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‘Scrapheap Youths’ Criminal Idols,’ Mishal read his mind and then, laughing at his disapproval, translated it into yellowpress headlines, while arranging her long, and, Chamcha realized, astonishing body into similarly exaggerated cheesecake postures. Pouting outrageously, fully aware of having stirred him, she prettily added: ‘Kissy kissy?’
Her younger sister, not to be outdone, attempted to copy Mishal's pose, with less effective results. Abandoning the attempt with some a
The real world.
‘You needn't look so fish-faced and holy, anyway,’ Mishal Sufyan pointed out. ‘Look where all your law abiding got you.’
‘Your universe is shrinking.’ A busy man, Hal Valance, creator of The Aliens Show and sole owner of the property, took exactly seventeen seconds to congratulate Chamcha on being alive before begi
My people again: Chamcha, disguised in turban and the rest of his ill-fitting drag, hung on a telephone in a passageway while the eyes of impermanent women and children gleamed through barely opened doors; and wondered what his people had done to him now. ‘No capeesh,’ he said, remembering Valance's fondness for Italian—American argot – this was, after all, the author of the fast food slogan Getta pizza da action. On this occasion, however, Valance wasn't playing. ‘Audience surveys show,’ he breathed, ‘that ethnics don't watch ethnic shows. They don't want ‘em, Chamcha. They want fucking Dynasty, like everyone else. Your profile's wrong, if you follow: with you in the show it's just too damn racial. The Aliens Show is too big an idea to be held back by the racial dimension. The merchandising possibilities alone, but I don't have to tell you this.’
Chamcha saw himself reflected in the small cracked mirror above the phone box. He looked like a marooned genie in search of a magic lamp. ‘It's a point of view,’ he answered Valance, knowing argument to be useless. With Hal, all explanations were post facto rationalizations. He was strictly a seat-of-the-pants man, who took for his motto the advice given by Deep Throat to Bob Woodward: Follow the money. He had the phrase set in large sans-serif type and pi
By the time he met Hal Valance (how many years ago? Five, maybe six), over lunch at the White Tower, the man was already a monster: pure, self-created image, a set of attributes plastered thickly over a body that was, in Hal's own words, ‘in training to be Orson Welles’. He smoked absurd, caricature cigars, refusing all Cuban brands, however, on account of his uncompromisingly capitalistic stance. He owned a Union Jack waistcoat and insisted on flying the flag over his agency and also above the door of his Highgate home; was prone to dress up as Maurice Chevalier and sing, at major presentations, to his amazed clients, with the help of straw boater and silver-headed cane; claimed to own the first Loire chateau to be fitted with telex and fax machines; and made much of his ‘intimate’ association with the Prime Minister he referred to affectionately as ‘Mrs. Torture’. The personification of philistine triumphalism, midatlantic-accented Hal was one of the glories of the age, the creative half of the city's hottest agency, the Valance & Lang Partnership. Like Billy Battuta he liked big cars driven by big chauffeurs. It was said that once, while being driven at high speed down a Cornish lane in order to ‘heat up’ a particularly glacial seven-foot Fi
The lunch was by way of thanking Chamcha for his part in a recent, smash-hit campaign for Slimbix diet foods. Saladin had been the voice of a cutesy cartoon blob: Hi. I'm Cal, and I'm one sad calorie. Four courses and plenty of champagne as a reward for persuading people to starve. How's a poor calorie to earn a salary? Thanks to Slimbix, I'm out of work. Chamcha hadn't known what to expect from Valance. What he got was, at least, unvarnished. ‘You've done well,’ Hal congratulated him, ‘for a person of the tinted persuasion.’ And proceeded, without taking his eyes off Chamcha's face: ‘Let me tell you some facts. Within the last three months, we re-shot a peanut-butter poster because it researched better without the black kid in the background. We re-recorded a building society jingle because T'Chairman thought the singer sounded black, even though he was white as a sodding sheet, and even though, the year before, we'd used a black boy who, luckily for him, didn't suffer from an excess of soul. We were told by a major airline that we couldn't use any blacks in their ads, even though they were actually employees of the airline. A black actor came to audition for me and he was wearing a Racial Equality button badge, a black hand shaking a white one. I said this: don't think you're getting special treatment from me, chum. You follow me? You follow what I'm telling you?’ It's a goddamn audition, Saladin realized. ‘I've never felt I belonged to a race,’ he replied. Which was perhaps why, when Hal Valance set up his production company, Chamcha was on his ‘A list’; and why, eventually, Maxim Alien came his way.