The Satanic Verses (53 page)

When his vision cleared, the lost soul had gone but there, floating on her carpet a couple of feet off the ground, was Rekha Merchant, mocking his discomfiture. ‘Not such a great start,’ she snorted. ‘Archangel my foot. Gibreel janab, you’re off your head, take it from me. You played too many winged types for your own good. I wouldn’t trust that Deity of yours either, if I were you,’ she added in a more conspiratorial tone, though Gibreel suspected that her intentions remained satirical. ‘He hinted as much himself, fudging the answer to your Oopar-Neechay question like he did.
This notion of separation of functions, light versus dark, evil versus good, may be straightforward enough in Islam –
O, children of Adam, let not the Devil seduce you, as he expelled your parents from the garden, pulling off from them their clothing that he might show them their shame –
but go back a bit and you see that it’s a pretty recent fabrication. Amos, eighth century
B C
, asks: “Shall there be evil in a city and the Lord hath not done it?” Also Jahweh, quoted by Deutero-Isaiah two hundred years later, remarks: “I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.” It isn’t until the Book of Chronicles, merely fourth century
B C
, that the word
shaitan
is used to mean a being, and not only an attribute of God.’ This speech was one of which the ‘real’ Rekha would plainly have been incapable, coming as she did from a polytheistic tradition and never having evinced the faintest interest in comparative religion or, of all things, the Apocrypha. But the Rekha who had been pursuing him ever since he fell from
Bostan
was, Gibreel knew, not real in any objective, psychologically or corporeally consistent manner. – What, then, was she? It would be easy to imagine her as a thing of his own making – his own accomplice-adversary, his inner demon. That would account for her ease with the arcana. – But how had he himself come by such knowledge? Had he truly, in days gone by, possessed it and then lost it, as his memory now informed him? (He had a nagging notion of inaccuracy here, but when he tried to fix his thoughts upon his ‘dark age’, that is to say the period during which he had unaccountably come to disbelieve in his angelhood, he was faced with a thick bank of clouds, through which, peer and blink as he might, he could make out little more than shadows.) – Or could it be that the material now filling his thoughts, the echo, to give but a single example, of how his lieutenant-angels Ithuriel and Zephon had found the adversary
squat like a toad
by Eve’s ear in Eden, using his wiles ‘to reach/The organs of her fancy, and with them forge/Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams’, had in fact been planted in his head by that same ambiguous Creature, that Upstairs-Downstairs Thing, who had confronted him in Alleluia’s boudoir, and awoken him from
his long waking sleep? – Then Rekha, too, was perhaps an emissary of this God, an external, divine antagonist and not an inner, guilt-produced shade; one sent to wrestle with him and make him whole again.

His nose, leaking blood, began to throb painfully. He had never been able to tolerate pain. ‘Always a cry-baby,’ Rekha laughed in his face. Shaitan had understood more:

He couldn’t have put it better. A person who found himself in an inferno would do anything, rape, extortion, murder, felo de se, whatever it took to get out … he dabbed a handkerchief at his nose as Rekha, still present on her flying rug, and intuiting his ascent (descent?) into the realm of metaphysical speculation, attempted to get things back on to more familiar ground. ‘You should have stuck with me,’ she opined. ‘You could have loved me, good and proper. I knew how to love. Not everybody has the capacity for it; I do, I mean did. Not like that self-centred blonde bombshell thinking secretly about having a child and not even mentioning same to you. Not like your God, either; it’s not like the old days, when such Persons took proper interest.’

This needed contesting on several grounds. ‘You were married, start to finish,’ he replied. ‘Ball-bearings. I was your side dish. Nor will I, who waited so long for Him to manifest Himself, now speak poorly of Him post facto, after the personal appearance. Finally, what’s all this baby-talk? You’ll go to any extreme, seems like.’

‘You don’t know what hell is,’ she snapped back, dropping the mask of her imperturbability. ‘But, buster, you sure will. If you’d ever said, I’d have thrown over that ball-bearings bore in two secs,
but you kept mum. Now I’ll see you down there: Neechayvala’s Hotel.’

‘You’d never have left your children,’ he insisted. ‘Poor fellows, you even threw them down first when you jumped.’ That set her off. ‘Don’t you talk! To dare to talk! Mister, I’ll cook your goose! I’ll fry your heart and eat it up on toast! – And as to your Snow White princess, she is of the opinion that a child is a mother’s property only, because men may come and men may go but she goes on forever, isn’t it? You’re only the seed, excuse me, she is the garden. Who asks a seed permission to plant? What do you know, damn fool Bombay boy messing with the modern ideas of mames.’

‘And you,’ he came back strongly. ‘Did you, for example, ask their Daddyji’s permission before you threw his kiddies off the roof?’

She vanished in fury and yellow smoke, with an explosion that made him stagger and knocked the hat off his head (it lay upturned on the pavement at his feet). She unleashed, too, an olfactory effect of such nauseous potency as to make him gag and retch. Emptily: for he was perfectly void of all foodstuffs and liquids, having partaken of no nourishment for many days. Ah, immortality, he thought: ah, noble release from the tyranny of the body. He noticed that there were two individuals watching him curiously, one a violent-looking youth in studs and leather, with a rainbow Mohican haircut and a streak of face-paint lightning zigzagging down his nose, the other a kindly middle-aged woman in a headscarf. Very well then: seize the day. ‘Repent,’ he cried passionately. ‘For I am the Archangel of the Lord.’

‘Poor bastard,’ said the Mohican and threw a coin into Farishta’s fallen hat. He walked on; the kindly, twinkling lady, however, leaned confidentially towards Gibreel and passed him a leaflet. ‘You’ll be interested in this.’ He quickly identified it as a racist text demanding the ‘repatriation’ of the country’s black citizenry. She took him, he deduced, for a white angel. So angels were not exempt from such categories, he wonderingly learned.
‘Look at it this way,’ the woman was saying, taking his silence for uncertainty – and revealing, by slipping into an over-articulated, over-loud mode of delivery, that she thought him not quite pukka, a Levantine angel, maybe, Cypriot or Greek, in need of her best talking-to-the-afflicted voice. ‘If they came over and filled up wherever you come from, well! You wouldn’t like
that
.’

Punched in the nose, taunted by phantoms, given alms instead of reverence, and in divers ways shewn the depths to which the denizens of the city had sunk, the intransigence of the evil manifest there, Gibreel became more determined than ever to commence the doing of good, to initiate the great work of rolling back the frontiers of the adversary’s dominion. The atlas in his pocket was his master-plan. He would redeem the city square by square, from Hockley Farm in the north-west corner of the charted area to Chance Wood in the south-east; after which, perhaps, he would celebrate the conclusion of his labours by playing a round of golf at the aptly named course situated at the very edge of the map: Wildernesse.

And somewhere along the way the adversary himself would be waiting. Shaitan, Iblis, or whatever name he had adopted – and in point of fact that name was on the tip of Gibreel’s tongue – just as the face of the adversary, horned and malevolent, was still somewhat out of focus … well, it would take shape soon enough, and the name would come back, Gibreel was sure of it, for were not his powers growing every day, was he not the one who, restored to his glory, would hurl the adversary down, once more, into the Darkest Deeps? – That name: what was it? Tch-something? Tchu Tché Tchin Tchow. No matter. All in good time.

But the city in its corruption refused to submit to the dominion of the cartographers, changing shape at will and without warning, making it impossible for Gibreel to approach his quest in the
systematic manner he would have preferred. Some days he would turn a corner at the end of a grand colonnade built of human flesh and covered in skin that bled when scratched, and find himself in an uncharted wasteland, at whose distant rim he could see tall familiar buildings, Wren’s dome, the high metallic spark-plug of the Telecom Tower, crumbling in the wind like sandcastles. He would stumble across bewildering and anonymous parks and emerge into the crowded streets of the West End, upon which, to the consternation of the motorists, acid had begun to drip from the sky, burning great holes in the surfaces of the roads. In this pandemonium of mirages he often heard laughter: the city was mocking his impotence, awaiting his surrender, his recognition that what existed here was beyond his powers to comprehend, let alone to change. He shouted curses at his still-faceless adversary, pleaded with the Deity for a further sign, feared that his energies might, in truth, never be equal to the task. In brief, he was becoming the most wretched and bedraggled of archangels, his garments filthy, his hair lank and greasy, his chin sprouting hair in uncontrollable tufts. It was in this sorry condition that he arrived at the Angel Underground.

It must have been early in the morning, because the station staff drifted up as he watched, to unlock and then roll back the metal grille of night. He followed them in, shuffling along, head low, hands deep in pockets (the street atlas had been discarded long ago); and raising his eyes at last, found himself looking into a face on the verge of dissolving into tears.

‘Good morning,’ he ventured, and the young woman in the ticket office responded bitterly, ‘What’s good about it, that’s what I want to know,’ and now her tears did come, plump, globular and plenteous. ‘There, there, child,’ he said, and she gave him a disbelieving look. ‘You’re no priest,’ she opined. He answered, a little tentatively: ‘I am the Angel, Gibreel.’ She began to laugh, as abruptly as she had wept. ‘Only angels roun here hang from the lamp-posts at Christmas. Illuminations. Only the Council swing them by their necks.’ He was not to be put off ‘I am Gibreel,’ he
repeated, fixing her with his eye. ‘Recite.’ And, to her own emphatically expressed astonishment,
I cyaan believe I doin this, emptyin my heart to some tramp, I not like this, you know
, the ticket clerk began to speak.

Her name was Orphia Phillips, twenty years old, both parents alive and dependent on her, especially now that her fool sister Hyacinth had lost her job as a physiotherapist by ‘gettin up to she nonsense’. The young man’s name, for of course there was a young man, was Uriah Moseley. The station had recently installed two gleaming new elevators and Orphia and Uriah were their operators. During rush-hours, when both lifts were working, they had little time for conversation; but for the rest of the day, only one lift was used. Orphia took up her position at the ticket-collection point just along from the elevator-shaft, and Uri managed to spend a good deal of time down there with her, leaning against the door-jamb of his gleaming lift and picking his teeth with the silver toothpick his great-grandfather had liberated from some old-time plantation boss. It was true love. ‘But I jus get carry away,’ Orphia wailed at Gibreel. ‘I always too hasty for sense.’ One afternoon, during a lull, she had deserted her post and stepped up right in front of him as he leaned and picked teeth, and seeing the look in her eye he put away the pick. After that he came to work with a spring in his step; she, too, was in heaven as she descended each day into the bowels of the earth. Their kisses grew longer and more passionate. Sometimes she would not detach herself when the buzzer rang for the lift; Uriah would have to push her back, with a cry of, ‘Cool off, girl, the public.’ Uriah had a vocational attitude to his work. He spoke to her of his pride in his uniform, of his satisfaction at being in the public service, giving his life to society. She thought he sounded a shade pompous, and wanted to say, ‘Uri, man, you jus a elevator boy here,’ but intuiting that such realism would not be well received, she held her troublesome tongue, or, rather, pushed it into his mouth.