The Satanic Verses (71 page)

Theirs had been a high-risk conjoining from the start, he reflected: first, Gibreel’s dramatic abandonment of career and rush across the earth, and now, Allie’s uncompromising determination to
see it through
, to defeat in him this mad, angelic divinity and restore the humanity she loved. No compromises for them; they were going for broke. Whereas he, Saladin, had declared himself content to live under the same roof as his wife and her lover boy. Which was the better way? Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.

In the morning Gibreel ordered an ascent of the local ‘Top’. But Allie declined, although it was plain to Chamcha that her return to the countryside had caused her to glow with joy. ‘Bloody flatfoot mame,’ Gibreel cursed her lovingly. ‘Come on, Salad. Us damn city slickers can show the Everest conqueror how to climb. What a bloody upside-down life, yaar. We go mountain-climbing while she sits here and makes business calls.’ Saladin’s thoughts were racing: he understood, now, that strange hobble at Shepperton; understood, too, that this secluded haven would have to be temporary – that Allie, by coming here, was sacrificing her own life, and wouldn’t be able to go on doing so indefinitely. What should he do? Anything? Nothing? – If revenge was to be taken, when and how? ‘Get these boots on,’ Gibreel commanded. ‘You think the rain will hold off all fucking day?’

It didn’t. By the time they reached the stone cairn at the summit of Gibreel’s chosen climb, they were enveloped in a fine drizzle. ‘Damn good show,’ Gibreel panted. ‘Look: there she is, down there, sitting back like the Grand Panjandrum.’ He pointed down at the Freekirk. Chamcha, his heart pounding, was feeling foolish. He must start behaving like a man with a ticker problem. Where was the glory in dying of heart failure on this nothing of a Top, for nothing, in the rain? Then Gibreel got out his field-glasses and started scanning the valley. There were hardly any moving figures to be seen – two or three men and dogs, some sheep, no more. Gibreel tracked the men with his binoculars. ‘Now that we’re alone,’ he suddenly said, ‘I can tell you why we really came away to this damn empty hole. It’s because of her. Yes, yes; don’t be fooled by my act! It’s all her bloody beauty. Men, Spoono: they chase her like goddamn flies. I swear! I see them, slobbering and grabbing. It isn’t right. She is a very private person, the most private person in the world. We have to protect her from lust.’

This speech took Saladin by surprise. You poor bastard, he thought, you really are going off your wretched head at a rate of
knots. And, hard on the heels of this thought, a second sentence appeared, as if by magic, in his head:
Don’t imagine that means I’ll let you off
.

On the drive back to the Carlisle railway station, Chamcha mentioned the depopulation of the countryside. ‘There’s no work,’ Allie said. ‘So it’s empty. Gibreel says he can’t get used to the idea that all this space indicates poverty: says it looks like luxury to him, after India’s crowds.’ – ‘And your work?’ Chamcha asked. ‘What about that?’ She smiled at him, the ice-maiden façade long gone. ‘You’re a nice man to ask. I keep thinking, one day it’ll be my life in the middle, taking first place. Or, well, although I find it hard to use the first person plural: our life. That sounds better, right?’

‘Don’t let him cut you off,’ Saladin advised. ‘From Jumpy, from your own worlds, whatever.’ This was the moment at which his campaign could truly be said to have begun; when he set a foot upon that effortless, seductive road on which there was only one way to go. ‘You’re right,’ Allie was saying. ‘God, if he only knew. His precious Sisodia, for example: it’s not just seven-foot starlets he goes for, though he sure as hell likes those.’ – ‘He made a pass,’ Chamcha guessed; and, simultaneously, filed the information away for possible later use. ‘He’s totally shameless,’ Allie laughed. ‘It was right under Gibreel’s nose. He doesn’t mind rejection, though: he just bows, and murmurs
no offoffoffence
, and that’s that. Can you imagine if I told Gibreel?’

Chamcha at the railway station wished Allie luck. ‘We’ll have to be in London for a couple of weeks,’ she said through the car window. ‘I’ve got meetings. Maybe you and Gibreel can get together then; this has really done him good.’

‘Call any time,’ he waved goodbye, and watched the Citroën until it was out of sight.

That Allie Cone, the third point of a triangle of fictions – for had not Gibreel and Allie come together very largely by imagining,
out of their own needs, an ‘Allie’ and a ‘Gibreel’ with whom each could fall in love; and was not Chamcha now imposing on them the requirements of his own troubled and disappointed heart? – was to be the unwitting, innocent agent of Chamcha’s revenge, became even plainer to the plotter, Saladin, when he found that Gibreel, with whom he had arranged to spend an equatorial London afternoon, wanted nothing so much as to describe in embarrassing detail the carnal ecstasy of sharing Allie’s bed. What manner of people were these, Saladin wondered with distaste, who enjoyed inflicting their intimacies on non-participating others? As Gibreel (with something like relish) described positions, love-bites, the secret vocabularies of desire, they strolled in Brickhall Fields among schoolgirls and roller-skating infants and fathers throwing boomerangs and frisbees incompetently at scornful sons, and picked their way through broiling horizontal secretarial flesh; and Gibreel interrupted his erotic rhapsody to mention, madly, that ‘I sometimes look at these pink people and instead of skin, Spoono, what I see is rotting meat; I smell their putrefaction here,’ he tapped his nostrils fervently, as if revealing a mystery, ‘in my
nose
.’ Then once again to Allie’s inner thighs, her cloudy eyes, the perfect valley of her lower back, the little cries she liked to make. This was a man in imminent danger of coming apart at the seams. The wild energy, the manic particularity of his descriptions suggested to Chamcha that he’d been cutting down on his dosages again, that he was rolling upwards towards the crest of a deranged high, that condition of febrile excitement that was like blind drunkenness in one respect (according to Allie), namely that Gibreel could remember nothing of what he said or did when, as was inevitable, he came down to earth. – On and on went the descriptions, the unusual length of her nipples, her dislike of having her navel interfered with, the sensitivity of her toes. Chamcha told himself that, madness or no madness, what all this sex-talk revealed (because there had been Allie in the Citroën too) was the
weakness
of their so-called ‘grand passion’ – a term which Allie had only half-jokingly employed – because, in a phrase, there was nothing else about it that was any good; there was
simply no other aspect of their togetherness
to
rhapsodize about. – At the same time, however, he felt himself becoming aroused. He began to see himself standing outside her window, while she stood there naked like an actress on a screen, and a man’s hands caressed her in a thousand ways, bringing her closer and closer to ecstasy; he came to see himself as that pair of hands, he could almost feel her coolness, her responses, almost hear her cries. – He controlled himself. His desire disgusted him. She was unattainable; this was pure voyeurism, and he would not succumb to it. – But the desire Gibreel’s revelations had aroused would not go away.

Gibreel’s sexual obsession, Chamcha reminded himself, actually made things easier. ‘She’s certainly a very attractive woman,’ he murmured by way of an experiment, and was gratified to receive a furious, strung-out glare in return. After which Gibreel, making a show of controlling himself, put his arm around Saladin and boomed: ‘Apologies, Spoono, I’m a bad-tempered bugger where she’s concerned. But you and me! We’re bhai-bhai! Been through the worst and come out smiling; come on now, enough of this little nowhere park. Let’s hit town.’

There is the moment before evil; then the moment of; then the time after, when the step has been taken, and each subsequent stride becomes progressively easier. ‘Fine with me,’ Chamcha replied. ‘It’s good to see you looking so well.’

A boy of six or seven cycled past them on a BMX bike. Chamcha, turning his head to follow the boy’s progress, saw that he was moving smoothly away down an avenue of overarching trees, through which the hot sunlight managed here and there to drip. The shock of discovering the location of his dream disoriented Chamcha briefly, and left him with a bad taste in his mouth: the sour flavour of might-have-beens. Gibreel hailed a taxi; and requested Trafalgar Square.

O, he was in a high good humour that day, rubbishing London and the English with much of his old brio. Where Chamcha saw attractively faded grandeur, Gibreel saw a wreck, a Crusoe-city, marooned on the island of its past, and trying, with the help of a Man-Friday underclass, to keep up appearances. Under the gaze of
stone lions he chased pigeons, shouting: ‘I swear, Spoono, back home these fatties wouldn’t last one day; let’s take one home for dinner.’ Chamcha’s Englished soul cringed for shame. Later, in Covent Garden, he described for Gibreel’s benefit the day the old fruit and vegetable market moved to Nine Elms. The authorities, worried about rats, had sealed the sewers and killed tens of thousands; but hundreds more survived. ‘That day, starving rats swarmed out on to the pavements,’ he recalled. ‘All the way down the Strand and over Waterloo Bridge, in and out of the shops, desperate for food.’ Gibreel snorted. ‘Now I know this is a sinking ship,’ he cried, and Chamcha felt furious at having given him the opening. ‘Even the bloody rats are off.’ And, after a pause: ‘What they needed was a pied piper, no? Leading them to destruction with a tune.’

When he wasn’t insulting the English or describing Allie’s body from the roots of her hair to the soft triangle of ‘the love-place, the goddamn yoni,’ he seemed to wish to make lists: what were Spoono’s ten favourite books, he wanted to know; also movies, female film stars, food. Chamcha offered conventional cosmopolitan answers. His movie-list included
Potemkin, Kane, Otto e Mezzo, The Seven Samurai, Alphaville, El Angel Exterminador
. ‘You’ve been brainwashed,’ Gibreel scoffed. ‘All this Western art-house crap.’ His top ten of everything came from ‘back home’, and was aggressively lowbrow.
Mother India, Mr India, Shree Charsawbees
: no Ray, no Mrinal Sen, no Aravindan or Ghatak. ‘Your head’s so full of junk,’ he advised Saladin, ‘you forgot everything worth knowing.’

His mounting excitement, his babbling determination to turn the world into a cluster of hit parades, his fierce walking pace – they must have walked twenty miles by the end of their travels – suggested to Chamcha that it wouldn’t take much, now, to push him over the edge.
It seems I turned out to be a confidence man, too, Mimi. The art of the assassin is to draw the victim close; makes him easier to knife
. ‘I’m getting hungry,’ Gibreel imperiously announced. ‘Take me to one of your top-ten eateries.’

In the taxicab, Gibreel needled Chamcha, who had not
informed him of the destination. ‘Some Frenchy joint, na? Or Japanese, with raw fishes and octopuses. God, why I trust your taste.’

They arrived at the Shaandaar Café.