Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

‘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 last 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.’

In the early 1970s Jumpy had run a travelling disco out of the back of his yellow mini-van. He called it Finn's Thumb in honour of the legendary sleeping giant of Ireland, Finn MacCool, another sucker, as Chamcha used to say. One day Saladin had played a practical joke on Jumpy, by ringing him up, putting on a vaguely Mediterranean accent, and requesting the services of the musical Thumb on the island of Skorpios, on behalf of Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, offering a fee of ten thousand dollars and transportation to Greece, in a private aircraft, for up to six persons. This was a terrible thing to do to a man as innocent and upright as Jamshed Joshi. ‘I need an hour to think,’ he had said, and then fallen into an agony of the soul. When Saladin rang back an hour later and heard that Jumpy was turning down Mrs. Onassis's offer for political reasons, he understood that his friend was in training to be a saint, and it was no good trying to pull his leg. ‘Mrs. Onassis will be broken in the heart for sure,’ he had concluded, and Jumpy had worriedly replied, ‘Please tell her it's nothing personal, as a matter of fact personally I admire her a great deal.’

We have all known one another too long, Pamela thought as Jumpy left. We can hurt each other with memories two decades old.

On the subject of mistakes with voices, she thought as she drove much too fast down the M4 that afternoon in the old MG hardtop from which she got a degree of pleasure that was, as she had always cheerfully confessed, ‘quite ideologically unsound’, – on that subject, I really ought to be more charitable.

Pamela Chamcha, née Lovelace, was the possessor of a voice for which, in many ways, the rest of her life had been an effort to compensate. It was a voice composed of tweeds, headscarves, summer pudding, hockey-sticks, thatched houses, saddle-soap, house-parties, nuns, family pews, large dogs and philistinism, and in spite of all her attempts to reduce its volume it was loud as a dinner-jacketed drunk throwing bread rolls in a Club. It had been the tragedy of her younger days that thanks to this voice she had been endlessly pursued by the gentlemen farmers and debs’ delights and somethings in the city whom she despised with all her heart, while the greenies and peacemarchers and world-changers with whom she instinctively felt at home treated her with deep suspicion, bordering on resentment. How could one be on the side of the angels when one sounded like a no-goodnik every time one moved one's lips? Accelerating past Reading, Pamela gritted her teeth. One of the reasons she had decided to admit it end her marriage before fate did it for her was that she had woken up one day and realized that Chamcha was not in love with her at all, but with that voice stinking of Yorkshire pudding and hearts of oak, that hearty, rubicund voice of ye olde dream-England which he so desperately wanted to inhabit. It had been a marriage of crossed purposes, each of them rushing towards the very thing from which the other was in flight.

No survivors . And in the middle of the night, Jumpy the idiot and his stupid false alarm. She was so shaken up by it that she hadn't even got round to being shaken up by having gone to bed with Jumpy and made love in what admit it had been a pretty satisfying fashion, spare me your nonchalance , she rebuked herself, when did you last have so much fun . She had a lot to deal with and so here she was, dealing with it by running away as fast as she could go. A few days of pampering oneself in an expensive country hotel and the world may begin to seem less like a fucking hellhole. Therapy by luxury: okayokay, she allowed, I know: I'm reverting to class . Fuck it; watch me go. If you've got any objections, blow them out of your ass. Arse. Ass.

One hundred miles an hour past Swindon, and the weather turned nasty. Sudden, dark clouds, lightning, heavy rain; she kept her foot on the accelerator. No survivors . People were always dying on her, leaving her with a mouth full of words and nobody to spit them at. Her father the classical scholar who could make puns in ancient Greek and from whom she inherited the Voice, her legacy and curse; and her mother who pined for him during the War, when he was a Pathfinder pilot, obliged to fly home from Germany one hundred and eleven times in a slow aeroplane through a night which his own flares had just illuminated for the benefit of the bombers, – and who vowed, when he returned with the noise of the ack-ack in his ears, that she would never leave him, – and so followed him everywhere, into the slow hollow of depression from which he never really emerged, – and into debt, because he didn't have the face for poker and used her money when he ran out of his own, – and at last to the top of a tall building, where they found their way at last. Pamela never forgave them, especially for making it impossible for her to tell them of her unforgiveness. To get her own back, she set about rejecting everything of them that remained within her. Her brains, for example: she refused to go to college. And because she could not shake off her voice, she made it speak ideas which her conservative suicides of parents would have anathematized. She married an Indian. And, because he turned out to be too much like them, would have left him. Had decided to leave. When, once again, she was cheated by a death.