The Satanic Verses

She had concealed her foot-ache from her fellow-mountaineers because the lure of Everest had been so overwhelming. But these days the pain was still there, and growing, if anything, worse. Chance, a congenital weakness, was proving to be her footbinder. Adventure's end, Allie thought; betrayed by my feet. The image of footbinding stayed with her. Goddamn Chinese, she mused, echoing Wilson's ghost.

‘Life is so easy for some people,’ she had wept into Gibreel Farishta's arms. ‘Why don't their blasted feet give out?’ He had kissed her forehead. For you, it may always be a struggle,’ he said. ‘You want it too damn much.’

The class was waiting for her, growing impatient with all this talk of phantoms. They wanted the story, her story. They wanted to stand on the mountain-top. Do you know how it feels, she wanted to ask them, to have the whole of your life concentrated into one moment, a few hours long? Do you know what it's like when the only direction is down? ‘I was in the second pair with Sherpa Pemba,’ she said. The weather was perfect, perfect. So clear you felt you could look right through the sky into whatever lay beyond. The first pair must have reached the summit by now, I said to Pemba. Conditions are holding and we can go. Pemba grew very serious, quite a change, because he was one of the expedition clowns. He had never been to the summit before, either. At that stage I had no plans to go without oxygen, but when I saw that Pemba intended it, I thought, okay, me too. It was a stupid whim, unprofessional, really, but I suddenly wanted to be a woman sitting on top of that bastard mountain, a human being, not a breathing machine. Pemba said, Allie Bibi, don't do, but I just started up. In a while we passed the others coming down and I could see the wonderful thing in their eyes. They were so high, possessed of such an exaltation, that they didn't even notice I wasn't wearing the oxygen equipment. Be careful, they shouted over to us, Look out for the angels. Pemba had fallen into a good breathing pattern and I fell into step with it, breathing in with his in, out with his out. I could feel something lifting off the top of my head and I was gri

She left the classroom, leaning heavily on her stick.

The city – Proper London, yaar, no bloody less! – was dressed in white, like a mourner at a funeral. – Whose bloody funeral, mister, Gibreel Farishta asked himself wildly, not mine, I bloody hope and trust. When the train pulled into Victoria station he plunged out without waiting for it to come to a complete halt, turned his ankle and went sprawling beneath the baggage trolleys and sneers of the waiting Londoners, clinging, as he fell, on to his increasingly battered hat. Rekha Merchant was nowhere to be seen, and seizing the moment Gibreel ran through the scattering crowd like a man possessed, only to find her by the ticket barrier, floating patiently on her carpet, invisible to all eyes but his own, three feet off the ground.

‘What do you want,’ he burst out, ‘what's your business with me?’ To watch you fall,’ she instantly replied. ‘Look around,’ she added, ‘I've already made you look like a pretty big fool.’

People were clearing a space around Gibreel, the wild man in an outsize overcoat and trampy hat, that man's talking to himself, a child's voice said, and its mother answered shh, dear, it's wicked to mock the afflicted. Welcome to London. Gibreel Farishta rushed towards the stairs leading down towards the Tube. Rekha on her carpet let him go.

But when he arrived in a great rush at the northbound platform of the Victoria Line he saw her again. This time she was a colour photograph in a 48-sheet advertising poster on the wall across the track, advertising the merits of the international direct-dialling system. Send your voice on a magic-carpet ride to India, she advised. No dji