Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

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 off 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 heart-rending 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.