. "I'm not proud of the answer, but it's the truth,"
she said. "It's the sex. We're unbelievable together, perfect, like
nothing I've known. Dream lovers. He just seems to, to
know
. To know
me
."
She fell silent; the night hid her face. Chamcha's bitterness surged up again.
Dream lovers were all around him; he, dreamless, could only watch. He gritted
angry teeth; and bit, by mistake, his tongue.

           
Gibreel and Allie had holed up in Durisdeer, a village so small it didn't have
a pub, and were living in a deconsecrated Freekirk converted―the
quasi-religious term sounded strange to Chamcha―by an architect friend of
Allie's who had made a fortune out of such metamorphoses of the sacred into the
profane. It struck Saladin as a gloomy sort of place, for all its white walls,
recessed spotlights and wall-to-wall shag-pile carpeting. There were
gravestones in the garden. As a retreat for a man suffering from paranoid
delusions of being the chief archangel of God, Chamcha reflected, it wouldn't
have been his own first choice. The Freekirk was set a little apart from the
dozen or so other stone-and-tile houses that made up the community: isolated
even within this isolation. Gibreel was standing at the door, a shadow against
the illuminated hallway, when the car pulled up. "You got here," he
shouted. "Yaar, too good. Welcome to bloody jail."

           
The drugs made Gibreel clumsy. As the three of them sat around the pitch-pine
kitchen table beneath the gentrified pulldown dimmer-switched lighting, he
twice knocked over his coffee-cup (he was ostentatiously off booze; Allie,
pouring two generous shots of Scotch, kept Chamcha company), and, cursing,
stumbled about the kitchen for paper-towels to mop up the mess. "When I
get sick of being this way I just cut down without telling her," he
confessed. "And then the shit starts happening. I swear to you, Spoono, I
can't bear the bloody idea that it will never stop, that the only choice is
drugs or bugs in the brain. I can't bloody bear it. I swear, yaar, if I thought
that was it, then, bas, I don't know, I'd, I don't know what."

           
"Shut your face," Allie softly said. But he shouted out:
"Spoono, I even hit her, do you know that? Bloody hell. One day I thought
she was some rakshasa type of demon and Ijust went for her. Do you know how
strong it is, the strength of madness?"

           
"Fortunately for me I'd been going to―oops, eek―those
selfdefence classes," Allie grinned. "He's exaggerating to save face.
Actually he was the one who ended up banging his head on the
floor."―"Right here," Gibreel sheepishly assented. The
kitchen floor was made of large flagstones. "Painful," Chamcha
hazarded. "Damn right," Gibreel roared, strangely cheerful now.
"Knocked me bilkul cold."

           
The Freekirk's interior had been divided into a large twostorey (in estate
agent's jargon, "double volume") reception-room―the former hall
of congregation―and a more conventional half, with kitchen and utilities
downstairs and bedrooms and bathroom above. Unable for some reason to sleep,
Chamcha wandered at midnight into the great (and cold: the heatwave might be
continuing in the south of England, but there wasn't a ripple of it up here,
where the climate was autumnal and chill) living-room, and wandered among the
ghost-voices of banished preachers while Gibreel and Allie made high-volume
love.
Like Pamela
. He tried to think of Mishal, of Zeeny Vakil, but it
didn't work. Stuffing his fingers in his ears, he fought against the sound
effects of the copulation of Farishta and Alleluia Cone.

           
Theirs had been a high-risk conjoining from the start, he reflected: first,
Gibreel's dramatic abandonment of career and rush across the earth, and now,
Allie's uncompromising determination to
see it through
, to defeat in him
this mad, angelic divinity and restore the humanity she loved. No compromises
for them; they were going for broke. Whereas he, Saladin, had declared himself
content to live under the same roof as his wife and her lover boy. Which was
the better way? Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer,
Ishmael, who survived.

           
* * * * *

           
In the morning Gibreel ordered an ascent of the local "Top". But
Allie declined, although it was plain to Chamcha that her return to the
countryside had caused her to glow with joy. "Bloody flatfoot mame,"
Gibreel cursed her lovingly. "Come on, Salad. Us damn city slickers can
show the Everest conqueror how to climb. What a bloody upside-down life, yaar.
We go mountain-climbing while she sits here and makes business calls."
Saladin's thoughts were racing: he understood, now, that strange hobble at
Shepperton; understood, too, that this secluded haven would have to be
temporary―that Allie, by coming here, was sacrificing her own life, and
wouldn't be able to go on doing so indefinitely. What should he do? Anything?
Nothing?―If revenge was to be taken, when and how? "Get these boots
on," Gibreel commanded. "You think the rain will hold off all fucking
day?"

           
It didn't. By the time they reached the stone cairn at the summit of Gibreel's
chosen climb, they were enveloped in a fine drizzle. "Damn good
show," Gibreel panted. "Look: there she is, down there, sitting back
like the Grand Panjandrum." He pointed down at the Freekirk. Chamcha, his
heart pounding, was feeling foolish. He must start behaving like a man with a
ticker problem. Where was the glory in dying of heart failure on this nothing
of a Top, for nothing, in the rain? Then Gibreel got out his fieldglasses and
started scanning the valley. There were hardly any moving figures to be
seen―two or three men and dogs, some sheep, no more. Gibreel tracked the
men with his binoculars. "Now that we're alone," he suddenly said,
"I can tell you why we really came away to this damn empty hole. It's
because of her. Yes, yes; don't be fooled by my act! It's all her bloody beauty.
Men, Spoono: they chase her like goddamn flies. I swear! I see them, slobbering
and grabbing. It isn't right. She is a very private person, the most private
person in the world. We have to protect her from lust."

           
This speech took Saladin by surprise. You poor bastard, he thought, you really
are going off your wretched head at a rate of knots. And, hard on the heels of
this thought, a second sentence appeared, as if by magic, in his head:
Don't
imagine that means I'll let you off
.

           
* * * * *

           
On the drive back to the Carlisle railway station, Chamcha mentioned the
depopulation of the countryside. "There's no work," Allie said.
"So it's empty. Gibreel says he can't get used to the idea that all this
space indicates poverty: says it looks like luxury to him, after India's
crowds."―"And your work?" Chamcha asked. "What about
that?" She smiled at him, the ice- maiden facade long gone. "You're a
nice man to ask. I keep thinking, one day it'll be my life in the middle,
taking first place. Or, well, although I find it hard to use the first person
plural: our life. That sounds better, right?"

           
"Don't let him cut you off," Saladin advised. "From Jumpy, from
your own worlds, whatever." This was the moment at which his campaign
could truly be said to have begun; when he set a foot upon that effortless,
seductive road on which there was only one way to go. "You're right,"
Allie was saying. "God, if he only knew. His precious Sisodia, for
example: it's not just sevenfoot starlets he goes for, though he sure as hell
likes those."―"He made a pass," Chamcha guessed; and,
simultaneously, filed the information away for possible later use. "He's
totally shameless," Allie laughed. "It was right under Gibreel's
nose. He doesn't mind rejection, though: he just bows, and murmurs
no
offoffoffence
, and that's that. Can you imagine if I told Gibreel?"

           
Chamcha at the railway station wished Allie luck. "We'll have to be in
London for a couple of weeks," she said through the car window. "I've
got meetings. Maybe you and Gibreel can get together then; this has really done
him good."

           
"Call any time," he waved goodbye, and watched the Citro‘n until it
was out of sight.

           
* * * * *

           
That Allie Cone, the third point of a triangle of fictions―for had not
Gibreel and Allie come together very largely by imagining, out of their own
needs, an "Allie" and a "Gibreel" with whom each could fall
in love; and was not Chamcha now imposing on them the requirements of his own
troubled and disappointed heart?―was to be the unwitting, innocent agent
of Chamcha's revenge, became even plainer to the plotter, Saladin, when he
found that Gibreel, with whom he had arranged to spend an equatorial London afternoon,
wanted nothing so much as to describe in embarrassing detail the carnal ecstasy
of sharing Allie's bed. What manner of people were these, Saladin wondered with
distaste, who enjoyed inflicting their intimacies on non-participating others?
As Gibreel (with something like relish) described positions, love-bites, the
secret vocabularies of desire, they strolled in Brickhall Fields among
schoolgirls and roller- skating infants and fathers throwing boomerangs and
frisbees incompetently at scornful sons, and picked their way through broiling
horizontal secretarial flesh; and Gibreel interrupted his erotic rhapsody to
mention, madly, that "I sometimes look at these pink people and instead of
skin, Spoono, what I see is rotting meat; I smell their putrefaction here,"
he tapped his nostrils fervently, as if revealing a mystery, "in my
nose
."
Then once again to Allie's inner thighs, her cloudy eyes, the perfect valley of
her lower back, the little cries she liked to make. This was a man in imminent
danger of coming apart at the seams. The wild energy, the manic particularity
of his descriptions suggested to Chamcha that he'd been cutting down on his
dosages again, that he was rolling upwards towards the crest of a deranged
high, that condition of febrile excitement that was like blind drunkenness in
one respect (according to Allie), namely that Gibreel could remember nothing of
what he said or did when, as was inevitable, he came down to earth.―On
and on went the descriptions, the unusual length of her nipples, her dislike of
having her navel interfered with, the sensitivity of her toes. Chamcha told
himself that, madness or no madness, what all this sex-talk revealed (because
there had been Allie in the Citro‘n too) was the
weakness
of their
so-called "grand passion"―a term which Allie had only
half-jokingly employed―because, in a phrase, there was nothing else about
it that was any good; there was simply no other aspect of their togetherness to
rhapsodize about.―At the same time, however, he felt himself becoming
aroused. He began to see himself standing outside her window, while she stood
there naked like an actress on a screen, and a man's hands caressed her in a
thousand ways, bringing her closer and closer to ecstasy; he came to see
himself as that pair of hands, he could almost feel her coolness, her
responses, almost hear her cries.―He controlled himself. His desire
disgusted him. She was unattainable; this was pure voyeurism, and he would not
succumb to it.―But the desire Gibreel's revelations had aroused would not
go away.

           
Gibreel's sexual obsession, Chamcha reminded himself, actually made things
easier. "She's certainly a very attractive woman," he murmured by way
of an experiment, and was gratified to receive a furious, strung-out glare in
return. After which Gibreel, making a show of controlling himself, put his arm
around Saladin and boomed: "Apologies, Spoono, I'm a bad-tempered bugger
where she's concerned. But you and me! We're bhaibhai! Been through the worst
and come out smiling; come on now, enough of this little nowhere park. Let's
hit town."

           
There is the moment before evil; then the moment of; then the time after, when
the step has been taken, and each subsequent stride becomes progressively
easier. "Fine with me," Chamcha replied. "It's good to see you
looking so well."

           
A boy of six or seven cycled past them on a BMX bike. Chamcha, turning his head
to follow the boy's progress, saw that he was moving smoothly away down an
avenue of overarching trees, through which the hot sunlight managed here and
there to drip. The shock of discovering the location of his dream disoriented
Chamcha briefly, and left him with a bad taste in his mouth: the sour flavour
of might-have-beens. Gibreel hailed a taxi; and requested Trafalgar Square.

           
O, he was in a high good humour that day, rubbishing London and the English
with much of his old brio. Where Chamcha saw attractively faded grandeur,
Gibreel saw a wreck, a Crusoe-city, marooned on the island of its past, and
trying, with the help of a Man-Friday underclass, to keep up appearances. Under
the gaze of stone lions he chased pigeons, shouting: "I swear, Spoono,
back home these fatties wouldn't last one day; let's take one home for
dinner." Chamcha's Englished soul cringed for shame. Later, in Covent
Garden, he described for Gibreel's benefit the day the old fruit and vegetable
market moved to Nine Elms. The authorities, worried about rats, had sealed the
sewers and killed tens of thousands; but hundreds more survived. "That day,
starving rats swarmed out on to the pavements," he recalled. "All the
way down the Strand and over Waterloo Bridge, in and out of the shops,
desperate for food." Gibreel snorted. "Now I know this is a sinking
ship," he cried, and Chamcha felt furious at having given him the opening.
"Even the bloody rats are off." And, after a pause: "What they
needed was a pied piper, no? Leading them to destruction with a tune."