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, flower 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.’
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, dee-owen, 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 goat-excrement 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, of the 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 first class, 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.
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 be fine,’ 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 of
f 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 lightly 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 body convulsed, 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 heartrending 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 to stand 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.’
‘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. ‘O Jesus I want to go. Jesus Mary I gotta go, lemme go, O God, O Jesus God.’ A very lecherous-looking 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.
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.