Mishal, Hanif Johnson and Pinkwalla – in whose eyes Chamcha’s metamorphoses had made the actor a hero, through whom the magic of special-effects fantasy-movies (Labyrinth, Legend, Howard the Duck) entered the Real – drove Saladin over to Pamela’s place in the DJ’s van; this time, though, he squashed himself into the cab along with the other three. It was early afternoon; Jumpy would still be at the sports centre. ‘Good luck,’ said Mishal, kissing him, and Pinkwalla asked if they should wait. ‘No, thanks,’ Saladin replied. ‘When you’ve fallen from the sky, been abandoned by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained human shape, what is there left to do but, as you would no doubt phrase it, demand your rights?’ He waved goodbye. ‘Good for you,’ Mishal said, and they had gone. On the street corner the usual neighbourhood kids, with whom his relations had never been good, were bouncing a football off a lamp-post. One of them, an evil-looking piggy-eyed lout of nine or ten, pointed an imaginary video remote control at Chamcha and yelled: ‘Fast forward!’ His was a generation that believed in skipping life’s boring, troublesome, unlikable bits, going fast-forward from one action-packed climax to the next. Welcome home, Saladin thought, and rang the doorbell.
Pamela, when she saw him, actually caught at her throat. ‘I didn’t think people did that any more,’ he said. ‘Not since Dr Strangelove.’ Her pregnancy wasn’t visible yet; he inquired after it, and she blushed, but confirmed that it was going well. ‘So far so good.’ She was naturally off balance; the offer of coffee in the kitchen came several beats too late (she ‘stuck with’ her whisky, drinking rapidly in spite of the baby); but in point of fact Chamcha felt one down (there had been a period in which he’d been an avid devotee of Stephen Potter’s amusing little books) throughout this encounter. Pamela clearly felt that she ought to be the one in the bad position. She was the one who had wanted to break the marriage, who had denied him at least thrice; but he was as fumbling and abashed as she, so that they seemed to compete for the right to occupy the doghouse. The reason for Chamcha’s discomfiture – and he had not, let’s recall, arrived in this awkward spirit, but in feisty, pugnacious mood – was that he had realized, on seeing Pamela, with her too-bright brightness, her face like a saintly mask behind which who knows what worms feasted on rotting meat (he was alarmed by the hostile violence of the images arising from his unconscious), her shaven head under its absurd turban, her whisky breath, and the hard thing that had entered the little lines around her mouth, that he had quite simply fallen out of love, and would not want her back even should she want (which was improbable but not inconceivable) to return. The instant he became aware of this he commenced for some reason to feel guilty, and, as a result, at a conversational disadvantage. The white-haired dog was growling at him, too. He recalled that he’d never really cared for pets.
‘I suppose,’ she addressed her glass, sitting at the old pine table in the spacious kitchen, ‘that what I did was unforgivable, huh?’
That little Americanizing huh was new: another of her infinite series of blows against her breeding? Or had she caught it from Jumpy, or some hip little acquaintance of his, like a disease? (The snarling violence again: down with it. Now that he no longer wanted her, it was entirely inappropriate to the situation.) ‘I don’t think I can say what I’m capable of forgiving,’ he replied. ‘That particular response seems to be out of my control; it either operates or it doesn’t and I find out in due course. So let’s say, for the moment, that the jury’s out.’ She didn’t like that, she wanted him to defuse the situation so that they could enjoy their blasted coffee. Pamela had always made vile coffee: still, that wasn’t his problem now. ‘I’m moving back in,’ he said. ‘It’s a big house and there’s plenty of room. I’ll take the den, and the rooms on the floor below, including the spare bathroom, so I’ll be quite independent. I propose to use the kitchen very sparingly. I’m assuming that, as my body was never found, I’m still officially missing-presumed-dead, that you haven’t gone to court to have me wiped off the slate. In which case it shouldn’t take too long to resuscitate me, once I alert Bentine, Milligan and Sellers.’ (Respectively, their lawyer, their accountant and Chamcha’s agent.) Pamela listened dumbly, her posture informing him that she wouldn’t be offering any counter-arguments, that whatever he wanted was okay: making amends with body language. ‘After that,’ he concluded, ‘we sell up and you get your divorce.’ He swept out, making an exit before he got the shakes, and made it to his den just before they hit him. Pamela, downstairs, would be weeping; he had never found crying easy, but he was a champion shaker. And now there was his heart, too: boom badoom doodoodoom.
To be born again, first you have to die.
Alone, he all at once remembered that he and Pamela had once disagreed, as they disagreed on everything, on a short-story they’d both read, whose theme was precisely the nature of the unforgivable. Title and author eluded him, but the story came back vividly. A man and a woman had been intimate friends (never lovers) for all their adult lives. On his twenty-first birthday (they were both poor at the time) she had given him, as a joke, the most horrible, cheap glass vase she could find, its colours a garish parody of Venetian gaiety. Twenty years later, when they were both successful and greying, she visited his home and quarrelled with him over his treatment of a mutual friend. In the course of the quarrel her eye fell upon the old vase, which he still kept in pride of place on his sitting-room mantelpiece, and, without pausing in her tirade, she swept it to the floor, smashing it beyond hope of repair. He never spoke to her again; when she died, half a century later, he refused to visit her deathbed or attend her funeral, even though messengers were sent to tell him that these were her dearest wishes. ‘Tell her,’ he said to the emissaries, ‘that she never knew how much I valued what she broke.’ The emissaries argued, pleaded, raged. If she had not known how much meaning he had invested in the trifle, how could she in all fairness be blamed? And had she not made countless attempts, over the years, to apologize and atone? And she was dying, for heaven’s sake; could not this ancient, childish rift be healed at the last? They had lost a lifetime’s friendship; could they not even say goodbye? ‘No,’ said the unforgiving man. – ‘Really because of the vase? Or are you concealing some other, darker matter?’ – ‘It was the vase,’ he answered, ‘the vase, and nothing but.’ Pamela thought the man petty and cruel, but Chamcha had even then appreciated the curious privacy, the inexplicable inwardness of the issue. ‘Nobody can judge an internal injury,’ he had said, ‘by the size of the superficial wound, of the hole.’
Sunt lacrimae rerum, as the ex-teacher Sufyan would have said, and Saladin had ample opportunity in the next many days to contemplate the tears in things. He remained at first virtually immobile in his den, allowing it to grow back around him at its own pace, waiting for it to regain something of the solid comforting quality of its old self, as it had been before the altering of the universe. He watched a good deal of television with half an eye, channel-hopping compulsively, for he was a member of the remote-control culture of the present as much as the piggy boy on the street corner; he, too, could comprehend, or at least enter the illusion of comprehending, the composite video monster his button-pushing brought into being … what a leveller this remote-control gizmo was, a Procrustean bed for the twentieth century; it chopped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until all the set’s emissions, commercials, murders, game-shows, the thousand and one varying joys and terrors of the real and the imagined, acquired an equal weight; – and whereas the original Procrustes, citizen of what could now be termed a ‘hands-on’ culture, had to exercise both brain and brawn, he, Chamcha, could lounge back in his Parker-Knoll recliner chair and let his fingers do the chopping. It seemed to him, as he idled across the channels, that the box was full of freaks: there were mutants – ‘Mutts’ – on Dr Who, bizarre creatures who appeared to have been crossbred with different types of industrial mac
hinery: forage harvesters, grabbers, donkeys, jackhammers, saws, and whose cruel priest-chieftains were called Mutilasians; children’s television appeared to be extremely populated by humanoid robots and creatures with metamorphic bodies, while the adult programmes offered a continual parade of the misshapen human by-products of the newest notions in modern medicine, and its accomplices, modern disease and war. A hospital in Guyana had apparently preserved the body of a fully formed merman, complete with gills and scales. Lycanthropy was on the increase in the Scottish Highlands. The genetic possibility of centaurs was being seriously discussed. A sex-change operation was shown. – He was reminded of an execrable piece of poetry which Jumpy Joshi had hesitantly shown him at the Shaandaar B and B. Its name, ‘I Sing the Body Eclectic’, was fully representative of the whole. – But the fellow has a whole body, after all, Saladin thought bitterly. He made Pamela’s baby with no trouble at all: no broken sticks on his damn chromosomes … he caught sight of himself in a rerun of an old Aliens Show ‘classic’. (In the fast-forward culture, classic status could be achieved in as little as six months; sometimes even overnight.) The effect of all this box-watching was to put a severe dent in what remained of his idea of the normal, average quality of the real; but there were also countervailing forces at work.
On Gardeners’ World he was shown how to achieve something called a ‘chimeran graft’ (the very same, as chance would have it, that had been the pride of Otto Cone’s garden); and although his inattention caused him to miss the names of the two trees that had been bred into one – Mulberry? Laburnum? Broom? – the tree itself made him sit up and take notice. There it palpably was, a chimera with roots, firmly planted in and growing vigorously out of a piece of English earth: a tree, he thought, capable of taking the metaphoric place of the one his father had chopped down in a distant garden in another, incompatible world. If such a tree were possible, then so was he; he, too, could cohere, send down roots, survive. Amid all the televisual images of hybrid tragedies – the uselessness of mermen, the failures of plastic surgery, the Esperanto-like vacuity of much modern art, the Coca-Colonization of the planet – he was given this one gift. It was enough. He switched off the set.
Gradually, his animosity towards Gibreel lessened. Nor did horns, goat-hoofs, etc. show any signs of manifesting themselves anew. It seemed a cure was in progress. In point of fact, with the passage of the days not only Gibreel, but everything which had befallen Saladin of late that was irreconcilable with the prosiness of everyday life came to seem somehow irrelevant, as even the most stubborn of nightmares will once you’ve splashed your face, brushed your teeth and had a strong, hot drink. He began to make journeys into the outside world – to those professional advisers, lawyer accountant agent, whom Pamela used to call ‘the Goons’, and when sitting in the panelled, book- and ledger-lined stability of those offices in which miracles could plainly never happen he took to speaking of his ‘breakdown’, – ‘the shock of the accident’, – and so on, explaining his disappearance as though he had never tumbled from the sky, singing ‘Rule, Britannia’ while Gibreel yowled an air from the movie Shree 420. He made a conscious effort to resume his old life of delicate sensibilities, taking himself off to concerts and art galleries and plays, and if his responses were rather dull; – if these pursuits singularly failed to send him home in the state of exaltation which was the return he expected from all high art; – then he insisted to himself that the thrill would soon return; he had had ‘a bad experience’, and needed a little time.
In his den, seated in the Parker-Knoll armchair, surrounded by his familiar objects – the china pierrots, the mirror in the shape of a cartoonist’s heart, Eros holding up the globe of an antique lamp – he congratulated himself on being the sort of person who had found hatred impossible to sustain for long. Maybe, after all, love was more durable than hate; even if love changed, some shadow of it, some lasting shape, persisted. Towards Pamela, for example, he was now sure he felt nothing but the most altruistic affections. Hatred was perhaps like a finger-print upon the smooth glass of the sensitive soul; a mere grease-mark, which disappeared if left alone. Gibreel? Pooh! He was forgotten; he no longer existed. There; to surrender animosity was to become free.
Saladin’s optimism grew, but the red tape surrounding his return to life proved more obstructive than he expected. The banks were taking their time about unblocking his accounts; he was obliged to borrow from Pamela. Nor was work easy to come by. His agent, Charlie Sellers, explained over the phone: ‘Clients get funny. They start talking about zombies, they feel sort of unclean: as if they were robbing a grave.’ Charlie, who still sounded in her early fifties like a disorganized and somewhat daffy young thing of the best county stock, gave the impression that she rather sympathized with the clients’ point of view. ‘Wait it out,’ she advised. ‘They’ll come round. After all, it isn’t as if you were Dracula, for heaven’s sake.’ Thank you, Charlie.
Yes: his obsessive loathing of Gibreel, his dream of exacting some cruel and appropriate revenge, – these were things of the past, aspects of a reality incompatible with his passionate desire to re-establish ordinary life. Not even the seditious, deconstructive imagery of television could deflect him. What he was rejecting was a portrait of himself and Gibreel as monstrous. Monstrous, indeed: the most absurd of ideas. There were real monsters in the world – mass-murdering dictators, child rapists. The Granny Ripper. (Here he was forced to admit that in spite of his old, high estimate of the Metropolitan Police, the arrest of Uhuru Simba was just too darned neat.) You only had to open the tabloids any day of the week to find crazed homosexual Irishmen stuffing babies’ mouths with earth. Pamela, naturally, had been of the view that ‘monster’ was too – what? – judgmental a term for such persons; compassion, she said, required that we see them as casualties of the age. Compassion, he replied, demanded that we see their victims as the casualties. ‘There’s nothing to be done with you,’ she had said in her most patrician voice. ‘You actually do think in cheap debating points.’
And other monsters, too, no less real than the tabloid fiends: money, power, sex, death, love. Angels and devils – who needed them? ‘Why demons, when man himself is a demon?’ the Nobel Laureate Singer’s ‘last demon’ asked from his attic in Tishevitz. To which Chamcha’s sense of balance, his much-to-be-said-for-and-against reflex, wished to add: ‘And why angels, when man is angelic too?’ (If this wasn’t true, how to explain, for instance, the Leonardo Cartoon? Was Mozart really Beelzebub in a powdered wig?) – But, it had to be conceded, and this was his original point, that the circumstances of the age required no diabolic explanations.
I’m saying nothing. Don’t ask me to clear things up one way or the other; the time of revelations is long gone. The rules of Creation are pretty clear: you set things up, you make them thus and so, and then you let them roll. Where’s the pleasure if you’re always intervening to give hints, change the rules, fix the fights? Well, I’ve been pretty self-controlled up to this point and I don’t plan to spoil things now. Don’t think I haven’t wanted to butt in; I have, plenty of times. And once, it’s true, I did. I sat on Alleluia Cone’s bed and spoke to the superstar, Gibreel. Ooparvala or Neechayvala, he wanted to know, and I didn’t enlighten him; I certainly don’t intend to blab to this confused Chamcha instead.
I’m leaving now. The man’s going to sleep.
His reborn, fledgling, still-fallible optimism was hardest to maintain at night; because at night that otherworld of horns and hoofs was not so easily denied. There was the matter, too, of the two women who had started haunting his dreams. The first – it was hard to admit this, even to himself – was none other than the child-woman of the Shaandaar, his loyal ally in that nightmare time which he was now trying so mightily to conceal behind banalities and mists, the aficionada of the martial arts, Hanif Johnson’s lover, Mishal Sufyan.
The second – whom he’d left in Bombay with the knife of his departure sticking in her heart, and who must still think him dead
– was Zeeny Vakil.
The jumpiness of Jumpy Joshi when he learned that Saladin Chamcha had returned, in human form, to reoccupy the upper storeys of the house in Notting Hill, was frightful to behold, and incensed Pamela more than she could say. On the first night – she had decided not to tell him until they were safely in bed – he leaped, on hearing the news, a good three feet clear of the bed and stood on the pale blue carpet, stark naked and quaking with his thumb stuck in his mouth.
‘Come back here and stop being foolish,’ she commanded, but he shook his head wildly, and removed his thumb long enough to gibber: ‘But if he’s here! In this house! Then how can I …?’ – With which he snatched up his clothes in an untidy bundle, and fled from her presence; she heard thumps and crashes which suggested that his shoes, possibly accompanied by himself, had fallen down the stairs. ‘Good,’ she screamed after him. ‘Chicken, break your neck.’
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