The Satanic Verses (46 page)

When Pamela Chamcha answered the door he found that her hair had gone snow-white overnight, and that her response to this inexplicable calamity had been to shave her head right down to the scalp and then conceal it inside an absurd burgundy turban which she refused to remove.

‘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,
and after half 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,
Mahavilayet
. 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 Cocky-bugger – 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 nutter 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 feelings 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 Fifty-Seven.
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.’