Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

They both straightened up, stung. Uriah began blustering: ‘Don't be so common now, Orphia,’ but her eyes stopped him in his tracks. Then he began to walk towards her, dreamily, leaving Rochelle flat. ‘Thas right, Uri,’ she said softly, never looking away from him for an instant. ‘Come along now. Come to momma.’ Now walk backwards to the lift and just suck him right in there, and after that it's up and away we go . – But something was wrong here. He wasn't walking any more. Rochelle Watkins was standing beside him, too damn close, and he'd come to a halt. ‘You tell her, Uriah,’ Rochelle said. ‘Her stupid obeah don't signify down here.’ Uriah was putting an arm around Rochelle Watkins. This wasn't the way she'd dreamed it, the way she'd suddenly been certain-sure it would be, after that Gibreel took her hand, just like that, as if they were intended; wee-yurd, she thought; what was happening to her? She advanced. – ‘Get her offa me, Uriah,’ Rochelle shouted. ‘She mashin up me uniform and all.’ – Now Uriah, holding the struggling ticket clerk by both wrists, gave out the news: ‘I aks her to get marry!’ – Whereupon the fight went out of Orphia. Beaded plaits no longer whirled and clicked. ‘So you out of order, Orphia Phillips,’ Uriah continued, puffing somewhat. ‘And like the lady say, no obeah na change nutten.’ Orphia, also breathing heavily, her clothes disarranged, flopped down on the floor with her back to the curved tunnel wall. The noise of a train pulling in came up towards them; the affianced couple hurried to their posts, tidying themselves up, leaving Orphia where she sat. ‘Girl,’ Uriah Moseley offered by way of farewell, ‘you too damn outrageous for me.’ Rochelle Watkins blew Uriah a kiss from her ticket-collection booth; he, lounging against his lift, picked his teeth. ‘Home cooking,’ Rochelle promised him. ‘And no surprises.’

‘You filthy bum,’ Orphia Phillips screamed at Gibreel after walking up the two hundred and forty-seven steps of the spiral staircase of defeat. ‘You no good devil bum. Who ask you to mash up me life so?’

Even the halo has gone out, like a broken bulb, and I don't know where's the store . Gibreel on a bench in the small park near the station meditated over the futility of his efforts to date. And found blasphemies surfacing once again: if the dabba had the wrong markings and so went to incorrect recipient, was the dabbawalla to blame? If special effect – travelling mat, or such – didn't work, and you saw the blue outline shimmering at the edge of the flying fellow, how to blame the actor? Bythe-sametoken, if his angeling was proving insufficient, whose fault, please, was this? His, personally, or some other Personage? – Children were playing in the garden of his doubting, among the midge-clouds and rosebushes and despair. Grandmother's footsteps, ghostbusters, tag. Ellowen deeowen, London. The fall of angels, Gibreel reflected, was not the same kettle as the Tumble of Woman and Man. In the case of human persons, the issue had been morality. Of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they shouldst not eat, and ate. Woman first, and at her suggestion man, acquired the verboten ethical standards, tastily apple-flavoured: the serpent brought them a value system. Enabling them, among other things, to judge the Deity Itself, making possible in good time all the awkward inquiries: why evil? Why suffering? Why death? – So, out they went. It didn't want Its pretty creatures getting above their station. – Children giggled in his face: something straaange in the neighbourhood . Armed with zapguns, they made as if to bust him like some common, lowdown spook. Come away from there , a woman commanded, a tightly groomed woman, white, a redhead, with a broad stripe of freckles across the middle of her face; her voice was full of distaste. Did you hear me? Now! – Whereas the angels' crash was a simple matter of power: a straightforward piece of celestial police work, punishment for rebellion, good and tough ‘pour encourager les autres’. – Then how unconfident of Itself this Deity was, Who didn't want Its finest creations to know right from wrong; and Who reigned by terror, insisting upon the unqualified submission of even Its closest associates, packing off all dissidents to Its blazing Siberias, the gulag-infernos of Hell... he checked himself. These were satanic thoughts, put into his head by Iblis-Beelzebub-Shaitan. If the Entity were still punishing him for his earlier lapse of faith, this was no way to earn remission. He must simply continue until, purified, he felt his full potency restored. Emptying his mind, he sat in the gathering darkness and watched the children (now at some distance) play. Ip-dip-sky-blue who's-there-not-you not-because-you're-dirty not-because-you're-clean , and here, he was sure, one of the boys, a grave eleven-year-old with outsize eyes, stared straight at him: my-mother-says you're-the-fairy-queen .

Rekha Merchant materialized, all jewels and finery. ‘Bachchas are making rude rhymes about you now, Angel of the Lord,’ she gibed. ‘Even that little ticket-girl back there, she isn't so impressed. Still doing badly, baba, looks like to me.’

On this occasion, however, the spirit of the suicide Rekha Merchant had not come merely to mock. To his astonishment she claimed that his many tribulations had been of her making: ‘You imagine there is only your One Thing in charge?’ she cried. ‘Well, lover-boy, let me put you wise.’ Her smart-alec Bombay English speared him with a sudden nostalgia for his lost city, but she wasn't waiting for him to regain his composure. ‘Remember that I died for love of you, you creepo; this gives me rights. In particular, to be revenged upon you, by totally bungling up your life. A man must suffer for causing a lover's leap; don't you think so? That's the rule, anyway. For so long now I've turned you inside out; now I'm just fed up. Don't forget how I was so good at forgiving! You liked it also, na? Therefore I have come to say that compromise solution is always possible. You want to discuss it, or you prefer to go on being lost in this craziness, becoming not an angel but a down-and-out hobo, a stupid joke?’

Gibreel asked: ‘What compromise?’

‘What else?’ she replied, her manner transformed, all gentleness, with a shine in her eyes. ‘My farishta, a so small thing.’

If he would only say he loved her:

If he would only say it, and, once a week, when she came to lie with him, show his love:

If on a night of his choice it could be as it was during the ballbearings-man's absences on business:

‘Then I will terminate the insanities of the city, with which I am persecuting you; nor will you be possessed, any longer, by this crazy notion of changing, redeeming the city like something left in a pawnshop; it'll all be calm-calm; you can even live with your paleface mame and be the greatest film star in the world; how could I be jealous, Gibreel, when I'm already dead, I don't want you to say I'm as important as her, no, just a second-rank love will do for me, a side-dish amour; the foot in the other boot. How about it, Gibreel, just three-little-words, what do you say?’

Give me time .

‘It isn't even as if I'm asking for something new, something you haven't already agreed to, done, indulged in. Lying with a phantom is not such a bad-bad thing. What about down at that old Mrs. Diamond's – in the boathouse, that night? Quite a tamasha, you don't think so? So: who do you think put it on? Listen: I can take for you any form you prefer; one of the advantages of my condition. You wish her again, that boathouse mame from the stone age? Hey presto. You want the mirror image of your own mountain-climber sweaty tomboy iceberg? Also, allakazoo, allakazam. Who do you think it was, waiting for you after the old lady died?’