Saitanic verses III. Ellowen Deeowen Part 2

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. 177 "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. "For God'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. 178 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. 179 "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't there, 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. 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 the Detention 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 180 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. 4 Jumpy 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 181 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 resenting Chamcha. 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 182 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.