The Satanic Verses (43 page)

I am a man, Chamcha realized, who does not know the score, living in an amoral, survivalist, get-away-with-it-world. Mishal and Anahita Sufyan, who still accountably treated him like a kind of soul-mate, in spite of all his attempts to dissuade them, were beings who plainly admired such creatures as moonlighters, shop-lifters, filchers: scam artists in general. He corrected himself: not
admired, that wasn’t it. Neither girl would ever steal a pin. But they saw such persons as representatives of the gestalt, of how-it-was. As an experiment he told them the story of Billy Battuta and the mink coat. Their eyes shone, and at the end they applauded and giggled with delight: wickedness unpunished made them laugh. Thus, Chamcha realized, people must once have applauded and giggled at the deeds of earlier outlaws, Dick Turpin, Ned Kelly, Phoolan Devi, and of course that other Billy: William Bonney, also a Kid.

‘Scrapheap Youths’ Criminal Idols,’ Mishal read his mind and then, laughing at his disapproval, translated it into yellowpress headlines, while arranging her long, and, Chamcha realized, astonishing body into similarly exaggerated cheesecake postures. Pouting outrageously, fully aware of having stirred him, she prettily added: ‘Kissy kissy?’

Her younger sister, not to be outdone, attempted to copy Mishal’s pose, with less effective results. Abandoning the attempt with some annoyance, she spoke sulkily. ‘Trouble is, we’ve got good prospects, us. Family business, no brothers, bob’s your uncle. This place makes a packet, dunnit? Well then.’ The Shaandaar rooming-house was categorized as a Bed and Breakfast establishment, of the type that borough councils were using more and more owing to the crisis in public housing, lodging five-person families in single rooms, turning blind eyes to health and safety regulations, and claiming ‘temporary accommodation’ allowances from the central government. ‘Ten quid per night per person,’ Anahita informed Chamcha in his attic. ‘Three hundred and fifty nicker per room per week, it comes to, as often as not. Six occupied rooms: you work it out. Right now, we’re losing three hundred pounds a month on this attic, so I hope you feel really bad.’ For that kind of money, it struck Chamcha, you could rent pretty reasonable family-sized apartments in the private sector. But that wouldn’t be classified as temporary accommodation; no central funding for such solutions. Which would also be opposed by local politicians committed to fighting the ‘cuts’.
La
lutte continue;
meanwhile, Hind and her daughters raked in the cash, unworldly Sufyan went to Mecca and came home to dispense homely wisdom, kindliness and smiles. And behind six doors that opened a crack every time Chamcha went to make a phone call or use the toilet, maybe thirty temporary human beings, with little hope of being declared permanent.

The real world.

‘You needn’t look so fish-faced and holy, anyway,’ Mishal Sufyan pointed out. ‘Look where all your law abiding got you.’

‘Your universe is shrinking.’ A busy man, Hal Valance, creator of
The Aliens Show
and sole owner of the property, took exactly seventeen seconds to congratulate Chamcha on being alive before beginning to explain why this fact did not affect the show’s decision to dispense with his services. Valance had started out in advertising and his vocabulary had never recovered from the blow. Chamcha could keep up, however. All those years in the voiceover business taught you a little bad language. In marketing parlance,
a universe
was the total potential market for a given product or service: the chocolate universe, the slimming universe. The dental universe was everybody with teeth; the others were the denture cosmos. ‘I’m talking,’ Valance breathed down the phone in his best Deep Throat voice, ‘about the ethnic universe.’

My people again
: Chamcha, disguised in turban and the rest of his ill-fitting drag, hung on a telephone in a passageway while the eyes of impermanent women and children gleamed through barely opened doors; and wondered what his people had done to him now. ‘No capeesh,’ he said, remembering Valance’s fondness for Italian-American argot – this was, after all, the author of the fast food slogan
Getta pizza da action
. On this occasion, however, Valance wasn’t playing. ‘Audience surveys show,’ he breathed, ‘that ethnics don’t watch ethnic shows. They don’t want ’em, Chamcha. They want fucking
Dynasty
, like everyone else. Your profile’s wrong, if you follow: with you in the show it’s just
too damn racial.
The Aliens Show
is too big an idea to be held back by the racial dimension. The merchandising possibilities alone, but I don’t have to tell you this.’

Chamcha saw himself reflected in the small cracked mirror above the phone box. He looked like a marooned genie in search of a magic lamp. ‘It’s a point of view,’ he answered Valance, knowing argument to be useless. With Hal, all explanations were post facto rationalizations. He was strictly a seat-of-the-pants man, who took for his motto the advice given by Deep Throat to Bob Woodward:
Follow the money
. He had the phrase set in large sans-serif type and pinned up in his office over a still from
All the President’s Men
: Hal Holbrook (another Hal!) in the car park, standing in the shadows. Follow the money: it explained, as he was fond of saying, his five wives, all independently wealthy, from each of whom he had received a handsome divorce settlement. He was presently married to a wasted child maybe one-third his age, with waist-length auburn hair and a spectral look that would have made her a great beauty a quarter of a century earlier. ‘This one doesn’t have a bean; she’s taking me for all I’ve got and when she’s taken it she’ll bugger off,’ Valance had told Chamcha once, in happier days. ‘What the hell. I’m human, too. This time it’s love.’ More cradlesnatching. No escape from it in these times. Chamcha on the telephone found he couldn’t remember the infant’s name. ‘You know my motto,’ Valance was saying. ‘Yes,’ Chamcha said neutrally. ‘It’s the right line for the product.’ The product, you bastard, being you.

By the time he met Hal Valance (how many years ago? Five, maybe six), over lunch at the White Tower, the man was already a monster: pure, self-created image, a set of attributes plastered thickly over a body that was, in Hal’s own words, ‘in training to be Orson Welles’. He smoked absurd, caricature cigars, refusing all Cuban brands, however, on account of his uncompromisingly capitalistic stance. He owned a Union Jack waistcoat and insisted on flying the flag over his agency and also above the door of his Highgate home; was prone to dress up as Maurice Chevalier and sing, at major presentations, to his amazed clients, with the help of
straw boater and silver-headed cane; claimed to own the first Loire château to be fitted with telex and fax machines; and made much of his ‘intimate’ association with the Prime Minister he referred to affectionately as ‘Mrs Torture’. The personification of philistine triumphalism, midatlantic-accented Hal was one of the glories of the age, the creative half of the city’s hottest agency, the Valance & Lang Partnership. Like Billy Battuta he liked big cars driven by big chauffeurs. It was said that once, while being driven at high speed down a Cornish lane in order to ‘heat up’ a particularly glacial seven-foot Finnish model, there had been an accident: no injuries, but when the other driver emerged furiously from his wrecked vehicle he turned out to be even larger than Hal’s minder. As this colossus bore down on him, Hal lowered his push-button window and breathed, with a sweet smile: ‘I strongly advise you to turn around and walk swiftly away; because, sir, if you do not do so within the next fifteen seconds, I am going to have you killed.’ Other advertising geniuses were famous for their work: Mary Wells for her pink Braniff planes, David Ogilvy for his eyepatch, Jerry della Femina for ‘From those wonderful folks who gave you Pearl Harbor’. Valance, whose agency went in for cheap and cheerful vulgarity, all bums and honky-tonk, was renowned in the business for this (probably apocryphal) ‘I’m going to have you killed’, a turn of phrase which proved, to those in the know, that the guy really was a genius. Chamcha had long suspected he’d made up the story, with its perfect ad-land components – Scandinavian icequeen, two thugs, expensive cars, Valance in the Blofeld role and 007 nowhere on the scene – and put it about himself, knowing it to be good for business.

The lunch was by way of thanking Chamcha for his part in a recent, smash-hit campaign for Slimbix diet foods. Saladin had been the voice of a cutesy cartoon blob:
Hi, I’m Cal, and I’m one sad calorie
. Four courses and plenty of champagne as a reward for persuading people to starve.
How’s a poor calorie to earn a salary? Thanks to Slimbix, I’m out of work
. Chamcha hadn’t known what to expect from Valance. What he got was, at least, unvarnished. ‘You’ve done well,’ Hal congratulated him, ‘for a person of the
tinted persuasion.’ And proceeded, without taking his eyes off Chamcha’s face: ‘Let me tell you some facts. Within the last three months, we re-shot a peanut-butter poster because it researched better without the black kid in the background. We re-recorded a building society jingle because T’Chairman thought the singer sounded black, even though he was white as a sodding sheet, and even though, the year before, we’d used a black boy who, luckily for him, didn’t suffer from an excess of soul. We were told by a major airline that we couldn’t use any blacks in their ads, even though they were actually employees of the airline. A black actor came to audition for me and he was wearing a Racial Equality button badge, a black hand shaking a white one. I said this: don’t think you’re getting special treatment from me, chum. You follow me? You follow what I’m telling you?’ It’s a goddamn audition, Saladin realized. ‘I’ve never felt I belonged to a race,’ he replied. Which was perhaps why, when Hal Valance set up his production company, Chamcha was on his ‘A list’; and why, eventually, Maxim Alien came his way.

When
The Aliens Show
started coming in for stick from black radicals, they gave Chamcha a nickname. On account of his private-school education and closeness to the hated Valance, he was known as ‘Brown Uncle Tom’.

Apparently the political pressure on the show had increased in Chamcha’s absence, orchestrated by a certain Dr Uhuru Simba. ‘Doctor of what, beats me,’ Valance deepthroated down the phone. ‘Our ah researchers haven’t come up with anything yet.’ Mass pickets, an embarrassing appearance on
Right to Reply. ‘
The guy’s built like a fucking tank.’ Chamcha envisaged the pair of them, Valance and Simba, as one another’s antitheses. It seemed that the protests had succeeded: Valance was ‘de-politicizing’ the show, by firing Chamcha and putting a huge blond Teuton with pectorals and a quiff inside the prosthetic make-up and computer-generated imagery. A latex-and-Quantel Schwarzenegger, a synthetic, hip-talking version of Rutger Hauer in
Blade Runner
. The Jews were out, too: instead of Mimi, the new show would have a voluptuous shiksa doll. ‘I sent word to Dr Simba: stick that up
your fucking pee aitch dee. No reply has been received. He’ll have to work harder than that if he’s going to take over
this
little country. I,’ Hal Valance announced, ‘love this fucking country. That’s why I’m going to sell it to the whole goddamn world, Japan, America, fucking Argentina. I’m going to sell the arse off it. That’s what I’ve been selling all my fucking life: the fucking nation. The
flag
.’ He didn’t hear what he was saying. When he got going on this stuff, he went puce and often wept. He had done just that at the White Tower, that first time, while stuffing himself full of Greek food. The date came back to Chamcha now: just after the Falklands war. People had a tendency to swear loyalty oaths in those days, to hum ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ on the buses. So when Valance, over a large balloon of Armagnac, started up – ‘I’ll tell you why I love this country’ – Chamcha, pro-Falklands himself, thought he knew what was coming next. But Valance began to describe the research programme of a British aerospace company, a client of his, which had just revolutionized the construction of missile guidance systems by studying the flight pattern of the common housefly. ‘Inflight course corrections,’ he whispered theatrically. ‘Traditionally done in the line of flight: adjust the angle up a bit, down a touch, left or right a nadge. Scientists studying high-speed film of the humble fly, however, have discovered that the little buggers always, but always, make corrections
in right angles
.’ He demonstrated with his hand stretched out, palm flat, fingers together. ‘Bzzt! Bzzt! The bastards actually fly vertically up, down or sideways. Much more accurate. Much more fuel efficient. Try to do it with an engine that depends on nose-to-tail airflow, and what happens? The sodding thing can’t breathe, stalls, falls out of the sky, lands on your fucking allies. Bad karma. You follow. You follow what I’m saying. So these guys, they invent an engine with three-way airflow: nose to tail, plus top to bottom, plus side to side. And bingo: a missile that flies like a goddamn fly, and can hit a fifty p coin travelling at a ground speed of one hundred miles an hour at a distance of three miles. What I love about this country is that: its genius. Greatest inventors in the world. It’s beautiful: am I right or am I right?’ He had
been deadly serious. Chamcha answered: ‘You’re right.’ ‘You’re damn right I’m right,’ he confirmed.