The Satanic Verses (30 page)

In the morning it took an hour to get through to the airline on account of the volume of calls still being generated by the catastrophe, and then another twenty-five minutes of insistence –
but he telephoned, it was his voice –
while at the other end of the phone a woman’s voice, professionally trained to deal with human beings in crisis, understood how she felt and sympathized with her in this awful moment and remained very patient, but clearly didn’t believe a word she said.
I’m sorry, madam, I don’t mean to be brutal, but the plane broke up in mid-air at thirty thousand feet
. By the end of the call Pamela Chamcha, normally the most controlled of
women, who locked herself in a bathroom when she wanted to cry, was shrieking down the line, for God’s sake, woman, will you shut up with your little good-samaritan speeches and listen to what I’m saying? Finally she slammed down the receiver and rounded on Jumpy Joshi, who saw the expression in her eyes and spilled the coffee he had been bringing her because his limbs began to tremble in fright. ‘You fucking creep,’ she cursed him. “Still alive, is he? I suppose he flew down from the sky on fucking
wings
and headed straight for the nearest phone booth to change out of his fucking Superman costume and ring the little wife.’ They were in the kitchen and Jumpy noticed a group of kitchen knives attached to a magnetic strip on the wall next to Pamela’s left arm. He opened his mouth to speak, but she wouldn’t let him. ‘Get out before I do something,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe I fell for it. You and voices on the phone: I should have fucking known.’

In the early 1970s Jumpy had run a travelling disco out of the back of his yellow mini-van. He called it Finn’s Thumb in honour of the legendary sleeping giant of Ireland, Finn MacCool, another sucker, as Chamcha used to say. One day Saladin had played a practical joke on Jumpy, by ringing him up, putting on a vaguely Mediterranean accent, and requesting the services of the musical Thumb on the island of Skorpios, on behalf of Mrs Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, offering a fee of ten thousand dollars and transportation to Greece, in a private aircraft, for up to six persons. This was a terrible thing to do to a man as innocent and upright as Jamshed Joshi. ‘I need an hour to think,’ he had said, and then fallen into an agony of the soul. When Saladin rang back an hour later and heard that Jumpy was turning down Mrs Onassis’s offer for political reasons, he understood that his friend was in training to be a saint, and it was no good trying to pull his leg. ‘Mrs Onassis will be broken in the heart for sure,’ he had concluded, and Jumpy had worriedly replied, ‘Please tell her it’s nothing personal, as a matter of fact personally I admire her a great deal.’

We have all known one another too long, Pamela thought as Jumpy left. We can hurt each other with memories two decades old.

On the subject of mistakes with voices, she thought as she drove much too fast down the M4 that afternoon in the old MG hardtop from which she got a degree of pleasure that was, as she had always cheerfully confessed, ‘quite ideologically unsound’, – on that subject, I really ought to be more charitable.

Pamela Chamcha, née Lovelace, was the possessor of a voice for which, in many ways, the rest of her life had been an effort to compensate. It was a voice composed of tweeds, headscarves, summer pudding, hockey-sticks, thatched houses, saddle-soap, house-parties, nuns, family pews, large dogs and philistinism, and in spite of all her attempts to reduce its volume it was loud as a dinner-jacketed drunk throwing bread rolls in a Club. It had been the tragedy of her younger days that thanks to this voice she had been endlessly pursued by the gentlemen farmers and debs’ delights and somethings in the city whom she despised with all her heart, while the greenies and peacemarchers and world-changers with whom she instinctively felt at home treated her with deep suspicion, bordering on resentment. How could one be
on the side of the angels
when one sounded like a no-goodnik every time one moved one’s lips? Accelerating past Reading, Pamela gritted her teeth. One of the reasons she had decided to
admit it
end her marriage before fate did it for her was that she had woken up one day and realized that Chamcha was not in love with her at all, but with that voice stinking of Yorkshire pudding and hearts of oak, that hearty, rubicund voice of ye olde dream-England which he so desperately wanted to inhabit. It had been a marriage of crossed purposes, each of them rushing towards the very thing from which the other was in flight.

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 MG 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 Château 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,
NEI
; 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 MPs 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.