This happened: Chamcha invented an Allie, and became his fiction’s antagonist … he showed none of this. He smiled, shook hands, was pleased to meet her; and embraced Gibreel. I follow him to serve my turn upon him. Allie, suspecting nothing, excused herself. The two of them must have so much to catch up on, she said; and, promising to return soon, departed: off, as she put it, to explore. He noticed that she hobbled slightly for a step or two; then paused, and strode off strongly. Among the things he did not know about her was her pain.
Not knowing that the Gibreel standing before him, remote of eye and perfunctory in his greeting, was under the most attentive medical supervision; – or that he was obliged to take, on a daily basis, certain drugs that dulled his senses, because of the very real possibility of a recurrence of his no-longer-nameless illness, that is to say, paranoid schizophrenia; – or that he had long been kept away, at Allie’s absolute insistence, from the movie people whom she had come strongly to distrust, ever since his last rampage; – or that their presence at the Battuta-Mamoulian party was a thing to which she had been whole-heartedly opposed, acquiescing only after a terrible scene in which Gibreel had roared that he would be kept a prisoner no longer, and that he was determined to make a further effort to re-enter his ‘real life’; – or that the effort of looking after a disturbed lover who was capable of seeing small bat-like imps hanging upside down in the refrigerator had worn Allie thin as a worn-out shirt, forcing upon her the roles of nurse, scapegoat and crutch – requiring her, in sum, to act against her own complex and troubled nature; – not knowing any of this, failing to comprehend that the Gibreel at whom he was looking, and believed he saw, Gibreel the embodiment of all the good fortune that the Fury-haunted Chamcha so signally lacked, was as much the creature of his fancy, as much a fiction, as his invented-resented Allie, that classic drop-dead blonde or femme fatale conjured up by his envious, tormented, Oresteian imagination, – Saladin in his ignorance nevertheless penetrated, by the merest chance, the chink in Gibreel’s (admittedly somewhat quixotic) armour, and understood how his hated Other might most swiftly be unmade.
Gibreel’s banal question made the opening. Limited by sedatives to small-talk, he asked vaguely: ‘And how, tell me, is your goodwife?’ At which Chamcha, his tongue loosened by alcohol, blurted out: ‘How? Knocked up. Enceinte. Great with fucking child.’ Soporific Gibreel missed the violence in this speech, beamed absently, placed an arm around Saladin’s shoulders. ‘Shabash, mubarak,’ he offered congratulations. ‘Spoono! Damn speedy work.’
‘Congratulate her lover,’ Saladin thickly raged. ‘My old friend, Jumpy Joshi. Now there, I admit it, is a man. Women go wild, it seems. God knows why. They want his goddamn babies and they don’t even wait to ask his leave.’
‘For instance who?’ Gibreel yelled, making heads turn and Chamcha recoil in surprise. ‘Who who who?’ he hooted, causing tipsy giggles. Saladin Chamcha laughed, too: but without pleasure. ‘I’ll tell you who for instance. My wife for instance, that’s who. That is no lady, mister Farishta, Gibreel. Pamela, my no-lady wife.’
At this very moment, as luck would have it, – while Saladin in his cups was quite ignorant of the effect his words were having on Gibreel, – for whom two images had explosively combined, the first being his sudden memory of Rekha Merchant on a flying carpet warning him of Allie’s secret wish to have a baby without informing the father, who asks the seed for permission to plant, and the second being an envisioning of the body of the martial arts instructor conjoined in high-kicking carnality with the same Miss Alleluia Cone, – the figure of Jumpy Joshi was seen crossing ‘Southwark Bridge’ in a state of some agitation, – hunting, in fact, for Pamela, from whom he had become separated during the same rush of singing Dickensians which had pushed Saladin towards the metropolitan breasts of the young woman in the Curiosity Shop. ‘Talk of the devil,’ Saladin pointed. ‘There the bastard goes.’ He turned towards Gibreel: but Gibreel had gone.
Allie Cone reappeared, angry, frantic. ‘Where is he? Jesus! Can’t I even leave him for a fucking second? Couldn’t you have kept your sodding eyes on him?’
‘Why, what’s the matter – ?’ But now Allie had plunged into the crowd, so that when Chamcha saw Gibreel crossing ‘Southwark Bridge’ she was out of earshot. – And here was Pamela, demanding: ‘Have you seen Jumpy?’ – And he pointed, ‘That way,’ whereupon she, too, vanished without a word of courtesy; and now Jumpy was seen, crossing ‘Southwark Bridge’ in the opposite direction, curly hair wilder than ever, coathanger shoulders hunched inside the greatcoat he had refused to remove, eyes searching, thumb homing in on mouth; – and, a little later, Gibreel headed across the simulacrum of that bridge Which Is Of Iron, going the same way as Jumpy went.
In short, events had begun to border on the farcical; but when, some minutes later, the actor playing the role of ‘Gaffer Hexam’, who kept watch over that stretch of the Dickensian Thames for floating corpses, to relieve them of their valuables before handing them over to the police, – came rowing rapidly down the studio river with his stipulated ragged, grizzled hair standing straight up on end, the farce was instantly terminated; for there in his disreputable boat lay the insensate body of Jumpy Joshi in his waterlogged greatcoat. ‘Knocked cold,’ the boatman cried, pointing to the huge lump rising up at the back of Jumpy’s skull, ‘and being unconscious in the water it’s a miracle he never drowned.’
One week after that, in response to an impassioned telephone call from Allie Cone, who had tracked him down via Sisodia, Battuta and finally Mimi, and who appeared to have defrosted quite a bit, Saladin Chamcha found himself in the passenger seat of a three-year-old silver Citroën station wagon which the future Alicja Boniek had presented to her daughter before leaving for an extended Californian stay. Allie had met him at Carlisle station, repeating her earlier telephonic apologies – ‘I’d no right to speak to you like that; you knew nothing, I mean about his, well, thank heavens nobody saw the attack, and it seems to have been hushed up, but that poor man, an oar on the head from behind, it’s too bad; the point is, we’ve taken a place up north, friends of mine are away, it just seemed best to get out of range of human beings, and, well, he’s been asking for you; you could really help him, I think, and to be frank I could do with the help myself,’ which left Saladin little the wiser but consumed by curiosity – and now Scotland was rushing past the Citroën windows at alarming speed: an edge of Hadrian’s Wall, the old elopers’ haven Gretna Green, and then inland towards the Southern Uplands; Ecclefechan, Lockerbie, Beattock, Elvanfoot. Chamcha tended to think of all non-metropolitan locales as the deeps of interstellar space, and journeys into them as fraught with peril: for to break down in such emptiness would surely be to die alone and undiscovered. He had noted warily that one of the Citroën’s headlamps was broken, that the fuel gauge was in the red (it turned out to be broken, too), the daylight was failing, and Allie was driving as if the A74 were the track at Silverstone on a sunny day. ‘He can’t get far without transport, but you never know,’ she explained grimly. ‘Three days ago he stole the car keys and they found him heading the wrong way up an exit road on the M6, shouting about damnation. Prepare for the vengeance of the Lord, he told the motorway cops, for I shall soon summon my lieutenant, Azraeel. They wrote it all down in their little books.’ Chamcha, his heart still filled with his own vengeful lusts, affected sympathy and shock. ‘And Jumpy?’ he inquired. Allie took both hands off the wheel and spread them in an I-give-up gesture, while the car wobbled terrifyingly across the bendy road. ‘The doctors say the possessive jealousy could be part of the same thing; at least, it can set the madness off, like a fuse.’
She was glad of the chance to talk; and Chamcha lent her a willing ear. If she trusted him, it was because Gibreel did, too; he had no intention of demanding that trust. Once he betrayed my trust; now let him, for a time, have confidence in me. He was a tyro puppeteer; it was necessary to study the strings, to find out what was connected to what … ‘I can’t help
it,’ Allie was saying. ‘I feel in some obscure way to blame for him. Our life isn’t working out and it’s my fault. My mother gets angry when I talk like this.’ Alicja, on the verge of catching the plane west, berated her daughter at Terminal Three. ‘I don’t understand where you get these notions from,’ she cried amid backpackers, briefcases and weeping Asian mums. ‘You could say your father’s life didn’t go according to plan, either. So he should be blamed for the camps? Study history, Alleluia. In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn’t destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn’t have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects. This Gibreel of yours: maybe he’s how history happens to you.’ She had returned, without warning, to the grand style of wardrobe preferred by Otto Cone, and, it seemed, to an oratorical manner that suited the big black hats and frilly suits. ‘Enjoy California, Mother,’ Allie said sharply. ‘One of us is happy,’ Alicja said. ‘Why shouldn’t it be me?’ And before her daughter could answer, she swept off past the passengers-only barrier, flourishing passport, boarding-pass, ticket, heading for the duty-free bottles of Opium and Gordon’s Gin, which were on sale beneath an illuminated sign reading SAY HELLO TO THE GOOD BUYS.
In the last light, the road rounded a spur of treeless, heather-covered hills. Long ago, in another country, another twilight, Chamcha had rounded another such spur and come into sight of the remains of Persepolis. Now, however, he was heading for a human ruin; not to admire, and maybe even (for the decision to do evil is never finally taken until the very instant of the deed; there is always a last chance to withdraw) to vandalize. To scrawl his name in Gibreel’s flesh: Saladin woz ear. ‘Why stay with him?’ he asked Allie, and to his surprise she blushed. ‘Why not spare yourself the pain?’
‘I don’t really know you, not at all, really,’ she began, then paused and made a choice. ‘I’m not proud of the answer, but it’s the truth,’ she said. ‘It’s the sex. We’re unbelievable together, perfect, like nothing I’ve known. Dream lovers. He just seems to, to know. To know me.’ She fell silent; the night hid her face. Chamcha’s bitterness surged up again. Dream lovers were all around him; he, dreamless, could only watch. He gritted angry teeth; and bit, by mistake, his tongue.
Gibreel and Allie had holed up in Durisdeer, a village so small it didn’t have a pub, and were living in a deconsecrated Freekirk converted – the quasi-religious term sounded strange to Chamcha – by an architect friend of Allie’s who had made a fortune out of such metamorphoses of the sacred into the profane. It struck Saladin as a gloomy sort of place, for all its white walls, recessed spotlights and wall-to-wall shag-pile carpeting. There were gravestones in the garden. As a retreat for a man suffering from paranoid delusions of being the chief archangel of God, Chamcha reflected, it wouldn’t have been his own first choice. The Freekirk was set a little apart from the dozen or so other stone-and-tile houses that made up the community: isolated even within this isolation. Gibreel was standing at the door, a shadow against the illuminated hallway, when the car pulled up. ‘You got here,’ he shouted. ‘Yaar, too good. Welcome to bloody jail.’
The drugs made Gibreel clumsy. As the three of them sat around the pitch-pine kitchen table beneath the gentrified pulldown dimmer-switched lighting, he twice knocked over his coffee-cup (he was ostentatiously off booze; Allie, pouring two generous shots of Scotch, kept Chamcha company), and, cursing, stumbled about the kitchen for paper-towels to mop up the mess. ‘When I get sick of being this way I just cut down without telling her,’ he confessed. ‘And then the shit starts happening. I swear to you, Spoono, I can’t bear the bloody idea that it will never stop, that the only choice is drugs or bugs in the brain. I can’t bloody bear it. I swear, yaar, if I thought that was it, then, bas, I don’t know, I’d, I don’t know what.’
‘Shut your face,’ Allie softly said. But he shouted out: ‘Spoono, I even hit her, do you know that? Bloody hell. One day I thought she was some rakshasa type of demon and I just went for her. Do you know how strong it is, the strength of madness?’
‘Fortunately for me I’d been going to – oops, eek – those self-defence classes,’ Allie grinned. ‘He’s exaggerating to save face. Actually he was the one who ended up banging his head on the floor.’ – ‘Right here,’ Gibreel sheepishly assented. The kitchen floor was made of large flagstones. ‘Painful,’ Chamcha hazarded. ‘Damn right,’ Gibreel roared, strangely cheerful now. ‘Knocked me bilkul cold.’
The Freekirk’s interior had been divided into a large two-storey (in estate agent’s jargon, ‘double volume’) reception-room – the former hall of congregation – and a more conventional half, with kitchen and utilities downstairs and bedrooms and bathroom above. Unable for some reason to sleep, Chamcha wandered at midnight into the great (and cold: the heatwave might be continuing in the south of England, but there wasn’t a ripple of it up here, where the climate was autumnal and chill) living-room, and wandered among the ghost-voices of banished preachers while Gibreel and Allie made high-volume love. Like Pamela. He tried to think of Mishal, of Zeeny Vakil, but it didn’t work. Stuffing his fingers in his ears, he fought against the sound effects of the copulation of Farishta and Alleluia Cone.
Theirs had been a high-risk conjoining from the start, he reflected: first, Gibreel’s dramatic abandonment of career and rush across the earth, and now, Allie’s uncompromising determination to see it through, to defeat in him this mad, angelic divinity and restore the humanity she loved. No compromises for them; they were going for broke. Whereas he, Saladin, had declared himself content to live under the same roof as his wife and her lover boy. Which was the better way? Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.
In the morning Gibreel ordered an ascent of the local ‘Top’. But Allie declined, although it was plain to Chamcha that her return to the countryside had caused her to glow with joy. ‘Bloody flatfoot mame,’ Gibreel cursed her lovingly. ‘Come on, Salad. Us damn city slickers can show the Everest conqueror how to climb. What a bloody upside-down life, yaar. We go mountain-climbing while she sits here and makes business calls.’ Saladin’s thoughts were racing: he understood, now, that strange hobble at Shepperton; understood, too, that this secluded haven would have to be temporary – that Allie, by coming here, was sacrificing her own life, and wouldn’t be able to go on doing so indefinitely. What should he do? Anything? Nothing? – If revenge was to be taken, when and how? ‘Get these boots on,’ Gibreel commanded. ‘You think the rain will hold off all fucking day?’
It didn’t. By the time they reached the stone cairn at the summit of Gibreel’s chosen climb, they were enveloped in a fine drizzle. ‘Damn good show,’ Gibreel panted. ‘Look: there she is, down there, sitting back like the Grand Panjandrum.’ He pointed down at the Freekirk. Chamcha, his heart pounding, was feeling foolish. He must start behaving like a man with a ticker problem. Where was the glory in dying of heart failure on this nothing of a Top, for nothing, in the rain? Then Gibreel got out his field-glasses and started scanning the valley. There were hardly any moving figures to be seen – two or three men and dogs, some sheep, no more. Gibreel tracked the men with his binoculars. ‘Now that we’re alone,’ he suddenly said, ‘I can tell you why we really came away to this damn empty hole. It’s because of her. Yes, yes; don’t be fooled by my act! It’s all her bloody beauty. Men, Spoono: they chase her like goddamn flies. I swear! I see them, slobbering and grabbing. It isn’t right. She is a very private person, the most private person in the world. We have to protect her from lust.’
This speech took Saladin by surprise. You poor bastard, he thought, you really are going off your wretched head at a rate of knots. And, hard on the heels of this thought, a second sentence appeared, as if by magic, in his head: Don’t imagine that
means I’ll let you off.
On the drive back to the Carlisle railway station, Chamcha mentioned the depopulation of the countryside. ‘There’s no work,’ Allie said. ‘So it’s empty. Gibreel says he can’t get used to the idea that all this space indicates poverty: says it looks like luxury to him, after India’s crowds.’ – ‘And your work?’ Chamcha asked. ‘What about that?’ She smiled at him, the ice-maiden façade long gone. ‘You’re a nice man to ask. I keep thinking, one day it’ll be my life in the middle, taking first place. Or, well, although I find it hard to use the first person plural: our life. That sounds better, right?’
‘Don’t let him cut you off,’ Saladin advised. ‘From Jumpy, from your own worlds, whatever.’ This was the moment at which his campaign could truly be said to have begun; when he set a foot upon that effortless, seductive road on which there was only one way to go. ‘You’re right,’ Allie was saying. ‘God, if he only knew. His precious Sisodia, for example: it’s not just seven-foot starlets he goes for, though he sure as hell likes those.’ – ‘He made a pass,’ Chamcha guessed; and, simultaneously, filed the information away for possible later use. ‘He’s totally shameless,’ Allie laughed. ‘It was right under Gibreel’s nose. He doesn’t mind rejection, though: he just bows, and murmurs no offoffoffence, and that’s that. Can you imagine if I told Gibreel?’
Chamcha at the railway station wished Allie luck. ‘We’ll have to be in London for a couple of weeks,’ she said through the car window. ‘I’ve got meetings. Maybe you and Gibreel can get together then; this has really done him good.’
‘Call any time,’ he waved goodbye, and watched the Citroën until it was out of sight.
That Allie Cone, the third point of a triangle of fictions – for had not Gibreel and Allie come together very largely by imagining, out of their own needs, an ‘Allie’ and a ‘Gibreel’ with whom each could fall in love; and was not Chamcha now imposing on them the requirements of his own troubled and disappointed heart? – was to be the unwitting, innocent agent of Chamcha’s revenge, became even plainer to the plotter, Saladin, when he found that Gibreel, with whom he had arranged to spend an equatorial London afternoon, wanted nothing so much as to describe in embarrassing detail the carnal ecstasy of sharing Allie’s bed. What manner of people were these, Saladin wondered with distaste, who enjoyed inflicting their intimacies on non-participating others? As Gibreel (with something like relish) described positions, love-bites, the secret vocabularies of desire, they strolled in Brickhall Fields among schoolgirls and roller-skating infants and fathers throwing boomerangs and frisbees incompetently at scornful sons, and picked their way through broiling horizontal secretarial flesh; and Gibreel interrupted his erotic rhapsody to mention, madly, that ‘I sometimes look at these pink people and instead of skin, Spoono, what I see is rotting meat; I smell their putrefaction here,’ he tapped his nostrils fervently, as if revealing a mystery, ‘in my nose.’ Then once again to Allie’s inner thighs, her cloudy eyes, the perfect valley of her lower back, the little cries she liked to make. This was a man in imminent danger of coming apart at the seams. The wild energy, the manic particularity of his descriptions suggested to Chamcha that he’d been cutting down on his dosages again, that he was rolling upwards towards the crest of a deranged high, that condition of febrile excitement that was like blind drunkenness in one respect (according to Allie), namely that Gibreel could remember nothing of what he said or did when, as was inevitable, he came down to earth. – On and on went the descriptions, the unusual length of her nipples, her dislike of having her navel interfered with, the sensitivity of her toes. Chamcha told himself that, madness or no madness, what all this sex-talk revealed (because there had been Allie in the Citroën too) was the weakness of their so-called ‘grand passion’ – a term which Allie had only half-jokingly employed – because, in a phrase, there was nothing else about it that was any good; there was simply no other aspect of their togetherness to rhapsodize about. – At the same time, however, he felt himself becoming aroused. He began to see himself standing outside her window, while she stood there naked like an actress on a screen, and a man’s hands caressed her in a thousand ways, bringing her closer and closer to ecstasy; he came to see himself as that pair of hands, he could almost feel her coolness, her responses, almost hear her cries. – He controlled himself. His desire disgusted him. She was unattainable; this was pure voyeurism, and he would not succumb to it. – But the desire Gibreel’s revelations had aroused would not go away.