The Satanic Verses

For Gibreel there was neither a hosepipe nor the sharp end of her tongue. Rosa uttered token words of reproof, held her nostrils while examining the fallen and newly sulphurous Saladin (who had not, at this point, removed his bowler hat), and then, with an access of shyness which she greeted with nostalgic astonishment, stammered an invitation, yyou bbetter bring your ffriend in out of the cccold, and stamped back up the shingle to put the kettle on, grateful to the bite of the winter air for reddening her cheeks and saving, in the old comforting phrase, her blushes.

As a young man Saladin Chamcha had possessed a face of quite exceptional i

He was offended. ‘I've got bones,’ he protested. ‘Bone structure.’

‘Somewhere in there,’ she conceded. ‘Everybody does.’

After that he was haunted for a time by the notion that he looked like a featureless jellyfish, and it was in large part to assuage this feeling that he set about developing the narrow, haughty demeanour that was now second nature to him. It was, therefore, a matter of some consequence when, on arising from a long slumber racked by a series of intolerable dreams, prominent among which were images of Zeeny Vakil, transformed into a mermaid, singing to him from an iceberg in tones of agonizing sweetness, lamenting her inability to join him on dry land, calling him, calling; – but when he went to her she shut him up fast in the heart of her ice-mountain, and her song changed to one of triumph and revenge ... it was, I say, a serious matter when Saladin Chamcha woke up, looked into a mirror framed in blue-and-gold Japonaiserie lacquer, and found that old cherubic face staring out at him once again; while, at his temples, he observed a brace of fearfully discoloured swellings, indications that he must have suffered, at some point in his recent adventures, a couple of mighty blows.

Looking into the mirror at his altered face, Chamcha attempted to remind himself of himself. I am a real man, he told the mirror, with a real history and a pla

There was a telephone extension on his bedside table. There, he admonished himself. Pick it up, dial, and your equilibrium will be restored. Such maunderings: they aren't like you, not worthy of you. Think of her grief; call her now.

It was night-time. He didn't know the hour. There wasn't a clock in the room and his wristwatch had disappeared somewhere along the line. Should he shouldn't he? – He dialled the nine numbers. A man's voice answered on the fourth ring.

‘What the hell?’ Sleepy, unidentifiable, familiar.

‘Sorry,’ Saladin Chamcha said. ‘Excuse, please. Wrong number.’

Staring at the telephone, he found himself remembering a drama production seen in Bombay, based on an English original, a story by, by, he couldn't put his finger on the name, Te

The curtain fell.

Saladin Chamcha, alone in an unknown bedroom in unfamiliar red-and-white striped pyjamas, lay face downwards on a narrow bed and wept. ‘Damn all Indians,’ he cried into the muffling bedclothes, his fists punching at frilly-edged pillowcases from Harrods in Buenos Aires so fiercely that the fifty-year-old fabric was ripped to shreds. ‘What the hell. The vulgarity of it, the sod it sod it indelicacy. What the hell. That bastard, those bastards, their lack of bastard taste.’

It was at this moment that the police arrived to arrest him.

On the night after she had taken the two of them in from the beach, Rosa Diamond stood once again at the nocturnal window of her old woman's insomnia, contemplating the nine-hundred-year-old sea. The smelly one had been sleeping ever since they put him to bed, with hot-water bottles packed in tightly around him, best thing for him, let him get his strength. She had put them upstairs, Chamcha in the spare room and Gibreel in her late husband's old study, and as she watched the great shining plain of the sea she could hear him moving up there, amid the ornithological prints and bird-call whistles of the former Henry Diamond, the bolas and bullwhip and aerial photographs of the Los Alamos estancia far away and long ago, a man's footsteps in that room, how reassuring they felt. Farishta was pacing up and down, avoiding sleep, for reasons of his own. And below his footfall Rosa, looking up at the ceiling, called him in a whisper by a long-unspoken name. Martin she said. His last name the same as that of his country's deadliest snake, the viper. The víbora, de la Cruz.

At once she saw the shapes moving on the beach, as if the forbidden name had conjured up the dead. Not again, she thought, and went for her opera-glasses. She returned to find the beach full of shadows, and this time she was afraid, because whereas the Norman fleet came sailing, when it came, proudly and openly and without recourse to subterfuge, these shades were sneaky, emitting stifled imprecations and alarming, muted yaps and barks, they seemed headless, crouching, arms and legs a-dangle like giant, unshelled crabs. Scuttling, sidelong, heavy boots crunching on shingle. Lots of them. She saw them reach her boathouse on which the fading image of an eyepatched pirate gri