The Satanic Verses (27 page)

           
Chamcha's room struck the sleepless intruder as contrived, and therefore sad:
the caricature of an actor's room full of signed photographs of colleagues,
handbills, framed programmes, production stills, citations, awards, volumes of
movie-star memoirs, a room bought off the peg, by the yard, an imitation of life,
a mask's mask. Novelty items on every surface: ashtrays in the shape of pianos,
china pierrots peeping out from behind a shelf of books. And everywhere, on the
walls, in the movie posters, in the glow of the lamp borne by bronze Eros, in
the mirror shaped like a heart, oozing up through the blood-red carpet,
dripping from the ceiling, Saladin's need for love. In the theatre everybody
gets kissed and everybody is darling. The actor's life offers, on a daily
basis, the simulacrum of love; a mask can be satisfied, or at least consoled,
by the echo of what it seeks. The desperation there was in him, Jumpy
recognized, he'd do anything, put on any damnfool costume, change into any
shape, if it earned him a loving word. Saladin, who wasn't by any means unsuccessful
with women, see above. The poor stumblebum. Even Pamela, with all her beauty
and brightness, hadn't been enough.

           
It was clear he'd been getting to be a long way from enough for her. Somewhere
around the bottom of the second whisky bottle she leaned her head on his
shoulder and said boozily, "You can't imagine the relief of being with
someone with whom I don't have to have a fight every time I express an opinion.
Someone on the side of the goddamn angels." He waited; after a pause,
there was more. "Him and his Royal Family, you wouldn't believe. Cricket,
the Houses of Parliament, the Queen. The place never stopped being a picture
postcard to him. You couldn't get him to look at what was really real."
She closed her eyes and allowed her hand, by accident, to rest on his. "He
was a real Saladin," Jumpy said. "A man with a holy land to conquer,
his England, the one he believed in. You were part of it, too." She rolled
away from him and stretched out on top of magazines, crumpled balls of waste paper,
mess. "Part of it? I was bloody Britannia. Warm beer, mince pies,
common-sense and me. But I'm really real, too, J.J.; I really really am."
She reached over to him, pulled him across to where her mouth was waiting,
kissed him with a great un-Pamela-like slurp. "See what I mean?" Yes,
he saw.

           
"You should have heard him on the Falklands war," she said later,
disengaging herself and fiddling with her hair. "'Pamela, suppose you
heard a noise downstairs in the middle of the night and went to investigate and
found a huge man in the livingroom with a shotgun, and he said, Go back
upstairs, what would you do?' I'd go upstairs, I said. 'Well, it's like that.
Intruders in the home. It won't do.' Jumpy noticed her fists had clenched and
her knuckles were bone-white. "I said, if you must use these blasted cosy
metaphors, then get them right. What it's
like
is if two people claim
they own a house, and one of them is squatting the place, and
then
the
other turns up with the shotgun. That's what it's
like
."
"That's what's really real," Jumpy nodded, seriously. "
Right
,"
she slapped his knee. "That's really right, Mr. Real Jam . . . it's really
truly like that. Actually. Another drink."

           
She leaned over to the tape deck and pushed a button. Jesus, Jumpy thought,
Boney
M?
Give me a break. For all her tough, race-professional attitudes, the
lady still had a lot to learn about music. Here it came, boomchickaboom. Then,
without warning, he was crying, provoked into real tears by counterfeit
emotion, by a disco-beat imitation of pain. It was the one hundred and
thirty-seventh psalm, "Super flumina". King David calling out across
the centuries. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land.

           
"I had to learn the psalms at school," Pamela Chamcha said, sitting
on the floor, her head leaning against the sofa-bed, her eyes shut tight.
By
the river of Babylon, where we sat down, oh oh we wept
. . . she stopped
the tape, leaned back again, began to recite. "If I forget thee, O
Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning; if I do not remember thee, let
my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; yea, if I prefer not Jerusalem in my
mirth."

           
Later, asleep in bed, she dreamed of her convent school, of matins and
evensong, of the chanting of psalms, when Jumpy rushed in and shook her awake,
shouting, "It's no good, I've got to tell you. He isn't dead. Saladin:
he's bloody well alive."

           
* * * * *

           
She came wide awake at once, plunging her hands into her thick, curly, hennaed
hair, in which the first strands of white were just beginning to be noticeable;
she knelt on the bed, naked, with her hands in her hair, unable to move, until
Jumpy had finished speaking, and then, without warning, she began to hit out at
him, punching him on the chest and arms and shoulders and even his face, as
hard as she could hit. He sat down on the bed beside her, looking ridiculous in
her frilly dressing-gown, while she beat him; he allowed his body to go loose,
to receive the blows, to submit. When she ran out of punches her body was
covered in perspiration and he thought she might have broken one of his arms.
She sat down beside him, panting, and they were silent.

           
Her dog entered the bedroom, looking worried, and padded over to offer her his
paw, and to lick at her left leg. Jumpy stirred, cautiously. "I thought he
got stolen," he said eventually. Pamela jerked her head for
yes, but
.
"The thieves got in touch. I paid the ransom. He now answers to the name
of Glenn. That's okay; I could never pronounce Sher Khan properly,
anyway."

           
After a while, Jumpy found that he wanted to talk. "What you did, just
now," he began.

           
"Oh, God."

           
"No. It's like a thing I once did. Maybe the most sensible thing I ever
did." In the summer of 1967, he had bullied the "apolitical"
twenty-year-old Saladin along on an anti-war demonstration. "Once in your
life, Mister Snoot; I'm going to drag you down to my level." Harold Wilson
was coming to town, and because of the Labour Government's support of U S
involvement in Vietnam, a mass protest had been planned. Chamcha went along,
"out of curiosity," he said. "I want to see how allegedly
intelligent people turn themselves into a mob."

           
That day it rained an ocean. The demonstrators in Market Square were soaked
through. Jumpy and Chamcha, swept along by the crowd, found themselves pushed
up against the steps of the town hail;
grandstand view
, Chamcha said
with heavy irony. Next to them stood two students disguised as Russian
assassins, in black fedoras, greatcoats and dark glasses, carrying shoeboxes
filled with ink-dipped tomatoes and labelled in large block letters, bombs.
Shortly before the Prime Minister's arrival, one of them tapped a policeman on
the shoulder and said: "Excuse, please. When Mr. Wilson, self-styled Prime
Meenster, comes in long car, kindly request to wind down weendow so my friend
can throw with him the bombs." The policeman answered, "Ho, ho, sir.
Very good. Now I'll tell you what. You can throw eggs at him, sir, "cause
that's all right with me. And you can throw tomatoes at him, sir, like what
you've got there in that box, painted black, labelled bombs, "cause that's
all right with me. You throw anything hard at him, sir, and my mate here'll get
you with his gun." O days of innocence when the world was young . . . when
the car arrived there was a surge in the crowd and Chamcha and Jumpy were
separated. Then Jumpy appeared, climbed on to the bonnet of Harold Wilson's
limousine, and began to jump up and down on the bonnet, creating large dents,
leaping like a wild man to the rhythm of the crowd's chanting:
We shall
fight, we shall win, long live Ho Chi Minh
.

           
"Saladin started yelling at me to get off, partly because the crowd was full
of Special Branch types converging on the limo, but mainly because he was so
damn embarrassed." But he kept leaping, up higher and down harder,
drenched to the bone, long hair flying: Jumpy the jumper, leaping into the
mythology of those antique years. And Wilson and Marcia cowered in the back
seat.
Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!
At the last possible moment Jumpy took a deep
breath, and dived head-first into a sea of wet and friendly faces; and
vanished. They never caught him: fuzz pigs filth. "Saladin wouldn't speak
to me for over a week," Jumpy remembered. "And when he did, all he
said was, 'I hope you realize those cops could have shot you to pieces, but
they didn't.'

           
They were still sitting side by side on the edge of the bed. Jumpy touched
Pamela on the forearm. "I just mean I know how it feels. Wham, barn. It
felt incredible. It felt necessary."

           
"Oh, my God," she said, turning to him. "Oh, my God, I'm sorry,
but yes, it did."

           
* * * * *

           
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, nee 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.