The Satanic Verses (50 page)

I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing
. He riffled on through the book, and replaced Elena Cone next to the image of the Regenerated Man, sitting naked and splay-legged on a hill with the sun shining out of his rear end.
I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise
. Allie put her hands up and covered her face. Gibreel tried to cheer her up. ‘You have written in the flyleaf: “Creation of world acc. Archbish. Usher, 4004 BC. Estim’d date of apocalypse,
, 1996.” So time for improvement of sensual enjoyment still remains.’ She shook her head: stop. He stopped. ‘Tell me,’ he said, putting away the book.

Elena at twenty had taken London by storm. Her feral six-foot body winking through a golden chain-mail Rabanne. She had always carried herself with uncanny assurance, proclaiming her ownership of the earth. The city was her medium, she could swim
in it like a fish. She was dead at twenty-one, drowned in a bathtub of cold water, her body full of psychotropic drugs. Can one drown in one’s element, Allie had wondered long ago. If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air? In those days Allie, eighteen-nineteen, had envied Elena her certainties. What was
her
element? In what periodic table of the spirit could it be found? – Now, flat-footed, Himalayan veteran, she mourned its loss. When you have earned the high horizon it isn’t easy to go back into your box, into a narrow island, an eternity of anticlimax. But her feet were traitors and the mountain would kill.

Mythological Elena, the cover girl, wrapped in couture plastics, had been sure of her immortality. Allie, visiting her in her World’s End
crashpad
, refused a proffered sugar-lump, mumbled something about brain damage, feeling inadequate, as usual in Elena’s company. Her sister’s face, the eyes too wide apart, the chin too sharp, the effect overwhelming, stared mockingly back. ‘No shortage of brain cells,’ Elena said. ‘You can spare a few.’ The spare capacity of the brain was Elena’s capital. She spent her cells like money, searching for her own heights; trying, in the idiom of the day, to fly. Death, like life, came to her coated in sugar.

She had tried to ‘improve’ the younger Alleluia. ‘Hey, you’re a great looking kid, why hide it in those dungarees? I mean, God, darling, you’ve got all the equipment in there.’ One night she dressed Allie up, in an olive-green item composed of frills and absences that barely covered her body-stockinged groin:
sugaring me like candy
, was Allie’s puritanical thought,
my own sister putting me on display in the shop-window, thanks a lot
. They went to a gaming club full of ecstatic lordlings, and Allie had left fast when Elena’s attention was elsewhere. A week later, ashamed of herself for being such a coward, for rejecting her sister’s attempt at intimacy, she sat on a beanbag at World’s End and confessed to Elena that she was no longer a virgin. Whereupon her elder sister slapped her in the mouth and called her ancient names: tramp, slut, tart. ‘Elena Cone never allows a man to lay a
finger,’
she yelled, revealing her ability to think of herself as a third person, ‘not a goddamn finger
nail
. I know what I’m worth, darling, I
know how the mystery dies the moment they put their willies in, I should have known you’d turn out to be a whore. Some fucking communist, I suppose,’ she wound down. She had inherited her father’s prejudices in such matters. Allie, as Elena knew, had not.

They hadn’t met much after that, Elena remaining until her death the virgin queen of the city – the post-mortem confirmed her as
virgo intacta –
while Allie gave up wearing underwear, took odd jobs on small, angry magazines, and because her sister was untouchable she became the other thing, every sexual act a slap in her sibling’s glowering, whitelipped face. Three abortions in two years and the belated knowledge that her days on the contraceptive pill had put her, as far as cancer was concerned, in one of the highest-risk categories of all.

She heard about her sister’s end from a newsstand billboard,
MODEL’S ‘ACID BATH’ DEATH
. You’re not even safe from puns when you die, was her first reaction. Then she found she was unable to weep.

‘I kept seeing her in magazines for months,’ she told Gibreel. ‘On account of the glossies’ long lead times.’ Elena’s corpse danced across Moroccan deserts, clad only in diaphanous veils; or it was sighted in the Sea of Shadows on the moon, naked except for spaceman’s helmet and half a dozen silk ties knotted around breasts and groin. Allie took to drawing moustaches on the pictures, to the outrage of newsagents; she ripped her late sister out of the journals of her zombie-like undeath and crumpled her up. Haunted by Elena’s periodical ghost, Allie reflected on the dangers of attempting to
fly;
what flaming falls, what macabre hells were reserved for such Icarus types! She came to think of Elena as a soul in torment, to believe that this captivity in an immobile world of girlie calendars in which she wore black breasts of moulded plastic, three sizes larger than her own; of pseudo-erotic snarls; of advertising messages printed across her navel, was no less than Elena’s personal hell. Allie began to see the scream in her sister’s eyes, the anguish of being trapped forever in those fashion spreads. Elena was being tortured by demons, consumed in fires, and she couldn’t even move … after a time Allie had to avoid the shops
in which her sister could be found staring from the racks. She lost the ability to open magazines, and hid all the pictures of Elena she owned. ‘Goodbye, Yel,’ she told her sister’s memory, using her old nursery name. ‘I’ve got to look away from you.’

‘But I turned out to be like her, after all.’ Mountains had begun to sing to her; whereupon she, too, had risked brain cells in search of exaltation. Eminent physicians expert in the problems facing mountaineers had frequently proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that human beings could not survive without breathing apparatus much above eight thousand metres. The eyes would haemorrhage beyond hope of repair, and the brain, too, would start to explode, losing cells by the billion, too many and too fast, resulting in the permanent damage known as High Altitude Deterioration, followed in quick time by death. Blind corpses would remain preserved in the permafrost of those highest slopes. But Allie and Sherpa Pemba went up and came down to tell the tale. Cells from the brain’s deposit boxes replaced the current-account casualties. Nor did her eyes blow out. Why had the scientists been wrong? ‘Prejudice, mostly,’ Allie said, lying curled around Gibreel beneath parachute silk. ‘They can’t quantify the will, so they leave it out of their calculations. But it’s will that gets you up Everest, will and anger, and it can bend any law of nature you care to mention, at least in the short term, gravity not excluded. If you don’t push your luck, anyway.’

There had been some damage. She had been suffering unaccountable lapses of memory: small, unpredictable things. Once at the fishmonger’s she had forgotten the word
fish
. Another morning she found herself in her bathroom picking up a toothbrush blankly, quite unable to work out its purpose. And one morning, waking up beside the sleeping Gibreel, she had been on the verge of shaking him awake to demand, ‘Who the hell are you? How did you get in my bed?’ – when, just in time, the memory returned. ‘I’m hoping it’s temporary,’ she told him. But kept to herself, even now, the appearances of Maurice Wilson’s ghost on the rooftops surrounding the Fields, waving his inviting arm.

She was a competent woman, formidable in many ways: very much the professional sportswoman of the 1980s, a client of the giant MacMurray public relations agency, sponsored to the gills. Nowadays she, too, appeared in advertisements, promoting her own range of outdoor products and leisurewear, aimed at holidaymakers and amateurs more than pro climbers, to maximize what Hal Valance would have called the universe. She was the golden girl from the roof of the world, the survivor of ‘my Teutonic twosome’, as Otto Cone had been fond of calling his daughters.
Once again, Yel, I follow in your footsteps
. To be an attractive woman in a sport dominated by, well, hairy men was to be saleable, and the ‘icequeen’ image didn’t hurt either. There was money in it, and now that she was old enough to compromise her old, fiery ideals with no more than a shrug and a laugh, she was ready to make it, ready, even, to appear on TV talk-shows to fend off, with risqué hints, the inevitable and unchanging questions about life with the boys at twenty-odd thousand feet. Such high-profile capers sat uneasily alongside the view of herself to which she still fiercely clung: the idea that she was a natural solitary, the most private of women, and that the demands of her business life were ripping her in half. She had her first fight with Gibreel over this, because he said, in his unvarnished way: ‘I guess it’s okay to run from the cameras as long as you know they’re chasing after you. But suppose they stop? My guess is you’d turn and run the other way.’ Later, when they’d made up, she teased him with her growing stardom (since she became the first sexually attractive blonde to conquer Everest, the noise had increased considerably, she received photographs of gorgeous hunks in the mail, also invitations to high life soirées and a quantity of insane abuse): ‘I could be in movies myself now that you’ve retired. Who knows? Maybe I will.’ To which he responded, shocking her by the force of his words, ‘Over my goddamn dead body.’

In spite of her pragmatic willingness to enter the polluted waters of the real and swim in the general direction of the current,
she never lost the sense that some awful disaster was lurking just around the corner – a legacy, this, of her father’s and sister’s sudden deaths. This hairs-on-neck prickliness had made her a cautious climber, a ‘real percentage man’, as the lads would have it, and as admired friends died on various mountains her caution increased. Away from mountaineering, it gave her, at times, an unrelaxed look, a jumpiness; she acquired the heavily defended air of a fortress preparing for an inevitable assault. This added to her reputation as a frosty berg of a woman; people kept their distance, and, to hear her tell it, she accepted loneliness as the price of solitude. – But there were more contradictions here, for she had, after all, only recently thrown caution overboard when she chose to make the final assault on Everest without oxygen. ‘Aside from all the other implications,’ the agency assured her in its formal letter of congratulations, ‘this humanizes you, it shows you’ve got that what-the-hell streak, and that’s a positive new dimension.’ They were working on it. In the meantime, Allie thought, smiling at Gibreel in tired encouragement as he slipped down towards her lower depths, There’s now you. Almost a total stranger and here you’ve gone and moved right in. God, I even carried you across the threshold, near as makes no difference. Can’t blame you for accepting the lift.

He wasn’t housetrained. Used to servants, he left clothes, crumbs, used tea-bags where they fell. Worse: he
dropped
them, actually let them fall where they would need picking up; perfectly, richly unconscious of what he was doing, he went on proving to himself that he, the poor boy from the streets, no longer needed to tidy up after himself. It wasn’t the only thing about him that drove her crazy. She’d pour glasses of wine; he’d drink his fast and then, when she wasn’t looking, grab hers, placating her with an angelic-faced, ultra-innocent ‘Plenty more, isn’t it?’ His bad behaviour around the house. He liked to fart. He complained – actually complained, after she’d literally scooped him out of the snow! – about the smallness of the accommodations. ‘Every time I take two steps my face hits a wall.’ He was rude to telephone callers,
really
rude, without bothering to find
out who they were: automatically, the way film stars were in Bombay when, by some chance, there wasn’t a flunkey available to protect them from such intrusions. After Alicja had weathered one such volley of obscene abuse, she said (when her daughter finally got on the end of the phone): ‘Excuse me for mentioning, darling, but your boyfriend is in my opinion a case.’