The Satanic Verses (68 page)

Now he was outside, with Jumpy fussing over him and even Pamela showing concern. ‘I’m the one with the bun in the oven,’ she said with a gruff remnant of affection. ‘What business have you got to pass out?’ Jumpy insisted: ‘You’d best come with me to
my class; just sit quietly, and afterwards I’ll take you home.’ – But Pamela wanted to know if a doctor was required.
No, no, I’ll go with Jumpy, I’ll be fine. It was just hot in there. Airless. My clothes too warm. A stupid thing. A nothing
.

There was an art cinema next to the Friends House, and he was leaning against a movie poster. The film was
Mephisto
, the story of an actor seduced into a collaboration with Nazism. In the poster, the actor – played by the German star Klaus Maria Brandauer – was dressed up as Mephistophilis, face white, body cloaked in black, arms upraised. Lines from
Faust
stood above his head:

– Who art thou, then
?

– Part of that Power, not understood
,

Which always wills the Bad, and always works the Good
.

At the sports centre: he could scarcely bring himself to glance in Mishal’s direction. (She too had left the Simba meeting in time to make the class.) – Although she was all over him,
you came back, I bet it was to see me, isn’t that nice
, he could hardly speak a civil word, much less ask
were you wearing a luminous something in the middle of your
, because she wasn’t how, kicking her legs and flexing her long body, resplendent in its black leotard. – Until, sensing the coldness in him, she backed off, all confusion and injured pride.

‘Our other star hasn’t turned up today,’ Jumpy mentioned to Saladin during a break in the exercises. ‘Miss Alleluia Cone, the one who climbed Everest. I was meaning to introduce you two. She knows, I mean, she’s apparently with, Gibreel. Gibreel Farishta, the actor, your fellow-survivor of the crash.’

Things are closing in on me
. Gibreel was drifting towards him, like India when, having come unstuck from the Gondwanaland protocontinent, it floated towards Laurasia. (His processes of mind, he recognized absently, were coming up with some pretty strange associations.) When they collided, the force would hurl up Himalayas. – What is a mountain? An obstacle; a transcendence; above all, an
effect
.

‘Where are you going?’ Jumpy was calling. ‘I thought I was giving you a lift. Are you okay?’

I’m fine. I need to walk, that’s all
.

‘Okay, but only if you’re sure.’

Sure
. Walk away fast, without catching Mishal’s aggrieved eye.… In the street. Walk quickly, out of this wrong place, this underworld. – God: no escape. Here’s a shop-front, a store selling musical instruments, trumpets saxophones oboes, what’s the name? –
Fair Winds
, and here in the window is a cheaply printed handbill. Announcing the imminent return of, that’s right, the Archangel Gibreel. His return and the salvation of the earth.
Walk. Walk away fast
.

 … Hail this taxi. (His clothes inspire deference in the driver.) Climb in squire do you mind the radio. Some scientist who got caught in that hijacking and lost the half of his tongue. American. They rebuilt it, he says, with flesh taken from his posterior, excuse my French. Wouldn’t fancy a mouthful of my own buttock meat myself but the poor bugger had no option did he. Funny bastard. Got some funny ideas.

Eugene Dumsday on the radio discussed the gaps in the fossil record with his new, buttocky tongue.
The Devil tried to silence me but the good Lord and American surgical techniques knew better
. These gaps were the creationist’s main selling-point: if natural selection was the truth, where were all the random mutations that got deselected? Where were the monster-children, the deformed babies of evolution? The fossils were silent. No three-legged horses there.
No point arguing with these geezers
, the cabbie said.
I don’t hold with God myself
. No point, one small part of Chamcha’s consciousness agreed. No point suggesting that ‘the fossil record’ wasn’t some sort of perfect filing cabinet. And evolution theory had come a long way since Darwin. It was now being argued that major changes in species happened not in the stumbling, hit-and-miss manner first envisaged, but in great, radical leaps. The history of life was not the bumbling progress – the very English, middle-class progress – Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation,
more revolution than evolution. – I’ve heard enough, the cabbie said. Eugene Dumsday vanished from the ether, to be replaced by disco music.
Ave atque vale
.

What Saladin Chamcha understood that day was that he had been living in a state of phoney peace, that the change in him was irreversible. A new, dark world had opened up for him (or: within him) when he fell from the sky; no matter how assiduously he attempted to re-create his old existence, this was, he now saw, a fact that could not be unmade. He seemed to see a road before him, forking to left and right. Closing his eyes, settling back against taxicab upholstery, he chose the left-hand path.

T
he temperature continued to rise; and when the heatwave reached its highest point, and stayed up there so long that the whole city, its edifices, its waterways, its inhabitants, came perilously close to the boil, – then Mr Billy Battuta and his companion Mimi Mamoulian, recently returned to the metropolis after a period as guests of the penal authority of New York, announced their ‘grand coming-out’ party. Billy’s business connections downtown had arranged for his case to be heard by a well-disposed judge; his personal charm had persuaded every one of the wealthy female ‘marks’ from whom he’d extracted such generous amounts for the purpose of the re-purchase of his soul from the Devil (including Mrs Struwelpeter) to sign a clemency petition, in which the matrons stated their conviction that Mr Battuta had honestly repented him of his error, and asked, in the light of his vow to concentrate henceforth on his startlingly brilliant entrepreneurial career (whose social usefulness in terms of wealth creation and the provision of employment to many persons, they suggested, should also be considered by the court in mitigation of his offences), and his further vow to undergo a full course of psychiatric treatment to help him overcome his weakness for criminal capers, – that the worthy judge settle upon some lighter punishment than a prison sentence, ‘the deterrent purpose
underlying such incarceration being better served here,’ in the ladies’ opinion, ‘by a judgment of a more Christian sort’. Mimi, adjudged to be no more than Billy’s love-duped underling, was given a suspended sentence; for Billy it was deportation, and a stiff fine, but even this was rendered considerably less severe by the judge’s consent to Billy’s attorney’s plea that his client be allowed to leave the country voluntarily, without having the stigma of a deportation order stamped into his passport, a thing that would do great damage to his many business interests. Twenty-four hours after the judgment Billy and Mimi were back in London, whooping it up at Crockford’s, and sending out fancy invitation cards to what promised to be
the
party of that strangely sweltering season. One of these cards found its way, with the assistance of Mr S. S. Sisodia, to the residence of Alleluia Cone and Gibreel Farishta; another arrived, a little belatedly, at Saladin Chamcha’s den, slipped under the door by the solicitous Jumpy. (Mimi had called Pamela to invite her, adding, with her usual directness: ‘Any notion where that husband of yours has gotten to?’ – Which Pamela answered, with English awkwardness,
yes er but
. Mimi got the whole story out of her in less than half an hour, which wasn’t bad, and concluded triumphantly: ‘Sounds like your life is looking up, Pam. Bring ’em both; bring anyone. It’s going to be quite a circus.’)

The location for the party was another of Sisodia’s inexplicable triumphs: the giant sound stage at the Shepperton film studios had been procured, apparently at no cost, and the guests would be able, therefore, to take their pleasures in the huge re-creation of Dickensian London that stood within. A musical adaptation of the great writer’s last completed novel, renamed
Friend
!, with book and lyrics by the celebrated genius of the musical stage, Mr Jeremy Bentham, had proved a mammoth hit in the West End and on Broadway, in spite of the macabre nature of some of its scenes; now, accordingly,
The Chums
, as it was known in the business, was receiving the accolade of a big-budget movie production. ‘The pipi PR people,’ Sisodia told Gibreel on the phone, ‘think that such a fufufuck,
function
, which is to be most ista ista
istar ista ista istudded, will be good for their bibuild up cacampaign.’

The appointed night arrived: a night of dreadful heat.

Shepperton! – Pamela and Jumpy are already here, borne on the wings of Pamela’s MG, when Chamcha, having disdained their company, arrives in one of the fleet of coaches the evening’s hosts have made available to those guests wishing for whatever reason to be driven rather than to drive. – And someone else, too, – the one with whom our Saladin fell to earth, – has come; is wandering within. – Chamcha enters the arena; and is amazed. – Here London has been altered – no,
condensed, –
according to the imperatives of film. – Why, here’s the Stucconia of the Veneerings, those bran-new, spick and span new people, lying shockingly adjacent to Portman Square, and the shady angle containing various Podsnaps. – And worse: behold the dustman’s mounds of Boffin’s Bower, supposedly in the near vicinity of Holloway, looming in this abridged metropolis over Fascination Fledgeby’s rooms in the Albany, the West End’s very heart! – But the guests are not disposed to grumble; the reborn city, even rearranged, still takes the breath away; most particularly in that part of the immense studio through which the river winds, the river with its fogs and Gaffer Hexam’s boat, the ebbing Thames flowing beneath two bridges, one of iron, one of stone. – Upon its cobbled banks the guests’ gay footsteps fall; and there sound mournful, misty, footfalls of ominous note. A dry ice pea-souper lifts across the set.

Society grandees, fashion models, film stars, corporation bigwigs, a brace of minor royal Personages, useful politicians and suchlike riff-raff perspire and mingle in these counterfeit streets with numbers of men and women as sweat-glistened as the ‘real’ guests and as counterfeit as the city: hired extras in period costume, as well as a selection of the movie’s leading players. Chamcha, who realizes in the moment of sighting him that this
encounter has been the whole purpose of his journey, – which fact he has succeeded in keeping from himself until this instant, – spots Gibreel in the increasingly riotous crowd.

Yes: there, on London Bridge Which Is Of Stone, without a doubt, Gibreel! – And that must be his Alleluia, his Icequeen Cone! – What a distant expression he seems to be wearing, how he lists a few degrees to the left; and how she seems to dote on him – how everyone adores him: for he is among the very greatest at the party, Battuta to his left, Sisodia at Allie’s right, and all about a host of faces that would be recognized from Peru to Timbuctoo! – Chamcha struggles through the crowd, which grows ever more dense as he nears the bridge; – but he is resolved – Gibreel, he will reach Gibreel! – when with a clash of cymbals loud music strikes up, one of Mr Bentham’s immortal, show-stopping tunes, and the crowd parts like the Red Sea before the children of Israel. – Chamcha, off-balance, staggers back, is crushed by the parting crowd against a fake half-timbered edifice – what else? – a Curiosity Shop; and, to save himself, retreats within, while a great singing throng of bosomy ladies in mobcaps and frilly blouses, accompanied by an over-sufficiency of stovepipehatted gents, comes rollicking down the riverside street, singing for all they’re worth.