Some moments later, however, Saladin was visited by the purple-faced figure of his estranged and naked-headed wife, who spoke thickly through clamped teeth. ‘J.J. is standing outside in the street. The damn fool says he can’t come in unless you say it’s okay with you.’ She had, as usual, been drinking. Chamcha, greatly astonished, more or less blurted out: ‘What about you, you want him to come in?’ Which Pamela interpreted as his way of rubbing salt in the wound. Turning an even deeper shade of purple she nodded with humiliated ferocity. Yes.
So it was that on his first night home, Saladin Chamcha went outside – ‘Hey, hombre! You’re really well!’ Jumpy greeted him in terror, making as if to slap palms, to conceal his fear – and persuaded his wife’s lover to share her bed. Then he retreated upstairs, because Jumpy’s mortification now prevented him from entering the house until Chamcha was safely out of the way.
‘What a man!’ Jumpy wept at Pamela. ‘He’s a prince, a saint!’
‘If you don’t pack it in,’ Pamela Chamcha warned apoplectically, ‘I’ll set the fucking dog on you.’
Jumpy continued to find Chamcha’s presence distracting, envisaging him (or so it appeared from his behaviour) as a minatory shade that needed to be constantly placated. When he cooked Pamela a meal (he had turned out, to her surprise and relief, to be quite a Mughlai chef) he insisted on asking Chamcha down to join them, and, when Saladin demurred, took him up a tray, explaining to Pamela that to do otherwise would be rude, and also provocative. ‘Look what he permits under his own roof! He’s a giant; least we can do is have good manners.’ Pamela, with mounting rage, was obliged to put up with a series of such acts and their accompanying homilies. ‘I’d never have believed you were so conventional,’ she fumed, and Jumpy replied: ‘It’s just a question of respect.’
In the name of respect, Jumpy carried Chamcha cups of tea, newspapers and mail; he never failed, on arriving at the big house, to go upstairs for a visit of at least twenty minutes, the minimum time commensurate with his sense of politeness, while Pamela cooled her heels and knocked back bourbon three floors below. He brought Saladin little presents: propitiatory offerings of books, old theatre handbills, masks. When Pamela attempted to put her foot down, he argued against her with an innocent, but also mulish passion: ‘We can’t behave as if the man’s invisible. He’s here, isn’t he? Then we must involve him in our lives.’ Pamela replied sourly: ‘Why don’t you just ask him to come down and join us in bed?’ To which Jumpy, seriously, replied: ‘I didn’t think you’d approve.’
In spite of his inability to relax and take for granted Chamcha’s residence upstairs, something in Jumpy Joshi was eased by receiving, in this unusual way, his predecessor’s blessings. Able to reconcile the imperatives of love and friendship, he cheered up a good deal, and found the idea of fatherhood growing on him. One night he dreamed a dream that made him weep, the next morning, in delighted anticipation: a simple dream, in which he was running down an avenue of overarching trees, helping a small boy to ride a bicycle. ‘Aren’t you pleased with me?’ the boy cried in his elation. ‘Look: aren’t you pleased?’
Pamela and Jumpy had both become involved in the campaign mounted to protest against the arrest of Dr Uhuru Simba for the so-called Granny Ripper Murders. This, too, Jumpy went upstairs to discuss with Saladin. ‘The whole thing’s completely trumped-up, based on circumstantial evidence and insinuations. Hanif reckons he can drive a truck through the holes in the prosecution case. It’s just a straightforward malicious fit-up; the only question is how far they’ll go. They’ll verbal him for sure. Maybe there will even be witnesses saying they saw him do the slicing. Depends how badly they want to get him. Pretty badly, I’d say; he’s been a loud voice around town for some while.’ Chamcha recommended caution. Recalling Mishal Sufyan’s loathing for Simba, he said: ‘The fellow has – has he not? – a record of violence towards women …’ Jumpy turned his palms outward. ‘In his personal life,’ he owned, ‘the guy’s frankly a piece of shit. But that doesn’t mean he disembowels senior citizens; you don’t have to be an angel to be innocent. Unless, of course, you’re black.’ Chamcha let this pass. ‘The point is, this isn’t personal, it’s political,’ Jumpy emphasized, adding, as he got up to leave, ‘Um, there’s a public meeting about it tomorrow. Pamela and I have to go; please, I mean if you’d like, if you’d be interested, that is, come along if you want.’
‘You asked him to go with us?’ Pamela was incredulous. She had started to feel nauseous most of the time, and it did nothing for her mood. ‘You actually did that without consulting me?’ Jumpy looked crestfallen. ‘Doesn’t matter, anyhow,’ she let him off the hook. ‘Catch him going to anything like that.’
In the morning, however, Saladin presented himself in the hall, wearing a smart brown suit, a camel coat with a silk collar, and a rather natty brown homburg hat. ‘Where are you off to?’ Pamela, in turban, army-surplus leather jacket and tracksuit bottoms that revealed the incipient thickening of her middle, wanted to know. ‘Bloody Ascot?’ ‘I believe I was invited to a meeting,’ Saladin answered in his least combative manner, and Pamela freaked. ‘You want to be careful,’ she warned him. ‘The way you look, you’ll probably get fucking mugged.’
What drew him back into the otherworld, into that undercity whose existence he had so long denied? – What, or rather who, forced him by the simple fact of its (her) existence, to emerge from that cocoon-den in which he was being – or so he believed – restored to his former self, and plunge once more into the perilous (because uncharted) waters of the world and of himself? ‘I’ll be able to fit in the meeting,’ Jumpy Joshi had told Saladin, ‘before my karate class.’ – Where his star pupil waited: long, rainbow-haired and, Jumpy added, just past her eighteenth birthday. – Not knowing that Jumpy, too, was suffering some of the same illicit longings, Saladin crossed town to be nearer to Mishal Sufyan.
He had expected the meeting to be small, envisaging a back room somewhere full of suspicious types looking and talking like clones of Malcolm X (Chamcha could remember finding funny a TV comic’s joke – ‘Then there’s the one about the black man who changed his name to Mr X and sued the News of the World for libel’ – and provoking one of the worst quarrels of his marriage), with maybe a few angry-looking women as well; he had pictured much fist-clenching and righteousness. What he found was a large hall, the Brickhall Friends Meeting House, packed wall-to-wall with every conceivable sort of person – old, wide women and uniformed schoolchildren, Rastas and restaurant workers, the staff of the small Chinese supermarket in Plassey Street, soberly dressed gents as well as wild boys, whites as well as blacks; the mood of the crowd was far from the kind of evangelical hysteria he’d imagined; it was quiet, worried, wanting to know what could be done. There was a young black woman standing near him who gave his attire an amused once-over; he stared back at her, and she laughed: ‘Okay, sorry, no offence.’ She was wearing a lenticular badge, the sort that changed its message as you moved. At some angles it read, Uhuru for the Simba; at others, Freedom for the Lion. ‘It’s on account of the meaning of his chosen name,’ she explained redundantly. ‘In African.’ Which language? Saladin wanted to know. She shrugged, and turned away to listen to the speakers. It was African: born, by the sound of her, in Lewisham or Deptford or New Cross, that was all she needed to know … Pamela hissed into his ear. ‘I see you finally found somebody to feel superior to.’ She could still read him like a book.
A minute woman in her middle seventies was led up on to the stage at the far end of the hall by a wiry man who, Chamcha was almost reassured to observe, really did look like an American Black Power leader, the young Stokely Carmichael, in fact – the same intense spectacles – and who was acting as a sort of compère. He turned out to be Dr Simba’s kid brother Walcott Roberts, and the tiny lady was their mother, Antoinette. ‘God knows how anything as big as Simba ever came out of her,’ Jumpy whispered, and Pamela frowned angrily, out of a new feeling of solidarity with all pregnant women,
past as well as present. When Antoinette Roberts spoke, however, her voice was big enough to fill the room on lung-power alone. She wanted to talk about her son’s day in court, at the committal proceedings, and she was quite a performer. Hers was what Chamcha thought of as an educated voice; she spoke in the BBC accents of one who learned her English diction from the World Service, but there was gospel in there, too, and hellfire sermonizing. ‘My son filled that dock,’ she told the silent room. ‘Lord, he filled it up. Sylvester – you will pardon me if I use the name I gave him, not meaning to belittle the warrior’s name he took for himself, but only out of ingrained habit – Sylvester, he burst upwards from that dock like Leviathan from the waves. I want you to know how he spoke: he spoke loud, and he spoke clear. He spoke looking his adversary in the eye, and could that prosecutor stare him down? Never in a month of Sundays. And I want you to know what he said: “I stand here,” my son declared, “because I have chosen to occupy the old and honourable role of the uppity nigger. I am here because I have not been willing to seem reasonable. I am here for my ingratitude.” He was a colossus among the dwarfs. “Make no mistake,” he said in that court, “we are here to change things. I concede at once that we shall ourselves be changed; African, Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Cypriot, Chinese, we are other than what we would have been if we had not crossed the oceans, if our mothers and fathers had not crossed the skies in search of work and dignity and a better life for their children. We have been made again: but I say that we shall also be the ones to remake this society, to shape it from the bottom to the top. We shall be the hewers of the dead wood and the gardeners of the new. It is our turn now.” I wish you to think on what my son, Sylvester Roberts, Dr Uhuru Simba, said in the place of justice. Think on it while we decide what we must do.’
Her son Walcott helped her leave the stage amid cheers and chants; she nodded judiciously in the direction of the noise. Less charismatic speeches followed. Hanif Johnson, Simba’s lawyer, made a series of suggestions – the visitors’ gallery must be packed, the dispensers of justice must know that they were being watched; the court must be picketed, and a rota should be organized; there was the need for a financial appeal. Chamcha murmured to Jumpy: ‘Nobody mentions his history of sexual aggression.’ Jumpy shrugged. ‘Some of the women he’s attacked are in this room. Mishal, for example, is over there, look, in the corner by the stage. But this isn’t the time or place for that. Simba’s bull craziness is, you could say, a trouble in the family. What we have here is trouble with the Man.’ In other circumstances, Saladin would have had a good deal to say in response to such a statement. – He would have objected, for one thing, that a man’s record of violence could not be set aside so easily when he was accused of murder. – Also that he didn’t like the use of such American terms as ‘the Man’ in the very different British situation, where there was no history of slavery; it sounded like an attempt to borrow the glamour of other, more dangerous struggles, a thing he also felt about the organizers’ decision to punctuate the speeches with such meaning-loaded songs as We Shall Overcome, and even, for Pete’s sake, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. As if all causes were the same, all histories interchangeable. – But he said none of these things, because his head had begun to spin and his senses to reel, owing to his having been given, for the first time in his life, a stupefying premonition of his death.
– Hanif Johnson was finishing his speech. As Dr Simba has written, newness will enter this society by collective, not individual, actions. He was quoting what Chamcha recognized as one of Camus’s most popular slogans. The passage from speech to moral action, Hanif was saying, has a name: to become human. – And now a pretty young British Asian woman with a slightly-too-bulbous nose and a dirty, bluesy voice was launching into Bob Dylan’s song, I Pity the Poor Immigrant. Another false and imported note, this: the song actually seemed rather hostile towards immigrants, though there were lines that struck chords, about the immigrant’s visions shattering like glass, about how he was obliged to ‘build his town with blood’. Jumpy, with his versifying attempts to redefine the old racist image of the rivers of blood, would appreciate that. – All these things Saladin experienced and thought as if from a considerable distance. – What had happened? This: when Jumpy Joshi pointed out Mishal Sufyan’s presence at the Friends Meeting House, Saladin Chamcha, looking in her direction, saw a blazing fire burning in the centre of her forehead; and felt, in the same moment, the beating, and the icy shadow, of a pair of gigantic wings. – He experienced the kind of blurring associated with double vision, seeming to look into two worlds at once; one was the brightly lit, no-smoking-allowed meeting hall, but the other was a world of phantoms, in which Azraeel, the exterminating angel, was swooping towards him, and a girl’s forehead could burn with ominous flames. – She’s death to me, that’s what it means, Chamcha thought in one of the two worlds, while in the other he told himself not to be foolish; the room was full of people wearing those inane tribal badges that had latterly grown so popular, green neon haloes, devil-horns painted with fluorescent paint; Mishal probably had on some piece of space-age junk jewellery. – But his other self took over again, she’s off limits to you, it said, not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim. – Whereupon his heart got in on the act, bababoom, boomba, dabadoom.
Now he was outside, with Jumpy fussing over him and even Pamela showing concern. ‘I’m the one with the bun in the oven,’ she said with a gruff remnant of affection. ‘What business have you got to pass out?’ Jumpy insisted: ‘You’d best come with me to my class; just sit quietly, and afterwards I’ll take you home.’ – But Pamela wanted to know if a doctor was required. No, no, I’ll go with Jumpy, I’ll be fine. It was just hot in there. Airless. My clothes too warm. A stupid thing. A nothing.
There was an art cinema next to the Friends House, and he was leaning against a movie poster. The film was Mephisto, the story of an actor seduced into a collaboration with Nazism. In the poster, the actor – played by the German star Klaus Maria Brandauer – was dressed up as Mephistophilis, face white, body cloaked in black, arms upraised. Lines from Faust stood above his head:
– Who art thou, then?
– Part of that Power, not understood,
Which always wills the Bad, and always works the Good.
At the sports centre: he could scarcely bring himself to glance in Mishal’s direction. (She too had left the Simba meeting in time to make the class.) – Although she was all over him, you came back, I bet it was to see me, isn’t that nice, he could hardly speak a civil word, much less ask were you wearing a luminous something in the middle of your, because she wasn’t how, kicking her legs and flexing her long body, resplendent in its black leotard. – Until, sensing the coldness in him, she backed off, all confusion and injured pride.
‘Our other star hasn’t turned up today,’ Jumpy mentioned to Saladin during a break in the exercises. ‘Miss Alleluia Cone, the one who climbed Everest. I was meaning to introduce you two. She knows, I mean, she’s apparently with, Gibreel. Gibreel Farishta, the actor, your fellow-survivor of the crash.’
Things are closing in on me. Gibreel was drifting towards him, like India when, having come unstuck from the Gondwanaland protocontinent, it floated towards Laurasia. (His processes of mind, he recognized absently, were coming up with some pretty strange associations.) When they collided, the force would hurl up Himalayas. – What is a mountain? An obstacle; a transcendence; above all, an effect.
‘Where are you going?’ Jumpy was calling. ‘I thought I was giving you a lift. Are you okay?’
I’m fine. I need to walk, that’s all.
‘Okay, but only if you’re sure.’
Sure. Walk away fast, without catching Mishal’s aggrieved eye.… In the street. Walk quickly, out of this wrong place, this underworld. – God: no escape. Here’s a shop-front, a store selling musical instruments, trumpets saxophones oboes, what’s the name? – Fair Winds, and here in the window
is a cheaply printed handbill. Announcing the imminent return of, that’s right, the Archangel Gibreel. His return and the salvation of the earth. Walk. Walk away fast.
… Hail this taxi. (His clothes inspire deference in the driver.) Climb in squire do you mind the radio. Some scientist who got caught in that hijacking and lost the half of his tongue. American. They rebuilt it, he says, with flesh taken from his posterior, excuse my French. Wouldn’t fancy a mouthful of my own buttock meat myself but the poor bugger had no option did he. Funny bastard. Got some funny ideas.
Eugene Dumsday on the radio discussed the gaps in the fossil record with his new, buttocky tongue. The Devil tried to silence me but the good Lord and American surgical techniques knew better. These gaps were the creationist’s main selling-point: if natural selection was the truth, where were all the random mutations that got deselected? Where were the monster-children, the deformed babies of evolution? The fossils were silent. No three-legged horses there. No point arguing with these geezers, the cabbie said. I don’t hold with God myself. No point, one small part of Chamcha’s consciousness agreed. No point suggesting that ‘the fossil record’ wasn’t some sort of perfect filing cabinet. And evolution theory had come a long way since Darwin. It was now being argued that major changes in species happened not in the stumbling, hit-and-miss manner first envisaged, but in great, radical leaps. The history of life was not the bumbling progress – the very English, middle-class progress – Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution. – I’ve heard enough, the cabbie said. Eugene Dumsday vanished from the ether, to be replaced by disco music. Ave atque vale.