III
Ellowen Deeowen
1
I know what a ghost is, the old woman affirmed silently. Her name was Rosa Diamond; she was eighty-eight years old; and she was squinting beakily through her salt-caked bedroom windows,
watching the full moon's sea. And I know what it isn't, too, she nodded further, it isn't a scarification or a flapping sheet, so pooh and pish to all _that_ bunkum. What's a ghost? Unfinished business, is
what. -- At which the old lady, six feet tall, straight-- backed, her hair hacked short as any man's, jerked the corners of her mouth downwards in a satisfied, tragedy-mask pout, -- pulled a knitted blue shawl tight around bony shoulders, -- and closed, for a moment, her sleepless eyes, to pray for the past's return. Come on, you Norman ships, she begged: let's have you, Willie-the-Conk.
Nine hundred years ago all this was under water, this portioned shore, this private beach, its shingle rising steeply towards the little row of flaky-paint villas with their peeling boathouses crammed full of deckchairs, empty picture frames, ancient tuckboxes stuffed with bundles of letters tied up in ribbons, mothballed silk--and-lace lingerie, the tearstained reading matter of once--young girls, lacrosse sticks, stamp albums, and all the buried treasure--chests of memories and lost time. The coastline had changed, had moved a mile or more out to sea, leaving the first Norman castle stranded far from water, lapped now by marshy land that afflicted with all manner of dank and boggy agues the poor who lived there on their whatstheword _estates_. She, the old lady,
saw the castle as the ruin of a fish betrayed by an
antique ebbing tide, as a sea-monster petrified by time. Nine hundred years! Nine centuries past, the Norman fleet had sailed right through this Englishwoman's home. On clear nights when the moon was full, she waited for its shining, revenant ghost.Best place to see 'em come, she reassured herself, grandstand view. Repetition had become a comfort in her antiquity; the well-worn phrases, _unfinished business, grandstand view_, made her feel solid, unchanging, sempiternal, instead of the creature of cracks and absences she knew herself to be. -- When the full moon sets, the dark before the dawn,
that's their moment. Billow of sail, flash of oars, and the Conqueror himself at the flagship's prow, sailing up the beach between the barnacled wooden breakwaters and a few inverted sculls. -- O, I've seen things in my time, always had the gift, the
phantom-sight. -- The Conqueror in his pointy metal- nosed hat, passing through her front door, gliding betwixt the cakestands and antimacassared sofas,
like an echo resounding faintly through that house of remembrances and yearnings; then falling silent;
_as the grave_.
-- Once as a girl on Battle Hill, she was fond of recounting, always in the same time--polished words, -- once as a solitary child, I found myself,
quite suddenly and with no sense of strangeness, in the middle of a war. Longbows, maces, pikes. The flaxen-Saxon boys, cut down in their sweet youth. Harold Arroweye and William with his mouth full of sand. Yes, always the gift, the phantom-sight. -- The story of the day on which the child Rosa had seen a vision of the battle of Hastings had become,for the old woman, one of the defining landmarks of her being, though it had been told so often that nobody, not even the teller, could confidently swear that it was true. _I long for them sometimes_, ran Rosa's practised thoughts. _Les beaux jours: the dear, dead days_. She closed, once more, her reminiscent eyes. When she opened them, she saw, down by the water's edge, no denying it, something beginning to move.
What she said aloud in her excitement: "I don't believe it!" -- "It isn't true!" -- "He's never _here!_" -
- On unsteady feet, with bumping chest, Rosa went for her hat, cloak, stick. While, on the winter seashore, Gibreel Farishta awoke with a mouth full of, no, not sand.
Snow. o o o Ptui!
Gibreel spat; leapt up, as if propelled by expectorated slush; wished Chamcha -- as has been reported -- many happy returns of the day; and commenced to beat the snow from sodden purple sleeves. "God, yaar," he shouted, hopping from foot to foot, "no wonder these people grow hearts of bloody ice."Then, however, the pure delight of being surrounded by such a quantity of snow quite overcame his first cynicism -- for he was a tropical man -- and he started capering about, saturnine and soggy,
making snowballs and hurling them at his prone companion, envisioning a snowman, and singing a wild, swooping rendition of the carol "Jingle Bells". The first hint of light was in the sky, and on this cosy sea-coast danced Lucifer, the morning's star.
His breath, it should be mentioned, had somehow or other wholly ceased to smell . . .
"Come on, baby," cried invincible Gibreel, in whose behaviour the reader may, not unreasonably, perceive the delirious, dislocating effects of his recent fall. "Rise "n" shine! Let's take this place by storm." Turning his back on the sea, blotting out the bad memory in order to make room for the next things, passionate as always for newness, he would have planted (had he owned one) a flag, to claim in
the name of whoknowswho this white country, his new-found land. "Spoono," he pleaded, "shift, baba, or are you bloody dead?" Which being uttered brought the speaker to (or at least towards) his senses. He bent over the other's prostrate form, did not dare to touch. "Not now, old Chumch," he urged. "Not when we came so far."Saladin: was not dead, but weeping. The tears of shock freezing on his face. And all his body cased in a fine skin of ice, smooth as glass, like a bad dream come true. In the miasmic semi--consciousness induced by his low body temperature he was possessed by the nightmare-fear of cracking, of seeing his blood bubbling up from the ice-breaks, of his flesh coming away with the shards. He was full
of questions, did we truly, I mean, with your hands flapping, and then the waters, you don't mean to tell me they _actually_, like in the movies, when Charlton Heston stretched out his staff, so that we could, across the ocean--floor, it never happened, couldn't have, but if not then how, or did we in
some way underwater, escorted by the mermaids, the sea passing through us as if we were fish or ghosts, was that the truth, yes or no, I need to have to.. . but when his eyes opened the questions acquired the indistinctness of dreams, so that he could no longer grasp them, their tails flicked before him and vanished like submarine fins. He was
looking up at the sky, and noticed that it was the wrong colour entirely, blood-orange flecked with green, and the snow was blue as ink. He blinked hard but the colours refused to change, giving rise to the notion that he had fallen out of the sky into some wrongness, some other place, not England or perhaps not-England, some counterfeit zone, rotten borough, altered state. Maybe, he considered briefly: Hell? No, no, he reassured himself as unconsciousness threatened, that can't be it, not yet, you aren't dead yet; but dying.Well then: a transit lounge.
He began to shiver; the vibration grew so intense that it occurred to him that he might break up under the stress, like a, like a, plane.
Then nothing existed. He was in a void, and if he were to survive he would have to construct everything from scratch, would have to invent the ground beneath his feet before he could take a step, only there was no need now to worry about such matters, because here in front of him was the inevitable: the tall, bony figure of Death, in a wide- brimmed straw hat, with a dark cloak flapping in the breeze. Death, leaning on a silverheaded cane, wearing olive-green Wellington boots.
"What do you imagine yourselves to be doing here?"
Death wanted to know. "This is private property. There's a sign." Said in a woman's voice that was somewhat tremulous and more than somewhat thrilled.A few moments later, Death bent over him -- _to kiss me_, he panicked silently. _To suck the breath from my body_. He made small, futile movements of protest.
"He's alive all right," Death remarked to, who was it, Gibreel. "But, my dear. His breath: what a pong. When did he last clean his teeth?"
o o o
One man's breath was sweetened, while another's, by an equal and opposite mystery, was soured. What did they expect? Falling like that out of the
sky: did they imagine there would be no sideeffects? Higher Powers had taken an interest, it should have been obvious to them both, and such Powers (I am, of course, speaking of myself) have a mischievous, almost a wanton attitude to tumbling flies. And another thing, let's be clear: great falls change people. You think _they_ fell a long way? In the matter of tumbles, I yield pride of place to no personage, whether mortal or im--. From clouds to ashes, down the chimney you might say, from heavenlight to hellfire. . . under the stress of a long
plunge, I was saying, mutations are to be expected, not all of them random. Unnatural selections. Not much of a price to pay for survival, for being reborn, for becoming new, and at their age at that.What? I should enumerate the changes? Good breath/bad breath.
And around the edges of Gibreel Farishta's head, as he stood with his back to the dawn, it seemed to Rosa Diamond that she discerned a faint, but distinctly golden, _glow_.
And were those bumps, at Chamcha's temples, under his sodden and still-in-place bowler hat?
And, and, and. o o o
When she laid eyes on the bizarre, satyrical figure of Gibreel Farishta prancing and dionysiac in the snow, Rosa Diamond did not think of _say it_ angels. Sighting him from her window, through salt--cloudy glass and age--clouded eyes, she felt her heart kick out, twice, so painfully that she feared it might stop; because in that indistinct form she seemed to
discern the incarnation of her soul's most deeply buried desire. She forgot the Norman invaders as if
they had never been, and struggled down a slope of treacherous pebbles, too quickly for the safety ofher not-quitenonagenarian limbs, so that she could pretend to scold the impossible stranger for trespassing on her land.
Usually she was implacable in defence of her beloved fragment of the coast, and when summer weekenders strayed above the high tide line she descended upon them _like a wolf on the fold_, her phrase for it, to explain and to demand: -- This is
my garden, do you see. -- And if they grew brazen, -
- getoutofitsillyoldmoo, itsthesoddingbeach, -- she would return home to bring out a long green garden hose and turn it remorselessly upon their tartan blankets and plastic cricket bats and bottles of sun-- tan lotion, she would smash their children's sandcastles and soak their liver-- sausage sandwiches, smiling sweetly all the while: _You
won't mind if I fust water my lawn?_ . . . O, she was a One, known in the village, they couldn't lock her away in any old folks' home, sent her whole family packing when they dared to suggest it, never darken her doorstep, she told them, cut the whole lot off without a penny or a by your leave. All on her own now, she was, never a visitor from week to blessed week, not even Dora Shufflebotham who went in
and did for her all those years, Dora passed over
September last, may she rest, still it's a wonder at
her age how the old trout manages, all those stairs, she may be a bit of a bee but give the devil her due, there's many"s'd go barmy being that alone.For Gibreel there was neither a hosepipe nor the
_sharp end_ of her tongue. Rosa uttered token words of reproof, held her nostrils while examining the fallen and newly sulphurous Saladin (who had not, at this point, removed his bowler hat), and then, with an access of shyness which she greeted with nostalgic astonishment, stammered an invitation, yyou bbetter bring your ffriend in out of the cccold, and stamped back up the shingle to put the kettle on, grateful to the bite of the winter air for reddening her cheeks and _saving_, in the old comforting phrase, _her blushes_.
o o o
As a young man Saladin Chamcha had possessed a face of quite exceptional innocence, a face that did not seem ever to have encountered disillusion or evil, with skin as soft and smooth as a princess's palm. It had served him well in his dealings with women, and had, in point of fact, been one of the first reasons his future wife Pamela Lovelace had given for falling in love with him. "So round and cherubic," she marvelled, cupping her hands under his chin. "Like a rubber ball."
He was offended. "I've got bones," he protested. "Bone _structure_.""Somewhere in there," she conceded. "Everybody does."
After that he was haunted for a time by the notion that he looked like a featureless jellyfish, and it was in large part to assuage this feeling that he set about developing the narrow, haughty demeanour that was now second nature to him. It was, therefore, a matter of some consequence when, on arising from a long slumber racked by a series of intolerable dreams, prominent among which were
images of Zeeny Vakil, transformed into a mermaid, singing to him from an iceberg in tones of agonizing sweetness, lamenting her inability to join him on dry land, calling him, calling; -- but when he went to her she shut him up fast in the heart of her ice- mountain, and her song changed to one of triumph and revenge. . . it was, I say, a serious matter when Saladin Chamcha woke up, looked into a mirror framed in blue-and-gold Japonaiserie lacquer, and found that old cherubic face staring out at him once again; while, at his temples, he observed a brace of fearfully discoloured swellings, indications that he must have suffered, at some point in his recent adventures, a couple of mighty blows.
Looking into the mirror at his altered face, Chamcha attempted to remind himself of himself. I am a real man, he told the mirror, with a real history and a planned-out future. I am a man to whom certain things are of importance: rigour, self--discipline, reason, the pursuit of what is noble without recourse to that old crutch, God. The ideal of beauty, the possibility of exaltation, the mind. I am: a married man. But in spite of his litany, perverse thoughts insisted on visiting him. As for instance: that the world did not exist beyond that beach down there, and, now, this house. That if he weren't careful, ifhe rushed matters, he would fall off the edge, into clouds. Things had to be _made_. Or again: that if he were to telephone his home, right now, as he should, if he were to inform his loving wife that he was not dead, not blown to bits in mid-air but right here, on solid ground, if he were to do this eminently sensible thing, the person who answered
the phone would not recognize his name. Or thirdly: that the sound of footsteps ringing in his ears, distant footsteps, but coming closer, was not some temporary tinnitus caused by his fall, but the noise
of some approaching doom, drawing closer, letter by letter, ellowen, deeowen, London. _Here I am, in Grandmother's house. Her big eyes, hands, teeth_.
There was a telephone extension on his bedside table. There, he admonished himself. Pick it up, dial,
and your equilibrium will be restored. Such maunderings: they aren't like you, not worthy of you. Think of her grief; call her now.It was night-time. He didn't know the hour. There wasn't a clock in the room and his wristwatch had disappeared somewhere along the line. Should he shouldn't he? -- He dialled the nine numbers. A man's voice answered on the fourth ring.
"What the hell?" Sleepy, unidentifiable, familiar. "Sorry," Saladin Chamcha said. "Excuse, please.
Wrong number."
Staring at the telephone, he found himself remembering a drama production seen in Bombay, based on an English original, a story by, by, he couldn't put his finger on the name, Tennyson? No, no. Somerset Maugham? -- To hell with it. -- In the original and now authorless text, a man, long thought dead, returns after an absence of many years, like a living phantom, to his former haunts. He visits his former home at night, surreptitiously, and looks in through an open window. He finds that his wife, believing herself widowed, has re-married.
On the window-sill he sees a child's toy. He spends a period of time standing in the darkness, wrestling with his feelings; then picks the toy off the ledge; and departs forever, without making his presence
known. In the Indian version, the story had been rather different. The wife had married her husband's best friend. The returning husband arrived at the door and marched in, expecting nothing. Seeing his wife and his old friend sitting together, he failed to understand that they were married. He thanked his friend for comforting his wife; but he was homenow, and so all was well. The married couple did not know how to tell him the truth; it was, finally, a servant who gave the game away. The husband, whose long absence was apparently due to a bout of amnesia, reacted to the news of the marriage by announcing that he, too, must surely have re- married at some point during his long absence from home; unfortunately, however, now that the
memory of his former life had returned he had forgotten what had happened during the years of his disappearance. He went off to ask the police to trace his new wife, even though he could remember nothing about her, not her eyes, not the simple fact of her existence.
The curtain fell.
Saladin Chamcha, alone in an unknown bedroom in unfamiliar red-and-white striped pyjamas, lay face downwards on a narrow bed and wept. "Damn all Indians," he cried into the muffling bedclothes, his fists punching at frilly--edged pillowcases from
Harrods in Buenos Aires so fiercely that the fifty- year--old fabric was ripped to shreds. "_What the hell_. The vulgarity of it, the _sod it sod it_ indelicacy. _What the hell_. That bastard, those bastards, their lack of _bastard_ taste."It was at this moment that the police arrived to arrest him.
o o o
On the night after she had taken the two of them in from the beach, Rosa Diamond stood once again at the nocturnal window of her old woman's insomnia, contemplating the nine-hundredyear--old sea. The smelly one had been sleeping ever since they put him to bed, with hot-water bottles packed in tightly around him, best thing for him, let him get his strength. She had put them upstairs, Chamcha in
the spare room and Gibreel in her late husband's old study, and as she watched the great shining plain of the sea she could hear him moving up there, amid the ornithological prints and bird-call whistles of the former Henry Diamond, the bolas and bullwhip and aerial photographs of the Los Alamos estancia far away and long ago, a man's footsteps in that room, how reassuring they felt. Farishta was pacing up and down, avoiding sleep, for reasons of his own. And below his footfall Rosa, looking up at the ceiling,
called him in a whisper by a long-unspoken name. Martin she said. His last name the same as that of his country's deadliest snake, the viper. The vibora,_de la Cruz_.
At once she saw the shapes moving on the beach, as if the forbidden name had conjured up the dead. Not again, she thought, and went for her opera- glasses. She returned to find the beach full of shadows, and this time she was afraid, because whereas the Norman fleet came sailing, when it came, proudly and openly and without recourse to subterfuge, these shades were sneaky, emitting stifled imprecations and alarming, muted yaps and barks, they seemed headless, crouching, arms and legs a--dangle like giant, unshelled crabs. Scuttling, sidelong, heavy boots crunching on shingle. Lots of them. She saw them reach her boathouse on which the fading image of an eyepatched pirate grinned and brandished a cutlass, and that was too much,
_I'm not having it_, she decided, and, stumbling downstairs for warm clothing, she fetched the chosen weapon of her retribution: a long coil of green garden hose. At her front door she called out in a clear voice. "I can see you quite plainly. Come out, come out, whoever you are."
They switched on seven suns and blinded her, and then she panicked, illuminated by the seven blue-
white floodlights around which, like fireflies or satellites, there buzzed a host of smaller lights: lanterns torches cigarettes. Her head was spinning, and for a moment she lost her ability to distinguish between _then_ and _now_, in her consternation she began to say Put out that light, don't you knowthere's a blackout, you'll be having Jerry down on us if you carry on so. "I'm raving," she realized disgustedly, and banged the tip of her stick into her doormat. Whereupon, as if by magic, policemen materialized in the dazzling circle of light.
It turned out that somebody had reported a suspicious person on the beach, remember when they used to come in fishingboats, the illegals, and thanks to that single anonymous telephone call there were now fifty-seven uniformed constables
combing the beach, their flashlights swinging crazily in the dark, constables from as far away as Hastings Eastbourne Bexhill-upon-Sea, even a deputation from Brighton because nobody wanted to miss the fun, the thrill of the chase. Fifty-seven
beachcombers were accompanied by thirteen dogs, all sniffing the sea air and lifting excited legs. While up at the house away from the great posse of men and dogs, Rosa Diamond found herself gazing at the five constables guarding the exits, front door,
ground-floor windows, scullery door, in case the putative miscreant attempted an alleged escape;
and at the three men in plain clothes, plain coats and plain hats with faces to match; and in front of the lot of them, not daring to look her in the eye, young Inspector Lime, shuffling his feet and rubbing his nose and looking older and more bloodshot than his forty years. She tapped him on the chest withthe end of her stick, _at this time of night, Frank, u"hat's the meaning of_, but he wasn't going to allow her to boss him around, not tonight, not with the men from the immigration watching his every
move, so he drew himself up and pulled in his chins.
"Begging your pardon, Mrs. D. -- certain allegations,
-- information laid before us, -- reason to believe, -- merit investigation, -- necessary to search your, -- a warrant has been obtained."
"Don't be absurd, Frank dear," Rosa began to say, but just then the three men with the plain faces drew themselves up and seemed to stiffen, each of them with one leg slightly raised, like pointer dogs; the first began to emit an unusual hiss of what sounded like pleasure, while a soft moan escaped from the lips of the second, and the third commenced to roll his eyes in an oddly contented way. Then they all pointed past Rosa Diamond, into her floodlit hallway, where Mr. Saladin Chamcha stood, his left hand holding up his pyjamas because a button had come off when he hurled himself on to
his bed. With his right hand he was rubbing at an eye."Bingo," said the hissing man, while the moaner clasped .his hands beneath his chin to indicate that all his prayers had been answered, and the roller of eyes shouldered past Rosa Diamond, without standing on ceremony, except that he did mutter, "Madam, pardon _me_."
Then there was a flood, and Rosa was jammed into a corner of her own sitting-room by that bobbing sea of police helmets, so that she could no longer make out Saladin Chamcha or hear what he was saying. She never heard him explain about the detonation of the _Bostan_ -- there's been a mistake, he cried, I'm not one of your fishing-boat sneakers-in, not one of your ugandokenyattas, me. The policemen began to grin, I see, sir, at thirty
thousand feet, and then you swam ashore. You have the right to remain silent, they tittered, but quite soon they burst out into uproarious guffaws, we've got a right one here and no mistake. But Rosa couldn't make out Saladin's protests, the laughing policemen got in the way, you've got to believe me, I'm a British, he was saying, with right of abode,
too, but when he couldn't produce a passport or any other identifying document they began to weep with mirth, the tears streaming down even the blank
faces of the plain-clothes men from the immigration service. Of course, don't tell me, they giggled, they fell out of your jacket during your tumble, or did the mermaids pick your pocket in the sea? Rosa couldn't see, in that laughter-heaving surge of men anddogs, what uniformed arms might be doing to Chamcha's arms, or fists to his stomach, or boots to his shins; nor could she be sure if it was his voice crying out or just the howling of the dogs. But she did, finally, hear his voice rise in a last, despairing shout: "Don't any of you watch TV? Don't you see? I'm Maxim. Maxim Alien."
"So you are," said the popeyed officer. "And I am
Kermit the Frog."
What Saladin Chamcha never said, not even when it was clear that something had gone badly wrong: "Here is a London number," he neglected to inform the arresting policemen. "At the other end of the
line you will find, to vouch for me, for the truth of what I'm saying, my lovely, white, English wife." No, sir. _What the hell_.
Rosa Diamond gathered her strength. "Just one moment, Frank Lime," she sang out. "You look here," but the three plain men had begun their bizarre routine of hiss moan roll--eye once again,
and in the sudden silence of that room the eye-roller
pointed a trembling finger at Chamcha and said, "Lady, if it's proof you're after, you couldn't do better than _those_."Saladin Chamcha, following the line of Popeye's pointing finger, raised his hands to his forehead, and then he knew that he had woken into the most fearsome of nightmares, a nightmare that had only just begun, because there at his temples, growing longer by the moment, and sharp enough to draw blood, were two new, goaty, unarguable horns.
o o o
Before the army of policemen took Saladin Chamcha away into his new life, there was one more unexpected occurrence. Gibreel Farishta, seeing the blaze of lights and hearing the delirious laughter of the law--enforcement officers, came downstairs in a maroon smoking jacket and jodhpurs, chosen from Henry Diamond's wardrobe. Smelling faintly of mothballs, he stood on the first-floor landing and observed the proceedings without comment. He stood there unnoticed until Chamcha, handcuffed
and on his way out to the Black Maria, barefoot, still clutching his pyjamas, caught sight of him and cried out, "Gibreel, for the love of God tell them what's what."
Hisser Moaner Popeye turned eagerly towards
Gibreel. "And who might this be?" inquired InspectorLime. "Another skydiver?"
But the words died on his lips, because at that moment the floodlights were switched off, the order to do so having been given when Chamcha was handcuffed and taken in charge, and in the aftermath of the seven suns it became clear to everyone there that a pale, golden light was emanating from the direction of the man in the smoking jacket, was in fact streaming softly outwards from a point immediately behind his head. Inspector Lime never referred to that light again,
and if he had been asked about it would have denied ever having seen such a thing, a halo, in the late twentieth century, pull the other one.
But at any rate, when Gibreel asked, "What do these men want?", every man there was seized by the desire to answer his question in literal, detailed terms, to reveal their secrets, as if he were, as if,
but no, ridiculous, they would shake their heads for weeks, until they had all persuaded themselves that they had done as they did for purely logical reasons, he was Mrs. Diamond's old friend, the two of them had found the rogue Chamcha halfdrowned on the beach and taken him in for humanitarian reasons,
no call to harass either Rosa or Mr. Farishta any further, a more reputable looking gentleman you
couldn't wish to see, in his smoking jacket and his, his, well, eccentricity never was a crime, anyhow."Gibreel," said Saladin Chamcha, "help." But Gibreel's eye had been caught by Rosa
Diamond. He looked at her, and could not look
away. Then he nodded, and went back upstairs. No attempt was made to stop him.
When Chamcha reached the Black Maria, he saw the traitor, Gibreel Farishta, looking down at him from the little balcony outside Rosa's bedroom, and there wasn't any light shining around the bastard's head.
2
_Kan an ma kan/Fi qadim azzaman_ . . . It was so, it was not, in a time long forgot, that there lived in the silver-land of Argentina a certain Don Enrique Diamond, who knew much about birds and little about women, and his wife, Rosa, who knew nothing about men but a good deal about love. One day it so happened that when the señora was out riding, sitting sidesaddle and wearing a hat with a feather
in it, she arrived at the Diamond estancia's great stone gates, which stood insanely in the middle of the empty pampas, to find an ostrich running at her as hard as it could, running for its life, with all the tricks and variations it could think of; for the ostrich
is a crafty bird, difficult to catch. A little way behind the ostrich was a cloud of dust full of the noises of hunting men, and when the ostrich was within six feet of her the cloud sent bolas to wrap around its legs and bring it crashing to the ground at her grey mare's feet. The man who dismounted to kill the bird never took his eyes off Rosa's face. He took a silver-hafted knife from a scabbard at his belt and plunged it into the bird's throat, all the way up to the hilt, and he did it without once looking at the dying ostrich, staring into Rosa Diamond's eyes while he knelt on the wide yellow earth. His name was Martin de Ia Cruz.After Chamcha had been taken away, Gibreel
Farishta often wondered about his own behaviour. In that dreamlike moment when he had been trapped by the eyes of the old Englishwoman it had seemed to him that his will was no longer his own to command, that somebody else's needs were in charge. Owing to the bewildering nature of recent events, and also to his determination to stay awake as much as possjble, it was a few days before he connected what was going on to the world behind
his eyelids, and only then did he understand that he had to get away, because the universe of his nightmares had begun to leak into his waking life, and if he was not careful he would never manage to begin again, to be reborn with her, through her,
Alleluia, who had seen the roof of the world.He was shocked to realize that he had made no attempt to contact Allie at all; or to help Chamcha in his time of need. Nor had he been at all perturbed
by the appearance on Saladin's head of a pair of fine new horns, a thing that should surely have occasioned some concern. He had been in some sort of trance, and when he asked the old dame what
she thought of it all she smiled weirdly and told him that there was nothing new under the sun, she had seen things, the apparitions of men with horned helmets, in an ancient land like England there was no room for new stories, every blade of turf had already been walked over a hundred thousand times. For long periods of the day her talk became rambling and confused, but at other times she insisted on cooking him huge heavy meals,
shepherd's pies, rhubarb crumble with thick custard, thick--gravied hotpots, all manner of weighty soups. And at all times she wore an air of inexplicable contentment, as if his presence had satisfied her in some deep, unlookedfor way. He went shopping in the village with her; people stared; she ignored them, waving her imperious stick. The days passed. Gibreel did not leave.
"Blasted English mame," he told himself. "Some type of extinct species. What the hell am I doing
here?" But stayed, held by unseen chains. While she, at every opportunity, sang an old song, in Spanish, he couldn't understand a word. Some sorcery there? Some ancient Morgan Le Fay singinga young Merlin into her crystal cave? Gibreel headed for the door; Rosa piped up; he stopped in his tracks. "Why not, after all," he shrugged. "The old woman needs company. Faded grandeur, I swear! Look what she's come to here. Anyhow, I need the rest. Gather my forces. Just a coupla days."
In the evenings they would sit in that drawing-room stuffed with silver ornaments, including on the wall a certain silver-hafted knife, beneath the plaster bust of Henry Diamond that stared down from the top of the corner cabinet, and when the grandfather clock struck six he would pour two glasses of sherry and she would begin to talk, but not before she said, as predictably as clockwork, _Grandfather is always
four minutes late, for good manners, he doesn't like to be too punctual_. Then she began without bothering with onceuponatime, and whether it was all true or all false he could see the fierce energy that was going into the telling, the last desperate reserves of her will that she was putting into her story, _the only bright time I can remember_, she told him, so that he perceived that this memory- jumbled rag-bag of material was in fact the very heart of her, her self-portrait, the way she looked in
the mirror when nobody else was in the room, and that the silver land of the past was her preferred abode, not this dilapidated house in which she was constantly bumping into things, -- knocking over coffee-tables, bruising herself on doorknobs -- bursting into tears, and crying out: _Everything shrinks_.When she sailed to Argentina in 1935 as the bride of the Anglo-Argentine Don Enrique of Los Alamos, he pointed to the ocean and said, that's the pampa.
You can't tell how big it is by looking at it. You have to travel through it, the unchangingness, day after day. In some parts the wind is strong as a fist, but it's completely silent, it'll knock you flat but you'll never hear a thing. No trees is why: not an ombü, not a poplar, nada. And you have to watch out for ombü leaves, by the way. Deadly poison. The wind won't kill you but the leaf-juice can. She clapped her hands like a child: Honestly, Henry, silent winds, poisonous leaves. You make it sound like a fairy- story. Henry, fairhaired, soft-bodied, wide-eyed and ponderous, looked appalled. _Oh, no_, he said. _It's not so bad as that_.
She arrived in that immensity, beneath that infinite blue vault of sky, because Henry popped the question and she gave the only answer that a forty- year-old spinster could. But when she arrived she
asked herself a bigger question: of what was she capable in all that space? What did she have the courage for, how could she _expand?_ To be good or bad, she told herself: but to be _new_. Our neighbour Doctor Jorge Babington, she told Gibreel, never liked me, you know, he would tell me tales of the British in South America, always such gay blades, he said contemptuously, spies and brigands and looters. _Are you such exotics in your cold England?_ he asked her, and answered his own question, _señora, I don't think so. Crammed intothat coffin of an island, you must find wider horizons to express these secret selves_.
Rosa Diamond's secret was a capacity for love so great that it soon became plain that her poor prosaic Henry would never fulfil it, because whatever romance there was in that jellied frame was
reserved for birds. Marsh hawks, screamers, snipe. In a small rowing boat on the local lagunas he spent his happiest days amid the buirushes with his field- glasses to his eyes. Once on the train to Buenos Aires he embarrassed Rosa by demonstrating his favourite bird-calls in the dining-car, cupping his hands around his mouth: sleepyhead bird, vanduria ibis, trupial. Why can't you love me this way, she wanted to ask. But never did, because for Henry she was a good sort, and passion was an eccentricity of other races. She became the generalissimo of the
homestead, and tried to stifle her wicked longings. At night she took to walking out into the pampa and lying on her back to look at the galaxy above, and sometimes, under the influence of that bright flow of beauty, she would begin to tremble all over, to shudder with a deep delight, and to hum anunknown tune, and this star-music was as close as she came to joy.
Gibreel Farishta: felt her stories winding round him like a web, holding him in that lost world where
_fifty sat down to dinner every day, what men they were, our gauchos, nothing servile there, very fierce and proud, very. Pure carnivores; you can see it in the pictures_. During the long nights of their insomnia she told him about the heat-haze that would come over the pampa so that the few trees stood out like islands and a rider looked like a mythological being, galloping across the surface of the ocean. _It was like the ghost of the sea_. She told him campfire stories, for example about the atheist gaucho who disproved Paradise, when his mother died, by calling upon her spirit to return, every night for seven nights. On the eighth night he announced that she had obviously not heard him, or she would certainly have come to console her beloved son; therefore, death must be the end. She snared him in descriptiSns of the days when the Perón people came in their white suits and slicked
down hair and the peons chased them off, she told him how the railroads were built by the Anglos to service their estancias, and the dams, too, the story, for example, of her friend Claudette, "a real heartbreaker, my dear, married an engineer chap name of Granger, disappointed half the Hurlingham. Off they went to some dam he was building, andnext thing they heard, the rebels were coming to blow it up. Granger went with the men to guard the dam, leaving Claudette alone with the maid, and wouldn't you know, a few hours later, the maid came running, señora, ees one hombre at the door,
ees as beeg as a house. What else? A rebel captain. -
- "And your spouse, madame?" -- "Waiting for you at the dam, as he should be." -- "Then since he has not seen fit to protect you, the revolution will." And he left guards outside the house, my dear, quite a thing. But in the fighting both men were killed, husband and captain and Claudette insisted on a joint funeral, watched the two coffins going side by side into the ground, mourned for them both. After that we knew she was a dangerous lot, _trop fatale_, eh? What? _Trop_ jolly _fatale_." In the tall
story of the beautiful Clau-- dette, Gibreel heard the music of Rosa's own longings. At such moments he would catch sight of her looking at him from the corners of her eyes, and he would feel a tugging in the region of his navel, as if something were trying to come out. Then she looked away, and the
sensation faded. Perhaps it was only a sideeffect of stress.He asked her one night if she had seen the horns growing on Chamcha's head, but she went deaf and, instead of answering, told him how she would sit on a camp stool by the galpón or bull-pen at Los
Alamos and the prize bulls would come up and lay their horned heads in her lap. One afternoon a girl named Aurora del Sol, who was the fiancée of Martin de la Cruz, let fall a saucy remark: I thought they only did that in the laps of virgins, she stage- whispered to her giggling friends, and Rosa turned
to her sweetly and replied, Then perhaps, my dear, you would like to try? From that time Aurora del Sol, the best dancer at the estancia and the most desirable oi all the peon women, became the deadly enemy of the too-tall, too-bony woman from over
the sea.
"You look just like him," Rosa Diamond said as they stood at her night-time window, side by side, looking out to sea. "His double. Martin de la Cruz." At the mention of the cowboy's name Gibreel felt so violent a pain in his navel, a pulling pain, as if somebody had stuck a hook in his stomach, that a cry escaped his lips. Rosa Diamond appeared not to hear. "Look," she cried happily, "over there."
Running along the midnight beach in the direction of the Martello tower and the holiday camp, -- running along the water's edge so that the incoming tide washed away its footprints, -- swerving and feinting, running for its life, there came a fullgrown, large--as--life ostrich. Down the beach it fled, and Gibreel's eyes followed it in wonder, until he could no longer make it out in the dark.
o o o
The next thing that happened took place in the village. They had gone into town to collect a cake and a bottle of champagne, because Rosa had remembered that it was her eighty-ninth birthday. Her family had been expelled from her life, so there had been no cards or telephone calls. Gibreel insisted that they should hold some sort of celebration, and showed her the secret inside his shirt, a fat money-belt full of pounds sterling acquired on the black market before leaving Bombay. "Also credit cards galore," he said. "I am no indigent fellow. Come, let us go. My treat." He was now so deeply in thrall to Rosa's narrative sorcery that he hardly remembered from day to day that he had a life to go to, a woman to surprise by the simple fact of his being alive, or any such thing. Trailing behind her meekly, he carried Mrs. Diamond's shopping-bags.
He was loafing around on a Street corner while Rosa chatted to the baker when he felt, once again, that dragging hook in his stomach, and he fell against a lamp--post and gasped for air. He heard a clip- clopping hoise, and then around the corner came an archaic pony-trap, full of young people in what seemed at first sight to be fancy dress: the men in tight black trousers studded at the calf with silver buttons, their white shirts open almost to the waist; the women in wide skirts of frills and layers and bright colours, scarlet, emerald, gold. They were Singing in a foreign language and their gaiety made the street look dim and tawdry, but Gibreel realized that something weird was afoot, because nobody else in the street took the slightest notice of the ponytrap. Then Rosa emerged from the baker's with the cake-box dangling by its ribbon from the index finger of her left hand, and exclaimed: "Oh, there they are, arriving for the dance. We always had dances, you know, they like it, it's in their blood." And, after a pause: "That was the dance at which he killed the vulture."That was the dance at which a certain Juan Julia, nicknamed The Vulture on account of his cadaverous appearance, drank too much and insulted the
honour of Aurora del Sol, and didn't stop until Martin had no option but to fight, _hey Martin, why you enjoy fi4cking with this one, I thought she was
pretty dull_. "Let us go away from the dancing," Martin said, and in the darkness, silhouetted against the fairy-lights hung from the trees around the dance-floor, the two men wrapped ponchas around their forearms, drew their knives, circled, fought. Juan died. Martin de Ia Cruz picked up the dead man's hat and threw it at the feet of Aurora del Sol. She picked up the hat and watched him walk away.Rosa Diamond at eighty-nine in a long silver sheath dress with a cigarette holder in one gloved hand and a silver turban on her head drank gin-and-sin from a green glass triangle and told stories of the good old days. "I want to dance," she announced suddenly. "It's my birthday and I haven't danced once."
o o o
The exertions of that night on which Rosa and Gibreel danced until dawn proved too much for the old lady, who collapsed into bed the next day with a low fever that induced ever more delirious apparitions: Gibreel saw Martin de la Cruz and Aurora del Sol dancing flamenco on the tiled and gabled roof of the Diamond house, and Peronistas in white suits stood on the boathouse to address a gathering of peons about the future: "Under Perón these lands will be expropriated and distributed among the people. The British railroads also will
become the property of the state. Let's chuck them out, these brigands, these privateers ..." The plaster bust of Henry Diamond hung in mid-air, observing the scene, and a white--suited agitator pointed a finger at him and cried, That's him, your oppressor; there is the enemy. Gibreel's stomach ached so badly that he feared for his life, but at the very moment that his rational mind was considering the possibility of an ulcer or appendicitis, the rest of his brain whispered the truth, which was that he was being held prisoner and manipulated by the force of Rosa's will, just as the Angel Gibreel had been obliged to speak by the overwhelming need of the Prophet, Mahound."She's dying," he realized. "Not long to go, either." Tossing in her bed in the fever's grip Rosa Diamond muttered about ombü poison and the enmity of her neighbour Doctor Babington, who asked Henry, is your wife perhaps quiet enough for the pastoral life, and who gave her (as a present for recovering from typhus) a copy of Amerigo Vespucci's account of his voyages. "The man was a notorious fantasist, of course," Babington smiled, "but fantasy can be stronger than fact; after all, he had continents named after him." As she grew weaker she poured more and more of her remaining strength into her own dream of Argentina, and Gibreel's navel felt as if it had been set on fire. He lay slumped in an
armchair at her bedside and the apparitions multiplied by the hour. Woodwind music filled the air, and, most wonderful of all, a small white island appeared just off the shore, bobbing on the waves like a raft; it was white as snow, with white sand sloping up to a clump of albino trees, which werewhite, chalk--white, paper--white, to the very tips of their leaves.
After the arrival of the white island Gibreel was overcome by a deep lethargy. Slumped in an armchair in the bedroom of the dying woman, his eyelids drooping, he felt the weight of his body increase until all movement became impossible. Then he was in another bedroom, in tight black trousers, with silver buttons along the calves and a heavy silver buckle at the waist. _You sent for me, Don Enrique_, he was saying to the soft, heavy man with a face like a white plaster bust, but he knew who had asked for him, and he never took his eyes from her face, even when he saw the colour rising from the white frill around her neck.
Henry Diamond had refused to permit the authorities to become involved in the matter of Martin de la Cruz, _these people are my responsibility_, he told Rosa, _it is a question of honour_. Instead he had gone to some lengths to demonstrate his continuing trust in the killer, de la
Cruz, for example by making him the captain of the estancia polo team. But Don Enrique was never really the same once Martin had killed the Vulture. He was more and more easily exhausted, and became listless, uninterested even in birds. Thingsbegan to come apart at Los Alamos, imperceptibly at first, then more obviously. The men in the white
suits returned and were not chased away. When Rosa Diamond contracted typhus, there were many at the estancia who took it for an allegory of the old estate's decline.
_What am I doing here_, Gibreel thought in great alarm, as he stood before Don Enrique in the rancher's study, while Doña Rosa blushed in the background, _this is someone else's place_. -- Great confidence in you, Henry was saying, not in English but Gibreel could still understand. -- My wife is to undertake a motor tour, for her convalescence, and you will accompany . . . Responsibilities at Los Alamos prevent me from going along. _Now I must speak, what to say_, but when his mouth opened
the alien words emerged, it will be my honour, Don
Enrique, click of heels, swivel, exit.
Rosa Diamond in her eighty-nine-year-old weakness had begun to dream her story of stories, which she had guarded for more than half a century, and Gibreel was on a horse behind her Hispano-Suiza,
driving from estancia to estancia, through a wood of arayana trees, beneath the high cordillera, arriving at grotesque homesteads built in the style of Scottish castles or Indian palaces, visiting the landof Mr. Cadwallader Evans, he of the seven wives who were happy enough to have only one night of duty each per week, and the territory of the notorious MacSween who had become enamoured of the ideas arriving in Argentina from Germany, and had started flying, from his estancia's flagpole, a red flag at whose heart a crooked black cross danced in
a white circle. It was on the MacSween estancia that they came across the lagoon, and Rosa saw for the first time the white island of her fate, and insisted
on rowing out for a picnic luncheon, accompanied neither by maid nor by chauffeur, taking only Martin de la Cruz to row the boat and to spread a scarlet cloth upon the white sand and to serve her with meat and wine.
_As white as snow and as red as blood and as black as ebony_. As she reclined in black skirt and white blouse, lying upon scarlet which itself lay over white, while he (also wearing black and white) poured red wine into the glass in her white-gloved hand, -- and then, to his own astonishment, _bloody goddamn_, as he caught at her hand and began to kiss, -- something happened, the scene grew blurred, one minute they were lying on the scarlet cloth, rolling
all over it so that cheeses and cold cuts and salads and patés were crushed beneath the weight of their desire, and when they returned to the Hispano-Suiza it was impossible to conceal anything from chauffeur or maid on account of the foodstains all over their clothes, -- while the next minute she was recoiling from him, not cruelly but in sadness, drawing her hand away and making a tiny gesture of the head, no, and he stood, bowed, retreated, leaving her with virtue and lunch intact, -- the two possibilities kept alternating, while dying Rosa tossed on her bed, did- she-didn't-she, making the last version of the storyof her life, unable to decide what she wanted to be true.
o o o
"I'm going crazy," Gibreel thought. "She's dying, but I'm losing my mind." The moon was out, and Rosa's breathing was the only sound in the room: snoring
as she breathed in and exhaling heavily, with small grunting noises. Gibreel tried to rise from his chair, and found he could not. Even in these intervals between the visions his body remained impossibly heavy. As if a boulder had been placed upon his chest. And the images, when they came, continued to be confused, so that at one moment he was in a hayloft at Los Alamos, making love to her while she murmured his name, over and over, _Martin of the
Cross_, -- and the next moment she was ignoring him in broad daylight beneath the watching eyes of a certain Aurora del Sol, -- so that it was not possible to distinguish memory from wishes, or guilty reconstructions from confessional truths, -- because even on her deathbed Rosa Diamond did not know how to look her history in the eye.Moonlight streamed into the room. As it struck Rosa's face it appeared to pass right through her, and indeed Gibreel was beginning to be able to make out the pattern of the lace embroidery on her pillowcase. Then he saw Don Enrique and his friend, the puritanical and disapproving Dr. Babington, standing on the balcony, as solid as you could wish. It occurred to him that as the apparitions increased
in clarity Rosa grew fainter and fainter, fading away, exchanging places, one might say, with the ghosts. And because he had also understood that the manifestations depended on him, his stomach-- ache, his stone--like weightiness, he began to fear for his own life as well.
"You wanted me to falsify Juan Julia's death certificate," Dr. Babington was saying. "I did so out of our old friendship. But it was wrong to do so; and I see the result before me. You have sheltered a killer and it is, perhaps, your conscience that is eating you away. Go home, Enrique. Go home, and
take that wife of yours, before something worse happens.""I am home," Henry Diamond said. "And I take exception to your mention of my wife."
"Wherever the English settle, they never leave England," Dr. Babington said as he faded into the moonlight. "Unless, like Doña Rosa, they fall in love."
A cloud passed across the moonlight, and now that the balcony was empty Gibreel Farishta finally managed to force himself out of the chair and on to his feet. Walking was like dragging a ball and chain across the floor, but he reached the window. In every direction, and as far as he could see, there were giant thistles waving in the breeze. Where the sea had been there was now an ocean of thistles, extending as far as the horizon, thistles as high as a full-grown man. He heard the disembodied voice of Dr. Babington mutter in his ear: "The first plague of thistles for fifty years. The past, it seems, returns." He saw a woman running through the thick, rippling growth, barefoot, with loose dark hair. "She did it," Rosa's voice said clearly behind him. "After
betraying him with the Vulture and making him into a murderer. He wouldn't look at her after that. Oh, she did it all right. Very dangerous one, that one.
Very." Gibreel lost sight of Aurora del Sol in the thistles; one mirage obscured another.He felt something grab him from behind, spin him around and fling him flat on his back. There was nobody to be seen, but Rosa Diamond was sitting bolt upright in bed, staring at him wide-eyed, making him understand that she had given up hope of clinging on to life, and needed him to help her complete the last revelation. As with the businessman of his dreams, he felt helpless, ignorant . . . she seemed to know, however, how to
draw the images from him. Linking the two of them, navel to navel, he saw a shining cord.
Now he was by a pond in the infinity of the thistles, allowing his horse to drink, and she came riding up on her mare. Now he was embracing her, loosening her garments and her hair, and now they were making love. Now she was whispering, how can you like me, I am so much older than you, and he spoke comforting words.
Now she rose, dressed, rode away, while he remained there, his body languid and warm, failing to notice the moment when a woman's hand stole out of the thistles and took hold of his silver--hafted knife. . .
No! No! No, this way!
Now she rode up to him by the pond, and the moment she dismounted, looking nervously at him, he fell upon her, he told her he couldn't bear her rejections any longer, they fell to the ground together, she screamed, he tore at her clothes, and her hands, clawing at his body, came upon the handle of a knife...No! No, never, no! This way: here!
Now the two of them were making love, tenderly, with many slow caresses; and now a third rider entered the clearing by the pool, and the lovers rushed apart; now Don Enrique drew his small pistol and aimed at his rival's heart, --.
-- and he felt Aurora stabbing him in the heart, over and over, this is for Juan, and this is for abandoning me, and this is for your grand English whore, --.
-- and he felt his victim's knife entering his heart, as
Rosa stabbed him, once, twice, and again, --.
-- and after Henry's bullet had killed him the Englishman took the dead man's knife and stabbed him, many times, in the bleeding wound.
Gibreel, screaming loudly, lost consciousness at this point.
When he regained his senses the old woman in the bed was speaking to herself, so softly that he could barely make out the words. "The pampero came, the south-west wind, flattening the thistles. That's when they found him, or was it before." The last of the story. How Aurora del Sol spat in Rosa Diamond's face at the funeral of Martin de la Cruz. How it was arranged that nobody was to be charged for the murder, on condition that Don Enrique took Doña Rosa and returned to England with all speed. How they boarded the train at the Los Alamos station and the men in white suits stood on the platform,wearing borsalino hats, making sure they really left. How, once the train had started moving, Rosa Diamond opened the holdall on the seat beside her, and said defiantly, _I brought something. A little souvenir_. And unwrapped a cloth bundle to reveal a gaucho's silver-hafted knife.
"Henry died the first winter home. Then nothing happened. The war. The end." She paused. "To diminish into this, after being in that vastness. It isn't to be borne." And, after a further silence: "Everything shrinks."
There was a change in the moonlight, and Gibreel felt a weight lifting from him, so rapidly that he thought he might float up towards the ceiling. Rosa Diamond lay still, eyes closed, her arms resting on
the patchwork counterpane. She looked: _normal_. Gibreel realized that there was nothing to prevent him from walking out of the door.He made his way downstairs carefully, his legs still a little unsteady; found the heavy gabardine overcoat that had once belonged to Henry Diamond, and the grey felt trilby inside which Don Enrique's name had been sewn by his wife's own hand; and left, without looking back. The moment he got outside a wind snatched his hat and sent it skipping down the beach. He chased it, caught it, jammed it back on.
_London shareef, here I come_. He had the city in his pocket: Geographers' London, the whole dog- eared metropolis, A to Z.
"What to do?" he was thinking. "Phone or not
phone? No, just turn up, ring the bell and say, baby, your wish came true, from sea bed to your bed, takes more than a plane crash to keep me away
from you. -- Okay, maybe not quite, but words to that effect. -- Yes. Surprise is the best policy. Allie Bibi, boo to you."
Then he heard the singing. It was coming from the old boathouse with the one-eyed pirate painted on the outside, and the song was foreign, but familiar: a song that Rosa Diamond had often hummed, and the voice, too, was familiar, although a little
different, less quavery; _younger_. The boathouse door was unaccountably unlocked, and banging in the wind. He went towards the song."Take your coat off," she said. She was dressed as she had been on the day of the white island: black skirt and boots, white silk blouse, hatless. He spread the coat on the boathouse floor, its bright scarlet lining glowing in the confined, moonlit space. She
lay down amid the random clutter of an English life, cricket stumps, a yellowed lampshade, chipped vases, a folding table, trunks; and extended an arm towards him. He lay down by her side.
"How can you like me?" she murmured. "I am so much older than you."
3
When they pulled his pyjamas down in the windowless police van and he saw the thick, tightly curled dark hair covering his thighs, Saladin Chamcha broke down for the second time that night; this time, however, he began to giggle hysterically, infected, perhaps, by the continuing
hilarity of his captors. The three immigration officers were in particularly high spirits, and it was one of these -- the popeyed fellow whose name, it transpired, was Stein -- who had "de-- bagged" Saladin with a merry cry of, "Opening time, Packy;
let's see what you're made of!" Red-and-white stripes were dragged off the protesting Chamcha, who was reclining on the floor of the van with two stout policemen holding each arm and a fifth constable's boot placed firmly upon his chest, and whose protests went unheard in the general mirthful din. His horns kept banging against things, thewheel--arch, the uncarpeted floor or a policeman's shin -- on these last occasions he was soundly buffeted about the face by the understandably irate law--enforcement officer -- and he was, in sum, in as miserably low spirits as he could recall. Nevertheless, when he saw what lay beneath his borrowed pyjamas, he could not prevent that disbelieving giggle from escaping past his teeth.
His thighs had grown uncommonly wide and powerful, as well as hairy. Below the knee the hairiness came to a halt, and his legs narrowed into tough, bony, almost fleshless calves, terminating in a pair of shiny, cloven hoofs, such as one might find on any billy-goat. Saladin was also taken aback by the sight of his phallus, greatly enlarged and embarrassingly erect, an organ that he had the greatest difficulty in acknowledging as his own. "What's this, then?" joked Novak -- the former "Hisser" -- giving it a playful tweak. "Fancy one of us, maybe?" Whereupon the "moaning" immigration officer, Joe Bruno, slapped his thigh, dug Novak in
the ribs, and shouted, "Nah, that ain't it. Seems like we really got his goat." "I get it," Novak shouted back, as his fist accidentally punched Saladin in his newly enlarged testicles. "Hey! Hey!" howled Stein, with tears in his eyes. "Listen, here's an even better. . . no wonder he's so fucking _horny_."
At which the three of them, repeating many times "Got his goat. . . horny.. ." fell into one another's arms and howled with delight. Chamcha wanted to speak, but was afraid that he would find his voice mutated into goat--bleats, and, besides, the policeman's boot had begun to press harder than ever on his chest, and it was hard to form any words. What puzzled Chamcha was that a circumstance which struck him as utterly bewildering and unprecedented -- that is, his metamorphosis into this supernatural imp -- was being treated by the others as if it were the most banal and familiar matter they could imagine. "This isn't England," he thought, not for the first or last time. How could it be, after all; where in all that moderate and common--sensical land was there room for such a police van in whose interior such events as these might plausibly transpire? He was being forced towards the conclusion that he had indeed died in the exploding aeroplane and that
everything that followed had been some sort of after- life. If that were the case, his long--standing
rejection of the Eternal was beginning to look pretty foolish. -- But where, in all this, was any sign of a Supreme Being, whether benevolent or malign? Why did Purgatory, or Hell, or whatever this place might be, look so much like that Sussex of rewards and fairies which every schoolboy knew? -- Perhaps, it occurred to him, he had not actually perished in the_Bostan_ disaster, but was lying gravely ill in some hospital ward, plagued by delirious dreams? This explanation appealed to him, not least because it unmade the meaning of a certain late-night telephone call, and a man's voice that he was trying, unsuccessfully, to forget . . . He felt a sharp kick
land on his ribs, painful and realistic enough to make him doubt the truth of all such hallucination- theories. He returned his attention to the actual, to this present comprising a sealed police van containing three immigration officers and five policemen that was, for the moment at any rate, all the universe he possessed. It was a universe of fear.
Novak and the rest had snapped out of their happy mood. "Animal," Stein cursed him as he administered a series of kicks, and Bruno joined in: "You're all the same. Can't expect animals to
observe civilized standards. Eh?" And Novak took up the thread: "We're talking about fucking personal hygiene here, you little fuck."
Chamcha was mystified. Then he noticed that a large number of soft, pellety objects had appeared on the floor of the Black Maria. He felt consumed by bitterness and shame. It seemed that even his natural processes were goatish now. The humiliationof it! He was -- had gone to some lengths to become
-- a sophisticated man! Such degradations might be all very well for riff-raff from villages in Sylhet or the bicycle-repair shops of Gujranwala, but he was cut from different cloth! "My good fellows," he began, attempting a tone of authority that was pretty difficult to bring off from that undignified position on his back with his hoofy legs wide apart and a soft tumble of his own excrement all about him, "my
good fellows, you had best understand your mistake before it's too late."
Novak cupped a hand behind an ear. "What's that? What was that noise?" he inquired, looking about him, and Stein said, "Search me." "Tell you what it sounded like," Joe Bruno volunteered, and with his hands around his mouth he bellowed: "Maaaa-aa!" Then the three of them all laughed once more, so that Saladin had no way of telling if they were simply insulting him or if his vocal cords had truly been infected, as he feared, by this macabre demoniasis that had overcome him without the
slightest warning. He had begun to shiver again. The night was extremely cold.
The officer, Stein, who appeared to be the leader of the trinity, or at least the primus inter pares, returned abruptly to the subject of the pellety refuse rolling around the floor of the moving van. "In this country," he informed Saladin, "we clean up our messes."The policemen stopped holding him down and pulled him into a kneeling position. "That's right," said Novak, "clean it up." Joe Bruno placed a large hand behind Chamcha's neck and pushed his head down towards the pellet-littered floor. "Off you go," he said, in a conversational voice. "Sooner you start, sooner you'll polish it off."
o o o
Even as he was performing (having no option) the latest and basest ritual of his unwarranted humiliation, -- or, to put it another way, as the circumstances of his miraculously spared life grew ever more infernal and outré -- Saladin Chamcha began to notice that the three immigration officers no longer looked or acted nearly as strangely as at first. For one thing, they no longer resembled one another in the slightest. Officer Stein, whom his colleagues called "Mack" or "Jockey", turned out to be a large, burly man with a thick roller--coaster of a nose; his accent, it now transpired, was
exaggeratedly Scottish. "Tha's the ticket," he remarked approvingly as Chamcha munched miserably on. "An actor, was it? I'm partial to watchin" a guid man perform."This observation prompted Officer Novak -- that is, "Kim" -- who had acquired an alarmingly pallid colouring, an ascetically bony face that reminded
one of medieval icons, and a frown suggesting some deep inner torment, to burst into a short peroration about his favourite television soap--opera stars and gameshow hosts, while Officer Bruno, who struck Chamcha as having grown exceedingly handsome all of a sudden, his hair shiny with styling gel and centrally divided, his blond beard contrasting dramatically with the darker hair on his head, -- Bruno, the youngest of the three, asked lasciviously, what about watchin" girls, then, that's my game.
This new notion set the three of them off into all manner of half-completed anecdotes pregnant with suggestions of a certain type, but when the five policemen attempted to join in they joined ranks, grew stern, and put the constables in their places. "Little children," Mr. Stein admonished them, "should be seen an" no hearrud."
By this time Chamcha was gagging violently on his meal, forcing himself not to vomit, knowing that
such an error would only prolong his misery. He was
crawling about on the floor of the van, seeking out the pellets of his torture as they rolled from side to side, and the policemen, needing an outlet for the frustration engendered by the immigration officer's rebuke, began to abuse Saladin roundly and pull the hair on his rump to increase both his discomfort and his discomfiture. Then the five policemen defiantly started up their own version of the immigration officers' conversation, and set to analysing the merits of divers movie stars, darts players,professional wrestlers and the like; but because they had been put into a bad humour by the loftiness of "Jockey" Stein, they were unable to maintain the abstract and intellectual tone of their superiors, and fell to quarrelling over the relative merits of the Tottenham Hotspur "double" team of the early
1960s and the mighty Liverpool side of the present day, -- in which the Liverpool supporters incensed the Spurs fans by alleging that the great Danny Blanchflower was a "luxury" player, a cream puff, fldwer by name, pansy by nature; -- whereupon the offended claque responded by shouting that in the case of Liverpool it was the supporters who were the bum-boys, the Spurs mob could take them apart
with their arms tied behind their backs. Of course all the constables were familiar with the techniques of football hooligans, having spent many Saturdays with their backs to the game watching the
spectators in the various stadiums up and down the
country, and as their argument grew heated they reached the point of wishing to demonstrate, to their opposing colleagues, exactly what they meant by "tearing apart", "bollocking", "bottling" and the like. The angry factions glared at one another and then,all together, they turned to gaze upon the person of
Saladin Chamcha.
Well, the ruckus in that police van grew noisier and noisier, -- and it's true to say that Chamcha was partly to blame, because he had started squealing like a pig, -- and the young bobbies were thumping and gouging various parts of his anatomy, using him both as a guinea-pig and a safety-valve, remaining careful, in spite of their excitation, to confine their blows to his softer, more fleshy parts, to minimize the risk of breakages and bruises; and when Jockey, Kim and Joey saw what their juniors were getting up to, they chose to be tolerant, because boys would have their fun.
Besides, all this talk of watching had brought Stein, Bruno and Novak round to an examination of weightier matters, and now, with solemn faces and judicious voices, they were speaking of the need, in this day and age, for an increase in observation, not merely in the sense of "spectating", but in that of "watchfulness", and "surveillance". The young constables' experience was extremely relevant,
Stein intoned: watch the crowd, not the game. "Eternal vigilance is the price o" liberty," he proclaimed."Eek," cried Chamcha, unable to avoid interrupting. "Aargh, unnhh, owoo."
o o o
After a time a curious mood of detachment fell upon Saladin. He no longer had any idea of how long they had been travelling in the Black Maria of his hard fall from grace, nor could he have hazarded a guess as to the proximity of their ultimate destination, even though the tinnitus in his ears was growing
gradually louder, those phantasmal grandmother's footsteps, ellowen, deeowen, London. The blows raining down on him now felt as soft as a lover's caresses; the grotesque sight of his own metamorphosed body no longer appalled him; even the last pellets of goatexcrement failed to stir his much--abused stomach. Numbly, he crouched down in his little world, trying to make himself smaller and smaller, in the hope that he might eventually disappear altogether, and so regain his freedom.
The talk of surveillance techniques had reunited immigration officers and policemen, healing the breach caused by Jockey Stein's words of puritanical reproof. Chamcha, the insect on the floor of the van,
heard, as if through a telephone scrambler, the faraway voices of his captors speaking eagerly of the need for more video equipment at public events and of the benefits of computerized information, and, in what appeared to be a complete contradiction, ofthe efficacy of placing too rich a mixture in the nosebags of police horses on the night before a big match, because when equine stomach--upsets led to the marchers being showered with shit it always provoked them into violence, _an" then we can
really get amongst them, can't we just_. Unable to find a way of making this universe of soap operas, matchoftheday, cloaks and daggers cohere into any recognizable whole, Chamcha closed his ears to the chatter and listened to the footsteps in his ears.
Then the penny dropped. "Ask the Computer!"
Three immigration officers and five policemen fell silent as the foul--smelling creature sat up and hollered at them. "What's he on about?" asked the youngest policeman -- one of the Tottenham supporters, as it happened -- doubtfully. "Shall I fetch him another whack?"
"My name is Salahuddin Chamchawala, professional name Saladin Chamcha," the demi-goat gibbered. "I am a member of Actors' Equity, the Automobile
Association and the Garrick Club. My car registration number is suchandsuch. Ask the Computer. Please.""Who're you trying to kid?" inquired one of the
Liverpool fans, but he, too, sounded uncertain.
"Look at yourself. You're a fucking Packy billy. Sally- who? -- What kind of name is that for an Englishman?"
Chamcha found a scrap of anger from somewhere. "And what about them?" he demanded, jerking his head at the immigration officers. "They don't sound so Anglo-Saxon to me."
For a moment it seemed that they might all fall upon him and tear him limb from limb for such temerity, but at length the skull-faced Officer Novak merely slapped his face a few times while replying, "I'm
from Weybridge, you cunt. Get it straight: Weybridge, where the fucking _Beatles_ used to live."
Stein said: "Better check him out." Three and a half minutes later the Black Maria came to a halt and three immigration officers, five constables and one police driver held a crisis conference -- _here's a pretty effing pickle_ -- and Chamcha noted that in their new mood all nine had begun to look alike, rendered equal and identical by their tension and fear. Nor was it long before he understood that the
call to the Police National Computer, which had promptly identified him as a British Citizen firstclass, had not improved his situation, but had placed him, if anything, in greater danger than before.
-- We could say, -- one of the nine suggested, -- that he was lying unconscious on the beach. --
Won't work, -- came the reply, on account of the old lady and the other geezer. -- Then he resisted arrest and turned nasty and in the ensuing altercation he kind of fainted. -- Or the old bag was ga-ga, made
no sense to any of us, and the other guy wossname never spoke up, and as for this bugger, you only have to clock the bleeder, looks like the very devil, what were we supposed to think? -- And then he went and passed out on us, so what could we do, in all fairness, I ask you, your honour, but bring him in to the medical facility at the Detention Centre, for proper care followed by observation and
questioning, using our reason-to-believe guidelines; what do you reckon on something of that nature? -- It's nine against one, but the old biddy and the second bloke make it a bit of a bastard. -- Look, we can fix the tale later, first thing like I keep saying is to get him unconscious. -- Right.
o o o
Chamcha woke up in a hospital bed with green slime
coming up from his lungs. His bones felt as if somebody had put them in the icebox for a long while. He began to cough, and when the fit ended nineteen and a half minutes later he fell back into a shallow, sickly sleep without having taken in any aspect of his present whereabouts. When he surfaced again a friendly woman's face was looking down at him, smiling reassuringly. "You goin to befine," she said, patting him on the shoulder. "A lickle pneumonia is all you got." She introduced herself as his physiotherapist, Hyacinth Phillips. And added, "I never judge a person by appearances. No, sir. Don't you go thinking I do."
With that, she rolled him over on to his side, placed a small cardboard box by his lips, hitched up her white housecoat, kicked off her shoes, and leaped athletically on to the bed to sit astride him, for all the world as if he were a horse that she meant to ride right through the screens surrounding his bed and out into goodness knew what manner of transmogrified landscape. "Doctor's orders," she explained. "Thirty--minute sessions, twice a day." Without further preamble, she began pummelling him briskly about the middle body, with fightly clenched, but evidently expert, fists.
For poor Saladin, fresh from his beating in the police van, this new assault was the last straw. He began
to struggle beneath her pounding fists, crying loudly, "Let me out of here; has anybody informed my wife?" The effort of shouting out induced a second coughing spasm that lasted seventeen and three--quarter minutes and earned him a telling off from the physiotherapist, Hyacinth. "You wastin my time," she said. "I should be done with your right lung by now and instead I hardly get started. You go behave or not?" She had remained on the bed, straddling him, bouncing up and down as his bodyconvulsed, like a rodeo rider hanging on for the nine- second bell. He subsided in defeat, and allowed her
to beat the green fluid out of his inflamed lungs. When she finished he was obliged to admit that he felt a good deal better. She removed the little box which was now half-full of slime and said cheerily, "You be standin up firm in no time," and then, colouring in confusion, apologized, "Excuse _me_," and fled without remembering to pull back the encircling screens.
"Time to take stock of the situation," he told himself. A quick physical examination informed him that his new, mutant condition had remained unchanged.
This cast his spirits down, and he realized that he had been half-hoping that the nightmare would have ended while he slept. He was dressed in a new pair
of alien pyjamas, this time of an undifferentiated pale green colour, which matched both the fabric of
the screens and what he could see of the walls and ceiling of that cryptic and anonymous ward. His legs still ended in those distressing hoofs, and the horns on his head were as sharp as before . . . he was distracted from this morose inventory by a man's voice from nearby, crying out in heart-rending distress: "Oh, if ever a body suffered . . . !""What on earth?" Chamcha thought, and determined to investigate. But now he was becoming aware of many other sounds, as unsettling as the first. It seemed to him that he could hear all sorts of animal noises: the snorting of bulls, the chattering of monkeys, even the pretty--polly mimic-squawks of parrots or talking budgerigars. Then, from another direction, he heard a woman grunting and shrieking, at what sounded like the end of a painful labour; followed by the yowling of a new-born baby. However, the woman's cries did not subside when the baby's began; if anything, they redoubled in
their intensity, and perhaps fifteen minutes later Chamcha distinctly heard a second infant's voice joining the first. Still the woman's birth-agony refused to end, and at intervals ranging from fifteen to thirty minutes for what seemed like an endless time she continued to add new babies to the already improbable numbers marching, like conquering armies, from her womb.
His nose informed him that the sanatorium, or whatever the place called itself, was also beginning to stink to the heavens; jungle and farmyard odours mingled with a rich aroma similar to that of exotic spices sizzling in clarified butter -- coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, cardamoms, cloves. "This is too much," he thought firmly. "Time to get a few things sorted out." He swung his legs out of bed, tried tostand up, and promptly fell to the floor, being utterly unaccustomed to his new legs. It took him around
an hour to overcome this problem -- learning to
walk by holding on to the bed and stumbling around it until his confidence grew. At length, and not a
little unsteadily, he made his way to the nearest screen; whereupon the face of the immigration officer Stein appeared, Cheshire-Cat--like, between two of the screens to his left, followed rapidly by the rest of the fellow, who drew the screens together behind him with suspicious rapidity.
"Doing all right?" Stein asked, his smile remaining wide.
"When can I see the doctor? When can I go to the toilet? When can I leave?" Chamcha asked in a rush. Stein answered equably: the doctor would be round presently; Nurse Phillips would bring him a bedpan; he could leave as soon as he was well. "Damn
decent of you to come down with the lung thing,"
Stein added, with the gratitude of an author whose character had unexpectedly solved a ticklish technical problem. "Makes the story much more convincing. Seems you were that sick, you did pass out on us after all. Nine of us remember it well. Thanks." Chamcha could not find any words. "And another thing," Stein went on. "The old burd, Mrs. Diamond. Turns out to be dead in her bed, cold as mutton, and the other gentleman vanished clear away. The possibility of foul play has no as yet been eliminated.""In conclusion," he said before disappearing forever from Saladin's new life, "I suggest, Mr. Citizen Saladin, that you dinna trouble with a complaint. You'll forgive me for speaking plain, but with your wee horns and your great hoofs you wouldna look the most reliable of witnesses. Good day to you now."
Saladin Chamcha closed his eyes and when he opened them his tormentor had turned into the nurse and physiotherapist, Hyacinth Phillips. "Why you wan go walking?" she asked. "Whatever your heart desires, you jus ask me, Hyacinth, and we'll see what we can fix."
o o o
"Ssst."
That night, in the greeny light of the mysterious institution, Saladin was awakened by a hiss out of an Indian bazaar."Ssst. You, Beelzebub. Wake up."
Standing in front of him was a figure so impossible that Chamcha wanted to bury his head under the sheets; yet could not, for was not he himself. . . ? "That's right," the creature said. "You see, you're not alone."
It had an entirely human body, but its head was that of a ferocious tiger, with three rows of teeth. "The night guards often doze off," it explained. "That's
how we manage to get to talk."
Just then a voice from one of the other beds -- each bed, as Chamcha now knew, was protected by its own ring of screens -- wailed loudly: "Oh, if ever a body suffered!" and the man-tiger, or manticore, as it called itself, gave an exasperated growl. "That Moaner Lisa," it exclaimed. "All they did to him was make him blind."
"Who did what?" Chamcha was confused.
"The point is," the manticore continued, "are you going to put up with it?"
Saladin was still puzzled. The other seemed to be suggesting that these mutations were the responsibility of-- of whom? How could they be? --"I don't see," he ventured, "who can be blamed . . ."
The manticore ground its three rows of teeth in evident frustration. "There's a woman over that way," it said, "who is now mostly water-buffalo. There are businessmen from Nigeria who have grown sturdy tails. There is a group of holidaymakers from Senegal who were doing no more than changing planes when they were turned into slippery snakes. I myself am in the rag trade; for some years now I have been a highly paid male model, based in Bombay, wearing a wide range of suitings and shirtings also. But who will employ me now?" he burst into sudden and unexpected tears.
"There, there," said Saladin Chamcha, automatically. "Everything will be all right, I'm sure of it. Have courage."
The creature composed itself. "The point is," it said fiercely, "some of us aren't going to stand for it. We're going to bust out of here before they turn us into anything worse. Every night I feel a different piece of me beginning to change. I've started, for example, to break wind continually ... I beg your pardon you see what I mean? By the way, try these," he slipped Chamcha a packet of extra-
strength peppermints. "They'll help your breath. I've bribed one of the guards to bring in a supply.""But how do they do it?" Chamcha wanted to know. "They describe us," the other whispered solemnly.
"That's all. They have the power of description, and
we succumb to the pictures they construct."
"It's hard to believe," Chamcha argued. "I've lived here for many years and it never happened before
..." His words dried up because he saw the
manticore looking at him through narrow, distrustful eyes. "Many years?" it asked. "How could that be? -- Maybe you're an informer? -- Yes, that's it, a spy?"
Just then a wail came from a far corner of the ward. "Lemme go," a woman's voice howled. "OJesus I want to go. Jesus Mary I gotta go, lemme go, O
God, O Jesus God." A very lecherouslooking wolf put its head through Saladin's screens and spoke urgently to the manticore. "The guards'll be here soon," it hissed. "It's her again, Glass Bertha."
"Glass . . .?" Saladin began. "Her skin turned to glass," the manticore explained impatiently, not knowing that he was bringing Chamcha's worst dream to life. "And the bastards smashed it up for her. Now she can't even walk to the toilet."
A new voice hissed out across the greeny night. "ForGod's sake, woman. Go in the fucking bedpan."
The wolf was pulling the manticore away. "Is he with us or not?" it wanted to know. The manticore shrugged. "He can't make up his mind," it answered. "Can't believe his own eyes, that's his trouble."
They fled, hearing the approaching crunch of the guards' heavy boots.
o o o
The next day there was no sign of a doctor, or of Pamela, and Chamcha in his utter bewilderment woke and slept as if the two conditions no longer required to be thought of as opposites, but as states that flowed into and out of one another to create a kind of unending delirium of the senses.. . he found himself dreaming of the Queen, of making tender love to the Monarch. She was the body of Britain,
the avatar of the State, and he had chosen her, joined with her; she was his Beloved, the moon of his delight.
Hyacinth came at the appointed times to ride and pummel him, and he submitted without any fuss. But when she finished she whispered into his ear: "You in with the rest?" and he understood that she was involved in the great conspiracy, too. "If you
are," he heard himself saying, "then you can count me in." She nodded, looking pleased. Chamcha felt a warmth filling him up, and he began to wonder about taking hold of one of the physiotherapist's exceedingly dainty, albeit powerful, little fists; but just then a shout came from the direction of the blind man: "My stick, I've lost my stick.""Poor old bugger," said Hyacinth, and hopping off Chamcha she darted across to the sightless fellow, picked up the fallen stick, restored it to its owner, and came back to Saladin. "Now," she said. "I'll see you this pm; okay, no problems?"
He wanted her to stay, but she acted brisk. "I'm a busy woman, Mr. Chamcha. Things to do, people to see."
When she had gone he lay back and smiled for the first time in a long while. It did not occur to him that his metamorphosis must be continuing, because he was actually entertaining romantic notions about a black woman; and before he had time to think such complex thoughts, the blind man next door began, once again, to speak.
"I have noticed you," Chamcha heard him say, "I have noticed you, and come to appreciate your kindness and understanding." Saladin realized that he was making a formal speech of thanks to the
empty space where he clearly believed the physiotherapist was still standing. "I am not a man who forgets a kindness. One day, perhaps, I may be able to repay it, but for the moment, please know that it is remembered, and fondly, too. . ." Chamcha did not have the courage to call out, _she isn'tthere, old man, she left some time back_. He listened unhappily until at length the blind man asked the thin air a question: "I hope, perhaps, you may also remember me? A little? On occasion?" Then came a silence; a dry laugh; the sound of a man sitting down, heavily, all of a sudden. And
finally, after an unbearable pause, bathos: "Oh," the soliloquist bellowed, "oh, if ever a body suffered. . .
!"
We strive for the heights but our natures betray us, Chamcha thought; clowns in search of crowns. The bitterness overcame him. _Once I was lighter, happier, warm. Now the black water is in my veins_.
Still no Pamela. _What the hell_. That night, he told the manticore and the wolf that he was with them, all the way.
o o o
The great escape took place some nights later, when Saladin's lungs had been all but emptied of slime by the ministrations of Miss Hyacinth Phillips. It turned
out to be a well-organized affair on a pretty large scale, involving not only the inmates of the sanatorium but also the detenus, as the manticore called them, held behind wire fences in theDetention Centre nearby. Not being one of the grand strategists of the escape, Chamcha simply waited by his bed as instructed until Hyacinth brought him word, and then they ran out of that ward of nightmares into the clarity of a cold, moonlit sky, past several bound, gagged men: their former guards. There were many shadowy figures running through the glowing night, and Chamcha glimpsed beings he could never have imagined, men and women who were also partially plants, or giant insects, or even, on occasion, built partly of brick or stone; there were men with rhinoceros horns
instead of noses and women with necks as long as any giraffe. The monsters ran quickly, silently, to the edge of the Detention Centre compound, where the manticore and other sharp-toothed mutants were waiting by the large holes they had bitten into the fabric of the containing fence, and then they were out, free, going their separate ways, without
hope, but also without shame. Saladin Chamcha and Hyacinth Phillips ran side by side, his goat-hoofs clip- clopping on the hard pavements: _east_ she told
him, as he heard his own footsteps replace the tinnitus in his ears, east east east they ran, taking the low roads to London town.
4Jumpy Joshi had become Pamela Chamcha's lover
by what she afterwards called "sheer chance" on the night she learned of her husband's death in the
_Bostan_ explosion, so that the sound of his old college friend Saladin's voice speaking from beyond the grave in the middle of the night, uttering the five gnomic words _sorry, excuse please, wrong number_, -- speaking, moreover, less than two hours after Jumpy and Pamela had made, with the assistance of two bottles of whisky, the two-- backed beast, -- put him in a tight spot. "Who was
_that?_" Pamela, still mostly asleep, with a blackout mask over her eyes, rolled over to inquire, and he decided to reply, "Just a breather, don't worry about it," which was all very well, except then he had to do the worrying all by himself, sitting up in bed, naked, and sucking, for comfort, as he had all his life, the thumb on his right hand.
He was a small person with wire coathanger shoulders and an enormous capacity for nervous agitation, evidenced by his pale, sunken--eyed face; his thinning hair -- still entirely black and curly -- which had been ruffled so often by his frenzied
hands that it no longer took the slightest notice of brushes or combs, but stuck out every which way
and gave its owner the perpetual air of having just woken up, late, and in a hurry; and his endearingly high, shy and self-deprecating, but also hiccoughy and over--excited, giggle; all of which had helped turn his name, Jamshed, into this Jumpy that everybody, even first-time acquaintances, now automatically used; everybody, that is, except Pamela Chamcha. Saladin's wife, he thought, sucking away feverishly. -- Or widow? -- Or, God help me, wife, after all. He found himself resentingChamcha. A return from a watery grave: so operatic an event, in this day and age, seemed almost indecent, an act of bad faith.
He had rushed over to Pamela's place the moment he heard the news, and found her dry-eyed and composed. She led him into her clutter-lover's study on whose walls watercolours of rose-gardens hung between clenched--fist posters reading _Partido Socialista_, photographs of friends and a cluster of African masks, and as he picked his way across the floor between ashtrays and the _Voice_ newspaper and feminist science--fiction novels she said, flatly, "The surprising thing is that when they told me I thought, well, shrug, his death will actually make a pretty small hole in my life." Jumpy, who was close to tears, and bursting with memories, stopped in his tracks and flapped his arms, looking, in his great shapeless black coat, and with his pallid, terror--
stricken face, like a vampire caught in the unexpected and hideous light of day. Then he saw the empty whisky bottles. Pamela had started drinking, she said, some hours back, and since then she had been going at it steadily, rhythmically, with the dedication of a long-distance runner. He sat down beside her on her low, squashy sofa-bed, and offered to act as a pacemaker. "Whatever you want," she said, and passed him the bottle.Now, sitting up in bed with a thumb instead of a bottle, his secret and his hangover banging equally painfully inside his head (he had never been a drinking or a secretive man), Jumpy felt tears coming on once again, and decided to get up and walk himself around. Where he went was upstairs, to what Saladin had insisted on calling his "den", a
large loft--space with skylights and windows looking down on an expanse of communal gardens dotted with comfortable trees, oak, larch, even the last of the elms, a survivor of the plague years. _First the elms, now us_, Jumpy reflected. _Maybe the trees were a warning_. He shook himself to banish such small-hour morbidities, and perched on the edge of his friend's mahogany desk. Once at a college party he had perched, just so, on a table soggy with spilled wine and beer next to an emaciated girl in black lace minidress, purple feather boa and eyelids like silver helmets, unable to pluck up the courage
to say hello. Finally he did turn to her and stutter out some banality or other; she gave him a look of absolute contempt and said without moving her black--lacquer lips, _conversation's dead, man_. He had been pretty upset, so upset that he blurted out,_tell me, why are all the girls in this town so rude?_, and she answered, without pausing to think,
_because most of the boys are like you_. A few moments later Chamcha came up, reeking of patchouli, wearing a white kurta, everybody's goddamn cartoon of the mysteries of the East, and the girl left with him five minutes later. The bastard, Jumpy Joshi thought as the old bitterness surged back, he had no shame, he was ready to be
anything they wanted to buy, that read-your-palm bedspread-jacket HareKrishna dharma-bum, you wouldn't have caught me dead. That stopped him, that word right there. Dead. Face it, Jamshed, the girls never went for you, that's the truth, and the rest is envy. Well, maybe so, he half-conceded, and then again. Maybe dead, he added, and then again, maybe not.
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."o o o
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 withhim 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 whenhe 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."
o o o
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 hisfucking 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 backan 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.
o o o
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, née 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._No survivors_. And in the middle of the night, Jumpy the idiot and his stupid false alarm. She was so shaken up by it that she hadn't even got round to being shaken up by having gone to bed with Jumpy and made love in what _admit it_ had been a pretty satisfying fashion, _spare me your nonchalance_,
she rebuked herself, _when did you last have so much fun_. She had a lot to deal with and so here she was, dealing with it by running away as fast as she could go. A few days of pampering oneself in an expensive country hotel and the world may begin to seem less like a fucking hellhole. Therapy by luxury: okayokay, she allowed, I know: I'm _reverting to class_. Fuck it; watch me go. If you've got any objections, blow them out of your ass. Arse. Ass.
One hundred miles an hour past Swindon, and the weather turned nasty. Sudden, dark clouds, lightning, heavy rain; she kept her foot on the accelerator. _No survivors_. People were always dying on her, leaving her with a mouth full of words and nobody to spit them at. Her father the classical scholar who could make puns in ancient Greek and
from whom she inherited the Voice, her legacy and curse; and her mother who pined for him during the War, when he was a Pathfinder pilot, obliged to fly home from Germany one hundred and eleven times in a slow aeroplane through a night which his own flares had just illuminated for the benefit of the bombers, -- and who vowed, when he returned with the noise of the ack-ack in his ears, that she would never leave him, -- and so followed him everywhere, into the slow hollow of depression from which he never really emerged, -- and into debt, because he didn't have the face for poker and used her money when he ran out of his own, -- and at last to the top of a tall building, where they found their way at last. Pamela never forgave them, especially for making it impossible for her to tell them of her unforgiveness. To get her own back, she set about rejecting everything of them that remained within her. Her brains, for example: she refused to go to college.And because she could not shake off her voice, she made it speak ideas which her conservative suicides of parents would have anathematized. She married an Indian. And, because he turned out to be too much like them, would have left him. Had decided to leave. When, once again, she was cheated by a death.
She was overtaking a frozen-food road train, blinded by the spray kicked up by its wheels, when she hit
the expanse of water that had been waiting for her in a slight declivity, and then the M G was aquaplaning at terrifying speed, swerving out of the fast lane and spinning round so that she saw the headlights of the road train staring at her like the eyes of the exterminating angel, Azrael. "Curtains," she thought; but her car swung and skidded out of the path of the juggernaut, slewing right across all three lanes of the motorway, all of them miraculously empty, and coming to rest with rather less of a thump than one might have expected against the crash barrier at the edge of the hard shoulder, after spinning through a further onehundred and eighty degrees to face, once again, into the west, where with all the corny timing of real life, the sun was breaking up the storm.
o o o
The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one. That night, in an oak-panelled dining-room decorated with medieval flags, Pamela Chamcha in her most dazzling gown ate venison and drank a bottle of Chateau Talbot at a table heavy with silver and crystal, celebrating a new beginning, an escape from the jaws of, a fresh start, to be born again first you have to: well, almost, anyway. Under the lascivious eyes of Americans and salesmen she ate and drank alone, retiring early to a princess's
bedroom in a stone tower to take a long bath and watch old movies on television. In the aftermath of her brush with death she felt the past droppingaway from her: her adolescence, for example, in the care of her wicked uncle Harry Higham, who lived in a seventeenth-century manor house once owned by
a distant relative, Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder- General, who had named it Gremlins in, no doubt, a macabre attempt at humour. Remembering Mr. Justice Higham in order to forget him, she
murmured to the absent Jumpy that she, too, had her Vietnam story. After the first big Grosvenor Square demonstration at which many people threw marbles under the feet of charging police horses, there occurred the one and only instance in British law in which the marble was deemed to be a lethal weapon, and young persons were jailed, even deported, for possessing the small glass spheres. The presiding judge in the case of the Grosvenor Marbles was this same Henry (thereafter known as "Hang"em") Higham, and to be his niece had been a further burden for a young woman already weighed down by her right-wing voice. Now, warm in bed in
her temporary castle, Pamela Chamcha rid herself of this old demon, _goodbye, Hang"eni, I've no more time for you_; and of her parents' ghosts; and prepared to be free of the most recent ghost of all.
Sipping cognac, Pamela watched vampires on TV
and allowed herself to take pleasure in, well, in herself. Had she not invented herself in her own image? I am that I am, she toasted herself in Napoleon brandy. I work in a community relations council in the borough of Brickhall, London, NET; deputy community relations officer and damn good at it, ifisaysomyself. Cheers! We just elected our first black Chair and all the votes cast against him were white. Down the hatch! Last week a respectedAsian street trader, for whom M Ps of all parties had interceded, was deported after eighteen years in Britain because, fifteen years ago, he posted a certain form forty-eight hours late. Chin-chin! Next week in Brickhall Magistrates' Court the police will
be trying to fit up a fifty-year-old Nigerian woman, accusing her of assault, having previously beaten her senseless. Skol! This is my head: see it? What I call my job: bashing my head against Brickhall.
Saladin was dead and she was alive.
She drank to that. There were things I was waiting to tell you, Saladin. Some big things: about the new high-rise office building in Brickhall High Street, across from McDonald"s; -- they built it to be perfectly sound-proof, but the workers were so disturbed by the silence that now they play tapes of white noise on the tannoy system. -- You'd have liked that, eh? -- And about this Parsi woman I
know, Bapsy, that's her name, she lived in Germany for a while and fell in love with a Turk. -- Trouble was, the only language they had in common was German; now Bapsy has forgotten almost all she knew, while his gets better and better; he writes her increasingly poetic letters and she can hardly replyin nursery rhyme. -- Love dying, because of an inequality of language, what do you think of that? -- Love dying. There's a subject for us, eb? Saladin? What do you say?
And a couple of tiny little things. There's a killer on the loose in my patch, specializes in killing old women; so don't worry, I'm safe. Plenty older than me.
One more thing: I'm leaving you. It's over. We're through.
I could never say anything to you, not really, not the least thing. If I said you were putting on weight
you'd yell for an hour, as if it would change what you saw in the mirror, what the tightness of your own trousers was telling you. You interrupted me in public. People noticed it, what you thought of me. I forgave you, that was my fault; I could see the centre of you, that question so frightful that you had to protect it with all that posturing certainty. That empty space.
Goodbye, Saladin. She drained her glass and set it down beside her. The returning rain knocked at her leaded windows; she drew her curtains shut and turned out the light.Lying there, drifting towards sleep, she thought of the last thing she needed to tell her late husband. "In bed," the words came, "you never seemed interested in me; not in my pleasure, what I
needed, not really ever. I came to think you wanted, not a lover. A servant." There. Now rest in peace.
She dreamed of him, his face, filling the dream. "Things are ending," he told her. "This civilization; things are closing in on it. It has been quite a culture, brilliant and foul, cannibal and Christian, the glory of the world. We should celebrate it while we can; until night falls."
She didn't agree, not even in the dream, but she knew, as she dreamed, that there was no point telling him now.
o o o
After Pamela Chamcha threw him out, Jumpy Joshi went over to Mr. Sufyan's Shaandaar Café in Brickhall High Street and sat there trying to decide if he was a fool. It was early in the day, so the place was almost empty, apart from a fat lady buying a
box of pista barfi and jalebis, a couple of bachelor garment workers drinking chaloo chai and an elderly Polish woman from the old days when it was the Jews who ran the sweatshops round here, who satall day in a corner with two vegetable samosas, one pun and a glass of milk, announcing to everyone who came in that she was only there because "it was next best to kosher and today you must do the best you can". Jumpy sat down with his coffee beneath the lurid painting of a bare-breasted myth- woman with several heads and wisps of clouds obscuring her nipples, done life-size in salmon pink, neon-green and gold, and because the rush hadn't started yet Mr. Sufyan noticed he was down in the dumps.
"Hey, Saint Jumpy," he sang out, "why you bringing your bad weather into my place? This country isn't full enough of clouds?"
Jumpy blushed as Sufyan bounced over to him, his little white cap of devotion pinned in place as usual, the moustache-less beard hennaed red after its owner's recent pilgrimage to Mecca. Muhammad Sufyan was a burly, thick-forearmed fellow with a belly on him, as godly and as unfanatic a believer as you could meet, and Joshi thought of himas a sort of elder relative. "Listen, Uncle," he said when the café proprietor was standing over him, "you think I'm a
real idiot or what?""You ever make any money?" Sufyan asked. "Not me, Uncle."
"Ever do any business? Import-export? Off-licence? Corner shop?"
"I never understood figures."
"And where your family members are?"
"I've got no family, Uncle. There's only me." "Then you must be praying to God continually for
guidance in your loneliness?"
"You know me, Uncle. I don't pray."
"No question about it," Sufyan concluded. "You're an even bigger fool than you know."
"Thanks, Uncle," Jumpy said, finishing his coffee. "You've been a great help."
Sufyan, knowing that the affection in his teasing was cheering the other man up in spite of his long face, called across to the light-skinned, blue-eyed Asian man who had just come in wearing a snappy check overcoat with extra-wide lapels. "You, Hanif
Johnson," he called out, "come here and solve a mystery."Johnson, a smart lawyer and local boy made good, who maintained an office above the Shaandaar Café, tore himself away from Sufyan's two beautiful daughters and headed over to Jumpy's table. "You explain this fellow," Sufyan said. "Beats me. Doesn't drink, thinks of money like a disease, owns maybe two shirts and no V C R, forty years old and isn't married, works for two pice in the sports centre teaching martial arts and what--all, lives on air, behaves like a rishi or pir but doesn't have any faith, going nowhere but looks like he knows some secret. All this and a college education, you work it out."Hanif Johnson punched Jumpy on the shoulder. "He hears voices," he said. Sufyan threw up his hands in mock amazement. "Voices, oop-baba! Voices from where? Telephone? Sky? Sony Walkman hidden in his coat?"
"Inner voices," Hanif said solemnly. "Upstairs on his desk there's a piece of paper with some verses written on it. And a title: _The River of Blood_."
Jumpy jumped, knocking over his empty cup. "I'll kill you," he shouted at Hanif, who skipped quickly across the room, singing out, "We got a poet in our midst, Sufyan Sahib. Treat with respect. Handle with
care. He says a street is a river and we are the flow; humanity is a river of blood, that's the poet's point. Also the individual human being," he broke off torun around to the far side of an eight--seater table as Jumpy came after him, blushing furiously, flapping his arms. "In our very bodies, does the river of blood not flow?" _Like the Roman_, the ferrety Enoch Powell had said, _I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood_. Reclaim the metaphor, Jumpy Joshi had told himself. Turn it; make it a thing we can use. "This is like rape," he pleaded with Hanif. "For God's sake, stop."
"Voices that one hears are outside, but," the café proprietor was musing. "Joan of Arc, na. Or that what's his name with the cat: Turn-again Whittington. But with such voices one becomes
great, or rich at least. This one however is not great, and poor."
"Enough." Jumpy held both arms above his head, grinning without really wanting to. "I surrender."
For three days after that, in spite of all the efforts of Mr. Sufyan, Mrs. Sufyan, their daughters Mishal and Anahita, and the lawyer Hanif Johnson, Jumpy Joshi was not really himself, "More a Dumpy than a Jumpy," as Sufyan said. He went about his business, at the youth clubs, at the offices of the film co-
operative to which he belonged, and in the streets, distributing leaflets, selling certain newspapers, hanging out; but his step was heavy as he went his way. Then, on the fourth evening, the telephone rang behind the counter of the Shaandaar Café."Mr. Jamshed Joshi," Anahita Sufyan carolled, doing her imitation of an upper--class English accent. "Will Mr. Joshi please come to the instrument? There is a personal call."
Her father took one look at the joy bursting out on Jumpy's face and murmured softly to his wife, "Mrs, the voice this boy is wanting to hear is not inner by any manner of means."
o o o
The impossible thing came between Pamela and Jamshed after they had spent seven days making love to one another with inexhaustible enthusiasm, infinite tenderness and such freshness of spirit that you'd have thought the procedure had only just been invented. For seven days they remained undressed with the central heating turned high, and pretended to be tropical lovers in some hot bright country to the south. Jamshed, who had always been clumsy with women, told Pamela that he had not felt so wonderful since the day in his eighteenth year when he had finally learned how to ride a
bicycle. The moment the words were out he became afraid that he had spoiled everything, that this comparison of the great love of his life to the rickety bike of his student days would be taken for theinsult it undeniably was; but he needn't have worried, because Pamela kissed him on the mouth and thanked him for saying the most beautiful thing any man had ever said to any woman. At this point he understood that he could do no wrong, and for the first time in his life he began to. feel genuinely safe, safe as houses, safe as a human being who is loved; and so did Pamela Chamcha.
On the seventh night they were awakened from dreamless sleep by the unmistakable sound of somebody trying to break into the house. "I've got a hockey-stick under my bed," Pamela whispered, terrified. "Give it to me," Jumpy, who was equally scared, hissed back. "I'm coming with you," quaked Pamela, and Jumpy quavered, "Oh, no you don't." In the end they both crept downstairs, each wearing
one of Pamela's frilly dressing-gowns, each with a hand on the hockey-stick that neither felt brave enough to use. Suppose it's a man with a shotgun, Pamela found herself thinking, a man with a shotgun saying, Go back upstairs . . . They reached the foot of the stairs. Somebody turned on the lights.
Pamela and Jumpy screamed in unison, dropped the
hockeystick and ran upstairs as fast as they could go; while down in the front hail, standing brightly illuminated by the front door with the glass panel it had smashed in order to turn the knob of the tongue- and-groove lock (Pamela in the throes of herpassion had forgotten to use the security locks), was a figure out of a nightmare or a late-night TV movie, a figure covered in mud and ice and blood, the hairiest creature you ever saw, with the shanks and hoofs of a giant goat, a man's torso covered in
goat's hair, human arms, and a horned but otherwise human head covered in muck and grime and the beginnings of a beard. Alone and unobserved, the impossible thing pitched forward on to the floor and lay still.
Upstairs, at the very top of the house, that is to say in Saladin's "den", Mrs. Pamela Chamcha was writhing in her lover's arms, crying her heart out,
and bawling at the top of her voice: "It isn't true. My husband exploded. No survivors. Do you hear me? I am the widow Chamcha whose spouse is beastly dead."
5
Mr. Gibreel Farishta on the railway train to London was once again seized as who would not be by the fear that God had decided to punish him for his loss
of faith by driving him insane. He had seated himself by the window in a first-class non-smoking compartment, with his back to the engine because unfortunately another fellow was already in theother place, and jamming his trilby down on his head he sat with his fists deep in scarlet--lined gabardine and panicked. The terror of losing his mind to a paradox, of being unmade by what he no longer believed existed, of turning in his madness into the avatar of a chimerical archangel, was so big in him that it was impossible to look at it for long; yet how else was he to account for the miracles,
metamorphoses and apparitions of recent days? "It's a straight choice," he trembled silently. "It's A, I'm off my head, or B, baba, somebody went and changed the rules."
Now, however, there was the comforting cocoon of this railway compartment in which the miraculous was reassuringly absent, the arm-rests were frayed, the reading light over his shoulder didn't work, the mirror was missing from its frame, and then there were the regulations: the little circular red--and-- white signs forbidding smoking, the stickers penalizing the improper use of the chain, the arrows indicating the points to which -- and not beyond! --
it was permitted to open the little sliding windows. Gibreel paid a visit to the toilet and here, too, a small series of prohibitions and instructions
gladdened his heart. By the time the conductor arrived with the authority of his crescent-cutting ticket-punch, Gibreel had been somewhat soothed by these manifestations of law, and began to perk up and invent rationalizations. He had had a lucky escape from death, a subsequent delirium of some sort, and now, restored to himself, could expect the threads of his old life -- that is, his old new life, thenew life he had planned before the er interruption -- to be picked up again. As the train carried him further and further away from the twilight zone of
his arrival and subsequent mysterious captivity, bearing him along the happy predictability of parallel metal lines, he felt the pull of the great city beginning to work its magic on him, and his old gift of hope reasserted itself, his talent for embracing renewal, for blinding himself to past hardships so that the future could come into view. He sprang up from his seat and thumped down on the opposite
side of the compartment, with his face symbolically towards London, even though it meant giving up the window. What did he care for windows? All the London he wanted was right there, in his mind's
eye. He spoke her name aloud: "Alleluia."
"Alleluia, brother," the compartment's only other occupant affirmed. "Hosanna, my good sir, and amen."
o o o"Although I must add, sir, that my beliefs are strictly non--denominational," the stranger continued. "Had you said 'La--ilaha', I would gladly have responded with a full-throated 'illallah'."
quiddity of the circumstances in which we live; as I hope you will allow." With a small but eloquent sweep of his thick ham of a hand, he indicated the opulence of his attire: the bespoke tailoring of his three-piece pin-stripe, the gold watch with its fob and chain, the Italian shoes, the crested silk tie, the jewelled links at his starched white cuffs. Above this costume of an English milord there stood a head of startling size, covered with thick, slicked-down hair, and sprouting implausibly luxuriant eyebrows beneath which blazed the ferocious eyes of which Gibreel had already taken careful note. "Pretty fancy," Gibreel now conceded, some response being clearly required. Maslama nodded. "I have always tended," he admitted, "towards the ornate."
The autobiography was concluded with a brief mention of the existence of a wife and some dozen children. Gibreel offered his congratulations and hoped for silence, but now Maslama dropped his bombshell. "You don't need to tell me about yourself," he said jovially. "Naturally I know who you are, even if one does not expect to see such a personage on the Eastbourne-Victoria line." He winked leeringly and placed a finger alongside his nose. "Mum's the word. I respect a man's privacy, no question about it; no question at all."
"Tending as I do towards the pantheistic view," Maslama thundered on, "my own sympathy for your work arises out of your willingness to portray deities of every conceivable water. You, sir, are a rainbow coalition of the celestial; a walking United Nations of gods! You are, in short, the future. Permit me to salute you." He was beginning to give off the unmistakable odour of the genuine crazy, and even though he had not yet said or done anything beyond the merely idiosyncratic, Gibreel was getting
maybe dangerous nut."
Maslama was struggling with his shoelaces. "All my life, sir, I knew I had been chosen," he was saying in a voice as humble as it had earlier been menacing. "Even as a child in Bartica, I knew." He pulled off his right shoe and began to roll down his sock. "I was given," he said, "a sign." The sock was removed, revealing what looked to be a perfectly ordinary, if outsize, foot. Then Gibreel counted and counted again, from one to six. "The same on the other
race that is the undertrial, and it is a defendant with a rotten record: a history-sheeter, a bad egg. Careful evaluations must be made. For the present, verdict is reserved; will be promulgated in due course. In the meantime, my presence must remain a secret, for vital security reasons." He put his hat back on his head, feeling pleased with himself.
derangement of John Maslama behind him and the excitement of Alleluia Cone ahead it was hard to get his thoughts straight. Then to his despair Mrs. Rekha Merchant floated up alongside his window, sitting on her flying Bokhara, evidently impervious to the snowstorm that was building up out there and making England look like a television set after the day's programmes end. She gave him a little wave and he felt hope ebbing from him. Retribution on a levitating rug: he closed his eyes and concentrated on trying not to shake.
and made it impossible to dream. Up _there_, Allie remembered, up there at eight thousand metres, the light was of such clarity that it seemed to resonate, to sing, like music. Here on the flat earth
mouth lack of restraint, "Baby, you're no iceberg, whatever they say. You're a passionate lady, bibi. Hot, like a kachori." He had pretended to blow on scalded fingertips, and shook his hand for emphasis:
naturally, as if she'd just bumped into an old acquaintance, for reasons afterwards obscure to her.
of signpost, a declaration of kinship. A prophecy of the future, perhaps, for it was at that moment that her secret dream was born, the impossible thing: the dream of the unaccompanied climb. It was possible, also, that Maurice Wilson was the angel of her death.
of fairy-tales in which he found the story of the sea- woman who left the ocean and took on human form for the sake of the man she loved. She had feet instead of fins, but every step she took was an agony, as if she were walking over broken glass; yet she went on walking, forward, away from the sea and over land. You did it for a bloody mountain, he said. Would you do it for a man?
wanted to ask them, _to have the whole of your life concentrated into one moment, a few hours long?
see he was doing the same. It looked like a grimace, like pain, but it was just foolish joy." She was a woman who had been brought to transcendence, to the miracles of the soul, by the hard physical labour of hauling herself up an icebound height of rock. "At that moment," she told the girls, who were climbing beside her every step of the way, "I believed it all: that the universe has a sound, that you can lift a
too, shook himself and we started down. The weather was changing rapidly; a blizzard was on the way. The air was heavy now, heaviness instead of that light, that lightness. We just made it to the meeting point and the four of us piled into the little tent at Camp Six, twenty-seven thousand feet. You don't talk much up there. We all had our Everests to re-climb, over and over, all night. But at some point I asked: "What was that noise? Did anyone fire a gun?" They looked at me as if I was touched. Who'd do such a damnfool thing at this altitude, they said, and anyway, Allie, you know damn well there isn't a gun anywhere on the mountain. They were right, of course, but I heard it, I know that much: wham bam, shot and echo. That's it," she ended abruptly. "The end. Story of my life." She picked up a silver- headed cane and prepared to depart. The teacher, Mrs. Bury, came forward to utter the usual platitudes. But the girls were not to be denied. "So what was it, then, Allie?" they insisted; and she, looking suddenly ten years older than her thirty- three, shrugged. "Can't say," she told them. "Maybe it was Maurice Wilson's ghost."
was dressed in white, like a mourner at a funeral. -- Whose bloody funeral, mister, Gibreel Farishta asked himself wildly, not mine, I bloody hope and trust. When the train pulled into Victoria station he
northbound platform of the Victoria Line he saw her again. This time she was a colour photograph in a
convinced that it kept changing shape as he ran around beneath it, so that the stations on the Underground changed lines and followed one another in apparently random sequence. More than once he emerged, suffocating, from that subterranean world in which the laws of space and time had ceased to operate, and tried to hail a taxi; not one was willing to stop, however, so he was obliged to plunge back into that hellish maze, that labyrinth without a solution, and continue his epic flight. At last, exhausted beyond hope, he surrendered to the fatal logic of his insanity and got
him he had fallen forward on to his forearms, his coat dangling loosely about him and giving him the look of a large, dying beetle who was wearing, for obscure reasons, a dirty grey trilby hat.
Gibreel realized that his move across the compartment and his inadvertent taking of Allie's unusual name had been mistaken by his companion for overtures both social and theological. "John Maslama," the fellow cried, snapping a card out of a little crocodile-skin case and pressing it upon Gibreel. "Personally, I follow my own variant of the universal faith invented by the Emperor Akbar. God, I would say, is something akin to the Music of the Spheres."
It was plain that Mr. Maslama was bursting with words, and that, now that he had popped, there was nothing for it but to sit it out, to permit the torrent
to run its orotund course. As the fellow had the build of a prize-fighter, it seemed inadvisable to irritate him. In his eyes Farishta spotted the glint of the
True Believer, a light which, until recently, he had seen in his own shaving-mirror every day.
"I have done well for myself, sir," Maslama was boasting in his well-modulated Oxford drawl. "For a brown man, exceptionally well, considering the
quiddity of the circumstances in which we live; as I hope you will allow." With a small but eloquent sweep of his thick ham of a hand, he indicated the opulence of his attire: the bespoke tailoring of his three-piece pin-stripe, the gold watch with its fob and chain, the Italian shoes, the crested silk tie, the jewelled links at his starched white cuffs. Above this costume of an English milord there stood a head of startling size, covered with thick, slicked-down hair, and sprouting implausibly luxuriant eyebrows beneath which blazed the ferocious eyes of which Gibreel had already taken careful note. "Pretty fancy," Gibreel now conceded, some response being clearly required. Maslama nodded. "I have always tended," he admitted, "towards the ornate."He had made what he called his _first pile_ producing advertising jingles, "that ol" devil music", leading women into lingerie and lip-gloss and men into temptation. Now he owned record stores all over town, a successful nightclub called Hot Wax,
and a store full of gleaming musical instruments that was his special pride and joy. He was an Indian from Guyana, "but there's nothing left in that place, sir. People are leaving it faster than planes can fly." He had made good in quick time, "by the grace of God Almighty. I'm a regular Sunday man, sir; I confess
to a weakness for the English Hymnal, and I sing to raise the roof."
The autobiography was concluded with a brief mention of the existence of a wife and some dozen children. Gibreel offered his congratulations and hoped for silence, but now Maslama dropped his bombshell. "You don't need to tell me about yourself," he said jovially. "Naturally I know who you are, even if one does not expect to see such a personage on the Eastbourne-Victoria line." He winked leeringly and placed a finger alongside his nose. "Mum's the word. I respect a man's privacy, no question about it; no question at all.""I? Who am I?" Gibreel was startled into absurdity. The other nodded weightily, his eyebrows waving like soft antlers. "The prize question, in my opinion. These are problematic times, sir, for a moral man. When a man is unsure of his essence, how may he know if he be good or bad? But you are finding me tedious. I answer my own questions by my faith in
It, sir," -- here Maslama pointed to the ceiling of the railway compartment -- "and of course you are not
in the least confused about your identity, for you are the famous, the may I say legendary Mr. Gibreel Farishta, star of screen and, increasingly, I'm sorry
to add, of pirate video; my twelve children, one wife and I are all long-standing, unreserved admirers of your divine heroics." He grabbed, and pumped Gibreel's right hand.
"Tending as I do towards the pantheistic view," Maslama thundered on, "my own sympathy for your work arises out of your willingness to portray deities of every conceivable water. You, sir, are a rainbow coalition of the celestial; a walking United Nations of gods! You are, in short, the future. Permit me to salute you." He was beginning to give off the unmistakable odour of the genuine crazy, and even though he had not yet said or done anything beyond the merely idiosyncratic, Gibreel was gettingalarmed and measuring the distance to the door with anxious little glances. "I incline, sir," Maslama was saying, "towards the opinion that whatever name one calls It by is no more than a code; a cypher, Mr. Farishta, behind which the true name lies concealed."
Gibreel remained silent, and Maslama, making no attempt to hide his disappointment, was obliged to speak for him. "What is that true name, I hear you inquire," he said, and then Gibreel knew he was right; the man was a full-fledged lunatic, and his autobiography was very likely as much of a concoction as his "faith". Fictions were walking around wherever he went, Gibreel reflected, fictions masquerading as real human beings. "I have brought him upon me," he accused himself. "By
fearing for my own sanity I have brought forth, from
God knows what dark recess, this voluble and
maybe dangerous nut.""You don't know it!" Maslama yelled suddenly, jumping to his feet. "Charlatan! Poser! Fake! You claim to be the screen immortal, avatar of a hundred and one gods, and you haven't a _foggy!_
How is it possible that I, a poor boy made good from
Bartica on the Essequibo, can know such things while Gibreel Farishta does not? Phoney! Phooey to you!"
Gibreel got to his feet, but the other was filling almost all the available standing room, and he, Gibreel, had to lean over awkwardly to one side to escape Maslama's windmilling arms, one of which knocked off his grey trilby. At once Maslama's mouth fell open. He seemed to shrink several inches, and after a few frozen moments, he fell to his knees with a thud.
What's he doing down there, Gibreel wondered, picking up my hat? But the madman was begging for forgiveness. "I never doubted you would come," he was saying. "Pardon my clumsy rage." The train entered a tunnel, and Gibreel saw that they were
surrounded by a warm golden light that was coming from a point just behind his head. In the glass of the sliding door, he saw the reflection of the halo around his hair.
Maslama was struggling with his shoelaces. "All my life, sir, I knew I had been chosen," he was saying in a voice as humble as it had earlier been menacing. "Even as a child in Bartica, I knew." He pulled off his right shoe and began to roll down his sock. "I was given," he said, "a sign." The sock was removed, revealing what looked to be a perfectly ordinary, if outsize, foot. Then Gibreel counted and counted again, from one to six. "The same on the otherfoot," Maslama said proudly. "I never doubted the meaning for a minute." He was the self--appointed helpmate of the Lord, the sixth toe on the foot of the Universal Thing. Something was badly amiss with
the spiritual life of the planet, thought Gibreel Farishta. Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
The train emerged from the tunnel. Gibreel took a decision. "Stand, six-toed John," he intoned in his best Hindi movie manner. "Maslama, arise."
The other scrambled to his feet and stood pulling at his fingers, his head bowed. "What I want to know, sir," he mumbled, "is, which is it to be? Annihilation or salvation? Why have you returned?"
Gibreel thought rapidly. "It is for judging," he finally answered. "Facts in the case must be sifted, due weight given pro and contra. Here it is the human
race that is the undertrial, and it is a defendant with a rotten record: a history-sheeter, a bad egg. Careful evaluations must be made. For the present, verdict is reserved; will be promulgated in due course. In the meantime, my presence must remain a secret, for vital security reasons." He put his hat back on his head, feeling pleased with himself.Maslama was nodding furiously. "You can depend on me," he promised. "I'm a man who respects a person's privacy. Mum" -- for the second time! -- "is the word."
Gibreel fled the compartment with the lunatic's hymns in hot pursuit. As he rushed to the far end of the train Maslama's paeans remained faintly audible behind him. "Alleluia! Alleluia!" Apparently his new disciple had launched into selections from Handel's
_Messiah_.
However: Gibreel wasn't followed, and there was, fortunately, a first--class carriage at the rear of the train, too. This one was of open--plan design, with comfortable orange seats arranged in fours around tables, and Gibreel settled down by a window, staring towards London, with his chest thumping and his hat jammed down on his head. He was trying to come to terms with the undeniable fact of
the halo, and failing to do so, because what with the
derangement of John Maslama behind him and the excitement of Alleluia Cone ahead it was hard to get his thoughts straight. Then to his despair Mrs. Rekha Merchant floated up alongside his window, sitting on her flying Bokhara, evidently impervious to the snowstorm that was building up out there and making England look like a television set after the day's programmes end. She gave him a little wave and he felt hope ebbing from him. Retribution on a levitating rug: he closed his eyes and concentrated on trying not to shake.o o o
"I know what a ghost is," Allie Cone said to a classroom of teenage girls whose faces were illuminated by the soft inner light of worship. "In the high Himalayas it is often the case that climbers find themselves being accompanied by the ghosts of those who failed in the attempt, or the sadder, but also prouder, ghosts of those who succeeded in reaching the summit, only to perish on the way down."
Outside, in the Fields, the snow was settling on the high, bare trees, and on the flat expanse of the park. Between the low, dark snow-clouds and the white-carpeted city the light was a dirty yellow colour, a narrow, foggy light that dulled the heart
and made it impossible to dream. Up _there_, Allie remembered, up there at eight thousand metres, the light was of such clarity that it seemed to resonate, to sing, like music. Here on the flat earththe light, too, was flat and earthbound. Here nothing flew, the sedge was withered, and no birds sang. Soon it would be dark.
"Ms Cone?" The girls' hands, waving in the air, drew her back into the classroom. "Ghosts, miss? Straight up?" "You're pulling our legs, right?" Scepticism wrestled with adoration in their faces. She knew the question they really wanted to ask, and probably would not: the question of the miracle of her skin. She had heard them whispering excitedly as she entered the classroom, 's true, look, how _pale_, 's incredible. Alleluia Cone, whose iciness could resist the heat of the eight-thousand-metre sun. Allie the snow maiden, the icequeen. _Miss, how come you never get a tan?_ When she went up Everest with the triumphant Collingwood expedition, the papers called them Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, though she was no Disneyish cutie, her full lips pale rather than rose--red, her hair ice-blonde instead of black, her eyes not innocently wide but narrowed, out of habit, against the high snowglare. A memory of Gibreel Farishta welled up, catching her
unawares: Gibreel at some point during their three and a half days, booming with his usual foot-in-
mouth lack of restraint, "Baby, you're no iceberg, whatever they say. You're a passionate lady, bibi. Hot, like a kachori." He had pretended to blow on scalded fingertips, and shook his hand for emphasis:_O, too hot. O, throw water_. Gibreel Farishta. She controlled herself: Hi ho, it's off to work.
"Ghosts," she repeated firmly. "On the Everest
climb, after I came through the ice-fall, I saw a man sitting on an outcrop in the lotus position, with his eyes shut and a tartan tam--o"--shanter on his
head, chanting the old mantra: om mani padmé hum." She had guessed at once, from his archaic clothing and surprising behaviour, that this was the spectre of Maurice Wilson, the yogi who had prepared for a solo ascent of Everest, back in 1934, by starving himself for three weeks in order to cement so deep a union between his body and soul that the mountain would be too weak to tear them apart. He had gone up in a light aircraft as high as it would take him, crash-landed deliberately in a snowfield, headed upwards, and never returned. Wilson opened his eyes as Allie approached, and nodded lightly in greeting. He strolled beside her for the rest of that day, or hung in the air while she worked her way up a face. Once he belly-flopped
into the snow of a sharp incline and glided upwards as if he were riding on an invisible anti-gravity toboggan. Allie had found herself behaving quite
naturally, as if she'd just bumped into an old acquaintance, for reasons afterwards obscure to her.Wilson chattered on a fair bit -- "Don't get a lot of company these days, one way and another" -- and expressed, among other things, his deep irritation at having had his body discovered by the Chinese expedition of 1960. "Little yellow buggers actually had the gall, the sheer face, to film my corpse." Alleluia Cone was struck by the bright, yellow-and- black tartan of his immaculate knickerbockers. All this she told the girls at Brickhall Fields Girls' School, who had written so many letters pleading for her to address them that she had not been able to refuse. "You've got to," they pleaded in writing. "You even live here." From the window of the classroom she could see her flat across the park, just visible
through the thickening fall of snow.
What she did not tell the class was this: as Maurice Wilson's ghost described, in patient detail, his own ascent, and also his posthumous discoveries, for example the slow, circuitous, infinitely delicate and invariably unproductive mating ritual of the yeti, which he had witnessed recently on the South Col, -- so it occurred to her that her vision of the eccentric
of 1934, the first human being ever to attempt to scale Everest on his own, a sort of abominable snowman himself, had been no accident, but a kind
of signpost, a declaration of kinship. A prophecy of the future, perhaps, for it was at that moment that her secret dream was born, the impossible thing: the dream of the unaccompanied climb. It was possible, also, that Maurice Wilson was the angel of her death."I wanted to talk about ghosts," she was saying, "because most mountaineers, when they come down from the peaks, grow embarrassed and leave these stories out of their accounts. But they do exist, I have to admit it, even though I'm the type who's always kept her feet on solid ground."
That was a laugh. Her feet. Even before the ascent of Everest she had begun to suffer from shooting pains, and was informed by her general practitioner, a no-nonsense Bombay woman called Dr. Mistry, that she was suffering from fallen arches. "In common parlance, flat feet." Her arches, always weak, had been further weakened by years of wearing sneakers and other unsuitable shoes. Dr. Mistry couldn't recommend much: toe-clenching exercises, running upstairs barefoot, sensible footwear. "You're young enough," she said. "If you take care, you'll live. If not, you'll be a cripple at forty." When Gibreel -- damn it! -- heard that she had climbed Everest with spears in her feet he took to calling her his silkie. He had read a Bumper Book
of fairy-tales in which he found the story of the sea- woman who left the ocean and took on human form for the sake of the man she loved. She had feet instead of fins, but every step she took was an agony, as if she were walking over broken glass; yet she went on walking, forward, away from the sea and over land. You did it for a bloody mountain, he said. Would you do it for a man?She had concealed her foot-ache from her fellow- mountaineers because the lure of Everest had been so overwhelming. But these days the pain was still there, and growing, if anything, worse. Chance, a congenital weakness, was proving to be her footbinder. Adventure's end, Allie thought; betrayed by my feet. The image of footbinding stayed with her. _Goddamn Chinese_, she mused, echoing Wilson's ghost.
"Life is so easy for some people," she had wept into Gibreel Farishta's arms. "Why don't _their_ blasted feet give out?" He had kissed her forehead. "For you, it may always be a struggle," he said. "You want it too damn much."
The class was waiting for her, growing impatient with all this talk of phantoms. They wanted _the_ story, her story. They wanted to stand on the mountain-top. _Do you know how it feels_, she
wanted to ask them, _to have the whole of your life concentrated into one moment, a few hours long?Do you know what it's like when the only direction is down?_ "I was in the second pair with Sherpa Pemba," she said. "The weather was perfect,
perfect. So clear you felt you could look right through the sky into whatever lay beyond. The first pair must have reached the summit by now, I said to Pemba. Conditions are holding and we can go. Pemba grew very serious, quite a change, because he was one of the expedition clowns. He had never been to the summit before, either. At that stage I had no plans to go without oxygen, but when I saw that Pemba intended it, I thought, okay, me too. It was a stupid whim, unprofessional, really, but I suddenly wanted to be a woman sitting on top of that bastard mountain, a human being, not a breathing machine. Pemba said, Allie Bibi, don't do, but I just started up. In a while we passed the others coming down and I could see the wonderful thing in their eyes. They were so high, possessed of such an exaltation, that they didn't even notice I wasn't wearing the oxygen equipment. Be careful, they shouted over to us, Look out for the angels. Pemba had fallen into a good breathing pattern and I fell into step with it, breathing in with his in, out
with his out. I could feel something lifting off the top of my head and I was grinning, just grinning from ear to ear, and when Pemba looked my way I could
see he was doing the same. It looked like a grimace, like pain, but it was just foolish joy." She was a woman who had been brought to transcendence, to the miracles of the soul, by the hard physical labour of hauling herself up an icebound height of rock. "At that moment," she told the girls, who were climbing beside her every step of the way, "I believed it all: that the universe has a sound, that you can lift aveil and see the face of God, everything. I saw the Himalayas stretching below me and that was God's face, too. Pemba must have seen something in my expression that bothered him because he called across, Look out, Allie Bibi, the height. I recall sort of floating over the last overhang and up to the top, and then we were there, with the ground falling
away on every side. Such light; the universe purified into light. I wanted to tear off my clothes and let it soak into my skin." Not a titter from the class; they were dancing naked with her on the roof of the world. "Then the visions began, the rainbows
looping and dancing in the sky, the radiance pouring down like a waterfall from the sun, and there were angels, the others hadn't been joking. I saw them and so did Sherpa Pemba. We were on our knees by then. His pupils looked pure white and so did mine, I'm sure. We would probably have died there, I'm sure, snow-blind and mountain-foolish, but then I heard a noise, a loud, sharp report, like a gun. That snapped me out of it. I had to yell at Pem until he,
too, shook himself and we started down. The weather was changing rapidly; a blizzard was on the way. The air was heavy now, heaviness instead of that light, that lightness. We just made it to the meeting point and the four of us piled into the little tent at Camp Six, twenty-seven thousand feet. You don't talk much up there. We all had our Everests to re-climb, over and over, all night. But at some point I asked: "What was that noise? Did anyone fire a gun?" They looked at me as if I was touched. Who'd do such a damnfool thing at this altitude, they said, and anyway, Allie, you know damn well there isn't a gun anywhere on the mountain. They were right, of course, but I heard it, I know that much: wham bam, shot and echo. That's it," she ended abruptly. "The end. Story of my life." She picked up a silver- headed cane and prepared to depart. The teacher, Mrs. Bury, came forward to utter the usual platitudes. But the girls were not to be denied. "So what was it, then, Allie?" they insisted; and she, looking suddenly ten years older than her thirty- three, shrugged. "Can't say," she told them. "Maybe it was Maurice Wilson's ghost."She left the classroom, leaning heavily on her stick. o o o
The city -- Proper London, yaar, no bloody less! --
was dressed in white, like a mourner at a funeral. -- Whose bloody funeral, mister, Gibreel Farishta asked himself wildly, not mine, I bloody hope and trust. When the train pulled into Victoria station heplunged out without waiting for it to come to a complete halt, turned his ankle and went sprawling beneath the baggage trolleys and sneers of the waiting Londoners, clinging, as he fell, on to his increasingly battered hat. Rekha Merchant was nowhere to be seen, and seizing the moment Gibreel ran through the scattering crowd like a man possessed, only to find her by the ticket barrier, floating patiently on her carpet, invisible to all eyes but his own, three feet off the ground.
"What do you want," he burst out, "what's your business with me?" "To watch you fall," she instantly replied. "Look around," she added, "I've already made you look like a pretty big fool."
People were clearing a space around Gibreel, the wild man in an outsize overcoat and trampy hat,
_that man's talking to himself_, a child's voice said, and its mother answered _shh, dear, it's wicked to mock the afflicted_. Welcome to London. Gibreel Farishta rushed towards the stairs leading down towards the Tube. Rekha on her carpet let him go.
But when he arrived in a great rush at the
northbound platform of the Victoria Line he saw her again. This time she was a colour photograph in a48--sheet advertising poster on the wall across the track, advertising the merits of the international
direct--dialling system. _Send your voice on a magic- carpet ride to India_, she advised. _No djinns or lamps required_. He gave a loud cry, once again causing his fellow-travellers to doubt his sanity, and fled over to the southbound platform, where a train was just pulling in. He leapt aboard, and there was Rekha Merchant facing him with her carpet rolled up and lying across her knees. The doors closed behind him with a bang.
That day Gibreel Farishta fled in every direction around the Underground of the city of London and Rekha Merchant found him wherever he went; she sat beside him on the endless up-escalator at Oxford Circus and in the tightly packed elevators of Tufnell Park she rubbed up against him from behind in a manner that she would have thought quite outrageous during her lifetime. On the outer reaches of the Metropolitan Line she hurled the phantoms of her children from the tops of claw--like trees, and when he came up for air outside the Bank of
England she flung herself histrionically from the apex of its neo--classical pediment. And even
though he did not have any idea of the true shape of that most protean and chameleon of cities he grew
convinced that it kept changing shape as he ran around beneath it, so that the stations on the Underground changed lines and followed one another in apparently random sequence. More than once he emerged, suffocating, from that subterranean world in which the laws of space and time had ceased to operate, and tried to hail a taxi; not one was willing to stop, however, so he was obliged to plunge back into that hellish maze, that labyrinth without a solution, and continue his epic flight. At last, exhausted beyond hope, he surrendered to the fatal logic of his insanity and gotout arbitrarily at what he conceded must be the last, meaningless station of his prolonged and futile journey in search of the chimera of renewal. He
came out into the heartbreaking indifference of a litter-blown street by a lorry--infested roundabout. Darkness had already fallen as he walked unsteadily, using the last reserves of his optimism, into an unknown park made spectral by the ectoplasmic quality of the tungsten lamps. As he sank to his knees in the isolation of the winter night he saw the figure of a woman moving slowly towards him across the snow-shrouded grass, and surmised that it must be his nemesis, Rekha Merchant, coming to deliver her death-kiss, to drag him down into a deeper underworld than the one in which she had broken his wounded spirit. He no longer cared, and by the time the woman reached
him he had fallen forward on to his forearms, his coat dangling loosely about him and giving him the look of a large, dying beetle who was wearing, for obscure reasons, a dirty grey trilby hat.As if from a great distance he heard a shocked cry escape the woman's lips, a gasp in which disbelief, joy and a strange resentment were all mixed up, and just before his senses left him he understood
that Rekha had permitted him, for the time being, to reach the illusion of a safe haven, so that her
triumph over him could be the sweeter when it came at the last.
"You're alive," the woman said, repeating the first words she had ever spoken to his face. "You got your life back. That's the point.,
Smiling, he fell asleep at Allie's flat feet in the falling snow.
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