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’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 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 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 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 bit
terness surged back, he had no shame, he was ready to be anything they wanted to buy, that read-your-palm bedspread-jacket Hare-Krishna 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 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 living-room 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’s it 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 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.’
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 US 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 hall; 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 la
st 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, bam. 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 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.’