Saitanic verses III. Ellowen Deeowen Part 3

183 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. 184 "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 185 her awake, shouting, "It's no good, I've got to tell you. He isn't dead. Saladin: he's bloody well alive." She came wide awake at once, plunging her hands into her thick, curly, hennaed hair, in which the first strands of white were just beginning to be noticeable; she knelt on the bed, naked, with her hands in her hair, unable to move, until Jumpy had finished speaking, and then, without warning, she began to hit out at him, punching him on the chest and arms and shoulders and even his face, as hard as she could hit. He sat down on the bed beside her, looking ridiculous in her frilly dressing- gown, while she beat him; he allowed his body to go loose, to receive the blows, to submit. When she ran out of punches her body was covered in perspiration and he thought she might have broken one of his arms. She sat down beside him, panting, and they were silent. Her dog entered the bedroom, looking worried, and padded over to offer her his paw, and to lick at her left leg. Jumpy stirred, cautiously. "I thought he got stolen," he said eventually. Pamela jerked her head for _yes, but_. "The thieves got in touch. I paid the ransom. He now answers to the name of Glenn. That's okay; I could never pronounce Sher Khan properly, anyway." After a while, Jumpy found that he wanted to talk. "What you did, just now," he began. "Oh, God." "No. It's like a thing I once did. Maybe the most sensible thing I ever did." In the summer of 1967, he had bullied the "apolitical" twenty- year-old Saladin along on an anti-war demonstration. "Once in your life, Mister Snoot; I'm going to drag you down to my level." Harold Wilson was coming to town, and because of the Labour Government's 186 support of U S involvement in Vietnam, a mass protest had been planned. Chamcha went along, "out of curiosity," he said. "I want to see how allegedly intelligent people turn themselves into a mob." That day it rained an ocean. The demonstrators in Market Square were soaked through. Jumpy and Chamcha, swept along by the crowd, found themselves pushed up against the steps of the town hail; _grandstand view_, Chamcha said with heavy irony. Next to them stood two students disguised as Russian assassins, in black fedoras, greatcoats and dark glasses, carrying shoeboxes filled with ink-dipped tomatoes and labelled in large block letters, bombs. Shortly before the Prime Minister's arrival, one of them tapped a policeman on the shoulder and said: "Excuse, please. When Mr. Wilson, self--styled Prime Meenster, comes in long car, kindly request to wind down weendow so my friend can throw with him the bombs." The policeman answered, "Ho, ho, sir. Very good. Now I'll tell you what. You can throw eggs at him, sir, "cause that's all right with me. And you can throw tomatoes at him, sir, like what you've got there in that box, painted black, labelled bombs, "cause that's all right with me. You throw anything hard at him, sir, and my mate here'll get you with his gun." O days of innocence when the world was young . . . when the car arrived there was a surge in the crowd and Chamcha and Jumpy were separated. Then Jumpy appeared, climbed on to the bonnet of Harold Wilson's limousine, and began to jump up and down on the bonnet, creating large dents, leaping like a wild man to the rhythm of the crowd's chanting: _We shall fight, we shall win, long live Ho Chi Minh_. "Saladin started yelling at me to get off, partly because the crowd was full of Special Branch types converging on the limo, but mainly because he was so damn embarrassed." But he kept leaping, up higher and down harder, drenched to the bone, long hair flying: Jumpy the jumper, leaping into the mythology of those antique years. And Wilson and Marcia cowered in the back seat. Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! At the last 187 possible moment Jumpy took a deep breath, and dived head-first into a sea of wet and friendly faces; and vanished. They never caught him: fuzz pigs filth. "Saladin wouldn't speak to me for over a week," Jumpy remembered. "And when he did, all he said was, 'I hope you realize those cops could have shot you to pieces, but they didn't.' They were still sitting side by side on the edge of the bed. Jumpy touched Pamela on the forearm. "I just mean I know how it feels. Wham, barn. It felt incredible. It felt necessary." "Oh, my God," she said, turning to him. "Oh, my God, I'm sorry, but yes, it did." In the morning it took an hour to get through to the airline on account of the volume of calls still being generated by the catastrophe, and then another twenty-five minutes of insistence -- _but he telephoned, it was his voice_ -- while at the other end of the phone a woman's voice, professionally trained to deal with human beings in crisis, understood how she felt and sympathized with her in this awful moment and remained very patient, but clearly didn't believe a word she said. .I'm sorry, madam, I don't mean to be brutal, but the plane broke up in mid- air at thirty thousand feet_. By the end of the call Pamela Chamcha, normally the most controlled of women, who locked herself in a bathroom when she wanted to cry, was shrieking down the line, for God's sake, woman, will you shut up with your little good-samaritan speeches and listen to what I'm saying? Finally she slammed down the receiver and rounded on Jumpy Joshi, who saw the expression in her eyes and spilled the coffee he had been bringing her because his limbs began to tremble in fright. "You fucking creep," she cursed him. "Still alive, is he? I suppose he flew down from the sky on fucking _wings_ and headed straight for the nearest phone booth to change out of his fucking Superman costume and ring the little wife." They were in the 188 kitchen and Jumpy noticed a group of kitchen knives attached to a magnetic strip on the wall next to Pamela's left arm. He opened his mouth to speak, but she wouldn't let him. "Get out before I do something," she said. "I can't believe I fell for it. You and voices on the phone: I should have fucking known." In the early 1970S Jumpy had run a travelling disco out of the back of his yellow mini-van. He called it Finn's Thumb in honour of the legendary sleeping giant of Ireland, Finn MacCool, another sucker, as Chamcha used to say. One day Saladin had played a practical joke on Jumpy, by ringing him up, putting on a vaguely Mediterranean accent, and requesting the services of the musical Thumb on the island of Skorpios, on behalf of Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, offering a fee of ten thousand dollars and transportation to Greece, in a private aircraft, for up to six persons. This was a terrible thing to do to a man as innocent and upright as Jamshed Joshi. "I need an hour to think," he had said, and then fallen into an agony of the soul. When Saladin rang back an hour later and heard that Jumpy was turning down Mrs. Onassis's offer for political reasons, he understood that his friend was in training to be a saint, and it was no good trying to pull his leg. "Mrs. Onassis will be broken in the heart for sure," he had concluded, and Jumpy had worriedly replied, "Please tell her it's nothing personal, as a matter of fact personally I admire her a great deal." We have all known one another too long, Pamela thought as Jumpy left. We can hurt each other with memories two decades old. On the subject of mistakes with voices, she thought as she drove much too fast down the M4 that afternoon in the old MG hardtop from which she got a degree of pleasure that was, as she had always cheerfully confessed, "quite ideologically unsound", -- on that subject, I really ought to be more charitable. 189 Pamela Chamcha, nee Lovelace, was the possessor of a voice for which, in many ways, the rest of her life had been an effort to compensate. It was a voice composed of tweeds, headscarves, summer pudding, hockey- sticks, thatched houses, saddle-soap, house--parties, nuns, family pews, large dogs and philistinism, and in spite of all her attempts to reduce its volume it was loud as a dinner-jacketed drunk throwing bread rolls in a Club. It had been the tragedy of her younger days that thanks to this voice she had been endlessly pursued by the gentlemen farmers and debs' delights and somethings in the city whom she despised with all her heart, while the greenies and peacemarchers and world--changers with whom she instinctively felt at home treated her with deep suspicion, bordering on resentment. How could one be _on the side of the angels_ when one sounded like a no-goodnik every time one moved one's lips? Accelerating past Reading, Pamela gritted her teeth. One of the reasons she had decided to _admit it_ end her marriage before fate did it for her was that she had woken up one day and realized that Chamcha was not in love with her at all, but with that voice stinking of Yorkshire pudding and hearts of oak, that hearty, rubicund voice of ye olde dream-England which he so desperately wanted to inhabit. It had been a marriage of crossed purposes, each of them rushing towards the very thing from which the other was in flight. _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. 190 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 191 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 one hundred 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. 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 dropping away 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 192 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 respected Asian 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 reply in 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? 193 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. 194 After Pamela Chamcha threw him out, Jumpy Joshi went over to Mr. Sufyan's Shaandaar Cafe 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 sat all 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 cafe 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?" 195 "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 Cafe, 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?"