Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

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 Citroen 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 Citroen 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 Citroen'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 damaging 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.’